More overseas workers are arriving in New Zealand but it could be several months before overseas students return in significant numbers

The number of overseas workers coming to New Zealand is gathering pace, with 8061 people arriving in Aotearoa on work visas in August, according to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment.

That is still well below the 20,148 who arrived on work visas in August 2019 before pandemic restrictions were introduced, but the numbers have been steadily increasing every month since February this year when just 285 people arrived on work visas. (The second graph below shows the monthly trend since January 2017).

However while the number of overseas workers entering the country has been steadily increasing since the start of this year, the total number of people in the country on work visas has declined sharply over the same period.

At the end of December last year, there were 175,269, people in NZ on work visas, but that number had declined to 108,918 by the end of August this year, a reduction of 66,351 (-38%) in eight months.

Most of that decline will almost certainly be due to people on work visas receiving residence visas under the 2021 Residence Visa Scheme set up by the Government last year.

This provided a fast track residence visa application process for skilled overseas workers who had already been in this country for several years.

That has seen the number of people in NZ on residence visas increase by 60,870 since the end of last year.

The transfer of people from work to residence visas can clearly be seen in the first graph below, which shows the trend for the population of both visa types since July 2014.

So the trend for overseas workers in NZ so far this year has been for around 60,000 to transfer to residence visas, enabling them to become established long term, while another 26,962 have arrived on work visas since the start of the year.

We are also seeing the start of overseas students returning.

The third graph below shows the number of people entering NZ each month on student visas.

This followed a very regular seasonal pattern up until the second quarter of 2020 when pandemic restrictions saw their numbers fall to almost nothing.

Those numbers have also started to increase, from just 93 in January this year to 4152 in July and then dropping back down to 1644 in August.

However as the graph shows, student arrivals are traditionally low at this time of year with overseas students not usually arriving in big numbers until January and February for the start of the academic year.

So it will likely be a few more months before know what overseas student numbers will look like long term now that pandemic restrictions have largely ended.

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