‘Here, people take care of other people’
A recent migrant from the UK has found a welcoming and caring community in New Zealand.
Not until she was a month away from leaving Birmingham did Farhanah Jeewa, 33, tell her family – her British-born father, Indian-born mother, four brothers and a sister – that she was migrating alone to the other side of the world.
Her Muslim parents had always stressed the value of education and Jeewa had completed a law degree, then, struggling to find the right job in law, had gone back to university to convert her law degree to a maths degree before also completing a teaching degree.
But as a teacher in the UK, she would go to school early in the morning, teach all day, come home in the evening to do marking, and during weekends do more marking.
“I knew there was a better lifestyle out there somewhere. I saw brochures of teachers being happy and thought, ‘There has to be something else’.”
She began to look up places she could go and applied to several countries. The agency that always responded was Oasis Education, which deals with vacancies in New Zealand. The replies from consultant Martin Strang, along with a face-to-face meeting with the then-principal of the school she chose, Auckland’s Avondale College, encouraged her, “because New Zealand was not a place I could just visit overnight, and I always needed reassurance”.
Quietly spoken, intelligent and
compassionate, Jeewa arrived in Auckland on January 1, 2018, knowing no one. There, she has found the better lifestyle she hoped for. When the Christchurch mosques were attacked, many people asked if she was okay. “We have incidents like this in the UK and no one checks up on us [Muslims]. No one asks if you’re okay. Here, there was a community feel and I felt like I was being taken care of so much more than I would have been at home. At the same time [as the shootings in Christchurch], three mosques at home were broken into, with their windows smashed. They didn’t get in the news. My family didn’t feel any kind of support. It’s just something that, over there, you have to deal with. Here, people take care of other people.”
She talks to her grandmother in Britain twice a day and thinks her family are now accepting that she is happier in New
Zealand, and they want the best for her.
Recently, she put down a deposit on a new-build townhouse. It has two bedrooms – one for her and one for the child or children that she would one day like to foster.
She will stay in Auckland for now, she says, because once she started teaching at Avondale, she made friends easily, “and they became family”.
The teaching has been more rewarding, too, with values she thinks were often missing in her previous school. She was surprised to find on her first day that “the kids were sitting at their desks, with their pens out”. They were ready to learn. In her Birmingham school, persuading the class to sit down was by itself a considerable effort. She has been supported by parents when she has called them about disciplinary matters. Kids themselves have apologised for incidents. By contrast, she says that, in Britain, parents she encountered would be more likely to blame the teacher.
Being able to concentrate on teaching is having its rewards. One of her pupils last year came top in the world in AS [Cambridge] maths – scoring an extraordinary 100% on both the statistics paper and the algebra paper. The student was delighted. So was Jeewa.
“It was a proud teacher moment.”
One of her pupils came top in the world in AS [Cambridge] maths – scoring 100% on both the statistics paper and the algebra paper.
recently, he has disparagingly singled out Indian migrants. In a 2019 discussion document, National proposed increasing from 10 to 20 years the time someone needs to be a New Zealand citizen or permanent resident in order to be eligible for New Zealand Superannuation.
We have been this way before. Ahead of the 2017 election, NZ First promised to bring net migration down to a mere 10,000 a year. Labour chimed in with a commitment to “take a breather on immigration” if elected, with an overall goal to reduce net migration by “20,000-30,000”. Since then there has been backpedalling. “We are not fixated on numbers,” says Immigration Minister Iain Lees- Galloway, adding that the manifesto number was never a target anyway.
He says the Government is focused on ensuring the immigration system supports the aim of a more productive, inclusive and sustainable economy. “In just about every region, particularly outside the large metro areas, localgovernment councils are crying out for more people – they want it to be easier to get the people they need,” Lees-Galloway says.
In September, Immigration New Zealand announced a new employer-assisted work visa to replace five existing temporary visas. The changes are aimed to help New Zealand industries get the staff they need, weed out exploitative employers, ensure jobs are paid in line with market rates and encourage migrant workers to look outside the main cities.
The criteria include ensuring a Kiwi worker could not do – or could not be trained to do – the job (with an exemption for jobs in rural regions). Sector-specific agreements will be negotiated for those industries reliant on foreign workers, such as the hospitality, aged-care, dairy and construction sectors, and it will become easier for low-paid workers to bring their families to New Zealand.
The Government is now looking at the residency programme “to see if we can target it better”, says Lees-Galloway.
“We are in competition with other Western nations for highly skilled migrants and we need our residency programme to focus on those highly skilled people to incentivise them to come and stay in New Zealand long term.”
A LENGTHENING QUEUE
For some, however, the path to residence is rocky. From 2018 to 2019, the number of people on temporary visas being granted permanent residence dropped sharply from 20,200 to 11,740, with more than 22,000 applications still pending.
New visa changes link the duration of temporary visas to pay grade – those working in lower-skilled roles with a lower pay packet will be eligible for yearly visas but only up to a maximum of three years. They will then have to leave the country for a year before applying for another visa for the same job or try to get a work visa for a higher-paid role. They could apply for residency but accruing the number of points
Immigration New Zealand has announced a new employerassisted work visa to replace five existing temporary visas.