Harrison assessed the evidence cited by public law specialist Mai Chen in an online book titled “Superdiversity Stocktake: Impact on Business, Government and on New Zealand”, released last November. He also looked at official thinking on immigration.
Harrison’s paper, titled “The Superdiversity myth”, was released the day before Statistics New Zealand announced a new record net gain in migrants of 65,900 in the year to January.
Mai Chen, who is chair of the Superdiversity Centre, which analyses the law, policy and business implications of New Zealand’s superdiversity, said in “The Superdiversity stocktake” that:
1. Superdiversity is economically beneficial for New Zealand
2. ‘Investment’ is needed to maintain the ‘diversity dividend’
3. More diversity is inevitable and is to be welcomed
4. Superdiversity benefits need to be widely understood and better communicated.
However, Harrison said three of the 10 references presented in “Superdiversity Stocktake” to argue that superdiversity is positive provided evidence that showed negative outcomes. The other seven did not provide any convincing evidence.
“There aren’t that many academic articles that find a positive relationship between ethnic diversity and economic benefits, and we didn’t find any that provided a compelling argument for a general proposition that ethnic diversity has significant economic benefits,” Harrison said.
“The other strand in the literature, that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on economic performance is entirely omitted from Mai Chen’s discussion,” Harrison said.
Harrison said the Labour Department’s immigration research based on a paper titled “New Zealand Research on the Economic Impacts of immigration 2005–2010: Synthesis and Research Agenda”, did not provide any convincing evidence that large-scale immigration is good for New Zealand. He said:
1. The flagship research effort, the computable general equilibrium model, was incapable of addressing the key issues that large-scale immigration raises.
2. The assessment that average incomes increase is a based on a flawed methodology and there is no evidence of a positive outcome for New Zealand-born residents.
3. The positive fiscal effect was also based on a flawed methodology.
4. Continuing large-scale immigration will have a substantial negative impact on immigrants who have recently arrived.
The conventional way of looking at the economic impact of large-scale immigration shows:
1. Real wages will fall
2. Owners of land will benefit because land underpins the New Zealand economy and the supply of land is fixed.
3. There will be an outflow of "native" labour in search of higher wages in Australia
4. The economy will be bigger, but average incomes will fall
5. Resources will flow into low value service production.
The official analysis of the impact of immigration in New Zealand almost entirely omits discussion of the fixed factors of production (land) as a simplification that doesn’t matter very much, without thinking at all about how New Zealand could be different.
The model seems to be consistent with some of the observed facts, which are:
1. Real per capita export growth has slowed as labour supply has increased
2. Labour productivity growth has been very slow
3. Census data shows Auckland median income growth was the second lowest of any region over 2001-2006, and the lowest over 2006 to 2013.
Auckland is the “poster child” of superdiversity, Harrison said. If there was anything in the ‘diversity dividend’ argument Auckland should have been leaping ahead in the income stakes and it is not.
See “The Superdiversity myth - A review of the economic arguments for the ‘superdiversity dividend’” at http://www.tailrisk.co.nz/documents/TheSuperdiversityMyth.pdf
10 comments:
Very good analysis. Why anyone takes any notice of what Mai Chen says, is a puzzle, as she has a vested interest in outcomes she pushes, including immigration. She is one of the law fraternity who are there primarily to make money. Anyone who was close to Geoffrey Palmer is suspect in my view, he is someone who pushed non existant "Treaty Principles" onto us, and will in the future be seen as causing huge separation in society. So someone prepared to challenge the "Mai Chen Myths" needs to be thanked by all of us.
Indeed // Imagine reading anything by Mai Chen or old yellow tooth Geoff Palmer. The tales of despair and emerging social disintegration coming from Europe are scary. No thanks not here.
Immigration. A two edged sword. ?
A temporary expedient to cover up the economic on coming disaster facing NZ ??
As per usual Mike hits the nail on the head, IF (and that is a big word) If we had a vibrant economy supported by an expanding export economy to support our present lifestyles. Yes, then immigration would be needed, but only on a selective basis in that those who wish to settle in “God’s Own” will ultimately benefit our society.
