International migration: July 2019

International migration statistics give the latest outcomes-based measure of migration, which includes estimates of migrants entering or leaving New Zealand.

Key facts

The comparisons between the July 2018 and 2019 months and years use the latest provisional estimates for each period.

The provisional estimates have 95 percent confidence intervals (±) beside them – the wider the interval, the greater the uncertainty about the estimate. However, these intervals reflect the model uncertainty, not the extent of future revisions to provisional data.

Provisional migration estimates are revised each month until they are finalised after 16 months. Migration data transformation has more information about the migration estimates, including the 12/16-month rule.

Annual

Year ended July 2019 (compared with year ended July 2018) provisional estimates:

• migrant arrivals – 149,000 (± 1,500), up 8 percent
• migrant departures – 96,300 (± 1,300), up 7 percent
• annual net migration gain – 52,700 (± 1,600), up from 48,700 (± 200).

For migrant arrivals in the July 2019 year, New Zealand citizens were the largest group with 35,000 (± 500) arrivals. The next largest groups were citizens of:

• China – 19,100 (± 400)
• India – 12,500 (± 200)
• South Africa – 9,200 (± 200)
• Australia – 8,800 (± 400)
• Philippines – 8,100 (± 200).

For migrant departures in the July 2019 year, New Zealand citizens were the largest group with 48,600 (± 900) departures. The next largest groups were citizens of:

• China – 7,800 (± 300)
• United Kingdom – 6,100 (± 200)
• Australia – 4,300 (± 200)
• India – 4,200 (± 100).

Month

July 2019 month (compared with July 2018 month) provisional estimates:

• migrant arrivals – 14,600 (± 800), up 13 percent
• migrant departures – 8,600 (± 700), up 5 percent
• net gain – 6,100 (± 900) migrants.

July 2019 month seasonally adjusted estimates:

• migrant arrivals – 13,200
• migrant departures – 8,100
• net gain – 5,100.

Changes to travel histories in June 2019

In June 2019, we improved our person identification methodology to construct more accurate travel histories. Using additional administrative data, available to us in May 2019, we identified about 109,000 travellers (out of 17 million identified travellers) over the June 2013 to June 2019 period, who were incorrectly classified as unique. We have merged the travel histories of such travellers resulting in small changes to the finalised migration estimates. This affected approximately 603,000 border-crossings out of a total of 75.8 million border-crossings, or a combined 13,600 migrant arrivals and departures over the six-year period.

As a result, year ended final migration series from January 2018 onwards are currently inconsistent with the sum of the monthly data. Only the January 2018 to March 2018 months have been finalised since the change, so other periods are currently unaffected. This inconsistency will be resolved when final migration estimates back to the early 2000s are published in October 2019.

Provisional migration estimates published from July 2019 are using the improved travel histories in the model. There is no impact on international travel statistics (of short-term travellers) from the improved travel histories.

Move to quarterly commentaries

After reassessing with customers the options for publishing this release, we have decided to continue releasing international migration data each month in Infoshare. However, we will move from monthly to quarterly written commentaries. We believe that quarterly commentaries are sufficient to describe migration trends, which tend to change gradually.

This means the last monthly commentary we will provide will be in November 2019 when we publish September 2019 data. After that we will publish a quarterly commentary with December 2019 data in February 2020, with March data in May, and with June data in August.

We encourage customers to make their own judgement on whether to use initial provisional migration estimates which have higher uncertainty, or provisional migration estimates 5–6 months after the reference period which have much lower uncertainty. The uncertainty reflects the number of migrant outcomes that need to be modelled, compared with those which can be definitively classified according to the 12/16-month rule.

Subnational data

Final migration estimates for subnational areas for the June 2014 to March 2018 months are now available in Infoshare (select subject category ‘Tourism’, then ‘International travel and migration – ITM’, then ‘Estimated migration by direction, citizenship, and NZ area, 12/16-mth rule’). Outcomes-based migration estimates are available for New Zealand’s 16 regional council areas, 67 territorial authority areas, and 21 Auckland local board areas.

We are assessing the frequency with which we will publish subnational migration estimates. If you’d like to provide feedback on monthly versus quarterly publication of these estimates, please email info@stats.govt.nz.

More data

Use Infoshare to access time-series data for international travel and migration:

Subject category: Tourism
Group: International travel and migration – ITM

Definitions and metadata

International migration – DataInfo+ gives general methodology used to produce international travel and migration statistics.

International migration concepts – DataInfo+ gives definitions of terms used in this release.

Subnational short-term NZ-resident arrivals – DataInfo+ gives methodology for determining the New Zealand-location information in short-term New Zealand-resident arrival records.

Media enquiries

Sandi Reily
021 285 9191
media@stats.govt.nz

Technical enquiries

Louis Warren
info@stats.govt.nz

ISSN 2624-2702

Next release

International migration: August 2019 will be released on 15 October 2019.