N.B.: Through this article, I’m going to use “migrant/migration” rather than mentioning “refugee” separately. Refugees are a distinct legal category from migrants and often experience very separate realities, but at the same time, many migrants are influenced to move by similar reasons that refugees are and vice versa. Given my argument is based in part on tracing the history of migration, I’m not going to inflict the headache of trying to retroactively apply categories where they didn’t exist.
I also use “illegal immigration” rather than “undocumented immigration” simply because it’s easier to contrast legal/illegal processes of migration than legal/undocumented existence once you’ve migrated. I’m not fussed with people illegally immigrating - it’s one of those “technically you shouldn’t, but I’m not going to get worked up about it” issues. “Undocumented” is usually used as a rebuttal against those who dehumanise or overly dramatise immigrants; I think the substance of my argument, that we shouldn’t be trying to make so many people immigrating illegal in the first place, is rebuttal enough.
Immigration is Back on the Menu
Immigration is not a top issue for most people most of the time; if you’re not in the process of immigrating and you’re not a rabid nativist, the topic probably doesn’t enter your mind in the polling booth, or make your top five concerns. Indeed, the subject rarely even merits headlines.
The last time we saw immigration enjoy widespread prominence with the public was the mid 2010s. Trump spearheaded a firestorm of anti-immigrant rhetoric. The migrant crisis bestrode Europe from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Britain punched out of the European Union and Schengen Area in large part because most voters were fed up with immigration levels. The general sense conveyed across media platforms was that many voters were fed up with the elitist political class that facilitated and enabled the entire migratory megastructure.
Then the issue faded away. Brexit and Trump were victories in a narrow sense for the populist, nativist right, but they also engendered a backlash. The far-right were forced to give off the appearance of moderating across much of Europe. (The two notable exceptions are Fidesz, who have kneecapped Hungarian democracy to their benefit, and the Alternative für Deutschland, who step on a rake once a week.) As they barred starfire from lighting their deep and dark desires, with even Trump moving on to other issues for the most part, other stories took over the global scene. To name just a few of the international storylines of the past several years:
Emmanuel Macron arrived as the last of the "charismatic young technocrat" leaderwave, and has suffered endless trials and tribulations since, in no small part of his own making.
Germany’s battles moved on from Merkel’s migrant crisis decisionmaking and Greece and the Eurozone. Energy was the new hotness: navigating the Nord Stream 2 pipe dream and phasing out nuclear power even in favour of coal.
The rise of China and the Belt and Road Initiative.
COVID-19.
Boris Johnson’s bumbling antics epitomised an era of laughing at Britain’s leaders after the buzz of Brexit wore off.
Russia invaded Ukraine.
Add on all the far more important and pressing domestic events in every individual Western country, and you can see how immigration has taken a back seat to most people. And immigration is inherently a bit of a weird issue to focus on. Voters tend not to care about stuff coming from outside our borders more than stuff going on within them. The reality of immigration is very boring process stuff around points and visas and moving houses. People only really care if they can be made to feel immigration alters their own everyday lives, instead of being simply another policy choice about the economics of the nation as a whole.
Right now, a lot of Europeans feel this way. This issue - along with the general post-COVID, anti-establishment hangover - is key to the far-right surge in the European parliamentary elections. These don’t mean anything really, and there’s a comical absurdity about voters streaming out to vote through an overthrow of the establishment so that far-right politicians can sit around in a useless EU institution and do squat all at the taxpayer’s expense. Nonetheless, these elections are a useful signal for European voting trends. The far right simply cannot avoid setting alarm bells off by doing well amongst German, Austrian and Italian voters. The German government is now on the brink of collapse, held together only by post-WWII constitutional duct tape.
We will likely see this surge make a real difference in the coming British and French parliamentary elections - indeed, France is primed to make a 28 year old Prime Minister by voting in a National Front majority. For goodness’ sake, Giorgi Meloni is Prime Minister of Italy these days. And she may be eclipsed in three years’ time by Marine Le Pen, who, if she wins the French presidency, will become the most powerful far right ruler in Europe since Adolf Hitler. (Or, if you wanted to get technical, you could argue since Fransisco Franco. Pros: outlived Hitler by three decades, enjoyed full dictatorial powers unlike French presidents. Cons: ruled a smaller, poorer state, did not retake Gibraltar.) Put plainly, around a quarter to a third of voters in many European countries are convinced they must vote for parties that treat immigrants as poison.
New Zealand has not experienced the same surge; indeed, our modern democracy almost unanimously shuns far right politics. However, we also succumb to waves of anti-immigrant sentiment at times. Norman Kirk kicked off the Dawn Raids that Robert Muldoon continued for years: after years of New Zealand welcoming Pasifika blue-collar men to do crucial industrial work for our economy, both major parties turned on those same families in tougher times to win votes.
Phil Twyford lashed out with the nasty “Chinese-sounding names” slur in 2015 and Labour never offered more than Ardern’s “I’m sorry if you felt that way” semi-apology. National in the past couple of years flipped from criticising Labour for too little to too much immigration. And, of course, there is NZFirst. “Two wongs don’t make a white” is merely the most memorable utterance in a long list of deeply mean-spirited and racist anti-Muslim and anti-Asian statements.
We may not be in Europe but the internet is everywhere. More than any form of media before, the internet spreads strong sentiments worldwide. And anti-immigrant sentiment is frequently a key component of, at the worst, far-right radicalisation, and more broadly, populist agitation. I want to push back on that and make the case for immigrants and immigration. I did that once, briefly, in one of the first articles I wrote in 2020, and I’m still happy with that article, but that was more of a statement than an analysis. Here’s the breakdown on why immigration is good and why we should welcome migrants across the West.
A Selective History of Migration
The starkest thing to notice about migration historically is how frequently migration intertwined with violence. Of course, plenty of people went from A to B without incident or through some rudimentary form of customs. However, I thought it was worth starting with that background as the worst possible nightmare of the anti-immigrant crowd who view immigration as an "invasion": why were there literal migratory invasions?
