Immigrants with the world at their feet

If New Zealand wants skilled migrants it must realise moving country is no longer a lifetime decision, reports SIMON COLLINS.

When a Chinese scientist and her husband decided to leave their country in 1995 their first choice - like millions of migrants before them - was the United States.

But times have changed since the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886 to welcome "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". These days, the United States is choosier, and the Chinese couple and their 3-year-old son were refused visas.

"We knew New Zealand had an immigration policy," says the scientist, now working for Genesis Research in Auckland. "We did some research about life in New Zealand, and most people say New Zealand is the last paradise in the world, a beautiful green country."

They obtained permanent residence for New Zealand before they left China. Her husband found a job within two months of arriving in 1995, and the scientist found work soon afterwards. They are happy, and their son is "100 per cent Kiwi".

Yet listen further to the scientist, and it's clear that her outlook is quite different from that of the "homeless, tempest-tossed" masses that New York welcomed long ago. In fact, she sounds pretty much like any young New Zealander.

"I wanted to have two experiences - one in China, and another in a totally different country. So we were very keen to go out of China to see the world," she says.

"I like New Zealand very much. It's a peaceful, green country. The people are very friendly. But I love China too because it's the place where I grew up and I feel I have so much connection to China, so I'm not sure if in the future I will go back to China or stay here.

"Not in the next few years. I don't know in the future."

T HROUGHOUT the world, the days of migrants moving once, and perhaps not seeing their relatives again for 20 years, have ended.

Today's migrants are mostly skilled and well-paid - and welcome almost anywhere they go. They use the internet to keep in touch with friends and relatives scattered around the world.

A 1996 survey by Auckland University's Manying Ip and Ward Friesen found that adult Chinese Aucklanders who had arrived in the previous 10 years had more brothers and sisters in the United States (10 per cent) and Canada (8 per cent) than in New Zealand (4 per cent).

They are also highly mobile. In the 10 months up to June, 10.3 per cent of the New Zealand residents at the 1996 census who were born in China left for at least a year, as did 8.8 per cent of those born in India, 7.1 per cent of other Asians and just 1.3 per cent of the New Zealand-born.

"Quite a number of them at least treat New Zealand as an important station of their international network," says Manying Ip.

In part, the big influx of people from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea in the early 1990s was a one-off, driven by fears after the Tiananmen Square shootings in 1989 and before China took over Hong Kong in 1997.

New Zealand's new immigration rules in 1987, which opened the country to skilled and wealthy migrants regardless of their origins, coincided with the removal of controls on taking money out of Taiwan and Korea. Then, in the early 1990s, China also removed travel restrictions.

After New Zealand imposed a $20,000 English language bond in 1995, migration approvals from Taiwan dropped suddenly from 12,325 to just 664 in a single year. Many Taiwanese have left. Migration consultant Jimmy Hong says membership of the local Hwa Hsia Society has dropped from 1500 in 1995 to around 800.

But total immigration approvals, after dipping to 33,683 in 1996-97, have risen to 45,011 in the year to June - more than halfway back to the 1995-96 peak of 54,437.

The approvals have simply switched from Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong to Britain (5688 approvals in the latest year), India (5683), China (5571) and South Africa (4154).

By 1996, there were already 110,700 Asian residents in the Auckland region, or 10 per cent of the region's population. Statistics NZ's central projection for this year is 152,700, or roughly one Aucklander in eight.

Y ING SHENG HSIEH is one of Auckland's most successful Asian citizens. Since he arrived in 1989, he has built the Auckland Institute of Studies in the former St Helen's maternity hospital into a business that brings New Zealand $50 million in foreign exchange each year.

Originally from Taiwan, Hsieh was educated in the United States and worked for an American electronics company, becoming its vice-president for the Pacific. New Zealand became part of his territory.

"At first glance I loved this country," he says. "When you deal with people they are much warmer."

With the help of mainly American investors, he founded the institute in 1990. It now has 160 staff and 1300 students, 80 per cent from overseas. About half the students learn English, but others study business, travel and other courses.

