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Migration: the spectre at the feast

Written By: - Date published: 10:48 am, May 28th, 2025 - 26 comments
Categories: capitalism, Economy, im/migration, International, workers' rights - Tags: , , ,

Since the 1980s, some free-market economists have argued that the unfettered flow of trade and investment must be accompanied by the equally unfettered flow of labour. In other words, low or non-existent borders for trade and capital must be complemented by the free movement of people.

Moreover, if such free movement is not permitted, then it follows from a neo-liberal perspective that a substantial part of the developed world’s GDP – between a third and half – must be transferred to the developing world in lieu of the lost opportunity created by regulation of the movement of labour. The justification for this transfer is twofold: compensation for the effects of the restriction of the global labour market, and a necessary measure to support political stability.

Whilst the economic orthodoxy may not be appealing, the argument speaks to two pressures – the tendency for populations to move, especially for economic reasons. and the fear created in populations facing the threat of such movements. These fears are perennial, often taken seriously only when the pressures for population movement are particularly strong. We can see such movements in history, in epochs when, for a combination of reasons, peoples have moved wholesale. Indeed, the rise and fall of empires have long been associated with major population pressures.

Today, we have become accustomed to pressure on the US-Mexico border, and the mass drownings in the Mediterranean and, now, the English Channel. Australian measures to stop informal migration from neighbouring countries has long been fraught. These are but the most obvious cases.

Ironically, in the 1950s and 1960s, the developmentalist model, derived from the Keynesian Accommodation, sought to begin an engagement of knowledge, investment and institutions between developed and developing economies. It was very much top-down and patronising, very much “end of ideology” and pro-capitalism, but it understood that the wealth differences created in a global capitalism would become worse and, eventually, unsustainable. The illness was identified; the chosen treatment failed. The World Bank, once the main purveyor of that treatment, and an early neo-liberal advocate, has in recent years begun to reflect on its errors. Too late. The Bretton Woods model is in disarray and its survival is an open question.

These concerns have resurfaced recently with the Starmer government’s emerging position on migration to the UK. A crisis has arrived, but with little governmental forethought and management. It’s not that the issue of migration hasn’t been front-and centre in the UK for generations, even centuries. It’s simply been left to contingent politics, with little preparation domestically or in international fora. That said, sober estimates suggest that the Labour government’s toughening of visa requirements will reduce immigration by about 10%, a significant change, but not radical.

The first thing to say is that a nation-state has an absolute right to manage inward migration. The second is that a nation-state should make careful distinctions between refugees fleeing persecution and other migrants. There is some imprecision in definitions and consequent practices. In the case of the UK, for example, the Labour government is acting well within internationally-accepted practice, notwithstanding that there is legitimate political debate about such matters. This is “business as usual”.

However, times may not be usual. Indeed, a combination of factors, alluded to above – including global economic crisis, growing wealth differentiation regionally and within countries, climate change, widespread political instability and tyranny, population pressures and the impact of globalised knowledge flows – may be driving far stronger migratory pressures than we have experienced in centuries.

For example, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs tells us that today “around one in every five children in the world—approximately 400 million—are living in or fleeing from conflict zones.” The International Organization for Migration, in its World Migration Report 2024, suggested that “(W)ith an estimated 281 million international migrants worldwide, the number of displaced individuals due to conflict, violence, disaster, and other reasons has surged to the highest levels in modern-day records, reaching 117 million, underscoring the urgency of addressing displacement crises.”  Such challenges are in scale unprecedented.

New Zealand’s relative isolation neither offers protection from this challenge nor allows us to turn a blind eye. This crisis is here and now. It demands attention, in terms of domestic policy settings and international cooperation. Traditional “just in time” responses may not suffice. After climate change, the challenge of population movements ranks second, something still to be understood.

26 comments on “Migration: the spectre at the feast ”

  1. Ad 1
    28 May 2025 at 11:47 am

    I'm not unhappy with New Zealand's points-based immigration system. We're a low-wage commodity economy and we need cheap workers. The free flow of labour in Queenstown is just great if you're OK living in a car in winter.

    Australia is a much higher-wage economy and its own points system works really well there.

    Neither Australia nor New Zealand have the spectre of Reform which is essentially the new Opposition lead. The UK's points-based immigration system and a hard cut-down of cheap low-skilled workers will affect its farmers the most. It's on Starmer to make the case for diversity and inclusion, but with his inheritance tax changes he won't get any friends from farmers.

