On the language of immigration

Iraqis wanting their Saddam-loving parents admitted as residents, phoney governmentally-people-smuggled Afghan refugee children who then have nine of their family admitted here, sham marriages for residence permits, chaos at the bungling, reactive, hopeless immigration department - the stories come thick and fast. They do not even know how many overstayers there are let alone their names. How long will this continue? My analysis, if musings and anecdotes could be seen as such, points to more deterioration.

I was struck by aHerald article that says the OECD reports we have a generous pension scheme which makes this country a retiree's heaven. So that's why your foreign girlfriend/boyfriend so keen to marry? So they can have their parents retire here. (Some limited first hand knowledge here).

Well I for one do not want more bloody pensioners and their:
Drawing on the NZ superannuation,
Expensive health problems,
Incompatible native prejudices,
Parental control and cultural reinforcement incompatible with intergration, and
Inability to learn our official languages.

We have a serious pension crisis and the government is compounding it by importing these uneconomic and unwanted people whose contribution to this country is to act as cultural and behavioural enforcers for their children who are supposed to be intergrating with us - not marrying each others children off to each other etc. There is no way we would accept these geriatrics if they applied in their own capacity and we should not accept them at all. AT ALL. It is contrary to the interests of the nation. Wonderful for the immigrants - cuts down on air fares to visit. Bad overall.

When you see, as anyone in Auckland can, these fish-out-of-water type grey-haired foreigners, usually in full native regalia and/or badly dressed like they were still in their home environment wandering the streets you know they are not tourists, not working immigrants and not retired long-time citizens - they are here on the family reunification category. They may flash their NZ passports but their English only extends to I am "Kiwi" as the odd report will attest.

If the government/bureaucrats think that providing full facilities and welfare for a would-be immigrant's aged parents is our "edge" in the global immigration market - they are selling us far too short. Where is the quality control?

What relevant value do these elderly immigrants add? Experience of old practices that may not even be suitable in their home country. Religious/cult practices. Enforcement of oppression within the family.

We have an honesty policy where we accept everyone and presume everything is kosher until Winston grandstands. Our system is a crock, a joke and always has been. It was before Mr Peters, during his coalition with National and afterwards. The government must put a stop to this spurious category immediately.

The recent changes to the Citizenship Act is to be welcomed despite being largely cosmetic. 5 years to gain citizenship should be the minimum. I would suggest making it the minimum with the rule being resident in the country for one-fifth of the applicant's life, ie. they must spend the next quarter of their life here to qualify - that would help minimise the oldies who have little chance of successful mergence into society and quickly become a drain.

It is far worse than that, of course. Our despicable, stupid governments allow anyone in the country a couple of years to vote. Citizenship? What's that mean? It ought to mean the exclusive category of people in a nation-state entitled to vote. These elderly people unable to speak our languages have the same vote as everyone else. They could agree with capital punishment, prisoner torture, arranged marriages esp. within families and lowering our standards - and that's your vote cancelled, Jack. The most insulting of all is the election pamphlets in foreign languages... I mean really.

The Act Party, to their great shame, promoted a petition a few years ago calling on the government not to enforce the English language requirements for residency and citizenship! I saw it. There were two - one in Korean and one in Chinese. Foreigners telling us what our policies should be! There were thousands of signatures, half of them (and their details) not in English. Could you imagine that occuring in any other country that is not hell-bent on their own destruction?! Would you go to China or Korea and then start petitioning the government to change the rules so you never had to speak their native/official language?! It would be a gross insult to your host. No matter, Act thought it would be a winner. Disgusting. They, and the people who signed it, should be ashamed. A feeling, perhaps, they do not have in their cultural repertiore.

Take Kenneth Wang, Act's new MP. I had a chat to him once and found it very difficult to understand him. So do the MPs in the House and everyone else. He's only been here 15 years but you know that he is still translating everything to and from Chinese in his head by the way he pauses constantly. Shocking as Pansy Wong is with her mutilation of the language at least she is obviously conversent with it. Asians may find English (and Maori for that matter) more difficult than other immigrants because they are different in grammar, script etc. but that in no way means the bar should be lowered just to accommodate them. The law says that candidates for citizenship need to be able to understand the English language. Enforcement and strengthening of this is crucially important. If you can't think in someone else's language how can you truly understand them. If you are going to live with someone should you not understand them?

I don't think we really understand that the Chinese have such a huge, multi-millenial cultural and imperial history and massive population that perhaps their attitude to learning anyone else's language is done under much sufferance. I get that impression. Do you bother to pronounce Maori names correctly? No? Not really? Don't care? Not important? Yeah, that's right - why should the Chinese bother to speak English at all!

Half the shops on Dominion Rd seem to have Chinese language signs, some of them exclusively so. Some even sport the Chinese communist flag. There is a diary in Mt Albert (there may be more) that has a massive Korean sign and language everywhere - and yet there is no Korean population there (...yet). So why? If you ask yourself "What would I do?" I think most non-immigrant New Zealanders would say they would respect the locals, not act to exclude them. If a sign is not in English then they do not want you in there - simple as that. Do we want immigrant communities to grow separate from us? - because that is what they are doing under our non-existent integration practices.

