How do people become refugees?

A refugee is really someone who is finding life in their own home….they are being oppressed politically. Perhaps they are being discriminated against, perhaps the people of a particular community is being kicked out of their homeland. You know in Uganda, Asians have been in Uganda for about a century, but suddenly Idi Amin, the President decided that Uganda was for black people, it wasn’t for Asian people and so he just kicked them out. They were stateless, where were they going to go? So New Zealand said yes well will take some Ugandan refugees, Asian refugees from Uganda. So refugees are people who are seeking a refuge. They are people who can’t live in their own homes because they are being politically oppressed, or they are being kicked out and they want somewhere to live.

We’ve got a whole little entry about the history of refugees who’ve come to New Zealand. Which is again a really interesting story, because we’ve had quite a range of different kinds of refugees. In the period immediately before the Second World War, there were a number of Jewish people who came as refugees. Immediately after the Second World War there were… well let’s just have a look at some of them.

These are Hungarian refugees who came from Eastern Europe. These are Chinese who came in from Indonesia. These are Asian refugees, who came in when they were being kicked out of Uganda in the 1970s. These are Chilean refugees, who at the time when there was tough military rule in Chile, some of those people came to New Zealand. These are, this is a mother and child from Iraq, and you probably all realise the difficulties that Iraq has had in the last 10 years or so. Well quite a number of Iraqis came to New Zealand as refugees.