From my experience as a migrant NZ is a very welcoming country and I have so far never experienced discrimination in any way. NZ is used to have people from all parts of the world coming and living here and they mostly embrace the positive sides about that fact.
However, there are some discussions about the "Asian Migrants" for the following reasons:
NZ is signing today a free trade agreement with China (as the first western country).
Not everybody is happy about that agreement, especially because nobody knows the content of the agreement (except of aunty Helen one would hope). The "public" will know more by tomorrow. The human rights issue set aside, it is rather frightening for some to hear that a country with a population of 4.26 million is signing a free trade agreement with a 1.32 billion (or 1.32 trillion in the US system) population country - knowing that somewhere in the agreement is a provision for some sort of "free movement of people".
NZ is currently exporting goods to China for $1.95 billion, whilst China is exporting to NZ for $5.59 billion. This means, China with a roughly 235,000,000,000 times bigger population than NZ, is importing only about 3 times more goods than NZ does from China. Additionally, NZ imposes currently hardly import taxes on goods imported from China (except of cloths etc.), whilst at present China imposes tariffs of 10 to 20 percent on goods imported from NZ. With the free trade agreement, these taxes should vanish. The consequences are - some think - that product prices will raise here in NZ considerably because of that (especially agricultural products). It is also anticipated that "cheap labour" will have access to NZ.
It is not the fact that there are Asian migrants, I think the anticipation of the sheer number is what frightens some of the Kiwis.
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