Going Places: Migration, Economics and the Future of New Zealand

Migration is one of the great contemporary touchstone issues, as we move into an increasingly globalised world experiencing unprecedented movement of people beyond country borders. Yet the subject is also poorly understood and ripe for misinterpretation and manipulation.

Going Places: Migration, Economics and the Future of New Zealand, the latest in the BWB Texts series, makes a significant contribution to redressing the balance. This succinct book applies the lens of economics to the realities and unrealised potential of migration for this country. It is not a catch-all essay that tries to say something about all forms of migration, nor about broader dimensions such as asylum-seeking and the plight of refugees; rather it restricts its scope to economic migration – and is all the stronger for it.

Going Places provides much-needed and up-to-date research and data on the economics of New Zealand immigration. In doing so it helps to set new standards for evidence-based debate, serving as a rational guide in an otherwise fraught and frequently emotive discussion. But it also advances arguments about the possibilities for both inward and outward migration as mechanisms for stimulating economic growth. It offers concrete proposals to support the ambitions of the late and eminent scientist Sir Paul Callaghan, who wanted New Zealand to become a place ‘where talent wants to live’.

In regards to inward migration, Julie Fry and Hayden Glass highlight the potential gains in shifting both attitudes and government policy to accommodate more readily those who might ‘disrupt, transform, provoke and cajole’ – skilled, creative, entrepreneurial people – to change ‘the way this country does things’. In particular, they recommend a new generation of business visas to reflect our globalising world, which draw on the networks and skills that contemporary economies thrive on. The authors also make a strong case for the role of the New Zealand diaspora, our ‘seventeenth region’, in international connectivity and thus on economic transformation.

This thought-provoking BWB Text reflects the already high standards of the series’ texts on contemporary issues, helping New Zealanders to understand our own situation and the challenges we face in the twenty-first century. As economist Hautahi Kingi has said, ‘Going Places helps us understand the complex issues behind how we got here, who is joining, who is leaving and where we are all going. Any meaningful discussion on the future of immigration in these islands will require an understanding of the issues outlined in this book.’

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