Inter-nation violence was far more widespread in general in the pre-modern world. Huge groups of people fled invading armies with free licence to loot and pillage, creating a knock on effect in the next nation over. Sometimes, warfare was so ongoing and intense that entire regions would become hugely depopulated.
Even when they weren’t losing everything to soldiers paid in their coin, most people lived precarious lives anyway. Resources were scarce, from the meagre possessions that any crofter held, to the vulnerability of crops to changing weather patterns like flooding, to the inevitable grazing-down of pastures and grasslands and need to move herds. Where people don’t have enough resources to survive, they move or die. People living on the edge are likelier to resort to extreme measures to secure their future.
Few mechanisms existed to resolve disputes over these meagre resources. Being able to go to your local lord and receive recompense against a thieving neighbour was one thing, but on a national scale, the Khwarazmians were unlikely to reach a peaceful resolution with the Mongols. Greater powers would inevitably steal and murder within smaller ones and powers unsure about their relative strength against rivals would often roll the dice on war anyways.
Few humans held a sense of a common humanity with all others. This can be debated, but at the very least it has to be said it was a less globalised world where, for instance, members of other religions were regularly dehumanised or even painted as legitimate targets for death and theft. The Crusades illustrate this point. European knights and commoners alike looking for someplace to go and a fortune to make travelled to the Middle East and, in order to free up land and buildings and gain power, massacred Muslim and Jewish occupants.
Settler colonialism in particular stands out as the ultimate manifestation of all of these trends. Colonial states empowered their citizens to travel across half the world to till indigenous lands whose theft was backed up by force. Indigenous peoples, in turn, had to go somewhere, sometimes clashing with those whose lands they moved onto, and would often try to reclaim their past lands with force against settlers and their states.
Migratory invasions are best known, in Western history, as a key component of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In fairness, non-violent assimilation also contributed. There’s no viable counterfactual where Rome could survive longer with a hard border policy, but the Romans certainly found out that in such a hardscrabble era that they could not convince many newcomers to sacrifice their self-interest for the sake of the imperial elite. The other classic example in our heritage is, just as those Germanic migrants mingled with Romance peoples to produce many of us as their descendants, so too did Scandinavian Vikings slash and burn from England to Sicily, joining the mix.
However, I’d argue that the most prominent appearances of migratory invasions through history is amongst the “horse peoples” on the great Eurasian steppe and beyond. From Turks and Bulgars to Apaches, arguably the most vulnerable people to all of the above factors could be found amongst great herds always on the move, in a symbiotic relationship primarily with their steeds and herds rather than the land.
Some of these peoples, in the end, were conquered by richer, more powerful states, settler colonists like Americans and Russians. After all, industrialisation simply meant that those who constructed systems where workers toiled in factories to process imported goods from colonies could afford more of everything, including people, than those who lived on the move. Others carved out lands where they found settlement more valuable than a continued migratory lifestyle. A few people still live a transitory lifestyle, but there are no more migratory states; every one is settled.
Violent migration has declined colossally, to a far greater degree than other large-scale forms of violence (be that war, inter- or intra-community, or within the home). As the modern rule of law and defined states proliferated, violent migration declined. The growth of humanism and ethical frameworks means people today are typically less keen on the idea of bopping somebody else on the head to take their stuff. We have figured out much better ways to invest and share in our common future.
The alternative is implausible. Before the modern era, a populace born in the saddle who grew up with archery could pose a plausible military threat, as the Mongols ably demonstrated with their impressive conquests. In the era of guns and planes, Apaches are just one of many, many groups of people who found out that settled states simply generate more weapons and everything else with their expansive industries (and, ironically enough, were simultaneously better at attracting and sending out more settlers).
No group of migrants today - even the millions of migrants who entered Europe in the mid-2010s - can plausibly battle a state. Weird examples exist from Darfur to Tajikistan to the western Sahel where migratory tribes battle each other within weak central authorities, and from Israel to Vietnam you can still find colonial settlers in 2024. However, the overall point stands: settled states control the world, and everybody dares not defy another country’s monopoly on violence short of a state-on-state invasion.
Even that imperial infrastructure built on violence was created to facilitate mass migration, which is why, for instance, you have black and Indian populations across the world stretching back centuries. Progressing past coerced migration and slavery, as empires reached their zenith and retreated from the world, they left behind the infrastructure for people to travel from A to B, because it made economic sense in many cases to enable settlers or conquered workers to move around. This dynamic often still has a power imbalance, like how the Gulf States mistreat their enormous quantities of workers. Nonetheless, labour in country X is freer to meet capital in country Y than ever before without violent barriers between the two.
Today, we have considerable legal processes to go through to move from here to there and access resources elsewhere. States have an overwhelming capacity to enforce these processes. New Zealand, for instance, is literally islands out in the ocean, and where before you could sail to shore and establish a pā or colony, now you have to come through airport security. If you want to participate in society, you need that legal status - not only to avoid having to look over your shoulder for the authorities and mistrust your colleagues and neighbours, but because there are strong benefits to being able to freely and without issue access all the benefits of the state and of businesses.
Illegal immigrants no longer represent cohesive nations with leadership attempting an invasion. Instead of coming at existing authorities head on, and targeting locals to displace or subjugate them, illegal immigrants hope to sneak around authorities and coexist with locals. People smugglers facilitate this process for profit rather than any higher ambition. Authority and process have already, by and large, carried the day. No migration into the West is an invasion. We simply face policy choices about how many people to legally admit, and how to catch and sentence those who eschew legal admission.
The hostile tone that so many people and media outlets speak about immigration in is completely wrong. This is a very different situation from, for instance, crime or gangs or drugs, where even if we disagree on our solutions, the subject at hand hurts and kills members of our communities. Those demand empathy for victims, however lenient and rehabilitative we want to be towards perpetrators.
Immigration, on the other hand, involves no malice or attempt to victimise anybody else; at most, illegal immigration is comparable to tax evasion, a serious and selfish crime where somebody wants to avoid going through the same loopholes as everybody else, which should be dealt with to better the country, but hardly a visceral one that makes a community unsafe about the perpetrator. The debate is simply one about economic impacts, not one that merits throwing around words like “invasion” or “illegals” at any time.
