So When Shane Jones Claims Wealthy Donors Are Influencing Immigration Decisions …

Shane Jones says you can’t trust the National Party on immigration, because they’re “funded by certain very rich overseas donors” with a vested interest in the matter.

On this particular matter, I shall have to defer to the superior experience of Jones – after all, I seem to recall an Associate Immigration Minister also by the name of Shane Jones who personally intervened against a mountain of official advice (including from Interpol), to get Kiwi citizenship for a foreign criminal festooned with fraudulent passports and other documents. Who had, as it happened, donated and otherwise fraternized pretty extensively with both Labour and National.

It seems like Jones’ outrage about supposedly suspect immigration is seriously selective. If it’s “Indian”, he’s against it. If it’s “Chinese”, he seems rather more circumspect (as in “silent”); and I mention this because I’m pretty sure that many of the shifts in our export education sector from the early-mid 2000s onward (or, as Jones calls it, the “ruining” thereof) were the result of a significant expansion in Chinese student visa numbers over that period.

This doesn’t mean it’s morally right to blame said students, of whatever nation of origin, either. As a country, we apparently decided we wanted Export Education to be a cornerstone of our growth and development strategy; and started energetically pushing the ‘recruitment’ for this in various target markets including India, the People’s Republic of China, and other such places.

This appears to have included sotto-voce ‘sweeteners’ about how long-term study in New Zealand would offer an easy pathway to Work-Visas and then eventually Residency.

And while an array of that is down to unscrupulous immigration brokers and sketchy education providers looking to make a quick buck by mass-importing fee-paying foreign students (I don’t just mean fly-by-night language schools, either – from my time in  the tertiary education sector, it seemed that even some of New Zealand’s more ‘reputable’ universities were quite intentionally in on it) …

… the manifest fact is that these policy decisions were made by *our* Government. Including, as it happens, two that Jones was personally part of.

I’ve previously covered in some detail how Jones’ bloviating references to “Butter Chicken” and “Bollywood Overreaction” when castigating immigration, appears to be an effort at setting a narrative, making a name for himself – getting ‘known’ as a guy against immigration via the specific, spurious, and repeated targeting of one stereotypable set of migrant demographics.

Yet now I think I’ll go further. Jones is patently aware that whenever the issue of immigration numbers or the sorts of immigration taking place comes up – that it’s *his own* record (or lack thereof) in Government that is effectively under scrutiny. Not the rambunctious rhetoric. The actual facts of what he and his have – or, more pointedly – have not done upon the matter.

That’s a losing wicket; so instead of allowing attention to be cast upon it, he’s attempting to redirect your attention to somebody .. anybody else.

So don’t look at his actual record, personally enabling *actual* dodgy immigration to New Zealand in a Ministerial capacity … instead keep your eye on the spectral shadow-puppet he’s projecting on that wall over there yonder: “3 million people [coming] here from New Delhi.”

To do anything else is, apparently, some kind of Greek Chorus “Overreaction”.