Guam and Hawaii were reimbursed 16 cents on the dollar for hosting Pacific Islander migrants. Arkansas, home to the largest such community outside Hawaii, was never eligible for a cent.

Citizens of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau can live and work anywhere in the United States without a visa, under Compacts of Free Association the U.S. signed after administering their islands as a Pacific trust territory — including the sixty-seven nuclear tests the U.S. military conducted over Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958, according to CRS.▸ More than 94,000 of their citizens and children now live in the United States, GAO found — up 68% from about 56,000 a decade earlier. Congress built exactly one mechanism to compensate the places absorbing that growth, and named only four of them.

The Compact of Free Association Amendments Act of 2003 created the "Compact Impact" grant: $30 million a year, mandatory funding running FY2004–FY2023, split by formula among four jurisdictions Congress designated "affected" — Guam, Hawaii, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), and American Samoa.▸ The idea was straightforward: these were the places absorbing the health, education, and social-service costs of Compact migration, so the federal government that signed the Compacts would help pay for it.

It didn't come close.▸ GAO's 2020 review found Guam, Hawaii, and CNMI self-reported a combined $3.2 billion in Compact-migrant-related costs for fiscal years 2004 through 2018. Over roughly that same window, FY2004–19, those jurisdictions received approximately $509 million in Compact Impact grants — about 16% of what they said it cost them. The other 84%, some $2.69 billion, came out of their own budgets.

Then, under current law, the $30 million grant simply ends — its statutory authorization ran out at the close of fiscal year 2023, and Congress has not renewed it.▸ A bill to bring it back for Guam, CNMI, and American Samoa through 2043, the Guam Host Community Compensation Act, was introduced in November 2023. It never received a floor vote and died with the 118th Congress.

The last full breakdown of the grant, for FY2019, shows exactly whose budgets that $30 million (plus $4 million in added discretionary funds) reached — and, by statute, whose it couldn't.

Guam and Hawaii split 94% of it.▸ American Samoa, with a tiny resident Compact-migrant population, got $22,678. Arkansas got nothing, because Arkansas was never in the statute — P.L. 108-188 names Guam, Hawaii, CNMI, and American Samoa as the only "affected jurisdictions" eligible for this money, full stop. That's a problem the law never had to reckon with, because by the time the grant existed, the largest Marshallese community in the continental United States was already thirty years old and growing in Springdale, Arkansas — built, family by family, around jobs at Tyson Foods' poultry plants. The 2020 Census counted 14,533 Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders statewide, 8,711 of them in Springdale alone, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas's tally of Census Bureau data — more people than lived in three of the four jurisdictions the federal government was actually compensating.

Arkansas's bar is an approximation — the 2020 Census counts race, not Compact-migrant status, and the Census Bureau has never run a COFA-specific enumeration there, because Arkansas doesn't receive the grant that enumeration funds elsewhere.▸ But the order of magnitude isn't in doubt: a 2020 CDC investigation of Benton and Washington counties found Marshallese and Hispanic residents were about 19% of the local population but 64% of COVID-19 cases and 57% of deaths — with Marshallese mortality running 65 times the rate among white residents. A 2021 University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences survey of 113 employed Marshallese adults found 31 of them, 27%, working in food-processing plants — the industry that drew the community to northwest Arkansas in the first place.

Rather than reauthorize Compact Impact funding, or extend it to states like Arkansas that had never gotten any, Congress took a different approach when it renewed the underlying Compacts in 2024.▸ The Compact of Free Association Amendments Act of 2024 (P.L. 118-42, §209(f)), signed March 9, 2024, made Compact migrants nationally eligible for federal safety-net programs — Medicaid, SNAP, and SSI among them — regardless of which state they live in. That's a policy that reaches Arkansas for the first time, on the same terms as Hawaii, rather than a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction grant that reaches only four places by name. The 2025 reconciliation law that stripped Medicaid, SNAP, and ACA eligibility from several other immigrant categories (P.L. 119-21) left Compact migrants' eligibility for those programs intact — Congress's clearest signal yet that the benefits-eligibility route, not the grant, is now the standing mechanism.

What that doesn't do is compensate a state's general fund, a hospital, or a school district the way a Compact Impact check did.▸ Medicaid and SNAP pay providers and grocers for services rendered; they don't reimburse a county health department for the outreach staff, translators, or emergency response the CDC found Benton and Washington counties needed and didn't have enough of in 2020. The jurisdictions that got a fraction of a fixed, if inadequate, grant now get an open-ended eligibility rule instead — and the places that never got the grant at all get the same rule, for the first time, as compensation for a cost they'd already been carrying for decades.

Cost and grant figures are drawn from GAO-20-491 (FY2004–2018/19) and the Department of the Interior's FY2019 Compact Impact distribution, the most recent full jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction breakdown published before the grant's FY2023 expiration; Arkansas figures use the 2020 Decennial Census and are not an official COFA migrant count.