The economic factor and the human factor.
Economic factor:
If we opened the floodgates to immigration we would have high unemployment regardless of the rate of economic growth, because human-supply would race ahead of commercial expansion, no matter how aggressive the economic growth.
Because of this, I like the idea of engineering precise immigration control, that directly relates to the immediate employment climate. As unemployment goes up we should stoke immigration back - but not crudely.
Firstly, we sometimes have the outlook, at is seems, that people who do menial jobs are "not worth that much" as expressed by their low pay. But I would argue that their low pay is at least as much an expression of excessive worker supply as the inherent value of their work. (Like oxygen. Oxygen has huge inherent value, but its market value is zero due to its abundance).
Low pay is often engineered by deliberate worker over-supply via immigration. We do this in New Zealand by stacking our economy with an abundance of foreigners who have limited english literacy, and who therefore cannot compete for more professional jobs. The result is intelligent people stacking shelves in the supermarket and the like, for low pay. Probably lower than what is truly fair, relating to the inherent value of their labour.
But the way to solve this problem is not with high minimum wages, that cruelly stop people from selling their labour at the price it will be bought for (forcing them onto the dole), but by developing a responsive immigration system that ensures a respectably tight job market for those who are specifically dependant on non-professional employment.
Wages should be bidded up - not legislated up.
However, there should be an allowance to this. Where there is pressing demand for specific skills we should allow for more immigration, for those who have those skills. This will not increase unemployment. It will only facilitate faster commercial expansion within those areas of the economy that are pressing to grow.
Too much immigration too soon also dilutes domestic capital per-capita, and maybe to the point where high immigrations natural advantages of scale, competition and diversity, are overwhelmed.
For example, New Zealand could not ram a million poor-people from China into Auckland within a decade, and expect to not take an economic hit from it.
Human factor:
There is no such thing as a 4,000,000 population community. Communities are small-scale structures. New Zealand is a society made up of many communities.
So, as long as your society is strong on freedom-of-association and also freedom-of-disassociation, somewhat high immigration rates shouldn't be too much of a problem as people can (and will) assemble into their own idealised communities - be what they may.
People who don't want to have much to do with immigrants, for whatever reason, do not and should not have to.
But the health of New Zealand, as a society, is still of course dependant on the quality of the immigrants it grants residency to.
So how do we determine quality?
Currently the government makes all the decisions based on their technical criteria. There is a place for this. We need the government to screen out those who are clearly inappropriate for basic reasons, such as criminality, extremism, and age. But in my view the system of technical approval is too dehumanised. I think there is -- or could be -- a place for relating to immigrants like we relate to job applicants...
An employer makes a short-list based on the CV, but from there he makes a final decision based on an interview. In an employment context, we trust our ability to get a feel for someone and we trust our ability to measure qualities that cannot be technically accounted for.
So why don't we do this for immigration as well, and give the public the opportunity to perform a kind of interview?
The model I'm thinking of is a akin to a jury service, only it would be based on voluntary participation and be conducted over the Internet.
The government, after a basic screening, would video-record a 2-minute interview of any foreign applicant, which may be viewed and rated by as many as 100 New Zealand citizens, online.
Immigration approval will be based on the online ratings. You could find, say, that maybe 1 in 3 people have their residency accepted, based on the top percentage of the people's ratings.
The weighting of the interviews in decision-making would be determined by how strict the governments requisites are (for preliminary screening) at any given time.
The advantage of this system is it allows for human factors to be given weight. If someone comes off in an interview like a nasty, angry person, for example, or with seriously poor English pronunciation, then it would be good to have a system that can respond to the fact of it.
But also it has a psychological advantage. It allows New Zealanders to directly have some say on who they do and do not let through their own front door, and at their own discretion. As they should, I believe.
It's also good for the immigrants themselves, as they can feel more that they've been personally chosen by the New Zealand people, and on more personal grounds, as opposed to being chosen only by some abstract government policy - which opens up the threat of developing resentments.
My proposition would actually be an extremely welcoming system. It is truly inclusive.
-Andrew Atkin
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