The number of overseas workers coming to New Zealand set a new record in March and is now running ahead of where it was prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), 20,442 people arrived in NZ on work visas in March this year, compared to 19,170 in March 2019, before Covid restrictions curtailed overseas travel.
The figures show that arrivals on work visas declined precipitously when Covid restrictions were introduced, dropping from 12,399 in March 2020 to just 237 in April 2020.
They remained at just a few hundred a month from April 2020 until March last year, and then began steadily rising again. They passed 10,000 a month for the first time post-Covid restrictions, in September last year.
However, March this year was the first time the number of arrivals on work visas exceeded pre-pandemic levels. It was also the most arrivals on work visas in the month of March since MBIE began collating the current data series in 2012. This suggests arrivals of overseas workers have recovered quickly and may be heading for a new peak.
The influx of overseas workers has also meant that the total number of people in NZ on work visas is rising again, after falling steadily from a peak of 222,036 in March 2020, to a recent low of 108,750 in September last year.
Since then it has risen back up to 139,578 at the end of March.
That decline in the total number of overseas workers was caused by a combination of workers returning to their home countries during the pandemic, with very few arriving to take their place over that period, and many obtaining residency visas under the special 2021 Residence Visa Scheme, which fast-tracked residency approvals for tens of thousands overseas workers who had already been in NZ for several years.
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87 Comments
Disinflationary
So these 20k have work or are looking for work?...
If so, what work and where!
How many people are currently leaving though? I keep hearing all over the place about people packing up and moving overseas. Lots of Kiwi's heading to Australia and a few migrants heading back to their home countries. Surprisingly have heard about a few Indians heading back. Even our local dairy owner is getting ready to move on. All anecdotal of course but I do have a pretty large network.
https://www.stats.govt.nz/topics/migration
People leaving is increasing but not as fast as those coming in. At the moment...
As we march towards 6 million... https://www.stats.govt.nz/topics/population
Hands up who thinks that's a good idea.
How many new/extra public hospitals have been built since 2000 when the population was under 4 million?
Just look at the masterton hospital. Was at capacity within a couple of years of being built due to population boom
All thanks to idiots in the Parliament and policy shops who believe adding a few million consumers to our population will make our economy more desirable as a destination for overseas exporters, shipping companies, etc.
Farfetched as that scenario is, it does not even account for the drop in purchasing power in NZ as a result of wage reduction and clogged-up infrastructure from rapid population gains.
No wage reduction. Lump of labour fallacy.
I think the Covid experiment disproved that theory.
For the first time in decades workers were able to negotiate decent pay increases, especially in industries dominated by migrant workers.
is it possible to see which are kiwis that are leaving vs non kiwis? Would love to know the stats of kiwis that are leaving NZ vs coming home and non kiwis.
The figure underneath the chart in the link above shows:
31,000 NZ citizens arrived
48,000 left
99,000 non NZ citizens arrived
50,000 non NZ left
In the year to Jan 2023
It's curious that we don't hear more complaints from Māori about the levels of migration...(or am I just in an echo chamber...chamber ...chamber ;) )
Its easier if you can say there are few job opportunities due to overseas workers taking local jobs and stay on the benefits.
A number of those non-citizens arriving will be the spouses and family of citizens given we finally reopened the border. Frank knows many many people in that category
🤚👏👍
Good link.
Shows that for the last two years of data (Jan 2021 to Jan 2023) net migration was minus 115,178.
However with a worrying trend that the last three months has been positive , 12K, 24K, 33K.
The immigration data isnt real - its based on a model with old assumptions. It takes 16 months before the numbers are adjusted to reflect what really happened rather than what they thought was happening. At the moment, they are assuming that the bulk of people leaving are merely heading off for a holiday, and it won't be until 16 months later that they will be reclassified as having left permanently.
Monthly passenger arrivals and departures show a sharp reversal in the last 2 weeks of March, where 26,500 more people left the country than arrived.
Thanks for sharing that link.
We are losing workers abroad and domestically, and gaining retirees.
Is there any evdience for that? Not sure StatsNZ break figures down by age
We certainly aren't gaining enough doctors and nurses to cope with the increase in population
Or the additional workload & cost as the boomers all age and require a greater proportion of the available medical care ...
Nzstats does break down by age, sex etc. Available here https://infoshare.stats.govt.nz/# under "tourism" -> International travel and migration
Not to worry about that. We'll have all those junior doctors on strike in the UK rushing off to apply for NZ residency which the govt announced in the last week would be given on application.
