Dear Minister

Dear Future Minister of Immigration

I do not know who you are yet - you may be the current Minister, still occupying the office after the November election or you may be her replacement. You may come from National, Labour, ACT, New Zealand First, the Greens, or whoever else might end up in the political mix.

Whoever you are, this article is intended for you.

Let me start by saying the current Minister deserves plenty of credit. They have brought a degree of pragmatism and correction to a portfolio that badly needed it. Immigration in the post-Covid era was left with some fairly substantial holes, which created some fairly substantial issues and many of those have been fixed. Not perfect fixes of course, because no immigration system is ever perfect, and there was only a limited window of time in which to make those changes (which is a part of why I have written this post).

Thankfully however, even in that short(ish) amount of time, some unnecessarily rigid settings have been unwound, parts of the residence system have been made more workable with two more options to attract the right people, and there appears to be a genuine attempt to make immigration policy respond more sensibly to the needs of employers and the economy. All of those changes and enhancements have been welcomed, however this is not really a letter about the current Minister. It is however about what happens next.

Because one of the enduring problems with New Zealand immigration policy is not simply whether a particular rule is good or bad, instead it is that migrants, employers and industries are regularly asked to make decisions that play out over timeframes, much longer than an election cycle, and against a policy framework that can shift significantly within that three-year window.

The fact a policy so complex, yet so important, is subject to the whims of each new party that might get to rifle through the rule book every three years, means that we tend to forget to think about what we are actually trying to achieve not just today, tomorrow or next year, but over a much longer timeframe. What do we want our population to look like, what sorts of people do we want to attract and how do we keep being able to attract them, how will we be able to compete for talent in an incredibly dynamic global labour market, and how are we meeting more urgent needs now, without creating problems for our society and infrastructure in the future.

Immigration, unlike a lot of Government machinery, isn’t set and forget, and needs to adapt, but equally it benefits from longevity and stability. For a country as small as New Zealand, with the sorts of ambitions we should have as a nation, immigration plays a really crucial role in being able to deliver on those ambitions.

Attempting to do so, based on a system that reinvents itself every few years is hugely problematic.

Three Year Governments, Ten Year Plans

As sure as the sun comes up each day, immigration policy will always change, and it should. Our economic needs as a country change and so too will our ability to meet those needs. Global events create fluctuating demand, our own economy needs more and then less and then more people, and within that, the specific skills we need to find will change as well. We also need to manage risk in a world where AI is increasing the potential for fraud exponentially with a growing threat of those willing to exploit it.

Immigration as a system has to try and juggle all of these things simultaneously, whilst delivering fair and equitable outcomes (that doesn’t always mean approving everything) and so the answer to the challenge immigration presents, cannot simply be to freeze immigration policy and preserve every rule indefinitely.

The problem we have is something quite different. Too often New Zealand changes not just the settings, but the underlying philosophy, without necessarily considering the longer term question of what we are trying to achieve and whether that particular philosophy serves the right purpose.

A great example of that was the roll out of the 2021 Resident Visa, which was in response to our experiences with Covid and rewarding those in the country at the time, whilst also providing employers with some certainty in terms of keeping staff in the country. The philosophy behind the RV 2021 was in part based on a response to an event that no one was really prepared for, or had ever dealt with. More than 212,000 people were granted residence via this one-off pathway.

The philosophy behind the policy had some merit, but its delivery meant that many people who may never have qualified under the usual skilled residence settings were given the ability to live here indefinitely. For some, eligibility was largely a matter of being in the right place, at the right time. And while good fortune is no bad thing, it is a questionable foundation on which to build a long-term immigration strategy.

This is the challenge we face continuously (albeit not to the scale of the 2021 RV). One government opens a pathway or creates a new category, and another then removes or narrows it. A particular occupation is valuable today, then less valuable tomorrow, then valuable again a month later.

Wage settings are introduced as a proxy for skill, adjusted, removed in some parts of the system and retained in others.

Qualification requirements become increasingly important and often to play directly in to the needs of the export education sector, then work experience is given more weight, then we reconsider the balance again. Each individual change can often be explained. Taken together, however, they create something more troubling: uncertainty about the direction of travel and a series of patchwork policies that are overly complicated and incredibly difficult to maintain.

