Minister briefed: no ethnic profiling
A pilot programme that prioritised overstayers for deportisation has been suspended by Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway, despite an assurance from Immigration New Zealand that ethnicity was not a factor that it had ever taken into account.
Immigration NZ also indicated that overstayers were only being selected for deportation based on their own information and behaviour, rather than the past behaviour of people with similar characteristics, as had been thought.
‘‘The term ‘profiling’ means different things to different people and Immigration NZ’s use of this word in the media has caused misunderstandings, which is regrettable,’’ a briefing provided by Immigration NZ’s general manager of risk and intelligence, Nicola Hogg, to Lees-Galloway stated.
‘‘In this situation, it simply describes a set of criteria Immigration NZ used to prioritise the deportation of unlawful migrants. Immigration NZ apologises for this confusion.’’
A storm broke out on Thursday after Immigration NZ official Alistair Murray told RNZ that the department was using ‘‘country of origin’’ as one of a number factors to profile and then prioritise the deportation of overstayers and other people who had breached their visa conditions.
That was after working out which groups of overstayers were mostly likely to be involved with the police or to run up hospital debts, he said.
That was likened to a ‘‘bureau of pre-crime’’.
Immigration NZ assistant general manager Peter Devoy had appeared to confirm on Thursday that racial profiling was taking place. When asked whether Immigration NZ was using country of origin, age and gender for the pilot, Devoy responded ‘‘we have used all of them’’.
But Immigration NZ’s briefing indicated that the information it provided on the pilot last week was incorrect.
‘‘There is no racial or ethnic profiling undertaken in deportation and there never has been,’’ the briefing document said.
Instead, the factors that could be considered were limited to people’s age, gender, skill levels, any ‘‘unlawful history’’ people had, any specific concerns about their character or identity, whether their address was known, and various details relating to their interactions with the immigration system.
A spokesman for Lees-Galloway confirmed it was only people’s own individual information that was taken into account, not how people whose characteristics they shared had behaved.
Lees-Galloway said he was ‘‘reasonably comfortable’’ with the pilot as it had now been explained, but he had asked Immigration NZ to suspend it until they had discussed it with the Human Rights Commission and Privacy Commissioner John Edwards.
Those meetings are planned for the next two days.
It had taken time for Immigration NZ to correct the record because the pilot was a low-tech exercise confined to its Auckland office, which was not widely known about, the spokesman for Lees-Galloway had earlier indicated.
Last year, Immigration NZ forcibly deported 827 people, of whom 28 per cent were from India, 26 per cent from Samoa, Tonga or Fiji, and 6 per cent from European Union countries.