Fewer work visas are being approved as the total number of overseas workers in New Zealand gets back up to pre-Covid levels.
The latest figures from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment show 13,836 work visas were approved in July this year, which apart from the three years of 2020-2022 which were affected by Covid-related travel restrictions and their aftermath, was the lowest number of work visa approvals in the month of July in the last 10 years. See the first graph below for the trend.
Work visa approvals are also lower on an annual basis, with 197,418 approved in the 12 months to July this year, down 33,048 (-14.3%) from 230,466 approved in the 12 months to July last year.
Work visa approvals peaked at 243,195 in the 12 months to July 2019, and were above 200,000 a year for 2016 to 2019 July years.
However while the number of work visas being approved appears to be in a modest decline, the number of overseas workers in the country is not.
According to MBIE there were 188,634 people in NZ on work visas at the end of July this year.
That's within a whisker of the 190,263 here pre-Covid in July 2019, and well ahead of the 168,105 in the country in July 2018.
However their impact on NZ's population is probably much greater than those numbers suggest.
The second chart below shows the number of people in NZ on work visas at the end of each month going back to 2008.
This shows their numbers follow a very regular seasonal pattern and steadily increased from 2011 to early 2020.
Numbers then began dropping away sharply in April 2020, falling to a low point of 108,336 in September 2022, and started rising steadily again from October 2022.
Because that period coincided with Covid-related travel restrictions, it would be easy to think that was the main cause of the downturn in the number of work visa holders in the country.
But there was also another factor at play - the 2021 Residence Visa Approval Scheme.
This scheme provided a fast track approvals process for people who had been in NZ on work visas for several years and wanted to apply for residence visas.
Applications for residence visas under the scheme have now closed and it is essentially being wound up as Immigration NZ processes the last stragglers - just 15 residence visa applications under the scheme were approved in July this year.
However between December 2021 and July 2024, 211,335 residence visa applications were approved under the scheme.
This caused a massive decline in the number of work visa holders, as people transferred from a work visa to a residence visa, and a correspondingly massive increase in residence visa holders.
Between January 2021 and July 2024 the number of people in NZ on residence visas, as measured by MBIE's truncated data, more than doubled, from 161,183 to 333,198.
The effect of this is easily seen in the second and third graphs below, one showing a huge but temporary decline in the number of people in the country on work visas, and the other showing a correspondingly huge surge in the number with residence visas.
Given that so many migrants to NZ originally arrived on work visas and later obtained residence visas, and that trend is likely to continue in the future but probably at a slower rate than was evident during 2022/23, the impact overseas workers have on our population growth and therefore our economy, is almost certainly much greater than is suggested by the work visa data alone.
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59 Comments
The only reason average rents have statistically gone down in certain suburbs is because the lack of interest deductibility artificially pumped the proportion of rentals that were new builds. Now that this has been reinstated older houses are available again.
With council rate hikes only just being realized, and high immigration, I fully expect rents will increase above the 3% pa target for the next couple of years
I fully expect rents will increase above the 3% pa target for the next couple of years.
Aside from un-interrupted capital gains, some "Essential service providers" expect a lot of things🤣
Two up votes now three, I "expect" this number to be ten fold by tomorrow night. You're on the money
So why aren't rents 3% higher today than they are? Because the market can't pay it.
That is the answer to all things property; "It's what the tenant or aspiring gatherer of more Debt CAN pay that determines market price". Whether that's the amount of rent attractable or the amount of Debt assumable to buy/continue to own property.
Scrap the ability of new Debt to be reliant on a revaluation of present holdings when applying for more Debt, for instance, and just see how many loans CAN be taken out. Make any new loan reliant on cash-flow and not a revaluation of the collateral, and amateur property speculation will die on its knees.
So why aren't rents 3% higher today than they are? Because the market can't pay it
That is simply not true. The 12 month rolling average for rent in May 2024 showed an increase of 5.2%. And the trend is showing an increase. So yes. Rents are more than 3% higher than they were 12 months ago.
The last time rents increased by less than 3% was 2012.
But...why aren't rents higher than they are today, no matter what past stat you care to look at; not '12 months ago', but today? The same answer as above.
I don't know what you are asking bw. Why aren't rents higher than they are today? The same reason rents are not lower than they are today. The price of rent today is today's rental price.
Today, median rents are 5.2% higher than. They were 12 months ago. Pick any time frame you want. But you need at least two time stamps to draw a trend line.
If tenants couldn't pay today's rents, then they would be lower. That is just as probable as your expectation of them being 3% more next year.
