Dialogue: Tension inevitable as migrants settle

By GARTH GEORGE

If anyone is surprised at yet another outbreak of racial tension in Auckland, I wonder what sort of fantasy world they live in. If anyone denies there was a racial component to last week's killing in Owairaka, they must be astonishingly naive.

You can't import thousands of people from the far side of the world into this country and expect them to integrate overnight.

This is particularly so when even our indigenous population - and I include Maori, Pakeha and most Pacific Islanders in that - display an inability to get on together and Maori and Pakeha, in particular, are constantly sniping at one another.

I predicted in this column years ago that racial problems would bother us for years to come. Strained relations between some Maori and the rest of us have continued unabated, and a new dimension has been added by the arrival of other races.

Immigration policies throughout the late 1980s and the 90s made that inevitable. Instead of bringing in non-European and non-Polynesian immigrants in small numbers, giving each contingent time to settle, integrate into the workforce and find a place for themselves in our society, we have flung the gates wide open to tens of thousands a year.

In a nation which had become so entranced with the almighty dollar that we imagined our own heads on the coin instead of the Queen's, we lusted after the wealth that immigrants might bring us without giving the slightest thought to the human and social consequences.

It seemed to occur to few that the people we were begging to come here from China and Southeast Asia were as different from us as it is possible to be - historically, physically, culturally, mentally and spiritually.

And that the same applied to those who came to us, mainly as "refugees", from African and Middle Eastern countries such as Somalia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Did we expect all these people to shuck off centuries of history, tradition, culture and religion the moment they landed on our shores? Did we expect them not to have serious difficulties acclimatising to our manner of living, our laws and legal system, our form of Government, our Judaeo-Christian heritage?

Or to comprehend an insularity that says if you aren't white and can't speak English well, there's no place for you here and you had better go back to where you came from?

It seems we did, and that's unsurprising since most of us had fallen victim to one of the greatest deceptions of political correctness, the one that tells us that all men and women are not only equal but the same.

Which, of course, is utter nonsense. It has never been true since Adam and Eve and it will never be true as long as humankind inhabits the Earth. Every person in this world is unique - just look at his or her fingerprints.

Now I'm not saying that we should not have invited these foreigners to come and join us or that they are not welcome here. They have much to contribute to the richness and diversity of our society and many of them have.

But in every nation on God's Earth - including this one - there are the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the industrious and slothful, the law-abiding and the criminal, the peaceful and the violent, and it would be against the immutable law of averages if we didn't get our share of the bad.

That's part of the deal, whether we like it or not. And even if all our immigrants came from Britain, the Irish Republic and Western Europe, it would be just the same - even worse if they came from Australia.

We have had Asian gangs putting the heavy on Asian businessmen in Auckland. Of course. Standover tactics and protection rackets are part of business through Asia. The police put paid to them chop, chop.

There is evidence that Muslim terrorists have used Auckland for a base; we have had Iranian and Iraqi refugees having a go at one another in a camp at Whangaparaoa; and there are serious tensions in the Sri Lankan immigrant community over Tamil separatism.

Now Somalis and Pacific Islanders have had a go. Of course. Two vastly different cultures met in an emotion-charged atmosphere and death was the result. In some societies personal insults are taken very seriously indeed, sometimes fatally so.

And so it will go on. But we have to remember that, considering the tens of thousands of immigrants who have arrived over more than a decade, such incidents are so few and far between as to be almost meaningless.

All they serve to do is to show us that when we throw our nation open to immigration, in order to reap the benefits we have to accept the downside, too.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz