KEY POINTS:
I know I'm only a humble immigrant, a drain on the economy in the eyes of Massey University academic Greg Clydesdale, but I'd have expected better of someone claiming the intellectual high road than the so-called "research" paper which the Dominion Post saw fit to publish on its front page last week with that helpful headline, "Pacific migrants 'drain on the economy'."
Yes, Dr Clydesdale is doing a very nice line in presenting himself as the brave and intellectually superior defender of the majority (how the white supremacists love him), a Seeker of the Truth fighting a lonely and noble battle against "intellectual bankruptcy", and unfairly persecuted by "PC bullies" for saying only what the "vast majority" of New Zealanders really think about us islanders.
And what was that again? Oh yes, that we're sucking the life-blood out of the economy with our high unemployment, our low wages, our criminal activities, our tendency to breed like rabbits, our school failures, and our damned neediness.
We are the weakest link, Clydesdale concludes, the deadweight holding the rest of you productive folk back from an otherwise bright economic future; too poor and culturally mismatched to deserve to be allowed into this country. Clydesdale looks at us and sees only a scary underclass.
So why would we be upset about this? The fact that all this is dressed up as quasi-academic "research" in a conference paper to be presented in Brazil (Growing Pains: The Valuation and Cost of Human Capital), can't quite disguise Clydesdale's tone and agenda. As he told Newstalk ZB: "What I'm basically saying is, their cousins can't come in."
Clydesdale seems incapable of seeing immigrants as anything other than human capital, to be judged solely by their economic contribution. Most exact a heavy cost on the economy, by his reckoning, even the highly qualified ones unlucky enough to be discriminated against by employers. Serves them right for not being "culturally compatible". To Clydesdale, the only economically viable immigrants are from Australia, the UK, Ireland and North America. The rest of us, it seems, add nothing of value, especially if we're from the Pacific.
But then Clydesdale doesn't see much economic point in diversity either. Oh sure, he admits grudgingly, diversity might "appear" to have benefits for products "that lend themselves to fusion of cultural form, for example, cooking, fashion and music", but not when it comes to innovations in the really important stuff like "process engineering or higher technology".
In fact, diversity may stifle creativity, he posits. "Workers must feel they can freely exchange ideas but cultural barriers to communication and compatibility can undermine this."
Yes, the statistics Clydesdale hangs his arguments on aren't new, but he's been rather selective, sidestepping any new evidence that doesn't support his unremittingly negative slant. His snapshot of the Pacific community is out of focus, a cross-sectional slice frozen in time, which fails dismally to capture the dynamism and diversity of Pacific people two-thirds of whom, by the way, were born here.
Some of the paper is laughable. Clydesdale has an environmental argument for cutting back on Pacific immigrants. If I'd stayed in Samoa, my carbon footprint would be 9 to 10 times less than it is now. On the other hand, as people in the UK have a higher footprint than the average Kiwi, immigration from there would reduce carbon emissions.
On other points, Clydesdale is simply wrong. Rates of convictions and prosecutions can say as much about the ability of people to defend themselves as about the number of crimes being committed. Pacific people make up 7 per cent of the population and 8 per cent of those convicted in 2006, which is an understandable over-representation given the correlation between poverty and crime but certainly not the highest rate.
And contrary to Clydesdale's picture of "enduring disadvantage", Ministry of Social Development statistics for 2007 show improvement across a broad range of social indicators.
As even Clydesdale's figures show, the longer migrants are here, the more they earn and contribute to the economy.
Of course, it's easier to build a case against Pacific migrants if you ignore recent evidence, social context, labour market shortages, and the history of New Zealand-Pacific relations. The Samoan quota is a consequence of that history, none of it very flattering to New Zealand. As is the entry right of Cook Islanders, Niueans and Tokelauans, who don't need Clydesdale's permission to come here.
Clydesdale builds his entire argument for cutting back Pacific migration on the rather shaky premise that Auckland is underperforming economically. Auckland is home to the majority of immigrants, ergo, this poor performance is the fault of the immigrants, especially the Pacific ones.
But it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. first, it's based on a 2004 NZ Institute of Economic Research report in which the authors cautioned against drawing any firm conclusions about regional productivity levels or growth, and secondly, it ignores a 2005 Treasury report that put Auckland's economic performance first equal with Wellington.
Auckland, rather inconveniently for Clydesdale, seems to be doing just fine, even with all these culturally mismatched immigrants.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
