New Zealand seeks rich investors, high-skilled labour in immigration reset
- PM Jacinda Ardern says the country’s reliance on temporary workers has suppressed wages and put pressure on infrastructure and housing
- The news came as another blow to migrants who say they’ve been unfairly treated, following successive immigration tweaks and a Covid-19 border closure that has split families
New Zealand is set to phase out lower-skilled migrants and lure wealthy investors in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s administration has billed as a “once-in-a-generation reset” of its immigration system.
Ardern on Tuesday said reliance on a temporary workforce had doubled in the last 10 years to 200,000, and this had not only suppressed wages in some sectors, but also put pressure on infrastructure and pushed up the costs of living, including for housing.
“We’ve long pointed to the fact a growth strategy that is built around your housing market and immigration settings is not a sustainable long-term strategy,” she told radio broadcaster RNZ. “We’ve seen very recent issues over the past 10 years.”
New Zealand’s net migration fell to just 6,600 in the year to end-March after it sealed its borders to control the spread of Covid-19, down from a record 91,900 in the same period a year earlier.
The country of 5 million will look to attract more highly skilled workers and investors for innovative projects, Tourism and Economic Development Minister Stuart Nash said in a speech late on Monday.
“When our borders fully open again, we can’t afford to simply turn on the tap to the previous immigration settings,” he said.
The high number of temporary workers meant businesses had been able to rely on lower-skilled labour rather than investing in plant or employing and training New Zealanders, Nash added.
According to the Ardern administration, temporary migrant workers and students have fuelled New Zealand’s population growth since the 1990s, while temporary work visa holders make up almost 5 per cent of the labour force, the highest share among OECD countries.
A business lobby group on Monday said the latest move would make it harder to find skilled labour.
“The so-called ‘low-value’ people that the government is talking about have helped keep our export industries going, and have cared for some of our most vulnerable people over the last year,” said Kirk Hope, Chief Executive of Business NZ, referring to the horticulture and residential care sectors.
June Ranson, chair of the Association for Migration and Investment, noted there was a lack of detail regarding the new investor scheme, which the government expects will see some 200 wealthy individuals given border exemptions over the next year.
“New Zealand needs the investment money, there’s no getting away from it, but it would have been very good if they had made the industry and the public aware of what their plans were,” she said.
Meanwhile, the news came as yet another blow to migrants who say they have been unfairly treated over the past few years, following successive immigration policy tweaks that have caused years-long delays to application processes and a border shutdown that has split families amid the pandemic.
Frustrated immigrants recently set up an alliance, the Federation of Aotearoa Migrants (FAM), to campaign for residency visas for those on temporary work visas who would normally be eligible for residency, and the phased re-entry of people stuck overseas who were separated from their families.
British immigrant Charlotte de Riet-Scholten Phillips, the co-president of FAM, said she and her family had been stuck in limbo for several years, as their residency application languished in a queue held up by changing quotas.
“For someone like me, sitting in the expression of interest queue, we could be waiting five, six, seven years, before we get residence, and that wasn’t really the understanding that we came here on,” she told local media. “And it means we are constantly living a temporary life.”
Other critics were more vocal. Ricardo Menendez March, a Mexico-born Green Party MP, described the government’s latest move as “dehumanising”.
“Migrant workers don’t suppress wages,” he said. “It’s irresponsible for the government to peddle this lie and scapegoat our communities to justify changes to immigration policy. The current direction signals that we value wealth above all the other contributions our communities make.”
