Dialogue: No wonder life is sour for migrants

By GARTH GEORGE

So life has turned sour for many of Auckland's Asian immigrants. According to an Auckland City Council study of Asian communities reported in the Herald last week (did you miss me, by the way? Well, it wasn't My Turn), a lot of new Asian immigrants are returning home or trying to move to Australia or the United States to escape "endemic unemployment."

Is anyone surprised? Years ago in this column I predicted that the huge influx of Asians into New Zealand would bring with it serious economic and social problems.

According to the survey there are at least 110,000 Asians in Auckland right now - which represents about 10 per cent of the entire population of the metropolis - and most of them have been here for less than 10 years. No wonder they've got problems.

They complain: that, except for Japanese, they have much higher rates of unemployment than the average; that the job market is stacked against them and they often can't even get to the interview stage; that many Asian youths find New Zealand "clean, green and boring"; that hospitals are difficult places because of language problems; that burglary is an especially bad problem; and that our schools are easy and slack compared with those they had at home.

Welcome to New Zealand, folks - a land populated by English speaking-people of European and Polynesian stock who, like all societies, have their own way of doing things and aren't willingly going to change for anyone.

And that goes particularly for immigrants, who were invited to this country by a Government of out-of-touch, off-the-wall, knee-jerk politicians without reference to the electorate and without any consideration being given to the consequences.

If many of those who have come here found us and our country not to their liking, blame the politicians who threw the doors open, took their money and thought nothing of the important things such as jobs and education and infrastructure and housing and medical-social services and assimilation into a culture as different from theirs as East is from West.

Don't blame your average Kiwi, because we weren't asked and if we had been, we'd most likely have politely - and not so politely - said "no."

And while some readers are right now choking on their porridge while screaming "racist," let it be known that the survey showed that many Asian immigrants feel that New Zealanders are not overtly racist.

Note the word "overtly," for it is a courageous man or woman indeed who in these nauseatingly politically correct times will say or do anything overtly which might be construed as racist.

But since all but a few of us are at heart racist - and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with recognising the vast and sometimes unbridgeable differences that exist between people and cultures - what most of us do is suppress our discomfort at the influx of Orientals and decline in a thousand different ways to put ourselves out for them. Some of us, no doubt, even go out of our way to be obnoxious.

That mightn't be good or nice or proper or decent - it might not even be the way it should be - but it's the way it is, the reality, and sooner or later we as a nation will have to face up to it. As will all those engaged in the blind rush towards globalisation, who choose to ignore national, racial and tribal divisions that go back to the dawn of mankind.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the immigrants who have come here, most in good faith, only to find that the reality has not lived up to the expectation. But I will not for a moment concede that this is in any way the fault of the average Kiwi.

And I marvel at the ignorance of those who pronounce on the problems of our Asian immigrants in such a way as to imply that the fault is ours for not putting ourselves out for them.

If you put an average Kiwi family down in Tokyo or Taiwan, Beijing of Bangkok, Saigon or Seoul, Kuala Lumpur or Kowloon, they would encounter the same difficulties our Asian immigrants are finding here. And in some of those places genuine racism would be in-your-face overt.

As a letter-writer said on the page opposite on Monday, it seems that a goodly proportion of Asian immigrants "did not take the time or effort to visit New Zealand before deciding to emigrate and didn't do their pre-immigration homework properly in checking out our education, health, local government services and so on, or consider cultural differences."

Fortunately, this problem is going to sort itself out. Those immigrants who can't or won't hack it will go home or somewhere else; those who can adapt will stay - and make a significant contribution to the health, wealth and diversity of our society.

They're welcome.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz