The Right Kind of Immigrant
I cannot count how many times I’ve been asked since we immigrated: “What brought you to New Zealand?”
We’d often quip: “Oh, that’s easy: George Bush.” This invariably got a laugh, since most New Zealanders understand all too well to what we were referring. We moved to New Zealand not long after the US invaded Iraq. Mary and I left the United States because we saw a country which was overrun with fear and hatred, with a need to lash out after 9/11. We saw a coming wave of violence, and of scapegoating, and of warmongering with millions about to die. We knew it was coming, and we wanted nothing to do with any of it.
But it wasn’t just the war which brought us. It was the violence we saw rising in American society, the proliferation of guns and the glorification of killing. It was an unwillingness to raise our family in a land where we needed to fear for our safety, for the safety of our kids. We wanted to give our kids a better life, and to make sure we could all be happy and healthy in a peaceful land, filled with peaceful people.
And so we immigrated to New Zealand. We left our lives in San Francisco behind, and we brought our children to Wellington, and here we have been ever since.
We took jobs. We started businesses. We became citizens of Aotearoa. We became a part of our neighborhoods, our community. We became New…
