New Zealand’s Small-Town Disruptions and the Role of Immigrant Mobilities

Abstract

Like in many other OECD countries, international migration has been increasingly visible in New Zealand’s rural and small towns, which had little or no significant history of immigration in recent times. The common, more conservative perception held is that the arrival of immigrants from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds disrupts the quintessential small-town images that have persisted often over generations with respect to these places being mono-cultural environments. This stereotyping, in turn, directly affects immigrant acceptance, social tension, and integration challenges. Drawing on evidence from New Zealand’s Southland and Otago regions, the chapter situates international migration to small towns into their historical, social, and economic processes that we conceptualise as ‘disruptions’ to help better contextualise immigrant settlement patterns, local impacts, and how multi-culturalism is negotiated in them. Further, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption by restricting labour migrants to small-towns. We argue that examining small-town disruptions intricately tied with rural cosmopolitanism which together helps recognise how multi-ethnic small-town futures are being shaped with immigrants’ active contributions – a greater recognition of which may help achieve resilience in small towns by retaining immigrants in them rather than seeing immigrants as disruptors.

1 Introduction

Globally, rural areas are recognised as areas which have struggled demographically as a result of urbanisation trends that have often led to rural depopulation, rising average ages, de-agrarianisation, and associated economic restructuring (Woods, 2010). Woods’s (2007) work on the ‘global countryside’ challenges us to develop a stronger understanding of how globalisation processes reshape rural areas. In this context, rural areas and the small towns/settlements within them have been significantly impacted by global and national economic, social, and political processes. Recession, neoliberalism, technological advances, urbanisation, and more recently depopulation and ageing have reshaped social and economic realities in the rural areas of most OECD countries. Within this context, one of the more distinctive recent trends associated with increased patterns of global human mobility is the degree to which, in some parts of the world, the countryside is experiencing processes of ‘cosmopolitanism’ – what Woods (2018a, p. 165) refers to as ‘cultural hybridity and openness’ (see also Alam et al., 2023; Alam & Nel, 2023). In this chapter a key focus is on how rural New Zealand, and more specifically our study area in the southern half of the South Island, is changing demographically following significant social and economic change, or what we refer to as ‘disruptions’. This is, primarily, as a result of the in-migration of new residents from multiple countries who, following immigration policy changes in the 1990s, have helped to fill labour-force gaps and in so doing maintained the vibrancy of local economies which is now becoming far more diverse in ethnic terms.

In this chapter we explore the notion that there have been disruptions in small-town New Zealand associated with how social and economic changes have played out in them. Mainly we argue that while more recent culturally and linguistically diverse international migration has caused significant disruption to the predominantly White small-town demographic landscape, such disruption is embedded into a series of internal and external disruptions that have historically shaped the regional development trajectories in the country. We use the term disruption (after Balnaves, 2012; Trabucchi et al., 2019) not to refer to individuals but rather to new processes or innovations that disrupt traditional ways of doing things and lead to the pursuit of new development paths, not dissimilar to established thinking with respect to regional adaptation and new path-creation following an internal or external change in a regional economy. The latter draws on notions of resilience and the ability of a region to respond to disruptions by accepting changes and adapting to changes as a way of charting a new development path that may lead to operational and institutional changes from traditional practices (Martin & Sunley, 2015; Gong & Hassink, 2017). The notion of social resilience at the regional scale is particularly relevant and refers to the ability of the local society and institutions to respond to and absorb change (Peng et al., 2017).

Since a consistent body of scholarship theorising the concept of disruption is scant in geographic scholarship, the next section draws on works from multiple disciplines that used the concept, and we try to understand what it entails and how it can be used to analyse the historical and emerging small-town processes in New Zealand, and particularly the Otago-Southland regions in the South Island that we use as a case study. Following the literature review this chapter first explores the key disruptions that have impacted on rural demography, economy, and society in the study area over the last 200 years, but with a primary focus on recent decades. The second section moves on to detail evidence of change and discuss the implications of what we see, and we try to understand how immigrant-led multiculturalism is shaping – and to a greater extent complementing – the changes and disruptions in the regions.