Comparisons to the Roman Empire or any other histrionics are worthless today. The world has changed, hugely: we do not have to pretend anymore that we are in violent competition with each other just by coexisting as humans. And we in the West enjoy the enormous privilege compared to so much of humanity historically and even many people today of living within very secure, safe, peaceful states. Immigration is “under control”, and our democratic votes and institutions, not the whims of history, decide what comes next for the future of migration.
Let’s tackle legal and illegal immigration separately.
Legal Immigration
People have the same push and pull factors as they ever do. You can add onto this that, in our modern era of industrialised prosperity, basic needs are more often assured. Many migrants are people who can afford to think about lifestyle: where would they most like to live? And in a world where wealth is much more transferable - you can, for instance, send your life savings to a bank overseas rather than them all being tied up in ships or a castle - migrating as an expression of preferences rather than a must has become a real option.
States have incentives to let immigrants come and to permit them to acquire status, like citizenship. To state the obvious, they physically add to the total population, growing our economy and society. Migrants bring resources with them, too, and at the high end, this looks like permitting rich businesspeople from China or America to come invest here. Yes, you can always invest from overseas, but needless to say many would prefer to live on the ground where they do business. (A note: as great as the famed “entrepreneurial spirit” of immigrants can be, this article ably explains how that’s often an unpleasant byproduct of an exclusionary society.)
Indeed, such immigration to increase our wealth is often necessary because we lack enough people with skills in a specific sector, or a willingness to work. If we expand our pool beyond our tiny % of the world’s population to include everybody overseas willing and able to migrate, there are many more willing and skilled workers. It’s as though employers - in both the private and public sector - are getting to hit a button on TradeMe Jobs to increase the number and average quality of job applications they receive.
To be able to migrate to rich Western countries that can afford to pick and choose, migrants need skills and resources, otherwise they won’t be admitted and they’d never be able to make the investment of considering a move in the first place. They come, they work and invest, they grow GDP as a result, and, ergo, our tax revenue expands as these migrants and the businesses they assist are taxed, so we can use those tax dollars (plus skilled migrants implementing programs in the public sector and improving innovation in the private sector) to address issues.
The political argument against this is that they are a drain: GDP may grow but not GDP per capita, as more people in the same country divides the resources more ways. I’ve never seen any firm data supporting this and I assume it’s a byproduct of when anti-immigrant arguments tend to get the most purchase - when people are struggling. If the economy’s already in recession or, like right now, a period of high inflation, nativists can point to graphs showing GDP per capita is going down, then claim “immigrants did this” without having to offer any scientific comparison of variables. You can do literally any argument with graphs you want if you can’t be bothered comparing and contrasting with a reasonable sample. I could argue GDP per capita has declined since 2020 because no new BoJack seasons have dropped, and if you accept both these claims as independently true and also turn your brain off, the argument stands.
Consider the aforementioned logic around migrant skill. Migrants need to meet a certain level to be admitted out of all the pool of applicants, whereas there’s no equivalent bar to be admitted as a native-born citizen. We don’t deport born-and-raised twentieth-generation Kiwis who dropped out of high school. Migrants typically go into work and produce more value than the average native-born citizen by virtue of their backgrounds.
This is a more beneficial form of population growth than children, who have to be raised for 18 years, at a great expense to the rest of us and especially their parents…never mind all the old people who, regardless of their past contributions to the economy and tax purse, are a drain for decades with no hope of returns in the future. We don’t suggest culling the latter or restricting the birth of the former, because that’d be a nonsense restriction on basic human freedoms and our understanding of how people still wind up contributing to our country. Hell, we don’t administer the death penalty to the absolute worst prisoners and we let the large majority out at some point. Given that, immigrants easily clear our bar for acceptable membership in society.
When I watch these arguments, there are no statistics or even basic analysis like I’m doing here. There are just claims that illegal immigration causes this and that, and any five year old can claim the sky is pink for all the good that’ll do reality. These are not arguments exercising free speech to convince others, they are simply repeating something in the hope this makes it true. As the populist lot are rightly fond of telling us, we shouldn't trust politicians. They're well-paid, powerful liars selling us a load of goods. The politicians who tell us not to trust the other politicians aren't exempted from that judgement just because their broken clock is right twice a day. I’ll expand later on this, but for now it just needs saying that politicians don’t bother doing even the most basic setup with their anti-immigrant arguments.
Of course, plenty of politicians who argue we need to lower immigration levels, as well as average people on the street, are happy to say we should cherrypick those immigrants whose skills we need while keeping up low-skilled labour. The obvious rejoinder is that this ignores the migrants we need to do jobs that most people simply refuse to, like fruit picking. It’s weird how often this is overlooked because nativists usually love to rag on young people for not being willing to get out there and work like they did back in their day, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.
Even putting that aside, the likely result of anti-immigrant sentiment rising, if it delivers any policy change, is blunt instruments: a large overall decrease, both because anti-immigrant populist voters aren't waiting to listen to politicians explain how the immigrants still coming are totes fine and valuable - that's just a liberal establishment thing to do! - and because if a country becomes known as a toxic anti-immigration hub, the quality of available migrants will decrease as those with the most options, i.e the most skilled and best-resourced, will say "no thanks, I'm moving to Canada instead".
Of course, anti-immigrant sentiment often doesn't even get results. Many thousands of Kiwi voters have been choosing Winston Peters and his dire warnings against immigrants since the mid-90s, and lo and behold, not once has he achieved a cut in immigration from the year prior. At most, he's encouraged Labour's worst instincts to slow the rate of increase, which I doubt his voters would consider a victory.
Yet again, it’s reasonable establishment compromise over maximalist fantasies of closing the border and taking the country back to the way things used to be. But these voters keep picking Winston to cut immigration. This is empty politics - no impact but antagonism and a worse social environment for immigrants, as simply existing as a person of a given race is treated as harming the country.
