Kia Ora Weeks 6 & 7: Community Outreach and Connections

It seems I got a little behind with blogging, so I figure I'll combine my thoughts on weeks 6 and 7. Speaking of which, I'm finding it hard to believe that I have only a few weeks of work left. With that in mind, it has got me thinking what I want to accomplish in the next few weeks.

Last week, our Centre put on a training session for a government agency, New Zealand Qualification Authority, (http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/) that focuses on establishing equivalencies between qualifications that individuals receive abroad and the comparable certification in New Zealand. While they do not focus directly on questions of immigration, related topics do come up in their work. I felt like it was really a neat opportunity to inform on immigration law in way that the attendants at the session could really take something away that could inform their work in a real way. I surprised by the depth that some of the attendants had into certain areas of immigration law while completely lacking knowledge in other areas of the law. I hope that what we were able to provide by the end of the seminar the big picture of immigration law in New Zealand rather than just into particular areas of interest.

I also was able to attend a discussion on a paper by the Human Rights Commission ("HRC") (http://www.hrc.co.nz/home/default.php) on the right to asylum . The paper was an analysis of the current state of how New Zealand upholds the right to asylum and what direction NZ policy should go in the future to meet its obligations with respect to the right to asylum. There were about fifteen people at the forum in Wellington with a couple of others video conferenced in from Christchurch and Auckland. The discussion was especially unique because it was not just a bunch of native New Zealanders sitting around trying to think about how to help individuals from other countries exercise their right to asylum in NZ. Instead, there were a number of former refugees and local refugee community leaders at the meeting. We heard from real voices telling of the struggles that people in this position face. I think that there is a general assumption that once a NZ accepts a refugee that everything is fine from there because that person is not in the dangerous environment from which they were freed. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Allowing a refugee legal status to be in NZ is not enough. There are excellent services and benefit programs available to certain refugees that come under the UNHCR quota for NZ which amounts to about 750 annually, but other refugees who came under regular NZ immigration policy are left entirely without guarantees to these services.

One of the attendants at the discussion shared his story of how hopeful he was coming to NZ as a refugee from Kenya, but then of the devastation and helplessness he felt in NZ as he was compelled to eat out of dumpsters and sleep on the streets with no support. He was not a quota refugee, and so he did not have access to any of the resettlement benefit programs that quota refugees would have. I hope that the discussion paper highlights these inequalities in the treatment of refugees here. It should be commended that NZ accepts refugees, but the right to asylum entails far more support than merely allowing the person to be physically present in NZ legally.