Last month my retired friend (English immigrant with PI wife) sold his house in Auckland and is now in Brisbane looking to buy.
Keep hearing about those around me or mutual contacts that have sold up and left NZ too. Me and my partner are now seriously considering the same.
My employer (manufacturing, ~250 staff) has just let all our full-time temps go, and accepted voluntary redundancy applications from shop floor and office staff. We are now 30+ individuals lighter, and I believe there will be more 'right-sizing' to come....
Where are all these overseas 'workers' destined for?
Replacing the kiwis leaving.
Lots of youngsters coming for a working holiday backpacking hospo adventure. Wait until they find the crippling housing and cost of living situation. Some will stay full term, some will go home.
some will win, some will lose
some were born to sing the blues
Most will simply switch to an Australian working holiday visa. Particularly when the weather here starts to get cold.
Slapheid, what's a full-time temp?
Full-time hours, but employed through an agency rather than directly by the company.
A strategy to deal with order-book peaks and troughs, that has worked well for us over the years.
Thanks, I get it!
Probably to your employer at minimum possible wage to replace those that have been let go. Or to your competition so that your employer can be undercut on price.
They will compete with kiwis over the jobs available and are cheaper in terms of wages for employers.
Not necessarily. Franks a champion of the working man and even he sees the labour shortages across the country.
The labour shortages are the result of an overheated economy, juiced up by all the free money that was sloshing around the last few years.
Correct that, and the labour shortages are solved.
Besides which it's generally accepted adding more people is both inflationary and increases demand in the economy.
Fix one area of shortages by bringing in people, but then another segment of the economy those new people rely on is now short staffed.
Like trying to balance a seesaw, but each person that gets on jumps rather than carefully steps.
They will also consume goods and services, creating more jobs. Probably more than they take.
The foreign work visas are tied up with them getting a fair bit more than the min wage though. Isn't it like 28 an hour to be eligible for the visa? Most people on this site likely earn more than that, but on farms, manufacturing, machine ops, drivers .. don't really get that much.
Slapheid.. tell me to mind my own... can I ask who you work for? I think we are in the same industry
Good
On what basis?
Probably on the basis that businesses can't currently find enough staff to operate properly. I know we need more staff.
If our house prices and living costs were in line with incomes then businesses would have staff because they wouldn't have been leaving the country. But no, high and rising property prices are a good thing to get excited about...
I must say I am feeling a bit more open minded these days about workers entering then country to help out after the the debates around this subject that have occurred since 2019. These people are here to help us recover from the disasters of the past few years. On our side of the coin we need to provide these people with suitable accommodation and infrastructure to allow them to perform to their ability. They beed us and we need them to dig ourselves out of the holes we are in at the moment.
Isn't what you are describing though just going to be an upwards spiral of needing more and more people? I.e. more people come in which requres more infrastructure which requires more people which requires more infrastructure....
When is enough enough?
Maybe we need a bit of patience to let the current population and work opportunities/wages adjust to each other?
Bit the same. The problem was the seemingly lack of screening in days past. Numbers for number sake and no attempt to match skill shortages.
Are we doing any better? I suspect not. Many of our arrivals are form the most scamming bribery ridden and dishonest places on the planet - who knows what skills many actually have.
*gasp* b-b-b-b-but that's racist.
Interestingly I once dealt with a colleague from one of these countries over documents and evidence. He explained that where he came from one would turn up to court early to procure and brief the necessary witnesses from those available outside the Court. For fee of course.
Nothing racist about it. Culturally difference perhaps - and the need to scratch a living in these places, or starve.
No, cultural
Many of our arrivals are form the most scamming bribery ridden and dishonest places on the planet - who knows what skills many actually have.
Look within our own government before you claim that
Verifying the background of many people with overseas docs is a major problem - this was the context and no claims was made about NZ govt.
It is not difficult to check our own institutions for verification etc. But verifying imported qualifications and backgrounds are a major problem.
We are better than most.
2021 Corruption Perceptions Index - Explore the… - Transparency.org
I'm not so sure. I'm from the Uk, a first world country and the rule of 6 degrees of separation applies so to check my background would mean contacting previous employers, universities, police databases, income tax records, etc. My wife comes from a 3rd world country where all those kinds of records can be counterfeit more easily however for educated people it is a country with 2 degrees of separation - if you need to check a reference just ask a random educated person and they will either know your candidate for immigration or they will know someone who does. When we arrived in NZ 20 years ago, I was puzzled by the INZ immigration process: very slow and bureaucratic, virtually no interviews or background checks. They should double the cost of visas and do more checking in the country of origin.
