This wasn’t unpredictable. The same thing happened in 2016, when there were 56,000 visits to the Immigration NZ website from the US in the 24 hours following the election that year – won by Trump.
Last week’s spike also follows a Google search explosion for moving to New Zealand after a Jon Stewart joke in June. The Daily Show host was commenting on the Trump-Joe Biden debate, in which the latter’s woeful performance prompted the worst fears among those concerned about a second Trump presidency.
“I need to call a real estate agent in New Zealand,” Stewart had said.
A similar surge in interest followed Trump’s election victory last week, with most of the searches coming from US citizens living in Oregon on the West Coast, followed by those living in Vermont, Hawaii, Colorado and Montana.
Google Trends searches are ranked between 0 and 100, with 0 meaning not enough data and 100 indicating peak popularity. At 9.08pm on November 6 – or in the hours following Fox News declaring that Trump had won – search interest in “Move to New Zealand” sat at 100.
What was perhaps less predictable is that no major effort was made to lure Americans to New Zealand and fill the many specialist workforce gaps that have been plaguing several industries, from healthcare to construction and infrastructure to manufacturing to the primary sector.
The estimate last year was that nearly 13,000 extra nurses and over 5000 doctors would be needed within a decade, though whether Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora would have any money to hire them is a separate matter.
The shortage was on the radar of the Medical Council, which recently said that international medical graduates with an approved postgraduate medical qualification could apply for a fast-tracked provisional registration. It is open in seven specialty areas to graduates from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, but those from the US did not line up so easily.
“From our data, we have identified the qualifications that are assessed as most comparable to the New Zealand qualification and therefore result in successful applications for provisional vocational registation,” a spokeswoman from the council said.
“We will continue to assess whether additional scopes or qualifications could be added.”
Asked what Immigration Minister Erica Stanford had done to attract Americans in the event of a Trump-related exodus, a spokesman said: “The minister hasn’t actioned anything. There are a number of current visa pathways available for US citizens interested in visiting NZ.”
Nor have Immigration NZ officials at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) done anything to target skilled, Trump-averse Americans.
“Immigration NZ continues its longstanding work to attract skilled workers from around the world (including the USA) who are considering making a move to New Zealand. However, there are no plans to target the USA in connection with their upcoming election,” immigration (skills and residence) policy manager Polly Vowles told the Herald prior to the US election.
She noted about a 40% increase in registrations via the Live and Work New Zealand website for the year to August 2024 (8309 registrations), compared to the previous year (5289 registrations).
These are essentially expressions of interest, where personal details have to be entered, but are not necessarily followed through with visa applications.
“These registrations are also below pre-pandemic registration numbers, and it isn’t possible to attribute the recent increase in registrations to any specific causes.”
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the Press Gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.
