Immigrant and locally bom Pacific Island Polynesians: Two populations?

At a huihuinga organised during the Conference on Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland in August 1985, there was a spirited exchange of views among participants on residence of Pacific Island Polynesians in New Zealand. As part of a wider critique of Pakeha cultural hegemony and superiority several Maori speakers stressed that Pacific Island Polynesians were manuhiri (visitors) in New Zealand and, like most of the people of European descent, they had "overstayed their permits" in the eyes of the tangata whenua . In responding to these claims, speakers from Samoa and Fiji sought to dispell a myth, still widely held in New Zealand, that the great majority of resident Pacific Island Polynesians were born in the islands. They reminded participants at the Auckland Conference that almost half of the people classed on the basis of ethnicity as Pacific Islanders in the 1981 census had been born in New Zealand. They were not "immigrants".