people conflate immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, boat people (illegal arrivals with no visa, often no documents at all) in an unhelpful way.
lets use a definition of immigration as when arrival has a visa.
Refugees are people who are entitled by a treaty we signed up to, to apply for a refugee visa, which will be considered under some hopefully objective process, and some of them will fit into our quota. A refugee has to have a well founded fear of persecution. As there are no wars in any countries adjoining us, they travel
Ethnic Boers in South Africa have that but it's a problem to admit them ahead of 5 billion others who might like to come here, despite them making the excellent candidates.
Immigration itself subdivides into permanent and temporary. Both of these subdivides into skilled and family reunion. And then you have Kiwis who get free access, and don't have to apply for citizenship, which makes it complicated when they commit repetitive crimes and we want to deport them.
its even more complicated, in that there are student categories and backpackers, pacific labourers and business people who commit to making a substantial number investment here.
Last I looked there were at around a hundred separate visa classes. This makes it a honey pot for people to set themselves up as immigration agents.
Now is a very good time to start with a blank page and define what we want, then design a vastly simpler system to deliver it.
There's going to be recession and continuing the Ponzi scheme is not going to work when the masses finally get it that residential and commercial properties are, like Wall St, two-way.
The Chinese students have picked up the vibe that the CCP is on the nose with many people here. I feel a bit sorry for some of them whose parents make big sacrifice to support them here. Many others are rich kids of people who are in business. They are often struggling with our language.
The Indian students generally have English language down pat and fit in better.
We can define the objective of out tertiary education system, at the same time as we do the immigration piece.
