ACT has positioned itself strongly as the leading pro-immigration party with the release of its immigration policy, which if implemented, would likely result in a strong surge in immigration numbers.
The policy would remove most restrictions on employers being able to recruit migrants for jobs in New Zealand and will also be welcomed by migrants who have NZ residency, who will be able to more easily have their parents join them on a permanent basis.
ACT is squarely taking aim at the current Work Visa Scheme which it's policy document describes as "the ridiculous labour market testing processes where bureaucrats try to micromanage the jobs migrants can undertake."
Under ACT's policy most of those restrictions would be scrapped, and employers in any industry would be able to hire migrant workers and there would be no cap on their numbers.
Essentially, as long as an intending migrant worker had a firm job offer in NZ, they would likely qualify for a work visa, regardless of whether they were going to work as a cleaner or a rocket scientist.
However ACT's policy also recognises that "the country also needs to build the infrastructure capacity to accommodate increases in population. There is still a need to have mechanisms for regulating the volumes of migrant flows."
Its solution is to have employers pay a levy for every migrant worker they employ, which could be adjusted up or down from time to time.
Under ACT's policy, if the Immigration Minister decided too many migrant workers were coming into the country, they could raise the levy to a level that would make that a less attractive option for employers, and if not enough migrant workers were coming, the levy could be lowered.
ACT's immigration spokesperson James McDowall said the employer levy would likely be set at $1350 for every migrant worker employed, which is about the same amount as employers currently pay in fees when sponsoring a migrant worker.
Given that work visas are generally issued for three years and McDowell said he was "fine with people renewing their visas," a one-off levy of $1350 per worker does not seem like much of an impediment to hiring migrants for any occupation, even those that pay the minimum wage.
McDowell acknowledged that introducing such a policy could cause an initial surge in migrant numbers, as employers rushed to hire migrant workers to fill vacancies.
"That's kind of what I'd expect and to be honest that's what we need because the shortages [of workers] at the moment are astronomical," he said.
McDowell said the main figure that would be used to determine whether the levy needed to be increased or decreased would be the net migration figures published by Statistics NZ, and he appeared to be under the mistaken belief that these were only updated every six months.
When asked how often the amount of the levy would be reviewed he replied: "I think every time the net migration figures come out from Stats NZ and I'm pretty sure that's every six months."
When told that Statistics NZ publishes new migration figures every month, McDowell was surprised.
"Is it monthly? God, how come I only receive them every six months?" he said.
But regardless of how often Statistics NZ updates its migration figures, McDowell said ACT's policy was to review the levy every six months.
However, relying on changes in Statistics NZ's net migration figures to set the levy could present a dilemma of its own.
Statistics NZ's figures are estimates which are revised every month and the revisions can be substantial.
As a result, its most current migration figures can be extremely unreliable, and interest.co.nz has found that later revisions can vary from the originally published figures by as much as 85%.
As a result, this website is no longer publishes a monthly summary of Statistics NZ's migration data.
The figures start to become reliable after about 12 months, depending on the rate at which migrant flows are changing, which would present policy makers relying on them to regulate migrant flows, with a dilemma.
Do they use the most current data, which may considerably over or under-state changes in net migration, or do they use later data which is likely to be more reliable, but could be up to a year or so out of date?
The other major ACT policy that could see a significant increase in migrants is to remove the cap on the number of parents of existing migrants who could settle here.
The Parent Visa Scheme, which allows migrants already living in NZ to have their overseas parents join them, was suspended by the then National-led government in 2016 because many of the elderly parents coming to NZ on the scheme had complex health issues, which were putting a serious strain on the public health system.
The scheme has recently been reopened by the current Labour government with a cap of 2500 parent visas a year.
ACT would remove the 2500 annual limit, but in a nod to the strain an influx of elderly migrants could put on an already stretched health system, would set up a compulsory health insurance scheme to which all migrant parents would have to subscribe.
According to McDowell, the insurance would only apply to the public health system such as public hospitals, and if migrant parents wanted cover for private medical services, they would have to purchase separate cover from existing medical insurance providers.
Migrant parents would not be eligible for free public health services until they had been in the country for 20 years.
However, while the new insurance scheme would reimburse hospitals and other public health providers for the services they provided to migrant parents, it would not alleviate the physical strain a significant increase in elderly patients would put on the health system, which is already under pressure.
While cost may have been factor in the decision to suspend the parent visa scheme in 2016, the main reason was the amount of health resources required by elderly migrants and the strain that was putting on the health system to cater to their needs.
McDowell acknowledged that could again potential problem but hoped higher overall immigration levels would fix it.
"If we look at [the strain on] the public healthcare system at the moment, most of it is to do with lack of immigration," he said.
"So yes, this [more migrant parents] will have an impact on the healthcare system in terms of manpower and physical needs," he said.
"But at the same time, we are also going to make it a lot easier to staff these hospitals.
"So we are solving one problem and hopefully not creating too much of another one," he said
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