The challenge of recruiting and retaining international talent

Abstract

Finding practical new ways to make New Zealand a smarter, more successful country was the challenge of the Government-sponsored Catching the Knowledge Wave conference in July 2001: This conference was sparked by a growing concern that our country's international competitiveness had dropped considerably by comparison with other developed countries over the past four decades. Hence the conference asked the question: what does New Zealand have to do to get back to the top half of the OECD countries, to create future economic prosperity and to improve the social wellbeing for all New Zealanders? Among the 44 recommendations from the conference was also a proposal to make fuller use of immigration as a source for talent. This paper focuses on the challenge to attract and utilise immigrant talent. In the first section I outline briefly some recent experiences in this regard with reference to immigration from Asia during the 1990s. This is followed by a review of the findings from some research I did for the New Zealand Immigration Service on the settlement needs of new immigrants. In the latter part of the paper I comment on the need for considerable flexibility in immigration policy given the high level of mobility of skilled labour in the contemporary international labour market. We are into a new age of international migration, and catching the knowledge wave is going to necessitate some significant shifts in the ways we view and respond to immigrants