We then also have policies that are connected without being connected, e.g. the Accredited Employer Work Visa, which is a standalone temporary entry policy that acts as the main route to residence for many people, without actually being one officially. So when something changes in the AEWV space, it has potential unintended consequences for future applications for residence, even if that was not the Government’s intention.

All of this is important because immigration policy does more than determine whether someone qualifies for a visa. It sends signals.

When New Zealand tells a skilled worker that we need people like them, they may move countries on the strength of that signal. They bring their family, they enrol children in schools and they leave established careers and family networks behind. Employers spend money recruiting them and build workforce plans around their ability to stay here. International students make similarly long-term calculations. So do investors and entrepreneurs.

None of these people make their decisions according to New Zealand's electoral timetable and yet that timetable can often set the tone for changes in that same system that can make some eligible now, and disqualified in three years’ time.

A migrant may reasonably spend several years building the work experience needed for residence. Under current Skilled Migrant Category settings, wage thresholds remain relevant to skilled employment and residence eligibility, while qualifications and New Zealand work experience continue to play substantial roles in determining who can progress. During that journey there may be an election, a new Minister and an entirely different political mood and that is the mismatch.

Take for example, the recent updates to the Skilled Migrant Category - these are strong signals that we want a much wider variety of skills to support our labour market - professionals, trades, essentially all skills that can help grow and build the country. This was created and presented by the current coalition government but driven primarily by the current National party Minister.

Then take the proposals rolled out by NZ First only a few weeks ago. Cut numbers down to a fraction of what we need and cap the system annually, change the ability for people to secure Permanent Residence, make students leave the country if they want to apply for a different visa, introduce longer welfare restrictions etc. The signals here are very clear and if National was the cheese, NZ First is the chalk.

Our immigration system and the migrants who choose to bring their skills, talent and investment here deserve much better, than election rhetoric. The reality is that policy generally deviates from a pretty consistent set of themes - skills, investment and family.

What Are We Trying To Achieve?

There is a more fundamental question underneath all of this and it’s something that quite a few people within the immigration system understand. I have quoted this a few times, a comment from a very senior INZ official, who said very plainly “what are we trying to achieve”. The comment was said in reference to a particular visa issue, but it’s representative of exactly what we need to consider when we think of how our immigration system should function.

What do we actually want our immigration system to do? Not just today or now or in response to a particular situation - that is short term thinking. What do we actually want it to achieve over the next five, ten, twenty or more years.

The obvious answer is that New Zealand wants people who contribute, but that simply creates another question. How do we measure contribution? Well over the years we have increasingly relied on convenient proxies to determine what is valuable and what is not. Salary is one and qualifications are another and these two things sit within a profiling system, that uses either points or occupations to deliver immigration.

Both the salary you earn and the qualification you have completed, do have value. However, neither of those things is independently valuable. A high salary can indicate scarce skills, seniority and economic contribution. It can also indicate that somebody happens to work in an industry where wages are high. A lower salary can indicate a relatively junior or lower-skilled position. It can also describe somebody doing work that New Zealand desperately needs.

We have already recognised some of the limitations of using wages too simplistically. The previous median wage requirement for the Accredited Employer Work Visa was removed in March 2025, with employers instead expected to pay the relevant market rate. The use of a fixed wage threshold was deemed to add certainty and remove too much required thinking from the officers assessing the applications, but it created artificial wage inflation and a bright line test that wasn’t representative of what people should actually be earning.

Yet wage thresholds remain embedded elsewhere, particularly within skilled residence settings - that in itself creates a problem between those two visa pathways being disconnected. In fact wages have now become far more crucial to an applicant’s eligibility for residence than ever before and yet as a measure of overall contribution and value, nothing has changed. The result is an uncomfortable question.

When we increase a person's immigration value because their salary crosses a particular line, or conversely we lower their value because the applicant didn’t meet a particular salary at a specific point in time, are we actually measuring skill and contribution, or simply measuring salary? Just because someone didn’t earn a specific hourly rate at a specific date in the past, doesn’t change what they actually did and the contribution they created in a broader sense. Take the example of two highly qualified and experienced tradespeople - the difference between one qualifying and the other not qualifying can literally come down to a few cents an hour - yet the skill value they present to the country - identical.

