In 2003 in a letter to the editor of the NZ Herald, New Zealand’s most successful playwright Sir Roger Hall, called the increase in population through migration “an avoidable self-inflicted injury.” At the time the population had just nudged four million and was increasing at a rate of 42,000 per year.

Twenty years later the population is well over five million with an annual net migration three times the number in Hall’s day. Where Hall worried about the reduction in green space and lifestyle, today locals watch essential services and housing straining to cope with the rising population from past years, and wonder how we can possibly absorb more people.

No wonder. We are just about the fastest growing country in the OECD, says Professor Paul Spoonley, a sociologist specializing in social change and demography. In 2023 we grew by 2.8 percent, 2.4 percent of that from migration.

That it didn’t rate as an election issue last year, in a political climate where immigration is arguably the most highly charged issue in the majority of Western nations, is remarkable. Perhaps people remember the accusation of racism levelled at Winston Peters around the mid-90s for raising the spectre of ‘an Asian invasion.’ Now that the bulk of migrants hail from India, the Philippines and China, this barely seems worth commenting on.

More likely that voters remember that neither major political party can claim a stellar record when it comes to this issue. Both have used immigration to gin up the economy or as a sticking plaster to cover deeper problems in society.

Labour and NZ First’s promise in 2016, to reduce migrant numbers, never eventuated. Instead, apart from the Covid dip, numbers continued to grow. By September 2023 net migration was at record levels with numbers over 133,000.

Some of the current increase is due to pent up post-Covid demand while the government’s offer to transfer temporary migrants to permanent residency in 2021 saw over 200,000 people take up this opportunity.

Hence, at the beginning of 2023, Hipkins vowed to rebalance immigration, ensuring our settings contributed to filling skills shortages and greater productivity and eliminating migrant exploitation. We all know how that ended- an explosion of low skilled migrants as well as the exploitation of many under the Accredited Employer Work Visa.

At the end of that year, the new National Prime Minister acknowledged that current levels of immigration are unsustainable. He wisely refused to put a figure on what is sustainable other than to say that post-Covid immigration settings had become too loose.

Fortunately Waikato Univeristy emeritus professor of population economics, Jacques Poot, is not a politician. He is prepared to hazard an educated guess at what a sustainable level of migration might be – and it’s not the current 2.4 percent.

“Based on past research, my gut feeling is that about 0.5% population growth from net migration could well be sustainable and economically beneficial (it would mean net migration of 25,000 per annum).  But even if that were the target, the numbers could continue to fluctuate quite wildly around it.”

Curiously Poot’s figure of 25,000 aligned roughly with the number of migrants New Zealand First and Labour campaigned on as desirable before the 2016 election.

Immigration is often used as an economic lever with mixed results. Spoonley says overall research shows immigration is an economic good. New Zealand migrants are more likely to be net payers of tax, paying more into the system than New Zealand natives.

But recent research from the University of Amsterdam paints a different picture. Their research concludes that mass migration is bad economics. Migrants, especially those coming from outside Europe, are a net fiscal cost to the Netherlands. People take out more than they put in. Low waged migrants generate low rates of tax revenue, more children in schools are costly and the pressures on public services are enormous.

As well, Dutch research showed that immigration does not help tackle the problems of an aging population. The researchers warned that the Dutch welfare state cannot sustain this growing burden indefinitely.

Once again, this finding is not echoed by New Zealand research. In a 2021-22 inquiry, the now defunct Producrtivity Commission found  that migrants do not displace lower paid workers. This conclusion seems to run counter to casual observation. Migrants appear to be over-represented in many lower paid jobs in our society.

Naturally, high rates of migration ramp up the demand for housing – as well as the cost. Is it any wonder New Zealand’s home ownership rate is the lowest it’s been since 1945? We may have to accept that you can have mass migration or available affordable housing but you can’t have both.

Then there’s the undeniable fact that large numbers of migrants come from countries and cultures vastly different to our own. What does this mean for social cohesion, let alone the practical pressures such as schools struggling to cope with non-English speaking migrant children?

Already there have been occasional outbursts of racial tension expressed in violence or verbal abuse targetted at the Asian community and broadcast on social media. Even though, when msm reports the offence, they often blur the face of the aggressor. Many comments conclude that’s because the aggressor is Maori.

Like it or not, the truth is we are like an addict, hooked on high migration, primarily because we have failed to fix structural problems in innovative ways. If we didn’t import large numbers of low-skilled labour, we might be incentivised to develop new technologies.

But, right now, many sectors of the economy rely on migrant labour. As the population ages – and even migrants age – that can only increase.

Perversely, at the same time we export some of our most skilled people. In this case migration acts as a kind of reverse welfare magnet, swapping the high skilled for the low. Not all migrants who arrive stay of course. Some may not find a pathway to residency and others may have always intended to be temporary.

Similarly we also draw the most highly skilled away from the poorer  homelands that educated them in the first place, homelands that desperately need their valuable citizens.

Close to home, Australia has already announced it intends to halve its migration rate by tightening visa rules for international students and low-skilled workers.

New Zealand is fortunate in that it is not an easy destination for illegal migrants and, so far, research shows we regard migrants favourably. But the current high numbers and overseas experience should tell us that the country needs a plan for population growth.

We need to talk about how many people it is practical to absorb and at what pace. We need to know if we are getting the people we need or those who need us. And we need to know the truth about the impact of large scale migration, and not rely on contentious arguments about economic growth and diversity.

And we should probably incentivise people to go to the provinces, instead of gravitating to cities. Most migrants come to Auckland, already the fourth most diverse city in the world, with 43 percent of residents born overseas. 

Western nations around the globe are grappling with this highly charged modern phenomenon. In many regions, the scale of migration has exploded beyond anything people could have imagined even 50 years ago. For example, more migrants came to Britain in the 11 years of the Blair government than between the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and 1950.

The strain of absorbing so many people from differing faiths, education levels and cultures is evident and should act as a warning to New Zealand. Author of the 1999 book The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens warns that mass migration is transforming Britain into a society with no culture at all. A society in which British history, traditions, customs and literature have been either forgotten or suppressed.

At best this might be described as a self-inflicted injury, at worst a national suicide.