3  The reverse diaspora

People born in New Zealand migrate to live elsewhere, but people born elsewhere also migrate to live in New Zealand: this is New Zealand’s “reverse diaspora”. Table 4 presents some statistics on trends in the reverse diaspora, based on the reported birth places of New Zealand’s usually resident population at the time of the 1981 and 2001 censuses. Between 1981 and 2001, numbers increased for all birthplaces, except for the United Kingdom. The fastest increases occurred for Africa and Asia. The rise in migration from Africa and Asia reflected the changes in New Zealand’s immigration policies during the 1980s and early 1990s. Preferences for migrants from “traditional” sources were ended and application decisions were based entirely on the personal characteristics of the migrants, such as age and human capital (Lidgard, Bedford and Goodwin 1998, OECD 2003).

^aExcluding the United Kingdom ^bAssumes that the ratio of New Zealand-born to foreign-born among respondents who do not specify a birthplace equals the ratio among respondents who do specify a birthplace

Source – Calculated from unpublished Census tabulations from Statistics New Zealand

The bottom row of Table 4 shows estimates of total numbers and percentages of foreign-born. To calculate these estimates, we assumed that respondents whose birthplace was unspecified or undefined had the same probability of being foreign-born as respondents who did have a clear birthplace. Although this is a standard assumption, we suspect that respondents with unspecified birthplaces were in fact disproportionately likely to be foreign-born, since foreign-born people may have been more likely to give answers that census coders could not interpret. If this suspicion is correct, then the actual number of foreign born in 2001 may have been slightly higher than the 19.4% suggested in Table 4.

Table 5 compares the percentage of foreign-born in New Zealand with percentages in other countries. Wherever possible, “unspecified” birthplaces are treated in the same way as they are for New Zealand.[5] Following standard practice we have had to use data on citizenship rather than birthplace for some countries. The two measures can diverse substantially: some countries, for instance, withhold citizenship from large numbers of locally-born children whose parents are foreign nationals (Coleman 2003: 310-314). The estimates for New Zealand are sufficiently large, however, that it can be safely concluded that the proportion of foreign-born in New Zealand is high by international standards. Though lower than Australia, it is substantially higher than in the United States, for instance, and over twice as high as in the United Kingdom.

^aForeign citizenship rather than foreign birth ^bRefers to 2002

Sources – See Appendix Table 1.

Table 6 shows the top 30 sources of migrants to New Zealand in 2001. The United Kingdom remains the largest source, with Australia a distant second. The remaining countries are widely scattered, including some from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America.