Introduction

The introduction of the 1987 Immigration Act fundamentally shifted the immigration system of Aotearoa/New Zealand. It transformed the system's previous race-based immigration policy into an economic-centric immigration policy and opened its borders to a much wider range of immigrants worldwide. Although strengthening family connections of immigrants was a major feature of the Act (Trlin 1992), a series of Aotearoa/New Zealand family immigration policy changes since then have increasingly restricted immigrants’ ability to reunite with their families from their country of origin. This is particularly true for the reunification between first-generation adult immigrants and their older parents (Bedford and Liu 2013; Ran and Liu 2021).

After more than three decades of embracing this immigration policy change, alongside the rapid increase of immigrants from all over the world – particularly Asian immigrants – a substantial new Chinese immigrant community from the People's Republic of China (PRC) was established in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Liu and Ran 2021b). The practice of building a close-knit multigenerational family is an important feature of family life for this immigrant group (Ran 2020). Often, multiple generations from both the PRC and Aotearoa/New Zealand sustain close ties in highly interdependent relationships across different stages of the members’ migration process (Liu 2018). However, evidence reveals that changes in family immigration policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand have had significant impacts on those families, including reshaping their family maintenance patterns and intergenerational dynamics (Ho and Bedford 2008; Liu and Ran 2021a, 2021b).

The impact of those changes on the well-being and functioning of these families and their individual family members has become an issue of increasing academic interest in recent decades, particularly with those families who adopted new family arrangements involuntarily mainly because of the changing family immigration policy (Bedford and Liu 2013; Brandhorst et al. 2020; Bryceson 2022; Ho and Bedford 2008). Therefore, a research project was created and undertaken by the author to explore the relationship between people's experiences of transnational migration and their multigenerational family dynamics (from 2017 to 2021). The project, which informs this chapter, had a particular focus on identifying the impact of the family immigration policy in Aotearoa/New Zealand on the intergenerational relations of Chinese immigrant families.

Drawing on the major findings of the research project, this chapter discusses the impact of the recent changes to the family immigration policy on Chinese immigrant families in Aotearoa/New Zealand.