The number of work and residence visas being approved both surged to record highs in March.
The latest figures from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment show 32,607 work visas were approved in March this year, up from 12,579 in February and 12,864 in March last year. (Immigration NZ sits under the MBIE umbrella).
The previous record for any month of the year was 24,261 work visas approved in March 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, according to MBIE figures dating back to July 2011.
In percentage terms there has been an even bigger increase in the number of residence visas being approved, with 13,206 approvals issued in March.
March was the third month in a row that residence visa approvals have hit a fresh high, rising from 3684 in December last year to 10,806 in January this year, 11,793 in February and 13,206 in March.
The previous record for residence visa approvals in any month of the year was 5121 in May 2016.
That takes the total number of residence visas approved in the first quarter of this year to almost 36,000, compared to about 32,000 in the whole of last year.
It's likely that most of the new residence visas were approved under the special 2021 Residence Visa Scheme set up by the Government last year, to fast track residency for people who had already been in New Zealand on work visas for most of the previous three years.
However while the number of work and residence visas has ramped up considerably in the last few months, the number of student visas being approved continues to languish, with just 603 new (not renewals) student visas issued in March this year, down from the monthly peak of 3186 issued in March 2019.
MBIE estimates there were 36,570 people in NZ on student visas at the end of March, down form the peak of 86,115 in October 2019.
That means foreign student numbers have declined by almost 50,000 (-58%) in the last three and half years.
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46 Comments
here we go ... the money printers that went brrrr are now immigration pumps that go frrrr
The idiots in Parliament believe our economy reeling with a cost-push inflation needs tens of thousands of new consumers each month!
Bring more competition for basic resources already in short-supply, what is the worse that could happen?
Crikey...National and Labour have really melded together into one entity, it seems: Keep house prices up, wages down, immigration running hot.
24,000 jobs available on trade me.
185,000 on the job seeker benefit.
But the good news is the additional visas can access our depleted/insufficient/failing infrastructure - health, housing & education etc..
Can you please find some engineers and builders in that list of 185,000?
All those who want to work, are able to work, and are qualified/competent are working.
We aren't going to lift our education standard by training people on the dole to teach high school maths.
INZ has for a long time outsourced the responsibility of bringing engineers, builders and other skills to employers.
Surely these businesses have NZ's best interest in mind, and will not exploit migration policies just to get around training locals and to suppress local wages.
You underestimate Kiwis Tokyo,
The trade me advertised jobs that are specialised are few and are repetitive, anyone can learn them, some roles only require minimal maths if any! English they have, compared to many immigrants. NZ Industry and Education should be coordinating with each other to ensure correct skill supply.
It's always best to invest in local people on a productive path of self development to improve the standard of their life, whanau and community; rather than burdening/costing the tax payer on the dole.
Immigrants taking Kiwis jobs is short term thinking - unemployment grows. Many immigrants end up on the job and sickness benefit, Council and Government housing and cause many problems - illegal activities violence/murder, laundering money, drugs etc..
There was a day I felt this.
I took local people on, some that seemed like they needed a chance. Paid them 20% above market rate, helped them navigate things in their personal lives. The drop out and failure rate was through the roof.
I don't really know how to fix some of these social problems but most of them set in stone from the age of about 12, is the current understanding.
Employment gives better outcomes but jobs in and of themselves won't fix people.
There ain't enough capable workers to support the economy, open the gates
You do realise they’re taxpayers right? If infrastructure and services aren’t keeping up, that’s a political choice.
For all the talk of "build back better" here we are, doing the same things we've always done but hoping for different results.
So predictable it's immigration by stealth. More consumers more houses it just keeps the failing economy proped up. Problem is nothing will save it this time.
And the floodgates are open once again! Didn't Labour say they were going to take a more circumspect approach to immigration? But then, what they say and what they do are 2 different things.
I believe this is the backlog of people who had applied and worked here for a while. There was a recent announcement.
The cavalry to the rescue?
We need more specialists in just about every field in New Zealand. Partly to cover for those who leave NZ or exit the workforce for other reasons and partly to cover the population we have now.
No country has the right to expect its people will just stay put like they owe some debt of labor to society. Young people, in particular, will want to get out there and work in fields that exist in other countries and people from other countries will want to get over here and work in fields that exist in ours.
In this case, most of the visas are solidifying the rights of people already working in New Zealand. Yet here we are, lining up to sound like a bunch of bigoted hermits in the comment section, again.
Of course NZ needs immigrants. But why does INZ approve three times as many per capita as most other OECD countries and has done so for decades. However those typical OECD countries have averaged better economic growth than NZ. We all know highly talented immigrants and rejoice they are here but honestly where are you most likely to meet an immigrant? Uber driver, checkout operator, fast food worker, etc. Maybe those Uber drivers are brain surgeons who prefer providing a taxi service. Just admit it - something is seriously wrong with NZs immigration policies. The govt talks 'skilled' but INZ mainly deliver low-paid workers undercutting low-skilled Kiwis. Our immigration policies is good for our rich but a kick in the teeth for our poor.
Nurses, aged care workers, builders..
We turn the tap on immigration because we don't educate our population properly. Instead we hand out NCEA participation awards.
Absurd, really, that we allow young people to take on debt to train for jobs in hotels - for example. Fancy using taxpayer money and youth debt to enable hotels not to train staff from scratch, and to allow some value extractor to run a for-profit school to train hotel staff. Hotel staff.
