When the Auckland Harbour Bridge opened in 1959, it had four lanes, servicing a population of around 430,000 people. Vehicle ownership was vastly different to what it is now and at the time, four lanes seemed to make sense. Within a decade of the bridge opening it became very obvious that it was already under strain. Traffic volumes had increased dramatically and the original design simply wasn’t enough to cope with that increasing demand.

So engineers did what engineers often do when faced with a practical problem. Instead of replacing the structure entirely which would have come at huge expense or adding a second crossing (something being heavily debated and discussed now), they bolted additional lanes onto the sides in the late 1960s. These became known as the “clip-ons”. These additional lanes, doubled the capacity from four lanes to eight.

The bridge worked again. At least for a while.

But the underlying structure had not fundamentally changed. Instead, additional capacity had simply been attached to the sides of something designed for a very different era.

Today, Auckland is home to a population of 1.7 million people, which is an almost four-fold increase in people from the time when the original bridge was built. When the Auckland Harbour Bridge opened in 1959 there were roughly 200 cars for every 1,000 New Zealanders. Today there are closer to 860 vehicles per 1,000 people, one of the highest vehicle ownership rates in the world. In other words, not only are there far more people crossing the bridge than the engineers and planners ever expected, they are doing it in far more cars as well.

You might be wondering what this has to do with our immigration system, and the answer to that is a pretty clear comparison to the evolution of our skilled migrant category, over its lifetime. In the same way that we bolted on more lanes to the bridge, our flagship immigration policy has effectively been given very similar treatment, including the further updates being rolled out in August 2026.

That raises the question as to whether our immigration system for skilled applicants remains fit for purpose or do we need to rethink the entire structure, starting from the ground up.

Nuts, Bolts, Screws & Tape

The core structure of New Zealand’s skilled migration system emerged in the early 2000s through the Skilled Migrant Category and it has from that point gone through many different iterations although fundamentally hasn’t changed all that much. The overall idea behind the system was fairly simple:

Select migrants with useful qualifications
Reward relevant work experience
Prioritise those with skilled employment in New Zealand

For the time, it was a logical model. New Zealand was competing globally for talent, and a points-based framework gave the system transparency and structure. In the earlier versions of this policy however, jobs were not critical and plenty of applicants could qualify for residence, without having secured a job upfront - that change occurred much later and has become entrenched in the current system.

**Patches and Fixes**

Our current skilled migrant system is a complex mix of old and new policy, fixes to plug holes and interconnected rules and criteria.

But the labour market in 2026 looks very different to the labour market in the early 2000’s. Global mobility has increased, alongside the ability for people to work remotely. Labour shortages have shifted into different sectors and have also become more fluid. Competition between countries for the best talent has also intensified.

And yet the underlying structure of our core immigration system has remained largely the same.

Rather than redesign or even rethink the framework, successive governments have tended to respond to problems by adding new policy settings to the side of the existing structure. Some of these additions were necessary. Others were reactive.

Over time we have seen the introduction and then further modification of:

Multiple salary thresholds used to define “skilled” employment or act as proxies for skill levels
Occupation lists such as the Green List (New Zealand immigration), which in reality was simply a modification of an earlier Long Term Skill Shortage List.
Temporary work visa frameworks like the Accredited Employer Work Visa, which utilise the same basic methods.
Separation of skilled migrants in to different priority based pathways, based on occupations.

Each of these changes has generally been introduced to solve a specific problem at a specific moment in time and usually as a response to labour market demands, or political pressures.

Although the skilled migrant category has adapted and changed over the years, the core mechanisms, in terms of how we identify and the reward skills, has remained the same. However the way talent moves globally, how we work, and how migrants approach and engage with the system have all changed dramatically.

Instead of rethinking the process, we have simply bolted more lanes onto the bridge.

Different System For A Different World

None of this means the current immigration system is necessarily broken. We still attract amazing, valuable people, and have a system that for the most part responds to labour market demands. Employers can still access offshore talent and in fact with changes being rolled out in August of this year, that talent pool has increased dramatically.

**Is Our System Fit For Purpose**

Our current skilled migrant system works and brings talented people in, but is it the right system for a more modern labour market and economy.

But the system itself is now carrying far more complexity than it was originally designed to bear. From the outside, the structure increasingly resembles a layered set of rules rather than a coherent, user-friendly framework.

Employers often struggle to answer basic questions such as:

Which visa pathway is appropriate for this role?
Does the job meet the current definition of “skilled”?
Will this worker ever qualify for residence?

