Heather du Plessis-Allan: When will I be a Kiwi?

Cricket fans enjoying the action. Photo / Mark Mitchell

There's nothing like being overseas to make you feel like a Kiwi. There we were, six New Zealand journalists trapped in a room in Tokyo, supposed to be waiting for a couple of prime ministers but desperately following a cricket game back home.

It was those excruciating last four overs. We tried streaming it on a phone but it wouldn't play. The radio journalist kept us up to date watching Twitter, staring at his phone screen with his forehead pressed against the door.

He moaned a lot. I think it was anxiety.

We tried to be dignified in front of the 20 or so Japanese journalists, diplomats and security staff. They were being respectfully quiet. We were, after all, waiting for a press conference with the leader of one of the world's biggest economies. And John Key.

But that last over was too much. We needed to know what was happening. I called my husband, put the phone on speaker and we crowded around it.

If only we could speak Japanese we would have explained what was happening to our country. We could have explained why the man on the end of the phone was yelling so loud it cut the speaker out. We could have explained all the jumping and hugging and yelling.

Someone walked over and said: "Inside voices, please."

We didn't care by then. We were just proud. We were even proud of how strange we knew our carry-on seemed to the Japanese, because we knew that carry-on was unique to New Zealanders that night.

We were celebrating with our country. We were Kiwis.

That South African man who hit the ball into the crowd for us earned the right to call himself a New Zealander that night. No doubt about it.

But it got me wondering - at what abstract point do we decide an immigrant has that right?

My Dad grew up here. I might have been born in South Africa, but I also grew up here. So I thought I could get away with calling myself a Kiwi. Still, there are a few crazies who occasionally write to tell me to go home. It doesn't bother me but I wonder when I - and plenty of others - will earn that right. Is it when I've lived here for decades or speak with a thick Kiwi accent, or make a worthy national contribution, like Grant Elliott?

Would we mind if an American started calling himself a New Zealander on the day he got his citizenship certificate? Would we flinch if a man with a thick Indian accent called himself a Kiwi?

There's nothing particularly malevolent in the natural inclination to separate people into them and us - immigrants and Kiwis. It's a very natural reaction. It happens in every country.

It's also very natural to blame immigrants for things that go wrong. Like the ridiculous house prices in Auckland lately. Or the rising crime rates, at least once a decade.

The only trouble is there is a heck of a lot of "them" in this country.

More than one million people who live here were born overseas. That's one out of every four or five of us. And more of "them" are pouring in. More of "them" arrived in February than in any other month in the history of the country.

That's great news, by the way. It means we have more workers, more money arriving and more proof our economy's doing okay.

So, for the record, I'm a Kiwi. My passport says it, my accent says it and my attitude says it. And, I rooted for the Black Caps, even though they were playing the country of my birth.

I'm rooting for them again today.