    Arguably the UK class system is well suited to local labour taking over the real crap jobs anyway.

    Reply
    • weka 1.1
      28 May 2025 at 4:07 pm

      dunno Ad, I think we can do better than running an economy that requires people to live in cars in winter in one of our coldest climates. There's also the wage suppression involved.

      Reply
      • Ad 1.1.1
        28 May 2025 at 6:00 pm

        They flock here. There's a whole YouTube category about NZ called "van life".

        Reply
        • weka 1.1.1.1
          28 May 2025 at 6:27 pm

          I know. But Queenstown also has a foodbank and a housing crisis which affects locals not those on a working holiday. It's not an exemplar of functional economy.

          People living in vans and on holiday will accept lower wages. That suppresses wages, making it harder for people who live there permanently to afford housing, food, kids.

          Reply
          • Ad 1.1.1.1.1
            28 May 2025 at 7:12 pm

            Immigration didn't cause the Queenstown housing crisis. It is certainly the most unequal place in NZ, even more than Waiheke Island. It is the essence of extreme inequality here. And it's where NZ is headed.

            Reply
            • weka 1.1.1.1.1.1
              28 May 2025 at 7:49 pm

              I think you missed my point. Queenstown has problems (many of its own making), that affect locals, not people on WHV living in vans. But those vanlifers get jobs because they will work for less and for worse working conditions. That impacts on the locals who are also struggling with the housing crisis and cost of living.

              NZ absolutely needs to change immigration settings, including around how local economies use (badly) low wage workers at the expense of local residents. If locals were doing ok, it would be different.

              Reply
              • Graeme …
                29 May 2025 at 1:24 pm

                There's not a big difference between people on a WHV who decide to live in their car and so called "locals' who arrive, get a rental, and then can't make ends meet. In reality the WHV in a van has got a more realistic viewpoint on how the town works than the "locals' who can't afford to live here and have the lifestyle they aspire to.

                Yes, Whakatipu is a very competitive and expensive place to make a life, and a lot, maybe most can't do it, either at all, or for not very long. But we rarely have labour shortages and there seems a continual stream of people both coming into town, and leaving.

                Reply
                • weka …
                  29 May 2025 at 3:00 pm

                  domestic immigration and offshore immigration. I get it, lots of people want to be in Queenstown. But Queenstown relies on cheap imported labour for the local economy. That local economy includes the housing crisis and the food bank. There are people getting squeezed right? Not just people who came and couldn't hack it.

                  Reply
                  • Graeme …
                    30 May 2025 at 12:05 am

                    I don't so much see people who are 'squeezed' but people whose lifestyle aspirations and spending grossly exceed their earnings. I also see a lot of people who get their heads around the place and match their aspirations, spending and income and live a balanced life. It's the ones who can't that grizzle. There's also a subtle thing about how the place socially cohorts around the time people arrive, and that cohort is quite vertical, so the social circle will have varying financial capabilities, this fucks over the less financially capable very quickly.

                    It's not a recent phenomena, scratch anyone with a negative attitude to the place and you'll often find they burnt a lot of cash living here, goes back to the earliest settlement and probably before. Whakatipu, often it makes you think you are stronger than you really are.

                    As an aside, social work practice here isn't to try and put things back together, rather to tear everything apart and send them back where they came from, pretty much zero chance of a benefit, unless you have a couple of generations living here (surprisingly small cohort, and very unlikely to be in that position), although the community is very tolerant of people who are a bit different.

                    There was an elective homeless guy who lived by a tree at Frankton for a couple of years and got displaced by the roadworks there. There was genuine concern around town that a place would be found for him where he wanted to be (he's good). One day when Kurt was at Frankton I saw him being hassled by some Gorons, I too far back in the traffic to do much but most locals close to it got out and made sure he was ok, and it was a good cross section of our community that I am very proud to be member of.

                    Reply
                • Ad …
                  29 May 2025 at 4:46 pm

                  Once I get a moment I'll do a post on Queenstown as New Zealand's Elysium; something like a floating space station of luxury that's moved away from the used-up nastiness in the rest of New Zealand.

                  Elysium being of course populated by billionaires and millionaires some of them local, served for their every waking need from getting dressed to cocktails and brushing your teeth, until they shuffle off this mortal coil, served by the international poor.

                  We have a few enclaves similar to it already but not as extreme: Waiheke Island, Omaha, Te Hihi, Pauanui, The Landing gated community north of Kerkeri, and the resorts Carrington Estate and Kaurki Cliffs in the Far North.

