Continuing in our series of Migrant Tales first hand accounts of the migrant experience of New Zealand.

Today’s tale was left in The Agora by an experienced and highly trained vet who lived in Dunedin for eighteen months before leaving for the US. From employment problems to poor housing, hygiene and experiences of racism from the point of view of an African American there are sure to be many experiences here that will ring a bell with those who’ve already gone through the NZ migrant experience.

“I lived in Dunedin from mid-2007 until the end of 2008 before deciding that New Zealand wasn’t for me. My experience wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as some I’ve seen in the forum, but when my return flight landed in Los Angeles, I actually got off the plane and kissed the ground. This is going to be a really long post. My thoughts:

Employment
The reason NZ wants skilled migrants is because every almost Kiwi who is capable of doing the job packed up and moved to Australia/UK the first chance they got because the pay was better. I’m a veterinarian with 15 years of experience: in the US, I don’t show up for less than $70k, and the custom is to work for a base guarantee plus a percentage of gross receipts. Depending on the area of the country I work in, I can expect $85-115k. The award schedule in NZ guarantees someone with my experience $NZ60K: in theory it’s a lot for NZ but in $US it’s less than my first job right out of vet school in 1997.

My US credentials transferred to NZ without any problem. I got a job at a small animal clinic for $25.64/hr: excellent pay by NZ standards. I worked only 12-15 hours a week, but this gave me almost the same salary as a minimum wage employee working a full 30 hr work week. It still wasn’t enough to live on alone: my life in NZ was heavily subsidized by my VA pension.
As long as all I wanted to do was work in private practice, everything was fine. But good luck to any migrant trying to get a job with the NZ government, as I don’t think it’s possible. The NZ agricultural industry desperately needs vets for their slaughterhouses and processing plants: they recruit nonstop and it’s a financial windfall with a salary at the end of 15 months of $92k. I did this job for the USDA for 6 years prior to moving to NZ; I even signed export certificates that NZ accepted for import without question. When I applied for the NZ job, I was told that I wasn’t qualified. MAF would apparently prefer to leave the jobs unfilled rather than give them to the skilled migrants that NZ encourages to immigrate. I’m not kidding: the vacancy announcement has been running non-stop with the same contact info since at least 2005. When I moved back to the US, I went straight back to the USDA, got promoted, and proceeded to sign a gazillion more export certifications that easily cleared NZ customs. My industry experience is apparently only good enough for NZ when I’m not in NZ. I totally believe the poster above who couldn’t get the special ed teacher job.

Housing
Air tightness, insulation, and a lack of mold aren’t too much to ask for. Especially somewhere that is supposed to be a first world country. Reality is that most NZ housing doesn’t meet World Health Organization standards for a habitable environment. And if you find something that does, you will pay dearly for it.

My first apartment was rented sight unseen from the US: I lived there for my first 6 months. It was basically a furnished studio with private bath, and then an upstairs shared kitchen. $270 a week or about US$875 a month. Dunedin is a college town, but this apartment was way above the budget of most NZ students who seem to be packed like sardines into apartments where they can pay $110 a week or less. All the other people living in the building with me were Asian students from overseas. The free ”high speed” internet was almost useless: it moved slower than US dial-up speed. The property managers were clueless: every month they sent me a pay or quit notice claiming that they never received my security deposit. And they kept sending it even after I provided the bank statements and wire transfer receipts that proved I had paid. They then tried to claim that the bank in question doesn’t exist and that I forged the documents: they finally gave up when I threatened to contact the housing council. Then the heater in the bathroom broke: it took three weeks to fix. After all this, the landlords seemed genuinely surprised that I declined to accept a $30 rent increase and moved out when my lease was over.

My Dunedin CBD apartment was also $270 a week, but unfurnished and with a parking spot. I had blue paisley circa 1970 carpet that smelled kind of moldy and was coming up at the seams: I never went barefoot. The subfloor sounded as if were about to collapse when I walked; there were occasions when I really expected to fall into the downstairs apartment. Although it was technically a 2 bedroom, it came with a tiny dorm sized refrigerator that was equally as old as the carpet and had no freezer. No bathtub, which was no biggie. But the floor of the shower stall was slanted the wrong way for drainage, so I had to squeegee after use unless I wanted standing water. The pipe under the bathroom sink burst twice in the year that I lived there. The night store heater didn’t work, and it took 6 weeks and a threat to contact the housing council before the landlord fixed it. In the interim, there were days when my indoor temp was 45F with the electric space heaters that I bought going full blast: the inside of a refrigerator is 33-41F. All this for an apartment in a neighborhood that was questionable at best: there was a brothel a block down the street and a strip club a block away in the opposite direction. Prostitution is legal in NZ, by the way.

