Richard Bedford

Immigration Policy and New Zealand's Development into the 21st Century: Review and Speculation

This article reviews the impacts of changes in immigration policy since the 1980s on New Zealands population, with particular reference to the labor market, and discusses recent initiatives in strengthening policies for New Zealands development in the 21st century. The policy objectives of encouraging the immigration of highly skilled people and those with capital to invest in business development initially drew favorable response, especially from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. However, the actual experiences of migrants in the New Zealand labor market and business environment were much less positive. Immigrants from Asian countries were found to have high levels of unemployment. Another concern is the emigration of skilled people from New Zealand. The government has undertaken a review of immigration policies and is supporting a longitudinal study of immigrant experiences. The final section speculates on prospects for immigration and the labor force into the 21st century, bearing in mind the evolving immigration policy environment.

Competing for Talent: Diffusion of An Innovation in New Zealand's Immigration Policy

In 2003, New Zealand introduced a novel “expression of interest” (EOI) system for selecting skilled migrants. In 2012, Australia adopted a similar approach while the Canadian government is proposing to adopt a variant of the EOI system in 2015. From being a follower of Canadian and Australian immigration policy initiatives, New Zealand has become the innovator. This paper examines the reasons for this significant policy shift and reviews some outcomes of the EOI system during the first decade of operation. As the international competition for talent intensifies, such policy innovation is essential if countries are going to attract skilled migrants.

Migration and Climate Change in Oceania

Two characteristics of the Pacific Islands region (Oceania) are high levels of exposure to environmental extremes and a long tradition of population mobility. Accordingly there are a number of examples of community relocation following natural disasters. Small island developing states have been identified as likely to have high levels of exposure to the effects of climate change. In Oceania these effects may include sea-level rise, increased incidence and intensity of floods and droughts, coral degradation, increased intensity of tropical cyclones, and changes in the distribution of disease vectors. It is possible that some locations, especially atolls, coasts (where the great majority now live), deltas and river flood plains may become uninhabitable.

Engaging with New Zealand's Recognized Seasonal Employer Work Policy: The Case of Tuvalu:

New Zealands Recognized Seasonal Employer (RSE) work policy is a managed circular migration initiative that is designed to provide benefits to employers in New Zealands horticulture and viticulture industries, workers from Pacific states that have limited opportunities for wage-earning employment in their own countries, and the communities that the workers leave temporarily for work in New Zealand. Tuvalu is one of five Pacific countries where the New Zealand Department of Labour has been facilitating participation in the RSE scheme since the policy was formally introduced in April 2007. Tuvalu is by far the smallest of the participating countries, with a population aged 15–49 years of around 4,600 in 2008. It is the Pacific country where the RSE scheme could potentially make the greatest difference to provision of temporary wage employment for the countrys labor force. However, there is little evidence to date that Tuvalians, despite their extensive experience of overseas labor migration, have maximized the potential for temporary work that the scheme offers. This previous experience is examined briefly, followed by a discussion of the terms under which Tuvalu has agreed to participate in the RSE scheme, with reference to the Inter-Agency Understanding (IAU) signed by New Zealands Department of Labour and Tuvalus Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Labour. The first two years of Tuvalus involvement in the program are then examined, drawing on information obtained during field work in Tuvalu in January 2008, January 2009 and April 2010, with particular reference to the perspectives of the different stakeholders involved. We suggest some ways of improving Tuvaluan participation in the RSE work policy at a time when the countrys engagement in the scheme appears to be at risk.

The Neighborhood Effect: The Pacific in Aotaearoa and Australia

Australia and New Zealand tend to view development issues in the Pacific, including labor mobility, in different ways. This paper compares the different policies of Australia and New Zealand on the migration of Pacific peoples. Both countries used to have colonies in the Pacific in the 20th century, but while Australia ceased to continue its special relationship with the island countries on immigration matters, New Zealand did the opposite and has become a major destination for Polynesians. New Zealands recent move to incorporate a seasonal work program to bring in Pacific workers marks another difference with Australias approach. The impacts of the seasonal work program for the two countries, the broader canvas of demographic and economic differentials between the Pacific Island states and Australia and New Zealand, and prospects for multilateral cooperation are examined in the article.

Managed Temporary Labour Migration of Pacific Islanders to Australia and New Zealand in the Early Twenty-first Century

ABSTRACT Circular migration was one of several enduring themes in Graeme Hugo’s highly productive research career. Although his specialist field was Asian population movement, during the 2000s he became increasingly interested in labour migration in the Pacific Islands. This paper reviews the development of two managed circular migration schemes targeting Pacific labour that emerged following the UN High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in 2006. New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme and Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) have attracted international attention as the kind of ‘best practice’ temporary labour migration schemes that Hugo had in mind when he emphasised the positive contributions that circular forms of mobility could make to development in both source and destination countries. The two schemes have transformed mobility between the participating countries and have played a major role in the negotiations over a free-trade agreement between Pacific Forum countries, including Australia and New Zealand. Although the schemes have been in operation for almost 10 years, this paper argues that they are not becoming ‘business as usual’; they embody complex systems of relationships between multiple stakeholders that require ongoing management to ensure that they do not become traps for low-skilled, low-paid ‘permanent’ temporary workers.

