It is like noticing an increase in firefighters and deciding to restrict them while ignoring the rise in house fires.
Employers go through the cost and bureaucracy of hiring overseas workers because they cannot find New Zealanders willing or able to do the jobs – including many jobs requiring few formal skills.
As of June 2025, more than 406,000 working-age adults were receiving a main benefit. Of those, 216,000 were on Jobseeker Support with around 120,800 considered work-ready.
Yet employers still cannot fill jobs in aged care, horticulture, hospitality, tourism and agriculture.
We spend billions on education. After a minimum of 12,500 hours of taxpayer-funded schooling, thousands of pupils leave school without the basic literacy and numeracy for a modern economy. Around one in eight school leavers are not in employment, education or training.
It is hard to learn if you do not attend school. Despite an improvement in attendance, too many schools have chronic absentee rates.
The lesson too many students learn is that attendance is optional. It is hardly surprising some carry that attitude into working life.
Work is a habit. Like any habit, it must be formed early.
New Zealand is not producing enough work-ready citizens. When we include superannuation, the number on taxpayer support is increasing.
We have drifted into becoming a country that imports temporary migrants to do the work while allowing able-bodied adults to remain on a benefit.
I know adults who have rarely had a job. We subsidise lives of alcoholism and other drug abuse.
A society that pays able-bodied adults to remain idle should not be surprised when social disorder follows. Spend a morning in the District Court listening to defendants give their occupation as “beneficiary”.
Our skilled citizens can see the model is not sustainable. They are fleeing to Australia.
Seymour acknowledges that, on paper, New Zealand has a sound immigration system: a points-based system for skilled permanent residence.
We can see that it works.
The Herald recently published the names of the highest-achieving students in the Cambridge International exams. The children of migrants dominate the list. They are precisely the sort of citizens New Zealand needs.
The problem is that temporary migration has increasingly become a parallel pathway to residence.
The total number of foreign workers in 2013 was just under 130,000.
Under Labour, by 2020 the numbers exploded to more than 220,000.
Labour then largely bypassed the skilled points system. Around 200,000 temporary migrants were granted residence. That is almost equal to the population of Wellington.
The coalition Government has marginally reduced work visa numbers.
Experience suggests that once large numbers of temporary workers are established here, political pressure grows to provide a pathway to residence.
Seymour is also concerned that there are about 21,000 overstayers, but it is 0.6% of our 3.5 million arrivals each year. Most overstayers came legally on visitors permits and most eventually leave voluntarily.
When I was MP for Auckland Central in the 1970s, overstaying was a problem. Immigration cases dominated my constituency clinics.
Immigration was very badly administered. No one knew how many overstayers there were. It could have been 20,000 then.
Now arrivals and departures are electronically matched. It confirms what officials have always suspected. Visitors from the UK and the US figure prominently.
Today, data-matching makes long-term overstaying difficult.
I have witnessed the change. When we became the caregivers for my 3-year-old grandson, we could not access health or education services until we proved his eligibility by producing his birth certificate.
Act is right to say there is an immigration problem.
But the cause is our failing domestic policies.
Until we pay schools for the number of pupils they teach, not the number they enrol, too many young New Zealanders will leave education unprepared for work.
Until we restore consequences for refusing work, too many able-bodied adults will choose welfare over employment.
Until we have savings-based superannuation, the cost will become unsustainable.
Immigration is not the disease. It is the symptom.
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