Why New Zealand immigration stance differs from UK’s new hardline approach – The Front Page

Britain's Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Photo / AFP

The UK Government is promising to fix a “broken” immigration system with new policies, which include proposals to tighten English tests for all visa applicants and their adult dependents.

The reforms would also mean migrants would have to wait a decade to apply to settle in the UK, instead of the automatic status after five years.

The move comes after the rise of the Reform UK party, which has a staunch anti-immigration policy and has become more mainstream in recent years.

The US has also strongly turned against immigration in President Donald Trump’s second term.

Massey University distinguished professor Paul Spoonley told The Front Page that the move comes after nearly 900,000 people arrived in the UK in 2023.

" The numbers have dropped by about 40% since that peak. So they were already falling, but they want to reduce them by a further 100,000 a year by 2029," Spoonley said.

While anti-immigration sentiment has swept Europe, the UK and the US in recent times, Spoonley said he doesn’t think the same can be said for New Zealand.

“There are some important differences in terms of immigration. In most of Europe, the immigrants we’re talking about there are actually refugees. In 2015 and again in 2016, over a million people arrived at the borders of various European countries.

“Australia, Canada, and New Zealand target skilled migrants, and we use our point[s] system to identify who’s going to be appropriate. We have a very managed immigration system. Most of Europe does not.

“When you approve migrants who are well-skilled, well-educated and, in New Zealand’s case, they’re better educated and sometimes more skilled than the New Zealand population, the settlement outcomes for those migrants tend to be much better.

“But of course, Europe is dealing with people who are traumatised, who are refugees. Very significant numbers of asylum-seekers. And there are issues around settling those migrants into society.

“I just think New Zealand, Australia and Canada’s general approach to migration is much more positive. The way we manage it is very different. And we just don’t have those very strong anti-immigrant politics. We have people who are very anxious about it, but they don’t represent significant parts of our political constituencies,” he said.

Spoonley said people’s attitude often changes towards what is perceived to be “different kinds of migrants”.

“[In New Zealand] refugees are always seen as different from migrants more generally and are seen in a more negative light.

“People from the UK, and to some extent, places like South Africa, are rated much more positively as migrants we want compared to those who are from Asia. And unfortunately, migrants from the Pacific tend to be rated as the lowest, the ‘least desirable’ by New Zealanders answering these surveys,” he said.

The latest Stats NZ data released yesterday showed a net migration gain of only 26,000 in the past year, against more than 100,000 the year before.

Provisionally, we had almost 150,000 migrant arrivals and more than 123,000 departures.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about the realities and fiction around immigration policy.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.