Keeping a family together
Thousands of people live in Aotearoa illegally, surviving in a shadow world of cash jobs, without benefits or healthcare. Steve Kilgallon examines what keeps overstayers here.
Afew days before Eason Diao’s 17th birthday, his father, 62-year-old house painter Chuanjin Diao, fell from a roof and died.
Next month, on his 18th birthday, there’s a very real possibility Diao’s mother, Xianglan Hao, could be deported to her native China.
Diao is a champion ballroom dancer and swimmer. He has a YouTube channel with 1660 followers and has just secured his first clothing endorsement. He’s in his final year at Macleans College in Auckland, with plans to study at Auckland University to become a radiologist.
His parents, who arrived from China in 2001, were both already overstayers when he was born here in June 2004. Both already had older children in China from previous relationships, and they decided to continue here illegally, in part because they feared China’s onechild policy would leave Eason facing discrimination.
The law at the time meant Eason became a New Zealand citizen by birth. Two years later, the Citizenship Amendment Act revoked that right. That is why the Kiwi-born children of Susan and Mary, Tongan overstayers profiled in part one of this series, in yesterday’s Sunday Star-Times, are considered overstayers.
A Supreme Court ruling in 2009 made it extremely difficult for Immigration NZ (INZ) to deport the parents of New Zealand citizens, saying it would be unusually cruel to leave a child without their parents, and the interests of the child should have ‘‘paramount weight’’.
Still, that same year, when Eason was 5, INZ attempted to remove the entire family. An immigration officer arrived at their home to take a passport photo of young Eason to apply for a Chinese passport in his name.
Eason’s father was detained, and his mother had a mental health incident after visiting him in Mt Eden Prison and learning he was about to be deported. Chuanjin only remained when a High Court injunction was obtained minutes before his plane was due to depart.
With both parents unable to care for him, Eason ended up living for six weeks with the family’s immigration adviser, former government minister Tuariki Delamere, and attending Westmere Primary school with Delamere’s mokopuna.
Eventually, Eason’s parents were released, but they remained overstayers with no right of residence. Diao says he is sure Immigration NZ made at least one more, if not two, further attempts to deport them in the years that followed. As the only English speaker, it was his duty to read them the deportation liability notices. As a result, they moved frequently.
Since then, while the family have lived in fear of a knock on the door, they appear to have been left alone by INZ, as what Delamere suspects is a ‘‘self-imposed penance’’ for the events of 2009.
Diao remembers snatches of what happened when he was 5. He suspects he’s suppressed much of it, but does remember the photo incident and living with Delamere. ‘‘I’ve been told more and more about what went on,’’ he says. ‘‘They would try to shield me from it as much as they could, but they couldn’t because they couldn’t understand a lot of the documents. I translated them, so I had a rough idea of what was going on. I was the one who had to tell them they were to be deported.’’
His parents both had IRD numbers, driving licences and paid tax, but had no ability to travel overseas and no access to benefits. ‘‘There was a lot of time being just scared that my mum will have to leave,’’ Diao says.
Shortly before his father died, realising their situation would never improve and they would never be able to afford to retire, he says his parents began discussing whether to leave. Their idea was to send financial support back from China to