Franks wife is from such a place, and has many skills in demand in this country. Until you’ve met such people who are keen to make something of themselves best you keep your insinuations to yourself.
.
May be wrong but I should imagine that the bulk of these are young travelers on temporary work visas who can undertake mostly unskilled work roles whenever it suits them as they move around NZ.
At least half of them will be RSE workers coming in for the grape harvest.
Any Doctors/ Surgeon's or Nurses amongst them?. Did they bring a house with them?
Yep, my partner is a nurse from the states. First good thing Labour has done is extend the working holiday visas another 6 months while we wait for a more permanent visa.
Got to suppress those wages, drive up that rental demand!
Bloating the labour force as an economic strategy really isn't working well for ordinary Kiwis.
It is great for business owners wanting customers, tertiary education establishments wanting students, the middle and upper class wanting barista coffee, property investors and landlords. It is not good for working class Kiwis.
Nah. Immigrants don’t suppress wages. There’s no evidence for that.
Economic growth is the best thing for “ordinary kiwis”.
The main problem would be with how that economic growth is distributed.
All the negative externalities put onto workers, all the positives reaped by the asset-owning class. Growth that isn't reinvested back into the community and infrastructure but instead concentrated into the hands of a few.
Over the last few years, it’s been the lower income workers making the most relative gains (in the US, at least, I’m not sure the same holds here, but I suspect it does). Anecdotally, if you look at the pay offered for low skilled work in NZ job ads, it’s hard to argue the majority (not to mention all) benefits are captured by the capital owning class. I could only dream of these conditions when I was searching for low skilled work post-GFC.
Even leftist economists recognise: the worst thing for inequality is low growth and high rates. R>G. Economic and population growth reduce inequality.
I think on the surface level you are correct, the minimum wage has been trending upward recently and it probably is working out well for low skilled workers at the moment.
It's probably those more on middle incomes that are getting more pressed and finding it harder to get by than they did in the past, the value proposition of New Zealand is getting worse for graduates and higher skilled proffessions which is where we are having shortages (Nurses, construction, etc). MBIE article on the the income share for workers, so the trend long term is more bleak but has gone slightly up more recently.
Our study covers the period 2002 to 2018, a period of moderately strong employment growth, apart from a GFC-related contraction in 2008-09 (Maré 2017). Although the longer term trend in the labour income share in New Zealand has been one of decline since the 1970s, the share has risen since 2002, from 49.5% to 53.8% in 2019. There was a pronounced fall in the labour income share in the late 1980s, at a time when New Zealand undertook widespread reform, including deregulation, privatisaion, and state sector reform (Bridgman & Greenaway-McGrevy 2018). It declined further in the 1990s, reflecting ongoing changes in the labour market and labour market insituions (Rosenberg 2017; Conway et al. 2015).
It is also argued in the article that increasing immigration has lowered our productivity as buisnesses don't find it as efficent to invest in productivity increasing technologies. This could also be a symptom of our wider economy focusing more on low-wage industries such as toursim and hospitally rather than investing in R&D and other high wage industries.
Paul Callaghan's talk on this from 2011 is really insightful as to why our productivity is much lower than countries we should be comparing ourselves to and what we could be doing to change this.
I think its also important to note the housing pressure immigration has put on workers. I'm all for immigration but it has to be done in a managed way and how it's been done in the past has put a lot of pressure on renters. We are seeing this in Australia as well. I can't see how bringing in more people without adequatly increasing housing supply can help in this regard.
https://www.unz.com/article/cape-cod-proving-george-borjas-right-reduce…
https://www.unz.com/runz/raising-american-wages-by-raising-american-wag…
https://www.unz.com/article/national-data-unprecedented-real-wages-surg…
There is significant proof actually. It just won't be published by the big business funded thinktanks or neoliberal economists.
You can conclude it off sheer supply and demand, it is growing the supply of labour.
Maybe in alt-right sewer media (along with vaccine conspiracy theories etc.). I know Trump’s admin paraded bunk studies to this effect. Nobody credible believes it though.
You can follow through to the links to the studies if you care to.
It is a fallacy to not read anything and simply say "official source didn't say that, therefore not true."
