Migrant outflow inevitable, but ties may lead back to New Zealand
The immigrant. Popular culture has given us a picture that owes a lot to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty: poor huddled masses crossing an ocean, leaving behind their old lives forever. Migration in the jet age is something quite different. A recent report in the New Zealand Herald throws the contrast into sharp relief.
The headline of the story reads: “Chinese flocking to NZ but it’s only a stopover - study” and sets out findings of an Auckland University doctoral student’s study. Its author, Liangni Liu, who is also a member of the Asia:NZ Young Leaders Network, interviewed 47 Chinese immigrants to New Zealand. Of those 47, 27 had returned to China, 10 had moved to Australia and only 10 remained.
The Herald story explores the dimension to the study that chimes with the often-heard lament: New Zealand doesn’t seem to do very well at engaging successfully with China. Is this more evidence that New Zealand business is not doing much of a job of opening its doors to Chinese immigrants?
Yes, and no. The numbers certainly seem to tell an unambiguous story: many immigrants are not putting down roots. They are moving on, or returning home. But these are not the migrants of an earlier age who made just one long one-way voyage. Even though an immigrant may have returned to China, some roots, Ms Liu says, have nevertheless been put down in New Zealand. Many say they intend to return. Their departure, for a time at least, bears out a simple reality: New Zealand business lacks sufficient scope to offer long term career opportunities.
Typically, she says, a well qualified Chinese immigrant will take a short or medium term position in a New Zealand business, enhance their employability and then move to a larger economy with greater scope and opportunity. But, she cautions, that is not the end of it. As they enter their forties, there is scope for a further transformation. Many say that at that point they may well return to New Zealand to raise their family in what they regard as a socially peaceful, natural environment.
New Zealand, she says, has not necessarily failed to make it possible for immigrants to settle down here; rather this is what you might expect to see in an era of high mobility. If you have the means and the eligibility to follow career and business opportunities around the globe, you may well become a global citizen with rather looser attachments to multiple countries.
Well-qualified young professionals go wherever they can to make the most of their qualifications. She gives the example of a young financial analyst who had returned to China for a position that fully used his skills in preference to his role in a financial services business New Zealand as a web site editor.
New Zealand, as a smaller economy, she argues, will often lose out in the reckonings that people will make about career progression; the calculation that young New Zealanders born here also make. The bigger the economy, the greater the opportunities. For the immigrants she interviewed, China has a particular allure because of the familiar social and cultural dimension and the perception that opportunities exist, at a time of such enormous growth, to be a part of “something big.”
Ms Liu speaks of “a new version of identity beyond geographical locations.” A highly mobile citizen of the 21st century is unlikely to see their newly-acquired legal status as a New Zealand resident or citizen as sufficient to identify themselves as “New Zealanders”.
But that does not mean that a tie of some significance has not been developed. Some interview subjects spoke of their disappointment at the language barrier and the perception that Asian arrivals were unwelcome, but others spoke positively about the experience of settling here.
When we ask “why are they leaving?” and the question it implies - “what are we failing to do?” we may be failing to see that churn is unavoidable, and not necessarily undesirable. If we ensure that the experience immigrants have here is positive and engaged, then we may create an opportunity to maintain contact with people who may be willing to be a part of our global network.
Massey University sociologist Professor Paul Spoonley offers the example of Vancouver, which resolved in 1989 that diversity was one of its strengths, and would make the most of it. He believes Auckland could likewise do much more to make the most of its “diversity dividend” and that employers deprive themselves of significant opportunities when they prefer local candidates over experienced, qualified migrants from China.
It is becoming more common in this age of high mobility for people to see themselves not as exporters or as migrants, but rather as global citizens doing business in a worldwide market. If New Zealand business wants to flourish as a global player and if it wants to flourish in China it must form many more network connections reaching out across the Pacific and around the globe. It has the chance to form such connections by developing enduring connections with people it might have thought to dismiss as “passing through”.
The Chinese perspective of New Zealand business visitors to China to do business is often reported as somewhat bemused: on the Chinese side there is an expectation that a relationship may build over time and business may ensue. The New Zealand expectation can be for a deal then and there. A shift in perspective seems in order.
A network of connections is a most valuable thing. For New Zealand business, that constitutes a 21st century infrastructure that still has a lot of building ahead of it. A more productive engagement with immigrants would be a solid investment.
- by David Slack
