In 1951, as the dispossessed of World War II streamed out of Europe, the world agreed on a Refugee Convention.
But 75 years later, the world is a different place. We are lurching from crisis to crisis. The world’s leader in aid, the US, has pulled up the drawbridge. Refugees have a different face.
“There’s just record numbers of refugees in the world right now,” says Rebekah Armstrong, World Vision’s head of advocacy and justice in New Zealand.
“There’s been a huge increase in the number of conflicts taking place, and the numbers of people who are displaced worldwide, and this has happened in a really short time frame.
“At the same time as this increased number of people requiring protection, there’s also been a huge reset on the funding available for refugees.”
The USAID cuts of two years ago are biting, and there’s been a big reduction in funding for organisations such as UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.
Today on The Detail, Armstrong talks about the need for New Zealand to develop an emergency protection framework that would iron out the inconsistencies present now, where we treat refugees differently depending on where they come from and the politics of the day.
She’s planning to use the same tactics to get government action on this as World Vision and other NGOs used to get the modern slavery bill over the line – basically, to draw up and present draft legislation that’s palatable to both sides of the House.
Armstrong says more work needs to be done on fleshing out the framework to find the answers to inevitable questions, such as the definition of “serious risk of harm” when it comes to refugees, how bridging visas would work, and how much it would cost the country.
New Zealand created special visas to support people caught up in the war in Ukraine and regime change in Afghanistan, but Armstrong points out there are no similar pathways for those affected by other humanitarian emergencies in places such as Sudan or Iran. She describes that approach as ad hoc and inconsistent, and says that’s why an emergency protection framework is needed.
In the last decade the numbers of forcibly displaced people have just about doubled, to around 118 million people. UNHCR says 2.5 million of those need urgent protection and resettlement.
New Zealand takes 1500 UNHCR-mandated refugees a year, the third-highest allotment in the world after Canada and Australia. But that doesn’t reflect the proportion of refugees we deal with compared to other countries, because of the sheer numbers of displaced people walking across borders elsewhere who are not documented by UNHCR.
Countries such as Jordan, Kenya and Bangladesh – countries that are also struggling to support their populations – take the vast majority of people.
Ritesh Shah, who is the director for the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies at Auckland University, says the world is dealing with complexities around displacement never imagined in the post-World War II era, when refugees were mostly from Europe.
Issues “aren’t necessarily ones caused by conflicts between states but sometimes conflicts within a state; they’re caused by the combination of poverty, climate change, natural disasters, conflict – all muddled together. The convention was never set up to respond to those issues.”
Shah says the reason New Zealand is now taking the third-highest allocation of refugees for permanent resettlement is largely because so many other countries have stopped doing it.
“For example the United States [and] many parts of Europe have entirely shut their doors to receiving and resettling refugees at the moment. So that has kind of elevated New Zealand in some ways, but I don’t think that’s something we should be proud of. Actually on a per-capita basis in terms of the total number of individuals we take in that are seeking protection we are still I think something like 80th in the world.”
Just over a week ago, Associate Minister of Immigration Casey Costello announced the Government will make the Community Organisation Refugee Sponsorship Programme a permanent part of our refugee resettlement system, but that pathway doesn’t increase our quota of 1500.
Shah says in spite of the resources required to resettle such people, we could take more.
One of the obstacles is the election-year issue of immigration, which Shah says isn’t front of mind for New Zealanders usually but takes centre stage during the election cycle.
“It’s very much part of the populist wave that we see of many leaders overseas as well,” he says.
“It’s very easy to identify scapegoats, and it’s oftentimes easiest to scapegoat the voiceless, the powerless. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here in Aotearoa as well with refugees and asylum seekers.
“Of course we have such an amazing history of those who’ve been resettled in New Zealand who have ended up becoming leaders in their community, political figures, doctors, lawyers, professionals … and I think we really do a disservice by portraying refugees and asylum seekers in this monolithic way; as a threat, as destitute, as lacking agency, as not having a voice.
“One of the things that I would actually compel the public and politicians to do is actually to listen to the voices of refugees and asylum seekers more.”
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