If you let in a Chinese (for example) who cannot speak English who will they:
Hire as an employee?
Vote for?
Trade with?
Socialise with?
Complain to?
Trust?
It's not as if they have an option is it.

I used to think Auckland was lucky that we had not developed that "Chinatown" thing many cities have where an ethnic community is effectively ghettoised. And then I realised that the whole of Auckland was becoming a "Chinatown." North Shore, being perhaps a "Little Korea." One single shop in a shopping centre festooned with Chinese symbols adds colour, certainly, and it also is an immediate notification that people who cannot communicate with the locals have moved in - people who are not locals and have no intention of becoming locals to be more accurate. I'm sure my thinking is far more charitable than the thoughts of other peoples subject to massive immigrant pressure.

It was on a summer day in the year 2000, and I was standing on the corner of Victoria and Queen Streets that I realised for the first time that there was more of "them" than there was of "us." Just looking around there were noticeably more Asian faces than non-Asian. It was not as though I had not noticed before but that the make-up of Auckland's main street had just tipped with all the students coming on line. Other streets have changed too; entire neighbourhoods: Sandringham is now more like Sandribad or Sandristan nowadays. I t was about two years ago that I saw my first piece of foreign vandalism too - on a Pt Chev cliff face near the beach, along from what my Dad calls the Piper Rocks. Chinese characters carved in the sandstone. I clenched my teeth and drew a sharp breath. "Ahhh, fuck... here we go."

5% of Auckland's population are foreign students. No, it is not actually a successful export industry as the government wishes. It is a foreigner import cost. We should be running schools in China, not importing their students. We only do so because we are dumb, have no comprehension of adding value and are too ready to rely permanently on something that should only ever be a temporary solution. The government becomes pathologically and economically beholden and dependent on these unsustainable and tetchy human markets as they see them only on financial lines without realising, appreciating or being wary of the negative impacts of keeping large amounts of complete foreigners inside the country. If there is a student or immigrant down-turn they will drop their standards to balance the books.

The government loves immigration as a tool of economic growth because that is what the Crown was forced to found the colony for. Forced by foreign land speculators. Maori, the locals, were horrified and quickly threatened by the waves of foreigners and what they were after - their resources. Nothing, I repeat, nothing, has changed. Immigration is the idiot's way to financial prosperity. It increases demand in the economy and increases the capital available to the economy and therefore economic growth occurs and the Finance Minister is happy. Pretty simple. Who cares if they are violent Balkan nationalists/elderly incomprehensible Chinese/marriage-peddling Indians/racist Englishmen/intolerant South Africans/inbreeding Arabs/HIV-ridden Africans/uneducated Islanders/religious nutter Americans/Zionist Jews/fill-in-the-cliché-it's-probably-true generic undesirable foreigner. Send them all in because government doesn't care about society as such or the future harmony and cultural development of the community, all they care about is the GDP stats for the current term.

Many people practice this sort of insanity themselves by taking in home stay borders. But even they are at the discretion of the householders. What would you say if the head tenant of your flat announced that to make ends meet they were going to hire out the spare room to someone who can't speak the flat's language? And then next year the garage, then the porch, the basement, then bring in a caravan... That is what we are doing as a country. Those reasons why people claim they want to come here and the reason that we love this country is largely because it is not over-run. That we can walk down the beach and be all alone. That we can gather enough kai moana for ourselves.

Our current plan is to increase the total population by 10,000 to 50,000 per year forever. The statisticians can make predictions and as many models as they want, the fact is the government has always been in favour of increasing the population and that is what they do. If there is not enough through the birth rate - they import. If people leave the country - they import. They only care about the net figure. If 200,000 left the country this year they will import 210-250,000 next year. You don't think they would? They have to keep their system going. There is no end to it because they are not intelligent enough to work out how to increase our standard of living without importing demand and using the very short-term monetary benefits of immigration.

Our speculative economy, and that is what it is, is based on the biggest pyramid deal ever: the immigration-property/mortgage spiral. If we don't import more people to buy our over-inflated houses then we default on the mortgage. Simple as that. Julius Vogel knew that when he borrowed heavily in the 1870s and put us into debt to foriegners forever. The current government, as all governments, are aware of it but see it as shrewd management. The foreigners keep lending us money (at very high interest) based on the understanding that we will keep the spiral going. There seems to be no alternative plan. Perhaps Pakeha are happy to only think one generation out?

In one hundred years time, carrying on with the current speculative model, will our population be 5 million, 10 million or 20 million? Will there be anything in the sea apart from plastic bottles? Will there ever be a deserted beach? The only people happy with more immigration are the immigrants themselves, and they are growing in number solidly with a framework of lax policies that allow them to import entire extended families. How long will any government be able to resist their voting wedge especially when they do not even need to be a citizen to vote? Will a recognition of "Asian values" be subtle or pronounced? Will we speak English and Maori, or will we let in so many Chinese that a party that wants their votes will make it an official language? We are already half way there.

I don't so much see the river Tiber frothing with much blood as a squat tiolet down which we are flushing our heritage and future.