2 Conceptualising Disruption for Understanding Small Town Mobilities

The concept of disruption had an early uptake in business and management disciplines and was used to denote new phenomena or developments that were not well-strategised but rather ‘undisciplined’. Often disruption was associated with forms of innovations (e.g. in agriculture) at their early stages, but when they took place, even at a very slow rate, and were able to have devastating impacts on the existing systems by challenging the traditional practices and status quo (Trabucchi et al., 2019; see also Downes & Nunes, 2014). More recently, disruption is a much-used term to explain the ongoing changes in the nature of work and employment as digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and co-creation and multi-locational work sites are creating new spaces for work and encouraging the merging of work and non-work spaces as never before (Valenduc & Vendramin, 2017; Richardson, 2018). Furthermore, Covid-19 has accelerated digitally induced work and consumption choices at both personal and institutional levels. Scholars argue that disruptions come at a cost as they impose stress on the existing structures and practices, forcing the system to readjust and adapt to changes that society would not make in a normal situation (Trabucchi et al., 2019). For example, studies on societies’ risks and responses to the effects of climate change have shown that climate change has caused disruption to human life in many predictable and unpredictable ways of which some are irreversible. However, there are instances that disruption like this may also positively impact communities if it provides opportunities for radical actions (Woodward, 2019) that were impossible otherwise, such as a new division of labour beyond the traditional gender-based ones following a disaster (Alam & Khalil, 2022).

Following Balnaves (2012, p. 132), disruptions can then be referred to as any new processes that ‘are perceived simultaneously as creators of new opportunity and a threat to the traditional’ ways of doing things that lead to the pursuit of new development (and adaptation) trajectories. Disruption can refer to either short-term or long-term drivers of change. It may have some resonance with the notion of ‘crisis’, which triggers changes – whether the outcome is good or bad for society. For example, New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, saw their public housing services go to private contractors and found themselves excluded [see Klein, 2007 for examples]. In a different context, in coastal Bangladesh, after major cyclones, husbands’ out-migration to the city forced their non-migrant wives to adapt through various household innovations and achieve resilience (Alam & Khalil, 2022). So, with the conceptualisation of disruption as a combination of shocks and subsequent transformations triggered by them, the rest of this review section explores the mix of disruptions and continuity that characterise the global small-town landscape, and this will help us to understand the New Zealand-specific case studies in the latter half of the chapter.

Small towns, variously called rural centres and rural settlements, have globally experienced significant endogenous and exogenous disruptions and changes since the last century (Alam et al., 2016). Marsden (2003), in his seminal work that focused on European countries, showed three interrelated, overlapping, and competing dynamics that we may refer to as hard and soft disruptions that influenced the socio-spatial expressions of rural and small towns. The first set of hard disruptions referred to the new agro-industrial linkages through which rural areas became part of the complex global supply chain that relied on technologies to expand (Marsden et al., 2002; Renting et al., 2003), which then led to smart management of rural landscapes by linking farming and non-farming structures (Allanson et al., 1995). This was followed by the second wave of hard disruption, often framed as the post-productivist turn, which led to the recognition of the countryside as a development space (Marsden, 1995, 1998). Combinedly these two hard, rather physically tangible, disruptions transformed rural spaces – on the one hand, rural areas were vertically assembled to thrive in their agro-food sector economy; on the other, horizontal linkages were developed to align rural areas with the non-farming processes of economic changes (Lowe et al., 1993; Murdoch, 2000). Both these processes were disruptive in the sense that they were seen to endanger local values, historical character, local communities, and their cultural features (Ruda, 1998) because of which conservation and economic development initiatives were integrated with rural land-use planning (Bowler et al., 2002; van Lier, 1998). The third disruption refers to ‘soft’ development initiatives, such as sustainable livelihoods, diversification of income, good governance, and new institutional arrangements without exceeding the rural carrying capacity (Dalal-Clayton et al., 2003; Gallent et al., 2008).