"If we were a university we could get over 5000 students easily with my contacts in the Asian countries," Hsieh says.

I N THE FIVE years to March, 323,958 people, including 108,938 New Zealand citizens, entered New Zealand saying they intended to stay for at least a year. In the same period, 332,089 people, including 254,766 New Zealand citizens, left for at least a year.

In effect, New Zealand has replaced almost a tenth of its population in just five years, despite our isolation. Professor Richard Bedford of Waikato University's migration research group believes this is one of the highest replacement rates in the world.

But people everywhere are moving around much more. Young New Zealanders and Chinese scientists are not the only ones who want to see the world. And the ending of most trade and investment restrictions has spawned global businesses seeking to tap global talent.

Dr Elsie Ho, also at Waikato, has interviewed young Chinese New Zealanders who have moved to Hong Kong and found they had a "transnational outlook".

"One of them told me, 'Oh well, I don't actually treat Hong Kong as my final permanent place. After a few years maybe I'll move to Singapore, or the US."'

New Zealand's image in this worldwide market is mixed. "Certainly New Zealand has a good name as a country for retirement," says Taiwanese consultant Jimmy Hong.

"But New Zealand tries to promote itself as a good country for working, and to us it's not that type of destination."

Many Asians can't get jobs here. In the 1996 census, only 46 per cent of working-age Asians in Auckland were in paid work, compared with 63 per cent of other working-age Aucklanders. And the working Asians included doctors who couldn't get registered here and ended up driving taxis.

Catherina Chang is a Taiwanese-born house surgeon at Waikato Hospital.

"If you have lived here for three generations, you have three generations of networks," she says. "If you have lived here for 10 years, you have 10 years of networks.

"My dad said that if I wanted a job here, he couldn't help me, but if I wanted a job in Taiwan he could come up with me on the search."

M ATTHEW FUNG, who is returning to Hong Kong, sees his life as three steps - "the first 25 years education, the second 25 years earning money, the third 25 years what I want to do".

In 1988, when he was 44, he decided that the place where he could do what he wanted to do was New Zealand. He and his wife brought their four children, then aged 9 to 17, to Hamilton.

"I can do what I want in this country because it's free and open government. It was difficult in Hong Kong because there were 6 million people."

A former teacher, he had worked for the previous five years for an air freight company "to upgrade my family's life". In Hamilton, he started with a coffee shop.

But his "dream job" was writing for a newspaper. "I like to write the essays, I like to speak to the public." In 1997 he got a job with Auckland's Chinese-language Independence Daily and a year later he helped to start the New Times.

But Fung's dream is over because his children have all gone back to Hong Kong. His eldest son, a designer, tried to get a job here but couldn't. After he left, the others followed him when each of them graduated.

"I feel a little bit sad, because when I came here I lost a lot of friendships in Hong Kong, and now I will lose the relationships I have here," Fung says. "It makes me think it [New Zealand] is a way stage of my life. But of course it adds some colour in my life when I was right here!"

Despite their difficulties most migrants don't regret living in another country. Joe Zou, a photographer who left China with his wife and child in 1999, says he came "just to have a change". Asked to comment on modern migration patterns, he says: "Follow your own heart."

The same spirit inspires young New Zealanders such as Fern Chan, who came here from Malaysia when she was 12, and left for New York as soon as she graduated. She's now an assistant publisher and aims to work for the United Nations.

"There's no place like New York, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere!" she says.

Inevitably, in this much freer world, many immigrants and local-born New Zealanders will find that their heart leads them far from New Zealand. Others from all around the world will find that their heart leads here.

New Zealand, like every country in the 21st century, will be both a society that equips its people to make it wherever they choose to go, and also a receiving society for people from other cultures.

W HEN engineer Iqbal Mujoo came here in June last year, he was well prepared. Originally from India, he had spent seven years in the Middle East, and had made contacts with all the New Zealand engineering companies operating there. He had also visited New Zealand in 1998 and met companies here.

