Winston Peters is racist, but he is also highlighting an actual real social and political issue we all need to grapple with: Immigration and the problems it creates

By Natalia Albert*

I will start with the obvious and most important point: Winston Peters is racist and xenophobic. I am treating that as a fact.

Also, a personal disclosure that is relevant to this analysis. 

I have been an immigrant for a very long time. Since I was four, when my mum was posted to the Consulate General in Vancouver and I left Mexico City, my hometown. We left Vancouver when I was eight, back to Mexico. Then Chicago at 13.

Back to Mexico at 15. Back to Vancouver at 18. So when I say I am a Mexican-born New Zealand citizen, understand that I am not coming at this as a novice. I am coming at it as a Black Belt migrant, one who has done her time across several countries over the past 40 years. That is my lived experience. I have also been studying this topic closely, formally and academically, in New Zealand for 14 years, and working on government-related matters for more than eight. Which will explain my passion but also my bias. 

The first time I heard Winston Peters say something racist was, to my fellow Mexican, Ricardo Menéndez March¹. In early 2025, Ricardo had the audacity to say the word “Aotearoa” in the House. Winston reminded the chamber that Ricardo “came here in 2006,” and that this, apparently, settled it. The name of the country is New Zealand, he said, and this person who arrived in 2006 was not going to change it. “You just arrived so your opinion counts for less than mine.”

It is the same play he ran on Xu-Nan. The move every migrant learns to recognise: the procedural reminder that you are a guest here, and guests do not get to rearrange the furniture. Citizenship be dammed. 

When Winston Peters told Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country,” he knew exactly what he was doing. He always does. The Race Relations Commissioner said it, Simeon Brown said it, and eventually even Christopher Luxon had to say it. So I’ll skip the part of the column where I perform my outrage for you. 

None of this should be a surprise. Back in January, I wrote that immigration was about to become the most contested terrain of this election and that the left had already lost the social licence to defend it. I called the piece Performing Sovereignty. I stand by every word, and I take no pleasure in it.

What I argued then was simple. New Zealand needs migrants more than it ever has. The boomers are retiring, the birthrate is falling, and by 2048 roughly a third of us will be Asian New Zealanders. And yet we have never trusted immigration less. That gap, between the country we are demographically becoming and the country a chunk of voters feel they miss, is a gap Winston found sitting unattended and is now moving into.

Winston's message is resonating because important questions about immigration, how much, how fast, who pays for the housing and the GPs, got reclassified as things only a racist would ask. And when you tell a large chunk of the public that their concern is a moral failing, you create a massive gap in the public debate. And it got gift-wrapped, to the one man cheerfully willing to pick it up and add the bigotry back in himself.

Immigration is a product of globalization and capitalism.

The toxic marriage neoliberalism handed us in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher threw the borders open to capital and gave the market more power than it knew what to do with. I know this one in my bones, because the reason I moved so much between Mexico, the United States, and Canada as a kid was NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the most consequential trade agreement of a lifetime, the one that reshaped the social, political, and economic landscape of not just my hometown but a whole continent.

I am a NAFTA baby, thoroughly indoctrinated into the gospel of globalization and open markets. I learned how to say NAFTA before I could walk. And here is what the gospel left out: we did too much, too fast, and we skipped some fairly important questions about tax, about infrastructure, and about social cohesion. Such as, for instance, what happens when a country ends up speaking more languages than its government can handle. 

It is fundamentally hard to coexist with this level of diversity, and harder still to govern it. 

We should have known that, and at some level we did. We just romanticized the whole project from the start. The diversity management literature was minted in the United States in the early 1990s, in the cusp of the continent being reorganized around free trade. And the definition of social cohesion we use here today also came from the cusp of NAFTA being signed in Canada. As a preventive measure for all the immigration that was about to reshape three mayor countries.