Qualifications create a similar problem. A degree is useful evidence of skill, and it demonstrates study, technical knowledge and, depending on the qualification, significant expertise. But qualifications are still evidence of capability rather than capability itself and yet under the current settings we reward those with higher qualifications and simultaneously devalue those with only work experience to show - in any economy doing something is far more relevant than the piece of paper that suggests you can do something.

There are highly valuable people whose skills have been developed through years of practical experience rather than formal study. There are business owners who have created jobs without completing postgraduate degrees. There are tradespeople, technicians, managers and specialists whose economic value would be obvious to their employers but less obvious when translated into an immigration points table.

To its credit, the current system is moving somewhat in this direction. Recent Skilled Migrant Category changes have created more specific pathways for trades and technicians and altered the way qualifications, work experience and wage settings interact, which is sensible. However in those same sets of additional pathways, self-employment has been outlawed. The people who have been able to do the thing that we want, and so successfully they have been able to create a business out of it, employing and training others to do that same thing, have effectively been sidelined or given a much longer pathway to secure residence. The rationale for doing this - it’s too hard to verify self-employment apparently. Yet it can be an indicator of a highly skilled individual who has the capacity to not just do a job here, but train others to do that job as well.

In all of these changes, we should keep pushing the questions further. Perhaps we need to become less obsessed with finding a single administrative instrument that tells us whether somebody is valuable. A person does not become more useful to New Zealand because their hourly rate moved from $49.90 to $50.10. Nor does someone suddenly acquire economic value because an overseas qualification happens to map neatly onto our qualification framework.

Immigration systems need rules and officials need objective criteria. There is no realistic alternative to that. But the rules should flow from a clearly articulated idea of what New Zealand is trying to achieve. At the moment, there is a risk that we occasionally do it the other way around. We create the criteria, then convince ourselves that the people who satisfy them must be the people we wanted.

A Longer View

So, to the next Minister, whoever you might be, the request is not that you leave immigration policy untouched, because it needs to be managed and adapted and refined. Some of those changes will be necessary. Some will be overdue. A few will probably be announced as transformational and quietly amended twelve months later. That is how Government operates.

The request is more modest, but also more difficult. Give the system a longer horizon.

Decide what New Zealand wants immigration to achieve over the next ten years, not simply what settings are required for the next election or how quickly we can patch up the holes we have found from the previous administration. Decide which principles should remain broadly intact when governments change and then decide what we mean by a valuable migrant. Most importantly, don’t design immigration policy around what can or cannot be done within the system, but make the system work to achieve what we really want and need.

Then allow the operational rules to move around those principles as circumstances dictate. There should be room for disagreement and debate. Different governments will reasonably have different views about migration numbers, temporary workers, family migration, international students and the balance between domestic training and overseas recruitment. But there should also be some things we can all agree on and that remain immune from a desperate attempt to get some votes.

Perhaps that starts with something we haven't been particularly good at - achieving a degree of cross-party agreement about what immigration is actually supposed to deliver. Not agreement on every visa category, wage threshold or annual target, but on the fundamental objectives. If we can agree on where we want to go, we might spend less time arguing about which road to take every three years.

If New Zealand tells somebody that their skills are needed, that signal should mean something. If we encourage someone to build their career here, there should be a reasonable degree of confidence about the pathway ahead. If an employer invests in bringing someone halfway around the world, government should recognise that constant policy movement creates real costs outside of Wellington.

And if the system changes direction, it should do so because the evidence justifies it, not simply because the person holding the portfolio has moved on. Certainty does not mean promising that immigration rules will never change and no responsible Minister could ever make that promise.

It means building a system where the destination remains broadly understood even when the route requires recalculating. New Zealand competes internationally for talented people and despite how we might view ourselves, we are not as attractive a destination as we once were. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a phenomenal place to live and plenty of people want to live here, however those people have choices and New Zealand is just one of them.

Our immigration policy therefore tells the world something about us and who we are. At its best, it says that New Zealand knows what it needs, values the people who can contribute and is confident enough to plan beyond the next election.

That seems like a signal worth sending.

So, Minister, whoever you turn out to be, change what needs changing.

But if you do change it, make the change worth something. Build for the next decade, not the next election.

Visit our immigration site: www.turnerhopkinsimmigration.co.nz