Human rights advocates urged New Zealand lawmakers on Wednesday to drop restrictions on the intake of Middle Eastern and African refugees. They say the policy undermines the character of a nation praised for its response to deadly mosque attacks in March.
“We believe this regulation is unfair … (and) completely undermines the humanitarian character of our refugee quota,” Carsten Bockemuehl, advocacy lead at World Vision, told a parliamentary committee considering a petition filed by the organization.
Former refugee and Muslim community advocate Guled Mire said the current policy was unfair and racist.
“It’s quite simple – it has to go,” he said.
Mire, a Somalia-born community advocate, arrived in New Zealand from a refugee camp in Kenya when he was six. He told the committee the policy simply has to go.
“If we were to go back to 1997 and we had the current restrictions … the reality is I would not be here today,” Mire said.
Mire said the policy was shutting vulnerable people out and that was wrong.
New Zealand currently has a tight limit on the number of refugees it takes from the region. The country also requires refugees have family there.
The restrictions were introduced by the previous center-right government in 2010, due to cost and security concerns, as it focused on an intake from the Asian region.
Ardern and Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway has previously said the restrictions were discriminatory and that the government would reconsider them.
The current policy does not apply to people who apply for asylum in New Zealand, although the isolated island nation has few asylum seekers compared to other developed nations.
Pressure on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s center-left government to drop the restrictions has been growing since the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch in March, in which refugees from Syria and Somalia were among the 51 killed and dozens wounded.
Ardern said the policy the current government “inherited” was under review.
“I’ve said before it’s something that needs to be looked at but we’ll be making announcements once final decisions have been made.”
The government has already announced plans to increase the number of refugees it takes each year, referred by the United Nations, by 500 to 1,500 from next year.
