Normalizing an Implicit and Discursive Secular Norm in Refugee Selection in New Zealand

Abstract

New Zealand has a long history of accepting refugees, with a refugee quota programme in place since 1987. New Zealand does not have a formal legislative structure for refugee resettlement. Its design and practice of the refugee quota programme are guided and determined entirely by cabinet ministers’ discretion. A significant gap in scholarly research on refugee resettlement in the New Zealand context is the highly unarticulated assumption of the secularism of the New Zealand statecraft that underpins the unregulated state–refugee relationship. This paper examines a previously confidential government document, only released at the request of the author, which provides official guidance on refugee quota selection, along with other key ministerial briefings. Interviews were also conducted with a refugee quota selection officer and a policy advisor involved in informing refugee resettlement policies. This is the first research paper that focuses specifically on refugee selection in the New Zealand context from a religious studies’ perspective. I show that the rhetoric of New Zealand’s state secularism has a significant impact on refugee quota selection, which normalizes an implicit but discursive secular order. The paper argues that refugee selection by a secular state does not necessarily mean a complete absence of the scrutiny of religion. Instead, the statecraft of a secular host country in the West could be so potent that the constant modelling of religious thinking and practices managed by the state could still end up normalizing the exclusion of Judeo-Christian others.

1. Introduction

New Zealand has been resettling refugees since World War II. A refugee quota programme was established in 1987 to facilitate the resettlement process. New Zealand accepts 1500 refugees per year under the refugee quota programme. The quota size and location of intake are reviewed by the Minister of Immigration every two years. A large proportion of those arriving in New Zealand as refugees come from majority Muslim countries. According to Immigration New Zealand’s (2025) official statistics, the top three arrivals through the refugee quota programme by nationality between 2015 and 2025 (financial years) were Syria (2235), Myanmar (1972), and Afghanistan (1691).

However, New Zealand does not have a formal legislative structure for refugee resettlement. Its design and practice of the refugee quota programme are guided and determined entirely by cabinet ministers’ discretion. This means that the annual quota and its geographical intake, as well as all related resettlement policies and procedures, can vary due to changing government priorities. This ministerial discretion raises key questions as to what the relationships are between the state and refugees, particularly given the absence of legislative constraints on cabinet decisions.

The process of resettling a refugee into New Zealand today involves several administrative steps as well as a wide range of stakeholders. Refugees registered with the United Nations Refugee Agency are first sought interest in resettling in New Zealand and interviewed by New Zealand officials during missions to locations aligned with government priorities. Selected refugees spend five weeks at the Mangere Resettlement Centre in Auckland upon arrival. The five-week comprehensive orientation programme at the Centre involves various government agencies such as the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation (MBIE), where the Immigration department belongs, the New Zealand Police, the Ministry of Social Development, Work and Income, as well as community social support personnel such as New Zealand Red Cross volunteers. The orientation programme reaches beyond refugees’ stay in the Centre, where Red Cross volunteers provide day-to-day support for up to twelve months and government agencies also provide ongoing support, such as in employment and health.

Research to understand New Zealand’s refugee resettlement is limited to examining technical solutions to help refugees in areas of employment, healthcare, education, housing, political participation, gender equality, community networks, and resilience (Bogen and Marlowe 2017, p. 106; Kamri-McGurk 2012; Cassim et al. 2022; Habte 2017; Kale et al. 2019; Slade and Borovnik 2018; Yzelman and Bond 2020; Thorpe et al. 2020). The New Zealand state, however, has received little scholarly attention. The characteristics of the New Zealand state and the ways in which it manages the process of refugee resettlement through the government and public servants are key in examining the dynamics in resettling refugees. This is not only because of the increasing intake of refugees who come from majority Muslim countries, but also because of the implications this trend has on New Zealand, which shares values and institutions with the West.

The New Zealand state is considered secular (Buang 2002, p. 144; Anonymous 2016, p. 280; Pratt 2016, p. 53; Thorpe et al. 2020, p. 2). Some believe it is among the most ‘highly secularized’ in the world (Clarke 2006, p. 70). As positioned in the varying interests of its secular statecraft, the New Zealand state shares similarities with many western states in terms of the pursuit of secularism, where the state separates itself from religion. Some scholars claim that varieties of religion, including traditional religiosity such as indigenous Māori spirituality, have been rejected by secular New Zealand through the privatization of religion, as commonly observed elsewhere in the West (Kolig 2003, p. 45), while others describe the state as having low interest in religious engagement (Pratt 2016, p. 53). Regardless of whether the New Zealand state proactively pushes religion away from the polity or passively accepts the heterogeneity that diversity brings, the ‘indifference towards religion’, as Kolig (2005, p. 86) describes, indicates the prevalent secular stance in contemporary New Zealand. In some analyses, the New Zealand state displays an ‘uneven’ secularity (Griffiths 2011, p. 280), which is embedded in a ‘cautiously multicultural society’ (Kolig and Kabir 2008, p. 274).

