Dialogue: Economic refugees are exactly the migrants we need

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Ww probably shouldn't shout this too loudly around the world, but we can afford to be a soft touch for determined migrants. Boat people, "queue jumpers" - we need 'em.

To broadcast the fact would defeat the purpose. We need people who know the path is tough but set out anyway.

It seems to me an opportunity went begging in Bali this week when governments met to relieve the pressure on Australia, and all that our ministers had to offer was to fill more of our miserable refugee quota with certified asylum seekers who have reached Indonesia.

Asylum seekers be damned. The curious thing about this whole subject has been the implication that those who wait in line for their credentials to be checked are the virtuous and those who don't are villains.

The only reason you would wait in line to see the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is so that you can establish "a well-founded fear of persecution" at home. In other words, the regime back there has a particular reason to regard you as an enemy.

That doesn't make you a villain, but it probably doesn't make you a blushing innocent either. Civil wars are brutalising for all sides and it shouldn't be assumed the losers are the lesser offenders.

Possibly our Government can ensure its annual quota is filled with painters, poets and pacifists whose work has offended the powerful, but I doubt it.

This is not an argument for refusing asylum to political fugitives. Not in the least. Let 'em come, too. But let's not treat the rest - "economic refugees" - as an inferior caste.

Economic refugees are ordinary folk, probably not politically aligned and unable to line up with confidence at the UN desk. Those who refuse to wait in the stench and squalor of refugee camps are a bit more than ordinary folk.

They are demonstrably risk-takers, enterprising. And they have amassed sufficient capital to pay handsome sums to unsavoury characters, "people smugglers", who finally put them to sea and point them at the empty northern coast of Australia.

I can understand Australia's nervousness, but not ours. If any of those leaky boats ever make it right down here I wouldn't set Lianne Dalziel's dogs on them. I'd pay Tuku Morgan to make a film of their voyage and put it in Te Papa right up there with the odysseys of our ancestors.

But they are not going to sail all this way, not in the numbers we need. We ought to give the pick of them a pleasant surprise in Indonesia, preferably before they shell out for a voyage likely to end in an Australian prison.

I don't suppose this will strike the Prime Minister as a particularly sensible immigration policy but there isn't much that is sensible about immigration rules at the best of times.

Ms Dalziel was on radio this week explaining why employers are about to be made liable for policing her regulations. One of the reasons, she said, is that employers make it more difficult to expel these people when they give them jobs.

Before you know it, she continued, they have signed on with Inland Revenue and become protected by that department's privacy code and it just gets very difficult.

I waited for Kim Hill to say, "They have jobs, they pay tax, and you want send them away?" but she let me down.

For a country far from anywhere, populated entirely by migration within the past millennium (a flicker of time by comparison with human occupation of, say, Australia) we are astonishingly reluctant to allow more people in.

Even as we agonise about economic improvement, invoking every quack elixir of public investment, we overlook the obvious: The place is underpopulated.

The population has been practically static for 35 years. So has the economy. It has been that long since we lost the security of colonial trade and had to look for a broader range of exports and markets.

Strict immigration limits might have made sense while the country thought its economic development depended on keeping foreign goods and capital at bay. But for the past 18 years the prescription has been an open door to the world, in every factor of production except the most important, people.

Liberal immigration makes voters nervous and politicians consoled themselves with the idea that when the country is open to world markets, the size of the domestic economy doesn't matter.

Not long ago, as part of the Government's "economic transformation" quest, the Treasury issued discussion papers suggesting that size does matter after all. The author, David Skilling, argued that companies in a small, remote economy are less likely to invest in specialised, high-value products and generally lack the scale to sell into foreign markets.

The implications are obvious, but they hardly featured in the Government's voluminous production a few weeks ago.

This is an age of heavy global migration. The proportion of the world's population living outside the country of birth is double that of 35 years ago. And the most lively and prosperous places in the world, notably the United States and latterly Britain, have been the most open to migrants looking for a better life.

This country has yet to use its real comparative advantages - good housing, sealed roads, running water, electricity. When you are languishing in a UN refugee camp, what more would you want.

I don't blame those who jump the queue. I would, too.