Let's take the recent changes aimed at limiting the ability of low-income migrant spouses to work here as an example.

While these changes are aimed at ensuring that those on partnership visas don't make it harder for local people to find low-paid work, the unfortunate reality is that these changes may end up as an own goal in the long term.

Balancing the needs of a host community with the needs of migrants is not always easy.

Certainly there is evidence from MBIE that in New Zealand's horticultural regions the employment of temporary migrant spouses is having a negative effect on the new hiring of beneficiaries and youth.

But the same reports show that in other places and industries temporary migration has a positive effect on the employment of New Zealanders.

What we can say is when it comes to building healthy resilient communities, the way a community treats migrants and the way migrants invest in their host communities are both really important.

Case studies in rural Queensland have found that when workers did not feel attached to a community they often underinvested in the long-term health of the community.

These studies also show when the community didn't invest in the migrants to ensure attachment with the overall effect, it led to a downward spiral in community connectedness.

The migrant and the community in effect became two groups of "consumers," taking from each other just what they wanted. The long term result was that a small town became an even less attractive place to be.

So how does a community build attachment to a place?

It often means ensuring migrants are seen as part of a wider family and community.

The way a community treats migrants and the way migrants invest in their host communities are both really important.

For us looking at the issue of spousal employment, it means doing everything we can to support spouses to be attached to a wider community.

Often this means finding meaningful work. OECD evidence from Norway, for example, shows that migrants with an employed partner are more likely to stay than those with an inactive partner.

For male migrants "the retention rate was almost twice as high when their spouse was working."

A similar effect was found in the Netherlands when looking at highly-skilled migrants.

We need to remember that even if the principal applicant is highly skilled, their spouse may not be.

A labour market test may compound the informal barriers that the partner faces.

Overall, building stronger communities needs more than just ensuring a local supply of workers. It means seeing these workers as part of a wider family and when it comes to migration policy focusing more on long-term outcomes than short term expediency.

Ensuring a community is strong requires that all kinds of people put down roots, claim a place as their own and work together to build a healthy community.

The welcome we offer to new members is the first opportunity to grow such a community.

• Julian Wood - writing for the Maxim Institute. Republished with permission.

The four-year deal, signed in 2014, was designed to resettle hundreds of refugees who have been transferred by Australia to the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru.

Australia's immigration officials have made repeated attempts to persuade the refugees of the merits of moving to Cambodia - one of the world's poorest nations - but only five people agreed to resettle there.

It has now emerged that three of the five - a Burmese man and an Iranian couple - have returned to their homelands. Continue reading

Yet the stir around Lampedusa is itself worth looking into. The pope said such tragedies are "shameful," but I would describe Europe's emotional state as one of embarrassment. The embarrassment relates to our reluctance to confront the hypocrisy embedded in how we think about immigrants from the poor and broken parts of the world. On the one hand, we have high moral standards about our duty of care to refugees fleeing lives of squalor, fear and oppression, and these are embedded in various international treaties and national laws. On the other hand, if we applied those standards generally, we would have to accept that over a billion people have some legitimate claim to refugee status.

Who are those billion? Most women in the Middle East and perhaps Central America; homosexuals from most of the world; many of the world's indigenous peoples; most inhabitants of failed states like Somalia and the Central African Republic; everyone but the elite in totalitarian dictatorships like Eritrea, North Korea and Uzbekistan; the 12 million people without citizenship of any state; religious and ethnic minorities in intolerant countries like Pakistan and Burma; all the civilians in war zones like Syria and Baghdad; India's untouchables; China's Tibetans; the vast number of refugees interned for decades in long-term camps in poor countries, like the Somalis living in Kenya or the ethnic Nepalis expelled by Bhutan - and so on. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics
• Image: World News Post