It's obvious that immigration has changed New Zealand in the past. But it's difficult to foresee how it will change us in the future. Where will the debate go and can we move past racism? What role will the media play? How will the questions we ask now shape immigration policy in the future? Noelle McCarthy asks; where do we go from here?

It's obvious that immigration has changed New Zealand in the past. But how will it change us in the future? In the final episode of Slice of Heaven, Noelle McCarthy visits a Northland town where old questions are being asked anew.

"There's that real fear our fisheries will go kaput, our water will be polluted beyond belief... we're all going to end up speaking Chinese...that's already happened here but it wasn't done by Asians." - Slice of Heaven, Ep 4.

And in a series of letters, economists Michael Reddell and Hautahi Kingi debate the benefits and costs to New Zealand of immigration. Michael Reddell opens the conversation:

Dear Hautahi,

Even though we've been running one of the largest immigration programmes anywhere for decades, there is little or no specific evidence that the average New Zealander has benefited. In fact, productivity - the basis of long-term prosperity - here has kept on drifting further behind other advanced countries.

Academic models seemed to suggest benefits from large scale immigration. But there is still no sign of them.

That shouldn't really be a surprise. Most of the models give little attention to fixed natural resources, but perhaps 85 per cent of New Zealand's exports are still natural resource based.

More people means nature's bounty just gets spread more thinly.

And entrepreneurs have found it very hard to develop successful international businesses, based on anything other than natural resources, in such a remote location.

Our policymakers need to pay much more attention to the specifics of New Zealand's situation and our experience. I've argued that we should abandon the Think Big experiment and substantially lower migrant numbers. We take three times as many migrants per capita as the United States does, so there is plenty of room to cut numbers, all while stepping back into the international mainstream.

Regards,

Michael

_______________

Tena koe Michael,

I share your concern for our woeful productivity numbers. However, we disagree about the cause and the solution to this problem.

Our fall down the OECD productivity ladder has spanned decades, and has certainly preceded the relatively recent increase in immigrants. The relationship you draw between migration and productivity therefore seems somewhat tenuous…

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New Zealand is one of the great immigrant nations. Everyone here has a link to someone from somewhere else. But that doesn't mean everyone can agree on who should get to come here next. Noelle McCarthy investigates immigration in New Zealand and asks; when we build a nation by inviting people in, do we know how it will turn out?

Words by Ali Ikram; audio by Noelle McCarthy and John Daniell.

New Zealand is one of the great immigrant nations. In the third episode of Slice of Heaven, Noelle McCarthy discovers that doesn't mean we all agree on how to do it well. And Ali Ikram - a Cantabrian child of immigrants - delivers a written warning against parts of the debate.

When you are from a migrant family it is often hard to reconcile the warm welcome one receives in person from the community as a whole and the way immigrants are spoken about - at times - in politics.

The tactic is nothing new - in fact it is as old as democracy itself. Xenophobia was being employed when my mother and father arrived from England in 1973. The oil crisis had created uncertainty and Pacific communities who New Zealand had encouraged to settle here to work in manufacturing were targeted by the authorities. Some were asked to produce proof of residency in random street checks.

My father was a cardiologist in Christchurch and in the middle of this climate, one of his colleagues - a Pākehā Englishman - rang the police, informing them that he (the colleague) was also an immigrant and asked whether he too should carry his passport at all times to prove his right of abode. He was informed that this wouldn't be necessary.

What is positioned as a 'debate' or 'discussion' about immigration is often little more than a political set piece and is usually sidetracked by accusations that individuals who are pro-migration are excessively liberal and racism motivates those who are not. The underlying truth of the matter is that New Zealand has always allowed varying levels of new arrivals to satisfy its own ends, complementing the skills and capacities of the existing population. This is underlined by the fact that today a quarter of all New Zealanders were born overseas with migrants making a vital contribution to the workforces of essential services and key industries. Often this background is overlooked and we are depicted as a charitable country admitting immigrants in pursuit of 'a better life' without acknowledging the benefits they bring with them.