Shifts from a reliance on hard nature of productivist and more diversified post-productivist to soft development regimes were built on ‘new’ activities such as tourism, amenity-based migration, and leisure-based activities that have benefitted some areas, while others have struggled to survive the loss of economic activity and often population numbers (Knox & Meyer, 2009; Vaz et al., 2013). These transitions have led to a growing international literature on how small towns have negotiated new futures for themselves through self-reliance, place-based development initiatives, and by tapping into new economic opportunities and the potentials from having high levels of social capital (Besser, 2013; Wang et al., 2017; Westlund, 2017). In other places, population loss has been linked to the phenomenon of shrinking towns (Wolff & Wiechmann, 2017). In the case of New Zealand, as various studies show, there is strong evidence of the former, and while shrinking towns might exist it is often more a case of retarded development as populations age, young people leave, and economic opportunities narrow. It is in this context that international migrants might alter local demographic patterns and development prospects (Nel & Stevenson, 2014; Nel et al., 2019).

Further to the above-mentioned disruptions, small and rural towns globally have seen a range of exogenous disruptions due to increasing and, more so, fragmented and non-linear (Triandafylidou, 2022) international mobilities to them as places are now more connected due to globalisation, changes in skill requirements attracting new waves of the temporary and permanent workforce in the primary and secondary sectors, and also because of rising human mobilities due to disasters (e.g. war, religious persecutions, etc.) and climate change-related displacements. In places like England, ethnic migrants have disrupted the quintessential, very homogeneous and White countryside that was folded into constructions of Englishness, heritage, and cultural ‘norms’. These places are now being recognised with multicultural, multiethnic, transnational. and mobile social imaginaries (see Askins, 2009). For example, Tolia-Kelly’s (2006, 2007) work on the experiences of Asian migrant residents in northern England provides a nuanced reading of disruptions to the English countryside and seeks to:

…unravel multiple relationships embedded in ethnic [own emphasis] engagements with [the English countryside] and thus disrupt…the landscape as embodying a singular English sensibility, normally exclusionary of British multi-ethnic, translocal and mobile landscape values and sensibilities. (Tolia-Kelly, 2007, p. 329)

Rural and small towns in other places like in Australia, Canada, and the United States are also facing visible racial and ethnic diversity and ‘cosmopolitanising’ in the last three decades (Woods, 2018a, b, 2022) as these countries have carefully designed their immigration regimes to direct immigrants to remote and regional areas (Akbari & MacDonald, 2018; Hugo, 2008; Lavenex et al., 2016; Triandafylidou, 2017, 2022) and specific labour market sectors, like agriculture or dairy (for example, see Strauss & McGrath, 2017; McLaughlin & Weiler, 2016; Collins & Bayliss, 2020). On the receiving end, while these smaller centres view international migration as one way to grow the local population and economy – for which a range of actors and support systems are assembled to support newcomer communities – they often struggle to retain migrants because of their low infrastructure base and a lack of robust cultural policies to embrace these changes (Forbes-Mewett et al., 2021). In the context of this chapter, the new demographic mobilities and associated infrastructural and cultural challenges in the small town sectors can be referred to as disruptions. These disruptions are hybrid, both hard and soft, due to introduction of newcomers and various arrival infrastructures, which have locally led and regional level community development interventions have followed.

With the above conceptual understanding of disruption and its perceived and actual implications to rural and small towns, the chapter provides a brief history of the disruptions and their implications in New Zealand small towns, especially as signals of remutualisation in modern capitalist society.

3 Early Disruptions: Colonial Settlement, World War II, and 1980s Neoliberalism

The earliest inhabitants to New Zealand are thought to have arrived around 1000 years ago (Statistics New Zealand, 1990). From this, the early Māori culture formed, but as early Europeans arrived in New Zealand some 200 years ago and the Crown purchased land, it became increasingly difficult for Māori to participate in the economy once the country became a colony (McAloon, 2008). The wider economic fortunes of New Zealand changed after the discovery of gold, particularly in Otago, West Coast, and Coromandel. While gold mining was a short-lived boom for many small areas of the country, the long-term benefits of development helped established more sustainable economic activities (Easton, 2010). The growth of the agricultural industry across the late-1800s and large government investment into roads, train networks, and telecommunications helped convert these ex-mining communities into many of the present-day rural farming towns (Statistics New Zealand, 1990). Policies encouraging immigration from Britain were also introduced to support the growth of these places. Across the early-1900s, the government continued to grow the public sector, investing heavily in agricultural technology and research to establish farm products as the country’s key export.

