Tapu Misa: Pregnancy testing at border hardly a neighbourly act

COMMENT

A reader from Britain emailed me the other day to ask what I thought about her family emigrating to New Zealand. She didn't know anyone here, and wondered if her British-Irish-South African children would be accepted.

Of course, I replied. We're a fair-minded, welcoming, egalitarian lot. Come on over.

I'm pleased I forgot to mention the bit about how neighbourly we are in this part of the world, how especially friendly. The British reader might well have wondered at our peculiar idea of friendship, particularly considering how our ever vigilant Immigration Service has lately been displaying its neighbourliness to our good friends in the Pacific.

In an apparent clampdown on foreigners availing themselves of our maternity services, the service has been getting tough on expectant mothers, requiring pregnancy tests of women from some of our nearest neighbours.

Trouble is, it seems to have singled out Pacific women - and only Pacific women - for this special treatment.

Tongan women, in particular, have borne the brunt of some over-zealous policing by the service's officials. Even the most high-ranking women in the kingdom haven't been exempt from the insulting tests.

Racist? Well, no, says the Immigration Service. Despite having no evidence to suggest that any but Pacific women have been required to take the test, operations manager Steve Jones denies the service is anything but even-handed in its efforts to safeguard our borders and taxpayer dollars.

If women from other countries don't get picked on, it's only because they're from countries that enjoy visa-free access to New Zealand, he says.

Tough luck for island nations such as Samoa and Tonga which, despite having special relationships with New Zealand, just aren't members of that club.

Still, you would expect that the problem must be pretty major to justify such a tough stance on our part.

The country must be in danger of being overrun by fecund Pacific Islanders, soaking up health dollars that don't belong to them. Again.

So it's a little surprising to find that no one's really sure how big (or small) the problem is, although you'd never know it from the confident way the Immigration Service keeps throwing figures around. It's forever pointing out that some 400 Pacific Island women come here to have babies every year.

Yet, even the Ministry of Health, which gave the figures, can't confidently swear that they're accurate.

Last year, for example, some 1657 non-resident women gave birth in New Zealand. Of those, 713 were Asian, 10 Maori, 387 Pacific, and 547 came from the rest of the world.

But there is no breakdown by country, and no one knows for sure how many of those women were citizens entitled to come home and have their babies here.

Debbie Sorensen, who was the ministry's chief adviser on Pacific health and then the general manager, Pacific health, for South Auckland Health, says there's never been accurate data to support the notion that ineligible people from the Pacific were amassing a mountain of unpaid hospital debts, although that hasn't stopped health boards from making the claim.

Getting reliable data continues to be notoriously difficult. Not surprisingly, most doctors and nurses have more important things on their minds than collecting ethnicity data. So the figures often involve guesswork on the part of admissions clerks and administrators.

And they'd lump in Cook Islanders and Niueans, who are New Zealand citizens as of right. Or assume that white patients (or patients who looked white) were resident Kiwis.

But its figures are like these that feed perceptions evident in a recent survey by Victoria University, which found that most New Zealanders thought Pacific Islanders were the biggest group of migrants despite being among the smallest, and few considered they were good for the economy.

A correspondent (a New Zealander based in Australia) can't understand what all the fuss is about, anyway. So what if a few women have been trying to secure New Zealand citizenship for their babies?

Given "the demographic time bomb, whereby an increasing number of oldies are dependent on a decreasing number of younger workers for support", we should consider ourselves lucky.

"The young pregnant Tongan woman trying to gain entry to New Zealand to elicit a positive immigration outcome for herself and her yet-to-be-born child is doing the country a favour, given that birth rates are well below replacement level. This viewpoint, regretfully, is probably not shared by the majority of New Zealanders. Most Kiwis would regard this hypothetical Tongan woman as a parasite."

The country may need young blood to support the burgeoning ranks of oldies, but we reserve the right to be fussy about where that blood comes from.

A Tongan-based friend has made the trip here seven times to have her babies. I couldn't blame her. Faced with the scary prospect of giving birth in a Tongan hospital, I'd have done the same.

As it happens, my friend is a Kiwi and wanted her children to enjoy the same rights of citizenship. That was a few years ago, and the children are now grown. After see-sawing between Tonga and New Zealand for much of their lives, most now live here - studying, working, paying taxes, not a single dole-bludger or miscreant among them.