This paper acknowledges a significant gap in scholarly research to deepen the understanding of refugee resettlement in the New Zealand context—specifically, the highly unarticulated and underappreciated assumption of the secularity in New Zealand statecraft. By focusing on the first stage of the refugee resettlement process—quota selection—this paper sheds light on how the secular state selects refugees by examining key government documents and drawing on interviews with two officials. This is the first research to situate New Zealand’s refugee quota programme, particularly the quota selection phase, in the secular statecraft of New Zealand. I show that the power of New Zealand state secularism has a potent impact on the selection of refugees, which normalizes a secular order in an implicit but discursive way. The findings of this research enrich the debate about secularism, religion, and refugee resettlement. It also aims to help policy makers in New Zealand, as well as in other refugee host countries from the West, to better understand the impact of state secularism on refugee selection.

2. Situating State Secularism

The historical conceptualization of state secularism was developed on the basis of the state’s engagement with religion. It could be traced back to as early as the 17th century, when the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 gave rise to the principles of sovereign states in Europe (Ager and Ager 2015, p. viii). The Peace of Westphalia was a European solution to conflict at the time that removed political dominance from the Roman Catholic religion of the Holy Roman Empire (Christenson 2013, p. 752). By establishing the separation of political rule from a dominant religion as a condition of peace, a new political structure was created where each state was sovereign and free from any imposed religion, which, as Christenson (2013) explains, ‘placed the state religion under the sovereign, subject to certain religious freedoms for those not of a ruler’s faith’ (p. 752).

In the 18th century, many other Western countries had begun to develop a separation of church and state as a constitutional foundation. As a prime example, the United States Constitution of 1787 left the governance of religion to be determined by individual states rather than the federal government. But as Gordon (2019, p. 103) argues, this was an ambiguous United States solution to religious issues where no state could control how other jurisdictions interpret the separation between church and state. This approach by the United States was ‘a roof without walls’, as Murrin (1987) characterizes it, where church–state separation was a move for power but not a powerful move to address religious issues at the central government level (Gordon 2019, p. 104). As the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson introduced the metaphor of ‘a wall of separation between church and state’, which was disseminated in the early 19th century and was seen as the ‘authorised emblem of modern secularism’ (Scherer 2013, p. 2).

However, the declaration of this separation was not sufficient to define the contemporary state’s exercise of secularism. The emerging literature has given rise to a more nuanced interpretation of the relationship between religion and state. As Hurd (2008, p. 153) puts it, religion and politics are not in divergent ‘domains of power and authority’, so secularism does not always imply a separation of religion from the state. In fact, religion could be regarded as a ‘strategy’ to establish principles by the state (Ager and Ager 2015, p. ix); it could also be understood as a ‘political philosophy’ that governs religious plurality (Ager and Ager 2015, p. viii) and continues to be in an ongoing transformation ‘process’ for the religion–politics interface (Scherer 2013, p. 1).

Casanova (2009, p. 1049) similarly argues that secularism can be a doctrine of political statecraft in which the state has presupposed neither a positive nor negative theory of religion. Secularism is an ideology where the state holds a particular view of what religion is and does (Casanova 2009, p. 1052), where the state in the West tends to feel the need to turn the ‘particular Western Christian historical process of secularisation’ into a universal human development of rational secular consciousness (p. 1054). Secularism can be formal and official as a constitutional arrangement; it can also be visible only through state practice. As a result, there has been a suggestion to reject defining secularism through the lens of religion–state separation, or, in Copson’s (2019, p. 3) argument, reject the non-interfering nature of that separation.

This paper is grounded in Agrama’s theorization of secularism, which acknowledges secularism as an expression of the state’s sovereign power or, in the words of Casanova (2009), as a ‘modern statecraft principle’, while the drawing of a line between religion and politics is always incomplete. Iqtidar (2012, p. 1014) points out that instead of a complete separation, secularism involves a ‘constant modelling’ of religious thinking and practices managed by the state. This modelling involves the process in which the majority in a society defines how the minority should be taken care of, which often requires intentional intervention by the state. As a result, secularism shapes how the state determines the development of law, education, and social policy, as well as of religion itself (Scherer 2013, p. 10). As there is no ‘single authoritative image of secularism’, as Scherer (2013, p. 26) describes it, understanding state management of religion in relation to refugee resettlement in New Zealand requires understanding what New Zealand’s state secularism does.

