Priority residency applications should be allocated within two weeks, but 300 high-earning migrants are facing four-month delays
Skilled migrant Ben* meets the salary threshold for his residence application to be processed in the two-week priority queue.?
But Immigration NZ’s freeze on processing residency applications while Auckland is under Level 3 restrictions has meant he will have waited more than four months for his application to be assigned to a case officer.
To work through the large backlog of applications, officials have been processing residency applications under priority and non-priority categories.?
Priority applicants are those who earn more than twice the median wage - $54 an hour, or $112,320 a year - or work in an occupation where registration is required.
In the meantime, the lives of 333 highly skilled migrants like Ben have been put on pause.?
Delays mean he can’t accept the promotion his workplace is offering nor can he travel to be with his partner abroad who was recently diagnosed with cancer.?
※My partner and I have been apart for 20 months and she can’t move here because of New Zealand’s partnership law requiring us to have lived together for a period of time before moving here,§ Ben says.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has rejected four exemptions to travel to visit her under compassionate grounds, he says.
Ben, who works in a highly specialised role, says he understands the Government is transitioning towards attracting highly skilled migrants, but feels as though those who meet the criteria are not being adequately prioritised.
He says applying for the new 2021 Resident Visa is out of the question given?he’ll likely have to wait several months as Immigration NZ goes through some tens of thousands of applications for the first cohort, which opens on December 1.
Since the August lockdown, Immigration NZ has only allocated 33 priority residency applications, and that happened a month into lockdown, in?the week of September 27.
Ben says it’s perplexing that under?Level 3.1 restrictions, Auckland libraries -?also paper-based systems -?have opened for click and collect this week, but Immigration NZ still can’t coordinate teams to access files.
※There was a time where immigration was dynamic and innovative and we were always looking for better ways to do things. But they seem to have fallen by the wayside recently.§
- Erin Goodhue, Immigration Advisor
Immigration NZ border and visa operations acting general manager Jock Gilray says officials were able to process 33 applications in Level 3 because a limited number of staff were able to return to the office to process paper files.
※Since the allocation of 33 applications on the week ending September 27, 2021, INZ has not allocated any further applications since then as the immigration officers are working on the current applications in their caseload.?
※When there is further capacity, more applications will be allocated to immigration officers for assessment and the allocations are likely to fluctuate.§
Immigration advisor and former Immigration NZ official Erin Goodhue asked MBIE why residency applications hadn’t been allocated in the month before or after September 27.?
The response she received this week said?this was?because the allocation of 33 was a ※one-off§ when Auckland moved to Level 3 and it was?※unlikely§ that any priority applications would?be allocated before December 1.
Earlier this year, an Official Information Act request by Goodhue revealed that the priority and non-priority queues were not part of official Immigration NZ policies.?Instead they were rules created by case officers handling the backlog of tens of thousands of cases.
※It’s quite scary the kind of things being requested by immigration officers. I mean I’ve had requests to resend applications because there’s a tiny corner of the scanned passport that has part of the signature missing. Looking at signatures is not part of an assessment,§ Goodhue says.
※They just seem to be pushing back on things that aren’t necessary. That’s what really worries me about this new 2021 Resident Visa because it’s sort of greenfields and we don’t know how far they’re going to dig into somebody’s application. They say it’s supposed to be very straightforward, but I’m dubious.§
She says the government department is ※not in a healthy condition§.
※There was a time where immigration was dynamic and innovative and we were always looking for better ways to do things. But they seem to have fallen by the wayside recently,§ she says.
※I think staff are ridiculously under-trained and not at the level they need to be able to handle these really important decisions about people’s lives.§
*Ben is not his real name. The man did not want to be named for fear of retribution from Immigration NZ.