Separating Refugee Facts and Fiction

By Tracey Barnett

Tracey Barnett, commentator and author of ‘The Quiet War on Asylum,’gives her take on separating fact from fiction in the recent media swirling around potential asylum boat arrivals to New Zealand.

What is the difference between an ‘economic migrant’, a ‘refugee’ and an ‘asylum seeker’ anyway?

A lot. Right away, let’s take ‘economic migrants’ off the table from this conversation. ‘Economic migrants’ are folks who choose to come to this country for better opportunities. That means the nice Singaporean businessman who lives next door most likely is not a refugee. He had the means—and the freedom—to come here by choice. It’s an important difference. Accepting an ‘economic migrant’ is an economic choice. Accepting refugees and asylum seekers is a humanitarian one.

A ‘refugee’ is someone who, after lengthy, rigorous scrutiny by New Zealand officials, is deemed to have suffered from persecution, making them unable to safely return home. If their case is accepted, they will be granted permanent residence in New Zealand. Most refugees are forced to leave their homes due to war or conflict. You may have heard the phrase ‘quota refugee’ too. That is someone who comes in under the UNHCR resettlement programme. New Zealand takes 750 ‘quota refugees’ annually, 42 percent are children.

You can think of an ‘asylum seeker’ as a kind of beginner refugee. An ‘asylum seeker’ is someone who has applied for refugee status and is waiting for their case to be determined. This process can take many months.

Bonus points: that means there is no such thing as an ‘economic refugee’, according to UNHCR Refugee Convention rules. Don’t even put those two words together. You either qualify as a ‘refugee’ due to persecution, or you don’t fall under refugee protection if you are found to be an ‘economic migrant’. Migrants will likely be sent home if they come into this country by asking for asylum.

Are these potential boat arrivals coming here illegally?

No. Let’s go back to those golden UNHCR Refugee Convention rules that the world created after the havoc of WWII, when millions needed to cross borders and didn’t have the proper papers or channels to do so. The world realised it needed to erect some kind of international legal framework for refugees, not only to protect individual countries, but to protect vulnerable asylum seekers too. They didn’t want to punish victims of war just for trying to find safety. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, asking for asylum became a legal right, no matter how an asylum seeker enters a country.

In New Zealand, once someone approaches immigration authorities to ask for asylum protection, they have the right to have their case heard. New Zealand, and 147 other countries worldwide, has signed UNHCR rules that say so. Yes, the Refugee Convention gives countries the right to reject ‘economic migrants’. But it also means New Zealand must honour any request for asylum until his or her case can be heard—no matter whether they’ve come by airplane, boat, or surfboard. That’s why you may have heard the buzz line, ‘Asylum is a legal right.’ In New Zealand, it has been for over half a century now.

Surely these potential boat arrivals are ‘queue jumping’ over the UNHCR quota refugees?

There is no queue. Never was. This idea of a ‘queue-jumper’ is a myth. Sadly, the phrase has become a derogatory slur, imported from Australia; one that hopefully will not gain usage in this fair-minded country.

Sadly, the fog of war doesn’t take reservations. The UNHCR resettlement process is needs-based first. UNHCR resettlement looks far more like rolling triage. If you are relatively safe in a Thai refugee camp, the UNHCR may not look at your case for years, especially if they have to suddenly pivot to the millions fleeing war in Syria. Some refugees I met in camps along the Thai-Burmese border had been there for over a dozen years. One camp I visited hadn’t been accepting UN applications for resettlement for over five years. There wasn’t even a fictitious queue to get into in the first place.

Asylum seeker cases are usually so acute; they aren’t safe to stay where they are. You can’t tell someone to wait patiently in a burning house for official permission to run for your life. New Zealand only gets about 300 asylum applicants a year. Of those, only about 120-150 will eventually be allowed to stay, a tiny number by any world standard.

Don’t underestimate the pull of home either. You may hear of millions of refugees flooding across borders in the news, but the truth is, worldwide the UNHCR will resettle less than 1 percent in another country. Most refugees will wait in a border country until it is safe to go home again, even if it takes years for war and conflict to dissipate.

If asylum seekers do come by boat someday, won’t locking them up deter others from coming?

Untrue. Research from multiple countries shows that detention simply doesn’t work as a deterrent. The UNHCR concluded that there is no empirical evidence that detention stops arrivals. Just ask Australia. They now spend billions annually to lock up boat arrivals. Their internationally-derided detention regime has been in place for over twenty years now. Boats arrivals come when they are desperate to flee war and conflict, no matter what awaits them at the end of the voyage.

Indeed, research has shown that these people are so vulnerable in the hands of their traffickers; most don’t even know the detention policy of their arrival countries. Even so, if you had to choose between certain death or torture at home, and the chance of eventual safety in a dangerous boat, desperate people will choose the possibility of life, every time.

Surely, good Kiwis punch above our weight worldwide in the number of refugees we take?

Not even close. New UNHCR figures show New Zealand has just fallen in the world ranking of the total number of refugees and asylum seekers we host. We now rank 90th in the world, per capita. Our standing is even worse if you measure it by our relative wealth; we’re now 116th in the world by GDP.

Indeed, our refugee quota has remained stalled for over 28 years. The only time it budged was when it went down by 50 places. Meanwhile, over these three decades, our population has grown by almost 40 percent. When you add that to the huge drop in asylum arrivals, down by a whopping -75 percent since 9/11, New Zealand is doing far less than half of what we used to do decades ago, per capita. Even if we modestly double our quota, it will only bring us back to what we used to contribute.

Despite the urging of the UNHCR to take more refugees, so far Prime Minister Key has signalled that he does not want to raise the quota when it will be reviewed next year.

Aren’t refugees a drain on society?

Tell that to your lawyer of fifty years, the man you had no idea came to this country as a Holocaust survivor at age twelve. Tell that to his wife, also a refugee who arrived at the same age, now a retired volunteer marriage counsellor of 25 years. Tell that to your electrical engineer colleague, a former ‘Tampa boy’ and now a successful working professional. Eventually, they’ll end up yelling at the television during All Blacks games just as loudly as you do.

War is not choosy. Refugees come from all walks of life. After some truly hard scramble to find their feet, refugees make excellent citizens. Research shows that those who arrive as asylum seekers will even be slightly better educated and do better in the job market.

But perhaps the greatest affirmation of just how New Zealand and its new arrivals enrich each other is the simple two-word assessment by the former Holocaust refugee, now a Queens Service Medal award winner, “Kindness heals.” No nation can offer a prouder investment than that.

Tracey Barnett is also the founder of the refugee awareness initiative, WagePeaceNZ, which can be found on Facebook.

ENDS

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