My general rule of thumb is that I would never pay more than five times my annual salary for a house. This would have given me a max budget of NZ$300,000 if I had been working full-time. I looked at buying a house: everything in Dunedin that was less decrepit than my apartment cost more than $350,000. Tiny new construction in a part of town even dodgier than where I was already living started at $400,000. To buy in Auckland, I would have needed more than a million.
As an FYI, I lived in Rochester, NY before moving to Dunedin. Rochester and Dunedin are about the same size, but there all similarities end. The 2000sf house that I owned at the time cost only $146k, had central heating/air, was located in a nice neighborhood, and there was no breeze blowing indoors when all the windows were closed. Even before I replaced the original 1940’s windows, my utility bill never topped $400 a month. I would probably have gone bankrupt trying to heat a similar home in NZ.

Hygiene
For a supposedly first world country, I thought NZ was filthy. The number of grubby looking people walking around barefoot and shirtless in cut off shorts is disturbing. The “no shirt, no shoes, no service” rule in US/Canada doesn’t apply in NZ. In Dunedin, the broken bottles and vomit from student drinking binges would remain on the streets for days: the tolerance for public drunkenness is shocking. People were also weirdly fascinated by my teeth: there’s nothing interesting about them except for the fact that they are all still there, and relatively straight and unstained. None of the comments about how nice my teeth are were hostile, but every time I heard one I would start thinking about Deliverance and Dueling Banjos: not good.

Education
Probably adequate if remaining in NZ; probably inadequate otherwise. I enrolled in the MPH program at the University of Otago while I was there. The program covered the general core competencies that you would expect, but it was very NZ specific. We spent a lot of time talking about the health implications of the Treaty of Waitangi, which has no status outside NZ. An MPH earned in NZ is worthless as far employment with a US city/state/federal government and many international health organizations is concerned. I’m eligible for specialty board certification and would be laughed at if I listed the NZ credential on my board application. I dropped out and enrolled at Johns Hopkins when I returned to the US. An MPH would have made me eligible for District Health Board jobs that paid a whopping $43k.

Racism
I think race relations in break down along the lines of Pakeha/Maori & Pacific Islander/Asian. There isn’t enough of any other group to really play into the big picture. I am African-American, and I think I generally got lumped in with the Pakeha(white European descendants). I don’t know if this is because the average Kiwi hasn’t met enough Black African diaspora people to know how classify me, or maybe sympathized with me as someone who probably hadn’t been treated fairly in my home country: media portrayals of life as a Black person in the US are generally unfavorable. I personally experienced nothing that I would have perceived as racism, and neither did my Black South African friend (she was a nurse).

The fact that the blatant racism wasn’t directed at me doesn’t make NZ any less racist. Being Maori would be preferable to being Asian, but I wouldn’t want to be either in NZ. Another friend (Indian doctor) was extremely unhappy and ended up leaving to take a job in Dubai.
I encountered no anti-American sentiments. I can generally say that every Kiwi I met hated President Bush. There was cheering in the bars and pubs as the 2008 election results came in and it became clear that Barack Obama had won.

Summary
If you already live in US/Canada/UK, everything bad about life in your current location is going to present in NZ: road rage drivers, shoplifting teenagers, loudmouth businessmen on cell phones, etc. And whatever it is you are hoping to find in NZ is already available in your own country: if you’re tired of the rat race, move to Montana or the Scottish countryside. The scenery there is just as nice as in NZ and you won’t have to struggle to make ends meet. NZ is a second world country pretending to be a first world country: it’s not worth the hassle or effort.

For those who choose to ignore my advice, and that of others in this forum: leave your stuff at home in storage if you decide to move to NZ anyway. NZ$ are worthless on the world market: the exchange rate fluctuated wildly between 0.55 and 0.83 while I was there. You will never be able to earn enough money in NZ$ to transport your stuff back home when you decide to leave.”