At the edge of empire: 40 years of immigration in New Zealand

Aotearoa New Zealand is home to people from more than 200 birthplaces who speak around 150 languages between them, according to the 2023 New Zealand Census.

This diversity reflects an immigration system that has transformed over the past four decades from a racially exclusive one, underpinned by ideas of empire and colonisation, into an economically exclusive one, as a new book, co-written by University of Auckland Professor of Sociology Francis Collins, explains.

Written with Professor Alan Gamlen (Australian National University) and Dr Neil Vallelly (University of Otago), Edges of Empire: The Politics of Immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980–2020 (Auckland University Press, 2025) draws on frank interviews with 15 former ministers of immigration, including the likes of Kerry Burke, Bill Birch, Lianne Dalziel and Michael Woodhouse, as well as extensive archival and academic sources.

Collins says New Zealand’s migration system is now based on ideas of liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal economics, and geopolitical reorientation towards Asia and the Pacific.

“Since the 1980s, our immigration policy has moved from explicitly favouring ‘traditional’ source countries, like the UK and Ireland, to promoting a nominally multicultural intake that has included immigrants from countries like India, China, the Philippines and South Africa, among others,” he says.

However, he says this shift has also introduced new hierarchies, where selection is based less on ethnicity and more on skills and perceived economic value.

“While selecting for skills seems fairer, it’s frequently discriminatory as well, favouring a nurse from the UK, for example, for whom English is a first language, and whose qualifications are recognised here, over a nurse from the Philippines, whose qualifications are not recognised.”

One of the most striking developments has been the rise of temporary migration.

“Permanent settlement has been replaced by a preference for temporary visas," he says, "and many migrants now find themselves ‘permanently temporary’, contributing to New Zealand’s labour and education markets without the security of long-term inclusion, which has led to some well-documented incidences of worker exploitation, in terms of both pay and conditions.”

He says from the mid-2000s onward, temporary visa categories, like student visas, working holiday visas, and essential skills work visas, surpassed permanent residency as the main form of entry.

And then there’s been the constant traffic across the Tasman; in 2024, for example, New Zealand recorded a net migration loss of 30,000 people to Australia, the highest in more than a decade.

Collins says the trans-Tasman migration connection is both an economic lifeline and a source of recurring tension.

“Because we share one of the most open borders in the world, New Zealand and Australia routinely copy and adapt each other’s policies.”

He says New Zealand has also acted as a laboratory for international migration policy.

“Concepts such as multiculturalism, the points system and seasonal labour programmes have been refined here in New Zealand before being adopted abroad.”

Despite the pace of change, he says immigration policymaking in New Zealand has been marked more by continuity than rupture.

“Both major parties have pursued incremental reforms,” says Collins, “while officials, experts and business groups have played an outsized role in shaping the system.”

He says that by contrast to Europe or the US, where migration is a flashpoint that can topple governments and cause major social upheaval – as it is currently with white nationalist protests in the UK – immigration in New Zealand has become part of the ‘national common sense;’ despite being routinely used as a political football by parties like New Zealand First, particularly at election time to drum up populist votes.

“That stability has benefits,” he says, “but it does bring up hard questions about rights and working conditions for temporary migrants for example, and inequality and inclusion, which are often left unasked.”

Something that has remained entirely absent from the immigration decision-making process over the years, says Collins, is the country’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi; ironically, as it can be said to the first such document to officially address the issue of immigration to Aotearoa.

“While the present government is rolling back progress on Te Tiriti, any substantive rethink of immigration policy needs to start with the obligations that are laid out in the making of Aotearoa New Zealand.

“That means Māori having a real voice in what immigration policy looks like and reconsideration of the values that underpin the arrival and inclusion of people in this country," he says.

Edges of Empire will be of interest to policymakers, scholars, and anyone wanting to understand how migration has transformed Aotearoa New Zealand in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.