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Have we got room to double our annual intake of refugees? Of course we have.
Would we be able to resettle them well? Of course we could.
We’ve done it before, 35 years ago when the ‘bogey’ of the refugee hordes was just as much paraded as it is being today. John Key was a teenager then. Immigration minister Aussie Malcolm was the voice of the government on refugees.
The ‘have we got room for more refugees’ discussion of 2015 is almost a carbon copy of what we were arguing back in 1979.
The mainly Vietnamese boat people of that time and land refugees from Pol Pot’s Cambodia and from Laos were crowded into camps in various parts of South East Asia particularly, Thailand. More than a million people left those three countries in the years 1975 to 1979.
And how many were let through the door here?
There were calls then, as now, for New Zealand to take in more than the small number accepted up to that time.
There were fears put about of boatloads of refugees washing up on our shores, taking up our space, using our housing, getting a free ride here when others could not. There was the suggestion that if we increased our quota we couldn’t do a good job resettling them.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was desperate then for host countries to help with refugee resettlement.
In response, in New Zealand, the numbers allowed in were small. In that time of horrific and total loss for the people concerned around 530 were let in – but only if they held formal UN refugee status and had occupation qualifications useful to New Zealand.
There were calls for New Zealand to show leadership by increasing our intake. The government said no. Not until it saw how the first groups had settled. (Given that desperation-settlement can take years it was going to be a long wait if it was properly going to be assessed.)
And now it’s happening again. Continue reading
- Hugo Manson can be heard interviewing locals on Radio Eketahuna along with interesting people from all over the world.
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