Aussie Malcolm: Licensing way to halt tide of false refugee claims

COMMENT

The Government proposes to regulate immigration consultants, a move for which some consultants have been calling for 20 years.

But in doing so, the Government needs to identify what evils it is seeking to eliminate. If the aim is to minimise the social and economic damage caused by false refugee claims, it must bring lawyers firmly into its net.

False refugee claims cost the country millions of dollars every year, through the cost of funding the refugee-status section of the Immigration Service, the Refugee Status Appeals Authority, providing welfare support for claimants and their families and, in many cases, legal aid for their lawyers.

The process is not only expensive but undermines public sympathy for the handful of genuine claimants.

Based on well-intentioned United Nations conventions drafted in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, the so-called asylum process has now become a dirty backdoor immigration system based on false passports and false claims driven, in this country, almost entirely by lawyers.

The Minister of Immigration has said lawyers will be exempt from his regulations, but they are among the worst abusers of the system, and the Law Society has been unable or unwilling to exert any control.

If the object of the regulation is to avoid people being given poor advice and false hopes, volunteer organisations and even MPs' electorate staff need to be brought into the net.

The question of whether advice that is given is competent does not relate to whether the client is paying a fee; it relates to whether the adviser knows what he or she is doing.

Most immigration consultants (but not lawyers or community advisers) belong to the Association for Migration and Investment, which has a robust code of ethics designed specifically to protect migrant clients.

It is doubtful whether a government regulatory body will improve on that code, although it may provide better enforcement, which is why most New Zealand-based consultants support the Government's move.

But that still leaves unanswered the conundrum of how New Zealand's regulatory arm can extend overseas, where the worst abuse occurs. The risk is that we will follow the Australian model, in which the domestic industry is relatively clean (as it is here) but there is an expensive layer of career regulators who are unable to stop abuse outside Australia.

An alternative to regulation is licensing. Start by asking the question "who owns immigration, and on whose behalf?" If the answer is "the Government owns the immigration system and it should be operating that system for the benefit of New Zealanders", it follows that the Government has a right to determine the profile and business practices of those who represent themselves as middlemen between it (as the giver of permits) and the migrating public (the seekers of permits).

I call this the Ford Motor Company model. If I want to set up as a Ford dealer, I have to meet the minimum requirements dictated by the owners of the product being sold. Those standards extend to showroom presentation, staff, spare parts, service, and warranty claims.

It does not matter whether I am an investor, a lawyer, or a motor mechanic; if I want to be a Ford dealer, I have to meet the requirements of the Ford Motor Company or else I lose my franchise.

Such an approach represents no threat to ethical consultants because most of their work already involves honestly representing the Government's policy to the client (that is, acting as an agent on behalf of the Government) just as much as it does representing the client to the Government.

For the ethical consultant, once the client's eligibility within policy has been established, representing that client does not require creativity or guile, but honesty, clarity and an understanding of the policy requirements.

Such a "licensing" approach is not contrary to free-market principles because immigration is not and never will be a free market. Immigration, by its very nature, is a monopoly run by the Government on behalf of the people.

If people in the private sector wish to represent themselves as agents in this process, let them do so according to standards determined by the "owner" of the process; and let those standards apply whether the "agent" is a lawyer, a consultant, or a well-intentioned but incompetent volunteer.

* Aussie Malcolm is the chairman of Malcolm Pacific, a former Minister of Immigration, a former vice-president of the Association of Migration and Investment, and co-author of that organisation's code of ethics.