Our foundational framework, written by Paul Spoonley and colleagues in 2005, was built directly on the Canadian model, right down to consulting Canadian immigration officials on how they had done it. So, the intellectual apparatus we use to manage diversity was manufactured in North America, by two of the economies busiest dissolving their own borders, at the very moment they were doing it. We imported the vocabulary. We did not import the funding, the infrastructure, or the patience. We romanticized the consequences and told ourselves that more is more and faster is better.

So why have we lost social licence for immigration?

Social licence is permission to operate. It is not a formal policy. It is the informal consent that sits underneath government permission to operate. Every agency needs it, for different things: Statistics NZ to hold our data, the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment to permit mining on the West Coast, Inland Revenue to collect our taxes. It is the quiet, renewable consent a public give to a thing it has agreed is worth the trouble. And like any permission, it can be withdrawn. Ours was, and we did it to ourselves, in three moves.

First, we built the licence on sand. Globalization sold us diversity as a self-evident good and never made us pay for the plumbing. Forty years of opening the flows and romanticising the results, while ducking the boring, expensive questions: housing, infrastructure, credential recognition, and what holds a society together when it speaks more than 150 languages. Read that again. More than 150, according to the last Census. That alone is enough to strain our social cohesion, without Winston Peters needing to be racist about it. 

New Zealand then adds a layer of complexity most countries never have to reckon with: Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which makes immigration an even hotter button. I have written about this at length, but in a nutshell, the Treaty is a formal agreement between Māori and the Crown. Not Māori, the Crown, and migrants². Migrants arrive into a relationship they can’t influence and that creates tensions between groups that cannot be resolved. It is a polarity, not a problem: something you manage rather than solve, and New Zealand manages it poorly. 

Second, cities changed faster than the people living in them had agreed to. Rents climbed, the GP waitlist grew, and a surgeon from Delhi ended up driving the Uber while we complained about the doctor shortage. It is what happens when you import the people and forget to build the country around them. We keep banging on about talent shortfall, when we have it here, we just refuse to hire them and promote them in the roles we don’t trust them in, even though we need them in those roles desperately. 

Third, we told the people noticing the problem that they were bigots and racist for wanting to know more about it.

We have lost our social licence for immigration by forbidding people to name the problems without first pleading guilty to racism. Woke liberalism made this worst. 

That is the unattended gap Winston walks into every single time. He has never offered real sustainable solutions to these issues. He is offering permission to say you are unhappy about the level of diversity in New Zealand. Then, being Winston, he laces that permission with poison, so a legitimate worry about planning and a genuinely racist sneer at a Chinese-born MP arrive in the same breath, impossible to prise apart. That is the con. He bundles the reasonable and the vile together and dares the left to reject both at once, which it obligingly does, proving his point for him.

And you may ask: if the anxieties are real, then isn't Winston just the man brave enough to name them? Aren't you conceding he has a point? No. The distinction might seem subtle, if you agree with Winston, but it is not. Explaining why something happens is not the same as endorsing it. The concern about social cohesion, enough housing and infrastructure is legitimate. Winston's answer to it is racist. The question is fair, his answer is not, and holding both of those in your head at once is needed for a more mature debate about a very real issue. What we need is a population strategy, but that is a topic for another week. 

1) I appreciate this might not be his first time.

2) I do not say this lightly. I have studied this relationship for more than 10 years, specialised in it across my undergraduate degree and my master's, read most of the books, and taken every workshop this country offers on it. In 2022, developing the social cohesion policy as a public servant, I spoke with many New Zealanders, Māori as Tangata Whenua and Mana Whenua, about exactly these tensions. I have also had my own reckoning with it as a migrant. There are several names for what I am supposed to be in this arrangement: tangata tiriti, tauiwi, and a migrant of color. I hate all of them. What matters is not the label but that I understand the tension and the many ways New Zealanders argue about it. This is just how I see it.

*Natalia Albert is a political scientist specialising in New Zealand politics. She is a regular contributor on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan, Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan and writes for interest.co.nz. Less Certain is her weekly newsletter. Albert stood as a TOP candidate in the 2023 election.