Wealthy Chinese migrants are now seeing to land on New Zealand’s soil, now that Canada has closed its doors on a scheme which let them ‘buy their way to that country’, as commentators put it.
The scheme to award permanent residency to those applicants who had loaned the government C$800,000 (NZ$841,000) for three years, had been cancelled by Canada in the month of February.
It is an accepted fact by now that Chinese who want to leave their country because of concerns like pollution and crackdown on corruption are now interested to move to New Zealand and Australia, instead of Canada.
Immigration consultancies now agree and accept the statement that : “since the Canadians shut down, we have had a lot of interest from China."
The reason behind New Zealand’s immigration intake for a decade – a huge growth of 31,900 with Chinese (6,200) the single largest was more of a phenomenon of the “invasion of deep-pocketed mainland Chinese”, as reported by South China Morning Post, last week.
Immigration policies of the government, property market conditions, etc. have been interlinked, since the influx of wealthy Chinese into New Zealand.
The chief economist of New Zealand, Tony Alexander, said that the construction sector grows along with the economy. So, he stated “we consider capping migration when there is a growth in economy then it will limit the builders’ availability which in turn leads to pressure on house prices”.
However immigration agents were less impressed with labor’s policy. Delamere described it as populism and said Labour has benefited in the year 2000 when the economy was sustained by students and business migrants from South Korea and China. He said that it is silly to blame them now and also added that Chinese buyers are not driving up house prices.
Tightening the immigration rules framed around family reunification for elderly parents, family and migrants in poor health where the main pay earner did not settle here would be better, according to Delamere. Tiang said that the government should initiate a mid- range category for migrants.