The same sort of brainlet ignorance is why trust in legacy and establishment media is sinking like a stone.
Can you even make the case that immigration doesn't suppress wages, is there a study that honestly argues that?
Nah. Crowding more and more people lowers quality of life for those already living here. Unless you are a developer or banker of course.
What have we learned during COVID and before? If this group is mostly doctors and nurses and aged care workers then thats good, (despite the lack of infrastructure and the lack of any plans to fix this). If its low wage workers, how will they live, NZ maybe the most expensive country in the world.
What we learned was that central planning out of the MBIE office (the one with the expensive sign) was bad. We don’t need any more of that. Let the market decide.
And have you not seen all the vacancy signs in storefronts. This country is screaming out for labour.
My wife, who is fit, motivated and qualified just applied for about 20 jobs. Got 3 interviews, most of the rest didn't even bother saying the jobs been filled. Maybe the organisations were too busy interviewing the 10000s new arrivals?
Welcome to the world of HR and recruitment. Where those in that area seemingly got their CV out of a cereal box
Judging by members of my own family NZ is expensive and especially decent housing but if you come from a 3rd world country you really appreciate the free medical services and the free education of your children. If it wasn't for health, education and security then half my family would return to their place of origin.
This argument doesn't apply to the many immigrants from England, France, Japan, S Korea and other developed countries - they come to NZ because they like the low density living and decent climate.
Amazing how Labour campaigned on reducing immigration and yet was responsible for record numbers of immigrants from 2017 to 2019. Its even more amazing that some posters on here still blame National for high immigration and think that voting Labour again will somehow reduce it.
Anyway, the numbers coming in are really immaterial if you can't show the equivalent graph of the numbers of people leaving NZ permanently. I'd have thought that it would be pretty simple to get a visa to head off to Australia or Canada now that workers have had a few year's experience in NZ, and other countries are also handing out visas like lollies. The 5000 nurses who have applied to work in Australia over the last 6 months are not going to be replaced by the 900 who have enquired about working in NZ.
Well Nats were responsible for massive immigration, but you are correct, the same lobby has been hammering a weak kneed labour party as well. You are also correct that labour will do nothing to stem the tide of humanity. There are no parties that will show any leadership on the population growth issue.
The only one who directly blathers on about high immigration is Winston. Unfortunately he forget to apply the handbrake when he had the opportunity.
Labour probably withheld the immigration information from him, like they did everything else. It seems Winston and NZ First was not included in most of Labour's policy discussion, and they went behind his back as well as lying to his face. Which is why he has said he will not work with them again. Labour makes promises they never intend to keep, and its all just designed to get them voted in after which they will turn around and do the complete opposite. Like promising we would never have vaccine mandates and passports, then introducing them.
So we have people to pick our fruit & veggies? So food inflation is coming down?
We will have the people to pick the grapes to make wine that we sell overseas.
A huge amount of fruit and veges was already picked a couple of months ago by a lass named Gabrielle. Demand for RSE workers this season will be...mediocre.
If you stay less than 12 months then govt stats treats you as a tourist but if you holiday for over 12 months then you are an immigrant. Best to check permanent residency visas and those are commonly given to people who are already here so asking at airports doesn't help. Presumably RSE veg pickers from PI islands are not immigrants but French tourists on long stay work visas are.
Farms, health care and many are here “with working holiday visa” without a job yet.
Touch & Go.
How do we the people set rules for the government so that for every '000s of immigrants they let in, they must bring in (or preferably have locally graduated) a required number of;
GPs,
Nurses,
Specialists,
Police,
Teachers
etc etc.
The idea sounds good, but in practicality what would happen is they approve the _____ number of visas and then have to wait on someone in those professions to apply.
We've seen the above areas of work become less and less attractive due to how they were treated during COVID, the level of burnout, and the rise off work from home jobs which are often seen as more attractive to those who have to be at a building 5 days a week or on shift work, plus the money was good elsewhere.
The only way I see this improving is for society to once again hold these professions in high regard, higher than they are now, therefore children aspire to be them and will sway towards those directions in education. We can't simply import to fill the gaps, it's the same as relying on imported fuel. There are inherent risks.
Had an argument with someone on Facebook the other week about this. I said he, who has sat on the housing market sidelines in Auckland for years, should get in and buy something city fringe before the new wave snapped up all the rentals and got residency. Buy in a relative slump. I was laughed out of the room because house prices are going down 70%.
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