Don’t kick Middleton out
Zealand. Both the Sensible Sentencing Trust founder and ACT leader are outraged that Middleton, who arrived in New Zealand as a four-year-old and is now 60, is set to be kicked out.
If you’re thinking Middleton is to be sent packing because he was convicted and jailed for nine months in 2001 (later suspended) for threatening to kill his stepdaughter’s killer, or even because he’s maybe become a burden to our society you’d be wrong. He was arrested at his workplace, teaching carpentry at Capital Training in Paraparaumu. So he was actually making a significant contribution towards this country, in both the exchange of skills and taxes. Middleton’s greatest error appears to be faith in a system that has failed him at least once before, and tragically so.
His lawyer says he arrived in New Zealand from Britain in 1962 with four siblings as a preapproved immigrant. Those siblings now have permanent residence, but Middleton doesn’t, which the lawyer puts down to bureaucratic bungling. So a man who has been in this country for 56 years, who has clearly contributed in a number of ways, and even considered a run for national politics, is now regarded as an overstayer, one of thousands on Immigration NZ’s books. Technically, no doubt, the agency is right. It usually is. But Immigration NZ has demonstrated once more that it knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. And in doing so it has exposed an awful hypocrisy at the heart of our immigration debate.
Our politicians and other commentators rail constantly about the outrageous way Australia dumps back on our shore people who have often spent most, if not practically all, of their lives across the Tasman but are then committed sometimes relatively minor indiscretions. Similarly we are appalled that America could consider so heartlessly divorcing itself of the Dreamers, the babies and young children of illegal immigrants who have gone on to live faultless, fruitful lives, Middleton is a Kiwi Dreamer, even if his parents arrived here legally. We’d like to think that the agency now reviewing his case, his future, could see the sense and compassion and look into lives lived as Kiwis who have made a real contribution to their adopted nation.