3. New Zealand State Secularism

New Zealand has shared Christin roots since its colonization by European settlers. However, there is a lack of constitutional arrangements to govern religion. New Zealand’s original Constitution Act of 1852 and the subsequent 1986 version make no reference to religion, despite Article 4 of the Treaty of Waitangi—the agreement between the Crown and the indigenous Māori, which is considered the founding document of New Zealand—affirming the protection of religious freedom.

The separation of religion from the state, by default, is because early settlers did not intend to give special privileges to the Church of England over indigenous religions (Lineham 2020, p. 7). A more recent example would be the removal of traditional references to ‘Jesus Christ our Load’ and ‘true religion’ from the Parliamentary Prayer (Oxholm et al. 2021, p. 88). As Griffiths (2011, p. 523) observes, the statement that New Zealand lodged with the United Nations Human Rights Council in April 2009 clearly noted that ‘matters of religion and belief are deemed to be a matter for the private rather than the public sphere’. The New Zealand state sees religion as a private good. However, the New Zealand state lacks the legal tools to manipulate social life where different religions coexist. With the backing of legal means, French laïcité, the principle of secularism separating the church and the state as defined by law, was capable of banning full-face coverings in public spaces with a law passed in 2010 (The Guardian 2010), and a municipal bylaw introduced in 2016 targeting Muslim women wearing burkini on beaches (The Guardian 2016). New Zealand has no political desire to introduce laws targeting any particular religion, as secularism neither is part of the constitution nor, as a legal construct, has any direct influence on the increasing diverse religious demography in New Zealand (Griffiths 2011, p. 523).

State secularism in the New Zealand context is therefore fundamentally about how the state manages religion in its loosely governed legislative setting. Not many scholars have given a precise definition of secularism that specifically characterizes New Zealand. Ahdar (2006) attempts to describe the secular New Zealand state’s management of religion as a pragmatic practice. But the objective of the New Zealand secular state appears to be driven by the desire for social cohesion not for the sake of religion but of ethnicity. The ‘White New Zealand’ (Beaglehole 2015, p. 1) immigration policy, as observed in the past, saw restrictions on the number of Chinese migrants and a poll tax imposed on those who arrived between 1881 and 1934. From 1920 to 1974, there were also ministerial powers that could exclude people who were not of British heritage (Beaglehole 2015, p. 1). The significant flow of migrants from Pacific Island nations to meet New Zealand’s labour needs triggered a series of policy reviews from the 1970s to facilitate a greater quota for their residency. The outcome of policy reviews was a human resettlement programme that was primarily based on ethnicity and, specifically in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, on political beliefs that rejected many ‘unsuitable’ Germans (Beaglehole 2015, p. 1).

Religion was a reason neither for restricting migrants nor for initiating a policy change. As Kolig and Kabir (2008) point out, New Zealand’s acceptance of Muslims, through its general immigration policy and refugee quota programme, is only the beneficiary of the ‘abrogation of assimilation policy and state-decreed cultural homogenization’ (p. 274). The prioritization of economic considerations could be seen as having influenced the shift away from an ethnicity-based immigration policy in the 1980s. Multiculturalism, or cultural heterogeneity, has only gradually emerged as an inevitable outcome of the changes instigated by this economic agenda.

This inevitability implies an unwillingness or reluctance of the New Zealand state to proactively facilitate diversity under its foundation of secular statecraft. But efforts have been made by the state to attend to cultural and religious diversity because of the changing demography. The Statement on Religious Diversity in Aotearoa New Zealand (the Statement), for instance, was first issued in 2007, with two further editions in 2009 and 2019. While the Statement began as a non-state initiative, it is still clear evidence that religious diversity has been officially recognized by state institutions in that the Statement was endorsed by the Prime Ministers of the time as part of the state’s display of social cohesion. However, attempts like this have created limited meaningful engagement with the religious communities themselves and can hardly be interpreted as creating state policy or a policy stance. Although the Statement has often been referenced in the reports of the New Zealand Human Rights Commission and by scholars, it does not provide the ‘religious reference points and stimuli’ (Kolig and Kabir 2008, p. 295) for non-Christians.

