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Vol 44, No 46
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GENUINE MIGRANTS: Former Honorary Polish Consul John Roy (centre frame) at a Polish children reunion in Wellington last year.
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‘Syrians not refugees’ By MARIANNE KELLY
S
yrians should be labelled ‘economic migrants’, says John Roy, the prominent Howick businessman and former Honorary Polish Consul to New Zealand. The tidal wave of Syrian people flooding into European Community (EU) countries are not refugees, he says, and New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key should have stuck to his guns when he was initially reticent about Aotearoa upping its intake. Mr Roy is one of 1.7 million Polish people who were forced from their homes in Eastern Poland to labour camps throughout Siberia at the start of World War II. He was also one of 733 Polish children who were welcomed to New Zealand and started their lives at the Polish Children’s Camp in Pahiatua, Wairarapa. He went on
to pursue a successful business career and established the Polish Heritage Trust Museum in Howick. “We must distinguish between immigrants and people who are refugees,” he says. The Syrian migrants are not refugees, he says. “Many are young well-educated people who are running away from their homes. Many are young men who should be staying in their own country and fighting the enemy. “After World War II there were genuine refugees and New Zealand took 733 children and 105 adults who came here in 1944 as guests of New Zealand,” he says. Original plans were for them to return to Poland, but after Eastern Poland became part of the former USSR they had no homes to go back to, so the New Zealand Government gave them perma-
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nent residence. “I didn’t run away from my home,” Mr Roy says. “I was deported to Russia and after the war had no country to go back to. Fortunately the New Zealand Government offered to take us and we became immigrants. But we never ran away or left our country [of our own volition].” John Key, he says, should not have been pushed into upping the country’s refugee quota. New Zealand will take in 750 Syrian people over the next three years including 600 above its annual quota. “They will come and live in their own groups,” Mr Roy says. “They will not become New Zealanders. It will just be a different place for them to live. “Anyone coming here as an immigrant should become a New Zealander, accept our way of life and live in a New Zealand society.
It should not be a place where they can swing from one to the other.” Some of the Syrian migrants have been quoted in international media saying they would return to their homes when the conflict in Syria is over. Mr Roy places much of the responsibility for the crisis on the head of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany, he says, is losing population and short of workers. “If they were genuine refugees we should take them. There are wars everywhere and if they were genuine refugees we should put our hands up and help them. “But the Syrians are not refugees. Of course they all want to go to Germany. It’s the richest country in Europe. They don’t want to be stuck on a Greek island. But we’ve seen the problems resulting in Austria and Hungary. It’s shocking.”