ACT Unveils Six-Point Immigration Plan With Tougher Deportation Rules and Daily Visa Surcharge
David Seymour has unveiled a six-point ACT party immigration platform that would make permanent residents deportable for serious crimes no matter how long they have been in New Zealand, charge temporary workers a daily infrastructure levy and lock new residents out of welfare for five years.
The policy released on Sunday afternoon arrives while submissions on Erica Stanford’s separate Immigration Amendment Bill are still being weighed by Parliament, and signals that ACT intends to make immigration a defining issue heading into the 2026 election.
Seymour told reporters the plan would “make immigration work for New Zealand” by welcoming migrants who share democratic values, learn English, fill genuine skill gaps and pay their share of infrastructure. The pitch leans heavily on what Seymour called the country’s “settler heritage” and the argument that “the rate of settlement has overwhelmed the ability to provide infrastructure”. He cited Dunedin as a benchmark, noting the city took roughly 180 years to build but New Zealand has been adding the population of Dunedin every couple of years while struggling to fund a single new hospital in the city itself.
The headline measure would extend deportation liability to any resident visa holder convicted of offences carrying sentences of ten years or more, regardless of how long they have lived here. That is a significant step further than the current government’s proposal to extend liability to a 20-year window. ACT argues the change is needed to remove the perverse incentive of long-resident migrants escaping deportation simply because the offending occurred late in their time in New Zealand.
Three further points target the work-visa system. Skill categories under the Accredited Employer Work Visa would expire every year and would need fresh evidence of labour-market demand to remain open, ending what Seymour described as “wide open” categories that persist long after the original skills gap has closed. A new six dollar per day infrastructure surcharge would apply to all temporary work visas on top of existing fees, which ACT says would raise roughly $80 million a year while still costing less than comparable visas in Australia and the United Kingdom. Basic English-language requirements would be extended across all AEWV types, with lower standards retained only for seasonal workers.
The most contentious change is likely to be a five-year welfare stand-down for everyone arriving on a residence-class visa. Under the policy, new residents would be unable to claim jobseeker support, the accommodation supplement or any income-tested benefit during their first five years in New Zealand. ACT frames this as “opportunity, not dependency” and argues most working-age migrants are recruited to fill a specific job rather than to access the welfare system.
The sixth point is enforcement. Citing the 20,980 known overstayers currently in the country, ACT proposes a dedicated overstayer enforcement unit inside Immigration New Zealand, mandatory work-rights verification by platform employers such as Uber and DoorDash, and a loss of employer accreditation for any business found to be facilitating overstaying.
Reaction was swift. Immigration lawyer Alistair McClyment told RNZ the welfare stand-down was “unnecessary” because most migrants arrive already in employment, and he questioned whether the additional fees would push lower-paid migrants into financial hardship. McClyment said the package “doesn’t really seem to be adding anything to the current immigration regime”, and accused ACT of borrowing the playbook of “xenophobic dog-whistle politics” that NZ First has used at recent elections. He warned that loading more cost onto temporary workers risked making them “more vulnerable to exploitation by bad employers”, because some would find themselves short of money for rent and food before their first pay cycle.
Seymour rejected that framing in his Whangārei speech accompanying the launch, saying ACT is pro-immigration but expects a “common set of expectations” of new arrivals — respect for freedoms, contribution to infrastructure, English, obeying the law and filling genuine gaps in the economy. He pointed back at the previous Labour-NZ First Government, which campaigned on cutting net migration to 30,000 and 10,000 respectively, but which presided over net migration of 80,000 within two years of taking office. The skilled migration channel, he argued, has drifted into “a general-purpose labour tap” that politicians of all stripes have failed to police.
The announcement also opens a noticeable gap inside the coalition. National’s existing reforms, led by Immigration Minister Erica Stanford, are already controversial, with critics this week comparing parts of her bill to United States-style immigration enforcement. NZ First, meanwhile, has long argued for sharper limits on net migration overall. ACT’s six-point plan stakes out a distinctive position from both partners, softer on overall numbers but harder on the terms of stay, and it explicitly anchors itself in the language of contribution and reciprocity rather than caps.
Whether any of these proposals survive into a future National-led legislative programme will depend on coalition negotiations after the next election. For now the document is party policy rather than government policy. But by laying it out in detail, with revenue forecasts and specific visa categories named, ACT has set a benchmark that its coalition partners and the opposition will both need to respond to.
What do you think? Is ACT’s six-point plan a sensible rebalancing of the immigration system, or does it add costs that working migrants will struggle to absorb? Tell us in the comments below.