Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Twelve years ago I had an Indian flatmate on contract to an IT company. He’d already worked in the United Kingdom and the United States and found New Zealand to be the most welcoming country he had lived in. I doubt he would say that now.
Now we have reports of anti-Indian racist grafitti outside an Auckland primary school where over 60 per cent of the pupils are Indian, police data shows South Asians are the group most experiencing racial abuse and, on rare occasions, this abuse has led to violence.
What’s changed? The scale and speed of migration from Asia, in particular from India, that’s what. In the last 12 years Indian migration to New Zealand has been turbocharged, or in the words of New Zealand First deputy leader Shane Jones, the country has experienced a “butter chicken tsunami”.
India is now the second-largest overseas birthplace in New Zealand, after England. From 2014, the year my flatmate arrived, until 2025, stats show that we have had a net migration gain of over 160,000 Indian migrants. The biggest year was 2023 when over 47,000 Indians arrived followed by 2024 with 25,500. This bulge occurred following the introduction of the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) in 2022.
In my previous post, immigration advisor Bakul Gupta makes the valid point that the AEWV has since been tightened following the Bestwick report that examined how Immigration New Zealand (INZ) administered the scheme, particularly the weakening of checks during the post-Covid surge.
Bestwick found that INZ had not adequately assessed the increased risk of abuse before making those changes, and that the pressure to meet processing targets and volumes had overridden risk considerations. The review concluded that the scheme was exposed to increased exploitation risk between 27 July 2022 and 30 June 2023.
In 2024 the government tightened the scheme, introducing minimum skills requirements, English-language requirements for lower-skilled jobs, greater checks on employers and New Zealand applicants, and reducing the maximum continuous stay for most lower-skilled workers from five years to three.
Very good but INZ’s own data reports that at most only 16 per cent of accredited employers are checked post accreditation. The changes to the AEWV may have improved the quality of new entrants to New Zealand but it’s impossible to be sure.
The trouble with immigration is that the effects can only be seen in hindsight. New Zealanders can’t help but observe the changes to our demographics, visible in the little retail outlets (many of dubious value) and numbers of ride share drivers, once the damage has been done. Migrants of other ethnicities also notice and comment. I’ve heard them. Plus Indians who have been here for some time have shared with me their dismay at the number and quality of their countrymen that have entered New Zealand.
Local Response
At the beginning of the year I attended a Destiny Church rally in Auckland. The majority of those present were Māori, many concerned about the changing face of New Zealand, specifically the swelling number of small Indian businesses. They noticed that these businesses rarely, if ever, employed Kiwis.
In April this year former Te Pāti Māori president Che Wilson performed a haka targeting ACT MP and Indian migrant Parmjeet Parmar. The haka, performed at the Tainui Regional Kapa Haka competition, reportedly included words and gestures interpreted as derogatory references to Indians. The mimicked gestures included sitting cross-legged and holding the hands in a prayer position. Movements and vocalisations were interpreted as mocking an Indian accent.
The ethnicity of those hurling racist abuse is rarely mentioned in news reports, however my guess is that New Zealand First leader Winston Peters is not the only Māori who has told an Asian to go back to their country.
In 2024 Auckland bus driver Rajnish Trehan was told by a violent passenger he was a servant here before the man smashed out four of his teeth – an incident not treated as a hate crime by police. The passenger, who told Trehan, “You’re in my country, you’re my servant,” was Paki Keepa. He was sentenced to one month of home detention. Police confirmed the crime was not treated as hate-motivated.
In the months following the attack, Trehan reported that he had experienced several instances of racist verbal abuse on the job. He has since left his bus driving position but continues to see racism towards South Asians in his neighbourhood in Papakura, including people throwing stones at the homes of South Asian families.
Such abuse is not restricted to Indian migrants. In June 2024, a 16-year-old Chinese-New Zealander was attacked on a bus travelling through Pakuranga. A woman allegedly abused him with racial slurs and struck him with a metal rod. He lost three teeth, had two others damaged and suffered a serious facial wound. Police treated the incident as a hate-motivated crime. The attacker was later publicly named as Ioana Joanna Jessica Kariki (also known as Ioana Tokotini). She received 23 months’ imprisonment, to be served at a secure mental health facility.
The following month, July 2024, on an Auckland central bus route, a woman allegedly yelled racist abuse at Asian passengers (including telling them to “go back” to their country), pushed, yelled, and spat at them. Police said two passengers may have been struck.
That same year community newspaper the Eastern Times reported that Asian passengers on buses travelling to and from east Auckland have been racially abused, robbed, assaulted and spat at in recent months.
Few New Zealanders resent the number of skilled, hard working Asian migrants employed by our hospitals, tech firms and engineering companies. It is the proliferation of low skilled workers in ever-expanding small businesses of dubious merit that grates. As well as reports of worker exploitation by other migrants.
Bakul Gupta dislikes my description of India as a low-trust society but I doubt anyone would describe the South Asian nation of over 1.4 billion as a high-trust society. Prior to this recent surge of migrants in the last 15 years, New Zealand could have been fairly described as a high trust society. Some Indian people who have lived here for decades have told me they lament the fact that this is no longer the case.
