Immigration: All Care, No Responsibility
New Zealanders have a slightly complicated relationship with immigration. We want all the benefits that migrants bring - skills, investment, family connection and yet not all of us are that keen on the actual concept of migration itself. We want the doctor to help speed up appointment times, the nurse looking after us in hospital, the builder constructing the houses we are short of, and the engineer repairing the infrastructure we failed to maintain.
We are a little less enthusiastic when those same people need somewhere to live, drive on the motorway, enrol their children at school or appear in the latest migration statistics. We tend to like what migrants do. We are sometimes less certain about the migrants themselves. We see this regularly in online commentary, particularly around election time. People with no exposure to how immigration works, suddenly pipe up, on where investor applicants should be putting their money, or why we should slow down on the issuing of work visas.
That may sound a little provocative, but after more than two decades working in immigration, I think it is a contradiction worth confronting. Immigration is regularly blamed for pressure on housing, transport, health services and infrastructure. Some of those concerns are perfectly legitimate. Rapid population growth without adequate planning creates pressure, regardless of where that growth comes from.
However, migrants did not decide how many houses New Zealand would build. They did not determine our infrastructure budgets, fail to train enough doctors or decide that Auckland should spend several decades discussing public transport before doing anything particularly decisive about it. Those are failures of planning and government. Immigration might expose those failures, but it did not create all of them.
The public debate also tends to overlook the fact that migrants are not simply units of labour imported to fill an immediate vacancy. They establish businesses, pay tax, buy homes, employ people, invest, raise families and become part of the communities in which they settle. Their contribution does not stop when the visa is granted or when the original job vacancy has been filled.
A lot of that simply boils down to the fact that most New Zealanders understand immigration based on political slogans or election campaign social media posts. Very few appreciate the complexity of the process, what migrants have to go through to actually get here and the logistical, emotional and financial toll that it can take.
Immigration is not automatically good simply because someone arrives from overseas. Nor is every immigration policy sensible. But reducing the entire subject to whether the numbers are “too high” or “too low” is not a serious discussion. It is usually just an easier discussion to have, when you don’t understand how the process actually works.
Election Year Noise
The 2026 General Election will be held on 7 November 2026 (just around the corner), which means immigration is now entering its traditional period of heightened political importance and rhetoric. Every three years, political parties rediscover the fact that immigration is actually a thing and a relatively important one to New Zealand. It’s also a hot topic that tends to get people talking (and hopefully voting).
One party will promise to tighten the rules, another will announce new pathways for the workers businesses desperately need. Someone will suggest migrants are placing too much pressure on infrastructure. Someone else will explain that the economy cannot grow without them. Occasionally, the same party will say both things, sometimes within the same week. That is politics of course - however, immigration policy does not operate only within New Zealand’s domestic political debate. The messages being sent here are heard overseas as well and migrants are listening.
Marketing Matters
Along the way, we seem to have forgotten how important it is to market to migrants and that every slogan, or election promise is a signal that migrants hear and see.
The nurse considering New Zealand is also looking at Australia. The engineer comparing Auckland with Brisbane is examining salary, housing, residence prospects and whether their family will feel welcomed or shunned.
The investor considering a New Zealand investment opportunity may also be considering Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada or the United States. These people have choices, and many of the people we most want to attract, have more choices than most. New Zealand sometimes behaves as though the rest of the world is waiting politely outside our door, hoping we might eventually let them in. That is no longer the market we are operating in and our “pitch” needs to appreciate that.
We compete globally for skills, experience, investment and talent. We compete against larger economies offering higher salaries, bigger markets and, in some cases, clearer immigration pathways. Our natural environment and lifestyle remain significant advantages, but even the All Blacks, beaches and Hobbits can only carry the marketing effort so far.
A new residence pathway sends a signal, so does closing one without warning. A Minister talking about attracting skilled people sends a signal. So does an election campaign built around the suggestion that migrants are responsible for every queue, traffic jam and unaffordable house in the country. We cannot quietly ask skilled people to build their futures here while loudly implying that their arrival is part of the problem.
Policy instability is also a signal. Migrants make major financial and personal decisions based on the rules governments create. They sell property, resign from jobs, move children between schools and leave support networks behind. When immigration settings change constantly, or residence prospects remain deliberately vague, people notice.
Our recent SMC changes are a great illustration of that point. They were announced in late November, with a few media releases dotted along the way and then the rules dropped only a couple of weeks ago. They feel rushed, unfinished and a bit messy and more deliberately linked to campaign timing than a structured revamp of a key part of our system. They are an improvement on what we have had, no doubt, but they also bring a lot of complexity, which is being talked about.
