People and Borders

The Alligator‘s gone back home. Hopefully not for too long; he’s undergoing immigration department processes to get back here and be able to work. He’s young with no dependents, a skillset that’s in the NZ skill shortage list, experience running a successful business and plans to start a new one here; just the kind of person our systems should be set up to encourage, one would think. It still seems to be a long slog with little comfort to be had and little certainty in outcome
He’s not alone of course. Sonal is searching for a way to get back into the UK, for love, for work, for every good reason. 2trees went through epic battles with the same country’s immigration section that only begun to be resolved when he married the local girl he’d been with for years; and that still hasn’t been the end of it.
Sonal asks bluntly what immigration controls achieve. And certainly, there is plenty of room to question that, in a globalised world where money flows easily.
I don’t have any answers, at least none that I can vouch for – I could happily expound on some random theory or other but that would have only a stopped-clock’s chance of being correct. In fact I don’t really have anything much to say at all. I just wanted to mark this stuff out for future though. And perhaps to suggest that, this thing we have of seeing the promise of the world, and allowing people to sink connections into different places but then making it so hard for them to stick around unless they can buy their passage? That isn’t a good way of doing things. Not at all.
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Wellingtonians: I am rather excited by the arrival in our fair city of the Gamblers, one of Korea’s premiere b-boy teams. I highlighted these guys in a Friday Linky back in June last year – linking to this incredible article about them at Salon. Sunday, Capital E, 2.30-3.30 is showtime. They’re touring other centres in NZ too.