Migrants face similar confusion. Many find themselves navigating a system that includes:

Multiple residence pathways
Changing occupation lists
Shifting salary thresholds
Changing work experience requirements

For people making life-changing decisions about migration or for employers planning for staffing levels, that level of complexity matters. People planning a move to New Zealand often commit years of their lives to the process. They take jobs, move families, buy homes and build careers based on the rules that exist at the time. When those rules shift or change repeatedly, the pathway to residence can suddenly become less predictable. Most migrants understand that immigration policy changes over time. What becomes difficult is when the system begins to feel like a moving target.

With competition for skills, between top-tier destinations, increasing, certainty and clarity of their options, is a very attractive thing to potential candidates - and now that those potential candidates often work in very different ways, given the evolution of technology, and are arguably more mobile, our systems need to catch up.

The way we value skills is also somewhat archaic. We essentially use a “delay” system to award or incentivise different occupations. Certain roles access residence more quickly, whereas some skills, have to work their way to the end goal. We essentially want all of them, as we have pathways to residence available, yet in a world where competition for talent is increasing, we carve out certain jobs, making them work their way towards that end goal over a period of time.

Ground Up Redesign?

The Harbour Bridge continues to function. Thousands of vehicles and people cross it every day. However the conversation about Auckland’s long-term transport infrastructure now regularly includes discussion about entirely new harbour crossings at enormous expense (and potentially a very long time to build). This is not because the bridge stopped working or sunk in to the harbour, but because the city outgrew the structure that was originally built and vehicle ownership and use patterns have changed dramatically over time.

New Zealand’s immigration system may be steadily approaching a similar moment. The system still functions as it was largely intended. It still brings skilled people into the country. But it is increasingly complex and layered, after years of incremental adjustments. At some point Governments and policymakers may need to ask a difficult question. Is it better to keep adding lanes to the side of the bridge? Or is it time to step back and rethink the structure entirely?

**Can We Fix It?**

Yes we can…but it would require a ground-up rebuild of the policy, using the same key objectives, but a more simplified, modern and easy to navigate system.

Underpinning every residence pathway we have in New Zealand is an objective - a guiding statement that outlines what the policy or set of rules is trying to achieve.

For skilled migrants we actually have five different objective statements, yet they all point towards the same thing - the grant of residence to people who can bring a specific level of skill or value in to our country.

That core objective and the fact we have now had to split in to five separate objectives for five different versions of what is effectively the same thing, underpins the argument that perhaps we have added too many layers, making the system too complex to manage. We have separated occupations into different pathways and then within those pathways separated occupations in to different lists, with different requirements, different wage rates and a multitude of other qualifying variables. Applicants have either a straight to residence pathway or need to work for one, one and a half or two years to achieve residence - yet all of these people are skilled as we have defined it, and we want to retain them.

If our skilled migrant system were a bridge, we would be up to lane 250 by now, adding new lanes for different occupations and different sectors of the labour market, while hoping the structure underneath still holds.

The Challenge with Change

I am not alone in suggesting that our skilled migrant system needs a rethink - there are plenty of my colleagues in the industry who would be singing from the same song sheet. Many of us, have been around long enough to see how the system has changed and yet also stayed very much the same.

I suspect there is also some political and potentially administrative will to do the same thing. Adding on bits and pieces of policy to plug gaps and fill holes is not sustainable and the more complexity you add over time, the harder that system is to manage.

However, changing our skilled migrant program and doing a ground-up rethink is no small task, in the same way that adding a new harbour crossing is causing politicians, planners and engineers here a significant headache. Add to this, that our immigration system has been somewhat entrenched in a complex web of very expensive (hundreds of millions of dollars) ICT systems, changing anything is like steering the titanic with a teaspoon.

However that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it.

A good system is one that is simple, easy to understand for the target market (migrants), easy to deliver for the administration (INZ) and is adaptable - in a way that doesn’t require just bolting bits and pieces on over time. I also think we need to modernise how we assess skills and value and then rethink how our temporary visa system links to the end goal that most migrants are aiming for - residence.

I of course have plenty of thoughts on how that might work, and how using existing mechanisms we can rethink how we present our skilled migrant offering to the world, delivering something that is simple, effective and meets that core objective (all five of them). However that is content for another article (or perhaps a few).

For now we do have a system that works and despite the patchwork of add-ons and updates, that system is trying to capture a much bigger pool of skilled applicants. The challenge for most migrants and employers involved in the process is complexity and of course that is where our expertise comes in.

Until next week!

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