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Immigration is moving towards the centre of New Zealand’s 2026 election debate. The language varies. Some politicians speak about social cohesion. Others say migrants must integrate, assimilate, share New Zealand values or become part of the national community. These words are often used as though their meaning were obvious. It is not.
The problem is not merely semantic. If social cohesion means that migrants must abandon their language, religion, customs or cultural identity, it conflicts with the liberal democratic freedoms New Zealand claims to protect. If it means no more than an absence of riots or communal violence, it sets the bar far too low. A society can be peaceful while remaining deeply segregated, distrustful and unequal.
The political philosopher David Miller provides a useful framework for thinking more carefully about the issue. In his 2016 book, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration, Miller divides integration into three forms: social, civic and cultural. For the purposes of this discussion, I will use integration, assimilation and social cohesion to describe the same overall objective — migrants becoming full and equal participants in a shared society. But that assumption is defensible only if assimilation is understood as inclusion, not cultural erasure.
My argument is that New Zealand’s current immigration regime does not adequately promote that inclusion. It too often marginalises migrants by keeping them insecure, dependent and provisional, even while their labour and skills are relied upon. When that institutional marginalisation operates alongside rising anti-migrant rhetoric, migrants are placed outside the community twice over: first by a system that restricts their ability to develop security and belonging, and then by a political discourse that treats their presence as a threat to cohesion. A regime that produces those conditions cannot plausibly claim to be strengthening social cohesion.
The timing matters. Net migration has fallen substantially from the exceptional post-pandemic peak, yet immigration has again become a politically charged issue. Debate surrounding the New Zealand–India Free Trade Agreement and its temporary work-visa provisions has placed particular attention on Indian migration. The risk is that a legitimate discussion about immigration settings becomes attached to a visible ethnic group, rather than remaining focused on evidence, policy design and the treatment of people who already live among us.
Social cohesion is then easily turned into a test imposed only on the migrant: Are they sufficiently like us? Do they speak like us, dress like us, worship like us or follow the same social customs? That approach misunderstands cohesion. A community cannot become cohesive through the unilateral efforts of one part of it. Cohesion describes a relationship, and relationships impose responsibilities on both sides.
The failure of an established community to see migrants as members of that community is itself a failure of social cohesion. People cannot pursue their lives as free and equal members of society if they face routine discrimination, hostility or the threat of violence because of their origin. Anti-migrant rhetoric does not merely report an absence of cohesion. It can actively manufacture that absence by defining some neighbours, workers and families as permanent outsiders. Immigration policy can reinforce the same message when it treats people who have lived and worked here for years as eternally temporary, easily displaced and only conditionally part of society.
Miller begins from episodes of racial violence in places such as Oldham in the United Kingdom. Investigations following the 2001 disturbances described communities living “parallel lives”, with little meaningful contact between them. The lesson was not simply that minorities had failed to assimilate. It was that separation and mutual ignorance had allowed suspicion and resentment to grow.
His response is to distinguish three connected forms of integration.
Social integration means regular interaction across a range of settings and, in Miller’s words, the development of “friendly, respectful relationships between equals”. People meet at work, at school gates, through sport, in neighbourhood organisations, places of worship, unions, professional groups and voluntary associations. Through repeated contact, strangers become colleagues, teammates, friends and neighbours.
It is understandable that new migrants initially rely heavily on people from the same language or national community. Those networks provide accommodation, work leads, advice, childcare, familiarity and emotional support. They are a rational and often essential response to the vulnerability of starting again in a new country. But migrants who remain confined to those networks may not gain access to the wider social capital that established residents take for granted.
That does not justify compelling friendships or policing private association. Liberal democracies rightly protect personal liberty. Government cannot order people to mix. It can, however, shape the conditions in which interaction becomes more or less likely. Settlement support, English-language learning, secure employment, community facilities, inclusive schools and access to sport and cultural organisations all create meeting places. By contrast, exploitative work, insecure visas, overcrowded housing and fear of authorities push migrants inward and make social connection harder.
Civic integration concerns the principles and practices that organise public life. It does not require agreement about every political goal. New Zealanders disagree constantly about tax, welfare, crime, the environment and the proper level of immigration. Civic integration instead requires a shared understanding of how those disagreements are pursued: through democratic institutions, lawful protest, free expression, equal protection, and respect for the rights of others.
Migrants should be given the knowledge and practical ability to participate in that system. That includes language support where needed, but also a real introduction to workplace rights, voting, public services, the legal system, New Zealand history and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. A civics programme should equip people to exercise rights, not merely test whether they can memorise approved facts.
The responsibility is again reciprocal. It is incoherent to demand that migrants place their faith in liberal democratic institutions while allowing those institutions to tolerate their exploitation or treat their communities with suspicion. Civic trust is created when the state demonstrates that its protections genuinely extend to everyone subject to its authority — including temporary migrant workers.
