Being at the mercy of developments in faraway places is perhaps the fate of small, remote islands like this one, the tip of an extinct volcano sticking out of the Indian Ocean, some 220 miles south of Indonesia and almost 1,000 miles away from mainland Australia.

The inhabited area can be covered in a quick drive, possibly from inside Christmas Island’s one taxi. The one movie theater  an outdoor amphitheater open for one weekly show on Saturday evenings  was recently offering “Easy Virtue,” released a year ago. The few times a week a plane flew in and out, the airport became a place to socialize over beers or gossip. People needed to know who was coming and who was going, one airport habitué named Faidal explained, though the island was so small that people would invariably run into one another on the street, at the one post office or at one of the two supermarkets.

With only a monthly community newspaper and a very slow Internet, messages were relayed by chalk on blackboards flanking the walls of a main roundabout. “Welcome home, Tanja, Chris & Poppy,” read one. “For health reasons please do not feed Buddy,” another warned cryptically, at least to the outsider unaware that Buddy was a mutt prone to wandering.

Image The new immigration detention center. Credit... Kemal Jufri/Imaji for The New York Times

No one lived on Christmas Island until the discovery of phosphate drew the British here a little over a century ago. Indentured workers from China and Malaysia followed. After the island became Australian territory half a century ago, Australian managers who were paid Australian wages supervised Asian laborers paid Asian wages. Managers lived in a leafy neighborhood called Silver City that was off limits to Asians, in a colonial-like system that was dismantled in 1980 following reforms pushed through by a new union.

“At work, there was a European mess and an Asian mess,” said Foo Kee Heng, an ethnic Chinese man who used to work in mining and is now deputy president of the Christmas Island shire.

Ethnic Chinese, who account for 60 percent of the population, and ethnic Malay, who account for 20 percent, are now Australian citizens; whites make up the other 20 percent.