Residency struggle means immigrant can't attend dad's funeral without fear of being shut out
Saturday, 24 October 2020
An immigrant who has battled to gain residency in New Zealand for more than a decade was forced to choose between family duty and his adopted homeland.
Palmerston North supermarket manager Ujjal Ghosh has lived visa to visa for 14 years and has spent thousands of dollars in fees on failed applications for permanent residency in the hope of eventually becoming a citizen.
Ghosh has spent his entire adult life in New Zealand. It is his home now, but he hasn’t been able to put down roots because he could be kicked out at any point – and almost has been twice.
Worse, his immigration status and the Covid-19 border closures mean he couldn’t to return to India to perform the traditional funeral rites that are his duty as the eldest son for his father, who died earlier this month.
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Ghosh said he could get bereavement leave and India would allow him through its borders, but New Zealand wouldn’t allow him to return until the borders reopened because he only held a work visa.
If he went, he would lose his job and visa, which would effectively make the move permanent.
“If I’d been a New Zealand resident, I would’ve gone in a heartbeat. Even if it meant I lost my job… because I could come home eventually.”
It’s a nightmare repeat of when his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2012 and Ghosh’s employer at the time wouldn’t give him leave to visit her in India during her dying days.
Ghosh said he almost quit to go anyway, but his parents asked him not to.
“They spent a lot of money – my dad sold his house – so they could help me get to New Zealand to study and establish myself.”
Culturally, returning to India after his parents’ sacrifices would be a disgrace, he said.
Despite his parents’ wishes, he felt guilty he wasn’t there for them and his life wasn’t what they’d all hoped for.
He graduated with a masters of business administration from Massey University in 2010, but has struggled to land a job that put his qualification to use.
Ghosh has mainly worked in retail and supermarkets for the past 10 years.
Simply keeping up with the requirements for his work visa is a struggle and Ghosh has twice been a month away from being booted out of the country after being made redundant from a job.
The last time was in 2016 and he had to leave behind his his friends and the support of his church in Porirua to take his current job in Palmerston North.
Ghosh said it was hard to get close to people when he might have to move at any point, given the constant reviews into work visa requirements. But his attempts at becoming a resident have been unsuccesful.
He has applied for 14 positions for which he trained for, and that would qualify him for residency, in the past couple of months alone.
Ghosh said he was often told he probably would’ve been hired if not for his immigration status.
Employers had to hire a Kiwi if one was available and some confide they would rather re-advertise a position than deal with waiting for sign-off from immigration authorities, he said.
“It’s so frustrating… I could have a job that meets Immigration [NZ’s] requirements if I already had residency.”
Ghosh said he knew many immigrants who gained their residency after only a couple of years, including a friend who received his in 2009 with the same qualification, after the same time in New Zealand and by working a similar job as Ghosh had when he made his last failed application in 2014.
“I don’t understand it… Why accept him, but not me?”
An Immigration New Zealand spokeswoman said most work visas were intended to fill temporary skill gaps for local employers and weren’t an automatic pathway to residency.
“Additionally, the length of time that a person has been in New Zealand is not necessarily a determining factor as to whether or not a person should become a resident.”
Immigration NZ did not answer questions about how long it took on average for an immigrant to gain permanent residency, or how unusual it was for it to take more than 15 years.
When Ghosh last applied for residency in 2014 he did so under the skilled migrant category, which works on a system of points awarded for factors such as a skilled job offer, experience, qualifications and age.
The Immigration NZ spokeswoman said Ghosh was rejected because he wasn’t in suitably skilled work for the category of residence he’d applied for.
His application was also considered against all the other residency categories, but didn’t make the grade.