Following the Great Depression in the 1930s, the government took control of the Reserve Bank and implemented wide-sweeping economic reforms, introducing a comprehensive social welfare system and establishing more core infrastructure. The outbreak of World War II and the Korean War brought substantial prosperity for New Zealand as demand for sheep, beef, and wool products soared. The government also introduced more settlement and assisted immigration policies post-World War II alongside more land purchases, with many of the veterans allocated into farming (McAloon, 2008). Across the 1950s and 1960s, rural New Zealand entered a period of substantial prosperity as farm products held high export prices and the government continued to invest in agricultural development, public works, and social services (Statistics New Zealand, 1990). A series of price shocks – the 1966 wool crash, the 1973 and 1979 oil crises – alongside the government’s continued overspending on both a declining agricultural industry and the ‘Think Big’ infrastructural projects saw New Zealand face an economic crisis in the early 1980s. In response to this, across the 1980s, successive governments implemented a series of neoliberal policies to transform the country’s monetary and fiscal systems (Wallace, 2014).

The neoliberal shift saw rural New Zealand face significant hardship across the 1980s and 1990s. The removal of agricultural subsidies, falling prices for sheep and wool, amalgamation of local government, and closure or privatisation of many local services saw many towns decline in population (Scrimgeour & Pasour, 1996; Wallace, 2014). Despite their decline, many places sought to diversify their local economies in response. For dairy farmers, the industry and demand for their products continued to grow across the 1990s. Additionally, the growth of the horticulture, viticulture, and tourism industries in New Zealand has helped support struggling rural economies (Keen, 2009).

4 Demographic Disruptions and New Mobilities

While neoliberal restructuring severely impacted the economy and forced many rural areas to restructure production, labour relations, and service provision, after 10 or so years and significant loss of employment, population, and the traditional forms of rural production, the agricultural sector started to adapt. The growth of high value dairy production, viticulture, and horticulture replaced the historic reliance on stock farming in many areas, but in so doing created new demands for skilled agricultural workforces that were increasingly difficult to meet locally in the context of rural depopulation and ageing. At a broader level, national skills shortages prompted a rethink on the part of government of their immigration policy which had, traditionally, focused on only allowing in immigrants from a narrow band of Western countries but could no longer meet the country’s growing skills shortages.

In response, immigration policy evolved in the 1990s to help address labour force shortages through transitioning to a skills-based rather than an ethnic-based visa scheme. This led to a shift away from the traditional focus on anglophone countries to opening up opportunities in particular to migrants from the Pacific, Asia, and the Middle East (Bedford et al., 2000, 2002; Spoonley, 2014). The introduction of the ‘skilled migration’ visa in 2003 saw significant increase in the number of new, skilled migrants from a diverse range of countries. In 2006 the introduction of the Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme, which provided short term visas to agricultural workers, helped facilitate new arrivals – in this case particularly from the Pacific to meet labour shortfall in the agriculture industries. As of 2022, up to a maximum of 19,000 seasonal workers can work in rural New Zealand and can stay up to seven to nine months (Immigration New Zealand, 2022).

While most of the skilled migrants locate in the larger urban centres (NZ Productivity Commission, 2021) as our research indicates, many smaller centres have also benefitted from the arrival of new migrants from a range of countries. Their arrival has often helped, in both numerical and skills terms, to fill gaps in rural New Zealand left by ageing and by the reduced numbers of young people. Numerous studies have examined the settlement experiences of new migrants in New Zealand and the impact they have had in rural areas, and in particular economic sectors such as the dairy industry (Rawlinson et al., 2013; Spoonley, 2014; Annabell & Nairn, 2019; Collins & Bayliss, 2020).

