Erica Stanford

residence program we've had in New Zealand history in such a short time.

230,000 people given residence with no health checks, no English language required.

It was a disaster.

And we have cleaned up that mess in the last two years.

And we're in a really good space now.

Possibly.

25, 26 is our long term sort of average.

And of course, it's cyclical.

So it goes with the economy.

When the economy is doing well, we need more migrants to fill skills and the numbers rise.

And when obviously the economy is not doing well, like it wasn't for the last couple of years, it reduces and we were at risk of actually dropping below, you know, dropping to zero.

and we're having negative net migration.

We managed to avoid that.

But the key thing for me is that in the last two years, we have flipped the skill level around.

So now 70% of the people coming in are highly skilled, and that is what you need to drive a highly productive economy.

That is fair, and Immigration New Zealand got absolutely hauled over the coals, and so should have the previous Minister under Labour.

When we opened the borders from COVID and we just let in anyone, we literally closed our eyes and said, you know, welcome to New Zealand, we're not going to check your documents or do a proper risk management.

That was a disaster.

That's how we ended up with 70% low-skilled migrants, couldn't speak English, you know, brought all of their family and were then essentially exploited.

what we've built over the last two years is proper risk management, proper verification, and we've brought in things like English language requirements.