The Failure of Multiculturalism
Not so long ago, migrants were expected to integrate and assimilate into the host culture. No more. In this age of identity politics, the notion of allegiance and affinity to the country in which migrants have moved to has been ditched in favour of multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism is the idea that a society can be made up of people from different ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic backgrounds, and that those differences are recognised and accommodated rather than requiring everyone to adopt a single cultural identity. Now what makes people different is celebrated, not what unites them.
But to many people in the Anglophone world, in particular in the United Kingdom (UK), this multicultural experiment doesn’t feel that wonderful. The UK has undergone unprecedented demographic change in recent decades. It has morphed from being a white British country with a small number of well-integrated ethnic minority residents, to white British people now being a minority in several of its major cities, including its capital.
This has had a major impact on social coherence and integration. In her upcoming book “Diversity is Not Our Strength”, Katharine Birbalsingh, a UK inner-city teacher and founder of the Michaela school, chronicles the rising self-segregation among children across schools which fail to do this.
The inner city scene I have described is, in the long run, more divisive than is understood. I have seen it all before. The Bengali kids sit together. The Pakistani kids sit on the other side of the hall. The Hindu Indian kids sit together. The Black African kids sit together, sometimes divided on the basis of whether they are Christian or Muslim. The Eastern European kids have their area outside by a set group of benches. At other moments, friendships across divides will be formed but there’s a catch: they will be bound together by the idea that they all experience marginalisation or are all from somewhere else.
Birbalsingh is a New Zealand-born principal of Indo-African and Jamaican descent, whose success at uniting a largely ethnic minority intake of students around their British identity, has earned her the title of “Britain’s strictest headmistress.” Her pupils have also been extraordinarily successful. They have achieved top-tier exam results and high attendance despite coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The subtitle of her new book, due out in November, is How the Left and Right Broke Multiculturalism and How to Fix It.
This multi-culti trend is evident in all Anglophone nations, including New Zealand, though, as yet, the demographic change here is not yet as marked. Nevertheless, our stats show that since 2006 the Asian population in Auckland has swelled from 18.9 per cent to 31.3 per cent, in Wellington from 13.2 per cent to 20.4 per cent, and Christchurch from 7.9 per cent to 17.1 per cent.
As a whole, the Asian population in New Zealand has risen from 9.2 per cent to 17.3 per cent of the total between 2006 and 2023.
For the Auckland region, the 2023 Census found that 42.9 per cent of residents were born overseas (703,422 people out of a population of 1,656,486). The remaining 57.1 per cent were born in New Zealand. That compares with 28.8 per cent overseas-born nationally in 2023.
The data quoted above is from Stats NZ up to 2023. Given that a large number of migrants arrived post-Covid, from 2023–25, we can expect this figure to be even higher in more up-to-date statistics.
The notion of multiculturalism comes with a moral overlay that inhibits criticism. Progressives assume that a potpourri of cultures and ethnicities in a nation is a moral good or an unquestionable virtue. Just about the worst thing anyone can say of a culture or region is that it is monocultural. Curiously, no one would expect a region in say Nigeria or China to be anything other than predominantly African or Chinese.
Thus the expectation that migrants will assimilate has been cast as infra dig and narrow-minded. Every culture is encouraged to maintain its traditions and viewpoints. ‘Diversity is our strength’ is the catch-cry of the progressive elites.
That is why few dare to question the establishment of three Islamic schools in Auckland with plans for expansion as well as creating an additional Islamic school, due to high demand and waiting lists.
As well, the first Sikh school is planned for the Bay of Plenty under the charter school system. It will combine the standard New Zealand curriculum with Punjabi language, Sikh history, and teachings of the Sikh Gurus.
New Zealand law also makes specific accommodations for Sikh religious practice. Section 13A of the Summary Offences Act 1981 makes it an offence to possess a knife in a public place without a “reasonable excuse”; section 202A of the Crimes Act similarly prohibits possessing a knife or offensive weapon without “lawful authority or reasonable excuse”. Religious observance can be relevant to whether such an excuse exists, although the legislation does not create an automatic blanket exemption for kirpans.
A more explicit exemption is given to Sikh motorcyclists and cyclists. NZTA allows members of the Sikh religion to ride without a helmet at speeds of up to 50 km/h. They must be able to establish their Sikh membership if required by an enforcement officer.
The position on aircraft is different. Kirpans are subject to aviation security screening like other potentially dangerous items. A kirpan with a blade under six cm may be carried in cabin baggage; one with a longer blade must be placed in checked luggage. New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority explicitly says religious items are not exempt from security screening.
Whatever you think of these exemptions, they are an example of the host country bending over to accommodate the new migrant. Not so long ago, the migrant would have been expected to fit in with the host country and observe their rules and regulations.
However there are signs, in Europe at least, that some migrants, academics and politicians are beginning to regard this hyper-tolerance with alarm. They say, while well intentioned, this viewpoint actually traps people within strict ethnic and cultural “boxes” controlled by self-appointed community leaders. They argue institutionalised segregation has led to fragmented, parallel societies and alienated minorities across Europe.
An overemphasis on cultural tolerance led by the elite has ignored the necessity of language acquisition, employment, and the adoption of liberal democratic norms. This has resulted in deep social fragmentation.
Instead of aiding new migrants, tolerance has facilitated decreased socio-economic mobility and heightened long-term inequalities.
Ideally New Zealand could look overseas, learn from mistakes made in other nations and avoid the most egregious effects of ill-thought-out immigration policies. Will we? Somehow I doubt it. Not until this is a conversation permitted in polite company.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
