THE RETURN OF THE Tongan Robin Hood
Thousands of people live in Aotearoa illegally, surviving in a shadow world of cash jobs, without benefits or healthcare. In the first of a three-part series going inside the world of overstayers, National Correspondent Steve Kilgallon reports on the live
During the first coronavirus lockdown, Mary* watched Jacinda Ardern’s press conferences every day. Even a year later, the prime minister’s most memorable catchphrase still echoes for her. “It always clicks into my mind,” says Mary. “Be kind on our people.”
Mary looks at me. “You will be the one giving my voice. I would love to ask the prime minister and the New Zealand Government, please be kind on us overstayers, give us a chance: for our kids. Please be kind on our kids and give us a chance: any pathways or any amnesty. We can survive on our own, we won’t rely on their money.”
Mary is among the roughly 14,000 people in New Zealand who have overstayed their visas and are now here illegally, living in a shadow world of cash jobs, no benefits and no healthcare.
She arrived here from Tonga on a visitor’s visa in 2009 and has accepted her own, uncertain fate. It’s her four children she worries about: despite being born here, none qualify for New Zealand citizenship.
Still, she thinks there’s more future for them here than in her homeland (they don’t have Tongan passports either, or even speak the language).
That hope is based on the growing clamour for an amnesty for overstayers: the first since 2000, when the Labour government allowed about 7000 long-term overstayers to become legitimate citizens. Three separate petitions have been presented to Parliament in the past year, totalling more than 100,000 signatures, asking for an amnesty and other changes to help migrants.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but international studies suggest that amnesties benefit the economy and overstayers tend to be highly law-abiding.
Some who have become overstayers were sold a dream: their short-term work visa would translate into residency and a passport. When the dream began to sour – often as a result of exploitation – pride, family pressure and sheer economics made them hang on.
Some, like Mary, simply took a chance: arriving on a visitor’s visa and trying to forge a life without documents.
Others simply fell through the net, overstaying without any intention to do so.
Like 81-year-old Sione Likio and his wife, Fifita, 72.
They’ve raised four children, informally adopted another, have many grandchildren, are pillars of their church and their local Tongan communities. They’ve also been living illegally in New Zealand for most of the past 15 years.
But last September, the Immigration and Protection Tribunal ruled there were “exceptional humanitarian circumstances” to allow the couple to remain in New Zealand.
Their lawyer, John Petris, says the case is representative of many he’s seen, and a good illustration of how otherwise law-abiding people slide into breaking our immigration laws.
The Likios had arrived in 2005 on visitor visas, and twice unsuccessfully attempted to secure residency, with an agent who filed late and with incorrect paperwork apparently to blame. They gave up, but kept living here without attracting official attention.
Petris says he often finds people try to become legitimate, but falter at the hurdles of producing paperwork, or completing a medical examination.
‘‘A small thing can unravel your whole life ... You know, form 2.1 wasn’t put in at the right time and your life was ruined,’’ he says.
‘‘You have a very sophisticated and not an easy immigration system with particular rules and some complexities that if you’re not familiar with, you can easily become without status, whether you tried your best and did not intend to find yourself in this situation.’’
In the end, it took the intervention of Petris, who took the Likios’ case to the IPT, to secure their future.
‘‘It’s a good case to use as an illustration,’’ he
says. ‘‘It’s not a case where they came and hid. They tried to sort it out. They were victims of high fees and things not sorted properly ... and they were also frustrated by their lack of knowledge to manoeuvre the system, and then it unravelled.
‘‘They did say to me they couldn’t find a good person after that to help them out, and they didn’t trust anyone ... They were very untrusting of me at first too: I was just another lawyer who was going to take their money.’’
He’s had other such clients: ‘‘Each story is different, but a common feature is something got stuffed up at the beginning, they became entrenched, and it became too hard to go away.’’
The tribunal received letters of support from two of the Likios’ sons, their adopted son, a daughter, a niece, a granddaughter, Fifita Likio’s two sisters, a church minister, a Methodist Reverend and a Justice of the Peace outlining the role they played in their community.
Petris says an amnesty would find many other Sione and Fifita Likios: honest, hardworking, lawabiding people who provide a centrepiece to a big, contributing family.
Petris believes an amnesty should be extended to people here for a long time on a series of shortterm visas with no chance of securing residence.
It is, he says, an ‘‘opportune time’’ for an amnesty for people like the Likios, who’ve ‘‘been here contributing to New Zealand, their record is clean, and they are settled’’.
Those deep family and cultural ties may in part explain why nearly 20 per cent of all overstayers are Tongan – by ethnicity, the largest group.