The rather naive, emotive humanitarian concept that we have a natural and international duty to accept a greater and greater number of refugees either legally or illegal ones is a potential disaster. We already have no coherent building policy “to eventually house what people we already have in this country”. (Pardon the split infinitive) A deal of this is due to the antiquated building standards ( as far as residential building we are still in the world of the T Model Ford) and no Local Government coherent simple policy on land development or standards.
The National & Labour party policy of courting China, to the extent of being reduced again to a colony status; merely to gain (or lose) access to the world’s largest and expanding (at present contracting) economy. It is a reminder of the sixties cry of cutting trade links with Britain and European so-called colonialism. Just to protect the establishment of uneconomic local manufacturers and boast of full employment. A policy supported by the then Hard Left, now successfully embodied in the Green Party, together with Union left wing socialist activists.
But with China we would do well to remember we have no such blood relation affiliations, or emotive ties as with the old British Colonial Institution. Another case of placing all one’s eggs in a single basket scenario???
The other factor is our propensity to allow unrestricted bureaucracy to produce continual barriers to private, commercial and export activities. The Conservation Act, the Human Rights Act, the R.M.A. (Now subject to a review, which now seems to be merely politically cosmetic). All of these State Departments committed to an intense campaign of placing extra costs on what is produced in this country, either directly or indirectly.
The Safety gurus have added further costs, ostensibly to protect the public from earthquakes and tidal waves etc., by stringent safety measures principally enabling the State too again, reduce individual responsibility and further its control. Shades here of a revival of Marxist/Lenin ideology together with this new slogan of a Superdiversity Dividend!
Would it be too cruel to say this is a case of ## “abyssus abyssum invocate” ##?
Brian.
## One missed step leads to another ????
PS Mike, Sorry, I seem to have drifted away somewhat from the subject of immigration...not on my usual single malt I regret to say!!
Note I have ticked "I am not a Robot", if still here in a decade, this would pose a problem!
In a discussion on Tariq Ramadan's book On Super Diversity a scholar says that the nation state is essentially racist and dealing with that is "one of the settled tasks". If so it doesn’t matter if it is good for the people of the nation or not, so they might feel justified (being the be-all and end-all) in controlling politics and journalism?
There are two models of multiculturalism. One is affirming of an existing society and culture. The other is deliberately undermining of it.
The first model is best described as a “melting pot.” Those who come to a country are expected to assimilate themselves into a single, existing national identity. The second model we might call a “salad basket.” Here, no requirement is placed upon migrants to conform to the laws and values of their host nation.
Where a melting pot model applies, a single common culture, to which everyone is required to broadly subscribe, occupies the public square. Immigrants are expected to identify with and accommodate themselves to the host culture, but remain free to privately express their cultures of origin as long as they do so within the law.
Salad basket multiculturalism holds that a variety of separate-but-equal cultures occupy the public square concurrently. Shake a salad basket all you like, and the colours and vegetables will remain forever separate. Any attempt to assert the primacy of one culture will be painted by leftists as an act of “cultural oppression.”
Salad basket multiculturalism is a subversive tool of the socialist left. These people are not nationalists, but internationalists. They are well aware that the nation state is the best prophylactic against the “world-mindedness” they mean to encourage. If nobody can agree on a single, common set of ideas, they reason, nobody will unite to defend them when the time comes.
Their agenda is to collapse the nation state into a global multiculture, then argue that since we are now one world demographically, we should also be one world politically. Along the way, they propose to rub everyone else’s noses in “diversity” as some kind of twisted atonement for our allegedly “white racist” past. Everyone must be made to wear the hair shirt.
Recent years have seen mass-scale immigration to New Zealand from particular destinations over a relatively short space of time. This is not a good thing. If manageable numbers of people from one place arrive slowly, the assimilative mechanisms of the community can embrace and draw them into the melting pot, allowing them over time to become Kiwis.
Deliberately or short-sightedly swamping those assimilative mechanisms removes any incentive to assimilate, allowing immigrant groups to ghetto-ise into self-sustaining outposts of foreign cultures within their host community.
