The main way the outside world gets inside New Zealand is that people from elsewhere come here. In Edges of Empire: The politics of immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980–2020, social scientists Francis L. Collins, Alan Gamlen and Neil Vallelly attempt a critical reading of how New Zealand transformed itself from a colonial outpost into a ‘megadiverse’ neoliberal hub, both of which are anathematic towards te ao Māori.
The book is not merely a dry policy history; it is a forensic and often polemically biting examination of the ‘national common sense’ about who gets to call Aotearoa home, under what conditions, and at what cost to tāngata whenua. The book probes these issues using a hybridised methodology. Hard-ish data—how many came from where and when they arrived—is blended with former immigration ministers’ anecdotal testimony about their policy intentions and their hindsight reflections on those intentions. This is the book’s Oz-like flourish: the authors fling back the tatty 40-year-old curtain and reveal the revolving cast of technocratic nominal wizards whose string-pulling, including—if not especially—its unintended consequences, has fundamentally changed the cast that skips down New Zealand’s yellow brick road.
Edges of Empire declares that it focuses on “the practices and processes of governing migration and the role of New Zealand ministers of immigration in making immigration policy”. However, the emphasis falls largely on the latter. This primarily involves scrutinising “the political rationalities” and “technologies (such as regulation, monitoring, and enforcement) used to facilitate, limit, and manage migration” from which “the regimes of governmental practice … emerge”.
Rather than individuals making independent, possibly even ‘subjective’, decisions about who gets in and who gets left out, Edges plumps for institutional ideology as the determining force in how the state exercises power. Ministers are ideological cyphers, and their intentions are pseudo-Althusserian ideological delusions. The authors point to sustained bipartisan consensus on immigration policy as evidence. That trans-partisan ideology is settler colonialism, a heavily freighted term nowadays and one often used in ways that tend to nip reasoned debate in the bud.
The book, then, does not so much parse the ministerial interviews for insight into human agency as read them as scripts for bien-pensant Pākehā structural presumption. Given the emphasis in Edges on first-hand but depersonalised ministerial confession, a Foucauldian shadow falls hard and darkly across its pages, often obscuring any nuance, ambiguity and democratic positionality that its authors could have shed more light on.
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The narrative of Edges of Empire begins with a stark reminder of New Zealand’s starting point in 1980: a nation largely monocultural, largely Pākehā, with a 10 percent Māori population, governed by an essentially post-imperial regime that effectively operated a ‘Whites only’ immigration policy, notwithstanding selective inflows from the South Pacific. The turning point came in 1986, when the fourth Labour government’s blindsiding Rogernomics reforms decoupled immigration from race and tethered it to the market. The authors argue that this shift to “economic multiculturalism” was not a moral or progressive victory for racial inclusion. Instead, it was a pragmatic pivot.
Discrimination gave way to quantity as the empire of old—based on faded British ties or apron strings—was replaced by the ‘empire’ of global capital. Selection was no longer about where you came from, and migrants were no longer settlers. The state gave you the golden ticket if you were a viable unit of human capital, someone whom the powers-that-be wagered would help lift GDP.
Under the National governments of the 1990s and Helen Clark’s Labour government in the early 2000s, the market’s grip on immigration tightened further. New Zealand entered a global ‘war for talent’ and sought to reposition itself advantageously at the edge of a new kind of empire: neoliberal globalisation. The authors neatly explain how the ‘points system’ was refined to attract highly skilled workers, international students and investors, the definition of the latter widening to accommodate billionaire lifestylists, disaffected Hollywooders and one-percent survivalist lunatics. While the rhetoric celebrated ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’, the underlying policy was increasingly managerialist, accompanied by an altogether provincial, wide-eyed fetishisation of filthy-lucre-for-filthy-lucre’s sake.
When it came to wage workers, however, immigration became a tap that bureaucrats and ministers could turn on and off according to short-term labour-market pressures, often without any long-term plan—which New Zealanders are seldom fond of, or indeed skilled at making—for social integration or infrastructure.
