Happier holidays: light at the end of the tunnel for some migrants, darkness for others
Friday, 24 December 2021
“I felt quite concerned you know, my future was totally unpredictable, and it was hard to make any plans,”
Russian immigrant to New Zealand Alexei is reflecting on how he felt earlier this year as immigration announcements were delayed, residency applications piled up, and a controversial immigration reset was announced.
Then, at the end of September, in a moment many migrants hoped for but few saw coming, everything changed. The Government announced a one-off 2021 resident visa creating a quick pathway to residence for an estimated 165,000 migrants who had been in the country on temporary visas.
Alexei intends to apply for the visa next year when he is eligible. Stuff has agreed not to identify him because he is concerned about jeopardising his application
**READ MORE:
* Can our 'trashed' immigration reputation still be repaired?
* 'Long overdue': Migrant workers welcome government's residency plan for 165,000
* Nearly 165,000 migrants eligible for fast-tracked residency
**
“It was like a miracle really. I can say that both my wife and I can hardly understand, can hardly imagine that it’s reality.”
Alexei immigrated to New Zealand when a clear pathway to residency existed for people working tough jobs in challenging environments. When he spoke to Stuff last Christmas he was exhausted at the end of a year working in a hot, punishing environment in a foundry, 48 hours a week split across five shifts.
When he moved to New Zealand people like him could work for one employer for three years and get residency, but partway through his stay the situation changed, and this pathway was removed. Then things got worse, with the whole system paused for Covid, and a mountain of residency applications unprocessed.
With no policy change on the horizon Alexei was either facing a lifetime of moving from temporary visa to temporary visa, until he was too old to stay or work in New Zealand, or heading back to Russia after having spent six years building a life here.
Alexei couldn’t understand it, especially considering all of his colleagues were migrants. Where was New Zealand going to find enough people willing to take on foundry work as a career?
As he described it to Stuff at the time: “I have a very challenging job. You have to work. You have to work and to work and work for years only to deserve in the end to be deported from New Zealand.”
But he says the difference between how he felt then and now is like night and day.
Same too, for another migrant Stuff spoke to last year, Javed, who was fired after Covid-19, and spent most of the period post-pandemic struggling to get people to hire him because of his visa status.
Like other migrants, including the Santos family, who were originally set to be deported on Christmas day for claiming $1600 worth of food vouchers, Javed could not access any social welfare benefit while he was out of work, so he had to rely on a $2000 redundancy pay-out from his employer, some savings, and his credit card.
A long-present provision to give migrants emergency welfare support was not activated despite calls to do so from across the political spectrum by both the Green Party and figures like former National Party cabinet minister Stephen Joyce.
Emergency benefit provisions were later activated, but not until the end of last year, after much of the economic disruption from Covid-19 had come to an end.
When Stuff spoke to Javed last year he had found a job in Picton, after a year of travelling up and down the country to meet anyone who would agree to interview him.
Not only is Javed now eligible for a resident visa, but the Government extended visas and changed some immigration rules in the middle of last year, making it easier for businesses to employ migrants.
Now employers were calling him day and night asking him if he is still interested in a job. His CV is still listed on job websites like Helping Hands.
“I was very surprised because some people who never accept your resume or anything, they also call you.
“That started in September, August or September … I had seven or eight people who wanted me to join their place.
“And it was a bit weird because many people normally have you trial before work, and these guys don’t have any trial, they just have a phone interview, and they were happy to go.”
Migrants like Javed and Alexei are happy that things have changed. However, while you might expect them to praise the actions of the minister, or the Government, they still remember how difficult things were earlier in the year.
Alexei feels the Government gave in to years of political pressure, rather than implemented something it really wanted to do.
“If you’re talking about this new visa I think we should say thanks to Anu Kaloti, we should say thanks to you [Stuff] personally, we should say thank you to some people from National, Erica Stanford, but really always people have pressurised Labour’s Government for years to make a decision like this.
“And I don’t want to say thanks to the Labour Government, honestly. Sorry, maybe it’s not right, I don’t know.”
Migrant Workers Association President Anu Kaloti praises the current immigration spokespeople of opposition parties National, the Greens, and ACT for banding together to lobby the Government.
“It’s kind of like a bittersweet moment for us, who have been campaigning and trying to get justice.
“We are delighted, but at the same time, the people who have been left out of that visa is just sad.