The former Productivity Commission made the point that clear residence prospects help attract global talent and that immigration policy needs to balance flexibility with predictability. It also recommended that immigration be linked more coherently with infrastructure, education, training and workforce planning.
That is considerably less exciting than an election slogan, but it is much closer to what New Zealand actually needs and a discussion that is long overdue in this country.
Getting It Right Matters Just As Much
None of this means New Zealand should simply open the doors and hope everyone finds a house and a doctor once they arrive. Good immigration policy is selective, deliberate and connected to a wider economic and population strategy. It should identify the skills New Zealand genuinely needs, provide credible pathways for people who can contribute over the long term, protect migrants from exploitation and avoid allowing immigration to become a permanent substitute for training New Zealanders. It should also recognise the country’s capacity to absorb population growth - although we need to first settle on what the population growth should look like.
Immigration Counts
Immigration is important to New Zealand, but having a system that delivers the right outcomes is a bigger challenge - one we need to front up to.
Housing, transport, schools, healthcare and other infrastructure must form part of the immigration discussion. Bringing in more people without investing in the systems required to support them is not an immigration strategy. It is a headcount followed by surprise.
Equally, reducing immigration whenever infrastructure comes under pressure is not much of a strategy either. It avoids addressing why the infrastructure was inadequate in the first place and can create a second set of problems when employers, hospitals, construction companies and regional businesses suddenly cannot find the people they need. This is why the debate needs more balance and needs to happen more often than every election cycle.
The latest provisional figures show New Zealand recorded a net migration gain of 18,800 in the year to May 2026. That is hardly evidence of a country being overwhelmed by arrivals, particularly when New Zealand continues to experience a substantial net loss of its own citizens to countries like Australia (although that trend also appears to be easing).
Research previously undertaken by the Productivity Commission also found that immigration had produced small and generally positive effects on the wages and employment of New Zealand-born workers. It did not find evidence that migrants systematically displaced local workers, although it correctly acknowledged that there can be negative effects in particular industries, locations or periods. That is an important distinction. Immigration creates benefits, but those benefits are not automatic and are not always evenly distributed.
We need immigration because New Zealand has an ageing population, skills shortages, a relatively small domestic market and a persistent habit of losing many of our own skilled citizens overseas - the effects of which ebb and flow with economic tides. We need people who can work, invest, build companies, deliver healthcare, support regional communities and contribute to the tax base. But we also need governments to choose well, plan properly and explain what they are doing.
The question is not whether immigration is good or bad. The question is what New Zealand is trying to achieve with it. At present, that answer is often unclear. Immigration is used as a tap: turned on when employers complain loudly enough and turned down when the political temperature rises. That approach produces uncertainty for businesses, confusion for migrants and very little confidence that anyone is working from a long-term plan.
New Zealand needs to decide what sort of country it wants to be, what population it expects to support, which industries it wants to develop and where the workers, skills and capital required to achieve that will come from. Immigration should then be built around those decisions, rather than adjusted every few months or years in response to the angriest headlines.
My view of the last few years, particularly since Covid-19, is that we have become used to patching up the system, adding layers as we go, to fix problems as they appear, without being bold enough to stop, take stock and redesign the system around the country New Zealand wants to be.
A Message Worth Sending
For migrants considering New Zealand, the election-year debate may not always make for pleasant listening and in fact it can be downright demotivating. Some political actors make it a focus to highlight immigration as the villain, conveniently forgetting that without migrants, New Zealand would ultimately grind to a halt.
Migrants are an important part of New Zealand’s economy, communities and future. The country benefits from the skills, experience, capital, ideas and connections to the wider world that they bring. Many New Zealand businesses and public services could not operate as they currently do without migrants and most of those same businesses and services have a very limited understanding as to how the process works or the lengths applicants need to go to, to succeed.
That does not mean every migrant should qualify for residence, every visa pathway will remain open or every move to New Zealand will be the right one. Migrants still need to understand the rules, assess the risks and make decisions based on reliable advice rather than political promises or social media optimism. As a country we do need to be selective, and we need to target the right skills and value, but we need to do so with a longer-term view, rather than seeing this all as a short-term fix.
As the election approaches, New Zealanders should listen carefully to how politicians talk about immigration, balancing what might be a bit of a plea for votes, compared with how migrants actually contribute to our country and the importance of having a system that works.
Because in a competitive global market, talented people will not wait indefinitely for New Zealand to decide whether it wants them. They will simply choose somewhere that already has.
Until next week.
