New Zealand’s immigration minister Erica Stanford came under fire after she said in parliament that Indians spam her inbox with emails asking for immigration advice. Indian-origin Labour MP Priyanca Radhakrishnan took offence over the remarks and said it is “careless at best and prejudiced at worst”. According to reports, the incident took place earlier this month when Labour’s Willow-Jean Prime asked Erica Stanford, a National MP, to confirm every single email related to her ministerial portfolios, which had ever been sent to or from her personal email account, had been captured for official record.This question had no connection to India and was asked to her as a day before Stanford said she used her personal email account for work purposes, including sending herself pre-Budget announcements for print-outs. “I have complied with the Official Information Act. I have also made sure that everything is available to be captured and have forwarded everything that I’ve needed to my parliamentary email address,” Stanford said in response to the Labour MP’s question.“I will acknowledge, though, in a very similar case to Kelvin Davis, I receive a lot of unsolicited emails like, for example, things from people in India asking for immigration advice, which I never respond to. I almost regard those as being akin to spam, and so there are those ones. But, similarly, other ministers have had probably very similar issues.”
‘If you are from India…’ Priyanca Radhakrishnan posts a message
Chennai-born Priyanca Radhakrishnan, a former minister of ethnic communities, wrote about this incident on her Facebook making clear how offended she was by the statement. “Earlier this week, in response to a question by @willowjeanprime the Immigration Minister felt the need to single out people from one country/ethnicity in a negative light. If you’re from India, don’t bother emailing her because it’s automatically considered spam. So much for the National govt’s all-of-government focus on strengthening the relationship between India & NZ and focus on people-to-people links,” Radhakrishnan wrote. “Comments like these serve to reinforce negative stereotypes against an entire community of people,” Radhakrishnan told Indian Weekender.Stanford said she did not say they are spam. “I said ‘I almost regard those as being akin to spam’.”
