4.2 Barriers to employment
The successful employment of migrants is dependent on a number of factors including the skill level of the migrants, willingness of employers to hire them and local labour market conditions. Breaking down these barriers is critical to increasing the employment rates of migrants.
The barriers to employment that are identified by the literature include poor English language skills and/or strong accents, recognition of qualifications, discrimination, inability to apply for jobs requiring a full driver’s licence, limited literacy skills and lacking in computing skills and experience pertaining to specific New Zealand employment applications. Fletcher (1999) identifies English language proficiency, recognition of qualifications, access to family and social networks, and access to information (effectively in that order) as being of greatest importance to the successful settlement of migrants.
The National Immigration Settlement Strategy released by the government at the end of 2003 looked at the wider question of settlement and identified particular barriers that government views as existing for migrants to fully settle into New Zealand. These include an inability to access services and information, difficulty speaking New Zealand English and difficulty gaining employment. These three barriers were prioritised for the 2004 Budget Round which allocated a package of $60 million over five years to fund a package of initiatives to support migrant settlement, including English for Speakers of Other Languages support for schools, adult ESOL training, New Zealand Qualifications Authority assessment of refugee qualifications, careers advice and labour market information, migrant resource services, refugee and migrant services and a national settlement structure.
Participation and employment rates for migrants improve over time, and for some migrant groups they surpass the rates of the New Zealand born. But the poor results for recent migrants are cause for some concern. The relatively low employment rates compared to natives may indicate a negative impact on GDP per capita. Migrants would be able to make a greater contribution to growth if they were assisted to integrate into the labour market as early as possible after arrival.
An important question, however, is whether the employment and participation rates for migrants as a whole are on average higher than the native population. If the migrant population has lower rates of participation and employment than the native population, but the migrant population is more highly skilled on average than the native population and therefore has higher productivity, then their impact on per capita growth may be positive. This would depend on the relative size of these two effects.
The literature suggests that migrants are facing a number of barriers to employment. This analysis suggests that addressing barriers to employment should be a high priority for the government as it could increase the employment rate of migrants which would improve their contribution to growth. This is discussed further in the policy section of this paper.