There are two actual legitimate arguments against immigration I can think of. One is that immigration is not what it sells itself as being to happy-clappy liberals like me - a life changing opportunity for people struggling to make it overseas to find their true calling here - because of everything I've said about skills and resources. The well off and well connected can afford to make the move; the global poor cannot. We’re merely facilitating the tax-dodging rich while holding up barriers against the poor - indeed, we are draining other countries of their brightest minds who’ve been fortunate enough to go to university.
You could argue about the legitimacy of this argument for other rich, attractive states. I would argue against brain drain that "brains" are often being simply wasted in many developing countries. For instance, if you are smart, caring, hard-working and well-educated in Nigeria, your realistic choices are very likely 1) make a lot of money for yourself, 2) try in vain to change a political system full of corrupt and exploitative rich people mistreating and neglecting an enormous number of poor people for personal gain - it's a collective action problem, how can any one hero make a difference in the face of mass indifference? - or 3) emigrate. This isn’t to dismiss all the people who do amazing work for others across the world; it’s simply an uphill battle in some countries.
However, from a New Zealand perspective, it’s a moot point. Our impact is utterly negligible on, for instance, India; we can let in all the rich businessmen and genius graduates we like and we wouldn't dent a sliver of a horsehair of a percentage of a percentage. And established powerbrokers and wealthmongers are likelier to stay where they are, where they can continue to exert their influence, rather than uproot themselves to countries with a nicer lifestyle for the upper class but without the same mansions-Cadillacs-and-servants viability for the 1%. We bring in more of people with brains, moxie and the desire to make a difference than scions of ultra-wealthy houses.
In New Zealand, we can get the most out of some of these people - and they know it, that’s why they chose to come here over all the other countries or staying where they are! Even if we play down our universities compared to some other countries like the US, we can offer different perspectives on a range of issues that students educated elsewhere won’t have, and resources make resources: well-educated, productive people coming to a wealthy Western country like ours is the nucleus of generation of jobs and technology.
The classic example is that the US letting in random Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali meant his son, Steve Jobs, was born in San Fran and, in Silicon Valley, founded Apple’s $3.2 trillion value to humanity. After all, the argument is not merely one about resources and skills, but also cultural: immigrant families tend to come at problems with more motivation and creativity than the average twentieth-generationer.
The concern with this that stands valid is the “Iranian nuclear scientist drives a taxi” problem, where letting in skilled immigrants who are not guaranteed to access skilled roles (particularly if those roles don’t exist in our economy, period) results in a mismatch. Granted, we also get this with native citizens due to our surfeit of degrees, and we can hopefully find a place that suits for them, like in this example lecturers or researchers. Nonetheless, I’ll concede that this is an example of why you do need policy targeted to the economy’s needs, not a too-broad points system that can be maxed out by inapplicable skills.
The second legitimate argument against immigration is the “Oh, that’s not-” school of thought, inspired by Kelly Osbourne's infamously clumsy critique of Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric: "If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to clean your toilets, Donald Trump?" Basically, a consensus concept between well-off liberal white collars and rich conservatives of migrants as all there to do the yucky grunt labour we don't want to do - treating immigrants as an underclass. These immigrants are not high-skill and well-resourced; they probably didn’t go to university and they’re being brought in because they’re willing to take on the crap jobs.
The “dignity of work” is a nice aspiration to talk about, but working class people regularly do deeply undignified work, because that’s the work that’s available for them and their families to get by on. This is just like how people will make sacrifices in their living conditions below a minimum acceptable level because it’s what they can physically afford. Let people make that choice to come do tough, shitty work themselves - don’t restrict them out of a well meaning sense of paternalism. Somebody has to do these jobs and we’re better served by ensuring they are fairly compensated and receive appropriate health and safety protections and so on than pretending we can magic these jobs out of existence.
The state should focus on targeting e.g exploitation and trafficking that minimise choice and maximise harm for migrants, rather than condescendingly making choices about what jobs are right for people, especially when you consider the relative nature of the world: not only are both crap jobs and poor living standards in NZ better than middle-class life overseas, but even when inverted.
Take, for example, Indian citizens living comfortably who can afford servants because there’s so much cheap labour. They find themselves doing hard manual labour when they migrate here: that’s a clear sacrifice in living conditions. Yet you can still see a clear upside, which is that our currency, sent back as remittances overseas, is worth a lot more than the equivalent salary they’d be making in India. If an immigrant’s family are gonna be unappreciative about the sacrifices they’re making to support the family, then…that’s very human family drama, not a state regulatory matter.
Yes, when this logic gets to Gulf State levels it’s simply unacceptable - coercing second-class citizens to die of heat exhaustion to build hollow skyscrapers is a human rights violation, not a libertarian fulfilment of human autonomy. Time for a sense check, though: we have much better labour laws than that. Our exploitation exists but at the edges, not wholesale and typically not to such an extreme extent. (See: Darleen Tana’s lovingly crafted manipulation of her workers.) We are not above criticism from immigrants and refugees but we are a good enough country that we should let the principle that people should live their own lives rule for immigrants, not just native-born citizens.
Does that mean we should go full open borders?
I was reading recently about a fascinating example of this - Côte d'Ivoire. No, they didn’t literally go open-border no-legal-process just-walk-in. However, Côte d'Ivoire not only held onto a lot of that aforementioned colonial infrastructure to retain French citizens, but made immigration so easy from surrounding West African countries like Liberia and Mali that, at the peak, fully a third of the population were immigrants. (Granted, part of FHB’s motives may have been exploiting xenophobia as a way to unite the native-born population.)
Lo and behold, the world kept on turning and the policy brought many benefits…but, past a certain point, unemployment rose and slums developed. I don’t have a more precise statistical study to work with, here, but I mention this to illustrate a point. If you let in more people than there is sufficient capital to support expansion to employ, then you haven’t done them any favours. Immigrants come on the expectation of work, and when there’s no work then that’s a lose-lose. Long-term unemployed people also uprooted from their homes and sidelined by society tend to be predictive for a range of problems, the classic one being the issues surrounding slums.
