Settlement Patterns and the Geographic Mobility of Recent Migrants to New Zealand

Twenty-three percent of New Zealand’s population is foreign-born and forty percent of migrants have arrived in the past ten years. Newly arriving migrants tend to settle in spatially concentrated areas and this is especially true in New Zealand. This paper uses census data to examine the characteristics of local areas that attract new migrants and gauges the extent to which migrants are choosing to settle where there are the best labour market opportunities as opposed to where there are already established migrant networks. We estimate McFadden’schoice models to examine both the initial location choice made by new migrants and the internal mobility of this cohort of migrants five years later. This allows us to examine whether the factors that affect settlement decision change as migrants spend more time in New Zealand.