The foreign vote

The ignorance of some voters is remarkable. Many people assume that the closer a democracy gets to 100% voter turn-out the better the result. That was certainly the assumption sloshing around the political studies department when I was at Auckland University. I have never held that belief. The higher the turn-out the more likely it is that the ignorant have cast an uninformed vote. The law, after all, says you can be insane and vote - you just can't be criminally insane.

I have blogged before about why it would be a good idea to restrict voting to people who are citizens - and exclude residents who are foreign citizens. I have blogged before about why official notices and documents should be in official languages and not foreign languages. The government's policy of encouraging immigrants to retain their languages is faulty and a potential cause for fractured communities down the line - as we have seen in other countries where tensions exist because integration has not taken place successfully: eg. Fiji, Solomon Islands, UK, Netherlands etc.

So when I read this article in the NZ Herald by Lincoln Tan I could not have hoped for a better example of how ridiculous the immigration situation had become:

In the electorate where immigrants and Asians outnumber New Zealand-born voters, confusion reigns.

Some voters in Botany are scared to vote against the ruling party for fear of reprisal, and others think National and New Zealand First are the same party because they both start with N.

A Herald street poll of 100 people found nine of 14 Chinese voters planned to give their party vote to Labour even though they wanted a change in government, and four who didn't think their votes were secret.

Three people said they would vote New Zealand First although their preferred Prime Minister was John Key.

One from Malaysia said he would vote NZ First because Winston Peters was in a similar position to a prominent Malaysian politician whom he also supports.

Others thought Helen Clark was standing as their Labour candidate, and not Koro Tawa, because her pictures were on the Labour Party billboards in the electorate.

Such confusion could partly explain why the poll found NZ First to have significantly higher-than-average support in Botany - at 10 per cent, it is more than twice the 3 per cent rating in other opinion polls.

Explaining why she chose NZ First for her party vote when John Key was her preferred PM, first-time voter and Chinese immigrant Doris Yu, 28, said in Mandarin: "I thought NZ First was John Key's party. It is difficult to differentiate between the two parties' logos because both NZ First and National uses the letter N ... I hope I don't make the same mistake on election day."

Another, advertising sales rep Huang I-Chia, 29, of Meadowlands, who came here as a student from Taiwan in 1994, said: "I thought John Key was the leader of NZ First."

A voter who didn't want to be identified, originally from China, said she would vote Labour because she didn't think her vote was secret.

"I am sponsoring my mother for residency and I am worried that if Labour gets re-elected, the Immigration Department will reject my application," she said in Mandarin.

I have blogged before why immigrants should not be able to import their elderly parents. NZ is a very soft touch - once you get in you can then get in family members that would never be considered eligible on their own merits. Why would the country need these elderly that will have NZ superannuation rights and access to the health system? - both are under strain already without the "Baby boomer" mass retirements that start taking place in a few years time. Are these people ever going to be able to hold a conversation in an official language or understand English language text? To the immigration department and the politicians it does not seem to matter.

The economic model NZ was founded on and continues now is to pump in warm bodies from overseas - and to keep that number up no matter what. It does not matter what sort of people they are or how old or whether they can communicate in English or not - what matters is how many. Every warm body generates economic activity. We have to be a lot smarter than that. A general rise in GDP from all the extra warm bodies does not necessarily translate into the raising of the incomes of the people who were here in the first place - that ought to be one of the central considerations in setting policy.

What value do low skilled immigrants/elderly add? Even many highly skilled immigrants are in make-do jobs far below their expected salaries because NZ simply does not have the infrastructure or size of market to support the aspirations of these professional people. What do you think is going to happen when the economy turns sour? Are they going to all go back to their homelands? I have said before that in the boom times - up until recently - everything appears to be socially calm, but in a recession when jobs become fewer and the market becomes more competitive that is where we start to see social fault lines between newly arrived immigrant groups (the ones that look and sound different) and the host society (including immigrants that do not look and sound different, ie. English-speaking white immigrants). This is a natural human phenomena and one that I'm sure the government has not planned for or ever thought about.