Mobility in Melanesia: bigman bilong circulation

Murray Chapmans reputation as a researcher on population movement in Melanesia is enormous – in the parlance of Melanesians, he is undoubtedly a ‘bigman bilong circulation’. This paper traces Chapmans journey into Melanesian mobility and outlines some of the major contributions he has made to our understanding of population movement in what was known until the late 1980s as the ‘Third World’. The journey begins with Chapmans own recollections of intellectual challenges he faced at the University of Auckland as a graduate student writing a thesis in 1960 and then as a Junior Lecturer in Social Sciences at the Victoria University of Wellington. The debates between Cumberland and Buchanan about the nature of geography were to have a profound influence on Chapman – he was to become a severe critic of attempts to impose a ‘western’ logic and way of thinking on processes which were at the heart of the livelihoods of peoples who had very different belief and value systems. This paper does not contain a critique of Chapmans arguments and findings; its purpose is to celebrate those contributions which have come into print so far from a geographer who has really tried to ‘make geography matter’ in the discourses about population movement and development.

R. Gerard Ward: quintessential Pacific geographer

In December 1998 Professor R. Gerard Ward retired after 27 years as Professor of Geography in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. Ward’s contributions to his discipline, the social sciences, and the discourses about development in the Pacific region have been very considerable. This paper reviews some of the achievements of one of the twentieth century’s eminent Pacific geographers. After establishing his academic roots in the Department of Geography at the University of Auckland in the 1950s, we outline the major clusters of his writing on land use and land tenure, population dynamics and urbanisation, Pacific history and prehistory, Pacific development issues, informal markets, transport systems and tele-cost worlds. The paper concludes with an assessment of three unusual features of Ward’s writing: the breadth of his interests, the range of scales he felt comfortable working at, and the innovative nature of ideas introduced into debates about Pacific development. A comprehensive list of Ward’s publications is attached to this paper.

Immigrants from the Pacific: “Drain on the Economy” or Active Participation in the Labor Force?

In May 2008, a major controversy about the participation of Pacific Islanders and their descendants in the New Zealand economy was initiated by the release of a report claiming they were “a drain on the economy,” were becoming an “underclass” and displayed “significant and enduring underachievement.” This report received considerable media attention at the same time that the first results of New Zealands Longitudinal Immigration Survey (LisNZ) were released. The results of the LisNZ received much less attention in the media, even though they contained considerable information about the participation of Pacific migrants in the labor force. This paper reviews some of the findings contained in the May 2008 release of LisNZ data as well as some additional information relating to the larger group of Pacific migrants who entered under all categories of approval spanning skilled migration, business migration, family sponsorship, humanitarian provisions, as well as the special Pacific categories. Three simple indices of labor market participation are used to compare migrants entering under the special Pacific categories with Pacific migrants who gained approval for residence under the other categories. Greater attention is then focussed on the labor market participation of three groups of Pacific migrants – Fiji Indians, Samoans and Tongans. Fiji Indians are included because they are the largest single group of immigrants from a Pacific country in the LisNZ survey database. The evidence generated by the first wave interviews of the LisNZ does not support an argument that Pacific migrants are failing to gain employment in New Zealand and thus becoming a “drain on the economy” or that “Polynesian immigration fuels an underclass.” On the three measures of labor force participation there were generally small differences between the Pacific migrant groups, however these were defined, and the rest of the migrants interviewed in the LisNZ. There were some expected differences in occupation distributions, education levels, and ways of obtaining work in New Zealand. But these differences are not indications of “underachievement” or any systemic failure of policies regulating immigration from the Pacific.

The global health care chain: from the Pacific to the world

Leontine Visser and Dedi Adhuri take the territorialisation analysis offshore and show how the management regimes are bound up in the specificities of livelihood systems. Through two case studies, one off eastern Borneo and the other in the seas off northern Australia, the authors show the disconnect between the principles of the policed border management, on the one hand, and the realities and priorities of resource users on the other. This reinforces the point made in the chapters on forests that transborder governance is not simply an issue between sovereign states protecting their mutual national sovereignty and territorial integrity, but rather one that involves complex relations between different value systems and priorities within as well as between states sharing a resource. The chapters on sea cucumbers and marine turtles show how governing these resources requires an understanding of the histories and cultures of those who have traditionally exploited and managed them. The very different ways in which sea cucumbers are husbanded in Japan and exploited/conserved in the Galapagos, for example, show us not so much which is the correct form of governance for such a resource (and by implication suitable to be applied/imposed elsewhere), but more so the very pitfalls of governance regimes imposed by external agencies to serve narrow conservation or exploitation objectives. The transborder character of the stationary sea cucumber is defined more by its longstanding international commodity status, with a primary market in China, and by the transnationalisation of its governance, than by the inherent properties of the resource itself. This contrasts with the case of sea turtles, whose long-distance life-cycle migration makes them an inherently ‘straddling’ or fugitive resource in need of transboundary protection. A final point to make, building on a brief discussion in the editors’ introduction, is that resources themselves have agency. That is, the transborder governance challenges and analyses are in part shaped by the exigencies of forests, seas, rivers and other resources respectively, further eschewing a one-size-fits-all approach. Overall, this book provides a very useful collection of quite readable case studies of reasonable length dealing with transborder governance of natural resources. It has good value as a teaching resource, and will help challenge some of the more formulaic assumptions of governing the transnational commons.