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Myth Busters >
New Zealand's population is only growing because of migration
In order for a country's population to increase, the combined effect of natural increase (births outnumbering deaths) and net migration (international arrivals outnumbering departures) must add people to the population. For migration to be the sole contributor to population growth, there would have to be more deaths each year than births (natural decrease).
The myth is busted
New Zealand's natural increase has been around 30,000 people per annum since the late 1980s. Migration's contribution to population growth varies depending on inflows and outflows of people each year. In recent times, net migration reached a peak of 43,000 in 2003, while in 1999 there was a negative net migration of 11,000, meaning that more people left New Zealand than arrived. So, while migration does contribute to New Zealand's population, the main contribution is from natural increase.
Where did the myth come from?
In the last century, New Zealand has been through a "demographic transition" from high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality. This means that people are having fewer babies and are living longer. New Zealand is experiencing sub-replacement fertility; that is, the total fertility rate is currently slightly less than 2.1 babies per woman, which is the average number of children a woman needs to have to produce one daughter who survives to childbearing age. However, births still outnumber deaths by roughly 2 to 1.
Wikipedia defines sub-replacement fertility as '...a fertility rate that is not high enough to replace an area's population', and goes on to say that although New Zealand and other countries, such as Australia and the United States, experience sub-replacement fertility, they '...still have growing populations due to high rates of immigration'.
This suggests that confusion has arisen between the current natural increase of population and the long-term effects of sub-replacement fertility. New Zealand is not projected to experience natural decrease until the mid-2040s when the relatively large numbers of people born in the sixties begin to die. (Births peaked at 65,390 in 1961, compared with 57,745 in 2005). In countries such as Germany, Hungary, Italy, Austria, Greece, Poland and Russia, deaths already outnumber births.
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