Have You Come Far?

With record migration and a fast-growing population, Aotearoa New Zealand is changing. How that will look depends upon the interplay between people here now and those who want to come. So who is coming and does it matter?

With record migration and a fast-growing population, Aotearoa/New Zealand is changing.

How that will look depends upon the interplay between people here now and those who want to come. So who is coming and does it matter? What is the ideal number of people, what benefits will we see and where are the potential flashpoints? Can we rely on political leadership to steer us in the right direction?

In this four-part podcast series for RNZ in association with Massey University, Noelle McCarthy investigates the state of immigration in New Zealand and asks - when it comes to our Slice of Heaven, is there enough to go around?

"We've been here for 1000 years. You guys have been here for 200 years. We're all immigrants." - Leonie Hayden, Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara, writer and editor, Slice of Heaven, Ep 1

The choices we've made about immigration have shaped the country New Zealand has become. The choices we're making now will impact our future in ways we can only dimly perceive.

A conversation with immigration expert Professor Paul Spoonley, which kept circling back to these two ideas, was the jumping-off point for Slice of Heaven. At a time when more migrants are coming to New Zealand than ever before, we've spoken to people from Kaitaia to Invercargill and various points in between about their experiences of immigration.

We've interviewed academics and economists, politicians and people in rugby clubs, dairy workers and construction companies, church groups, iwi and more besides.

We ended up talking to more than 60 people and we tried to go into each of those conversations with open minds. All the same, many of them said things that surprised us - how their perception of immigration was altered by knock-on effects that are complex and sometimes confusing.

We had a young Indian man crying in the studio as he described the mental stress involved in getting residency.

And we had an interviewee who was careful to wait until we'd stopped recording before saying, "Auckland liberals talk about diversity, and that's fine, but where I'm from I see homeless Māori sleeping in the streets."

This wasn't grandstanding - if anything, they were apologetic about saying something so potentially inflammatory. But after years of dealing with the sharp end of social issues, their frustration with a one-dimensional view of immigration was clear. "And the people living in what used to be their homes are immigrants."…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details