Still, there’s a lot of latitude within that “let in the number of people that there is sufficient capital to support expansion to employ” statement. Put less wordily, “how many immigrants does the economy need to maximise its current potential?” I’ve been reading about Spain recently (After The Fall by Tobias Beck - I recommend it, I’d never been interested in Spain until he gave his perspective) and it’s a really instructive example.
In the boom years before the GFC hit, from 1999 to 2010 as construction surged across Spain, the population grew from 40 million to 47 million, driven by 5 million non-Spaniards - foreigners exploding from 2% to 12% of the population, from Ecuador to Morocco. Once again, history spoke: just as countries like New Zealand can welcome English speakers from former British colonies across the world, so can Spain access the vast pool of Latin American migrants ready to speak the language and share the culture.
And although the idea of boom years accompanied by a drive for housing to house them may set off alarm bells, not only can one hardly blame the crisis on immigrants instead of the regulators and politicians who failed to properly brace the banking system, but immigrants proved remarkably capable of finding win-wins in this time of crisis. Communities rallied to look after their own instead of adding to state dependency - for instance, high trust within the Castilian Chinese community enabled cheap and easy loans between one another to keep expanding businesses and taking on Spanish employees, such that Chinese immigration actually grew during the Great Recession.
And those who sadly couldn’t hack it just…went home, right! They’re migrants! They’re from somewhere else they have citizenship in, and if they’re sitting around unemployed with no luck, a whole lot of them will simply use their citizenship to go back where they came from until better days arrive, at which point they’ll come right back because there’s work for them. I don’t know how many times I can say that lots of people are quite good at figuring out what the smart financial decision is and pursuing that, and the easier we make it for them to go through with their choice, the better. (Think how much value we get from New Zealanders who move abroad then return years later with their skills and resources!)
Despite Spain’s extensive history since the Reconquista and expulsion of Jews as a key part of European narratives around repelling the outsider, Spain proved largely welcoming to immigrants and disinclined to blame them for Spain’s persistent economic woes since the crisis. An exhaustive study found, out of an immigrant sample averaging the age of 18, just 5% said they experienced discrimination “sometime or many times”.
So, open borders is not quiiite optimal, though the Schengen Area certainly is bloody cool. Probably a helpful factor in that is that, besides the political and cultural realities that Europeans are likelier to help each other out instead of permitting slum situations to develop as we see in Paris and so on, there are considerable linguistic similarities that make it easier for new workers to integrate and apply. To continue the example, Spain has a large Romanian population who arrived through the Schengen Area and rapidly picked up Spanish, another Romance language. But one can overstate it - there’s also a large Chinese population and everybody knows how many worlds away Spanish is from Mandarin, Cantonese et al.
Immigration levels should be set based not on a fear of some perceived harm, but as much as we can allow before it fails to meet that win-win criteria of “there’ll be jobs for them and therefore benefits for us” anymore. That can be set pretty high! The USA is a great example of getting, like, a bajillion immigrants over time and winning big for it…with the big, big caveat that this was a win for all those settlers and new arrivals after, not so much for all the different Native American peoples.
Another argument against this logic, to expand on the earlier theme of “GDP per capita goes down due to the same resources being split between fewer people”, is that the wins of GDP and tax can’t fix every problem, like housing. Whatever tax is made off of Eritrean cleaners and Indian data analysts can’t make Kiwibuild work. Migrants can only affect these problems by providing a burden on these resources. Ergo, we should limit migration.
Weirdly, this is an argument that often comes from the left, like Labour in NZ and elsewhere, even though its internal logic is right-wing: that government, properly funded by increased tax revenues, is ineffective at making headway on the issues. Some left-wingers love to deride immigration as a way to enable neoliberal growth, which leads to all sorts of analysis along the lines of, “GDP may have grown under National in the 2010s but that’s only because they propped up the economy with immigration”.
I fucking hope so!!!
How would you rather they grow GDP? Oil and gas exploration??
Any day of the week I’ll take immigration over half a hundred other sacrifices you could offer on the growth altar! Unless you seriously want to argue that an immigrant from Antigua and Barbuda will create more emissions here than in their home country - true, but at that point down the rabbit hole you’re nearing the “cull the elderly, zero child policy” limit - I think we can safely discard these weird “growth bad, immigration is fraudulent economics” arguments. One way or another, if we want poverty and unemployment to go down, we need growth, and letting more people come fund the government’s programs sounds like an attractive deal to me.
Yes, I concede there inevitably has to be some tradeoff. I’d like to see more stats on that; again, I reiterate that the anti-immigration crowd never provides any to work with. But logically more people do increase, for instance, quantity demanded for housing, increasing house prices and decreasing the odds somebody who has lived in NZ and given to us for a while will be able to buy a house rather than a rich businessman who arrived yesterday.
They’re just not the main cause of problems. Housing as an investment being snapped up and charged extortionate prices for is caused by everything from NIMBY regulations to the lack of a capital gains tax. Just as putting money into homebuyers’ hands hasn’t solved the housing crisis, because it’s a demand-side solution, so too can depressing quantity demanded not solve the crisis. It’d help, but it is absolutely ridiculously unserious politics to suggest it’d solve the crisis, never mind that effort and attention should go towards that rather than dry, boring, vitally important stuff like RMA reform. This is a classic example of how what’s glitzy and glamorous grabs voters more than common sense solutions: hence why Phil Twyford in the mid 2010s put effort into dogwhistling against immigrants to win votes instead of figuring out how on God’s RMA-ridden earth Kiwibuild was going to work in government.
Housing can’t be fixed by demand-side changes, but as I’ve argued before, immigrants contribute to supply-side solutions. As I stated earlier, taking a bat to immigration will lose us some of our most skilled builders, plumbers, glaziers et al. Other issues can be fixed by demand-side changes without needing to meddle on immigration at all. For instance, when it comes to “immigrants taking our jobs”, instead of bringing in fewer immigrants (some of whom will be teachers, professors, trainers etc.), why not focus on upskilling NZers to compete?
We can’t screw our future for the now. Action for the environment and against climate change honestly do require short term tradeoffs that materially hurt working people, and working-class and poor people and minorities the most. We will be bitterly regretting not making those sacrifices in the interest of our future if we leave ourselves the time in inaction to look back on them.