5 Evidence of Changes in Otago-Southland Regions

5.1 The Study Area

Our study focusses on the rural areas and small towns of the Otago and Southland regions in the South Island of New Zealand (see Fig. 7.1). This is an area with a current population of some 350,000 (Stats NZ 2022). Our focus is not on the largest urban centre of Dunedin (c.120,000 people) but rather on its hinterland, which includes numerous small and large towns, a productive agricultural base anchored on stock farming, dairy, viticulture, and horticultural and an increasing reliance on tourism.

Fig. 7.1

Map of the Study Area

Rural and regional New Zealand, after a period of reduced population growth from 1996 to 2006 and occasional population decline, started to recover demographically from 2006 onwards – a partial reason appearing to the be in-migration of migrants, many from non-traditional source countries who have helped fill employment gaps, improve, or in some cases, at least stabilise local population levels and school rolls. Evidence from the study regions of Otago and Southland and selected towns within them certainly supports this argument.

Table 7.1 indicates the relatively low rate of population growth in the country in 1996–2006 (9.4%), followed by a significantly higher growth rate of 16.7% from 2006 to 2018. In comparison, in the selected areas of the Otago (Clutha district only) and Southland (and its main centre Invercargill) regions, where this study is based, all three depopulated in the first period but recovered slowly thereafter.

Table 7.1 Population Change in the Study Area, 1996–2018 ³

While we cannot argue direct causality between the arrival of new migrants from diverse backgrounds and the restoration of positive population growth and the filling of labour and skills gaps, the evidence, as discussed below, suggests that their impact has been significant. Table 7.2 indicates the degree to which New Zealand’s population and that of the two study regions of Otago and Southland has become more ethnically diverse since the immigration policy changes took effect in the 1990s. The overall percentage of the national population of European origin fell some 10 percentage points in the period from 1996 to 2022, from 71.7% to 61.5%, with corresponding relative declines in the two study regions. While the Māori population remained relatively constant as a percentage, the Asian population percentage has more than tripled between 1996 and 2022 and the Pacific percentage has doubled both nationally and regionally.

Table 7.2 The composition of the resident population (in %) in terms of ethnicity, 1996, 2018 and 2023 estimate⁵

At a local level, anecdotally, the key demographic role played by international migrants in the changing make-up of the population can be discerned. For example, in Southland’s main centre of Invercargill, the population fell from 43,850 in 1996 to 40,551 in 2006. It has since recovered to 43,263 in 2018 (Statistics New Zealand, 2022). The growth in the total population by just under 3000 people is strikingly close to the increase in the Asian and MELAA (Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African) population of 3954 in the same period. In parallel, in the Clutha District, the total population rose by some 900 people since 2006 that includes the growth in number of Pacific, Asian, and MELAA residents by 550 in the same period which must help to account for part of that growth.

At a regional level when one looks at actual numbers and not just percentages, evidence of change is apparent from Table 7.3. For example, between 1991 and 2018, the Asian population of Southland increased from 561 to 4809, while in Otago the same population tripled. Similar increases are identifiable for the MELAA groups in both regions. More modest increases are discernible for Pacific peoples.

Table 7.3 Regional level demographic change

6 Immigrant Settlement Support and Adaptation

To account for increasing numbers of migrants, local and national government have implemented support systems to assist in migrant settlement – primarily in the form of advice and counselling. At a national level, schemes like the New Zealand Migrant Settlement and Integration Strategy have seen Immigration New Zealand take on a central role in migrant settlement policy and efforts across the country (Immigration New Zealand, 2016).

For both Otago and Southland, as populations have become more diverse, local government recognised the need to assist its migrant communities. This recognition is in response to both the requirement that local government promotes ‘wellbeing’ in the areas under its jurisdiction and to the sense of local duty and care that often exists in smaller centres. Councils across the regions have become accredited with the Welcoming Communities initiative, implementing settlement support within long-term plans and aiming to ‘mobilise and involve local residents in welcoming activities’ (Immigration New Zealand, 2017, p.3). Alternatively, councils managing their own initiatives – like the Clutha District Settlement Support – serve as another way for councils to remain involved. Non-governmental organisations such as the New Zealand Federation of Multicultural Councils and the Newcomers Network have also operated for many years and have branches nationally to support migrants locally. These groups often assist in the facilitation of events and other support for migrant communities across Otago and Southland. The growth in numbers has also seen a variety of faith- and ethnic-based groups become involved in settlement, with many churches serving as hubs for migrants. These groups often facilitate events to help migrants learn English, understand the New Zealand ‘way of life’, and provide a social network.