                  Reply
                  • Graeme …
                    29 May 2025 at 10:58 pm

                    Oh, I thought that was how Wanaka rolled.

                    But yeah, it happens. Probably also the most sustainable prart of our economy, locally, and maybe nationally.. Sad but they generally pay promptly and well. But take it out to a national level and what are we doing as a country underselling ourselves as a small commodity producer when we've got a similar sized top end market. Our 'productivity problem' can be solved by going as up-market and as direct as we can. If that's having the world's elite living here and we mow their lawns (neighbour goes through a $30K mower/year doing that) or selling our produce as directly and as far up the value chain as possible, then we're doing better than chacing $/kg milk solids at the expense of out lowland water quality.

                    Reply
                    • SPC …
                      29 May 2025 at 11:31 pm

                      Part of our future, as/when we become a rentier society (with our working class over in Oz, replaced by migrants) sans Treaty (Hobson's Pledge).

                      1.Competing for a share of the work from anywhere in the world home lifestyler (in good health, given our health system decline).

                      2."Premier" (elite lodge) tourism, Air B and B (second tier).

                      3.Growth in the multiple holiday homes worldwide market, this is in the C of C plans to open up coastal land, riverway and lakeside and high country land to foreign investment (lock locals out).

                      (locals selling for untaxed CG).

                      4.Rich locals creating their own enclosures.

  2. weka 2
    28 May 2025 at 4:06 pm

    refreshing to see this discussed on the left.

    I would add that from a green pov, we have to also talk about population growht, and do assessments of the carrying capacity of the land, both currently, and the post-carbon/regenerative world.

    The developed world is in overshoot, how do people think this is going to end? Parts of the left are in denial and seem to think humans can just keep building cities and everything will work out because mumble mumble new not yet invented tech mumble.

    We should increase the refugee quota, and we should be doing that in the context of sustainability (not the greenwashed version). Likewise looking at immigration settings and what we can actually sustain (not the neoliberal vision of cheap labour and damn the consequences). We desperately need to step out of the open borders or you're racist rhetoric from liberals. There are ways to help other people and manage within our limits.

    What are the current pressures? Housing, wage suppression, power generation, and that's not even getting to the source materials and pollution involved in ever expanding infrastructure.

    With people rightly going off damming rivers, but instead wanting wind and solar farms, why are we not talking about the limits of growth and what happens when we start to hit the same blocks as we did with hydro? Most of the conversation is how to build more, very little is how to live within our means and nature.

    And NZ hasn't even considered the conversation about mass migration and what we will do. The more open borders crowd never talk about ecological sustainability.

    Reply
    • Belladonna 2.1
      29 May 2025 at 9:27 am

      I really don't see how we can increase the refugee quota and do so sustainably. Unless you're proposing that (for a large part) immigration into NZ is only refugees (i.e. the total remains the same, but there are a greater proportion of refugees). While that might be nice to have, we, as a country, actually need highly qualified migrants (doctors, veterinarians, etc.). [How we deal with them, once they're here, is another issue]

      Housing affordability (although currently mitigated by the outflow of people to Oz) – is still unacceptable; and the health system is overloaded. Those are two areas where migrants (and especially refugees) have a significant impact.

      If we're seriously looking to live within our means – then there is no reason to increase our population (making this harder).

      Reply
      • weka 2.1.1
        29 May 2025 at 10:16 am

        What do you mean by sustainably in your first sentence?

        Reply
        • Belladonna 2.1.1.1
          29 May 2025 at 12:04 pm

          I was referencing your initial comment "We should increase the refugee quota, and we should be doing that in the context of sustainability (not the greenwashed version)."

          Reply
          • weka 2.1.1.1.1
            29 May 2025 at 3:06 pm

            ok, I was referring to the carrying capacity of landmasses (or bioregions, or even catchments), over the long term. I can't see any inherent reason why refugees can't be part of that. Refugees aren't necessarily not skilled. We do need doctors, but we also need care workers, and importantly in the climate context, we need people who understand doing without, not simply the people of excessive lifestyles who will vote to keep them over climate action.

            Once we know what the sustainable/renewable carrying capacity is, we can then look at whether we can increase the population or need to decrease over time. At the moment we don't know.

            Reply
        • Drowsy M. Kram 2.1.1.2
          29 May 2025 at 4:39 pm

          Housing affordability (although currently mitigated by the outflow of people to Oz) – is still unacceptable; and the health system is overloaded. Those are two areas where migrants (and especially refugees) have a significant impact.