Similarly, the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Mosques on 15 March 2019 (2020), initiated after 2019 when a white Australian national killed 51 Muslims as they were worshipping in two mosques in Christchurch, showed that the state agreed in principle to the 44 recommendations, but with no legal binding power by the Royal Commission of Inquiry and no timeline to achieve them. This reflects what Kolig and Kabir (2008, p. 289) characterized the New Zealand state’s tendency to largely avoid explicit ‘prescriptive measures’ in managing religion.

4. Research Methodology

Critical discourse analysis is used to understand state policy since policy documents in New Zealand are either publicly available or subject to release upon request. It is particularly useful as official documents are a key instrument to comprehend how the state interprets its relationship with religions and interacts with it. These documents include briefings to the Minister of Immigration seeking decisions on various refugee-related policy choices, government narratives on religion and its strategies, reports on refugee resettlement, and internal guidelines on refugee selection. In the absence of a well-documented acknowledgement of the state’s relationship with religion in New Zealand, studying the written texts and language of these documents offers a pathway to reflect on the specific historical, political, and social context that underpins the state’s engagement with religious refugees.

Particularly by incorporating internal texts that guide refugee selection released under the Official Information Act and interviews with a refugee quota selection officer and a resettlement policy advisor, this paper includes both the ‘perspective of structure and the perspective of action’ (Wodak and Meyer 2001, p. 122), which have revealed a clear picture of how the state is thinking, speaking, and acting in relation to refugee resettlement and religion.

Interviews with the two government officials were conducted in early 2022 as part of a larger doctoral study involving refugees and non-governmental organizations. It was a period of city lockdowns and stringent COVID-19 restrictions in New Zealand when field research was underway. This condition limited access to government officials who worked on refugee quota selection and policy engagement. The political sensitivity of the research topic also played a role in limiting the number of interviews with officials. Several officials working at different stages of refugee resettlement believed that they would have to seek permission from their senior leadership, which was never received.

This paper acknowledges the limitations that the lack of representation brings. As the first research that examines the selection of refugees in New Zealand, the findings of this paper provide initial insights into the relationship between the secular state and selection of refugees, with the hope of encouraging further research with a larger sample size. It is also worth highlighting that many officials I approached responded by saying that their work had nothing to do with religion and therefore believed they were not the appropriate participants. Their responses were nevertheless another form of evidence that the engagement with and management of religion in refugee resettlement by state actors in New Zealand is cognitively ambiguous.

5. The Policy of New Zealand’s Secular State in Refugee Quota Selection

To understand how the state operationalizes its secular discourse in refugee selection without an interpretation that is prescriptive enough, examining internal government documents is extremely useful. Official policies on refugee selection are generally transparent in New Zealand. Government departments often proactively release official documents such as ministerial briefings and cabinet papers, which contain detailed policy options and rationales seeking senior ministers’ approval. Many other communications and documents that are not made public under proactive release may also be obtained through the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA); however, certain information may be withheld by officials under OIA rules, such as when it could negatively impact New Zealand’s national interests. This paper examines two types of government documents, namely internal guidelines used by refugee quota selection officials and briefings for the Minister of Immigration.

5.1. The Standard Operating Procedure

I submitted a request to the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, which is responsible for administering immigration policies, including those related to refugees, for the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that guides the refugee quota programme to be released. Appendix A shows session S3.22g of the SOP, which specifically provides guidance for refugee quota selection officers to assess refugees’ barriers to settlement in New Zealand.

Section S3.22g—“Assessing barriers to settlement” in the SOP—is designed to guide officers on how to assess all applications under the quota programme based on whether ‘there are any significant barriers to the ability of any of the applicants to settle in New Zealand’ (MBIE 2022, p. 22). Apart from potential barriers like employment opportunities, differences in qualifications and language, and pre-existing medical conditions, one of the criteria is to question applicants’ ‘opinions held’. Specifically, the document states:

Do any applicants hold opinions that are inconsistent with New Zealand’s laws and societal beliefs, such as women should not work, girls should not go to school, hitting children who is acceptable [sic], mistreating animals is acceptable, or they do not want to live in a multicultural and secular society.

(MBIE 2022, p. 23)

This statement in the SOP is significant not only because it is a key internal guideline for refugee selection but also because it is rare to see official documents touching on the secularism of New Zealand, assumed by officials among themselves without legislative basis. Even the latest edition of the Statement on Religious Diversity (Human Rights Commission 2019), which was published in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, did not endorse the state’s secular status, while only claiming that it was New Zealanders who ‘often think ours is a secular country’ (p. 6).

