Arunima Dhingra says there has been a tightening up which has not been acknowledged.

• 14 per cent of Indian applicants for the employer-assisted work visa were rejected last year compared to 4 per cent for Chinese applicants.
• In the essential skills work visa category, 19 per cent of declines were for Indian applicants.
• Of those in the country unlawfully, 922 of 2541 Indian applicants were approved compared to 828 of 1232 Chinese applicants and 239 of 310 British immigrants.

Immigration New Zealand denies there has been any change.

"Every time we've asked immigration 'what's happening? Are you singling them out? Is there a different way of processing applications for Indian nationals?' We've always had 'no, it's never that,'" said Dhingra.

Immigration lawyer Alastair McClymont says Immigration NZ's "absolute discretion" in decision-making inevitably leads to racial discrimination.

He says Indian students in New Zealand are correctly identified as being vulnerable to exploitation.

But "Immigration NZ's only solution to the problem of exploitation would appear to be to remove vulnerable students."

And he says they are doing it by cutting corners on Indian applicants' fundamental common law rights to have applications processed in a fair and just manner.

A year ago Immigration New Zealand introducing a new complaints process.

While decisions were previously able to be overturned in the complaint process, from May 2017 on this right was taken away.

At the same time, Immigration New Zealand began advising the minister that its strategy to clamp down on migrant exploitation was to target those migrants who are at risk of exploitation - to deport people who may become victims, rather than stop the exploitation itself.

Source

• radionz.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• Image: radionz.co.nz

Yet the stir around Lampedusa is itself worth looking into. The pope said such tragedies are "shameful," but I would describe Europe's emotional state as one of embarrassment. The embarrassment relates to our reluctance to confront the hypocrisy embedded in how we think about immigrants from the poor and broken parts of the world. On the one hand, we have high moral standards about our duty of care to refugees fleeing lives of squalor, fear and oppression, and these are embedded in various international treaties and national laws. On the other hand, if we applied those standards generally, we would have to accept that over a billion people have some legitimate claim to refugee status.

Who are those billion? Most women in the Middle East and perhaps Central America; homosexuals from most of the world; many of the world's indigenous peoples; most inhabitants of failed states like Somalia and the Central African Republic; everyone but the elite in totalitarian dictatorships like Eritrea, North Korea and Uzbekistan; the 12 million people without citizenship of any state; religious and ethnic minorities in intolerant countries like Pakistan and Burma; all the civilians in war zones like Syria and Baghdad; India's untouchables; China's Tibetans; the vast number of refugees interned for decades in long-term camps in poor countries, like the Somalis living in Kenya or the ethnic Nepalis expelled by Bhutan - and so on. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: World News Post