What of immigrants from Communist China?
As Andrew Browne reminds us in a recent Wall Street Journal Asia article on PRC-born migrants: “[W]herever they go, those who depart [from Red China] will be shadowed by the organs of the Leninist state they've left behind. A sprawling bureaucracy—the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council—exists to ensure that distance from the motherland doesn't dull their patriotism. Its goal is to safeguard loyalty to the Communist Party.”
PRC-born migrants grew up in a Communist country. They were indoctrinated into the belief that Communism would one day supplant capitalism by hook or by crook. Despite having been welcomed here with open arms, many of these people are likely to remain committed to advancing the strategic interests of a foreign power. Even if they are not, the safety of family at home is always a loaded gun to their heads.
Flooding New Zealand with increasingly unassimilable migrants, most of whom who can never accept our existing Judeo-Christian, free market culture is an undemocratic act. The electorate was never asked it wanted New Zealand transformed into a multi-ethnic, multicultural country. Had it been asked in those terms, it would have voted resoundingly against.
New Zealand, like every other Western country, is now run by a deeply embedded leftist establishment using its cultural dominance as a bully pulpit against anyone daring to question its monolithic world view.
We’re told repeatedly by our leftist cultural elite that unrestrained multiculturalism is good for us. “Diversity” is regarded as an end in itself and not to be contested. To ask “How much diversity is enough?” is to invite public crucifixion.
But put simply, New Zealanders need to be far more assertive about valuing the cultural identity of English-speaking, Judeo-Christian New Zealand. Otherwise, a large influx of inassimilable migrants will eventually force the wholesale deconstruction of New Zealand’s sense of its own identity. If nobody is prepared to stand up and be counted, New Zealand as we know it will disappear into the dustbin of history in the not too distant future.
Behind mass-scale third world immigration is a deliberate Marxist-Leninist attack on the Judeo-Christian culture of white Europeans that came to us via Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, a culture many non-whites around the world have subsequently derived enormous benefit from having adopted.
So what on the surface appears to be ethnic cleansing and population replacement of white people is not really intended as an assault on whites at all, but is a well-planned initiative to eradicate the West’s Judeo-Christian that originated with whites.
There are four main roadblocks to a one-world socialist government: [1] private property, which provides for material independence from State power; [2] the nuclear family, which provides for loyalties above that to the State; [3] the Judeo-Christian religion, which provides for a source of moral authority above that of the State (as well as being the moral basis for private property rights and the nuclear family); and [4] the nation state, which acts as a road block to the “world-mindedness” socialist One-Worlders intend to develop in the rest of us.
Multiculturalism means population replacement, or to use words we might all understand, ethnic and cultural cleansing. Take a walk down parts of Auckland’s Sandringham Road, Dominion Road, Stoddard Road, or New North Road. While there’s little overt hostility (yet) towards native-born Kiwis, they‘re an ever-declining minority in these traditional working class suburbs.
If words like population replacement, ethnic cleansing, and cultural cleansing make you somewhat uncomfortable, consider birth rates in New Zealand’s non-white and non-Christian migrant populations. Current birth rates mean the white population will progressively decrease with each generation. The non-Christian migrant population will massively increase, eventually swamping New Zealand’s traditional Judeo-Christian culture.
To become both an ethnic and cultural minority in your own country over just a few decades suggests that undeclared government policy is to ethnically cleanse white New Zealanders (or rather their Judeo-Christian culture) from their homeland. The leftists responsible for this treacherous betrayal never stated their agenda upfront, preferring instead to frame mass-scale immigration and its accompanying “diversity” as a form of collective contrition for our supposedly white “racist” past.
Leftists are well aware that New Zealand’s white population is being ethnically cleansed to eradicate its Judeo-Christian culture. Newspaper articles and government policy documents crowingly announce that white New Zealanders will soon become a racial and cultural minority in their own country, thus tacitly admitting the leftist agenda of population replacement. Non-whites who have adopted Judeo-Christian values and practices will also get to join whites as a cultural minority.