The SOP first implies its internal reasoning about who is more appropriate to draw the line around religion. It refers to a secular society rather than secular politics or the state. It could be understood that the examples raised in the context of gender and children are what New Zealand society considers important for refugees. This is consistent with the narrative in the Statement on Religious Diversity, where the secular status of New Zealand is primarily defined by the people. State actors seem to leverage the secularization of the general public without providing an official explanation, which makes state secularism embedded in social values. Seeing state secularism in social values is different from some other practices of secularism that separate social values from the authority of tradition, such as in Türkiye (Sevinc et al. 2017, p. 168).

However, so-called societal beliefs do not further elaborate on the beliefs and values that society cherishes. The examples given are related to gender roles in employment and education and the role of children and animals in society, which present a rather narrow definition of societal beliefs. These roles could be based on either culturally based traditions or religiously oriented values. Making no distinction regarding how these societal beliefs are formed differently signals an unwillingness from the outset to engage with the diverse nature of social values. Agrama (2010, p. 495) argues that the power of secularism is heavily dependent on the ‘precariousness of the categories it establishes’. The SOP implies that it is society that is given the power to determine the line between religion and politics; this power is precarious and depends on which societal groups dominate the prevailing norms, and therefore the power of secularism in the New Zealand state is not stable.

Secondly, in terms of where to draw the line between religion and politics, the use of the conjunction “or” to link the statements on personal values and the willingness to live in a secular society is particularly interesting, as it presumes an independent relationship between refugees’ existing knowledge and practice in comparison with New Zealand’s societal beliefs and their future commitment to secular values. Refugee selection officers are instructed to assess whether there are any misalignments with presumed societal values, or whether the applicants do not wish to embrace multicultural and secular values. It is also important to highlight that ‘expressing concern about how different the culture in New Zealand is and how it may be hard to adjust’ (MBIE 2022, p. 23) does not constitute a barrier to resettlement. Therefore, it is theoretically a criterion that targets any factors that could diverge from the current societal norm. For example, someone who might accept the secular nature of New Zealand society but had not been consciously practicing secular values in everyday life would still be considered eligible. Interventions by the state, that is, rejecting a refugee quota application on the basis of some barrier to resettlement, are only triggered when there is a sign that refugees would challenge the existing secular order of society. The line between religion and state might be drawn by people under the context of a secularizing societal trend; state secularism here is not to know where exactly the line is, but the state continues to make sure that the normative secular societal order is protected.

The refugee policy positions itself by creating an implicit barrier in the first place for all refugees intending to settle in New Zealand, to safeguard a secular order. The state ambiguously drew the line between secularism and religion without a clear understanding of what constituted this particular selection criterion and the extent to which it should be applied.

5.2. Briefings for the Minister of Immigration

Other types of important documents on refugees are ministerial briefings, which are used to seek the minister’s decision on policy options. They are important given the fact that New Zealand’s refugee resettlement policy is determined by ministers’ discretion, and the ways officials communicate policy issues of refugee resettlement could play a significant role in influencing ministers’ understanding of the issues and therefore impact their decision making. Examining briefings reveals an inconsistent interpretation of refugee resettlement, which is rooted in the absence of systematic guidance on how to manage issues of religion.

The protection needs of refugees are uniquely central in all briefings to the Minister of Immigration, since this concept has never been mentioned in the internal instruction for refugee selection. In contrast to the need for refugees to embrace New Zealand’s multicultural and secular society and realign their personal values with New Zealand’s societal beliefs, a Cabinet paper seeking approval of the Next Three-year (2016/17-2018/19) Refugee Quota Programme (MBIE/MFAT 2015) claims that quota refugees are selected from those mandated by UNHCR ‘on the basis of physical and legal protection needs’ (p. 2). In later communications with the Minister and Cabinet, the definition of refugee protection needs is clarified by officials, with ‘vulnerable’ people repeatedly put forward to describe those who deserve New Zealand’s protection. For example, the Minister of Immigration was informed that New Zealand is committed to ‘finding durable protection solutions for the most vulnerable people around the world’ (MBIE 2017, p. 1; 2019, p. 1). The government’s contracted resettlement service provider, the New Zealand Red Cross, also evidently implements this concept in its Strategy 2030, whose mission is to ‘improve the lives of vulnerable people by mobilising the power of humanity’ (New Zealand Red Cross 2022, p. 10). Women at risk are repeatedly cited as the government’s interpretation of vulnerability in the context of forced migration. However, its interpretation significantly lacks a comprehensive understanding of the diverse contextual background that has put women in risky conditions in the first place.

Advising the Minister of Immigration on potential changes to existing quota allocations for the 2019/20 to 2021/22 quota cycle, the briefing (MBIE 2019) provides an explanation to the Minister regarding who are considered women at risk.