The day after the first Covid-19 lockdown, on March 26, 2020, Kennedy Maeakafa Fakana’ana’a-ki-Fualu posted a public notice on his Facebook page Tonga News Hub, a news aggregator with an audience of 28,000. Fakana’ana’a-ki-Fualu – aka ‘‘The Tongan Robin Hood’’ – listed the service providers who could help. He also added his own phone number.
‘‘A lot of the overstayers were afraid to come and speak to an English speaker, but they would speak to a Tongan,’’ he says.
‘‘They were too scared, they wouldn’t pick up the phone, and those that did call, what they heard was ‘can we have your full name, your address?’ They’re not going to do that, they don’t trust the systems.’’
And so the Tongan Robin Hood was back in business. Fakana’ana’a-ki-Fualu first earned the title in 1987, when he worked for Inland Revenue and helped a surge of Tongan overstayers who had arrived a year earlier on free short-term visas, to navigate the system towards residency. At times, he queued overnight at Immigration New Zealand’s Queen St office.
‘‘I would get there at 11 or 12 [midnight], there would be 20 people in front of me with sleeping bags,’’ says Fakana’ana’a-ki-Fualu. ‘‘It was unheard of for a public servant to do this. I got a lot of applications through, they were all accepted, and they became residents of New Zealand. So that’s how I got started with the labour of love for the overstayers.’’
He’s seen a bit of life since then, moving to Tonga, America and then Australia, losing a son to cancer, and enrolling late in life to study law, politics and media at Auckland University. But once the calls began coming, he was taken back to 1987.
‘‘Thirty-three years later, I am back to helping them. I thought I was done.’’
Maeakafa Fakana’ana’a-ki-Fualu bought some basic foods in bulk from a wholesaler – flour, milk, rice; cabin bread. During level four, he drove around South Auckland delivering to overstayer families. He helped 20 families that first week, then many more came forward.
The Michael Jones Foundation, the Village Community Services Trust and BBM – boxer David ‘‘Butterbean’’ Letele’s charity – covered 25 families each. Kiwi Harvest, which redistributes excess food to charitable organisations, also helped with bulk supplies for another 50.
He has parked his studies to concentrate on helping the overstayers. ‘‘I just can’t bear the thought of children going to sleep on an empty stomach,’’ he says. ‘‘That reason is enough for me to sacrifice a lot of things, including my studies.’’
It’s also provided meaning to him after the loss of his son in 2003. ‘‘I was so broken,’’ he says. ‘‘My faith was tested, I said ‘God, take me instead please, don’t take my son’.’’
He knows of individual overstayers, but focuses his efforts on families – many of them long-term overstayers, here 15 years or more, but still in very precarious living situations.
He believes it is time for an amnesty. ‘‘Let them come out of hiding, and those that are able to work, let them go and do the work,’’ he says, citing the desperate shortage of fruit pickers.
‘‘Offer a pathway to residency, or a work visa, and if, at the end of it, they have proven they are a good citizen, have proven they can pay taxes, and proven they can survive and work without depending on the system, and more importantly have a good record – let them stay.
‘‘We don’t condone breaking the law, but simply overstaying: we don’t want to box them up with violent criminals, because that stigma is there ... Overstayers are just normal people, mums, dads, kids, they don’t break the law, they are just looking for a better life.’’
Among those the Tongan Robin Hood helps with food parcels is Susan*. When she decided to move here in 2015, she brought her husband and the two youngest of her five children. Considered at risk of overstaying, the family received only a one-month visa.
‘‘Before we came from Tonga, we planned [that] even if they gave us one day, one week or one month, as long as they opened the door for us to come here, we would stay,’’ she says.
They took out a bank loan to fund the cost of the trip, and initially stayed with Susan’s sister in the central North Island, before realising that all the cash jobs were in Auckland.
The three oldest children, now aged 17, 15, and 10, were left with Susan’s elderly retired parents in Tonga. Attempts to bring them over since have been blocked by Immigration NZ, although the eldest has visited twice during school holidays.
The two youngest children, aged nine and six, are in New Zealand. Both are enrolled in primary school.
Susan’s husband, a plumber back home, has a cash job as a builder, work he found through his cousin. But neither have IRD numbers and she has been unable to find work herself. She had a job offer, but was asked for her IRD number, and the offer was withdrawn.
Finding a house was difficult: they rented one in a friend’s name.
Before the lockdown, they would ask family in Tonga to airmail medicine over if the children got sick. Susan’s oldest child was sick shortly after they arrived, and the treatment cost $500. They still send money home to pay for their older children and an ill sister.
