In 2005, Labour repealed the long-standing principle of birthright citizenship in Aotearoa. Why? As with everything else Labour does, it all came down to austerity: "foreign mothers" were supposedly "coming to this country to give birth", and this was "put[ting] pressure on hospitals". Then-Immigration Minister George Hawkins explicitly gave this as the reason during the law's first reading debate, saying:
Some people may come to New Zealand on temporary permits solely to give birth, so that their New Zealand - born children are citizens. Under current law those children are entitled to access publicly funded services such as health care and education. Restricting citizenship by birth will ensure that citizenship and its benefits are limited to people who have a genuine and ongoing link to New Zealand.Twenty years later, and we're seeing the cost of this change: kiwi kids being threatened with deportation to foreign countries. And while public outrage seems to have caused the Minister to rethink, this should never have happened. People who were born here, have grown up here, have never known anywhere else should not be exiled from their country, or victimised due to the legal mistakes of their parents.
We should learn this lesson, and fix the underlying law which threatened to result in this injustice. And that means restoring birthright citizenship, not just to those born here in future, but also to those immorally deprived of it by the Clark government's cruel penny-pinching. And if the current government wants to quibble over this, we should ask them: are they really that small?
(And while we're at it: we should restore relationship rights too, so kiwis can be with the people they love).