Cultural integration is the most controversial category because it can mean very different things. At its most oppressive, it means that migrants should suppress their inherited culture and adopt the majority’s way of life. That demand violates the freedom it claims to defend. Food, music, dress, family customs, religious practice and language largely belong to the private and associational sphere. A liberal state should protect those freedoms, not make cultural sameness the price of acceptance.
Miller offers a more limited and useful conception. He distinguishes private culture from a shared public culture. Migrants benefit from acquiring enough background knowledge to understand the references, institutions and history that shape everyday life in their new country. That knowledge makes informal participation easier without dictating what people must believe or how they must live at home.
A small example makes the point. I once watched an organisation established by settled Chinese migrants introduce recent arrivals to rugby. Local club players taught the basic skills and refereed a game. The participants later attended a provincial match and, eventually, an All Blacks test. Nobody was required to renounce Chinese culture or even to love rugby. They were being given access to a common point of reference — the kind of knowledge that helps a person join a Monday morning workplace conversation.
New Zealand’s public culture cannot, however, be treated as a fixed inheritance belonging exclusively to an established majority. It has a particular history, including the foundational place of Māori and Te Tiriti. It is also continually reshaped by everyone who participates in it. K-pop, curry, rugby, hip-hop, kapa haka and the flat white all illustrate, in different ways, that culture is neither sealed nor static. Migrants enter a public culture, but they also become co-authors of it.
Once Miller’s distinctions are applied, the central error in much political rhetoric becomes clear. Social cohesion is often presented as something migrants must deliver to the host society. In reality, it is a shared public achievement.
Migrants can reasonably be expected to respect democratic rules, the equal freedom of others and the law. They can be encouraged and supported to learn about the country’s institutions, history and public life. They should have opportunities to acquire the language and social knowledge needed to participate fully.
The wider community has corresponding obligations. It must treat migrants as equals, protect their private cultural freedom, enforce their employment rights and open pathways into shared institutions. Political leaders carry an especially heavy responsibility not to turn anxiety about housing, infrastructure or wages into suspicion of a nationality or ethnic group. Those policy pressures may be real, but blaming visible newcomers neither solves them nor strengthens cohesion.
Visa policy is therefore central, not incidental, to social cohesion. A system that keeps workers permanently temporary, ties their security closely to an employer or leaves families uncertain about whether they can build a future creates poor conditions for integration. It is difficult to ask people to invest deeply in a community while the state continually reminds them that their presence is provisional. Insecurity can limit participation, discourage migrants from reporting exploitation and keep families at the margins of community life. When that marginalisation is accompanied by increasingly hostile rhetoric, the immigration regime and the political climate operate together to prevent the very cohesion politicians say they want. If New Zealand wants migrants to belong, its immigration system must allow at least those who become long-term members of our workplaces and communities a fair opportunity to do so.
The useful question for political parties is therefore not simply whether they favour more or less immigration. It is whether their policies create the conditions in which migrants and established residents can live together as free and equal members of a common society. On that test, the present regime falls short: it marginalises many migrants through prolonged temporariness and insecurity, while political rhetoric increasingly invites the wider public to view migrants as a social problem.
A serious social-cohesion policy would promote secure and lawful employment; strong enforcement against migrant exploitation; accessible English-language and civics education; knowledge of New Zealand history and Te Tiriti; community institutions that bring people into regular contact; protection for religious and cultural freedom; and credible pathways that allow long-term residents to develop a real stake in the country.
It would also recognise that rhetoric is policy-adjacent. When politicians repeatedly associate immigration risk with a particular ethnicity, they make social integration harder. When they distinguish carefully between legitimate concerns about numbers or infrastructure and the equal dignity of migrants already here, they help preserve the trust they say they value.
If integration, assimilation and social cohesion are to be treated as different names for the same goal, that goal must be defined with care. It cannot mean that newcomers become culturally indistinguishable from those who arrived earlier. Nor can it mean that migrants alone carry the burden of preventing division.
A cohesive liberal democracy is one in which people share the civic ground rules of public life, possess enough common knowledge to understand and participate in their society, and form ordinary relationships across lines of origin. At the same time, each person remains free to preserve and develop their private culture. The public culture belongs to everyone and changes as its membership changes.
On this account, the opposite of social cohesion is not cultural diversity. It is exclusion: parallel lives hardened by inequality, insecurity, distrust and the belief that some people can never become “one of us”. New Zealand cannot credibly call for greater cohesion while its immigration regime marginalises migrants and its political debate increasingly portrays them as outsiders. The purpose of good immigration and settlement policy should be to dismantle those barriers, not reproduce them. The measure of success is not sameness, but whether migrants and established New Zealanders can recognise one another as equal participants in a society they now share.
About the author
Alastair McClymont is a veteran Immigration Lawyer practising at Righteous Law in Auckland with multiple degrees in Law, History and Political Philosophy
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