Split families and would-be migrants stuck in limbo may have to wait until October due to limited processing capacity at the visa office
There has seldom been a time when the difference between the treatment of people from visa waiver and non-visa waiver countries has stood in such stark contrast.
With the staged border re-opening announced last month, visa waiver travellers from countries like the United Kingdom, United States or Canada will be able to hop on a plane for Auckland or Christchurch.
Non-visa waiver countries will need to wait until October, unless Cabinet moves the date forward on advice from public health experts.
The latter category includes countries such as India, China, the Phillipines and South Africa - all with large migrant populations in New Zealand.
The distinction between the two groups used to be put down to safety, with countries like India being restricted from entry during last year due to having more than 50 cases of Covid-19 per 1000 arrivals.
But ever since the Omicron outbreak has allowed Covid-19 to take root in the community, government messaging on this issue has steered clear of the safety angle.
When asked last week why non-visa waiver families holding out on a reunion will need to wait until October during a press conference at an empty Eden Park, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the necessity of processing the visas of these travellers means it will take some time before they can be allowed in.
“The difference is it's obviously much more clear cut a re-opening arrangement for those visa waiver countries as of course it's not contingent on our ability and scale of processing,” she said.
Travel requiring a visa requires a certain number of hours of administration and processing by Immigration New Zealand, which Ardern said was currently also the case for critical worker and working holiday visas, as well as the new residency programme.
A finite capacity at INZ presumably means an opportunity cost for any decision it makes.
“There will be trade-offs by bringing those dates forward, so we need to work through those,” Ardern said.
Immigration adviser Katy Armstrong works with split families and people left in limbo by Immigration New Zealand. She was dubious about Ardern’s reasoning.
She said capacity preventing the Government from allowing loved ones to reunite pointed to a “woeful lack of planning”, especially following the closure of visa processing offices in Beijing and India during the pandemic.
“It doesn't have any logic,” she said. “We can't explain it any other way. They are just grinding these couples into the ground and holding out on them.”
Many of the people on the list of last to be served are trying to enter the country on partnership-based visas, and may have already had their relationship verified by immigration officers.
“What capacity do you need if you’ve already assessed them?” asked Armstrong. She wants to see a high-trust, low-maintenance model allowing people in this position into the country quickly, comparing it to the high trust wage subsidy scheme that was established by the Government not long after Covid’s arrival on New Zealand shores.
Capacity is a resolvable issue, Armstrong argued: “You could get a support officer in there tomorrow to issue visas. They don't need high knowledge, you just go into the IT system and go 'here they all are',” she said. “Where are the staff that were doing MIQ gone? Where have all the contact tracers gone? Why can't they be redeployed?
Nicola Hogg, General Manager Border and Visa Operations at Immigration New Zealand, said the organisation has been working on increasing capacity.
“[INZ] has been actively recruiting more staff, reprioritising its existing resources including onto the special one-off 2021 Resident visa, working to streamline its processes and is opening a new office in Christchurch to build our workforce to manage expected work volumes as our border reopens,” she said.
She said forecasting future visa volumes and the associated amount of workers needed in visa offices is a particularly complex challenge.
As of the beginning of March, there were 662 immigration officers employed by Immigration New Zealand.
Hogg also said new online systems meant time was being saved as some administrative tasks had been automated.
Despite this, the soonest hope offered to split families remains October.
Greens spokesperson for Immigration Ricardo Menéndez March agreed that a move to a high-trust model would solve many of the issues around immigration - but also said these were problems that predated the pandemic.
“The problem for the split families stems from before the pandemic,” he said. “It was this refusal to review the partnership rules that lead to this.”
He refuted the idea that the hold-up was now solely a capacity issue.
“I would challenge the notion that it's solely a capacity issue when they could introduce a high-trust model and process all of those visas,” he said. “If that is the excuse, that’s a failure of the minister and Immigration New Zealand to actually have a well-resourced department to meet the challenges and the processing from the community.”
And if it’s a problem of feet on the ground in visa-processing offices, he wonders why it is being presented as an insurmountable obstacle.
“If they implemented a high-trust model with the people who have partnership-based general visitor visas in the systems, it wouldn’t take too much processing capacity,” he said. “They also could move people from the MBIE team who worked on border exemptions into helping process those visas, now we are likely to get less border exemptions requests.”
Immigration New Zealand lists the amount of time people can expect for their visas to be processed on its website. Although with much of the world still unable to apply for visitor visas at the moment, the information only pertains to a segment of potential visitors.
Fifty percent of holiday visas are processed within 43 days, with 90 percent of them are completed within four months. Most student visas are processed within a matter of weeks. The partners of workers, however, tend to wait between two and four months for their visa to come through.
Residency visas take even longer, with almost all skilled migrant visas taking between two and three years to be completed.