Agreed. If rents are up 5%, why are they not up 10%? Maybe Landlords are truly acting with altruism, and are all going out of their way to charge well below market rent?
I have had to reread this several times to make sure I'm not having a stroke. But just to clarify, are you asking me why 5% is not 10%?
No, they are making a point that the price is dictated by the market's ability to pay rather than the pricing decision of the landlord. Either way it's a silly tangent. Assuming wages grow and immigration is here to stay, the long term trend is that rent prices will generally increase.
One would expect those numbers to drop away significantly as the labor market continues to ease.
If history is much of an indicator, they should trend fairly flat for a couple of years.
Hmmm, maybe. I can only see data back to 08.
it will be more nuanced potentially than ‘history repeats’
most importantly what sectors are the dominant ones in terms of employment for people on work visas, and how vulnerable are those sectors economically?
what is the sectoral composition of work visa employment now compared to say 07/08? For example, are there similar numbers of work visas in construction now compared to then? My gut feeling is much higher now, therefore more vulnerable
Well, you'd want to assume construction gets super low, and stays low for years (historically likely).
But then if it did, that'd also coincide with lower supply (also historically likely), which also looks to coincide with rent prices taking off (i.e. 2-3 years of new house construction falloff overlaps with a jump in rents).
We are outsourcing a few jobs, for the first year the company puts the person on the ground in AKL, then off to India for the next 4 etc. High end coding jobs, but old languages. Replacing retiring workers, who will train the out source workers over their remaining 2-3 years. One will be in 70's by then.
There is a lot of this going on across banking and insurance, mainly mainframe / core system / cobal etc etc
Will be adding to visa numbers... these jobs will never come back, but at the same time young coders want to work CI/CD dev ops cloud not cobal
Young developers don’t have the nerve to yeet code into prod like what was the norm even ~15 years ago.
There is definitely a trend of in-house servers coming back so some of those safety nets that cloud containers provide might disappear with that.
It's funny how things change. For the past few decades, I've built a website every 4 years or so. The first ones required coding in HTML, and the most recent one has required me to type in a paragraph, and AI does the rest.
The obsolescence of tech makes for interesting employment dynamics, as IT GUY has inferred. Sort of like being able to tune a carburetor in the world of fuel injection (or electrics).
Haha oh wow HTML automation.
This is something like saying “I built a backyard shed with prefab from Costco. The obsolescence of construction makes for interesting employment dynamics”. You have no idea how little you actually understand about the subject.
In reality, AI is almost useless for anything serious that would require employing immigrants to do.
It's not just HTML automation, it can do the design and layout, create images and logos, write copy for as many pages as you want, etc. It's not 100% perfect, but it cuts out a lot of hours.
Er so can scrapping the internet for other designs in less then a minute. Copy and paste of something else is not AI and it is not a time saver when critical site faults & security holes are widely prevalent.
If you want a landing page site you do not need AI for that. Eyesight helps but equally blind people can still pick up a template easily enough in less then a couple minutes. AI is just a waste of energy for that purpose and it is not going to make the content you copy paste into the site any less fake.
Also protip design normally involves a lot more then just HTML (only those completely clueless about the internet thinks HTML is what makes up a whole website even decades ago; it is hilarious you skipped many steps which shows the kind of work & level done). If you are not familiar with at least the 15 most popular languages used for site design you are already exposing yourself to more risks. But as a bonus if it is just a landing page site serving cheap fake content you copy pasted who really cares if it gets hacked. If it takes user data, sales, or provides services you are really in the shit for thinking AI is any level of solution (especially when most the code AI uses is regurgitated answers from sites like stackoverflow, reddit etc). AI generators even when provided the exact solution in its training data have been proven to be less then half the time correct. Flip a coin on something you copy from online and it would be more accurate then AI LLM generators.
Well, I'm talking from the experience of doing it sporadically over the years. Every time the jump in speed required and result is fairly noticeable.
If you're wanting to nerd out over specifics, or flaws, fill your boots mate.
Yeah we normally reserve the laughs over AI generated garbage and fake site content for the tech & engineering forums. The failures are so funny, and often costly for larger companies, the term "self inflicted" normally applies to those who use AI generators & trust them.
Well I'm literally just talking about a landing page/site for online profiling. No interaction aside from contact forms (and those are independent of AI).
I'd probably waste 8-10hrs doing it myself from scratch, and it'd look/read worse.
Wait you have contact forms and don't edit generic copy paste code to prevent bots & hacking, or ensure the content &code is accurate & safe... yikes. Please go on.