Women who are without their traditional protector are particularly vulnerable in refugee situations. An increase in these places [Asia and the Middle Eastern region] would allow New Zealand to demonstrate its commitment to supporting the most vulnerable refugees and aligns well with the humanitarian intent of the refugee quota.

(p. 14)

This could raise many questions, such as whether women who have traditional protectors but face domestic violence could qualify as women at risk, or whether religious and cultural discrimination against certain groups of women would constitute vulnerability. The way officials brief the Minister on New Zealand’s refugee quota programme signals that the New Zealand state does not seek to engage with the dynamic situations facing refugees at a policy level, including the considerations of cultural and religious underpinnings that contribute to vulnerability.

Furthermore, there has been a shift in language in terms of New Zealand’s objectives and commitment to refugee resettlement. In one of the latest government decisions on refugee-related policies, the Cabinet paper seeking approval on the three-year Refugee Quota Programme (2022/23 to 2024/25) (MBIE 2022) states that

New Zealand’s refugee quota programme contributes to New Zealand’s fulfilment of our international humanitarian commitments and supports UNHCR and the international community in providing protection to refugees who are not able to return safely to their home country.

(p. 1)

From providing a durable solution for vulnerable people to providing protection to those who cannot return home, the narrative has shifted from a protection of vulnerable people to a protection seemingly ruling out the possibility of deep engagement. The linkage between the refugee quota programme and New Zealand’s humanitarian commitments remains the same, but the removal of the “durable” approach and the replacement of “vulnerable” people by a description of displaced people could imply that the state signals an ongoing unwillingness to engage with refugees beyond physical and legal protection.

So far, we have seen that the way officials describe New Zealand as a society in ministerial briefings is different from how it is communicated internally. The briefing to the Minister of Immigration outlining options for the Three-year Refugee Quota Programme 2019/20–2021/22 (MBIE 2019) informs the Minister that the full assessment and screening done by Immigration New Zealand includes interviews with refugees and ‘explaining what New Zealand is like to live in, outlining New Zealand’s democratic society, and tolerant attitudes’ (p. 10). It is on this basis, along with other factors like security risk, that the assessment determines whether ‘settlement in New Zealand is the right option for them’.

(MBIE 2019, p. 10)

To recall earlier analysis on the SOP that is being used by refugee selection officers to conduct interviews, New Zealand is described to refugees in terms of its secular environment as a society and its barely defined societal beliefs. However, when summarizing the interview screening process of refugees in the briefing for the purpose of informing the Minister, officials use terms like ‘democratic’ rather than ‘secular’ and ‘tolerant attitudes’ rather than ‘societal beliefs’ to describe New Zealand, thereby creating an inconsistent interpretation of the qualities that the New Zealand state seeks from refugees.

For example, the emphasis on a democratic society implies not only an unwillingness by the state to interact with the moral values of refugees, but also its inability to deal with any moral challenges. As McKenna (2015, p. 673) points out, although democracy creates a unifying place to consider communities’ ideas and values, its end point is merely a reflection of the rule of the majority. Moral values are always being rejected ‘in the competition for democratic endorsement’ (McKenna 2015, p. 673), where eventually democracy neither produces a solution nor denies moral challenges.

In this vein, putting forward the notion of a democratic society to the Minister, refugees, and the general public delivers a message implying that the starting point of New Zealand’s humanitarian motives in relation to refugee resettlement could be shifted or disregarded once it enters into domestic democracy, where individual moral values have to give way to an ‘uncritical embrace of mythical one-sided notions of progress ... and freedom’ (McKenna 2015, p. 668). While a democratic society could ignore consequences and implications as it is determined to look for maximum satisfaction, a secular society bears the responsibility to keep religion and politics in their appropriate positions, which makes consequences and implications important considerations in policy making. Therefore, the New Zealand state could be seen as democratic with a desire for satisfaction without the need to respond to moral challenges; the New Zealand state is also secular with a responsibility that could include a tolerant attitude, but on the condition of satisfying a commonly shared societal belief.

6. The Actor of the Secular State in Refugee Quota Selection

The written rules of the SOP, however, are subject to individual interpretation and assessment by refugee quota selection officers. That is why hearing from a quota selection officer is helpful in uncovering the practicability of assessing refugees’ opinions held as part of the criteria and what it means for the state’s relationship with refugees at the selection stage. Examining the practical experience of refugee selection shows that the secularism of the New Zealand state is discursively represented. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with an experienced refugee quota selection officer and a policy advisor in 2022.