As immigrant proportions have grown in Otago and Southland, so too have their role in local economies. The Regional Seasonal Scheme (RSE scheme) – which allows a set number of agricultural workers, primarily from Pacific Island states, to gain short-term and often seasonal work visas – was crucial to the development of the horticulture and viticulture industries in Central Otago and elsewhere. Further changes like temporary work visas became important in places like Queenstown’s hospitality industry. In Southland, a lack of skilled workers in the dairy industry has seen many migrants employed, supporting the region’s plan to grow its population substantially by 2025. Additionally, some councils, such as the Waitaki District, have noted the role migrant diversity brings to their towns and stressed its importance in their district plan (Waitaki District Council, 2021).

While there are a range of positives noted about migrants in these communities, this has not always been reflected through the migrant experience. There have been several reports over the years of exploitation of migrant labourers, particularly those of the RSE or short-term work permits, with some facing underpayment, long hours, and poor working conditions (Otago Daily Times, 2014, 2016, 2019; Southland Daily Times, 2019). Additionally, for non-migrants, the rapid transformation of ethnic proportions in communities was not always met with ease. In Southland, for example, racial tensions from locals to the new migrants were noted in the media as early as 2008 (Southland Daily Times, 2008) and received attention over the years. Despite this, in more recent years, Southland was noted to have become far more accepting of other ethnic groups, potentially because of the recognition of the key role new migrants have played in maintaining the employment base and school and church rolls (Southland Daily Times, 2020).

In more recent times, visas have become a core focus as the Covid-19 pandemic was a time of great uncertainty for many migrants. Border closures reduced the in-flow of migrants for nearly 3 years (2020–2022) as the migrant workforce tap got ‘turned off’ (Harding, 2021). This caused significant stress in both primary and secondary industry sectors and small towns across the country as, for example, a lack of seasonal workers due to Covid-19-related border restrictions put the NZ$ 9.5 billion of the country’s horticultural economy at risk in September 2020 (Flaws, 2020). Similar stresses are evident in hospitality and tourism sectors in places like Queenstown and Invercargill due to short supply of skilled workforce. On top, more than 1500 migrant workers in Southland who were on temporary work visas were in limbo as Immigration NZ stopped processing visa applications for skilled residency and (Steyl, 2021). However, later in 2021, a one-off resident visa for migrants already in New Zealand induced some certainty as employers could retain skilled staff (Williams, 2021).

7 Situating Immigrants in Small-Town Disruption Discourse

By tracing social, economic, and political processes, it is apparent that small towns in the Otago-Southland regions and, to some extent, in the whole of New Zealand have gone through endogenous and exogenous disruptions, starting with the 1900s uptake of the agricultural sector relying on the rural resource base and European settlement in this part of the world. This followed significant government investments in infrastructure to support the production base in the following five to six decades, based on which rural areas were able to make a solid productivist turn as these settlements presented themselves as ‘development space’ for the state. External factors like wars brought prosperity due to the rising demand for New Zealand-grown produce worldwide. Rural agrarian processes during this time were aligned with the non-agrarian processes of the economic development trajectories of the central government. Thus, in many ways, the fate of the national economic prosperity became intricately tied to the processes that were taking place in the rural production sectors as their contribution became much larger to the national economy. This paralleled successive immigrant waves in the early 1900, mainly from Britain. Later after World War II, some degree of diversity was added as other European people immigrated.