Indeed, if climate change is the great future-thinking issue of the natural world, I’d argue migration is for the human world. Just as we can’t say let’s burn oil and gas out the nines to afford to reduce poverty, so we can’t say let’s kill our population intake in the long term so that a few more people on the margins get homes months sooner and finish paying off their mortgages years sooner.
Speaking of which, we have to talk population growth. I’m not trying to be weird about it, because, let’s be real, people who take up the subject usually get very weird about it. (I’m not linking the “premier pronatalists” article because I don’t want to subject anyone to that, but if you’ve read it…yeah…this topic makes anybody who sets it as a high priority lose all sensibility.) But we do need to sustain population growth. Besides the aforementioned points around GDP and productivity, we have to keep our population pyramid balanced.
What I mean by that is that right now, across the West and other rich societies like South Korea and Japan, we have a huge top-heavy bulge of baby boomers who need taxpayers to afford their pensions, high healthcare costs and so on. We also have falling birth rates, due both to increases in women’s rights and autonomy and in average wealth, and so we have a bottom-light cohort coming through who will struggle to support them without huge increases in productivity. And NZ is not known as a high-productivity economy, by the standards of the West. Immigration balances out the middle and bottom of the pyramid by bringing in people ready to work right away, and adding to the size of future generations.
Legal immigration is good for individuals who get to enjoy life here. It’s good for our country, which becomes richer and more sustainable. And it’s good for the world, because we can lean into our comparative advantage by putting out products and innovations in sectors like agriculture that benefit the world - for instance, technology invented by immigrants that reduces emissions. The alternative of sacrificing immediate progress due to a dream of fixing everything ever, if only we didn’t have immigrants adding to demand, is naive.
But also…Western countries like us are only gonna be the only premier destinations for so long, right? The world’s changing rapidly - just look at China for advances in living standards over a few decades - and as these countries are advancing relatively rapidly compared to us, the gap will close and reasons to move to NZ will shrink. Let’s not overstate it: we have a unique lifestyle to offer here, from our strong human rights to our environmental condition and access. Plenty of countries in regions like sub-Saharan Africa are considerably less developed than China et al. and the gap will take a lot longer to start significantly closing.
On the other hand, it is an unpredictable world! Past patterns aren’t guaranteed to hold in the future; we are an attractive destination right now and lots of people overseas can move, but who knows what might change. In particular, what happens when the governments of rich and high-skill but less welcoming countries like Japan get their heads out of their asses and realise they should start bringing in immigrants by the boatload? Indeed, we’ve already started to see that shift under Fumio Kishida.
We need to be moving early and hard on the opportunity that immigration presents, especially because of how population builds on itself, especially especially because most immigrants will have higher average birth rates than native-born citizens. Again, not trying to be weird about birth rates here, we shouldn’t try doing any weird policy meddling in that department, but it’s simply very likely that well-off Kiwis will continue to see our fertility rates drop in the coming decades, and precisely because we avoid weird policy meddling we don’t have another population solution in mind.
At absolute most, we should allow for solving the housing crisis in the next decade with our immigration continuing to grow at the rates of the past fifteen years, then, once we’re seeing house prices start to drop across the country, hit go. I can imagine no other reason to delay. To go from analysis to vibes here, to support immigration is a fundamentally optimistic perspective: that the good of permitting humans to come and make their homes and livelihoods here the same as the rest of us leads to more good.
Anti immigration mentalities are fundamentally pessimistic and narrow-minded, fearfully defending an ever-shrinking pie and watch the rest of the world enjoy more success than us. And it’s difficult - doable, but difficult - to manage to sell such a sour mindset when it comes to legal immigration. Yet people are so able to be whipped up into that thinking, and particularly overseas compared to New Zealand, because of the spectre of…
⚡Illegal Immigration⚡
Illegal immigration is rare in New Zealand and I hope I’ve made the case enough already that we should let in lots of immigrants here. We certainly shouldn’t try to get tough on illegal immigration - that way lies Australia’s “stop the boats” nonsense and a repeat of the terrible mistakes of the Dawn Raids - but, as stated, we should try to reduce trafficking and exploitation in our own backyard, because that happens here as everywhere, and requires serious policy responses, not the occasional sensational trend about the matter.
Illegal immigration, however, is well worth discussing in terms of, as we circle back around to where we began in this article: Europe and the USA, amongst others. The USA has a huge number of illegal immigrants. American society has made itself extraordinarily attractive to migrants the world over, and for all those without resources to make it in legally, many still want to come. And despite several million illegal immigrants making it around the law…the USA still lives. Use your common sense: if they haven’t hurt the country yet, they never will. It’s ground zero for testing the impacts of illegal immigration, and the results are “yeah they just skipped the queue then got on with life like everybody else”.
The portrayal of illegal immigrants as way disproportionately criminals just can’t stick the landing. When you risk being deported and lack recourse if things get out of hand, crime has added consequences for you compared to native-born Americans. Indeed, crime disproportionately hurts illegal immigrants by either directly exploiting and targeting them due to that lack of recourse or inadvertently drawing heat to them. And Crime 101 is knowing it’s in the state’s interest to offer misdemeanour criminals a way out, because otherwise they can become cogs in the machine of far worse criminal organisations.
You’ve got to ask yourself as well why the worst critics of illegal immigration have failed to stop it. Why has Trump failed to fix the border? Because building a wall is some Wile E. Coyote level shit. Never mind “Mexico will pay for it”. Metaphorical my ass, that was some next-level cope from Trump voters thinking that’d happen. Indeed, the lurid framing of the border is not really accurate at all. America’s illegal immigrants are mostly overstayers who defrauded the immigration terms they legally entered under.
“Stop the boats” hasn’t worked, whichever Prime Minister proposes it. The Rwanda Plan is a farce. Everywhere you look, just as with “tough on crime” approaches, you see the failures of crackdowns on illegal immigration. Just as with “tough on crime” you have to go full El Salvador and jail everybody to see a real impact, so too with illegal immigration would you have to outdo the Germans along the Normandy beaches if you wanted to end the Channel crossings. This even the furthest right Western governments will not do, because their hands are tied by our innate liberalism, and they are left to drift along as rudderless populists without a program of government.
