Jay Marlowe: supporting a fair start for all

We’re living through a global refugee crisis that is getting ever worse.

The latest projections from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees notes more than 120 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to persecution, conflict or human rights violations. This is the highest number on record and nearly three times as many as only 15 years ago.

The majority are from countries such as Syria, Myanmar and Ukraine, as well as from parts of Africa and, of course, Gaza.

And now Europe, currently hosting more than one in three of the world’s refugees, is closing its doors and adopting restrictive policies to deter more from arriving. So the need for research that will change things for the better, and which addresses systemic injustices is vital, believes Jay Marlowe.

Jay is a professor of social work, whose research is focused on refugees and asylum seekers. He has been at the University since 2010, and early next year will become head of the School of Social Practice in the University’s new amalgamated faculty (combining Education and Social Work, Arts and some of Creative Arts and Industries). Next month he and his team will be publicly recognised among the winners at the University’s 2024 Hīkina kia Tutuki, Rise to Meet the Challenge, Celebrating Research Excellence awards, which celebrate impactful research.

A ‘multi-storied’ approach

Jay has had an adventurous journey to get to this point.

Originally from North Carolina, he completed his undergraduate degrees in anthropology and biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has since worked with Indigenous communities in the Amazon River basin of Ecuador, people bereaved through suicide in Australia, youth from gang-related backgrounds in the US, and homeless children in Guatemala, where he met his Kiwi wife, Penny.

“Penny and I met when we were guiding hikes up volcanoes raising money for a school and dorm for homeless kids who were impacted by Guatemala’s 36-year civil war,” says Jay. “We lived in multiple countries before deciding to do my postgrad work in Australia [at Flinders University in Adelaide] where we both could remain on different passports.”

This diverse work left him “struck with the possibilities” for developing relationships with people whose backgrounds differed so starkly from his own, he says, “provided we created safe and respectful environments”.

When Jay arrived in New Zealand to begin lecturing in social work at the University, he started teaching and creating courses based on the premise that everyone’s life is ‘multi-storied’.

“Simply stated, people can tell many stories about their lives, so, for example, approaching all refugees through a lens of ‘trauma’ is very limiting. What are we missing behind those labels?”

His early travels have since become the foundation of his life’s work, his academic direction and the motivation for his teaching, for which he won a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award in 2017.

“I saw the potential of education to connect people to new ways of knowing, as a pathway to relate to others and, importantly, as a tool to inspire change,” says Jay.

Social justice, rooted in the pursuit of a fair go for everyone, especially the most vulnerable, is the cornerstone of his practice – and of social work more generally, he says.

“It involves challenging existing power structures, focusing on possibilities and envisioning a future where things can and should be different.”
 

Settling in the social media age

Since arriving in Aotearoa, Jay has worked widely beyond the University with organisations like the Aotearoa Resettled Community Coalition, the Asylum Seeker Support Trust, the NZ Red Cross and the World Health Organisation to find out how refugees and asylum seekers here are getting on in their new home, what’s working and what needs to change.

A focus has been how refugees use social media to stay globally connected with each other, with family and friends back home, and during times of disaster.

"New Zealand accepted 1,791 refugees and asylum seekers in 2022 and almost all of them will be connecting daily via social media channels like WhatsApp, Facebook and Viber.”

As part of a recently published study in New Zealand Sociology, and funded by a Marsden Fund grant, Jay led a team who explored the degree to which refugees use social media in their everyday lives, and the benefits and the limitations of doing so. Their findings were drawn from a national survey of 592 people who replied in six languages.

“Our survey showed that refugees’ social and political activities on social media allow them to get involved in their communities and offer a sense of belonging; but they also face barriers which constrain this use, including cost, security concerns, and low technical and digital literacy levels.”

This generation of resettled refugees are far better connected than previous ones, he says, but our refugee policies were developed in a pre-digital age.

“What does ‘belonging’ mean, when refugees can maintain significant links and relationships in several places and countries at once? I’m interested in how policy and practice can best support refugee resettlement, social inclusion and well-being in an age where people can live simultaneously ‘here’ in New Zealand and ‘there’ within their transnational networks.”

A fair start for all

Another area of concern has been the plight of asylum seekers, who are often viewed with suspicion, and receive little support as they await the outcome of New Zealand’s refugee status determination process.

“There is a perception of asylum seekers as ‘queue jumpers’, which is baseless. There is no queue, as less than one percent of the world’s forced migrants will have opportunities to settle in countries such as New Zealand,” says Jay.

“There’s nothing in the Refugee Convention that distinguishes between a quota refugee, who has been accepted by the government before arrival, and a convention refugee, who arrives and then applies for refugee or protection status as an asylum seeker. However, New Zealand has treated them very differently in terms of the rights and entitlements to certain policies.”

Jay is also a co-founder and co director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS), alongside adjunct research fellow Rez Gardi, a Kurdish human rights lawyer from a refugee background. The centre is hosted by the University to address the looming issue of forced displacement in the Asia Pacific region due to both conflict and climate change.

In 2022, the CAPRS team collaborated with the Asylum Seeker Support Trust on a report advocating for the equal treatment of all refugees called Safe Start. Fair Future: Refugee Equality, which was presented to Parliament that same year.

“For those claiming asylum in New Zealand, 394 on average each year, there’s been limited access to services like mental health, social welfare and work rights, but the best way to make sure asylum seekers can settle successfully is to provide enough support, which was the key message of that report,” says Jay.

In recent decades, there’s been a global shift in the perception of asylum seekers from being ‘at risk’ to being ‘a risk’, he says.

It’s something evidenced in the recent riots in the UK, which were fuelled by misinformation on social media.

Alongside promoting active work with the NGO sector, the report has also prompted a shift in government policy, and adoption of its two key recommendations.

“In 2023, the previous government committed to providing financial support to asylum seekers for the first time and included convention refugees – and a few other groups – in a key policy document, the New Zealand Refugee Resettlement Strategy [2022/23],” says Jay.

A key collaborator on the report was Dr Bernard Sama, an asylum seeker from Cameroon, who is among many students from refugee backgrounds that Jay has supervised during his time at Waipapa Taumata Rau.

“This University was the first in New Zealand to make refugees an equity group and currently has more than 800 students enrolled. It was my pleasure to supervise Bernard’s PhD on improving refugee well-being in our legal processes, and those of many others that have already gone on to make a significant contribution to Aotearoa.”

Another notable and ongoing piece of work (led by Jay through CAPRS and funded by a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship), is a groundbreaking study of the economic situation of 24,894 people from refugee backgrounds who came to New Zealand between 1997 and 2020.

“We broadly wanted to know about refugee access rates to education and state housing, who remains on benefits, as opposed to in employment, and what factors contribute to income over time.

“Our research highlights the critical importance of the first five years for refugees – the ‘golden window’ – where settlement outcomes, particularly economic ones, are most significantly shaped. Beyond this window, progress tends to level off.”

In his rare downtime, and as a break from the intensity of his day job, Jay has embraced Auckland’s coastal lifestyle and endurance sports like ironman and ultramarathons. Most recently, he tackled the Coast to Coast.

“Doing challenging things outdoors is often where I do my best thinking,” he says.
He and Penny have two sons, aged 10 and 12, and he’s delighted they get to call Aotearoa home.

“Living and belonging in New Zealand means recognising the difference between being invited and truly welcomed; between mere presence and genuine participation. I’ve enjoyed calling this country home and so appreciate the many opportunities it offers for meaningful engagement and connection.”

Julianne Evans