          While the significance of refugee impacts on NZ’s health services and housing affordability is debatable, highlighting the refugee 'problem' has political appeal – "Children Overboard" anyone?

          NZ's per capita refugee intake is small compared to most wealthy democracies.

          New Zealand has one of the lowest numbers of refugees per capita in the world — there is room for many more [18 June 2021]
          According to the latest pre-COVID statistical yearbook from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), New Zealand has one of the lowest numbers of refugees per capita internationally: 0.3 refugees per 1,000 people, putting us 95th in the world.

          By comparison, Sweden ranks sixth by accepting 23.36 refugees per 1,000 people, Canada 49th (2.68), United Kingdom 55th (1.83), Australia 59th (1.74) and the United States 77th (0.84).

          Norway and Ireland, with similar populations to New Zealand, are placed 15th (11.29) and 69th (1.22) in the world respectively.

          The Government established a formal annual Quota for the resettlement of refugees in 1987. From 1 July 2020 this Quota increased from 1,000 to 1,500.
          https://www.parliament.nz/mi/pb/library-research-papers/research-papers/the-new-zealand-refugee-quota-a-snapshot-of-recent-trends/

          Reply
  3. AB 3
    28 May 2025 at 10:35 pm

    “After climate change, the challenge of population movements ranks second, something still to be understood.”

    If climate change is as bad as some predictions. it will spark population movements that will dwarf what we see now. The two challenges are linked. These migrations from outside will hit countries already faced with their own internal migrations away from unlivable regions and also faced with the enormous costs of adapting to climate change without destroying the living standards of existing citizens. The response, even from relatively civilised countries like NZ, will be brutal and violent, or else they will face internal political revolution. It will make Farage and Badenoch look like paragons of empathy.

    Reply
    • weka 3.1
      28 May 2025 at 11:00 pm

      there is no adapting to the worst predictions. Best we could do is buy ourselves some time. But we still have the window in which is make the shift to low carbon, and this does mean lowering our standard of living. We can still live good lives, just not the excessive consumption and pollution we do now. Just Transition gives us the best chance.

      Reply
      • gsays 3.1.1
        29 May 2025 at 12:39 pm

        If an evening we watch a fair bit of You Tube.

        Last night was a wee doco on Bhutan.

        What sounded like a restrictive, onerous regime produced the happiest citizens.

        In a profoundly spiritual nation, workers must wear national dress during working hours. A big part of the family's day is getting the food needed to prepare the evening meal.

        While a lot of the half hour or so was filmed rurally, not a skerrick of advertising was seen.

        When you look at all of our riches, freedoms and rights, we do not produce a happy society.

        Reply
        • weka 3.1.1.1
          29 May 2025 at 3:03 pm

          ooh, can you please share the link? I'll watch it too.

          One of the biggest challenges we have with the climate crisis is people's believe that a drop in standard of living is inherently a bad thing, and this will make them (even more) unhappy. It is a bad thing when done via austerity and neoliberalism. But it's not when done by choice, consciously and in community (or at least it doesn't have to be). We're still missing the stories in the mainstream of how to transition well.

          Reply
          • gsays 3.1.1.1.1
            29 May 2025 at 4:48 pm

            It would scare most folk if it were proposed we lived like this but it is a great example of simple, humble living, in harmony with nature and the (harsh) seasons. And the happiness…

            I understand Bhutan is carbon negative. 70% of the land mass is forest plus their lifestyle is so light on carbon.

            Reply
  4. Belladonna 4
    29 May 2025 at 9:30 am

    Really, it's hard to see any of the illegal migration into the UK as being anything other than economic. Refugees have to cross the entirety of Europe to get there. There are plenty of other places where they can apply for asylum en route.

    Reply
  5. Darien Fenton 5
    29 May 2025 at 11:10 am

    The world's population is growing on a planet that can't sustain it forever. It is inevitable that we, along with other countries will be squeezed with people wanting to migrate here, mainly for economic reasons. And we do it badly. We have had a lot of hysteria over the years ; remember the pointless clamp down on imaginary ships in the sea, bringing boatloads of illegal migrants here when we live in an island nation which is hard to reach? I support raising the refugee quota. It's not an easy pathway and many refugees live in camps for years before they are approved though UN processes, We are protected somewhat by being isolated at the bottom of the world, but the irony is of course that our migration is going the other way ; ie to Australia. Somehow, we have to find a way to share this planet.

    Reply

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