Tapu Misa: Don't fret: Our xenophobia goes back a long way

My folks came here in the late 1960s. They were not the kind of immigrants who would be considered desirable today, being unskilled, with little education and next to no English.

But they were good, decent, hard-working people - characteristics which do not seem to count for much in today's preferred-immigrant stakes.

They would have been content to stay in Samoa, where they had status and a community, but they had been persuaded that New Zealand could offer their children the kind of education that would guarantee bright futures.

So they came, putting up with the cold weather, the menial, low-paid jobs and the at times unfriendly environment for the sake of a better life. Their experience is not too different from that of many Asian immigrants whose presence is causing so much disquiet in Auckland today.

Like Asians, Pacific Islanders were not that welcome, either. And just like Asians, we also were once the target of an election campaign which preyed on the fears of New Zealanders.

That was the election that swept Rob Muldoon and National back into power, aided by the now infamous dancing Cossacks television advertisement, which did such a good job of exploiting fears about Communists and Coconuts.

Although not old enough to vote, I've never forgotten the cartoon images of Pacific Islanders - complete with big lips and Afro hairdos - as undesirables swarming into the country either to take jobs away from honest, law-abiding Kiwis or to be burdens on the state.

Coming, as it did, not long after the humiliation and indignity of the dawn immigration raids of the early 1970s - in which the more visible Pacific Island overstayers were targeted although most overstayers were white - it had a lasting impact. A feeling of not quite belonging that took years to shake.

I wonder what lasting impressions are being shaped in the minds of Asian youngsters as they listen to Winston Peters' utterances this election.

Already there are tensions between those who have been here a generation or two and the newcomers. Newly arrived Asians, I am told, call their more established counterparts "ripe bananas" - yellow on the outside and white on the inside.

For their part, the Kiwi Asians fret about the way the new arrivals reflect badly on them. They have worked hard at fitting in and see the new arrivals as stirring up racist feelings against them, a sentiment that Peters likes to trot out as a reason to curb more "Asianisation by stealth".

One Kiwi-Chinese mathematician told me that when the Government apologised to the Chinese over the poll tax, many felt they should not push for compensation because "we don't want them to hate us again".

Peters, who claims to be sort of Chinese (much like some claim he's sort of Maori), says it is not about racism. It is about numbers. Sure, but had the same number of white immigrants settled in the country I doubt we would ever have noticed.

As the success of right-wingers like Jean-Marie Le Pen in France proves yet again, most people are programmed to dislike immigrants, particularly when they are different. It is an understandable, if not particularly admirable, human trait.

And it's not an experience that is new to this country, either. Take the reaction of those early British settlers to the first wave of Chinese immigrants in the 1800s. It was not enough for them to shun and dislike them - they had to slap a ruinous poll tax on them as well.

Then there was their treatment of the Croatian migrants who arrived at the turn of the last century to dig gum in the Far North. Being not quite white enough, they were called, among other things, white Chinamen and Dally dogs. Premier Dick Seddon went so far as to describe them in Parliament as locust-like - before penalising them with a poll and reserving the best bits of land for the British gumdiggers.

Which was a bit rich considering most Britons had been in the country barely long enough to unpack their bags.

If the face of New Zealand is undergoing a radical makeover, it is not for the first time. At the time the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, the number of Maori was estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 and white settlers made up between 1 and 2 per cent of the population. A few generations later, the situation was reversed.

Peters says we should have the right to choose who will be a New Zealander, but I wonder how many of us would be here if that were the case.

A couple of generations after the Croatians first arrived here, as illiterate fishermen and peasants who could not speak English, they came to be regarded as model New Zealanders, recognised for their hard work and business acumen, particularly in the fishing and wine industries. Had they lost heart and returned to Dalmatia instead of sticking around, we probably would not have a wine industry.

Which just goes to show that there's hope for the rest of us.

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