Visa fees are set to rise across the board as the immigration minister introduces a user-pays-for-migrants model
Erica Stanford has unveiled her vision to make her agency self-funded by making changes to specific visas.
For seasonal migrants, Stanford’s announcement brought the much-needed introduction of a multiple-entry clause – but it came at a price. Employers can now pass some of the costs on to staff.
For anyone looking for permanent employment in New Zealand, the impact of the news was proportional to what the country has to offer: more opportunities and pathways for higher-skilled workers or workers in sectors where there is a shortage, while lower-skilled workers face more restrictions and more scrutiny from a minister who will not apologise for putting New Zealanders first.
Stanford's talk was dominated by the theme of competing pressures. From the top down, she categorized the immigration portfolio as one where “no matter how hard you try, it's impossible to please everyone.”
She described her goals as ambitious, saying her vision was an immigration system that was flexible, responsive, navigable and easy to use, without sacrificing timeliness or security. She wanted to reduce the number of job seekers by 50,000 in five years, but also grow the economy and increase exports. “So you see the competitive pressures there,” Stanford said.
In an effort to get more Kiwis into work, she targeted low-skilled migrants who came to New Zealand under looser immigration rules. “Despite all the efforts, the institutions of the previous government were not good,” Stanford said.
She said the post-lockdown border surge had put unmanageable pressure on Immigration New Zealand. With tens of thousands of people trying to cross at once, “Immigration NZ had to set up a process that overrode their systems. They were essentially not assessing the risk.”
Stanford said the risk went both ways. Background documents weren't being investigated, but neither were employers on the mainland. This led to “horrific consequences,” Stanford said. “We saw all of that with the unacceptable levels of exploitation of migrants: the stories of 40 men crammed into a three-bedroom house with no food, migrants paying tens of thousands of dollars to get a job with no real offer.”
She also pointed to record numbers of asylum applications. With our borders “effectively compromised,” Stanford said, New Zealand saw 2,500 applications in a 12-month period, five times the historical rate. And while an estimated 80 percent of those will not survive, “it will take years to clear the backlog,” she said.
In the meantime, these asylum seekers have what Stanford called the “golden ticket” of visas in the Open Work Visa, a visa that gives them the flexibility to work in almost any field and compete for jobs with regular Kiwis.
“They are here because we did not properly assess the risk, whereas in the past they would have been turned away and held offshore. Now they are here and they are seeking asylum,” Stanford said.
The impact was felt by everyone, she said, describing longer waits to see a GP, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages and – drawing on her other portfolio – “huge pressure on our schools”.
Stanford said the country had seen a huge increase in demand for English-language support “and a flood of students with undiagnosed additional learning needs” as a result of relaxed border restrictions.
Overall, Stanford said there is now a “significantly higher percentage of low-skilled workers than what we saw before Covid.”
And these migrants were not of the caliber that Stanford was willing to admit: “While there will always be a need for entry-level, low-skilled workers in certain regions and in certain industries, we know that we need a higher — much higher — percentage of high-skilled workers to drive our economy and improve our productivity.”
Her solution was to return to pre-pandemic policies. Stanford’s changes reduced the maximum continuous residency requirement for low-skilled roles from five to three years. A basic English requirement was reinstated, and provisions for partners and children were removed. “Many of these changes were not new. They were simply a return to pre-Covid environments that better balanced the needs of business with New Zealand’s broader interests,” Stanford said.
As these migrants competed with Kiwis for jobs, Stanford blamed employers for contributing to the poor statistics. “To give you an example, since April, under my new changes, the Ministry of Social Development has listed over 3,000 positions through the Accredited Employer Work Visa-related listings,” Stanford said. “Of those, just over 50 have resulted in a job for a New Zealander. That's less than two percent.” When employers didn't consider hiring a migrant worker, that placement rate jumped to 60 percent.
Stanford said she could understand why some employers would prefer a migrant for a particular position, but she cited “a significant number of employers” who pre-select a migrant for a position and do not take the MSD requirements seriously.
“I think it's unreasonable that someone can have 50 New Zealand applicants through MSD for a job that requires fewer skills and then say there are no people who are suitable for that job,” she said.
Stanford said the country's future success “depends on supporting New Zealanders to find work, not on leaving tens of thousands of people unemployed while tens of thousands of migrants arrive on temporary work visas.”
During her tenure, she said she expected Immigration NZ to crack down on employers who claimed they couldn’t recruit locally. “I make no apologies.”
Highly educated workers were a different story. Stanford wanted to expand not only their access to the country, but also their ability to stay there.
She continued on the category of skilled migrants: “If we want to grow our exports, build infrastructure and rebuild the economy, we have to make sure we can attract and retain the skilled people we need.”
Stanford said that to enter this path you either had to have a degree, or be in a registered profession, or earn 1.5 times the average wage. But this overlooked a whole category of missing skilled workers, mainly in the trades, who had years of experience, who were well qualified, who could help train Kiwi workers, but who had no path to residency.
Stanford said she recognised that the inability to retain skilled workers was a “source of deep frustration” for many employers in New Zealand, and agreed that the path had to change. After she completed her work on the Accredited Employer visa, she would focus on this.
In the meantime, work had already been done on adapting the Recognized Seasonal Employer Visa (RSE).
Stanford announced that the administration would continue with a temporary visa program for essential seasonal workers, saying it would be a temporary solution while further details were worked out.
Stanford, returning to her theme of competing interests, said she wanted to make sure the government struck the right balance between reducing costs and compliance for employers and improving flexibility for workers. “I think we've got that balance right.”
NZ Apples and Pears is the largest employer of RSE workers. Its CEO, Karen Morrish, said Stanford's temporary solution was perfect: “It would be fantastic to have them permanently,” she said.
The new RSE scheme includes Timor-Leste and increases the limit by 1,250 to a total of 20,750 for the coming season. In a major benefit for workers, it will also allow a worker to enter the country multiple times.
Morrish said adding the multiple entry clause to the visa was a “game-changer” for workers, who previously had to go through a separate process to go home in the middle of the working season for a bereavement or celebration.
While employees will welcome the multiple access clause, the flexibility comes with a concession: employers can now pass on some of the costs to employees.
Employers still have to pay 50 percent of a worker’s visa costs, but once they’re on land, they can charge that worker an accommodation fee. That fee was frozen during the pandemic, but Stanford has reopened it, capping it at a 15 percent increase over current fees. Additionally, employers no longer have to pay them 10 percent above minimum wage until a worker has completed three seasons.
Until now, Stanford has spent most of its time in front of the cameras on education policy and the report on abuse in health care.
Thursday’s presentation was likely the first chance she had to lay out her immigration priorities, she said, an area “known for being extraordinarily complicated… where every little detail matters and there are far-reaching consequences for any wrong move.”
Going forward, the country's immigration strategy would prioritize highly skilled migrants, ease the process of hiring seasonal workers abroad, and use higher tariffs to finance the rest of the service.
Stanford said, “This will restore balance to the immigration system.”