Edges of Empire is at its most insightful when it looks at temporary migration. Its authors highlight that when New Zealand’s borders were sealed during Covid-19 in 2020, roughly 6 percent of the population—more than 300,000 people—were in the country on temporary work or study visas. This created a class of residents who were ‘permanently temporary’. They contributed to the economy, paid taxes and built lives, yet were denied the basic rights and securities of residency.
The book also delves into the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme, often praised internationally as a model for ‘circular migration’. Collins, Gamlen and Vallelly are less valorising, pointing to systemic vulnerabilities that have created well-documented worker exploitation in primary industries. Temporary visas often tie workers to a single employer, which for the authors amounts to indentured labour in all but name. The market’s churning ebbs and flows render workers’ lives precarious, their presence justified solely in economic terms and their pathways to residence often labyrinthine or frozen in legal limbo.
The book provocatively jousts at immigration’s so-called ‘depoliticisation’. The authors argue that a nexus of bureaucrats and academics—what elsewhere has been reductively couched, notably by right-wing conspiracy theorists, as ‘the deep state’—has managed New Zealand’s immigration system, often wielding more effective power than their political masters while also enjoying continuity that outlasts the electoral cycle.
While these embedded, unelected administrators have forestalled the kind of toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric heard in the US and Europe—although big cracks are beginning to show—it’s claimed that their backstage role has also stifled democratic debate. By framing immigration as a purely technical or economic necessity, successive governments have waved away difficult questions: What is the purpose of immigration beyond filling labour gaps? What kind of society are we trying to build? And what does it mean for te Tiriti? The authors warn that these administrative éminences grises, implementing technocracy by stealth, inevitably undermine and erode democracy, reducing it to something increasingly performative and ceremonial rather than decisive.
An emboldened bureaucracy redefines national identity without the citizenry explicitly mandating it, although what the now-fissiparous majority would approve of as a ‘national identity’ is beyond the authors’ pale. Unsurprisingly, the book is also concerned with the relationship between immigration and te Tiriti o Waitangi, tacitly raising the shibboleth of co-governance. For decades, immigration policy was a ‘Crown-only’ affair that outright ignored the state’s obligations to Māoridom. The authors argue that a truly decolonised immigration system must integrate Māori authority into decision-making processes. The book calls for a ‘Tiriti-led’ migration policy that considers the impact of population growth on Indigenous communities and sovereignty, although it does not go into any meaningful detail about what such a policy might look like.
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I hope readers will come away from this book with a heightened awareness that the question of who wants to come here should serve as a mirror for self-reflection.
Take the influx of almost exclusively white South Africans into New Zealand after apartheid ended. In 2018 there were nearly 37,000 South African-born residents in the Auckland region, many living on the city’s North Shore and in its eastern suburbs. For South Africans, New Zealand—and Auckland especially—had a great deal going for it: jobs, a mild climate, fellow expatriates, the whole rugby thing, and so on. Wanting to get away from crime and lawlessness is entirely understandable. But then again, they did not flock here during apartheid’s violent heyday. They were okay with that—and then they were okay with New Zealand. Edges of Empire notes the 2011 suggestion by Margaret Mutu, Professor of Māori Studies at the University of Auckland, that such immigration might need to be limited because it could bolster the “white supremacist dimensions of settler colonialism in New Zealand”.
The political establishment under John Key’s National government, like previous governments, deemed Mutu’s entirely reasonable position to be far outside the local ‘Overton Window’ (the range of policies and ideas acceptable to the majority of the public). That is to say, New Zealand’s policy status quo took it for granted that white settlers from South Africa and elsewhere were the ones most like ‘us’. It is a disquieting assumption, and one that New Zealanders—Pākehā especially—could benefit from thinking about.
