Labour campaigned against immigration in the last election and there has been speculation that their anti-immigrant stance hurt Labour in the Asian immigrant vote. Some data has come out suggesting widespread support for the National Party from Chinese voters.
I can’t directly test immigrant support for Labour, but I can test the support for Labour in each electorate and compare that to the proportion of immigrants in that electorate.
Statistics New Zealand provide easily accessible information on ethnic groups and world birthplace in each electorate. Unfortunately, neither dataset allows us to drill down to distinguish between different Asian countries or cultures, for instance, to look at relationships to Chinese or Indian residents in particular. Because we’re interested in immigration, I used the data on birthplace rather than ethnicity. So every time I talk about “Asian immigrant residents” or “residents from Asia” in an electorate here, we’re looking at the number of people born in Asia (excluding the Middle East) who were in that electorate on Census Night 2013.
There’s no significant link between an electorate’s residents from Asia and Labour support…
For context, let’s look at how the data in 2014 and 2017 side-by-side.
For both years there’s no clear trend: you can see that in both 2014 and 2017, overall, there’s no significant association among electorates between voting Labour and the number of Asian residents.
…But there is a link between an electorate’s Asian-origin population and the swing from 2014 to 2017
If we want to know whether Labour’s stances over the last three years might have hurt it with Asian voters, then we are less interested in the vote in 2017 as we are in the change in votes from 2014 to 2017:
The first thing we can see here is that Labour improved its record in every electorate, by an average of from 25% to 35% across the general electorates. Still, that wasn’t enough to quite beat National, at least in pure numbers, this time around.
But on to our question of interest. There is a clear correlation here: the more residents from Asia within an electorate, the less boost that electorate got for Labour from 2014 to 2017 (r=-0.36, p=0.0034).
This doesn’t prove that if Labour hadn’t been through the Chinese-names saga, and hadn’t campaigned against immigration, that it would have done better. But is there any other reasonable explanation for this pattern?
Considering the effect of Greens support doesn’t change the result
Adding Greens’ success in 2014 as a predictor only makes the effect of Asian immigrant residents in an electorate even more important. We can calculate that on average, for every 950 votes the Green party got in an electorate in 2014, we’d predict that electorate to have a 1% rise in Labour support from 2014 to 2017. Using the same method, we predict that for every 3600 Asian immigrant residents in an electorate, there is a 1% fall in Labour support, or, more accurately, 1% less of an increase from 2014 to 2017.
Labour’s loss was National’s gain
This is actually instructive, too. It turns out that there’s a very strong relationship between National support and Asian residents in an electorate. For every 4000 Asian residents in an electorate, there is a 1% rise in National support.
Results were similar for electorates with high immigrant populations from the Pacific Islands and Africa…but not the UK
Electorates with high numbers of immigrants from Pacific Island and Middle East and Africa sources followed the same significant trend as those with high numbers of immigrants from Asia. We actually saw the reverse pattern for electorates with high numbers of immigrants from the UK and Ireland: a larger swing towards Labour.
What does this mean?
There’s been speculation that Labour’s immigration policies may have influenced voting in 2017, particularly by influencing people in electorates with high proportions of residents from Asia. The data suggests that in electorates with more people from Asia, the Pacific, or the Middle East and Africa, Labour did not gain nearly as much support as in electorates with relatively few immigrants from those regions.
This might be relevant when Labour works to frame immigration policy. When voters have themselves immigrated to New Zealand; when their neighbors have; they may have more sympathy for immigrants and question restrictive immigration policies.
Following through on a campaign promise to reduce immigration by up to 30,000 people every year would be a huge change and the data I presented here could mean that it would harm Labour in the polls three years from now. National has resisted making similar changes, and Bill English actually claimed Labour’s changes would end up having minimal effect on long-term migration, because the changes mostly target international students, 80% of whom return to their country of origin. In any case, if Labour wants to avoid high-immigrant electorates becoming characteristically National territory, they may need to reach out to those communities to find out what might be alienating them from voting Labour.
- Here, “number of residents from Asia in an electorate” means the number of people in the electorate on Census night 2013 who reported being born in an Asian country. See 2013 Census electorate tables.