Indian Women Spouses as Secondary Migrants in New Zealand: Challenges and Missed Opportunities

Abstract

In the last three decades New Zealand has emerged as a key destination for highly skilled Indian migrants in response to the expansion of the knowledge economy and the demand for skilled professionals. The New Zealand government has designed a migration regime for skilled migration flows in which migrants are assessed according to their skills and qualifications. New Zealand governments have been strongly committed to this policy direction, and over the last two decades, have reoriented the country's migration program from the recruitment of unskilled labour to targeting educated, skilled professionals. Unlike less-skilled migrants who enter as guest workers, skilled migrants are allowed to bring their spouses and families with them. Most spouses are usually highly-skilled individuals themselves and are admitted under the skilled secondary or family streams. However the skills and qualifications of this category of migrants are largely ignored in the skilled migration equation since spouses are regarded as associational migrants. The increasing transnational nature of human mobility requires a concerted effort by the New Zealand government to both acknowledge and provide spouses with better work and integration opportunities and sound support systems to assist their settlement in the country. This thesis critically analyses the settlement experiences of a group of skilled women from India who migrated to New Zealand between 1998 and 2008 in the skilled migration stream.