Just one example of business underinvestment in training and student debt / taxpayer subsidies enabling unnecessary for-profit businesses.
Si all the nurses leaving to work overseas are not educated?
Oh, look at all these words that have been put into my mouth.
Some nurses are leaving because we don't pay them properly.
13,000 residence visas approved in a single month. For a typical OECD country that is pro-immigration about 3,000 per million population per year is usual. So NZ manages in a month what other countries take a year.
For example: in the UK using pre-Covid data: (2016) 66,024 and (2017) 67,806 new permanent residents. But the UK has a population of 67million roughly 13 times bigger than NZ.
The question is how many people will leave New Zealand once their resident visa approved? It will be interesting data to see.
Wait seven years for citizenship then leave.
Percentage of Kiwis foreign born: 27.4%. For Denmark it is 8%. South Korea is 2.3%.
Very high rates of immigration do have costs.
Interesting that you quote SK - https://www.dw.com/en/whats-behind-south-koreas-population-decline/a-60…
NZ is 2.5 times larger than South Korea, has a better climate too. But South Korea has a population of over 50 million. In the long run as the world's finite resources deplete, South Korea will benefit from a smaller population.
Why would you compare NZ with countries that have been populated for thousands of years.
Who are the fools that would want to come to NZ to buy over priced houses and live in a low wage economy? And potentially at the point of falling asset prices?
Oddly it doesn't sound like the type of people you would want to attract....those that you do, would be smart enough to stay away.
Part of my family is from a 3rd world country with few benefits - poor health and education services and neither dole nor state pension. They are all happy to be in NZ although half would return to the place of their birth if they had NZ wages and welfare state. Our UK immigrants (OK that's me) can easily choose to return to the UK but immigrants from 3rd world countries are trapped here (not quite true since 3 of my extended family who have NZ citizenship are now working in Australia).
Determining a sensible immigration policy for NZ is not easy but at least we ought to try.
A lot of stereotyping.
Some of those stereotypes are family living with me (step-daughter, son-in-law and their Kiwi born daughter); another is my step-daughter and her two kids who live next next door. The third girl is a senior well paid civil servant who is single and is desperately trying to find work back in her country of origin. I'm sure you can find people with different attitudes. For example my neighbour about 10 years ago were a Turkish couple who stayed about 3 or 4 years; had two children in NZ and then choose to return to Istanbul.
'Stereotype: a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.' It all depends on how long the comment is - keeping it brief makes it a stereotype.
If you'd seen enough of the world you'd know the answer to that.
It's like how people on Tropical Pacific Islands don't understand what foreigners find so great about their backwaters.
For example well educated and high earning professional Europeans who are sick of what's happening on the continent. Especially now with inbound immigration into Europe through the roof from the east as well as the south.
“Who are the fools that would want to come to NZ to buy over priced houses and live in a low wage economy? ”
Many of those “fools” don’t come here for high wages but for life style. We see them everyday. They arrive with money in the bank, start up a small business or work part time at Miter10, drive expensive cars and buy one or two houses. They then advertise to their friends back home and they do the same.
Sell your house in London and buy two in Auckland. I did it. The fact that NZ is a now a comparatively poor country compared to top western nations does make it easier for average people to arrive in NZ and instantly join the upper middle class. The truly exceptional will still be going to places where they can earn far more and compete in bigger markets. When Lorde became successful she didn't stay in Takapuna
The government is trying their very hardest to make sure NZ wages do not increase out of control, these new workers will lessen wage growth inflation.
They’re already here …
As expected, demand to come to NZ has gone back up in record numbers. Migrants all want to NZ passport as it's the easiest and one of the safest. All will need homes to live in, so hope the housing supply continues to go up.
-7
Is there a reason why Permanent Residency is permanent in NZ? In other countries like Canada, if you leave the country for more than "X" years, your PR gets revoked and you have to start from scratch again.
Why is NZ keeping it permanent?
-7
Everybody here conveniently forgot this is a one-off for people that are already here. Nobody is coming to NZ. In fact we lost about 13,000 people net so far this month alone.
Ys that is true, but don't set aside that some of them or the Majority have a family way back their home. so the numbers are still positive outcomes I reckon.
After 5 years, Half of these Numbers will end up in Aussie or other countries especially if they are Nurses and IT Pro. NZ is a stepping stone. Going back to the 08'-13' situation again. Tsk tsk tsk...
A Kiwi who lived in and had a very successful career Japan for 36 years, I now drive ride share (UBER, Ola, Zoomy etc.) in Auckland and the overwhelming message I get from my passengers, especially HWMs (hated, white males) is that they are leaving, mainly for Australia, with the younger, better educated ones looking for any successful economy where their skills, talent and get up and go will be appreciated. I live in a heavily immigrant populated area in Eastern Auckland and during the recent school holidays picked up quite a few young male Asian high school/university students and in conversations during the ensuing long rides found out they were all planning to leave NZ ASAP and they asked me what I thought were the best destinations. Their main reasons for leaving were that "NZ is so childish", NZ women and a lack of opportunity for those who are intellectually and financially ambitious. Another group are young educated IT and financial services lads.Several of the former told me that in recent job interviews the first question that they are asked was, "And what pronoun should we use with you."
So the two stereotypes would be the good ones leave and the less good stay.
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