The Labour Government has loosened migration settings for the third time in five months in an attempt to juice population and economic growth at the same time as taking wage pressure off employers, inflation and interest rates more generally.
The changes include expanding the 'Green List' for work-to-residency visas to include nurses, construction workers, gasfitters, drainlayers, crane operators, halal slaughterers, mechanics, telecommunications technicians and teachers, while the juicier straight-to-residency visa Green List was expanded to include midwives, a wider variety of doctors and auditors.
Facing a potentially election-losing deficit in opinion polls, the Government has also moved to cauterise complaints from business, health and education employers that a migration 'reset' or 'rebalance' announced just seven months ago to improve local skill levels and wages was instead knee-capping economic growth and causing inflation.
PM Jacinda Ardern used her last post-cabinet news conference of the year to announce the changes alongside Immigration Minister Michael Wood and faced repeated questioning about why the Government had delayed the inclusion of nurses on the Green lLst after almost a year of calls for a relaxation.
"We need to attract skilled workers to our shores without pay, without conditions and with certainty," Ardern told the news conference.
"So in discussions with business in sector groups, we're expanding on our plan to make New Zealand the most attractive place in the world to live," she said.
"That's why today we're announcing the expansion of the Green List, which provides two fast tracks to residency to help attract people to New Zealand and fill labor shortages."
Elsewhere, the Government would also:
- offer bus and truck drivers a "time-limited residence pathway" through a sector agreement;
- automatically extend employer accreditation by 12 months if their first accreditation is applied for by 4 July 202;
- introduce a streamlined Specific Purpose work visa to help keep the approximate 2,500 long-term critical workers already in the country to continue to work in their current role for up to three years; and,
- providing a 12-month Open Work Visa for approximately 1,800 previous holders of Post Study Work Visas who missed out because of the border closure in 2020-21 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ardern and Wood said they did not have advice on the potential number of new migrants the changes would create, or the likely economic impacts on inflation, unemployment, rents or house prices.
They pointed to recently low-to-negative net migration to justify the loosening of the settings, although overall inward net migration has picked up in recent months, particularly of non-New Zealand citizens offsetting the number of New Zealanders leaving to live permanently in Australia because of wages 30% to 40% higher there. The gap is even larger after housing costs, where rents and housing costs are a lower share of disposable income in Australia than New Zealand.
The latest changes are the third set of loosenings in five months, including a reopening of the skilled migrant category for residency visas in October (see story here) and a loosening in August (see story here) to cut the wage rules for years for the aged care, construction, meat processing, seafood and adventure tourism sectors, and to double the cap for working holidaymakers, who can work for anything above the minimum wage.
Wood said the whole world was experiencing labour shortages right now and the Government had listened to business requests for more opportunities to recruit internationally.
“We have approved over 94,000 job positions for international recruitment, granted over 40,000 working holiday visas, reopened the Pacific Access Category and Samoa Quota, delivered the largest increase in a decade to the RSE scheme, and resumed the Skilled Migrant Category and Parent Category so as to strengthen our international offering – but there is more we can do to support businesses to attract the workers they need," Wood said.
“New Zealand’s strong economic position during a time of global downturn presents a unique opportunity to attract more high skilled migrant workers to our shores, as we prepare for a challenging year ahead. We understand that labour shortages are the biggest issue facing New Zealand businesses, and are contributing to cost of living pressures too," he said.
"These measures are about addressing those shortages and providing greater certainty to businesses as they recover from the pandemic."
Wood said the Green List would be reviewed again in mid-2023.
The 134,000 migrants approved to come in over the next year adds to the 200,000 migrant workers granted residency because they stayed here during Covid 19. In September, Wood also increased the annual quota for temporary Registered Seasonal Employee scheme workers from Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu by 3,000 to 19,000, which was the largest increase in over a decade.
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