It is hilarious that the standards of a toy fan forum setup by those completely inexperienced in tech (for bronies ... it was a dark day lookup for friends after the movie & the Andrew W.K interview) is higher then your work.
No seriously this is good stuff. I am not sure is there a reverse version of Clients from Hell? Cowboys from Hell perhaps.
Sure and then customer data (where some customers are very large businesses and govt depts) and identity theft can be much more prevalent in services that have mandates to follow NZ laws but fail to ensure data stays in a jurisdiction where those laws apply... I think you will find they are already in breach of the NZ privacy act the second they cannot ensure the act is followed by their contractors in a foreign country and make allowances for the data sharing.
Protip if you think banking & insurance can skip out on that whole customer data protection thing & can have widespread negligence of the management of their IT contractors you better look again. Sadly we still allow that level of management incompetence allowing situations of massive data leaks locally in local & national govt depts because the watchmen don't watch themselves.
cobal?
Did you mean COBOL?
If so, can you point me at a job advert. Apart from being a wiz myself (from DOS to MVS to iSeries to COBOL.Net on windows), I could tempt some other wizzes out of their indulgences. And yes, we're all pretty fluent in most modern languages, OSs, networks and all things web, security, etc, etc. Kind of nerd mafia. (btw COBOL.Net works just fine in a CI/CD dev ops cloud environment. We did one a few years back that is being slowly converted to more modern .Net languages when the need arises - which is less often than anyone imagined.)
IKR I have not seen the COBOL ads kicking around. But then employment advertising by recruiters is even worse these days, considering most is copy pasted, a lot of the actual review work is cheap automation designed to fail, and not related to the actual work roles and the costs for running the ads borders more on subscription model. Much of the applications to jobs are also not even processed by humans so automated filtering failures are frequent (the number that said they applied to a role but then recruiters incorrectly never sent applications through or even bothered responding to the applicants outside of a automated email). It got so bad often we ended up doing the review ourselves (of hundreds of CVs) which turned out cheaper then the recruiters and resulted in more successful qualified applicants.
The number immigrating on work visas continues to run a bit more than the number on Jobseeker beneficiaries.
What's wrong with this picture?
The Spruikers all came to Spruik Barfoot failed auction numbers, and now they have to read immigration numbers, must be disappointing...
I have noticed the real estate stats are no longer coming out at the same time each week etc, I suspect its to try and avoid the DGM comments around them and try to change the narrative to "falling rates be quick"... "the crash is behind us etc"
They never seem to comment on job seeker numbers perhaps its because a job seeker is not a marginal buyer. I know someone running a water bottling plant out Eastern BOP, its very hard to find good workers, who are reliable and can test drug free so they can work on plant. They pay above minimum wage.
I suspect the recently made unemployed will be off job seeker as soon as they can find a new job, they truely need the help
some recent stats
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/jobseeker-benefit-more-than-half-of-18900…
ITGUY What are you, DGM or spruiker. Sound dgm-ish and act spruiker-ish if I may say
We know that cats have 9 lives so the dead cat may get up again and purr
Maybe but I think the NZ Property Market has a huge number of head winds, and IMHO there may well be other markets that offer better returns, Gold for example is looking great. Remember BTC at $300 then $3000, now? Well gold is only 4k NZD, how many people do you know who own BTC? How many who own investment in gold? (not rings etc) .
Gold has legs to run and run. Its owned by central banks as a hedge, that's interesting isn't it. Once there are Gold Investment Facebook groups, it will be worth getting out. Its possible that gold may increase more in a month then in a lifetime... but would it be about the collapse of fiat in which you are valuing it? Best hedge ever
Yip you are at risk of being abused as an unintelligent ‘gold bug’ if you admit you own gold! (but who cares..). I moved a small amount of net worth to gold in 2019 when interest rates inverted and it’s been a decision I don’t regret. It’s been tracking away upwards while there’s been a lot of volatility in other assets (including bonds).
investing in gold is not bad, but the storage & selling of it can be very problematic. E.G. incidence of theft is higher then that for shares or cash investments but there is a physical barrier being someone would need to physically steal it. Hence thieves can be more prevalent as the bar is lowered and they can be low tech but they need physical proximity so the reach they have to targets is also lower. Key thing with gold investments is secrecy even to family and friends, but often may need a way to inform them should the need arise e.g. emergency or accident or death where the owner is impaired. Natural event disasters are also an issue for gold storage. Plan well and gold investments are fine.
