Immigration is being reset back to where we started

Thursday, 12 May 2022

Former Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi announces new 'Green List', which intends to simplify migrants' applications and pathways to residence. (Video first published in May).

ANALYSIS: “I think the minister just needs to finally acknowledge that all of this ideology around the immigration reset is just being undermined with every decision they make,” ACT’s immigration spokesperson James McDowall says.

McDowall is saying that because there is nothing in the reset of New Zealand’s immigration system on Wednesday that couldn’t have been achieved with tweaks or changes to the earlier rules and visa types.

Some other goals, like preventing migrant exploitation, have arguably gone backwards: wayward employers will be hard to detect within 10 working days.

Linking employer visas to jobs will leave migrant workers with less power to leave exploitative employers, and more incentive to go along with arrangements where they get paid an attractive salary on paper, but cycle those wages back to their employer.

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The old immigration rules had criteria around wage rates, it had blacklists of employers who weren’t able to hire migrant workers, there were checks on employers, and there were rules around who could or couldn’t get residency.

So what will the country actually gain from this reset that couldn’t have been achieved a lot faster by simply tweaking the old rules and system?

After all, migrants and members of the business community have gone through a lot of anxiety over the past few years around the apparent need to create an entirely new system to support different goals around immigration.

Yet at a press conference after his announcement on Wednesday afternoon Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi couldn’t point to a single thing the new system for work visas could do which couldn’t have been achieved with the old one.

Except that he believes the new system will be faster.

Kris Faafoi has ambitious expectations for visa processing, but can Immigration NZ meet them?

“If you were here two years ago a lot of people at this meeting would have said that there were delays, and it’s complicated.

“What we’ve tried to make sure we’ve got here is simple and streamlined immigration system.”

But Faafoi has no proof that this new system will be more efficient, and agrees it is untested.

He has attached ambitious timelines to these changes, he is hoping Immigration officers will take 10 working days to do an employer check, another 10 for a job check and 20 working days for a migrant check.

This seems like a tall order, even with a few hundred extra staff. It is a big shift from the current situation where Immigration NZ estimates it can take five months for them to process a simple visitor’s visa.

If Faafoi is wrong about how quick this will be then the border re-opening might not be much of one.

Jacinda Ardern announces border re-opening and immigration changes.

If it takes several months to issue visas then the border might be open, but workers won’t be able to get the visas they need to come through it.

Immigration lawyer Alastair McClymont can’t see anything in Wednesday’s announcement that will make things faster.

“It’s not adding anything, it’s just returning to something that worked before and giving it a different name and taking credit for it,” McClymont says.

National’s Immigration spokesperson Erica Stanford is also far from convinced Faafoi will make his targets.

“I think there is a huge, unanswered, massive elephant in the room. How is he going to do all of this?'

The old system ground to a halt before Covid-19 hit, a huge queue of residency applications formed because the Labour-NZ First coalition agreement couldn’t come to an agreement on a residency target.

Erica Stanford says there are serious questions around how realistic the Government’s promises are.

The target is needed in order to help Immigration officials decide how quickly they should be processing applications.

Residency visas that were once processed within a matter of months suddenly started taking more than two years to make their way through the system.

ACT Party defence spokesperson Dr James McDowall.

Things got worse after the country went into lockdown, and the Government froze the process allowing people to enter the residency queue, creating a new queue to get into the residency queue.

This started causing economic problems as frustrated professionals, the ones with the most options of where to move to, started leaving.

To cut-through the delays with that the Government introduced the 2021 Residents’ Visa.

However, after Wednesday’s announcement there will be more delays with that visa too.

With the border re-opening immigration officers have to be reallocated away from processing those residency applications.

The earlier promise was that 80% of 2021 Residents’ Visa applications would be processed within a year.

That deadline has now been extended by an extra six months. An 18-month wait for the processing of an amnesty-type visa that was initially touted as something easy to process.

So what about all this talk about migrant exploitation, the load immigrants are placing on infrastructure, and the driving down of wages?

Ricardo Menendez-March says low wage migrant workers should have a realistic pathway to residency.

In acknowledgement of this, would any of these categories, including residency visas, be capped at a particular number?

Faafoi had a simple response: “No'.

However, there will be a natural limit on numbers that comes with these criteria, as Immagine managing director Iain MacLeod says: “You don’t have to have a cap, to have a cap”.

Plus, there are still some announcements on the skilled migrant category to come. This is the “points-based” system where points are raised or lowered to allow more migrants a pathway to residency.

It is also telling that under the new system plenty of migrants on lower wages will be able to come here, and work at lower wages for a number of years. They just won’t be able to settle.

Green Party immigration spokesperson Ricardo Menendez March points out this is unfair, and makes us more like places like the United Arab Emirates that run guest worker programmes.

Alistair McClymont says the current proposals don’t do much to avoid migrant worker exploitation

This is the kind of situation the Government had signalled it was trying to avoid.

March says if we are willing to accept people working here on lower wages, then it should also be possible for people to settle here too.

He says there is a racial element to this rule as well. The criteria they have chosen mean a larger number of people from countries like the United States and the United Kingdom will be approved for residency faster.

March cites figures from Parliamentary written questions which show that there are five times as many people from the UK on work visas earning twice the median wage than people from India earning the same. But this flips in the other direction at lower salary levels.

There are other elements of unfairness, like partners of work visa holders not having work rights, which could end up giving these partners less power within their relationships.

And what about migrant exploitation? Here the changes almost represent a step backwards.

The new accredited work visa system ties workers to employers, because employers effectively foot the bill for it.

The Government argues an accreditation system will allow it to check if an employer is the sort who might exploit workers, but can any government agency achieve this feat within 10 working days?

McClymont talks about schemes within the Chinese community that would be nearly-impossible for Immigration New Zealand to detect, where people get paid a very high salary on paper, but then cycle their excess wages back to their employer through cash transactions overseas.

High wage requirements encourage this sort of thing, and visas linked to employers gives employees fewer options to leave their employer.

In other words, after several years of political acrimony we are mostly back to where we started: employer-linked visas, inconsistent carve-outs for favoured industries and occupations, and an immigration system where low-wage workers can come into the country, but can’t stay.

Only now there is a lot more doubt around whether the new system will actually be able to handle all of this.

Which is why MacLeod says the changes announced on Wednesday aren’t really a reset, or a rebalance, they are a bit more like the status quo with a couple of tweaks.

“There isn’t actually a lot to see here folks.

“This is the old story, in a liberal democracy everything trends towards the status quo.”