The questions asked during the quota selection process are designed to confront refugees with hypothetical examples aimed at challenging their practices and values. The refugee selection officer implicitly points out a question on gender that he usually asks refugees and that is specifically related to religion.

In some cases, only the male in the family is allowed to work, and the female must stay at home all the time. We would tell them [refugees] that New Zealand is a secular society and normally both husband and wife go out to work to support the family financially. Some of them have a problem with that as well. Normally, we would give them some time to think about it. We would provide some information on the spot during the interview. When we come back from the mission and start to assess the cases, we will write a letter to the United Nations agency and ask them to pose the questions to them again to see if they have changed their mind.

The use of “secular” to describe New Zealand and as a way to judge the particular social behaviour of refugees is consistent with what is written in the SOP. It is also consistent with what the language in the SOP sets out in terms of the state’s determination to invoke secularism in the policy management of refugee resettlement. The state, through its government actors, has inevitably been making ‘substantive arguments and claims about what is essential or inessential to the domain of religious belief’ (Mahmood and Danchin 2014, p. 5). However, government actors do not recognize the challenge that they pose to refugees’ home cultures and practices. The quota selection officer insists that religion itself is not part of the assessment criteria unless a particular person’s religion is part of the reason why they became a refugee.

What seems to be essential in determining the secular-religious value benchmark is the family and gender norms. References to children and women for the selection officer, as well as the same written examples in the SOP, exemplify the emphasis on family and gender norms as the source of selection criteria in relation to a potentially successful resettlement. Many other Western host countries also have a similar rule regarding the refugee selection criteria. For example, Germany’s selection of Syrian refugees in Türkiye imposes “integrational potential” as a criterion, aiming to establish whether refugees’ family and gender norms and practices are in accordance with its perception of Germany’s ‘national order’ (Welfens and Bonjour 2021, p. 226). The indicators for integrational potential assessment include religion, along with factors such as educational and vocational training, professional experience, language, age, and so on. Here, religion is implicitly an indicator contributing to the overall selection benchmark, and the secularity norm of the individual refugee is embedded in how the family and gender norms ‘are supposedly lived and performed’ (Welfens and Bonjour 2021, p. 226).

The secular norm is also tested with reference to the law. During resettlement missions, for instance, Norwegian officials are required to follow a guideline that entails criteria relating to refugees’ potential for future integration. Brekke et al. (2021, p. 44) find that the screening for integration, as per the guideline, must be assessed on refugees’ willingness to participate in state services provided by Norwegian municipalities under the Immigration Act, such as the refugee induction programme. Several pieces of law are also referenced in the selection process for future integration, such as those covering gender equality, the rights of children, and forced marriage (Brekke et al. 2021, p. 44). Although excluding integration as a criterion for refugee selection, the French authority also explicitly references the constitutional ‘core principles of the Republic’ (Brekke et al. 2021, p. 51), such as secularism, in all interviews.

Similar to other Western states that receive refugees, New Zealand undoubtedly claims the right to invoke secular discourse in refugee selection. However, the effort of using it to defend the ‘national order’ or a ‘basic standard norm’ is rather discursive. While religion is raised specifically by German officials as an indicator to be assessed under the integrational potential category, New Zealand’s SOP makes no reference to religion, but only categorizes it as opinions held. The New Zealand state could make no reference to law to safeguard a secular social norm, since New Zealand has neither a formal refugee resettlement policy under any piece of legislation, as Norway does, nor an overarching constitutional principle proclaiming state secularism as in France. The practice of the New Zealand state is to take advantage of the assimilability embedded in family and gender norms as an indication of the broader secular norm. Despite “secular society” being the reasoning for testing refugees’ views, the practical assessment of refugees’ secularity is only implicitly addressed. It is also illustrated through another form of communication other than face-to-face interviews. The officer claims that the assessment on opinions held in SOPs ‘make sure they [refugees] are making an informed choice’, which is also the same message that German officials partially intend to use the integrational potential assessment for when selecting Syrian refugees in Türkiye (see Welfens and Bonjour 2021, p. 227).

The policy advisor, who is familiar with immigration policy, confirms the idea of intending to give refugees an informed choice in the New Zealand case.

When they [refugee quota selection officers] are doing the selection mission in refugee camps, they often play a video which describes what New Zealand’s life is like. But there are clips in there, you know, people playing on the beach, or women not wearing headscarf, same-sex relationships and stuff like that. So, refugees themselves have an opportunity to know there are things not consistent with my values and perhaps I wouldn’t want to actually go there.

