BYATA IMMIGRATION Updates

Immigration NZ provides BYATA up-to-date Visa Statistics and commentary on key immigration issues as they relation to Tourism.

Working Holiday Visa summary table

The latest Working Holiday Visa numbers are still stubbornly falling, although the decline has slowed. We recently received the data for the five-month period beginning last December, and we have seen a further fall of 717 arrivals over that period. As of the end of March, we had 37,645 arrivals in the previous 12 months — well short of our ideal number of 60,000. Further, these numbers don’t yet show the effect of the conflict in Iran.

We will keep pushing for more to be done to attract the WHV cohort. However, headwinds such as rising unemployment make this argument difficult from a political perspective, despite studies showing that WHV makers collectively create more jobs than they take.