Wednesday Oct 08, 2008

The head of immigration New Zealand says immigration department-bashing is not helping the country's fight to bring in the migrants it needs to help boost the economy.

Andrew Annakin believes ongoing attacks on New Zealand's immigration service will restrict the country's already ailing economy by discouraging would-be migrants from applying.

But his pleas appear to be falling on deaf ears with the Kiwi Party, which yesterday released an immigration case to the Herald it says will form the basis for a criminal complaint against the department.

Mr Annakin - who replaced former immigration chief Mary Anne Thompson - says the continuing attacks were also denting staff morale.

"Everybody can bring up an example of an immigration application that didn't go as well as hoped, but who documents the fact that every year, we process hundreds of thousands of entry decisions," he said.

Mr Annakin said immigrants contributed over $8 billion a year, and immigration was one of the key contributors to the economy.

A Labour Department report released on Monday and showing New Zealand's workplace productivity to be among the lowest in the OECD further reinforced the urgent need to attract more skilled migrants.

"Immigration New Zealand plays a very important role as a facilitator to bring in the people New Zealand needs, and it does not help nor is it constructive for it to be constantly under attack," Mr Annakin said.

But Kiwi Party candidate Bernie Ogilvy rejected Mr Annakin's comments.

"What he is effectively saying is that we should let his department get away with murder."

Mr Ogilvy, a former MP, said an immigration case on a Chinese family investigated by Kiwi Immigration Watch showed Immigration "needs to be completely pulled apart and be restructured again."

"Here we have a Chinese immigrant family who had legally obtained their residencies, but taken away illegally by INZ, which then spent years after that lying, forging documents and covering the whole case up," he said.

"We found that staff had also been withholding information from the ministers."

The case - which went on between 2002 and 2008 - "spanned five Labour Immigration Ministers" and was only recently resolved when the department issued a fresh residency approval for the family - but it refused to conduct an investigation on its staff or answer any of the questions the family had, Mr Ogilvy said.

"As a Kiwi, I am embarrassed that we have a system ... which absolutely denigrates people and ignores them," he said.

Kiwi Immigration Watch spokesperson Allan Hughes - a former immigration compliance investigator - said it would take "far more than a replacement for Mary Anne Thompson" to fix the department.

"There is an entire culture within immigration whereby staff treat clients like enemies, and behave like public masters rather than public servants, and that goes far beyond Mary Anne Thompson," he said.

* An earlier version of this story gave a different emphasis to Mr Annakin's comments in the first paragraph.

(Source NZ Herlad, Lincoln Tan)