The book’s story ends with the Covid-19 pandemic, which it presents as a stress test of the New Zealand model. When the borders closed, the fragility of a system dependent on a constant flow of temporary labour was exposed. National ‘common sense’ was shaken as, in practical terms, businesses faced labour shortages and ‘permanently temporary’ migrants found themselves without a safety net. Collins, Gamlen and Vallelly suggest that ‘economic multiculturalism’ has had its day and that Aotearoa stands at a fork in the road. The choice ahead is between doubling down on precarity by continuing to treat migrants as a flexible labour force denuded of rights, or taking a left turn for a new settlement in which the country moves towards a system based on genuine inclusion, rights and Te Tiriti obligations.
It is, of course, difficult to summarise what made New Zealand what it was, or what makes it what it is. Two things, however, will never change: its location and geography, and the foundational relationship between tāngata whenua and the Crown.
Immigration to Aotearoa New Zealand between 1980 and 2020 is indelibly marked by a small state still figuring out what it is in 19th-century terms while situated at the edge of global systems that actively seek to evaporate traditional state-centred sovereignty. Stratification has deepened as the population has grown more diverse and cosmopolitan. Policies calibrated for openness have simultaneously manufactured new peripheries within the nation: temporary migrants, refugees, precarious renters. The edges of empire are no longer geographic but ethical. They run through workplaces, visa categories and daily conversations about who counts as ‘one of us’. Understanding that landscape demands historical literacy rather than nostalgia: an awareness that today’s migration hierarchies descend from older imperial grammars of privilege and dependence.
The challenge for New Zealand in the coming decades is not merely to manage population flows but to cultivate a political imagination generous enough to recognise continuity with its own past—and critical enough to write new sentences in that long imperial transcript.
Edges of Empire is an engaging and welcomely discomforting read. It challenges the self-congratulatory middle-New Zealand narrative that sees the country as a ‘successful multicultural experiment’ by exposing the structural inequalities baked into the system. The book assumes that the settler-colonial project decisively shaped the subsequent ethos of immigration policy, from which different governments’ policies were derived. This seems fair enough to me, given that New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements are themselves settler-colonial.
Although the authors can seem too credulous in taking governmental intentions at face value, their decision to give voice to successive ministers of immigration—a kind of collective ‘horse’s mouth’ speaking to the tradable orthodoxies of the past four decades—offers a rare glimpse at who wields the levers of power and of the unintended consequences of treating human beings as economic inputs. It is an impassioned call to move beyond the ‘edge of empire’ and towards a more honest and equitable version of Aotearoa.
However, honesty and equity are not inevitable, nor can we comfortably fit them into a functioning democracy that allows governments room to move. Democratic honesty means allowing all voices to be heard, so long as they do not undermine democracy itself. It means reconciling a hermeneutic tipping point with expansive allowability of expression. Equity, meanwhile, requires maximising participation while letting majorities exercise consented authority.
These tasks are almost impossibly difficult for our society, especially in an era of Trumpian chaos and populist-driven policy. Nowadays, one sees more of what might be called performative policy: policy less concerned with outcomes than with signalling an attitude, especially vis-à-vis one’s political constituency. If populism were to continue its ascent here, the worry is that, amid the dog whistles and finger-pointing bluster, damagingly effective policies could be enacted under the cover of public confusion. We ought to seek to improve the system insofar as it enables better decision-making: more informed, more transparent, more inclusive and so on.
Collins, Gamlen and Vallelly argue that the powers-that-be have made, or are making, the wrong decisions, and that things must change or we will get more of the same. But should we really shake up our democracy so that governments cannot make decisions we dislike but which most of our fellow citizens support? That is a big question, one for which New Zealand must find an answer we can all live with, before too long.
Edges of Empire: The politics of immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980–2020 by Francis L. Collins, Alan Gamlen and Neil Vallelly (Auckland University Press, $50) is available in bookstores nationwide. Robert McLean’s excellent review is taken with kind permission from the online site The Landfall Tauraka Review.
