This article presents a profile of Aotearoa New Zealand’s asylum claimants – people who have sought recognition as a refugee or protected person and then applied for a temporary visa. Sourcing data from New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), we considered 11,091 refugee claimants between 1997 and 2022. The data suggests that the path to recognition can be long and circuitous, requiring multiple applications before status recognition. The data also reveals a wide health and mental health services uptake gap despite recent policy changes. When read together, we contend that this data supports the notion that everyday, discerning bordering exists in New Zealand through different forms of permeability and permanence based on gender and ethnicity. The article concludes with some insights for future policy directions.

Covid-19 and the policy shift to lockdowns had a considerable impact on global higher education. Campuses transitioned to virtual, online teaching leveraging a host of learning technologies to deliver educational content. While many universities had existing infrastructure to shift to online content delivery, interactive, collaborative learning within this virtual teaching space was not as simple. Students were unable to travel for valuable exchange and field-based learning activities, including applied research and internship opportunities. This article considers one attempt during Covid-19 lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand and Ontario, Canada to co-create and deliver an innovative, cross-national virtual learning environment. The project that emerged from theseunprecedented circumstances asked: how can students in different countries, on opposite sides of the globe, engage in virtual collaborations to develop practical insights into global, locally relevant public policy problems? The model leveraged existing academic staff, university resources and existing relationships between researchers and community organizations to provide a successful model.

This article considers the role of lawyers and immigration advisers in the deportation process for non-resident visa holders in New Zealand. In the process, this article adds to a small but growing literature on the role of immigration officials in the immigration policy space. We use Lipsky’s concept of the street-level bureaucrat and Lakhani’s notion of ‘para-state’ actors—those outside the formal apparatus of the state who nonetheless serve a central role in policy implementation—to advance our understanding of the deportation process. This qualitative study engaged in in-depth interviews with twenty-two (22) immigration lawyers and advisers to explore their experiences. We identify several themes about the importance of formal and informal networks for developing advocacy skills and tactics; how the features of the immigration system, lower levels of judicial scrutiny of decisions, and lower evidentiary requirements create spaces for lawyer advocacy and creativity; and how participants shared a commitment to social justice and camaraderie in their work that was essential to interactions with state officials and others. We contend that these efforts have the potential to reshape the state’s bordering practices yet are an often-overlooked area of study.

Family reunification remains a socially vital yet politically contested element of immigration policy. This article presents a comparative analysis of Canada and New Zealand’s approaches to parent reunification, highlighting Canada’s sustained institutional commitment amid neoliberal reforms and contrasting it with New Zealand’s episodic suspensions and reactive policy shifts. Applying a lesson-drawing framework, the article examines how Canada’s incremental adjustments – such as integrating economic logic without dismantling core family programmes – can inform more coherent and principled policy design in New Zealand. It argues that economic sustainability and family unity need not be mutually exclusive, and that older migrants contribute significant social capital through childcare, cultural continuity and migrant retention. The analysis concludes with practical recommendations for strengthening New Zealand’s parent reunification framework, including targeted eligibility criteria.

This article is a rejoinder to two previous articles about the political science discipline in Aotearoa New Zealand published in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education: Annie Te One and Maria Bargh’s “Towards a Fairer and More Tika Political Science and Politics: Are Political Science Programs Equipping Students Adequately for Aotearoa Realities?” (vol. 52, no. 2) and Jack Vowles’s “Fairness, Tika and Political Science in Aotearoa New Zealand: Some ‘Inconvenient Evidence’” (vol. 53, no. 1).