However, it is possible to recognize the legitimate concerns people have about the promises of what a New Zealand lifestyle should represent, while also understanding that these concerns are being manipulated to achieve a political outcome. …

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Immigration is a hot topic coming up to the election but just talking about it can be a tense experience. Noelle McCarthy asks what those tensions are, who is stoking them and why are we so touchy about it all?

Are we shouting past each other on immigration? In the second episode of Slice of Heaven, Noelle McCarthy talks to Winston Peters, Jim Bolger and others - and John Daniell and Paul Spoonley explain the link between New Zealand First's polling and immigration levels.

Recent political results in the US and in Europe remind us that immigration remains a sensitive issue that generates anxiety and anger among some.

New Zealand has been here before. It was a galvanizing topic in the 1996 general election that translated into substantial support for a new political party, New Zealand First.

Will it have the same effect in 2017?

"It is axiomatic that immigration is about ethnicity" - New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, Slice of Heaven, Ep 2

One of the ironies is that New Zealand First appears to need high immigration numbers to generate support. And in 2017, they certainly have that with the net immigration rate hovering around 72,000, an historic high.

This association between immigration flows and support for New Zealand First is obvious in this graph of net migration and the seats won by the party over the last two decades.

The correlation is broken only in 2008, the year New Zealand First's political donations were investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. Although the SFO found no basis for fraud charges to be laid, the party's leader, Winston Peters, lost the Tauranga electorate and the party fell below the 5 percent threshold, meaning they would have no seats in Parliament. Since then support has again risen as the number of immigrants has increased.

If the correlation holds, it suggests the potential for a strong New Zealand First surge this year.

This growing anxiety about immigrant numbers has been confirmed by recent polls, notably UMR earlier this year. The electorate is divided - although not as much as some would have us believe.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment polling in 2016, the annual Asia New Zealand Foundation polling and the Ipsos Public Affairs survey in 2016 all show that the support for immigrants and immigration is relatively positive - much more so than most other countries.

A group gathers to celebrate Africa Day in Wellington earlier this year

But there is also concern that immigrants are not adapting to New Zealand and some see a country and its values under threat…

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With record migration and a fast-growing population, Aotearoa New Zealand is changing. How that will look depends upon the interplay between people here now and those who want to come. So who is coming and does it matter?

With record migration and a fast-growing population, Aotearoa/New Zealand is changing.

How that will look depends upon the interplay between people here now and those who want to come. So who is coming and does it matter? What is the ideal number of people, what benefits will we see and where are the potential flashpoints? Can we rely on political leadership to steer us in the right direction?

In this four-part podcast series for RNZ in association with Massey University, Noelle McCarthy investigates the state of immigration in New Zealand and asks - when it comes to our Slice of Heaven, is there enough to go around?

"We've been here for 1000 years. You guys have been here for 200 years. We're all immigrants." - Leonie Hayden, Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara, writer and editor, Slice of Heaven, Ep 1

The choices we've made about immigration have shaped the country New Zealand has become. The choices we're making now will impact our future in ways we can only dimly perceive.

A conversation with immigration expert Professor Paul Spoonley, which kept circling back to these two ideas, was the jumping-off point for Slice of Heaven. At a time when more migrants are coming to New Zealand than ever before, we've spoken to people from Kaitaia to Invercargill and various points in between about their experiences of immigration.

We've interviewed academics and economists, politicians and people in rugby clubs, dairy workers and construction companies, church groups, iwi and more besides.

We ended up talking to more than 60 people and we tried to go into each of those conversations with open minds. All the same, many of them said things that surprised us - how their perception of immigration was altered by knock-on effects that are complex and sometimes confusing.

We had a young Indian man crying in the studio as he described the mental stress involved in getting residency.

And we had an interviewee who was careful to wait until we'd stopped recording before saying, "Auckland liberals talk about diversity, and that's fine, but where I'm from I see homeless Māori sleeping in the streets."

This wasn't grandstanding - if anything, they were apologetic about saying something so potentially inflammatory. But after years of dealing with the sharp end of social issues, their frustration with a one-dimensional view of immigration was clear. "And the people living in what used to be their homes are immigrants."…

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