Babies With Bath Water

If you are not familiar with it, there is a great saying “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” which essentially means you want to avoid getting rid of something good or positive, whilst trying to remove something bad or unwanted.

Sometimes, dealing with Immigration New Zealand, can feel a bit like trying to catch the baby, once they (INZ) have thrown the bath full of water off of a very large cliff.

For anyone that follows my regular posts (I know there are a least a few of you), you will be very familiar with the ups, downs and sometimes sideways of dealing with the NZ immigration system. This is particularly relevant now and something I have written a fair bit on over the last few months.

Since we reopened the borders in 2022, unleashing the newly minted, Accredited Employer Work Visa system on to employers and applicants, INZ has been pushed, shoved and prodded in as many different directions as we have had Immigration Ministers (and we have had a fair few).

When that system was rolled out and when the borders did open up, there was an enormous demand for migrant labour - having been locked up in our little island paradise for two and a half years, we were starved of skills, suffering from record low unemployment and in desperate need of kick-starting the economy. Unfortunately this new Work Visa system, being dropped on employers who were frantic to bring in skills, was a recipe for disaster.

No one (including INZ) knew how this system was supposed to work, IT systems tasked with delivering it were a complete mess and as a consequence, timeframes ballooned and applications were taking far too long to process. The fix was for INZ (at the behest of the former Minister) to move towards a “high-trust” processing model. This is bureaucratic speak for “don’t check anything, just get the approvals out the door”.

That worked, for a while - the pressure came off, migrants poured in and employers stopped shouting. However fast forward to late 2023 and the consequences of this “high trust” model started to drive cracks through the labour market. Exploitation was on the rise (although still relatively low overall), increasing numbers of lower skilled migrants were crossing the border and applicants who should potentially never have been given Visas were sitting in NZ trying any and all means to stay.

The wheels had fallen off.

In early April, the new Minister, having inherited this mess, moved (rather hurriedly) to fix it and rolled out changes to the Accredited Employer Work Visa scheme - ramping up requirements for the lower skilled applicants, tightening up on employer obligations and generally trying to plug the holes that the last administration had left. No small task, but also one that came with further unintended consequences.

These are the consequences we are having to deal with now and for the less experienced advisers and applicants tackling the process first time around, it is nothing short of a nightmare.

INZ Chasing Their Tails

Having been in the industry for this long, what we are seeing now, is nothing new, but it does have the potential to catch out applicants and less experienced advisers.

Playing Catch Up

Right now there is a lot of angst within the adviser community because the number of declined applications is increasing. These declines are often for very strange reasons, and often with little to no merit.

Equally, applicants with approved Visas are being stopped at the border, before they try to fly to New Zealand and having their Visas cancelled (this is still very rare). Genuine and very well-established employers are being asked more questions and their job checks and accreditation renewals are being scrutinized to within an inch of their lives. Good quality applications for a variety of different visas are being delayed, dragged out and pulled apart by officers, for very unusual and often irrelevant reasons.

Why all the scrutiny?

Well when the current Government rolled out a raft of changes that essentially signals the end of rogue employers trying to bring in low skilled applicants (making money off the back of them), which is a really good thing to do, INZ read this as a signal to tighten up across the board.

In the same way that the previous Government wanted INZ to loosen the reigns for Work Visas, which they did, but then loosened the reigns everywhere and for all Visas, we now have the same system, tightening up not just on Work Visas but for everyone, applying for anything and for any reason.

Add to this, INZ’s consistently high turnover of staff, meaning new officers come in to their role being handed a pair of iron fists, you have a recipe for chaos of a different kind. They are all effectively playing catch up, trying to remedy the problems created over the previous two years, post our border reopening.

However in doing so, they are also making life far more difficult for those genuine applicants, including those with valid reasons to be here, that we so desperately want and need for their skills and/or tourism dollars. Despite tougher economic conditions our unemployment number remains low and there are still significant gaps in our labour market for a wide range of roles. However INZ doesn’t tend to differentiate and so when the message from up high is to go tough, they apply that across the board.

Just this week, I assisted an adviser who was struggling with a declined Visitor Visa for someone to attend their sisters wedding - yep a wedding is apparently not a good enough reason to visit New Zealand. I suggested that the adviser push back and get INZ to take another look (even though there is no right of appeal in these cases) and he did. INZ approved that Visa this morning, without explaining why the change of mind.