The main reason for this is blindingly fucking obvious: how on earth are any deterrents that border patrol can prepare supposed to outweigh living conditions in El Salvador, Syria and so on? This isn’t the case for everybody, but for so many illegal immigrants, they are fleeing high rates of violence, scary lack of opportunity and so on. We are the ones who make the legal pathways strict, not just for immigration but for seeking refuge, so families forced to weigh up their choices roll the dice on illegal immigration over gangs and pistols or government gassings.
And, crucially, many migrants suffer from a critical lack of information that leads to them simply having to believe in their best hopes about the United States or another rich, peaceful society on the horizon. Definitionally, they are on the move and under pressure, not exactly always able to sit down and carefully rationally consider whether to sell their house in Damascus and get a moving van to Strasbourg.
They typically speak different languages from those in the countries they are going to, so at most what they’re learning about those countries’ policies, approaches and attitudes is second hand, and immigration and refuge policy is notoriously opaque and difficult in the first place. And those nefarious people smugglers have every incentive and ability to lie to them and leave them in the dark - indeed, as we have seen, often to their awful deaths - to make money off their misfortune. They are delivered from the hands of one kind of gang to another on our watch.
The best thing to do is to try to make their home countries better, whether that looks like the USA investing in ending conflict and finding youth work in Central America or the UK and France not destabilising the Middle East then whining when people flee their wreckage. (This is a cheap shot, I accept the R2P arguments for why the West attacked Gaddafi, but like…Iraq…what on earth…) All our states should evaluate a crackdown on illegal immigration the way we do all victimless crimes: where do we still need to draw the line versus allowing for amnesty and change, and where is our enforcement doing more harm than good?
As it stands, policy against illegal immigration has been a shambles across the West. We have enabled people smugglers by talking a big game about safe routes without providing them. We engage in utter daftness like the Rwanda Plan because we’d rather delude ourselves than tell the voters “yeah no that’s not gonna work”. And we oversee the humanitarian failures of Triton and so on, where we decide the value of the lives of migrant families, again and again, is not worth putting some taxpayer cash into boats. We do have an obligation to protect even criminals, because justice is impartial, blind, and fair, not left to the whims of people smugglers and the elements, least of all against children, the sick and disabled and so on.
If we want to take back control over immigration, we do that best through a legal system. That way, migrants have to share their information with us, and we can make decisions around them that best suit the allocations our economy needs. Ergo, we should expand legal immigration as the more effective way to reduce illegal immigration compared to crackdowns. Obviously, due to my earlier logic around resources, access to legal immigration won’t include all illegal immigrants, but as mentioned some of the immigrants we let in come not with the best skills but with the willingness to do the hard yards. That’s the angle. So why not take the sensible solution? And, frankly, why is immigration such a heated issue? Why is my (mostly!) dispassionate tone and slightly dry lecture on economics not the nature of the discourse?
The Nasty Part
Have I mentioned yet that I don’t trust politicians?
Let’s return to the point about what serves their interests. Demonising immigrants wins over that voter base, not only directly but also by fueling narratives against globalisation and elites “trying to replace us”. It’s a way to stick up a middle finger to the changing world and to dry economic logic over what everyday people feel. The downside of campaigning against immigrants as a politician is minimal for the following reasons:
Lots of immigrants can’t vote, because they haven’t lived in the country long enough.
Even if they can vote against these parties, plenty of immigrant families are disconnected from the political process, either because they’re solely invested in events back home or they feel uprooted and detached from countries in general.
Even if they are engaged in the process, plenty of immigrants are fond of populism anyway, such as many naming tough on crime policy as a high priority, and lots of immigrants resent and dislike other immigrants too! This can be for general nativist reasons, but more specifically a sense that illegal immigrants are jumping the queue they went through fair and square, with all the effort and cost that entailed to them. This is similar to, for instance, complaints from graduates who have paid down their student debt about student debt cancellation in the USA etc.
Even if they want to vote against these parties, the political scene may not offer them a clear pro-immigrant party with a viable shot, let alone one that in practice will actually get to and try to implement pro-immigrant policy.
Even if they have an opportunity to vote against these parties, if you are an immigrant or descendant who can vote, you have…already immigrated. You can’t necessarily change the most for yourself, and you may well rank other priorities high above immigration - you very probably do, in fact.
Even if all the immigrants unite into a beautiful rainbow coalition against Winston Peters, there are only so many immigrants and not exactly many countries where they approach even a plurality.
Much like with trade protectionism, there’s very little gain for its proponents. (Remember, there was a time where “free trade” was a policy idea which freaked voters out, even though it’s the norm today. Might “free movement” go the same way? The Schengen Area tentatively suggests so!) It’s therefore easier for parties who aren’t particularly anti-immigrant to get dragged to the anti- side, to compete for votes or at least neutralise the issue.
Any fantasies of long-term population change being the plan are put to paid the moment you remember how infamously short-termist and self-interested politicians are - they’re not sticking around for a millennia to see the Grand Plan come to fruition, and the old lords who do are the xenophobic racists because they’re old boomers. How on earth are Republicans treating Joe “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent” Biden like Mister Open Borders?
Anti-immigrant sentiment helps itself by being highly selective. It typically ignores white immigrants from rich Western countries whose governments might care about efforts to impede their movement. Instead, it singles out immigrants from “unsafe” or “unskilled” countries, even though, as I’ve discussed, immigrants tend to tick boxes for why they’re less likely to commit crime and more likely to than the rest of us, and these things all depend on our environments, not some innate racial character, because...that’s racism, not analysis.
Look at the notorious British resentment of the stereotypical “Polish plumber” who speaks imperfect English, and how the tipping point driving the Brexit vote was a fear that Turkey would be admitted to the EU and Muslim people of colour might migrate to Britain in large numbers. Look at how the largest foreign born population in NZ by a mile are from England, with Australia and South Africa at #5 and #6 - obviously, not only white people immigrate from these white-majority countries, but clearly a pass is given to white-majority countries and their mostly white immigrants in the eyes of anti-immigrant advocates, because you never hear a word against them. (Okay, you hear a few words against the Saffas and a lot against the Aussies, but that’s because the Boks and the Bies take the L so regularly.)
