Ōtepoti was home to some of Aotearoa’s earliest non-pākehā tauiwi, with thousands of Chinese lured to seek their fortunes in Dunedin, a place they called San Gam Saan – the “New Gold Mountain”. While few intended to stay on, many were forced to, forming a community whose legacy remains across Aotearoa to this day. But while their challenges and persecution seem like ancient history, ones that most people respond to with a dismissive “that was how they did things back then,” a closer look reveals just how little things have changed about how we view immigrants as a nation.
The origins of Chinese history in Dunedin were mostly pragmatic: as the gold rush ended and miners began leaving in droves, the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce spied an opportunity to keep the (economic) party going. Chinese were seen as “well-behaved” and “hard-working”, able to produce gold from areas which were abandoned by other miners, and most importantly, “large consumers of foodstuff and store goods”. These miners were almost exclusively young, impoverished men from the Guangzhou (Canton) province, deemed the fittest in their families and the most likely to survive the dangerous voyage overseas. The autobiography of James Shun, who was seventeen when his ship from Hong Kong was met with a storm, recalls: “In the hold where our beds were, there was a foot of water. Then all the passengers began crying out, ‘Save us!’ I did not hear on whom they were calling to save them.”
European gold miners had largely left for the West Coast when the gold ran out in the Otago fields, leaving the Chinese migrants with the scraps. Despite having poorer tools–often brought from home–the Chinese miners were diligent, frugal and thorough, willing to pore over the same plot, syphoning specks of gold previously unnoticed or unwanted. But this oft-celebrated “hard-working, industrious nature” obscures the fact that, like many immigrants today, most were starting from a place of profound disadvantage. Working hard was not necessarily “in their genes”, but a matter of survival because of the conditions imposed on them. Ineligible for the subsidised fares paid to encourage British settlement, many were already in debt after paying for their passage over. Additionally, unlike most pākehā miners, they had to earn enough to support families overseas as well as themselves. To supplement their scarce income, many ended up doing low-paying labour for pākehā farmers, like gorse-cutting and ditch-digging.
In China during the late Qing Dynasty, greener pastures overseas were marketed as an invaluable opportunity for advancement, or at the very least to make enough to provide a better life for their families back home. It took about £100, or roughly $20,000 today, to achieve what many miners dreamed of: a ticket back home so they could reunite with their families, enough to expand their family’s plot of land, or perhaps to start a small business. Many failed to achieve even these modest goals. As David Ng wrote in his 1962 thesis: “[some] lived in their old age, lonely and uncared for, living on the charity of their countrymen or by Government aid… they had not even heard of their families and relatives for years, and could not hope to see again their native land.” Around 200 Chinese were buried in Ōtepoti’s Southern Cemetery from the 1880s to the 1920s – the vast majority were gold miners who did not have the money or family connections to send their bodies back home.
These tough conditions did not stop rising resentment, particularly from the few remaining pākehā miners. They saw Chinese as having “low morals [and] segregated ways of life”, and the fact that they were willing to work long hours for relatively low wages was seen as “being detrimental to the general standard of living”. The very things that the pākehā working-class saw as a threat, though, the rich saw as an opportunity; the strongest defenders of the Chinese were “representatives of the landed, mercantile and professional interests… [who] praised the Chinese for their industry, thrift and ancient culture and civilisation”.
As the gold ran out and Chinese miners began moving into cities in search of work, the hostility stepped up a notch. In 1871, a local newspaper reported that “All classes agree that the Chinese are eating up an inheritance that we should leave for our race in the future.” The pressure prompted the Government to set up a “Special Inquiry into the Chinese Question,” which found “There was no special risk to the morality and security from [Chinese] presence in the Colony.” Lawmakers and the public, however, were not ones to let facts get in the way of their feelings.
In the succeeding decades, a steady drumbeat of increasingly punitive legislation was introduced. The “Asiatic Restriction Act” of 1881 introduced a poll tax (initially £10, soon increased to 10 times that) and limited the number of “Asiatics” a ship could carry based on its weight. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1920 meant any non-pākehā migrant required a special permit from the Minister of Customs. The adoptive mother of Kathleen Pih-Chang, who grew up to be Otago Uni’s first Chinese graduate, had to schmooze the Governor-General in order to get her into the country. She even went as far as to christen the five-year-old Kathleen after the GG’s daughter.
