Thanks for the post Jogai.

I think it’s an important discussion to have and rather than lay out concrete policies, parties seem to fall into a trap of things like ‘low quality’, or ‘Chinese-sounding-names’. It seems the priority is not to come up with policy backed by evidence, but rather to say things for votes.

The ‘low quality’ argument is rather strange, because I’d be curious if we would accept Kiwis to be judged under the same criteria when we are migrating to other countries. Also, when we judge humans by quality, I think we all know where that leads.

I came as an international student and I agree that reform is needed in the area, but the language used by political parties is not constructive. It’s demeaning. An arbitrary way of deciding that we need only tertiary-educated students is not very helpful either.

Policy is important in this area, but before we get to that how about a bit of human decency.