I’m not writing about him.
There’s nothing new there. It’s his brand, his bread and butter.
As a headline, it’s very much “Dog bites man” or “Wolf eats sheep”.
But what is interesting is that National and Act (both currently in coalition with this other bloke) have decided to jump on the populist immigration debate.
These parties have traditionally favoured a neoliberal approach to immigration, which, if not quite “the more the merrier”, did at least assume that more people equalled more growth and more wealth.
Perhaps they’ve seen how well the issue is playing for populist politicians in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Perhaps it is because they have noticed that the biggest dent in their own polling seems to be coming from the rise of their coalition partner.
Who knows?
A debate about New Zealand’s immigration settings is entirely legitimate.
I’ll get to some of the economic reasons for being wary of loose immigration policy shortly.
But appealing to notions of social cohesion, as Act appears to be doing with its proposed citizenship test, and as Christopher Luxon did literally in his speech last week, is a bit sinister.
It involves projecting international issues that don’t really exist in New Zealand onto a political landscape that is unfortunately vulnerable to culture wars and tribalism.
The coalition Government is presiding over one of the lowest net migration rates in more than a decade.
If we exclude the bit where our borders were closed because of Covid, then you have to go back to 2013 before you see net migration as low as we’ve seen in this political cycle.
In August 2025, the annual net migration rate dropped to 10,000 as young Kiwis departed en masse.
Since November 2023, the migrant arrival rate has dropped by 100,000 from (an admittedly high) 234,000 to 133,000 by March 2025.
At 24,000, our current net migration is sitting below the long-run average (31,000 between 2002 and 2025).
If anything, New Zealand is losing the battle to attract the skilled migrants we need to grow and develop the economy.
We’re losing engineers, police officers, doctors, nurses and more to Australia.
With Australia’s higher wages and lower unemployment, it is hardly surprising.
Skilled workers don’t pack up and move their lives across the world unless there are jobs to go to.
On that basis, if you want to lower the migration rate, tanking the economy is a quick way to achieve your goal.
Is there really angst in New Zealand about the lack of social cohesion caused by immigration?
The latest Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor, which polls Kiwis on what’s bothering them, suggests there isn’t.
Immigration ranks as the 12th most pressing issue behind (deep breath): the cost of living, health, the economy, housing, crime and violence, unemployment, poverty, climate change, petrol prices, drug and alcohol abuse and education.
Just 8% of those polled put it in their top three issues. Which is not surprising, because it isn’t a big issue.
Anyone who has been in a hospital in the past decade can see how crucial immigration is to New Zealand.
Without it, our population would be going backwards.
In 2025, New Zealand’s Total Fertility Rate was 1.55 births per woman, the lowest on record.
There are some good economic arguments for keeping immigration well controlled.
It is important to have the right mix of skilled workers coming in.
Nobody wants immigrants to take jobs that Kiwis could be doing.
But you have to look at the net impact on the economy before you start talking about migrants taking jobs.
As consumers and businesspeople, immigrants create jobs too.
The same goes for infrastructure and housing.
There are limits to what the country can absorb, especially if the bump in tax revenue the Government gets from higher GDP is not funnelled into the relevant areas.
In the past two decades, both National and Labour have been guilty of banking the gains from immigration without covering these costs.
However, we need to acknowledge that New Zealand is among the most sparsely populated countries in the world.
Countries with even lower population density, such as Mongolia, Russia, Canada and Australia, have large tracts of hostile and largely uninhabitable land.
New Zealand is far more hospitable and could double its population and still be one of the lowest-density countries.
If we quadrupled it to 20 million people, we’d have a density in line with Ireland.
To match the population density of the UK, we’d need 76 million people (more than the current UK population).
We don’t want that. We like our wilderness. But a population of six-10 million isn’t wildly implausible.
People get upset about how much groceries cost here. A lot of that has to do with the lack of competition. We have only two major supermarket chains.
There’s a reason the UK has 10 major chains: more consumers.
If we want more competition among supermarkets, we’ll need a higher population, argues Liam Dann.
Finally, there’s the productivity dilemma. It is one of the best reasons to manage migration policy carefully.
If you allow a constant stream of low-skilled migrants into the country, you don’t just undermine the earning potential of your own workers. You let businesses put off investing in new technology and improving productivity.
The last Government to take that seriously was the Labour-led coalition in 2017.
Based on research by the NZIER, they adopted a tighter migration policy that unfortunately crashed into Covid.
We saw what happens when you turn off the migration tap. There were labour shortages, unemployment plunged, and wages soared.
Which sounds great until you see what it does to inflation. We don’t need to relitigate all that. But the economy was still in recovery when the oil shock hit this year.
It’s worth noting, too, that Labour buckled to business pressure, opened the borders and presided over record levels of immigration in its second term.
There is an annual net migration rate that is optimal for New Zealand’s economic progress. I don’t claim to know exactly what it is.
But it is not zero, and it is not 130,000.
Whatever the figure is, it needs to be steady, consistent, and based on policy fit for the purpose of growing both the size and performance of our economy.
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Liam Dann is business editor-at-large for the New Zealand Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.