20/08/2021 - Processing update INZ

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Immigration New Zealand (INZ) is operating under the same Alert Level 4 lockdown requirements as all businesses, which means that INZ offices are currently closed and most INZ staff are now working remotely.

While working remotely presents challenges to some of their people, the visa processing workforce have the ability to work from home, which means they are focussing on online applications, including border exceptions.

Read more: 20/08/2021 - Processing update INZ

06/08/2021 - Breaking News - Three interesting news items

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Three recent news paper articles worth reading;

• Govt ignoring NZ’s deepening tech skills crisis
• Manākitanga in the age of COVID, Peter Wilson Principal Economist NZ Institute for Economic Research (NZIER)
• Immigration Minister denies residency queue is 'shambles' (Aug 2021)

05/08/2021 - Two worthwhile articles

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02/08/2021 - Businesses advised not to underestimate work visa accreditation process

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Businesses are being advised to take action now to become an accredited employer under a new work visa scheme - a time consuming and lengthy process.

The government's Accredited Employer Work Visa scheme is expected to be rolled out next June.

But immigration lawyer Aaron Martin at Immigration Law said businesses had no time to waste in getting the paperwork underway.

Businesses seeking accreditation status would be required to demonstrate their trustworthiness in several areas, including labour law compliance, human resources, worker training, benefits, and pay.

Read more: 02/08/2021 - Businesses advised not to underestimate work visa accreditation process

30/07/2021 - Come on NZ Government ...

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Come on NZ Government, do something, respect the most basic need of the migrant communities, as this current situation is just untenable. This none reactive Government not willing to listen to migrant families, employers and migrant employees, has and continues to create an increasing gap between NZ and the developed world, on an economic and humane front.

From where I stand, it should be easy to solve this current situation, as follow;

Read more: 30/07/2021 - Come on NZ Government...

24/07/2021 - Migrants filling labour shortage run out of patience with Government

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Migrant workers filling skill shortages, such as teachers, nurses, doctors and engineers, are running out of patience with the Government's lack of a clear pathway forward for them. 

More than 10,000 people waiting for skilled migrant visas to be approved

The Government stopped process applications amid Covid, but now many migrants are running out of patience. Source: 1 NEWS

New Zealand's border remains closed to all except residents and citizens and there's a pause on the pathway to residency for skilled migrants, with a processing time of around two years across a number of residency categories.

Read more: 24/07/2021 - Migrants filling labour shortage run out of patience with Government

26/07/2021 - Update - Closing dates various categories

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20/07/2021 - More than 1000 registered doctors and nurses waiting in New Zealand residency queue

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GPs are urging the Government to urgently re-open residency for healthcare workers to avoid losing them overseas. 

There are more than 1000 registered doctors and nurses stuck in the frozen immigration queue - and Newshub has spoken to one doctor who's giving up and leaving. 

Nina Fransham's first New Zealand holiday was a Kiwi classic - travelling in a campervan, she saw how beautiful the country was and knew it would be great for children. 

She moved from the UK to Northland in December 2019. Loving it so much, she encouraged other foreign doctors to move to Northland - but her love has limits.

"Our lives just feel incredibly temporary and that's incredibly frustrating," she told Newshub. 

Fransham is stuck in the frozen residency queue for skilled migrants - unable to access KiwiSaver, healthcare or buy a house. So next week, she's reluctantly moving back to the UK. 

"No one in their sane mind would fly all the way back to the UK in the middle of a world pandemic working in the NHS."

But she's far from alone.

When COVID-19 hit last year and the borders were slammed shut, Immigration New Zealand also shut down residency applications, leaving 10,000 skilled migrants in the queue.

Immigration New Zealand figures show among them are 901 registered nurses and 235 doctors - like Fransham. They're healthcare workers New Zealand desperately needs, already in the country, working in our health system, just waiting on the Government. 

"GPs leaving the country just worsens an already difficult situation for a lot of practices," says NZ College of General Practitioners medical director Bryan Betty.

National's immigration spokesperson Erica Stanford says the situation is simply illogical.

"We've already got medical professionals here that are being treated so badly in a residents' queue that's going nowhere and they're looking to leave. And guess what we'll have to do? Replace them with more migrant doctors and nurses."

Newshub asked Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi for an interview but he declined, only saying he was working on the issue. 

After pressure, earlier this year he created a border exemption to bring in more healthcare workers.

But he's now starting to lose the ones that are already here, with jobs, because of this unnecessary immigration rigmarole.

Source: Newshub, Amelia Wade

17/07/2021 - Government immigration reset blows up in its face

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OPINION: It is easy to pull the rug out from under thousands of migrant workers, but nobody ever tells you the carpet might just bounce back and hit you in the face.

