New Zealand tries to live up to its welcoming reputation
Oct 10th 2019SYDNEY“THEY ARE us,” said Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, of the 51 Muslims, many of them immigrants, who were murdered by a white nationalist in Christchurch in March. She has positioned herself as a leader “with a bit of heart”. So it was embarrassing that her centre-left government had kept a policy that all but excluded any refugees from Africa and the Middle East. The government has announced that it will amend the rules in question, which are “the very definition of discrimination”, according to the immigration minister, Iain Lees-Galloway.They were inherited from the conservative National Party, which surreptitiously ordained in 2009 that refugees from the Middle East and Africa could come to New Zealand only if they had relatives living there already. Few did, so their numbers dwindled, even though New Zealand technically allocated 28% of its total intake of refugees to the two regions. Over the past nine years it has accepted just 187 people from the entire continent of Africa—fewer than arrived in the single year before the policy came into force, according to Murdoch Stephens of Massey University.Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address