Government won't review 'discriminatory' immigration policy towards disabled people
Friday, 18 March 2022
The Government is not recommending a review to the acceptable standard of health immigration settings, which have been labelled “discriminatory” towards disabled people.
In 2021, Juliana Carvalho presented a petition calling to “End discrimination on disability grounds in the immigration system’’ to the Government’s education and workforce select committee.
The petition recommended that the acceptable standard of health requirement was reviewed to instead align with a strengths-based approach for disabilities, screening only for the most serious health conditions.
Carvalho is paraplegic and has lupus, an autoimmune disease. She arrived in New Zealand from Brazil on a student visa in 2012.
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Her own immigration “nightmare” started in 2014, two years after she came to New Zealand.
After years of campaigning to fight her case with various lawyers and government agencies, Carvalho’s resident visa came through in July 2020, after intervention from Poto Williams, the associate minister of immigration at the time.
She was exempted from the acceptable standard of health requirement because her character requirement was clean. But other families in New Zealand with disabled family members were still fighting their case and being left in limbo, she said.
Carvalho said she was in “disbelief” that the Government disregarded the recommendation.
“I’m just really thinking of the families who were holding out hope for this change.”
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The Government’s response to the petition, released on March 17, said: “The Government values the contribution that disabled people bring to society and is always willing to take steps towards making New Zealand a nondisabling society. However, as this goal pertains to the current ‘Acceptable Standard of Health’ (ASH) immigration settings, the Government considers these settings appropriate.
“The current settings are not specifically discriminatory against disabled people, but instead focus on assessing the public health impact an individual will have. The current settings test whether applicants have health conditions that will have significant costs and/or demands on New Zealand’s health or education services, which ensures that applicants are not placing additional demands on areas that are already in high demand and under resourced.”
Carvalho was disappointed that the Government was “completely disregarding the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with a Disability”.
In 2007, New Zealand signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Article 18 (b) of the UNCRPD states that disabled people: “Are not deprived, on the basis of disability, of their ability to obtain, possess and utilize documentation of their nationality or other documentation of identification, or to utilize relevant processes such as immigration proceedings, that may be needed to facilitate exercise of the right to liberty of movement.”
The Government’s response also said: “INZ has the ability to grant medical waivers to those who are found to have a listed condition or have a condition that meets the high-cost threshold but have other personal strengths and characteristics that outweigh the costs of their medical conditions.”
Despite not getting the result she wanted, Carvalho said she was “absolutely not giving up”.
She planned to keep the petition open, keep gathering signatures and try again.
The Government said it was reviewing aspects of immigration health screening which included reviewing medical conditions that will likely cost $41,000 or more. However, it stated: “This review does not intend to significantly change screening requirements.”
In written questions to Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi on February 18, he was asked if there was any consultation with disabled people as part of the review referred to in Carvalho’s petition.
Faafoi responded: “I am advised that Immigration New Zealand (INZ) and the Ministry of Health (MoH) intend to engage with relevant parties such as the Office for Disability Issues during the course of reviewing the list of high cost medical conditions.”
Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March said it was “really disheartening” to see the Government “seemingly ignore” the recommendations from the select committee report.
He said it “sends a really strong signal that we should be having a strengths-based system and the way the Government talks about reviewing the Acceptable Standards of Health entrenches ableism and discrimination and ignores the voices of people like Juliana, many disabled people who have openly spoken about how this policy discriminates and the Office for Disability Issues who unequivocally called for a much broader review beyond tweaking the $41,000 threshold.”
There are many wider issues with New Zealand’s immigration policy, he said, because it doesn’t line up with the Human Rights Act, “which is why we end up in a situation where the minister both acknowledges that our immigration system is discriminatory, while also at the same time trying to argue that he’s trying to end discrimination for disabled people. We can’t have it both ways.
“We can’t be working towards ending discrimination while we don’t even give migrants the human rights we would grant other people. Those are two very different things. The law change needs to happen.”
CORRECTION: Juliana Carvalho started her immigration process in 2014, not 2019 as stated in the original article. (Amended March 22, 2022 at 12.20pm)