New Zealand’s immigration system is broken

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New Zealand’s international reputation as being a great destination for skilled migrants to move to is eroding under this Labour Government.

Over the past four years the Government, through poor planning and poor policy, has completely broken our immigration system.

We now have the longest queues for residence in our history and record wait times for getting residence visas processed.

As a result, we are now losing the skilled migrants we desperately need who moved to New Zealand before last year’s lockdown with the promise that there would be a pathway to residency for them and their families.

We can’t afford to lose any more doctors, engineers, or IT workers because they have no certainty around when they can become a resident.

These people have played a pivotal role in getting New Zealand through the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

By turning a blind eye to this huge issue the Government is effectively forcing our skilled migrants to leave the country. At the same time it’s trying to find limited space in Managed Isolation and Quarantine for other foreign workers to replace them.

This is madness given the huge skill shortages across a number of sectors and how severely stretched MIQ capacity already is.

National can see this problem is only going to get worse if something doesn’t change, so we’ve come up with a plan, all the Government has to do is adopt it.

There are 20,000 applications sitting in the residence queue, so the first thing a National Government would is clear that backlog by unfreezing the residency pool, and streamlining and fast tracking residency processing.

Then we need to offer a pathway to residency for those migrants already in New Zealand. These are our dairy workers, aged care workers, truck drivers, construction workers and hospitality staff who are here because there was a skills shortage and they were needed.

A National Government would also decouple visas from a specific employer to stop the exploitation of migrants. A smarter approach is bonding people to sectors and regions as this would make sure the right skills are in the right regions.

With record unemployment and the biggest labour shortage in 40 years we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to offer a pathway to residence for those migrants who stuck with us and worked hard through Covid. They contributed to our economy but they also contributed socially.

This pathway would be called the ‘Covid Contribution Visa’. It would give our valuable migrants the time, surety and ability to apply for residence.

This would affect about 35,000 Essential Skills workers and their families that will be processed in the next few years, once we have cleared the current backlog. In the meantime we would offer all of these workers a three-year work visa so they don’t have to keep reapplying while they wait.

We can’t attract good people to our shores to help boost our economy and our productivity if we have a system that is in complete meltdown.

By clearing the residency backlog and offering a Covid Contribution pathway to residence we can clear the decks and start again.

If we want the best, we need to be the best. The Government must take this on board and make some serious changes. – Erica Stanford, National MP from East Coast Bays and Immigration spokesperson (Please note this column was written before the alert level 4 lockdown)

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