Shamabil Yacob

But yes, I think people are far more open to being openly racist than had been in the past.

But am I seeing this outpouring of hate and all that kind of stuff?

Absolutely not.

I give, I don't know, last year I gave over 50 presentations around New Zealand and you made a diverse cross-section of New Zealand.

And a small minority will voice things like, you know, just the immigration, not people like you, but the new ones that are coming in.

Or quite often from a person who's clearly an immigrant themselves, talking about immigration in slightly different ways.

So there is an element of this I think that's personal, but also I think really a big challenge for New Zealand because immigration is one of the safety valves that we have used for a long time, both for our economic policy and for our fiscal policy and for our labour market policy.

We've used that as the shorthand for not investing in training, not changing our tax settings, whatever.

And if the social licence is running out for immigration, what happens next?

Look, I mean, it does.

And I guess in some ways the financial benefit is why we have immigration in New Zealand, right?

It's a very economic reason why we have immigration in New Zealand.

There's some great work done by the Treasury that showed that even though immigrants make up a relatively small part of the population,

They are overweight in their contribution to taxes in New Zealand.

So it's not like these people are not paying their way.

Right.

But because the conversation around immigration in New Zealand is quite schizophrenic, we go from we must have more immigrants to why there are so many of those immigrants here.

So we kind of switch between these two states of mind.

And so do our policies.

I don't think it serves New Zealand well, nor does it serve the migrants well.