How do Muslim migrants and former refugees come to feel at home in Aotearoa, and what does settling here mean in a country founded on a relationship between Māori and the Crown?

Abstract

This seminar draws on a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study: a survey of 264 Muslim residents, followed by interviews with twelve participants designed to explain the survey results. Three findings are discussed. First, belonging to the Muslim community and belonging to New Zealand are built through different resources, with trust in public institutions the only resource feeding both. In the interviews, that trust is described as the freedom and safety to be visibly Muslim. Second, refugees report feeling closer to New Zealand than voluntary migrants, but they explain this by how they were received, not by having nowhere else to return to. Third, warmth toward Māori is near-universal and is predicted by generalised openness rather than by contact with Māori; yet support for Māori claims varies sharply, and it follows where participants locate themselves in the Te Tiriti relationship rather than how warm they feel. Refugees, notably, often meet Māori first as hosts.

About the speaker

Dr Hussain Raissi is a postdoctoral fellow at Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa, the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, where he completed his PhD in 2024 on belonging among Muslim immigrant youth in New Zealand.

His research concerns migration, social cohesion, belonging and discrimination, and has been published in several peer-reviewed journals in Aotearoa and overseas.

He was a research assistant on the Muslim Diversity Study, and before coming to Aotearoa he worked in France as a cultural mediator and social worker alongside asylum seekers. He came to New Zealand as a former refugee himself.