In parallel to these rather prolonged productivist and post-productivist processes in the countryside, in some areas sudden disruptions were also visible – for example, the boom-and-burst of the rural mining sectors in places or large-scale nationally significant infrastructure projects such as the Clyde dam. Although short-lived, these projects had long-term impacts through economic development and development of small-town infrastructures and services. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, a change in the government’s neoliberal policy led to the erosion of government subsidies to rural sectors. The oil crisis, loss of trading ties with the UK, and the fall in the price of agricultural products in the global market all contributed to the rural decline. Privatisation of services and growing environmental awareness-led resistance to large-scale infrastructure projects in rural areas were disruptive. In the same period, exclusive sectors like viticulture and tourism partly helped survive the challenges by stabilising the rural economy.

It was in this context that new waves of immigrants from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and with particular skill sets were introduced to rural New Zealand through diversification of immigration policies (Spoonley & Bedford, 2008), and their arrival and subsequent settlement experiences can be understood through the lens of disruption. In fact, there are multiple layers of disruptions, some of which are less prevalent than others, and here we highlight some of them. We provided evidence in earlier sections that these immigrants have made many positive contributions to the small-town sectors as they fill in the skill gaps and keep running the engines of rural primary and secondary sectors. This means that the introduction of skilled immigrants to rural towns can be seen as a larger adaptation pathway for rural towns and regional areas to sustain their productivist and post-productivist dynamics by mitigating the stresses the areas face due to depopulation, ageing of original populations, loss of sector-specific productivities, and so on.

As evident in various small towns in Invercargill, Winton, Mataura, Gore, and Balclutha, immigrants from the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, and a handful of Pacific Islands have enrolled in the dairy, meat processing, hospitality, and care sectors (Alam et al., 2023). While migrant workers are ‘indispensable to many farms’, they also ‘place stresses on rural communities and community services, e.g., schools’ (Trafford & Tipples, 2012, p. 29); therefore, these mobilities do not go uncontested. Our interviews with multiple immigrants suggests that many have experienced varying degrees of racism and discrimination in the workplace and in daily life. While many migrants would not automatically want to disclose this reality, others, particularly in group interviews were more forthcoming about the low levels of racism they had experienced. Until recently, ethnically and racially diverse immigrants’ presence was not really normalised within small-towns that hold the constructed notion of a homogeneous ‘society’ where rural populations are thought of as ‘English speaking’ and also ‘English looking’ (Lyons et al., 2011); therefore, racial stereotyping of immigrants in the workplace (Collins & Bayliss, 2020) and everyday settings is not uncommon, which leads to various degrees of selective exploitation of immigrants (Bonnett, 2019).

To a certain degree, often associated with direct employment contracts, one can detect that people from certain countries are tending to cluster in particular economic activities e.g. Pacific Islanders and Malay migrants in meat works and Filipino workers in the dairy industry. In these industries there is generally low level of contact with the wider community and hence there are reduced chances for racial tension. By contrast, one particular sector – that of social care – brings migrants into direct contact with older long-term residents and hence if there are social tensions, this is where they might arise. For example, despite the recognition of high efficiency of Filipino care workers globally (Guevarra, 2014), local evidence (from Invercargill) suggests that the White elderly populations initially were uneasy to take migrant workers’ services in aged care homes. Ironically enough, the sector is now dominated by Filipino care workers, with many workers ascending to higher level managerial positions as they upskilled themselves in local institutions. These instances align with the concept of disruptions (Trabucchi et al., 2019) in the sense that immigrant enrolment into the small-town sectors, although it comes with benefits, occasionally has also started to challenge existing systems, practices, and the status quo. In response to these, we have also seen various employment sectors learning the treatment of immigrants in workplace settings, although some of these initiatives rely on racial profiling to understand (‘good and bad’) migrants who ‘are fundamental to the operation of systems of migrant recruitment and selection, while also informing into the micro-politics of interactions between migrants and employers’ (Collins & Bayliss, 2020, p. 10). The programmes are actively supported by government agencies and organisations (e.g. Great South in Invercargill).

