Olivia O’Malley is a former press secretary to a Leader of New Zealand’s Opposition and a long-time Conservative staffer. She currently works in public affairs.
Immigration is rarely out of the headlines. Legal or illegal, the question of how many people we want or need, from where and in what jobs, has dominated the British political conversation for years, since well before David Cameron’s ill-fated commitment to reduce it to the ‘tens of thousands’. It will undoubtedly be one of the biggest questions facing the new Labour government.
But the UK isn’t the only place where immigration influences political fortunes. In New Zealand, the number of new people arriving seems to be declining after several years of increases and a tightening of visa restrictions, with the new government calling the rate of newcomers ‘unsustainable’.
The real story, however, isn’t who is arriving: it’s a story of emigration.
Young New Zealanders have always headed off abroad. The ‘Overseas Experience’, or OE, is a rite of passage so ingrained that it is an official government term.
This makes sense. It’s a geographically-isolated country of six million in the South Pacific, with almost all New Zealanders having links to somewhere else only a few generations back – around one in four people were born overseas, rising to one in three in Auckland – and a much larger neighbour offers higher wages just a three-hour flight away.
The result is an estimated sixth of New Zealanders, or around one million people, living outside New Zealand. Recent figures suggest that there was a net loss of over 60,000 New Zealand citizens in the 12 months to April, equivalent to more than one per cent of the total population.
For a new government battling sluggish growth, this presents a significant challenge.
More than half of departing Kiwis head for Australia, where the number of New Zealand citizens has exceeded 700,000 for the first time. New Zealand citizens generally have freedom of movement and the right to live and work in Australia unrestricted; the lower unemployment and cost of living, combined with higher wages, provides a powerful lure.
For years, New Zealanders had no pathway to Australian citizenship to give them security in the longer term, but since 2022 that has changed.
Many other New Zealanders come to the UK, or more specifically London, where an estimated 80,000 Kiwis live, aided by the generous terms of the Youth Mobility scheme. This was expanded in 2023 as part of the post-Brexit free trade agreement, meaning New Zealanders can now stay for three years instead of two and are eligible to apply until the age of 35.
A significant number of New Zealanders are also British citizens or eligible for a UK Ancestry visa, allowing them to live in the UK for up to five years and ultimately settle.
In practice, most New Zealanders who come to the UK are university-educated and arrive not just with a degree, but with several years of work experience. While most will not stay long-term, increasing the length of time people can spend in the UK does make putting down roots more likely.
Anecdotally, the number of people from both university and my time working in Wellington who have made the move in the past year is well into the double digits. It’s not scientific, but it ties into a trend.
Many New Zealanders will ultimately return, of course, armed with overseas experience which benefits the economy. Jacinda Ardern spent three years in London in the early aughts, as did her successor, Chris Hipkins.
Christopher Luxon, the current prime minister, spent a long time away, in Sydney, London, and Toronto, before eventually returning to New Zealand. His successor as CEO of Air New Zealand, Greg Foran, lived in Australia, China, and the United States; John Key lived in Singapore and the UK.
There is, however, an undeniable trend of people leaving in greater numbers than pre-pandemic. For now, this is probably attributable to pent up demand as a result of Covid-19, paired with weak growth in the New Zealand economy. But how long until talk of a ‘brain drain’ takes hold?
More importantly, what is the new government going to do to halt the increase? Helen Clark’s Labour government made student loans interest-free for New Zealand residents in 2006, to try to entice graduates to stay, and the policy has stuck.
But even then, it took years for the number of emigrants to slow, and wasn’t a silver bullet. What really changed the game was the end of the recession.
There is a very real risk that, at least in the short-term, New Zealand’s economy, faltering due to the loss of so many skilled workers, gets stuck in a doom loop which fails to draw people back. Already the recession is deeper, and interest rates are higher than here in Britain.
But while things are worse on some measures, in many respects the two countries have striking similarities. Beneath the UK’s immigration quagmire and the seemingly endless demand from low-skilled migrants, the problem is broadly the same: what is needed for the economy to thrive is a deep skills base.
If New Zealand figures out how to stem the migration flow and retain the people it already has, the lessons for the UK – and the NHS, which regularly loses its doctors to New Zealand and Australia – will be there for the taking.