A Kiwi solution to a Canadian problem on refugee sponsorship?
Dr Eric Crampton is chief economist at the New Zealand Initiative and a regular opinion contributor.
OPINION: Ten years ago, the NZ Initiative brought a Canadian diplomat to Wellington to explain how Canada let ordinary citizens sponsor refugees. Dean Barry told us that when Canadian communities pledged to support one more refugee, Canada admitted one more. Civil society helped decide how many refugees Canada accepted.
Dean Barry visited in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis. New Zealanders who wanted to help people had to spend their time lobbying the government to increase the quota. Canadians who wanted to help could fundraise and get on with the job of helping people.
Canada has since run into trouble. As of end-November 2025, about 87,000 people remained in the privately sponsored refugee inventory (the queue), well above the 48,000 places Ottawa is targeting for the next three years. Ottawa has frozen new applications from Groups of Five and Community Sponsors until the end of 2026.
Canada’s government could not keep up with Canadian communities’ willingness to house, feed, and settle refugees. Yet Ottawa’s failure was self-imposed. If the government faces increasing costs in processing more migrants, it could add those costs to the amount that community sponsors need to raise. The system could then be self-sustaining, without creating long and persistent queues.
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The New Zealand government trialled a refugee sponsorship regime after Barry’s visit. The Community Organisation Refugee Sponsorship scheme is now a standing pathway.
The scheme asks sponsored refugees to arrive with English and work-ready skills, thereby steering sponsorship toward the easiest cases. The hardest cares remain subject to the regular process. But a congregation that can teach English, or a group with real experience in trauma or disability support, could do much good for the harder cases.
There is a bigger catch. The government seems to have taken a different lesson than I have from Canada’s experience.
Sponsored refugee places in New Zealand’s programme will draw from the existing refugee quota rather than helping more people. If sponsorship grows toward 200 places a year, then the government will take 200 fewer refugees through the ordinary channel. Any unfilled sponsored place reverts to the quota. The total stays pegged at 1500. As the minister put it, the scheme is “funded from within existing baselines”.
Community generosity thus helps reduce the government’s cost in resettling refugees and will help them acclimatise to life in New Zealand. But it does not enable more refugees to come. And in the next crisis, communities that want to be able to do more will again have to lobby Parliament to increase the quota rather than fundraise to help more people.
While every refugee costs something to fly here, process and settle, the government’s reasoning is rather austere. There is a straightforward solution to controlling settlement costs
Immigration New Zealand already recovers the cost of most visas through fees. Rather than block entry when the government does not want to bear the cost of more arrivals, let sponsors carry the cost when communities want to do more to help.
The government could set a full-cost tier for sponsoring arrivals above the government’s current quota. Sponsoring communities would pay the full additional cost of an additional arrival, whether it be the airfares, health and security checks, or processing, on top of the settlement support they already provide.
Charges could be tiered. If a surge in community willingness to help risked tight capacity constraints at Immigration New Zealand, the charge could increase with demand. Immigration New Zealand could hire more people to process applications. The number of refugees then settles wherever community willingness to help meets the real cost of saying yes.
If you think charging for this service is cruel, surely it is crueller to maintain a locked door. The current de facto price is infinite: if sponsors wished to help one more refugee find a safe home, and New Zealand’s quota for the year had already filled, they simply would not be allowed to help.
Done properly, none of this need increase the direct Crown cost of bringing additional refugees here.
Nor would above-quota sponsorship import Europe’s failures. Refugees are selected before arrival; sponsors are approved and monitored; and New Zealand keeps its health, security, character and deportation backstops.
The New Zealand government may worry that Kiwis, like Canadians, have more willingness to help than their government can deal with.
But Canada’s queue grew because sponsorship demand and government processing capacity were allowed to diverge. Canadians kept volunteering to rescue strangers, and the government could not keep up.
New Zealand can avoid that error by letting above-quota sponsors cover the government’s direct up-front cost of adding capacity. Cost-recovery systems that can scale up with demand are better than rationing scarce capacity.
If we did it well, perhaps a future New Zealand diplomat could explain to a Canadian think-tank audience how the Kiwis had solved the problem with Canada’s otherwise-excellent system.
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