In with the new

What's the goal of immigration? Whatever the rationale, New Zealand today prefers newcomers with skills and cash.

- BY MARK FRYER

Many more people from many more countries: if you wanted to describe how immigration has changed New Zealand in recent decades, that's not a bad summary.

The “many more people” is there in the statistics: between the 2013 and 2018 censuses, migration added 250,000 people to this country - more than half of the population gain over those years - say the authors of this history of our immigration system.

As for the “many more countries”, just look around. According to the latest 12-month numbers, the biggest sources of foreign migrants were India, China, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

None of this is fresh news. But there's another feature of our immigration system that's not so obvious: the huge number of migrants who are here only temporarily.

We may think of migrants as people setting out to make a new life for themselves in this country, but increasingly, that's not the case. Instead, many are here for only a limited time, with little chance of becoming permanent residents.

How many fall into that category? Well, when Covid-19 closed the border in March 2020, about 300,000 -more than 6% of the people in New Zealand at the time - were here on temporary work or study visas. As the authors say, “in a word, many [migrants] have effectively become guest workers”.