TOURISM AS A FORM OF DEMOGRAPHIC IMPERIALISM: A COMPARISON OF THE BAHAMAS AND VIRGIN ISLANDS (CARIBBEAN, SOCIAL IMPACT)

Tourism exemplifies the development of the service sector and contradictions of state capitalism in the periphery. In the Caribbean region, the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands became two of the pre-eminent destinations for international travelers. As a consequence of the extraverted growth associated with the expansion of tourism and their intensive economic articulation with the United States, these microstates achieved two of the highest per capita incomes in the region.; Due to the inequality between the center and the periphery in the world system and the cleavages of race and class within social formations, tourism and the immigration entail an unequal exchange of populations. The author constructed a theory of demographic imperialism to analyze the population dynamics within an unified political economy framework. The primary sociological research procedures were comparative and documentary methods supplemented by field work in the Caribbean.; The author concludes that tourism in the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands has had several serious, negative long term effects. (1) The socioracial stratification patterns differed from those of the other West Indian social formations prior to the tourist era, but the early influence of the tourist trade Americanized race relations. (2) In the world system, the islands performed the economic function of "off-shore consumption platforms." Consequently, immigration from the center and the periphery was a countervailing force that reconstituted a rigid, three tier, socioracial structure which corresponded to the international division of labor. (3) Additionally, these social formations were becoming increasingly stratified along the overlapping dimensions of geopolitical origin, race, and class. This tendency was most vividly observed by the segregation in "lindurbs," a new form of urbanization accompanying tourism development exemplied in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island and Virgin Islands National Park, St. John. (4) Despite significant differences in political status, tourism was making both of the island archipelagos more dependent upon the United States and intensifying underdevelopment. Without structural changes and a new orientation of tourism policies, such as banning cruise ships and suspending subsidies to the private tourist sector, these trends are likely to continue.