Immigration
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- Continue to be a pro-immigration party, honouring our heritage as a nation of immigrants, while trimming back overly generous entitlements such as pensions after only ten years’ residency.
- Maintain New Zealand’s values of free speech, free assembly, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, property rights and the rule of law as non-negotiable conditions that all immigrants must accept. We should require new citizens to explicitly sign up to these values, as required in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
- Pursue a free trade and free movement area between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (CANZUK).
- Read more here.
- Immigration policies should be impartial regarding countries of origin, ethnicities, cultures, age, gender, and sexual orientation.
- The refugee quota should be progressively increased, with settlement support to match.
- Overseas partners should be issued with provisional residency status, with barriers to family members coming to New Zealand reduced – especially for dependent children, disabled family members, and elderly parents.
- Employers should be required to provide the same working conditions and wages to temporary migrant employees, as they do to local employees doing the same job.
- Read more here.
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- Ensure that Kiwi workers are at the front of the job queue
- Guarantee that immigration policy is based on New Zealand’s interests such as meeting critical skill gaps
- Maintain parent category visa cap at 1000 and ensure that sponsors can adequately support and fund their family during and after migration
- Continue to develop strategies that encourage regionally dispersed immigration so that it lessens the burden on already overloaded urban cities
- Investigate a ‘skills of absolute shortage’ visa category to replace the incumbent skills shortage list
- Ensure that regionalised skills shortage lists reflect and are consistent with COVID-19 recovery efforts
- Introduce a ‘rural visa scheme’ that will apply to communities of less than 100,000 residents, while placing into law an obligation for migrants to stay in their specified place of settlement until they have secured permanent residency
- Have a nationwide review to set a 30 year ‘Population Plan’ to gain a majority view on the level of future population numbers. This will enable government to plan infrastructure with consideration for natural population growth, immigration, and attrition via death or emigration
- Read more here.
- Immigration should not be driven by student visas, nor reciprocal visitor working visas it should only be about whether the immigrant benefits us. Of course migrants accepted for humanitarian reasons are a separate issue.
- Focus on skilled people that are looking for a more liberal and tolerant society.
- Will make it quicker and simpler for truly skilled people to live and work here. This will require changes to our visa regime, and international brand.
- Read more here.
2 Comments
The three parties with the longest experience of immigration have no policies for immigration! Rather surprising since immigration has significant effects on so many other areas such as housing, productivity, infrastructure, worker exploitation, low wages, health, education, etc. After the last 25 years surely some lessons have been learned by the parties that set our immigration controls in the past. So if the last elections policies are now dumped are we about to see a change of direction by Labour and National and NZF?
https://www.top.org.nz/smarter_immigration_policy
Immigration is important to New Zealand’s development – the fact that around 25% of our workforce wasn’t born here is testimony to that. Migrants can be beneficial to an economy, particularly if they are highly skilled. Used properly, immigration will help underwrite economic growth and prosperity, and help us manage the pressures of an ageing population.
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