Over twenty years and counting, I have seen this changing processing environment on more than one occasion and so its not new and it is also why we always prepare applicants in the same way (more than they think they need to or more than Facebook might have told them to). We operate on the basis that INZ will always scrutinise your application, even if sometimes they might not.

Migrants Caught Out

The “high trust” processing model, created a false sense of security amongst applicants and employers…leaving many to now be caught out.

No More “High Trust”

If you entered the migration process as an employer or an applicant anywhere from late-2022 onwards you were probably wondering what all the fuss was about. INZ seemed to be basically approving everything and without a lot of documentation to back up the applications they were considering. We saw it first-hand with applications we had prepared, that we expected to be argued over (and so we meticulously put them together), being approved without so much as blink from INZ and with lightning speed as well.

It was obvious to anyone who has been in this industry long enough, that this was not sustainable and the tide would eventually go out on this incredibly relaxed processing approach. That tide is now so far out, there are boat loads of migrants, stranded on New Zealand’s sandy shores.

Employers are in the same situation and unfortunately many of them have never experienced the sort of processing environment we are in now, having become used to the much easier “high trust” model that INZ were peddling for almost two years. Now however, as those same employers seek to renew their accreditation or submit further job checks to bring in new migrants, INZ are pouring on the acid, asking numerous questions, checking over every detail and picking apart applications, hauling people up on the most simple of errors or omissions. This of course leads to longer processing times, more back and forth and a much greater level of uncertainty for everyone.

For our part, the message remains the same as it always have, a well prepared, well documented and well executed application should always be the goal, regardless of how easy or not, the immigration process might seem. If you are always over-prepared, then issues that many applicants and employers are facing will be things you never have to deal with.

Finding The Right Balance

While these changes in processing are unsettling for many applicants and employers (unless they are prepared well in advance), there are much bigger concerns with how easily INZ can throw those applicants out with the murky bath water, that their own system might have been drowning in.

Remember that there are often two parties involved here, one being the applicant and the other being the employer. We have heard stories on the migrant grapevine of genuine applicants, who have applied for Work Visas, which have been approved, heading to the airport, only to be stopped at check-in, because their employer has been caught out by INZ, doing something they shouldn’t have.

These cases are still very rare, but arguably if INZ had been doing its job correctly and consistently, those situations would be pretty much non-existent. None of this is of any use to an applicant (and their family) who have packed up, sold up and have set their sights and their finances on a new life in New Zealand.

This is the issue with political interference in to our immigration process, and different Ministers pushing and pulling INZ in various directions, depending on what PR disaster they need to fix. Immigration needs to be able to react to changing conditions, that is simple, but also we need political leaders to be able to understand that it is a long-game and what is done today, as a quick-fix, will have greater impacts over that longer term.

Right now, the current Minister is faced with a system full of holes and a public perception that immigration has been playing fast and loose with approvals (not entirely inaccurate). However the fixes being rolled out and the signals being sent to INZ might plug some of those gaps, but they also have the effect of signaling to the migrants that we do want to attract, that everything has become too hard.

On more than one occasion this week, I have had to explain to a very good potential applicant, that they have nothing to fear, provided they tackle the process in the right way. Being prepared, having the right documentation, doing the right homework - all things that every migrant should do, are now more important than ever - but for those who do it, their process looks no different and has every chance of succeeding.

The Government (whichever one is at the helm) needs to be very clear with INZ as to which of the many problems they are trying to solve, and ensure that we dont end up putting off or throwing out really good applicants, with those that should never have been allowed in, in the first place. They also need to appreciate that a lot of these issues are of the Governments on making and simply blaming it on the last party to be in power, whilst suddenly wrenching on the brakes, is not a long-term strategy.

Migrant markets and our ability to attract the right people is something that happens over years and takes considerable time to build up, however it only takes one or two rushed, knee-jerk reactions for those same markets to disappear and go to Australia or Canada.

For those considering the move, our advice (which is always the same) is to be vigilant, prepare well and never underestimate the process you are about to tackle. However if you do all of those things (and a few more tricks that we suggest along the way), you have every chance of making this process work for you.

Until next week!