According to 2013 Census Data, over one million New Zealanders were born overseas, accounting for about 25% of the country's population. This marks an increase from about 20% in 2001 and 23% in 2006.
Between 1986 and 2006, the numbers born in Asia and now resident in New Zealand went up by 661 percent, with Chinese (899.4 percent) and Indians (841.6 percent) dominating growth in this population category. Over that time the number of overseas-born Pacific people also doubled, and immigration from other countries, such as Africa, increased substantially.
This social shift was brought about by the Fourth Labour Government’s Immigration Act 1987, which radically changed migrant entry to New Zealand. Requirements were now to be based on individual characteristics, skills and money rather than preferred source countries. Election night television coverage from Labour’s campaign headquarters leaces little room for doubt that immigration was a quid pro quo offered by Labour in exchange for votes.
Merely considering the overall percentage of migrants masks the greater density and impact of foreign-born populations in the cities and suburbs where immigrants tend to congregate.
A Otago Daily Times article (December 2012) by Lincoln Tan stated that according to Statistics NZ figures, white Europeans were likely to lose majority status in Auckland over the next few years as the combined population of Asians (particularly Chinese and Indians), Pacific Islanders, and those culturally identifying as Maori skyrocketed.
Auckland’s population was 76 percent white European in 1976. Projections show this will decline to 51 percent by 2016, with further reductions to follow over succeeding years. Massey University sociology professor Paul Spoonley, who made the Auckland population projection based on Statistics NZ figures, said it was a matter of "when" rather than "if" minority communities combined would outnumber white Europeans in Auckland.
This migrant population is primarily a youthful one, meaning the decline in white European population will be further accelerated by higher birth rates among immigrants. As one might expect, the effect of this demographic trend will first be felt in Auckland, and is already taking place. As a September 2011 NBR article noted, though around 40 percent of Aucklanders were foreign-born, half of all working-age Aucklanders were born outside New Zealand.
Since Auckland is home to some 32 percent of New Zealand’s population, it is indisputable that mass-scale immigration, left unchecked, will leave native-born New Zealanders a minority, first of all in the major cities, then in their own country, in 50 years or less.
This population replacement is already well underway everywhere unassimilable blocs have become entrenched. But New Zealanders never voted for it. It just happens, forced or enabled from above.
A majority of us might want to disappear into a global multiculture, but I doubt it. That’s why we have borders and immigration laws. Sadly, we also have a political class that feels entitled to make a mockery of the democratic process, and thus of our nationhood.
The response of our Leftist academic, media, and political establishment to anyone highlighting these trends is to accuse them of "scaremongering." The enlightened thought-bubble is now meant to register the word "racism." But is it really "fear of immigrants" or "racism" for native-born Kiwis to object to their own demographic extinction?
Is it "fear" and "scaremongering" to challenge this deliberate population replacement and ethnic cleansing? Is it "racism" to oppose the ever-hastening demographic and cultural obliteration of a nation taking place before our unseeing eyes?
The impulse to limit the influx of unassimilable immigrants, whose demographic waves will otherwise transform our Kiwi culture into a global multiculture is not racism. Rather, it is the instinct to survive as a recognisable culture and nation state.
This issue is too important to be left to our academic, media and political establishment. Surely ALL those who live here, not just a handful of self-anointed opinion-shapers, have an absolute right to say who gets to live here, in what numbers, and under what conditions.
Buckling to denigration of a nation's survival instinct as an atavistic expression of fear and racism is to enable the mechanism of our own demise: silence and retreat in the face of the nasty labels deployed by leftists to close down a debate that we surely need to have before it is too late.
What a way to lose a country.
ENDS
The West’s chattering classes and politicians continue to provide us with a very shallow analysis of the Middle Eastern “refugee” problem. Behind this current are the Socialist One-Worlders of the UN, which has always seem itself as a One World Government in the making.
For upwards of 30 years, the One Worlders have been promoting salad-basket (a variety of separate but equal cultures in the public square rather than a single common culture to which all are required to broadly subscribe) multiculturalism as a subversive force. Their agenda was (and is) to dissolve the nation state into a global multi-culture, then argue that since we are all one world demographically, we should also be one world politically.