Why do we need to label people as being either DGM or spruiker? The vitriol and name calling adds nothing to the quality of the commentary on here. And trying to put people into one of these two mental categories means there is little ability to rationally reason, with an open mind, with peoples data/points of view.
(if anyone in the future catches me using the terms, please call me out as a hypocrite).
Why do we need to label people as being either DGM or spruiker?
Because at a base level, we tend towards being fairly tribal.
Here's me, and my group. We're the protagonists in this story. Over there are the others, they're the villain.
Way easier to view things in a binary sense.
Property bull - someone who likes property but is willing to see future falls etc ie open kinded
spruiker - buy yesterday buy today buy tomorrow no concept that falls are possible probably depend on transaction flow for commission income
sane people could move between bull neutral and bearish but a sprinkler needs turnover therefore they are often selective in analysis
The first one is likely to be a trader and the second an investor
The crossover to DGM/spruiker is someone who tries to shift sentiment for their own self interest with a narrative they may not actually believe. Those who talk from both sides of their mouth.
Surely a DGMer is so negative they will never buy and and spruiker is so positive they cant buy anymore because they shot their wad last week buying. I dout both naratives, I am sure that a DGMer will buy one day, and I am sure no spruiiker has enough to buy as often as they spruik
you can be a property bull but consider you are long enough here.... its ok to let a trade complete without constantly adding to it
"...recipients of the main Jobseeker Support payment now projected to spend an average of 13 years on a benefit"
https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/350176008/welfare-dependence-soars-s….
Considering most jobseekers on the jobseeker benefit are disabled or also in carer roles that is no surprise. What you think NZ will fix its massive discrimination, systemic denial of employment to disabled people and have more accessible communities in 13 years? We are already 30 years behind the US on that and 20 years behind Australia. People don't find magical cures to help reduce the amount of systemic discrimination and employment denials they face when on incomes that don't even provide subsistence living and need charities to provide support for food and transport on top. It is so obvious the jobseeker length of time numbers that those who use the stats provoke a bit more then a facepalm.
What the stats do show is that it takes a long time to find any employers who do not discriminate & work that is accessible. The time on jobseeker is more of a NZ and us as a whole thing then the jobseekers themselves. Hence the "job seminars" are really just more consulatant time wasters looking to milk the taxpayer for nothing less then their own fraud and meaningless abuse of those on jobseeker benefits. The amount paid to the consultants running the seminars could have been paid to all the job seekers they "helped" for the same work with no difference in outcome.
Above minimum wage is not enough to live on. Imagine the wage necessary for housing, to support a family and pay for transport & gear for work and unexpected living costs. I think you will find even $28 /hr is very low. But sure cram some migrants into a hostel or cheap unmaintained housing, claw back their wages through work costs, transport, penalties and then pat yourself on the back that you pay barely "above minimum wage" for what you expect is skilled trained workers. In this time migrants have burned through their multigenerational family life savings just to live and get by in the roles. Can't reason why kiwis are not jumping for a chance at the overcrowded, financially costly and unhealthy lifestyles that migrants take up just long enough to get residency and then get out.
It's unfortunate we have created a system where one of the biggest barriers to locals securing work is their knowledge of employment law and their refusal to work for below minimum wage.
When these migrants compete with Kiwis for jobs, Stanford held employers at fault for contributing to lacklustre statistics. “Just to give you an example, since April, under my new changes, the Ministry of Social Development has listed over 3000 roles via the Accredited Employer Work Visa associated listings,” said Stanford. “Of those, just over 50 have resulted in a New Zealander being employed. It’s less than two percent.” When employers did not consider hiring a migrant worker, that placement rate rose to 60 percent.
Stanford said she could appreciate that some employers may prefer a migrant for a given role, but called out “a significant number of employers” who predetermine a migrant for a position and don’t take the MSD requirements seriously.
“It’s not reasonable to me that someone can have 50 applicants from New Zealanders through MSD for a lower-skilled job and say that not a single person is appropriate for that role,” she said.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/08/17/no-apologies-on-immigration-from-a-stalwart-stanford/
So you're saying it's okay for employers to break the law?
No. I'm saying employers who have been able to overlook locals because of their preference for easily manipulable migrant workers need a boot up the arse.
Knowledge of employment law shouldn't be something that counts against a potential employee, but Labours idiotic enthusiasm for creating a system where the foxes are in charge of the hen-house means it does.
Those darn employees going to the ERA seeking to ensure minimum employee rights like pay for the hours they work or non discrimination & non harassment of employees, wah.
So ... Get a work visa, then get residency, then citizenship and then (the bit that's missing from the article?) immigrate to Australia?
