John Roughan: We can hold many more people - and we need them

COMMENT

Down at the tennis club, quite late on a couple of nights a week, the Koreans come out. They choose evenings when hardly anybody else is about, park their cars far from the clubhouse, switch on the lights over the most distant courts and play happily for hours.

We never see them at weekends when we run a sociable system of organised games for anybody who comes along. We never see them at all except for once a year when they renew their membership.

Some of us think this is a problem. I don't.

Long ago I spent a year in Japan. The experience of living in a very foreign country is salutary. My wife and I went there with other New Zealanders and at least two or three times a week we would get together in our own bubble.

A Japanese fly on the wall at those little gatherings would have been appalled. We'd vent all the minor irritations of life in a quite different culture, comparing notes, taking merciless delight in the foibles we had noticed in the natives, talking too much of home.

We weren't, in fact, that homesick. We stayed away for years more. Some loved Japan so much and stayed there so long we wondered if they'd ever leave. But I don't think they ever lost the pleasure of gathering with Westerners, shutting out their surroundings for a while and relaxing with people who shared the same terms of reference.

So when the tennis club committee began to worry about the Koreans it was probably as well, I thought, that we were not flies on the courtside fence. And when a well-meaning group wondered how to devise an integration programme for Asians in clubs such as ours, I said leave them alone.

One way and another we worry too much about immigration. This country never seems smaller and sadder than periodically when Winston Peters decides to stir the pot for his own miserable survival.

The nasty little pamphlet he put into the post at taxpayers' expense a week or so ago is some sort of nadir in his poisonous career. Imagine being an immigrant and opening the mail that day.

The Japanese experience is salutary in that context, too. We were vaguely conscious at that time of a xenophobic element on the fringe of the country's politics. Demented men with nationalistic armbands and bullhorns used to be driven around on the back of trucks to berate passers-by, who largely ignored them.

I didn't know the language but I gained the impression they were not welcoming the likes of me. That didn't surprise or even offend me really; as a conspicuous alien I was bound to be resented by a section of that society. It happens everywhere.

I hope conspicuous immigrants in this country adopt the same attitude when they come upon NZ First's drivel. But I suspect that in a country of this size the sentiment sounds more serious.

Whenever someone says we are admitting too many migrants I am seized by quite a different fear: what if they stopped coming?

What if this country could no longer attract sufficient numbers to cover the leakage of people to larger countries? It is not a remote possibility.

How good it was to hear Don Brash tell a National Party audience on the North Shore yesterday that Peters' immigration statements were "racist and despicable in my view".

Brash also said that since 1979 we have had a net loss of citizens every year. Were it not for immigrants, he said, we would not now be enjoying a boom in house prices, employment and activity.

It could easily change. We naturally find this is the loveliest country in the world and imagine hordes are knocking at the door. They are not.

Step into the shoes of an energetic Asian attracted to life in a Western country and ask yourself where you would want to go: London, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Sydney or Auckland?

It is not easy to start a business in a population of our size. Here the economics of scale are against you, let alone the language and the racial suspicion you probably expect to be worse in a small, remote country.

The risk that the flow of migrants will fall away seems infinitely greater than the supposed risk that we will be overrun. Immigrants don't "take over" well-functioning countries, anyway; those countries take over them.

Asian immigrants are walking around in All Black outfits these days. Their children will have New Zealand accents. Korean members of the tennis club are seeking time to themselves, not because they're plotting to take us over but because an adopted country presses upon them so strongly.

To maintain an advantageous rate of population growth we probably need to ensure that attitudes here become more cosmopolitan quickly.

That means not only tackling the low-level antagonism to non-Western immigrants but not killing them with kindness either. They need to be able to keep their distinctions and we need to appreciate the diversity they bring.

Also turning up at tennis these days are Russians, South Africans, Zimbabweans. Last weekend I played a Bosnian Serb from Sarajevo. Not long ago I encountered an interesting man from Macedonia.

I hope Peters is right that we are a soft touch for refugees; more likely our isolation is attracting them. This is about as far from trouble as it is possible to be.

It also underpopulated. Excepting Australia and Canada with their uninhabitable wastes, New Zealand has the lowest population density in the OECD.

The most prosperous places in the world today, the United States and Britain, are those that have been the greatest magnets to poor, mobile people.

We can accommodate many more people and we need them. We can tolerate many more cultures and we would be a more interesting country with them. We should let them in, and let them be.