Immigration Paper

VisionNetwork publishes short papers on a regular basis, and has just produced by written by Dr Andrew Butcher & Dr George Wieland. Butcher is the Director of Policy and Research at the Asia New Zealand Foundation, and Wieland is a lecturer in New Testament at Carey College, NZ.

The Introduction states:

Immigration has played a significant role in the making of New Zealand. However, the growth in immigration from Asia since the mid-1980s onwards has significantly altered the ethnic composition of New Zealand society. This has, in turn, presented significant challenges for how New Zealanders respond to these changes, for how socially cohesive New Zealand is and could become, and for how churches in New Zealand respond to these changes as reflected in their congregations and parishes.

This paper seeks to identify and address some of these challenges as well as present implications and actions for the way forward. To begin, this paper provides a brief overview of immigrants and immigration policy in New Zealand. This is followed by a discussion of immigration and immigrants in the Bible. To conclude, we discuss the implications for Christian attitudes towards immigrants and immigration today.

The paper is available online here.

Migrants to New Zealand

Want to know more about the people migrating to New Zealand? A branch of the Department of Immigration, in conjunction with NZ Statistics, is doing three 'waves' of research to see how new migrants are settling in. The first wave has been completed (at six months), with research covering some 7,000 new migrants. The two follow-up waves will be completed at 18 months and three years respectively.
Some of the highlights from the first report, entitled, New Faces, New Futures: New Zealand,” are as follows:

• The median age of migrants is 34 years. Most migrants are under 45, with 36 percent aged 25–34. Overall, 52 percent of migrants are female and 48 percent were male.

• The four main ethnic groups of migrants are European (42 percent), Chinese (15 percent), South African (9 percent), and Indian (8 percent).

• Over half of all migrants live in the Auckland region, with the Canterbury and Wellington regions the next most popular.
  

• Fifty-eight percent of migrants are approved through skilled migration categories.

• The main region of origin of migrants is the United Kingdom/ Republic of Ireland (32 percent), followed by North Asia (18 percent) and the Pacific (12 percent). Business migrants are predominantly from North Asia (63 percent).

• A notable proportion of migrants from the UK/ Republic of Ireland (18 percent) and the rest of Europe (18 percent) settled in Canterbury. A high proportion of North American migrants (21 percent) settled in Wellington.

• Fifty-nine percent of migrants speak English as their main language or as a language they speak best, while a further 27 percent report having good or very good English language skills.

• After English, the most common languages spoken best by new migrants were Chinese languages followed by Hindi.

• Migrants who are more proficient in English are more likely to establish relationships with friends outside their own ethnic group than are migrants with poor English language ability.

• About a quarter of the European migrants (excluding UK/ Republic of Ireland migrants) report English as a language they speak best. Nearly 70 percent of this group report having good or very good English language skills. Fifty-three percent of South Asian migrants report English as a language they speak best.
  

• Sixty-five percent of all migrants speak more than one language, with people from South Africa, North Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific reporting fluency in two languages. About half of the migrants from the rest of Europe and South Asia report speaking three or more languages.

• The most important reasons for migrants to choose New Zealand are the relaxed pace of life or lifestyle (44 percent), the climate or clean green environment (40 percent), and the opportunity to provide a better future for their children (39 percent).

Gran Torino

I watched 79-year-old Clint Eastwood's latest (and probably last) movie on DVD last night. He plays a stolid, grumpy character with flint in his bones who, at the beginning of the movie, has just lost his beloved wife, and now lives alone with his dog. He's the only white person in a neighbourhood where various other ethnic groups have moved in, and lives right next door to a Hmong family - the teenagers speak English, but the mother and grandmother have no English at all.
The movie takes a while to wind up: the first twenty minutes or so set up Eastwood (who plays Kowalski, so ironically he comes from a family that were immigrants themselves at one point) as the sole survivor of the white people in the neighbourhood, at odds with his neighbours (or at least wanting to avoid them), and at odds with the '27-year-old virgin' Catholic priest who insists on keeping his promise to Eastwood's deceased wife, that he'd get the man to confession.
Then there's a turnaround, and he begins to befriend - or mentor - the young Hmong boy from next door, who's in line to get caught up in a gang that does nothing but cause trouble.
The relationship is a surprise - for both the characters - and for the audience. And the outcome of their relationship is also a surprise, with an intriguingly Christian parallel underpinning it.
I won't spoil the story for you, but it's worth seeing. You'll have to put up with Kowalski's often foul and blasphemous mouth (though some of his use of language is quite funny), but if you can get past that, this is a movie that has considerable integrity at its heart (as Eastwood's late period movies mostly have). And it's an interesting parable in its own way.