An "ugly casserole" indeed

So we've tightened up our immigration settings, again. Opponents are saying it's fiddling at the margins. I hope the critics are right: while it's dismaying that they've felt the need to bend with the prevailing political winds at all - "an ugly casserole of prejudice, resentment, economic envy and xenophobia from which New Zealand is not exempt", as Vernon Small put it in his īnsightful Dom-Post article - I hope it's the absolute minimum the government could get away with.

Not that it's without its own political dangers.Throwing scraps of meat out of the sleigh as the wolves close in may delay the chase, but wolves soon learn to chase sleighs for reward, and will be after you fitter and faster than before.

And I certainly didn't like the "Kiwis first" messaging around the thing. That's more the sort of jingoism you expect from the Aussies, and indeed got this week in their own tightening of their immigration regime, which more obviously pandered to the likes of One Nation and is more likely to do real economic damage. Early reactions suggest they've shot themselves in the foot, making it harder for employers to fill hard-to-recruit vacancies.

Let's not pretend, either, that there's anything remotely linked to the economy behind this. It's pure politics.

For one thing, the cyclical state of the labour market is very strong. Wanna see a picture of a thriving labour market? Here's one from the ANZ's Bank's latest tot of job ads.

Wanna see another? This is MBIE's latest tot of vacancies - jobs available right now. High, and climbing steadily,

If you're concerned that unskilled emigrants are driving down wages and stealing the everyday battlers' jobs at the hard end of the labour market, the greatest rise in vacancies in recent years has actually been for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs.

So it's extraordinarily hard to make any case that immigrants have soaked up the available jobs. Despite a recent large increase in net migration, there are more vacancies available than ever, even at the low wage end.

As for the fable that immigrants are putting pressure on already stressed infrastructure, it's either a marginal effect or complete bollocks. Higher levels of net immigration are a relatively recent phenomenon - the last three years or so - whereas the infrastructure, especially in Auckland, was already stuffed every way to Sunday well before that. 

Here's the clincher: as an economist colleague helpfully pointed out when I was tweeting about this, there was very little difference between Statistics New Zealand's population projections for Auckland's population ten years ago and what has actually happened. We knew there was a surge coming, and didn't plan for it, and still aren't - that's the reality, under national and local administrations of all political hues. It's got very little if anything to do with migration, and everything to do with systematic underfunding of infrastructure and obstructive land-use and other regulation. Our politicians have preferred to run dairy farms, mine coal, deliver letters and keep prime housing land to grow onions, rather than deliver the social and physical infrastructure for a high-income economy.

And that's something else the anti-immigration crew are missing. Far from being a burden on the economy, many migrants are actually alleviating the roadblocks to growth we've inflicted on ourselves. Across the road from us, one of those terrible Asian property investors - probably got one of those suspicious Chinese-sounding surnames - has started to turn two houses into five. Round the corner another of these awful leeches has already redeveloped one house into three. Employment for two gangs of tradies, five extra houses. Not bad for two parasites.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised about these latest turns of events here and in Australia. Liberal values and sensible economics are under attack pretty much everywhere, from the clowns in Washington to the Brexit-deluded in the UK through to the more sinister operators in (for example) France, Hungary and Poland. It's especially sad to see people "of the left", who might be expected to take a more progressive, internationalist view of the world, going along. 

But maybe there's hope around the corner. As this excellent article, 'In defence of liberalism', points out, the liberal values and better economic policies that created post World War Two prosperity are certainly under attack. But it concludes

the things we value can’t all be realised simultaneously and made compatible with each other. A liberal society is the best method yet devised of recognising this multiplicity of aims. It stresses value pluralism in the face of political and religious dogmatism, and of spurious appeals to national unity for the common good. I’ll doggedly stick to it.

So will I, even though in the short run the probability of a socially liberal, economically responsible government emerging from our next election looks to be half of five eighths of sod all.