Olivia O’Malley is a former press secretary to a Leader of New Zealand’s Opposition and a long-time Conservative staffer. She currently works in public affairs.
Net migration is at an all-time high since the pandemic, according to UK statistics. Recent reports suggest London has surpassed its pre-pandemic peak population, reaching over 10 million. Net migration hit 745,000 in the year to December 2022, far from the ‘tens of thousands’ originally envisaged by David Cameron back in 2010.
Regardless of your position on immigration, a tripling of the pre-Covid figure and three-quarters of a million new people in a single year seems rather a lot.
New Zealand is facing a similar surge. In the year to October 2023, net migration to New Zealand hit a new record high of 177,700.
Political parties have all made noise about it. Before last year’s election, National, the leading centre-right party, now leading a coalition government, talked about returning to an immigration target of around 50,000 per year.
For a country of New Zealand’s size, even that is still quite high. So why are Kiwi politicians relaxed about immigration?
New Zealand’s politicians have not always been in favour of it. Our politics has also never been immune to allegations of racism. New Zealand’s Labour Party came under fire in 2017 for estimating home ownership by foreign buyers on the basis that the purchasers’ names ‘sounded Chinese’. But the political consensus is still much more pro-immigration than the UK.
To make an obvious point, there is more available space: in physical terms, New Zealand is slightly larger than the UK with only a fraction of the population. Whereas the UK is absorbing new arrivals into a population of around 70 million, New Zealand’s population is just five million, meaning the current rate of immigration is around three times that of Britain.
New Zealand also boasts creaking infrastructure and a healthcare system plagued by long waitlists, so the core political issues on the new government’s agenda are not entirely different those facing Rishi Sunak.
The differences in attitude and approach are partly cultural and historical, with another likely to be geographical.
New Zealand is a former colony with a history of migration. From the 1840s, it quickly became home to thousands of primarily British settlers. I challenge you to find a single New Zealander without an ancestor who migrated there in the past two centuries; I am reasonably sure no such person exists.
Today, one in four New Zealanders were born abroad, rising to one in three in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, which has doubled in population size in the past 30 years and continues to grow.
This means that the country itself is quite diverse. Almost everyone knows someone who arrived recently, even if they themselves did not. Recent arrivals have largely come from India, China, the Philippines, Fiji, and South Africa. It has also been estimated that around 1 in 7 Kiwis is eligible for or has a British passport.
Geographical isolation also helps to stem the flow of immigration into more manageable numbers.
Being in the Pacific Ocean’s bottom corner, it is simply much harder and riskier, not to mention more expensive, to get there on a small boat or other kind of vessel.
This doesn’t mean illegal migration never happens or that no refugees make it to New Zealand, but the numbers and mechanisms are different. Illegal migration often happens through overstaying a visa, while refugees chiefly arrive through safe, organised routes in numbers of up to 1,500 per year.
What this gives policymakers is the critical sense of control over immigration which the UK often seems to lack. If the checks and balances are correctly applied, which usually happens, most people will have had to jump through significant hoops to get there.
A long-running and popular reality TV show is Border Patrol, which shows New Zealand’s immigration officers refusing entry to people suspected to have nefarious motivations for travelling there. The clear message is that New Zealand’s borders are robust and impermeable. This contributes to a sense amongst Kiwis that the system is suitably strict.
Immigrant communities in New Zealand also have a reasonable amount of political heft. Even if they are not citizens, permanent residents can vote in General Elections. In the 2023 election, National, ACT, and Labour all proposed new visit visas to allow the parents of immigrants to visit them, a reflection of the political reality that immigrants do vote, and in large numbers.
The other thing that the UK does not have is a high rate of emigration. Net migration statistics for New Zealand mask the fact that just under 50,000 New Zealand citizens left in 2023. In total, approximately a million Kiwis live overseas. Some of will eventually come back, but others will stay abroad, lured by better pay and opportunities in places like Australia.
The biggest driver for New Zealand’s approach to immigration is a pragmatic, economic one: in order just to keep the country standing still, let alone growing, immigration is essential.
The post Olivia O’Malley: Immigration into New Zealand is at record levels. Why doesn’t it top the political agenda? appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Olivia O’Malley
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