The country is now overwhelmed by a wave of economic capacity issues most of which are linked in some way to severely reduced migration and border flows.

Which is why, after scrambling to let migrants know they are not welcome the Government is frantically moving in the opposite direction.

If you were a migrant and feeling angry about how things have gone since lockdown you might take a strange sort of comfort in the way inflation has spiked, job vacancy advertisements have soared, job re-training budgets have proven woefully inadequate to the task of retraining people, and employers have been unable to fill vacancies.

New Zealand Initiative chief economist Eric Crampton has long been a critic of the Government’s policies on immigration and understands why it did not move quicker to extend visas for a longer period of time in March, when everyone was predicting a 1930s-style economic depression.

The somewhat self-defeating part is how the Government did not change tack in August when it became clear the economy was roaring back.

“The Government at that point should have re-assessed and should have given everyone who was here legally in March a much longer-term visa,” he says.

“Another option that we could have been considering ... was just granting residency to everybody that we had done poorly by.”

Crampton says short-term visa extensions for migrants left them scrambling with no idea of what they might be allowed to do long-term.

Which made it harder for them to find jobs because employers were reluctant to take on people who, on paper, might have to leave the country in six months.

On Friday the Government reset its immigration reset from less than eight weeks prior. Although it insists the original reset is still happening (by that it means the second mention of the word ‘reset’ in this paragraph, in case you lost track).

Instead of booting low wage migrants out of the country, or trading them in for a wealthier “high value” breed, workers earning below median wage will now be eligible for two-year working visas.

These visas will still be linked to a single employer and the move will probably postpone uptake of the Government’s accredited employer work visa scheme too. Not a bad thing since some employers seem to think the new accreditation scheme will give them even more power over their migrant “meat”.

The Government tightened the screws on these workers last year when it started renewing their visas in short six- month increments at a time when they were at their most powerless.

What were they going to do? Back then no vaccine had been approved in the United States and flights were few and far between. Even if you caught one, any place worth flying to was probably still in lockdown. The only rational decision was to suck it up, live with the uncertainty, and await a new press release from the immigration minister (first Iain Lees-Galloway then Kris Faafoi) every few months.

It was a last-minute pattern repeated right across a host of visa types including for working holiday visa holders, and it was even worse for people with real aspirations to live here long-term.

The irony is the country seems to have gained nothing from having treated all these different types of migrant workers so badly.
Migrant Workers Association president Anu Kaloti says many migrant workers simply left for other countries as opportunities overseas came up.

“All the people who live in this land must be looked after equally well. So to pit migrants and New Zealanders against each other has been totally the wrong stance.”

The essential skills work visa numbers quoted in the Government’s press release hardly seem likely to topple the entire country into low wage subjugation, and it makes you wonder what the fuss was about.

This decision that many have been calling for will benefit just 18,000 work visa holders while a streamlined process attached to it will help 57,000.

So how about we flip this whole equation around. Rather than looking at this as a way to scare migrants with little to no benefit how about we think of it as an opportunity to sort these problems out with little cost to the economy.

Managed isolation statistics reveal we have been filling up fewer than 250 rooms a day in recent times, which puts us right back to where we were at the beginning of the pandemic in terms of economic constraints.

With such low numbers of people coming through the border it is debatable whether we still need a labour market test for migrant workers preventing them readily filling up workforce gaps.

The labour market test was meant for a time when globalisation was unconstrained and employers could more easily tap into migrant workers overseas. It is a headache to administer, which makes it a dubious priority with Immigration New Zealand’s resources so obviously stretched.

Then there are changes we could make for more permanent migrants. The Cabinet ramping up the planning range for residency applications would be a good start as would doing something with people who have put in expressions of interest for residency.

This would prevent us having to bring more workers through the border to plug the gap.

More importantly we could use this as an opportunity to tackle a major element in the immigration mess we have been reluctant to address.

The root cause of exploitation: visas attached to a single employer.

As Crampton says: “The best protection that workers can ever have in the first instance isn’t the whole set of labour market legislation that still has a lot of process costs on either side of it.”

“It’s having recourse to lots of potential employers who might prefer to bid you away from your current job.”

Source: Stuff, Dileepa Fonseka

16/07/2021 - Thousands of foreign workers allowed to stay in NZ as essential skills visas extended

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At least 18,000 visa holders are set to benefit following the Government's decision to extend the duration of some essential skills visas and streamline the application process amid ongoing border closures.

The maximum duration of essential skills visas for jobs paid below the median wage will temporarily increase from 12 months to 24 from Monday. The maximum duration of essential skills visas for jobs paid above the median wage remains at three years.

Read more: 16/07/2021 - Thousands of foreign workers allowed to stay in NZ as essential skills visas...