Let’s end ‘racist’ refugee policy
Mire said this week that ‘‘this policy was designed intentionally to keep people like me out’’.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there are more than 25 million refugees worldwide. Some 57 per cent of them come from just three countries: Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan.
Coincidentally, refugees from all three countries are directly discriminated against by our refugee policy. Since 2009, New Zealand has had a policy of allowing refugees from Africa and the Middle East only if they already have family connections here. Some call the policy ‘‘racist’’, and Immigration Minister Iain Lees-galloway agrees it is ‘‘the very definition of discrimination’’.
The Government expects to announce a decision on changing it soon. But first, there must be a way of accommodating coalition partner NZ First, which has delayed much-needed and long-overdue change. Leader Winston Peters has disputed that the current discrimination is in any way racist.
Against the flood of global refugees, the policy can make aspects of our contribution look utterly pitiful. As aid organisation World Vision has pointed out, there are 2.3m refugees from South Sudan alone. And what has been New Zealand’s contribution? Since 2011, we have taken only 12 refugees from there.
Former refugee Guled Mire presented his case to Parliament’s education and workforce select committee on Wednesday, highlighting that he fled the Somalian civil war with his mother and eight siblings in the 1990s, when he was just 6.
Now a community advocate, Mire told RNZ in June that, while many believe ‘‘that refugees are going to come here and be a drain on the system, multiple studies . . . show that refugees economically and socially enrich New Zealand society and host communities around the world’’.
Mire said this week that ‘‘this policy was designed intentionally to keep people like me out’’.
How did this unfair and clearly discriminatory situation arise? Refugee advocate Murdoch Stephens, who led the campaign to double New Zealand’s refugee quota, explained the background in an article published at Policy Quarterly in 2018.
Stephens found there were three clear reasons for the National-led government’s focus on the Asia-pacific region. One was cost, as it was cheaper to fly people from Southeast Asia. The second was a hope that this focus would dissuade people from making the dangerous trip by boat to Australia from Indonesia. And finally there were ‘‘broad security concerns’’. But explanations of those concerns were redacted in the files Stephens received under the Official Information Act.
Stephens argued that, while New Zealand has not explicitly banned refugees from the Middle East and Africa, ‘‘the policies implemented by the National-led government have effectively led to that outcome for refugees from Africa, and to a significant decrease for Middle Eastern refugees’’, whose numbers were bolstered by an emergency intake of Syrians. ‘‘If US President Donald Trump’s rejection of Middle Eastern and African refugees has been evidenced by a series of smoking gun tweets, New Zealand’s move away from the same regions is a purposeful, but difficult to prove, death by a thousand cuts.’’
The numbers tell that story. Before 2009, one in four refugees who came to New Zealand were originally from Africa. Now it is around one in 20. The policy has even meant that New Zealand has not met its already reduced quota for refugees from Africa and the Middle East over the past decade.
As World Vision concludes, ‘‘This approach is clearly at odds with the key purpose of a humanitarian quota, which is to support the most vulnerable people and help them start a new life in dignity.’’