But the nation state displayed unexpected rehabilitative powers. While the first generation of immigrants from any destination wanted their children to marry others like them, succeeding generations were left to make their own choices, becoming increasingly assimilated via the melting pot.
Enter Islam. Islam will always be an ever-growing cancer in the body politic of any non-Islamic host country, because Muslims can only marry other Muslims. Any Muslim who marries a non-Muslim who doesn’t convert is according to Muhammad and the Koran required to be killed as an apostate.
Many in the West are waking up to the likelihood of a planned Muslim demographic takeover referred to in Muslim Brotherhood documents as “Civilisation Jihad,” meaning the pace of Islamic immigration must be stepped up to reach a tipping point as rapidly as possible.
Islamic Jihadists can be likened to the members of a pickpocketing gang who distract the mark so he doesn’t notice his pocket is being picked. ISIS is a convenient “radical” sideshow that has created a conflict displacing millions of “moderate” Muslims, who are flooding into the West apparently to get away from it. The Socialist One-Worlders and their liberal “useful idiot” enablers then pressure the West to admit all these “migrants” on compassionate grounds, thus hastening the demographic advance of Islam.
None of the oil-rich Middle Eastern states that are not war-torn are putting up their hands to take in fellow Arabs and Muslims. One reason might be they don’t want to admit a mass of potential troublemakers. But they are well-content to insert it into the West to further swell the already burgeoning Islamic demographic there.
Charity clearly begins in the West, not at home. Saudi Arabia, for example, has an empty tent city in the desert near Mecca set up for the use of Haj pilgrims with a capacity of more than 3.5 million people. The only aid advanced by the Saudis is an offer to fund the building of 200 mosques (aka Islamist hate and indoctrination centres) in Germany to help the "refugees" acclimatise.
Behind the women and cute children shown front and centre in television news reports, at least 80% of the “refugees” are young, fit men of military age, travelling in groups, carrying cell phones and wearing designer trainers. This is clearly an orchestrated and controlled migration movement, a Hijrah to colonise new Islamic lands, emulating the manner in which Muhammad relocated to and took over Medina.
We cannot know for sure how many of these young men are ISIS fifth columnists. Sheer numbers mean the “refugees” will receive at best a cursory processing, meaning a significant contingent of unidentifiable Islamists will be hiding inside this Trojan Horse. The aggressive young Muslim men in transit through Greece chanting obscenities and "Allahu Akbar" while refusing donated food and water did so because the Red Cross is a “Christian” symbol.
If these young men are so hostile to the barest manifestation of Judeo-Christian culture when they are hungry and thirsty, how much more hostile are they likely to prove once comfortably housed in a Muslim ghetto in a Western country?
The West ought to be offering asylum to the relative handful of the war-torn region’s persecuted Christians who have escaped being brutally done to death by Islamic Jihadists rather than admitting more unassimilable Muslims. Christian refugees are clearly a better fit with our existing Judeo-Christian culture and won’t further swell the pool of potential Islamic Jihadists already here.
Syrian Muslim refugees (the so-called "moderates" fleeing ISIS) are already showing their true colours towards Christianity by bullying and threatening Christian refugees. These Christians fled Syria to escape Islamic persecution, only to be persecuted by Syrian Muslims upon taking refuge in Sweden. Having made it what they thought was safety, the Christians were forced out of a group refugee house by Muslims, who refused to allow them to use the public areas of the house, and also made them hide their crucifixes.
Refugee policy must be made on the basis of a sober analysis of whether it will be in The West’s long-term interest rather than whether or not it makes liberals feel virtuous. Admitting large numbers of Muslims will certainly have a profound long-term effect on New Zealand’s body politic, and on the evidence of Europe, 30 years further down this path than we are, not a good one.
Europe already knows (or ought to) that Muslims are only peaceful until there are enough of them to create a recognisable Islamic community. Once this occurs, those who formerly just wanted to “get along” are pressured by the more pious and observant into following the commandments in the Koran to self-segregate and wage perpetual war on non-Muslims.
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