Tierra del Fuego comprises the southernmost archipelago of the South American continent, divided politically into Chilean and Argentine territory. Its main island ? Isla Grande ? located south of the Magellan Strait is shared by both nations and houses the vast majority of the archieplago?s population. On the Argentine side, the Province of Tierra del Fuego currently has 130,000 inhabitants, most of them products of immigration flows as consequences of geopolitical interventions of the national government since early 20th Century.The implementation of the National Law for Industrial Promotion in 1972, which empowered the province with important tax benefits, has intensified migration movements and concentrated the population in two industrialized mid-sized urban centres that house over 95% over the total provincial population. Migration emerges as a constitutive factor of this local context, referred to by islanders as one without identity. The question then arises: who is this islander? What are the emblematic features of this community that shape groups and create social divisions and disparities between them?In this contribution we study population mobility in Tierra del Fuego to improve our understanding of its process of political and cultural configuration. In a context of extreme population mobility we can observe that different groups are constituted on the bases of the prolonged permanence settlement on the island. Consequently, cities on Tierra del Fuego appear to be organized socially by the logic of time of residence. Does this characteristic itself constitute an attribute of power?