"Should NZ offer refuge to 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers?" (Go on, guess what YV contributors think about that.)
And, Doggone, if someone did give you the information about "the refugees we have taken in over the past 10 years, how many are on benefits, how many have bothered to learn our language, how many have had extended family members arrive under reunification of families, how many clog up our health system", and you found out that actually none of those things were borne out by the evidence, would that change your view?Doggone (Hamilton): Absolutely not to the Sri Lanken refugees, we can't afford them. Time to stop taking in all the riff raff that just go on to our benefit system. It would be interesting to know of the refugees we have taken in over the past 10 years, how many are on benefits, how many have bothered to learn our language, how many have had extended family members arrive under reunification of families, how many clog up our health system etc. Sorry but time to look after our own for once and for all. Thank god St Helen of the Pacific is not our PM or we would get the whole boatload and then some.
I suspect not. I suspect that, like with 'Intelligent Design Theory', you'd just come up with some other bollocks rationale. The paradox of WW2-era anti-Semitism was that Jews were portrayed as both rampaging capitalists and snivelling, traitorous socialists. The paradox of anti-immigration rants is that immigrants both come and steal our jobs and bludge off the welfare state.
...says the New Zealander living in Brunei. As for preying on "our sympathetic and unworldly natures", I don't think there's much danger of that on YV.Kiwi overseas (Brunei Darussalam): When I lived in NZ I was naive and would have said "let them all in". Now I say "why should they be allowed to jump the queue", "why should NZ be so gullible', etc. These are economic migrants who are playing cleverly on our sympathetic and unworldly natures. Take a very hard line both with so-called refugees and also with all immigration.
So yeah... don't read any of that. Have a nice weekend.
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Wow that is depressing.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone wants to see what the thousands - wait, 750 - refugees we let in each year get up to, head along to the Cultural Festival in Wesley in March.
ReplyDeleteI went a few years ago, stuffed myself full of awesome random food, drank excellent Eritrean coffee and met a whole lot of cool people whose work ethic and sense of humour were ridiculously better than those of any Your Views commenter.
Can we please start persecuting bigots so they want to leave? We could replace them with tens of thousands of cool foreigners.
Really, what YV needs to do is create a Bigot Randomizer Template, to make it easier on the Illiterati.
ReplyDelete(insert racist/sexist/homophobic line 1, line 2, line 3) We'd all be better off. It's a fact. We are teh majority, so only we count. Beneficiaries Something. (insert disparaging of previous government) Press submit here -> dogwhistle.