Even the small trickle of refugees Aotearoa accepted from Japanese-occupied China, in the midst of World War II, were initially sent on temporary visas, with the country ready to spit them back out at a moment’s notice. It was only public pressure that stopped the Government from sending them home in 1947, as the Chinese Civil War violently raged. The Dunedin Presbyterian Church’s Public Question Committee pleaded: “With inflation and civil war in China, it would be inhumane to force their return and to tear apart families now united… many children are at school, and their companionship with our children in lessons and play is of great educational value to young New Zealanders, especially in view of our tendency to insularity and isolation.”
Throughout these years, the door was never “officially” closed to Chinese. Yet a steadily increasing pile of administrative and bureaucratic hurdles was growing: onerous thumbprinting requirements; English language exams; and even increased powers for Police searches (on suspicion of opium) all served to effectively prohibit Chinese, and indeed most non-pākehā, from immigrating for the next century or so. Just like the neighbouring White Australia Policy, Aotearoa’s “European society” and “European heritage” was thus constructed – an artifice maintained by punitive legislation, racist attitudes and sophisticated bureaucratese, which could market the nation as an egalitarian paradise while still upholding stark inequalities.
Occasionally, the quiet parts were said out loud. According to William Massey, Prime Minister from 1919-1925, these laws were “the result of a deep-seated sentiment… that this Dominion shall be what is often called a ‘White’ New Zealand.” As late as 1953, a report from the Department of External Affairs stated: ‘Our immigration is based firmly on the principle that we are and intend to remain a country of European development. It is inevitably discriminatory against Asians – indeed against all persons who are not wholly of European race and colour. Whereas we have done much to encourage immigration from Europe, we do everything to discourage it from Asia.”
The first halting steps towards changing this discriminatory system began in the 1970s and 1980s. However, just like in the 1860s, the prising open of Aotearoa’s doors came not from a change of heart or conscience, but by calculations to improve the bottom line. As the United Kingdom began to distance itself from its colonial remnants and draw closer to Europe, Aotearoa was forced to scout for ways to kick-start their flagging economy. And just like in the 1880s, immigrants were seen as the motu’s golden ticket.
In 1987 the Immigration Act was passed, forming the foundation of the system we have today. Under our current system, immigrants who have skills that are deemed to be valuable by the Government have preference. As of 2022, this “Green List” contains 56 jobs, from surveying to food technology, from otorhinolaryngology to dairy farming. The majority of the remaining immigrants to Aotearoa are either family members of the above skilled people, and refugees (which make up about 1-2% of migrants annually).
As in the past, the primary issue now is not so much explicit wording of legislation but implicit welcoming and acceptance. The Government may welcome you with open arms if your job is on a “skills shortage list,” but applying to get a job that way is a different kettle of fish. Almost every immigrant will be able to tell you about periods spent working minimum-wage jobs because, perversely, while the Government accepts overseas smarts and qualifications as being good enough for Aotearoa, a lot of local companies won’t.
A report by Diversity Works found a striking “migrant pay gap” amongst those immigrating from different countries. The highest paid migrants, South Africans, earned on average $4/hour more than the average pākehā (15.4%), with Americans, Canadians, Brits, Irish and SE Europeans (Greeks, Hungarians, Polish etc.) not far behind. On the other end of the scale: South East Asians, Koreans, Chinese and Japanese on average earned $4/hour less than the average pākehā. The gaps persisted even for migrants who have been in Aotearoa for long periods of time. Headlines of human rights abuses towards migrant workers, particularly Recognised Seasonal Employers (RSE) workers, are all too common.
While much has changed for the better since the days of the “Yellow Peril” in the 1880s, many of the lenses we see immigrants through have remained the same. It is still fundamentally a system which sees them as a resource to be tapped and taken advantage of. And while the immigration system has been tightened and loosened over the few decades, as fear mongering over “immigrants taking Kiwi jobs” competed with a desire to plug skill shortages and boost the economy, it is at its core the same: a system which weighs migrants up financially. And migrants, back then as they are today, are worth their weight in gold.