“New Zealand is going down the same ‘crimmigration’ route as Australia, the US, the UK, and other restrictive settler-states seeking to look strong on law and order,’ writes Dr Henrietta McNeill-Stowers. Pictured is an adolescent boy recently deported from the US to Guatemala. (Photo: UN)

“Since 2015, New Zealand has seen the immense human cost of deportations at the whim of another country’s legislative changes,” writes Henrietta McNeill-Stowers. “So why are we willing to inflict the same thing on our Pacific neighbours?”

Last week, immigration minister Erica Stanford announced her plans to change New Zealand’s deportation laws. Under the proposed changes, non-citizens who have lived here for up to 20 years could be deported for legal infractions.

This is a big change from current laws that restrict deportation to those with less than 10 years of residency. If the changes go through, deportations will dramatically increase, including to the Pacific Islands region.

Stanford says that these legislative changes were spurred by the Mama Hooch rapists, two Australian brothers convicted in 2023 of drugging and violating more than 20 women in Christchurch, but who escaped deportation because they had lived in New Zealand for more than 10 years.

However, immigration specialists argue the changes are “less about criminals, and more about deporting people for immigration infringements”.

Whichever the case, New Zealand is going down the same “crimmigration” route as Australia, the US, the UK, and other restrictive settler-states seeking to look strong on law and order. Research shows that this approach demonises and causes harm to migrants, and opens the door to costly and ongoing legal challenges.

What is less talked about is the international impact of such deportation policies. US executive orders are ramping up deportations, including to the Pacific, and Australia is about to send 300 people to Nauru, including asylum seekers. We should be considering the consequences of sending people “away”. (Spoiler alert: there is no such place as “away” — everyone goes somewhere.)

New Zealand is all too familiar with the effects of sudden changes in immigration laws by other countries. Australia’s section 201 of the Migration Act (1958) initially limited deportations to those who broke laws with less than 10 years’ residency (similar to New Zealand’s current law). But this was changed in 2014 with amendments to section 501, allowing anyone to be deported for crimes carrying a sentence of more than 12 months, or simply for having a “bad character”.

When these laws changed in 2014, deportations from Australia increased 16-fold, mostly to New Zealand. Seventy percent of the deportations to New Zealand under section 501 would not have occurred under the previous section 201 rule. Section 501 deportations also disproportionately affected Māori and Pasifika peoples living in Australia.

Australia’s changes to deportation legislation caused fear in the New Zealand diaspora living in Australia and raised ongoing concerns in New Zealand about the implications for increased gang numbers, drug movements, and reoffending.

Fifty-seven percent of people deported from Australia to New Zealand committed crimes after returning, 27 percent of them within the first year.

Deported people attribute these statistics to a lack of support to help them reintegrate into a country that they left as children and often returned to without family or any other support networks.

Successive New Zealand prime ministers — John Key, Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon — have all had terse words with their Australian counterparts about deportation policy, with varying degrees of success. All in all, as Jacinda Ardern noted: “It’s having a corrosive effect on our relationship.”

So why are we willing to inflict the same thing on our Pacific neighbours?

The Dawn Raids era is not that far behind us, a period that caused significant tensions between New Zealand and Pacific Island countries. Recent figures show that more than 30 percent of New Zealand’s criminal deportations are to Sāmoa, while Tonga tops the list for overstayers eligible for deportation. Both will be significantly affected by the legislative changes proposed this week.

Both Sāmoa and Tonga have limited resources for managing deportations, which would be stretched further with increased arrivals. The Tongan Transnational Crime Unit spend 35 percent of their time managing the arrival of deportees. This year alone, deportations from the US to Sāmoa and Tonga have doubled, increasing pressure on Tonga’s resources. New Zealand doesn’t need to add to this strain.

Sāmoa and Tonga already blame New Zealand (and Australia, and the US) for problems caused by deportation. As the former Tongan justice minister Samiu Vaipulu put it: “New Zealand, Australia and even the United States, when they have people with problems, they flood them over here, to our islands, without doing anything about them, and they come do the same thing [commit crimes] here.”

Successive Tongan and Sāmoan prime ministers have raised their concerns with their New Zealand counterparts about deportations and potential reoffending — just as New Zealand prime ministers have done with their Australian counterparts.

New Zealand has made efforts to increase the information given to Pacific Island governments before a deportation, but Pacific nations still feel like New Zealand is “exporting a problem”, without taking responsibility for the consequences.

But surely New Zealand is funding reintegration support for deportations through its aid programme? Not adequately.

Deported people experience trauma entering a country that, in most cases, they haven’t lived in since they were toddlers, and where they have no support network and little familiarity with the local language or culture. Separation without support can cause them to “turn back to what they know”, usually drugs and crime.

It’s hard for deported people to integrate into society without adequate and skilled support. The Sāmoa Returnees Charitable Trust is a long-standing reintegration organisation whose work reduces the rate of reoffending by returnees. But New Zealand doesn’t fund the trust, leaving the financial responsibility to the Sāmoan government.

New Zealand once contributed $17,000 to a Tongan reintegration organisation building project, but this doesn’t begin to assuage the costs of return for a person who feels deeply betrayed by New Zealand for deporting them away from their life and family, or for the receiving country, which has to manage their reintegration into a new place.

Since 2015, New Zealand has seen the immense human cost of receiving deportations at the whim of another country’s legislative changes.

New Zealand already has strained diplomatic relations with our Pacific neighbours. We should rethink the consequences of our own deportation policy. Increasing deportations may look strong on law and order domestically, but it will cause untold damage to our Pacific relationships.

(Photo supplied)

Dr Henrietta McNeill-Stowers is a New Zealand academic based at the Australian National University. Her award-winning PhD thesis examined deportations to Sāmoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands.

E-Tangata, 2025