There is no informed decision being made here, no genuine analysis of people or society or economics. These arguments rely on “you have to see it”, “common sense”, “it’s going to get crowded” and all manner of other pithy statements they expect to magically disintegrate all opposition. Like, no! You can’t just make your fantasies up and expect us to buy the sandwich you’re selling. Prove it! If it’s so obvious, that’d be easy to do, right? But they never do.
Yeah, it’s racism. Aided by politicians and abetted by the media, and most of all social media, which produces some awfully toxic stuff that plenty of viewers and commenters lap right up like it’s a good use of their day. These arguments always have something uniquely bad to point out about immigrants - that they commit more crime, which I’ve dealt with, or, also, that they’re bigots or would-be oppressors, be it towards gay people or with sharia law.
Newsflash: native-born Westerners also hold dogshit attitudes towards their fellow people! My immigrant ethnic community regularly reminisce about white minority rule, advocate for violence and oppression to resolve issues, and predict race wars and all manner of social disharmony from women and the LGBT+ community having freedom. Are you going to fucking deport me and mine? No, you’re bloody well not!
Because it was never about trying to cooperate towards a more inclusive society, just defending your way of life instead of having to grow and adjust. Never on my life do I hear any fair and equal application of this perspective; there’s always something menacing about people of colour that there isn’t about whites. (Hell, while racism can fly in all directions depending on the context, even in majority-POC societies like Japan, white immigrants generally seem to get a pass compared to e.g Koreans.)
Because this is such a fundamentally boomer argument - and it’s nuts how many young Europeans are buying into this retrograde crap, like, what’s in it for you? Analog clocks and Elvis? - they miss one of the most obvious facts that anybody can see simply by existing as a young person outside a homogenous community: young people generally get along and emphasise our individual lives and common humanity over any ethnic or religious differences; indeed, we’re the generation most interested in understanding and finding the merits in these differences.
Whenever I hear the latest screed about immigrants’ malicious electoral or social plan, all I can picture in my mind is some hypothetical middle-aged Turkish guy moaning about women these days while his kids roll their eyes and say “sure, dad”, because, just like xenophobia, just like “back in my day” sentiments, this is the trend through the generations: us younger ones grow and evolve and build a better future. Not perfect, we’ll find our own ways to nostalgia it up and be stuck in the mud when we’re older, but we will step forward. The “worst case” immigrants coming in won’t be sharia law child trafficking masterminds - they’ll be kinda bigoted boomers and illegal cigarette factory entrepreneurs, just like we get from amongst our own native-born population. And, needless to say, they won’t exactly be a representative slice.
Just as I’m trying not to be weird about putting immigrant POC on a pillar as a different kind of wunderhuman instead of just people like anybody else, I’m not trying to dismiss that, ya know, racism, bias and all that exist at all ages. Both towards and from immigrants. Some young immigrants are chauvinists, zealots, or general jerks, same as any of us. But these qualities are much rarer in each successive generation, as kids grow up in a more secular, liberal society than their grandparents did and adjust accordingly…especially because, if they want to look back towards their heritage, that country has probably also gotten more liberal!!
The future of the West will be more diverse, which is cool and promises less division, but it’s not the end of racism and nor should that simple fact be used as a way to impede anti-racism efforts. The more we limit that future and slow our diversification, the more we sentence ourselves to decline, the older generations dragging us down with them. All in the name of finding kahoots with the far-right fringe about “preserving white society” instead of being normal about other humans.
The last wave of widespread racial violence that NZ saw was settler colonialism. The hate that has stayed with us all through our modern democracy, that NZFirst especially feeds on, is a rejection of human progress - a claim that resources are scarce, we can’t share, and they aren’t human. At its most extreme, this takes the form of far right premonitions across Europe and all over the internet of race war, sharia law and all the rest. So, so much on the internet. The internet didn’t invent this brain rot but it certainly can’t be good for the people who live in that white wonderland.
There’ll be no such transformation. Peace and stability will reign, this is obvious to anybody who isn’t an armchair pundit (xd). However, there is the threat of violence on an individual level: hate crimes that make an entire community feel unsafe. And paranoia about immigrants does its own damage. This is why official government institutions with serious resources to work with spied on Muslims, taking out a terrible gamble against an immigrant community instead of trying to protect them.
Every day, would-be migrants make the choice of whether to go and where to go, and we gotta open up options for as many of them as possible. We need a permanent pro-immigrant political consensus like we’ve tried to forge on climate change. We need to ensure that NZFirst’s imminent demise is the end of anti-immigrant rhetoric making it anywhere: the Overton Window should narrow to simple economic discussions around the rate of increase. We gotta look after our migrants better and particularly refugees.
And across our country, we have to change ideas, away from weird notions - negative or positive - about migrants, to one that centres the idea that, born here or elsewhere, whatever ethnicity or faith or anything else, we have in common our humanity. Not just in a humanitarian, philosophical sense, but that the foibles and strengths of humanity manifest in all our different groups, and there’s no exclusion. A migrant can be flawed - indeed, will be flawed - because they are human. No individual immigrant is a magic silver bullet to all our problems; instead, immigrants are promising simply because humans are promising. Insofar as we differ, frankly, difference is cool and we are well served by understanding it.
The alternative is constructing a countrywide safe space for racist boomers, the kind who will never question my right to own a home or how I tax the country’s resources, only my Taiwanese neighbour’s or my Indian-Irish politician’s or my Zimbabwean peers. It’s not about building a better NZ to them; it’s just that a face a different shade from mine, a new language, a foreign festival makes them uncomfortable, and like petulant little children they want it to stop instead of growing up. Safe spaces are one thing on a university campus or in a club. They’re another thing altogether as the foundation for our entire socioeconomic future. Aotearoa New Zealand is special. We are an extraordinary country and a great nation and I love it here. Let’s keep it that way.
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