A troubled stranger in a strange land

New Zealand newspaper opinion pages over the last week or so have been filled with comments about an incident in which a 33-year-old Somalian woman allegedly stabbed three people and tried to take control of a small passenger plane in Blenheim.

The woman in question, a refugee named Asha Ali Abdille, arrived in New Zealand in the early 1990s, and according to a spokesman for the Somalian community quoted in the Press, had a long history of difficulties fitting in.

According to Immigration services, she had been raped during three years spent in a refugee camp in Kenya, and has had a history of mental health problems during her time in New Zealand.

In 1994, she came to the attention of New Zealand First leader Winston Peters when she tried to bring in 14 family members, and the minister revealed she had several convictions.

The obvious question in a case like this, is why a troubled person from a non-western culture, should have been let into the country as a refugee when she had no family or friends here.

Given that she apparently had a large number of family members in Africa, who could potentially have provided guidance and support, wouldn't she have been better off staying in their instead of moving to a distant and very alien country which is difficult and expensive to travel to?

As Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative has pointed out, it tends to be better if refugees are settled in countries which have a similar culture to their homeland, and which, I would add in a case like this, are not too distant from friends and family.

Those who advocate settling third world immigrants in western countries, will argue that poor third world countries cannot afford to take on refugees, and that the refugees in question will suffer at the hands of disgruntled locals.

However, why not offer to sponsor such third world refugees, instead of ambitiously trying to resettle them in the costly West.

For a fraction of the cost of trying to resettle refugees in western countries, where there is a high chance they may never fully integrate, western governments could provide refugees with comprehensive support in neighbouring countries. Since such refugees would not be an economic burden on the host nation, it is less likely that they would be treated badly, and in many cases they might actually be welcomed as a stimulus to the local economy.

There is also increasing evidence that many refugees actually experience downward mobility when they move from a developing country to a complex western country, where they are unlikely to be fluent in the local language or be able to come to grips with the inevitable labyrinth of bureaucratic obstacles and competitive pressures that confront them. Such downward mobility is likely to be a significant factor in the relatively high crime rates of many refugee communities in western countries.

Conversely, an refugee from a developing country who moves to another developing country with a similar culture with assistance from a first world country, is more likely to be able to rebuild their previous socio-economic status, and arguably is less likely to become involved in anti-social behaviour.