Shelter from war and persecution

The number of people seeking asylum here may be small but as the backlog has grown our processing systems have become clogged. GRAHAM REID reports.

Above Bill Smith's desk in his small Grey Lynn office is a large, detailed map of North Africa and the outer reaches of eastern Europe.

The place names are an unfamiliar shuffle of letters for most New Zealanders, the countries as remote and distant as the moon.

Yet fugitives from these regions and other troublespots arrive at our airports, many seeking political asylum.

At present there is a backlog of about 2400 asylum-seekers in New Zealand waiting to be processed. Some have been waiting more than two years for their applications to be heard.

Some of these people just turn up at the border using false documents, which they often destroy or declare to be false, and ask for asylum. Others may arrive in the country on holiday or on a visitor's visa and then claim asylum.

For many such people, the distance to New Zealand is the attraction. For many reasons, the further from home the better.

Mr Smith, executive secretary of the Auckland Refugee Council, encounters these people and their often-tragic stories on a daily basis.

The council's resources are modest, relying on the largess of the Lottery Grants Board, community grants, the Salvation Army, the Auckland City Council, the Catholic Church and other benefactors.

Out of this sporadic stream of funding, the refugee council runs Grove Hostel in Sandringham, which offers short-term accommodation to 15 people.

Since it opened three years ago it has been a refuge for around 500 asylum-seekers from 40 countries and has reluctantly had to turn away about half that many again.

However, as numbers of asylum-seekers are increasing slowly - from 901 in the 1990-91 financial year to more than 2000 in 1998-99 - those on the frontline often despair at the speed their cases are dealt with.

Immigration Service statistics show that in the first six months of the 1999-2000 financial year, 676 applications were received by asylum-seekers, 345 were approved and 725 declined. The applications received are for the stated year. Figures for approved or declined relate to applications lodged in previous years as well as in the current year.

The backlog of applications means that by the time a decision is made on whether a person may stay or must go, the individual concerned may be integrated into New Zealand.

Despite language difficulties and lack of money, many waiting that length of time have learned basic English, found jobs and accommodation, made friends and become, to all intents, citizens. Children may be in schools.

If an asylum seeker's claim is rejected, he or she is expected to pack up and leave.

The new Government is now moving to address many of these problems by allocating money and resources to take on new staff and attack the backlog.

That came in June in the form of $500,000 for the 2000-01 financial year, a sum which Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel expects will reduce the wait for status determination to six months by next July.

The Government also put $180,000 (2000-01) and $200,000 (2001-02) into grants for community groups working with claimants, and made a discretionary grant of $45,000 to Grove Hostel to continue its operation.

The hostel relies on community goodwill, personal donations and assistance from sympathetic people such as the former refugee council president Dr Nagalingam Rasalingam, who offers weekly medical consultations, and barrister David Ryken, the council's secretary, who gives legal advice.

As Mr Smith notes, the refugee council's medical checks, translation assistance and help with work permits and benefits (all but around 2 per cent of these applications are granted) are services which assist the Department of Work and Income and other Government agencies.

"If Grove Hostel wasn't here, it would be necessary to invent it," he says.

Some claims of asylum-seekers will be manifestly unfounded, made by people from countries that do not have significant human rights problems.

Asylum-seekers are refugees who simply turn up at our borders.

To be judged a genuine refugee, a person has to fit the United Nations definition, which essentially means he or she must have a well-founded fear for his or her life or fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group or for having a political opinion.

Of 340 decisions handed down between the start of January and the end of August 1999 on applicants from South Korea, Fiji and Thailand, only five were successful. Almost half the applicants did not attend the Refugee Status Branch interview to assess their case and another 76 were withdrawn or lapsed, usually because the applicant had left the country.

Often these abusive claims, which clog the system and distort statistics, are made by agents and advocates without their client's knowledge. But the advocates are aware that the present processing delays buy time for their client in the country.

Mr Smith says those who apply at the border, rather than after they are in the country, are more likely to be genuine.

Yet many remain under a cloud of suspicion. They have arrived here from undetermined circumstances, and many have no way of proving the veracity of their claims of persecution.

Some of the stories are remarkable.