He and his wife, a teacher, chose New Zealand for the education of their children, aged 14 and 17. "It was not really to further our own careers."

But finding work was tough. Mrs Mujoo got only occasional relief teaching, and eventually took a shop assistant's job through a training scheme for which she had to hide her postgraduate degree in English.

As well as answering advertisements, Iqbal Mujoo rang everyone who employed engineers, and eventually arranged two months access to the Auckland City Council resource centre where he spent time self studying and observing work procedures in the Auckland City Council.

"Through my conversations with people in the cafe I made some friends and got to know a bit about what happens here."

Then he heard about a work experience scheme for migrant engineers being run by Work and Income New Zealand and a private recruiting firm, Tad. He was lucky. Out of 200 employers approached by Tad to take on some of Auckland's 600 unemployed migrant engineers for free, only seven provided places - and Mujoo got one of them. That meant six months without pay at a one-man company, Building Code Consultants.

"At the end of six months, there was not enough work [for a paid job]. But he said I could give his name as my referee, and that's what I did." After dozens of interviews, he has finally got a job with Transfield, a facilities management company.

"It was a closed door," he says. "But I didn't give up. I had a degree of confidence in myself that I should be able to make it."

H UNDREDS more Mujoos are still out there pumping petrol or on the dole. By this week, 1166 migrants had registered on the Auckland Chamber of Commerce's job-matching website, www.newkiwis.co.nz - and 92 per cent of them have tertiary qualifications.

Newkiwis manager Leah Gates says 79 per cent of them are willing to go anywhere from North Cape to Bluff for a job.

Sixteen per cent have experience in information technology (IT), 15 per cent in accounting, 13 per cent in engineering, 11 per cent in clerical and administrative work. Six per cent are teachers. Their average age is in the 30s, and most have partners and children with them.

About 150 employers have downloaded resumes, and 50 jobs have been filled. They include an accountant for a business wanting to reach Korean migrants, and a marketing manager who spoke Japanese.

Newkiwis, launched in May, is one of 11 pilot programmes initiated by the Government and local councils to help New Zealand employers and communities receive migrants more effectively. Others include a migrant resource centre in Auckland, due to open in the next few months, and two mentoring schemes.

This contrasts with countries such as Australia, Canada and Israel, which all have ministries to help new settlers, offering free language courses and help with job placement. In New Zealand these services are available to refugees, with a long waiting list, but not to all migrants.

National MP Pansy Wong advocates more work experience schemes such as the one she helped to organise for migrant IT experts at Mangere Bridge School last year, plus short orientation courses to tell immigrants about the services in their new communities and helplines to call in their own languages.

"I find it strange that we say, 'Hello, welcome,' only after the citizenship ceremony [at least three years after arrival]," she says. "When we start to have immigrants from quite different cultures and background, they do need more of a helping hand."

Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel is setting up a settlement branch within the Immigration Service to work with local bodies to coordinate help services, with Housing New Zealand providing premises for resource centres.

She has also asked Education Ministry officials to develop a strategy for English as a second language courses.

M AN YU LEUNG and Renee Foong, both second-year students at Waikato University, will have the pick of the world when they graduate. Foong, who came with her parents from Malaysia in 1989, thinks she will do her 'OE' in Britain, then live in Malaysia "because there are more jobs there".

Leung, who came from Hong Kong in 1995, says: "My choices are New Zealand, Australia, America, Canada, Hong Kong.

"I can't make up my mind: New Zealand because of my family; Australia because it's close to New Zealand; Hong Kong because I still have my grandmother there and some of my aunties and that's home; America and Canada because I've got some relatives there as well."

She has been back to Hong Kong once since 1995 and found it "busy, crowded, polluted, kind of strange - it's changed so much since I left".

"Hong Kong is home, although it doesn't feel like it, and it doesn't feel like home here anyway," she says. "I'll stay here if I can find a reasonable job. If I can't, I'll go overseas. In the long run, I'll come back, because my parents are very keen on living in New Zealand."