Heading for the sun: Migrants feel more at home in big city

The multicultural staff at Cardlink. Picture / Glenn Jeffery

When they first came to New Zealand from Bombay, Seema Kapadia and her husband lived in Wellington, where they had friends. They didn't stay long.

"I'm used to crowds and people all the time and Wellington is like a dead city. We stayed only three months," she says.

They moved to Auckland, where Seema works for a classic "knowledge-based" company, Cardlink. Her husband is the human resources manager for Westhaven's Kermadec restaurant.

"Now we have people like us, migrants," she says. "Now, because we have people of our own kind, we don't feel we are too much away from home, and there are so many Indian things happening here. We have the temples, and all the festivals are taken care of."

It's a common story at Cardlink, whose 57 Auckland staff come from Britain, China, Dubai, Fiji, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Africa and Zimbabwe as well as NZ.

"We are a League of Nations," says Mahendra Jithoo, a 46-year-old South African who brought his wife and two teenagers here after he saw "houses without fences and people walking in the streets after 9pm". "I wouldn't swap this for anything," he says. "We went back to South Africa in November and after three weeks we got homesick for here."

Kaizad Irani, who came with his parents five years ago and finally got the IT job he wanted with Cardlink three months ago, says "Auckland is the place to be".

"I've been around New Zealand. I've been to Wellington but it was dead - not many people, not many work opportunities. Auckland is a place for opportunity."

Chief executive Ben Unger says Cardlink's customers are "everywhere but Auckland". It runs national loyalty card schemes such as FlyBuys, Shell cards and Taxi Charge, manages vehicle fleets for national companies such as Telecom, and sells its software in Asia, South America and Europe.

But the company stays in Auckland because it could not get the skilled people it needs anywhere else.

IT manager Todd Preston, from Hawkes Bay, says that when he advertised the last job and had a dozen applicants, all were immigrants.

"Where are the New Zealanders?" he asks. "It's nothing to do with money. We wanted to train someone, but we got overseas people coming in with degrees all over the place."