The Productivity Commission says pre-pandemic rates of immigration are “unsustainable” with migration outstripping the ability of public infrastructure to cope with it, adding to “burdens for the wider community”.
It wants a law change to require governments to “explicitly consider how well New Zealand can support and settle more people”.
Do you agree?
Stuart Smith
National MP Kaikoura
Immigration into a country like New Zealand should always be responsive to the needs of our economy and to the requirements of our citizens.
While we are hopefully coming to the end of lockdowns as we move from a pandemic to living with Covid, now is a good time to consider immigration policy as we look at opening up to the world.
The productivity commission’s report reaches some interesting conclusions. Although they regard pre-pandemic levels of immigration as being unsustainable, they also see immigration as a positive fiscal gain.
There will always be positives and negatives to immigration, just as there is with anything, the key to success is striking the right balance and focusing on the gaps we have in our workforce.
The major concern I have with constraining immigration is the hole it would leave for specific industries.
Aged care facilities, nurses and hospitality, to name but a few, see large proportions of immigrant workers. The hospitality sector in this country is on its knees at the moment, but it will recover and if we are going to slow immigration post-Covid, who is going to fill those jobs?
Nurses work incredibly hard to keep patients safe and as our ageing population increases, we will need more migrant nurses to fill those gaps.
I think the real issue we need to address, which sits alongside immigration, is the number of people we have on taxpayer-funded benefits. Yes, we need migrants to top up sectors that require their skills, but we also must address the issue of people languishing on the unemployment benefit, whilst businesses all over the country cannot fill jobs.
The Government did away with the requirement for those on the dole to actively look for work and we are all literally paying the price for this with our taxes. Why should we fund people that could work, to sit at home because they choose not to work?
The September 2021 quarter shows that over 112,000 ‘work ready’ New Zealanders are sitting on the jobseeker benefit, that number is staggering.
The underutilisation of people who we already have in New Zealand that aren’t working is unfathomable, given all those businesses screaming out for staff.
But it is also the impact it has on the beneficiaries as well. All the statistics show that the longer someone is on the benefit, the less likely they are to re-enter the workforce. And it then becomes intergenerational.
We must address this issue, we are literally killing them with kindness.
Nobody can know what the ideal rate of immigration would be, however, I am certain that centrally planned immigration rather than demand driven immigration would be a dismal failure.