New Zealand’s Small-Town Disruptions and the Role of Immigrant Mobilities

Abstract

Like in many other OECD countries, international migration has been increasingly visible in New Zealand’s rural and small towns, which had little or no significant history of immigration in recent times. The common, more conservative perception held is that the arrival of immigrants from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds disrupts the quintessential small-town images that have persisted often over generations with respect to these places being mono-cultural environments. This stereotyping, in turn, directly affects immigrant acceptance, social tension, and integration challenges. Drawing on evidence from New Zealand’s Southland and Otago regions, the chapter situates international migration to small towns into their historical, social, and economic processes that we conceptualise as ‘disruptions’ to help better contextualise immigrant settlement patterns, local impacts, and how multi-culturalism is negotiated in them. Further, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption by restricting labour migrants to small-towns. We argue that examining small-town disruptions intricately tied with rural cosmopolitanism which together helps recognise how multi-ethnic small-town futures are being shaped with immigrants’ active contributions – a greater recognition of which may help achieve resilience in small towns by retaining immigrants in them rather than seeing immigrants as disruptors.