“And those who are stranded offshore, this Government just refuses to acknowledge the problem, and it’s really serious.”
Kaloti is talking about those migrants who were on valid visas but were locked out of returning because they were not permanent residents or citizens.
Last year Stuff spoke to Vanita and Mehak Sehgal. Vanita’s husband, Mehak’s father, visited India shortly before the Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, but was unable to return.
The family were left with no clear idea of when they might be able to see him again.
Then Vanita lost her job, leaving the pair of them reliant of handouts from the Sikh temple.
Vanita was reluctant to comment saying she had been advised by her lawyer that continuing to talk to the media could affect her application for the 2021 resident visa. However, she confirmed her husband had made it through the border in September under a small series of border exceptions.
Kaloti, and Green Party immigration spokesman Ricardo Menéndez March recently took part in a virtual cross-border protest for a pathway to return for other migrants stuck offshore after the borders closed.
March says he plans to campaign heavily next year for the Government to follow Australia’s lead and issue “replacement visas” to temporary migrant workers who want to return.
Australia recently announced migrants on temporary visas stuck offshore would be issued new visas to return, and plug a labour shortage, countries like Canada and the United Kingdom have made similar moves too.
“I’ve been in touch with migrants who have been stuck offshore, some of them have been living in New Zealand for six-plus years before the borders closed and have all of their belongings still in New Zealand as well as their community connections,” March says.
“The problem here is that we closed the borders to keep the virus out, which meant some people got stuck offshore, and at no point did we actually create a realistic pathway for them to come back, or even tell them if there is going to be a pathway.”
National Party immigration spokeswoman Erica Stanford says the resident visa 2021 policy has helped a lot of people, but argues the bureaucracy and structures supporting immigration are in even more of a mess.
Like March, and Kaloti, she too has a problem with some of the groups that have been left ineligible for the 2021 resident visa, and says some of the rules that hinder PhD students from applying make little sense in the context of a global skills shortage.
She thinks the Government had to put simple rules in place because Immigration New Zealand’s personnel are not up to the task of handling complicated applications.
“They’ve got all of their resources going towards the 2021 visa, as you would imagine, because the minister has his neck on the line, his whole reputation is based on this Resident 2021 visa and how well it goes, and obviously already the system crashed.”
In an interview with the Employers and Manufacturers Association, Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi said the 2021 resident visa would fix many of the queues within the immigration process by simplifying the criteria.
“I want to acknowledge some of the frustration that people have had because of the queues. As I’ve outlined the process is vastly different now, both in terms of how people apply and the assessment that will be done.”
In the same session Faafoi also encouraged people to apply for the visa early, rather than leaving it until applications closed, saying it would be “first in, first served”.
However, when thousands of people logged on to file their applications on day one, the system crashed.
A critical database had not been updated in six years, causing many applications not to go through. This reportedly led to an army of consultants being employed, at significant cost, to urgently perform several years’ worth of IT updates in a few days.
Sources close to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment that Stuff has spoken to say the systems crash was avoidable with planning, and will eventually cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars because the fault lay with an old system, not with a Microsoft cloud product as first thought.
Microsoft Azure was set up to handle the large number of expected applications at the front-end. However, the MBIE database Azure was feeding data into, called the Immigration Global Management System (IGMS), was not.
One person Stuff spoke to said the situation was easily avoidable, and likened it to attaching a jet engine to a car, turning the engine on, then being surprised when the wheels of the car fell off in the process.
In a written statement MBIE argued taxpayers would not be out of pocket from the ordeal because most of the work was covered by existing commercial support agreements, a defence disputed by other sources Stuff has spoken to.
Processing of these applications has also been slow with 506 applications fully approved in three weeks, if this is carried over to the full 165,000 applications that would imply the process of issuing visas under the scheme could take several years rather than the 12-month maximum.
Faafoi expects processing times on applications to decrease next year, and says a new Advanced Digital Employer-led Processing and Targeting (ADEPT) system which will better link with Microsoft Azure.
“Immigration NZ has acknowledged there were some initial issues, which have been rectified after the Minister requested that the necessary resources were applied,” a spokesman for Faafoi says.
Kaloti says INZ should have anticipated a whole influx of applications, especially given Faafoi’s comments about the system being “first in, first serve”.
“INZ should have anticipated this. People have been waiting for years … if people can apply on the first day, that’s surely what they will do.