Escape to New Zealand with some positive vibes and a business plan

Global Impact Visa applicants are interviewed and vetted by a committee of four people who try to find the right mix of candidates based on their backgrounds, talents, and ambitions

Maybe you’re tired of sharing a studio apartment with five other coders. Or perhaps WeWork’s beer selection no longer inspires big thoughts. Or maybe you’re just a restless multimillionaire who simply wants to be rich somewhere else. Whatever the case, New Zealand has the immigration system for you. The country’s Global Impact Visa is as much about intellectual renewal and generating positive vibes as economic impact. You can live in New Zealand or not, do business in New Zealand or not, and stay in New Zealand at the end of the visa term or not. The main requirements, which were set when the programme was established two years ago, are that you’re an interesting person with good intentions and good ideas and that you know lots of other interesting people with good intentions and good ideas. 

Another unusual thing about New Zealand’s visa programme is it wasn’t conceived by New Zealanders. Three overseas transplants—an Ethiopian, Yoseph Ayele, and two American brothers, Brian and Matthew Monahan—came up with the Global Impact Visa from a rural compound the brothers own near Wellington. The property has yurts, geodesic domes, composting toilets, and something called a “Zen Den,” all nestled on hundreds of hilly acres of grassland and forest. It’s gorgeous. Twice a year, the place fills with crowds of new Global Impact Visa holders who camp and discuss their plans for world harmony. Imagine a verdant Burning Man with lots more global utopianism, and you’ll get the idea.

To acquire a Global Impact Visa, you do not woo bureaucrats with their elusive but prized rubber stamps. Instead you’re interviewed and vetted by a committee of four people who try to find the right mix of candidates based on their backgrounds, talents, and ambitions. They hand out about 70 to 100 of the visas per year and will keep doing so until 2020, when the government will reevaluate the programme. The visa is good for three years, during which time you can basically do whatever you like in New Zealand and then opt for a path to permanent residency. Those who are picked receive the title of Edmund Hillary Fellows, in honour of the Kiwi explorer and climber of Mount Everest. “We carry the mantle of Sir Edmund Hillary—be a bold and humble leader,” Ayele says. “You have to be solving a problem that really matters in the world and that New Zealand can play a role in.”

New Zealand’s open-mindedness about immigration puts it way out of sync with its closest allies. The UK has embroiled itself in Brexit melodrama. The US is going medieval with its quest to build a wall along its southern border. In Australia, rhetoric against Asian and Muslim immigrants and their influence on the Australian way of life, whatever that means exactly, has been on the rise for years. New Zealand is not immune from the same tensions—a point made horrifically clear in March when an Australian gunman killed 50 people at a mosque in Christchurch. 

Although New Zealand has both pro- and anti-immigration camps, the current government has embraced foreigners as a means of diversifying the economy and rethinking the country’s collective goals. Politicians and businesspeople have been pushing to attract talent that will build new industries, which could carry New Zealand past its dependence on agriculture and tourism. Beyond that, there’s a growing desire to make New Zealand a role model for a more modern, enlightened capitalist economy. 

The country is an ideal petri dish for this type of human lab work. With 5 million people, New Zealand is a two-degrees-of-separation place where a key government official or bright engineer is a phone call away. This connectedness lets small groups of people get surprisingly big things done. A local named Peter Beck, for example, founded a startup a few years ago called Rocket Lab, which more or less created New Zealand’s aerospace industry and has become an important part of the emerging commercial space industry. The country also takes the environment and climate change seriously. In 2014 the government began honouring the traditions of its indigenous Maori people—who call the country Aotearoa—by bestowing legal rights on seas, rivers, forests, and mountains. If you harm a river with chemicals, you are, in the eyes of the law, assaulting a person. The government’s rhetoric about the annual budget has also shifted to prioritise “people’s well-being and the environment” over gross domestic product growth as a measure of success. 

To that end, the Global Impact Visa, unlike many other work visas, focuses less on business success or a particular set of skills and more on demonstrated dedication to completing worthwhile projects—the more unusual, the better. “I think it’s the best visa in the world,” says Michelle Dickinson, a scientist and media personality in New Zealand, who helped shape the programme and pick candidates. “It bets on the people and what kind of change they can bring and not on how much money they have made.” 

One day in November, 39 Hillary Fellows and their families arrive at the Monahan compound, having committed to spending a week in a yurt village. There are some unyurtlike comforts: electrical outlets, makeshift closets, and twin mattresses with electric blankets. The main inconvenience, other than lack of plumbing, is the yurts’ tendency to collapse when there’s a lot of wind, which, it turns out, is often.