I am a migrant. I came to New Zealand on the ill-fated Achille Lauro ship in 1966 as a 5 year old with my parents and two siblings and an accent so thick even I couldn't understand it. My parents had just enough money to freight us all from the docks in Wellington to Auckland where we lived in Ponsonby (when it was poplulated with working class people, many from the Pacific Islands) in a house shared with relatives who had preceeded us. Things were tight for many years, both of my parents worked in low paid jobs for many years. They were able to buy a home on the North Shore on a section which, like those around it, had been scraped of topsoil making the suburb an orange desert of clay unlike anything we had known in our homeland - where most things were grey.

My point is that I am Scottish. It is easy to imagine that the term migrant refers only to easily identifiable groups,...Asians, Africans, eastern Europeans etc, but by far the largest migrant groups are historically from Britain and yet we are largely ignored. The cliche is that Scottish people are canny and industrious - we endure our own stereotyping and prejudice. As a boy I flattened out my accent so that now you would never know I wasn't born and raised entirely in Aotearoa.

I fundamentally dislike the tag 'immigrant'. I think it is crucial to remember that, whatever ethnic extraction you are from, it is no reliable indicator of promise. And, rightly or wrongly I believe New Zealand is as close to a meritocracy as you will find in the world.

If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.  

nice cartoon!  

I agree, David: New Zealand is the closest thing to a meritocracy in the western world. I think Singapore might be up there, too.
   It is interesting you make this note. Some English friends of mine, who came in 1974, talked of the prejudices they faced, too, principally from other white New Zealanders of Anglo extraction, who just happened to have come a few generations earlier.    I had hoped that we are better at treating our new arrivals and welcoming them to our nation today.  

Mark, I pimped you in an interview last week!