Lower staff numbers at
Immigration NZ blamed for visa 'bottleneck'
RNZ - 24 April 2022
for
restricting how many migrant workers, students and visitors can come into the
country.
Travellers
from a country needing visas to enter New Zealand, such as China, India and
South Africa, have to wait till October under the government's current border
timeline, unless they have an existing visa or border exemption.
Immigration
New Zealand (INZ) has 20 percent fewer staff than before the pandemic and has
been juggling the surge in one-off residence visas and an overhaul of work
visas.
But it
denied its ability to process visas was the sole factor in the delay to
re-opening to the rest of the world.
Mounir
Ziati has been waiting for his skilled migrant (SMC) residence application to
be decided since October 2019.
"So
basically from October 2019 to now it's been almost 30 months," he said.
"We put everything aside because our decision was to move to New Zealand
with this idea that everything will be done within six months.
"We
have information that there are only 10 case officers processing all the SMC
applications, both general and priority, and the other resources were
transferred to the Residence Visa 2021."
About
1200 of the 2600 people in the same situation are, like him, still overseas and
some have been waiting for a decision since Christmas 2018, despite reaching
the immigration points threshold.
"We
know that the vast majority of applicants like me don't have a job offer. To
earn 160 points without a job offer in New Zealand you have to be very, very
skilled, have a high degree diploma, a master's degree and so on. So basically
we are a lot of skilled people who are waiting and putting on hold your
life."
Ziati,
however, counts himself luckier than many as his French citizenship means he
does not need a visa to visit - so he and his partner and five-year-old son are
coming next month.
Ministers
cited INZ capacity issues as a factor in delaying non-visa-waiver arrivals for
another six months, but said they would see if they could bring that date
forward.
Officials
said they were ready to process the 5000 border exceptions the government had
announced for students.
Capacity
was only part of the reason for the October date for other visas, INZ's acting
deputy secretary of labour, science, and enterprise Ruth Isaac told
parliament's Education and Workforce Committee.
"So
how many students we could do in the middle of the year for semester two, was
alongside decisions about opening other visa categories, the resident visa 2021
processing, and what could be managed without significant trade-offs,"
Isaac said.
"Ministers
had a range of options to choose between, and that's where they landed. Larger
numbers would have made perhaps slower processing of critical worker border
exceptions or other things. So it's about the balance across students, workers,
family and other categories that ministers wish to open."
Impact on economy - National
The
constraint the economy was suffering through labour shortages, tourism and
international education losses was incredibly damaging, said National MP Penny
Simmonds.
"So
we've got this incredible bottleneck because Immigration New Zealand is not
able to process quickly enough across all these areas to get our industries
going at full speed again, whether it's in the critical worker or the
international student visas. We have got a bottleneck because of Immigration
New Zealand capacity."
Immigration
was not the only factor, Isaac said.
"Ministers
took into account the volumes of arrivals they wanted to have in light of the
potential Omicron peak and remember those decisions were taken before we were
in the middle of it. They were waiting for the travel declaration system to be
in place so that we had automatic ways to ensure that people were meeting the
health criteria for entry to New Zealand, which has just come into place.
"And
they were trying to balance a number of things. And they've also been quite
aware that doing everything at once is a way to create large queues, and having
a staged process is the best way for us to do a good job at every step of the
process."
But Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern, announcing the border
re-opening timeframe last month, said visa capacity was key to its
decision.
"The
major issue here is not a question of safety, but a question of the ability to
process those new visas in a timely way - keeping in mind we're already dealing
with a large number of people who are now being made residents through recent
decisions and gearing back up a lot of visa processing."
Staff numbers
INZ
figures show it has 179 fewer workers than before the pandemic.
Since
December, it has received 91,000 applications for 181,000 people to get
residence under the government's fast-track scheme. And next month, the
twice-delayed Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) will begin to replace six
work permit categories, with the first visas due in July.
Immigration's
general manager of border and visa operations, Nicola Hogg, said it was
recruiting for more New Zealand staff and has opened a second office in
Christchurch after closing three overseas offices last year.
"INZ
is constantly reviewing our capacity and capability to ensure we have the right
level of resources to process anticipated incoming visa volumes.
"The
new staff we hire are trained across a number of different visa categories as
we are always training and moving staff between different visa categories,
depending on incoming visa volumes. We will continue to do this as we process
2021 Resident Visas, while also opening offshore applications in line with the
government's Reconnecting New Zealand plan.
"INZ
currently has 658 Immigration officers processing and making decisions on visa
applications. In February 2020 when the borders closed due to Covid-19, INZ had
837 Immigration Officers processing visa applications in Auckland,
Christchurch, Porirua, Hamilton, Palmerston North and in overseas
offices."
Some
migrants worry about how quickly they may get visas approved once they are able
to apply in October, especially split families wanting to reunite before
Christmas.
For
others with expiring visas, October will be too late.
Figures
released to the Green party immigration spokesperson Ricardo Menendez March
show an average of 20,000 visas expire each month from now till October.
Migrant
Jagdeep Singh, who had a post-study work visa but was in India when the border
closed, said more than 80 percent of visas had already expired.
"It's
discrimination with us," he said. "We want to extend our visa or get
a replacement visa same as in Australia. Our future and life has been totally
destroyed, it's against humanity. Nobody has listened to us."
www.samigration.com
