The Best Immigrants

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22103, 27 May 1937, Page 10

The Best Immigrants

Speaking as president of the Auckland branch of the British Empire Society, at an Empire Day dinner, Mr Justice Callan referred to the trend of the Dominion's population figures, and they led him to hope for a speedy and steady increase in the flow of the best immigrants into New Zealand. He disclosed the point of these words in an epigram! "For New Zealand, the "best immigrants are native-born New Zea- " landers." Unlike many epigrams, this one is all good sense; and it will stand a great deal of hammering and probing. For example, is the arrival of native-born immigrants encouraged or discouraged by a basic wage principle which credits the unmarried wage-earner with the obligation of supporting a wife and three children, and so on? For example again, is the arrival of such immigrants encouraged or discouraged by economic and fiscal policies which increasingly load the average householder with public costs and which deplete*his free income faster than his share of the public benefit grows? The thousands of wage and salary earners who have contributed their increased imposts to the income tax revenue, doubled since 1933-34, will have their answer to the question. But Mr Justice Callan's statement remains, plainly to impress the truth that economically and socially New Zealand will stand self-confessed as bankrupt of wisdom if it cannot devise measures which will, indirectly and directly, serve to turn the curve of the population graph distinctly upward. It may be assumed by some, mistakenly, that his sentence rejects oversea immigration. On the contrary, it includes such a policy. Oversea immigrants are, the prospective fathers and mothers of native-born New Zealanders, of whom* a new first generation will be no less valuable than a third or fourth. There is no case for a greater population in New Zealand which is not a case for the immediate impetus of a judicious immigration policy. Mr Savage in his many evasive pronouncements on the subject has occasionally caught a glimpse of one certainty about it: that immigration will have to be calculated. Even when he said that the best immigration policy would be to make New Zealand so prosperous that immigrants would want to"come to share its prosperity an indulgent critic might acquit him of the folly of suggesting that, given the old balance of advantage between the worker's standard of life in Great Britain and the worker's standard of life in New Zealand, immigration could be left to manage itself. It is not in the least degree likely that such a balance in New Zealand's favour will in the measurable future be restored, and exert the former, wide pull. To supply that pull and to regulate it and make it selective must be part of any immigration policy. A series of factors could be defined, each of which contributes to the conclusion that the period is over when the relatively more rapid growth of prosperity in the Dominions sufficed to set moving, and keep moving, the transfer of population from Great Britain. But this is a long way from the conclusion that it is either undesirable or impossible to stimulate again by carefully designed measures a flow which has ceased. The Dominion's extensive capital development, its social and industrial needs, and its defence problems are obvious reasons why such measures should be devised and made to operate;

and they are consistent, fully, with the interests of Great Britain and of the Empire as a whole. The keys to the appropriate measures are not very hard to find. First, the Dominion requires reasonable security of markets oversea for the export surplus of primary production. Second, domestic manufacture needs to be strongly but carefully developed: strongly, because it is on this side that the Dominion is most backward and most handicapped; carefully, because it would be fatally easy to abuse the common expedient of developing manufactures behind high protective tariffs, at the cost of impoverishing the standard of living. This is the field where expert knowledge, the intelligent use of State capital to aid private enterprise, and strict specialisation may be expected to give good results. Third, there is scope for much better, more rational publicity, specifically directed to reach and influence the kind of migrant desired; and lastly, there are technical disabilities that can be removed and should be—for example, the loss of such earned benefits and rights under the English social services as the migrant ordinarily surrenders. None of these things will happen by itself. The two firstmentioned are actually part of the Government's policy; but they are not imagined or thought out or definitely aimed as instruments of an immigration policy. They ought to be; and it will be surprising and saddening if the Imperial Conference does not bring Mr Savage and Mr Nash to the point of discovering it.