Although the video clips are not available publicly, their description seems to be focused on the norms at a societal level, without a clear image of the role that government actors play. With the lack of an explicit position on religion and secularism in assessing refugees’ barriers to resettlement, the refugee quota selection officer finds that government actors like him have no solid ground to engage with this particular criterion. It is believed by the officer that religion is brought up only in case-specific situations where it directly influences the refugee’s circumstances. The occasions to bring up religion, according to this officer, are when refugees have faced religious persecution.

A typical case [for religion to be part of the assessment] is Afghan refugees, many of whom are of Hazara ethnicity. The reason they became refugees in the first place tends to be because they were persecuted based on their ethnicity as well as their religious sect. So, we would ask whether they are Shi’a Muslims during the interview, and if they confirm that, we don’t ask further about their religion because it’s their own issue.

Direct reference to religion is used in this case, but it is not deemed desirable for further engagement. The overall position of government actors is still centred on how to address the secularity observed at the societal level. Both the refugee quota selection officer and the policy advisor did not think that the criteria of opinion held and the reference to a secular society in the SOP constitute a direct engagement between the state and the religious beliefs of refugees.

Raising the concept of a “secular society” during the interview process with refugees is a powerful but confusing move. It is powerful because the statement pre-determines an unequal relationship between refugees and New Zealand society, going forward and asking refugees to assimilate. This relationship, implied again by the officer during selection missions, is also confusing, as it is not the secularity norm that selection officers are instructed to assess but the specific family and gender norms that require an attitude check with refugees. The position of the state through its government actors is implicitly reflected in the latter, which fails to distinguish the cultural foundation of these norms from what Mim (2020, p. 13) describes as the ‘religious-backed cultural praxis of the refugees. Because of the implicit representation of the state’s secularism in refugee selection, it becomes questionable whether refugees are well informed or ill-informed about the quality that the discursive New Zealand’s state secularism expects from them.

7. Conclusions

This research improves the scholarly understanding of state secularism and refugee resettlement. By setting the scene in New Zealand as a refugee host country with shared values and institutions of the West, the nature of New Zealand as a country with no state religion and the unspoken assumptions about the secular nature underlying New Zealand’s practice of resettling refugees become evident. The assumption of a secular New Zealand state is deeply rooted. It is also profoundly difficult to define and practice legally. New Zealand could be characterized as ‘the most studiously ignorant of religion’, such that the subject is ‘actively avoided and deemed better to ignore’ (Pratt 2016, p. 53). However, the state has a strong desire to invoke the ‘rhetorical power of secularism’ (Griffiths 2011, p. 524) to normalize its principle of secular statecraft, as implicated in the case of selecting refugees under its quota programme.

The SOP is a significant internal government document that details how refugee selection officers conduct interviews with refugees and assess their cases. The criterion of successful resettlement is interpreted through the lens of state secularism, which sees the New Zealand state pursuing a secular order in refugee selection, by effectively using a narrowly defined secularism to test refugees’ personal beliefs and values. The pursuit of a secular ideal in preserving a societal order is both implicit and discursive in the practice of refugee quota selection in New Zealand. The secular norm imposed on refugees potentially relocating to New Zealand is only reflected in the considerations of family and gender norms. The New Zealand state offers no guiding principle on how to manage religion at the refugee selection stage, which only authorizes religion to be implicitly addressed through societal norms, with inconsistent interpretations between policy makers and practitioners at times. This, in turn, enables government actors to comprehend and apply these norms discursively in their own ways.

Refugee resettlement is a long process. The selection of refugees by officials is the first step in relationship building between the New Zealand state and refugees. By examining government documents and empirical practices that are specific to the refugee quota programme, this paper argues that refugee selection by a secular state does not necessarily mean a complete absence of scrutiny of religion among minority groups. Instead, the statecraft of a secular host country in the West could be so potent that the constant modelling of religious thinking and practices managed by the state could still end up normalizing the exclusion of Judeo-Christian others, even in the context of refugee resettlement.

This research hopes to encourage further research to examine the impact of state secularism on the resettlement of refugees. The religious beliefs of refugees are often thought by scholars to present an obstacle to their integration into Western values (e.g., Adida et al. 2010; Norris and Inglehart 2012). Refugee host countries in Europe, for example, are said to have experienced long-lasting ‘European anxieties’ with questions on whether refugees are able to embrace European secular values (De Codes 2020, p. 459). The policy practice of refugee selection in New Zealand appears to share this anxiety. Anxious secular states could attempt to allow the time and space in the quota selection process to support both government officials and refugees in exploring the meaning of secular society in the New Zealand context without a predetermined relationship.