Part 3: Colonisation & Settlement
Part 5: Immigration
“The Te Āti Awa chief Te Wharepouri told William Wakefield, brother of Edward Gibbon, that he had participated in the sale of land to the New Zealand Company expecting about ten Pākehā to settle around Port Nicholson, one for each pa. When he saw the more than 1,000 settlers who stepped off the company’s first fleet of immigrant ships, he had panicked. The spectacle would have seemed like an invasion of extraterrestrials. It was beyond anything that Wharepouri had imagined.”
— Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand
In 2023 over 250,000 migrants arrived in New Zealand.
What was once an alien invasion is today a Tuesday morning.
Like its settler-colony peers Australia and the US, New Zealand has taken its migrants in waves. Prior to the 1970s, outside its native Māori population, it was a deeply British culture. The Penguin History of New Zealand illustrates this with a couple of fun anecdotes: one about a local knocking out a man on a bus in 1936 for speaking Norwegian, and another about how a few Indian workers spawned the creation of the White New Zealand League in the 1920s.
The vast majority of migrants to New Zealand until the 1970s were from Britain. After 1974, annual immigration from Britain fell from more than 90% of new arrivals to less than 10%. As of 2023, the country’s 1.4 million immigrants accounted for 29% of New Zealand’s 5 million population, a share sitting alongside Australia’s as highest in the developed world. 14% of these were from England, followed by China (10%), India (10%), the Philippines (9%), South Africa (7%), and Australia (6%).
Nevertheless, New Zealand was one of the more tolerant places in the world quite early on. The Catholic Church in New Zealand flipped from being French to Irish around the 1870s. Unlike in the US, Britain, and Australia, Protestant and Catholic tensions were surprisingly low.
An English member of the Religious Tract Society who visited New Zealand in 1880 was alarmed by the extent of Catholic–Protestant interaction he found.
“One can’t help feeling that the spirit of tolerance is somewhat carried to excess when one finds Protestants patronizing the Roman Catholic bazaar. One admires their love more than their wisdom, their heart more than their head.”
A Catholic became first Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament in 1854. Another Catholic became Premier in 1864. The influential Premier Julius Vogel, first elected in 1873, was a Jew.
What kind of immigrants did New Zealand select for, either directly or indirectly?
American immigrants paid their own way, or were supported by friends and family. Australian and New Zealand immigrants were subsidised, their fares largely paid for for over a century. In addition, there were risk-taking migrants around New Zealand’s own goldrushes which, as in Australia, injected male-dominated irascible strains. By the 1940s, would-be migrants paid a token ten pounds — waived for veterans — earning them the affectionate moniker ‘Ten Pound Poms’. Even this nominal sum proved onerous, especially for young women, and was abolished in 1950. The vetting itself was anything but token. Applicants submitted birth certificates, character references, employer statements, military records, and medical reports, and faced a mandatory personal interview where they were sized up for ‘character’ and ‘bearing’. Many were rejected. Immigration officers complained that ‘the wrong type’ kept applying — semi-professional men, junior executives, small traders. Exactly the kind of people America was actively trying to attract. One observer reckoned it was harder to migrate to New Zealand than to join a gentleman’s club in London.
New Zealand’s subsidised and screened immigration policy selected for safety-ists while America’s self-driven immigration process selected for more risk tolerant types. Fischer writes:
Immigration as a process of social filtration had other important consequences for both New Zealand and the United States. In some ways its effects were diametrically opposed. In New Zealand, Megan Hutching did a survey of assisted immigrants and found that “in the end, people often chose New Zealand because it seemed non-threatening.” One woman explained that she selected New Zealand because it was “small and comfortable.”
All of this was very different from American immigration. In the United States, a voluntary and largely self-driven process selected immigrants who were restless, autonomous, ambitious, aggressive, entrepreneurial, and highly individuated. They tended to be more tolerant of risk, in the hope of greater profit. America’s open and voluntary system of immigration selected a population that lived for liberty and freedom.
New Zealand officials advertised their country to new immigrants as a fair society. America put the emphasis on economic opportunity via land grants. Australia was somewhere in between, subsidising migrants for a century but also with the judicious use of land grants and a steady stream of gold and other mineral rushes that attracted risk-takers.
Will you also do a piece looking at NZ emigration? The ABS estimates there is about 638,000 New Zealand-born people in Australia. That’s about 12% of NZ’s domestic population.
Emigration is changing the country quite dramatically - ethnically and socially. Your comments on NZ having a safetyist culture are correct. I would also add that it’s very conformist. Emigration is reinforcing these tendencies as those who leave tend to be more enterprising, adventurous and individualistic.
How do you reconcile New Zealand's heritage with "men of nerve" with the results of its immigration policy that "selected for safety-ists"? If I had to, post-hoc, try to reconcile the two things, I might think New Zealanders are not lacking in courage, and eager to fight together, when answering the call of duty, but tend not to engage in cut-throat competition with each other. That reconciliation still cuts against portraying its immigration policy as "selected for safety-ists" though. Selecting for brave conformists, perhaps.