Unfortunately, migrants with the critical skillset that we should retain move on to Australia. Think doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, etc.
Those without such skills to offer (hospo, tourism, retail workers, Uber drivers, etc.) don't have better career opportunities in Oz or further afield, so this lot ends up sticking around after citizenship.
The slave trade in NZ is alive and well. Meanwhile there 11.6% out of work, 386,000 people in receipt of income.
Bonded Slave labour is a thing in NZ.
Pfff.
Hyperbole.
Not so fast.... Its reels! https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/government-responds-unsustainable-n…
In my opinion your reference doesnt come anywhere near the definition of slavery.
Next NZ prisons are gulags? Poverty and housing in NZ has reached Dahravi levels and downtown Auckland is Mogadishu?
I grow increasingly frustrated with discussions swamped with examples wildly out of context with the situation. Normally I just delete my comments before posting but today I'm a bit snippy. I maintain my "pffff".
Living in Denial works for some folks.
Slavery is too expensive. You have to buy the slaves (or breed them I guess), feed, clothe, house and care for them, etc. Its easier to pay someone and they sort themselves out.
Classic brilliant comment. Ps I dont subscribe to slavery or any sort of bondage
These days we often get the slaves to pay for that themselves. They sell up family assets, savings, investments, pay for the transport, illegal overcrowded housing & food from those savings they had and end up penniless in a matter of a couple years in which you just rinse them out through illegal terminations, denial of work, denial of income and stop communication and repeat the process with a new bunch of hopefuls. Hence modern slavery well known in AEWV scheme and the endless hospo imports, where trafficking is so common. It is the natural progression that no longer do direct employers need to pay for the slaves *cough* migrants they can get them to pay for it and get outside contractors and services to manage the process.
Hire companies can be set up to bring in more and more migrants reaping large payouts from them, then they are farmed out. If one hire company gets a bad rep or could face legal action they just phoenix and move on to the next joke name.
NZ also did similar with the disability community in recent history so it is not like slavery is alien to us. We just formalized the process and reduced the costs to employers.
Hence Labours & Greens be kind strategy over the past 6 years was to ramp up migrant exploitation in a big way, much like the enabling of overseas students to work so more degree mills got set up as another way to milk the system (prior to the complete migrant exploitation as you like it AEWV scheme).
It was kind of them to think of the scammers & fraudsters engaging in massive modern slavery rings. After all it is tough on the soul having to destroy the hopes and dreams of that many families.
There are a couple differences to the old slavery of Africans (often thought of when using the terminology because of its prevalence in popular cinema & the US). 1. people are not considered property to be brought and sold (hence they don't need to be in chains) 2. the process of acquiring slaves is more deception based, however there is still a lot of deception techniques used today that was shared with the slavery of Africans.
The slavery of Africans was widely prevalent worldwide and was moved to an industrial scale but it was also costly & resulted in much loss of life, and strife. Hence the transition to self funded and self entrapped slavery as a way to get the slaves to pay for everything themselves and there are no rebellions, no wars, and you don't need to pay for transit or massive living costs. You can entrap people much easier with financial theft & control then you can with barriers & chains because the people feel like they have to stay to enable their freedom and not the reverse.
It does use the simple behavioral techniques to get those people into that position and many of them feel like they have to stay e.g. gamblers fallacy, optimism & survivorship bias, halo effect etc. You don't need to raise slaves or bother with discipline, just get more people instead. They pay for it themselves, you collect most of their life savings from the outset so you get immediate financial benefit and if they bother you then you just drop contact with them and get a new one. No need for discipline and with the rinse and repeat method you can strip another person of life savings so it is a benefit just to drop people at will. You can even do this with arranged marriages so long as you are picking from a lower class to reduce risk of any response from the family.
In NZ we met the conditions for much closer definitions of classic slavery, then we just upgraded to modern slavery (get the slaves to pay for their indentured servitude). We even now have prosecutions for slavery in NZ in recent years because even the old system of slavery was still around in many communities (those cases were related to the classical versions of pacific slavery). But now with AEWV you can just set up a human trafficking ring without any qualms. Just get the slaves *cough* migrants to give up their live savings, get them to work without legal contracts, fail to pay for time worked or even as contracted, strip the pay from them with "charges" and then threaten them and their families if they don't work.
When you think of slavery often people fail to realize it existed long before the African slave trade and was in many different versions.
Even Maori tribes had and used slavery and many utu resolutions resulted in slavery. It is what it is. Part of history and human cultures world over.
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