Promised Land? 
Not Quite, Mate!

By Rakesh K. Simha in Auckland

Not by a long shot, says Colah, who has put her house on the market and is moving to Australia in a few weeks. She won’t even wait for the house to sell. “No point hanging around until then; I might as well be setting up base in Sydney,” she says with a resigned air. Their reasons for leaving: her husband, who was an engineer back in India, hasn’t been able to get a job in his own field, and secondly both of them are unhappy with the kind of money they make. “The average white collar Kiwi earns around $50,000 per year, but because we are immigrants, it would be unrealistic to expect that much. The only way we can enjoy life and save for the future is if one person gets $50,000 and the other earns a similar amount that goes straight into the bank.”

Girish Bhatia, 40, migrated from Rohtak, Haryana, eight years ago. He has given up his full time job as an insurance salesman and works only 20 hours a week—the normal is 40 hours—as a packer in a hardware company. To make up for the shortfall in earnings, they get state support on which 70 per cent of New Zealanders depend. 

“There’s really no point working like a dog when there’s zero possibility of upward mobility, when you can work at your own pace and get state support,” says Bhatia. “I agree this isn’t the best way to earn a living, and certainly this isn’t the Indian way, but when most of the country is living on government subsidies, why can’t I?”

Pockancherry Vikrama Singh, 22, is an engineer from Calicut, Kerala, who works as a technician in an automotive design company in Auckland. He’s trying to get a break in the firm’s CAD/CAM department, which would mean a salary in the range of $80,000, extremely high by Kiwi standards. However, he says there’s strong resistance to employing someone fresh out of India. “Indian experience counts for zilch here. You could have worked 20 years as an engineer in India but for Kiwis all it matters is NZ experience. For them India is a country awash in poverty; they think we are agrarian and live in houses with tarp roofs. Such ignorance prompts them to believe that our education system can’t be all that good. I’m working in a non-descript job because it’s the only way to get your foot in the door. They won’t even look at you if you ask for a break in their elite CAD/CAM department,” says Singh.

But Singh is certain he’ll make it. “The situation isn’t so bad for skilled immigrants in technical jobs,” he says. “In fact, I’m getting my brother, who’s studying IT networks, to come here next year.”

Three immigrants, three outcomes, all different. They came from different backgrounds and had varying levels of success, or the lack of it. New Zealand isn’t America, the land where Indian immigrants can become senators, hotel tycoons, or celebrity surgeons. It is not a nation of immigrants; it is still a country which is grappling with the question—what to do with immigrants? Non-European immigration is a fairly recent phenomenon, with large-scale immigration starting only as late as the 1990s.

According to a survey conducted earlier this year by The Global Indian, an Indian magazine in New Zealand, most Indians in New Zealand are likely to be in an administrative/physical job, be under-paid, likely to have never been promoted, and faced job discrimination up to 10 times or more. The survey says almost two in three Indians (63%) felt they have been discriminated in recruitment process or at work.

The NZ-wide survey says three in four (72%) Indians felt their career has been adversely affected after migrating to New Zealand. Every second Indian is likely to be earning less than $50,000 a year, while every third Indian is employed in physical, administrative, secretarial, or customer service role.

One in two Indians said they have never been promoted in a job in New Zealand. Two in three Indians feel that their salary is not in line with their qualifications and skills, and that they are under-paid. One respondent said that he/she has not had a permanent job for the past 12 years.

While entry into the white collar world isn’t easy for Indians, the fact remains that the sort of immigrants who come here are not exactly India’s brightest. This may sound uncharitable to both Indians living here and to New Zealanders, but most immigrants who choose New Zealand are simply not good enough to enter the US. While America wants India’s rocket scientists and software czars, New Zealand attracts taxi drivers.

To be fair to New Zealand employers, they really have little to offer white collar jobseekers. While the country needs a large number plumbers, fitters, masons, electricians, nurses, computer repair people and so on, there simply aren’t too many white collar jobs to go around as the manufacturing base is small.

Even in development terms, New Zealand has some appalling statistics. Over 20,000 children go to school everyday on an empty stomach because there’s no breakfast at home. More than 70 per cent of Kiwis depend on state support to pay their household bills. Buying a home has become an increasingly difficult task for young people. Child abuse is rampant. No wonder that New Zealand has one of the highest percentage of people prone to depression.

It is in such an environment that Indians find themselves. Clearly it can be a rude awakening, especially if you are brown, speak with an accent, and can’t prepare a decent resume.

Also, everything is on a much smaller scale than back home. For instance, if you apply for a call centre job, be prepared to go through three rounds of interviews, and endless waiting before they send you snail mail, regretting that “the standards were extremely high so you were not considered this time”. In India, the average call centre hires at least 20 freshers a day.

Another factor not working in favour of the Indian community is the big exodus from New Zealand. Last year 34,000 Kiwis left for foreign shores, mostly to Australia, Canada and England. Among Indians who leave, those who haven’t got jobs in their own field are the first to leave—often just weeks after getting their citizenship. Consequently the community hasn’t been able to develop a critical mass of white collar citizens who can be role models, who can act as referees, and who can pull up more people into the white collar world. In short, social gentrification remains a distant dream.

In the 1920s, the White New Zealand League tried to have Indians excluded from buying land or operating businesses. Indians were accused of ‘undercutting’ the ‘white man’ and were said to pose a threat to the morality of the nation.

New Zealand has come a long way since those xenophobic days. But now the Indians just aren’t biting.

January 2008