Migration has been a longstanding topic in New Zealand.

Migrants have been coming to New Zealand for a long time.

Polynesians migrated to an uninhabited, heavily forested land, around 800 to 1000 years ago.

Colonial settlement started in the 1840s and reached a peak in the late 19th century.

Last century, world wars dispersed people around the planet and, in recent decades, there has been more movement of people from the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, Africa, and China.

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123RF European, Asian migrants, African, and Middle Eastern peoples, have been migrating to New Zealand for decades.

Governments here and across the Tasman have ramped up populist rhetoric and argued immigration policies are in need of change.



But where did New Zealand's migrants come from? These graphs show migration to New Zealand from each world region.

Regional migration figures from Statistics New Zealand show several trends. Data from 1979 to 2016 gives the annual (net) number of permanent and long-term migrants by country of residence and citizenship.

Oceania, which includes Australia and New Zealand net movements plus the wider Pacific region, was a net loss for most of the last four decades.

In the early 1980s, European migrants - mainly people from the United Kingdom and Germany - were the largest group but fewer than 10,000 people a year were migrating.

Asian immigration was growing slowly during the early 1980s to the early 1990s, when the numbers started to increase.

The first real spike in modern times was during the early 1990s, when Asian, European, and African, migration reached 30,000. Numbers decreased significantly in the late 1990s and the turn of the millenium.

The peak year 20 years ago was 1995, when there was a net Oceania loss, but a gain of 22,113 people from Asia, 6949 from Europe, 1422 from the Americas, and 5432 people from Africa and the Middle East.

There are, of course, caveats with data.

Kiwi migration to Australia historically contributed to a net loss; in other words there were more Kiwis leaving New Zealand shores than the number of people returning.

In the last couple of years, there has been a net increase in New Zealanders moving back here and an increase in migrants from other countries.

Migration data may also include some Kiwis who are residents of countries other than New Zealand.