Here we highlight how the immigrant mobilities have also caused soft disruptions (Marsden, 2003) beyond the productivist and post-productivist ones. As argued by Balnaves (2012), disruptions may happen at a slow rate, which is also relevant to international mobilities in rural New Zealand that took nearly two decades to become more visible beyond the gateway cities (Friesen, 2015). The rural areas are now visibly racially and culturally more diverse. Some scholars argue that labour migration to New Zealand, Canada, and Australia is fundamentally different to those historically occurring in countries in the Middle East, Singapore, or Korea in the sense that migrants aspire to become residents and settle in them. This recognition has led central and various local organisations to change their treatment of migrants as a ‘foreign solution’ (Trafford & Tipples, 2012) to rural sectors. As discussed earlier, since 2017 new support systems (e.g. Welcoming Communities, etc.) have been introduced to assist migrant settlements in small towns. This is a significant shift in the sense that there is a greater emphasis on community development through assembling support networks both horizontally and vertically, within territorial boundaries and nationwide to connect ministries, local governments, local and international NGOs, faith-based groups, and even migrants’ own groups. There are also immigrant-led self-help groups that are now being enabled as part of these schemes with the view to enable settlement support for immigrants in small towns. This is a different way to approach the small-town sectors than the previous ‘economic’ and ‘temporary’ migrant focus. It can be argued that these regional areas are increasingly adopting soft interventions through community development and wellbeing, which may be seen as a strategy that seeks to future-proof various rural sectors by attracting multi-ethnic immigrants with skill sets that are in demand and at the same time responding to the needs of these visible ethnic and racial diversity in small towns.

8 Concluding Remarks

The chapter has made a modest attempt to understand international migration to New Zealand’s small towns through the conceptual lens of disruption. In doing so, we have tried to understand how social and economic changes have played out in small towns, which already had various degrees of disruption and undertaken subsequent processes of adaptation to changes. Although within the scope of this chapter we did not systematically differentiate those observed disruptions, we still sense there are distinct hard and soft disruptions that complement each other and in them migrant mobility has been a critical element – most often through different waves of migration strategies encouraged in response to other local disruptions. Although the relationships are not linear, we have summarised the disruptions in Table 7.4. We observed a range of hard disruptions beginning with the Crown’s purchase of land, then mining, followed by the growth of agricultural industries, the establishment of rural farming towns, regional infrastructure projects, and so forth. These successive hard disruptions were often followed by soft disruptions, namely immigrant and settlement policies, later more systematic visa regimes, settlement support, and community development strategies in the most recent time. Future research should examine the correlations between specific hard and soft disruptions in their historical and spatial contexts.

Table 7.4 Hard and Soft disruptors in New Zealand’s small towns

The earlier disruptions in the last century transformed the countryside from productivist regimes to post-productivist ones. In particular, immigrant mobilities in the last three decades since the diversification of immigration policies have not only helped strengthen the productivist and post-productivist regimes but support for the ethnically diverse migrants has also presented these rural and regional spaces as soft developmental spaces. This indicates that small rural towns are becoming hybrid spaces where international mobilities should no more be seen as a disruption, which is often imagined with many negative connotations. Instead, we show that international migration has a specific role to play in the changing rural landscapes, and in many ways these mobilities are adaptation solutions towards achieving resilient rural sectors. This line of thinking has significant practical implications regarding how rural and small towns should prepare with an appropriate infrastructure base to retain migrants for their future-proofing. Theoretically, having the lens of disruption helps rethink immigrants beyond the ‘precarious rural cosmopolitanism’ discourse that has gained momentum in recent geographical scholarship but is not free from criticism.

As a point of departure, we point out that small towns in the Southland and Otago regions will experience new waves of change due to the recent start of large-scale infrastructure projects (such as the establishment of data centres, new energy transition projects, etc.). This means regional areas will attract new waves of migrants, who would be different from the previously received low- to semi-skilled agricultural workforce. These new disruptions will coincide with the most recent reform of the Resource Management Act 1991, which committed to a stronger regional focus with a new requirement for long-term regional spatial planning across the nation (Ministry for the Environment, 2023). With these disruptions underway, how the new mobilities will unfold in small towns and what their interactions will be with the pre-existing primary and secondary sectors are unknown; that said, it is clear that these new disruptions will play a significant role in building New Zealand’s post-2020 small-town futures, and there is a need for future research to look into these changes.