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This story was originally published on RNZ.co.nz and republished with permission.
New Zealand will not open its doors wide to the large number of new migrants seen in recent years, once it is ready to reopen the border.
Covid-19 has halted net migration, although tens of thousands of New Zealanders have either returned or been trapped here due to the pandemic.
The strong signal is that while the government will use migration to fill skills gaps, companies should get used to the idea of using the already available workforce.
At the beginning of 2020 tens of thousands of people were still arriving. Then there was a huge rush of people from abroad to get home, but more recent arrivals have slowed down considerably.
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For the first time in a long time, the number of New Zealanders who arrived here outnumbered those who left.
Take the six months of last year, between April and September, when net migration was about 2,500, in any other year it would normally be about 20,000.
“An absolute catastrophic collapse,” is how Infometrics senior economist Brad Olsen describes it.
“Before the pandemic, New Zealand’s net migration was falling very slowly from around 64,000 in mid-2016 to around 50,000 per year during 2019, the early stages of 2019,” he says.
It skyrocketed, possibly up to 95,000 in the year to March 2020, which Olsen says includes “all the visitors and other people who came to New Zealand before we closed the borders, who we expected to leave, who couldn’t. , they were stuck in New Zealand. “
There should be a “strategy on what kind of skilled workers we need to bring in and what that general profile is for New Zealand migration and population environment,” he says.
“So that we can adequately supply the rest of the country, so that we have hospitals in the right places, so that we have houses so that people can move in without everyone having to sell a kidney to move up the housing ladder.”
Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi is telling those who have relied on migrant workers in the past to “think differently about how to do that in the future.”
The government had “made it a priority to invest resources in upgrading the skills of New Zealanders,” he says, “and we would prefer that, if we’re going to do that, obviously, the jobs that we’ve relied on with migrant labor in the past could be filled by New Zealanders. “
However, he is not willing to talk about numbers.
“I think everyone is going to use the default numbers first, but for us it’s about the kind of economy we might have in the future, the kind of jobs we want New Zealanders to have … the kind of training we want have it available, “says Faafoi.
National’s Judith Collins doubts there is public interest in immigration numbers spiking once the border is reopened.
The government should “think very carefully before starting to reestablish the same kind of numbers that it had before,” he says, “but at the same time, understanding that there are some industries and businesses where they have become very dependent on the hand of immigrant work “. .
Industries like horticulture “just want people who are, one, willing to work, second, able to work, and third in the right place to work,” says Collins.
“And when people say ‘Oh, you know, they should pay more’ and all of this, it’s really just costing them losing fruit and losing everything else.
“It also means that people have to understand that if they can’t get the staff to do the work,” he says, “they will have to automate or just scale it down and that’s what will happen.”
Green’s immigration spokesman, Congressman Ricardo Menéndez March, wants to see a fairer system that is “equitable and that people have access to fair times to process their visas.”
He says the system has been moving to restrict numbers by delaying applications, and furthermore, it shouldn’t discriminate against people based on things like income and skill level.
Faafoi has pointed to a review of New Zealand’s largest residency program, the Skilled Migrant category, which includes making sure agencies are “working with employers who identify specific skills shortages and have them in the new system, be they the they apply for visas and not the others walk around.
That change “would occur at the end of this year,” he says. There had been what he called “a group of requests at the lower end of the point scale” that would be part of the review.
Refugee program
The New Zealand Refugee Quota Program has started again, but in much smaller amounts. It had been on hold since March of last year, with exceptions made for only a small number of priority emergencies.
Faafoi says that while “everyone would like everything to get back to normal” as quickly as possible, accepting refugees at this time was “purely a matter of capacity.” Getting around 200 people together by the middle of the year was a “good start,” he says, “but obviously it’s not 1500 in a year that the government is committed to.”
“New Zealand’s ability to contribute more is really controlled by what we can do with the UN [United Nations] and getting people through your system, and the ability to get more people through managed isolation, Faafoi says.
“And we have to take New Zealanders into account and also MIQ’s ability.
Collins says it is “simply unsustainable to continue bringing in refugees in the numbers we have, and we still have New Zealanders who need to be isolated and quarantined, and we don’t have enough places for New Zealanders to go home.” .
She would not be “in a rush to get to the goal or the limit” and would be “very careful to make sure New Zealanders get home first.” Once the border opens, New Zealand should “stick to the same numbers” it had previously, but still proceed with caution, says Collins.
Faafoi says he doesn’t have a “crystal ball” by the time the show fully resumes, but says “it would take some time to get back to 1500.”
This story was originally published on RNZ.co.nz and republished with permission.