On his map Mr Smith charts the journey of a genuine asylum-seeker fleeing political persecution in Sierra Leone, who made his way to Senegal, crossed the Sahara to the Sudan, got a boat up the Nile and into Egypt, stowed away on a ship to possibly India (he wasn't sure) and through an agent bought a false passport.

He arrived in New Zealand and asked, "Where am I?" When he was shown on a map, says Mr Smith, "he said, 'I've fallen off the edge of the Earth'."

Often asylum-seekers are quite literally caught in the crossfire. A refugee from the ongoing conflict between Karen separatists and the Burmese military encapsulates his situation in a local aphorism: When the buffalo fight, the grass gets trampled.

Flight to freedom comes with risks of exposure, extortion or betrayal. It is also expensive. Asylum-seekers speak in five-figure digits when they talk of buying false documents and bribes to bureaucrats.

In the international overview, the transparency of New Zealand bureaucracy is the exception rather than the norm.

And if false papers have been obtained, many run the risk of detection by interdiction teams at South American and Southeast Asian gateway airports which help airlines identify improper documentation.

In the past 12 months, around 170 people have been intercepted. Those perceived to be genuine are referred to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to verify their status. That agency makes an assessment and finds a country for resettlement, not necessarily New Zealand.

"There are a tremendous number of hurdles to people getting here," says Mr Smith. "But it's ironic to call somebody a crook for having to use smuggling rings to get here. You have to use crooks to get past the fence, but it's not them who are wrong. It's the fence which is wrong."

Many speak of New Zealand's fortress mentality and cite by way of example the imprisonment of a group of Indian and Pakistani asylum-seekers last year (seven of whom last week lost bids to stay, but are appealing the decision).

Amnesty International last month, for the third time, named New Zealand among the countries jailing asylum-seekers too often. Amnesty criticised New Zealand for passing legislation to allow asylum- seekers to be detained indefinitely if they arrived without proper papers.

Ms Dalziel disputed this, noting that the Immigration Service had to get approval from a district court judge every week to keep people in jail.

A grant to upgrade fencing at the Mangere Reception Centre - where refugees taken under our annual quota of 750 are housed for six weeks' orientation - will allow for a secure detention area there, an alternative to prison.

Some, such as Mr Smith, view that development as another symbol of our willingness to detain and constrain.

He points out that keeping asylum-seekers in Mt Eden Prison costs around $1200 each a week. A supportive institution such as Grove Hostel could accommodate them for $250, excluding food, for which they would pay $90 from their benefit.

There was also what some characterised as the draconian, alarmist law passed under urgency in June last year when there was a perceived threat of a boatload of people - economic refugees rather than asylum-seekers - from China.

The law, brought forward from October, allows for mass, indefinite detention.

The boat never arrived, but that is not to say that such large numbers will not. In an over-populated world, this under-populated country is a rarity.

For those who arrive and request asylum, there is an informal arrangement that immigration officials call Grove Hostel to see if it can assist with temporary accommodation. However, asylum-seekers often have nowhere to go and rely on local members of their ethnic community, if there is one.

Once armed with a work permit, many asylum-seekers take the jobs no one here wants.

"Sixty or seventy hours a week for $300; would a New Zealander do that?" asks one rhetorically.

"This is the cheapest labour the country can get. Everyone is asking us what we want, but nobody is listening. We are just asking for tolerance and understanding. When you pay us $150 a week [the dole] and put us in a situation where we cannot work, that is not solving anything. We would like to be productive."

It is the small things that grind people down and create frustration or depression: can't get a job even though they want to work, not allowed to drive even though they can, can't get through the paperwork but need to, have no money to pay those who can do it for them ...

And in restaurant kitchens and factories, aimlessly walking the streets or isolated in small flats with only their thoughts, are hundreds of asylum-seekers reduced to a sense of rootlessness and in limbo.

"New Zealanders really have no idea what some of these people have been through just to get here," says Mr Smith. "If their stories were told or made into a movie these people would be heroes."

A recent migrant says some of them will eventually be successful. "The way they were treated will come out in books and movies. And it's not going to look good."

The immigrants - a Herald series

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