Susan breaks into tears. ‘‘My husband sometimes wants to give up and go back to the island. But I say to him ‘we planned this before we came here, we want a better life for us and for the kids’. Back in the island, even though we live for free, sometimes we don’t have enough to eat.’’
She desperately wants to stay here. She recounts being stopped while driving on her Tongan licence, and praying the police didn’t check her status. ‘‘I was so scared because I thought they would deport me straight away.’’ The next day she applied for a New Zealand licence.
Sometimes she allows herself to daydream that she is a citizen, but she’s not ashamed of being an overstayer, and is open about it within her community. And despite everything, she says, she feels ‘‘lucky’’.
Mary, our Jacinda Ardern watcher, first visited New Zealand in 2008 for a holiday and to visit her uncle. She also joined him at his job harvesting potatoes in Pukekohe, and that’s when she knew she would be back: she was paid more than $300 in cash for a week’s work. Her real job, as a clerk in a commercial bank in Nuku’alofa paid just 240 Tongan pa’anga (about $147) a week.
So Mary returned in 2009 on another visitor’s visa, but with no intention of returning home. Three months was extended to nine, but since then, she has been in New Zealand illegally.
By December that year, she was married to a fellow Tongan overstayer who had arrived in 2006, although he has an IRD number and pays tax on his construction job.
The couple have since had four children. All have birth certificates, but no citizenship or residency: they are effectively stateless.
A Ministry of Education scheme for ‘‘Unlawful Domestic Students’’ means the oldest two attend school. In a statement, deputy secretary Katrina Casey says the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states all children have the right to a good quality education, and 466 children are enrolled as unlawful domestic status students.
‘‘Our focus is on providing these children with access to education … it is important that any family living in New Zealand unlawfully feels safe to approach us about their children applying for unlawful domestic status.’’
Mary has heard there is no provision for tertiary education, and that already worries her.
The oldest boy, she says, is desperate to join the Skids after-school group. But without a subsidy number from Work and Income, he cannot enrol. ‘‘He doesn’t understand what our situation is. I have to say son, I am sorry, we don’t have money to pay for that. We earn just enough for us now, but not any money to pay for the Skids.’’
A doctor’s visit costs $50 per child because they cannot be registered as residents; any medication prescribed is unsubsidised. An adult visit is $95, so Mary and her husband don’t go, ever. Despite this, she still sends money back home.
Mary says she can budget to live off her husband’s income. First come her kids. Then the bills. Then the maternity bills. It cost $40,000 to
‘‘Our focus is on providing these children with access to education … it is important that any family living in New Zealand unlawfully feels safe to approach us about their children applying for unlawful domestic status.’’ Katrina Casey Ministry of Education deputy secretary
have her four children delivered. She has almost finished paying off the two eldest kids. Spare money is sent home.
Her husband is paid between $500 and $600 a week for six days work. Until recently, rent was $445, but they’ve found somewhere for $300 because the landlord ‘‘knows our situation’’.
‘‘If you think New Zealanders struggle at life, even though you’ve got money – so if you put your shoes on us, how can you survive?
‘‘Growing up in the island, it is just so hard for us, because you earn your money just from fishing and plantation. There were 10 of us. Every Sunday is a feast day for us, but we have to share 1kg of lamb between the 12 of us, so can you imagine that? So that’s how life is, tough in the island, because there are many of us, and because prices are rising, we don’t have much.
‘‘I don’t want my children to grow up that way. I wish that I have a chance for my kids, because they are New Zealanders, even though I am not a New Zealander, they were born here. There should be something for them. I don’t mind for myself, but at least my children should have a chance to grow up here in a better life.’’
Immigration NZ has never made contact. Is she surprised at that? Mary laughs. ‘‘It’s OK.’’
But she adds: ‘‘It worries me because you never know if someone might tell on us. Only our family knows. I don’t like to let people know, but everyone in the community knows our situation.’’
She tried once to apply for an essential skills visa in 2010, and was denied. She hasn’t tried since: an agent took $500 from the family, but never lodged an application. To get residency, she says, ‘‘would be overwhelming’’.
Every night, the family’s prayers include a plea for a passport: ‘‘That’s always in our dreams.’’
And her plea to Ardern for her kids? ‘‘They don’t understand what the situation is. It is my fault,’’ she says tearfully. ‘‘But they should be a citizen, because they were born here, and we are paying the bills for them ... they should have a chance of a better future.’’
‘‘I just can’t bear the thought of children going to sleep on an empty stomach. That reason is enough for me to sacrifice a lot of things, including my studies.’’ Kennedy Maeakafa Fakana’ana’a-ki-Fualu