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Skilled migrants have had enough of the immigration frustration

The people with the skills we need can’t take any more of the uncertainty, and other countries are actively pursuing them. Dileepa Fonseka reports.

New Zealand needs doctors like Ann Solomon so badly that the Government granted her a rare border exemption to enter the country after Covid-19. But now she is thinking of going back to England because the situation around residency rights is so uncertain.

Facing major shortages in healthcare and education, the Government created these border exemptions to fill critical worker shortages. Solomon came to New Zealand on such an exemption in August.

However, the Government did not fix other problems within the immigration system at the same time, meaning even someone as highly-paid and sought-after as Solomon, who is a general practitioner, cannot be sure they will be allowed to stay in the country long-term as a permanent resident.

‘‘I know lots of GPs are going to Australia and I know my colleague up the road has just given up and gone, which is just placing more of a burden on our practice.

‘‘It’s a disaster for healthcare in any nation. It’s a sort of Third World situation not to be able to find a GP.

‘‘I had a woman come to see me 50 kilometres from Foxton, she drove her teenage daughter because she wanted contraception advice from a female GP.’’

Solomon thought getting residency would be easy given how the Government made an exception for her at the border, but the process for selecting applications like hers has been paused, meaning she has no timeline for when she might be able to buy a house or start contributing to KiwiSaver.

One of her children is likely to leave school soon but will not legally be able to work here unless the family are granted permanent residency.

It is not just the medical profession either. People with choices are increasingly beginning to wonder if they should move somewhere else while they still have options.

Not only are they leaving because of frustration with New Zealand’s immigration system, but they are being actively courted by other countries.

Dairy farm manager Michael Salilig got so many calls from Canada’s immigration service begging him to move he thought he was getting scammed.

‘‘Because the number that called me is a Canadian number . . . I did a research and it’s like really the [immigration] agency.

‘‘At first, because he kept on calling me [I thought], is it a scam or something like that?’’

Another dairy farm worker formerly living in Taranaki, Merbs Labrador, has just made the move to Australia after nine years of working in New Zealand on a temporary visa.

Some of his friends who made the decision several years ago are already Australian citizens.

‘‘They said, ‘oh well if you decided back in 2016 to be with us you’d already be a citizen’.

‘‘I said, well, it is what it is, mate’.’’ Charlotte te Riet Scholten-Phillips, of the Association of New Kiwis Aotearoa, says an ongoing survey of 2385 migrants on temporary visas shows 82.4 per cent of them have considered moving to another country, and 69.7 per cent said the specific country they were thinking of offered up a clearer path to residency.

‘‘A lot of us had perfectly OK lives ‘back home’. We left them because we believed New Zealand offered better, but it’s not that we can’t return if things here are awful, which they are currently,’’ says te Riet Scholten-Phillips, a British immigrant who moved from the Netherlands.

National Party immigration spokeswoman Erica Stanford says she is concerned so many migrants are considering leaving while we have little ability to replace them because of border restrictions and low managed isolation (MIQ) capacity.

‘‘It makes it even more important that we hold onto the people that we have in New Zealand, the highly skilled, talented people.

‘‘We have a number of highly-skilled teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers that are onshore that are actively looking to leave because they’re either stuck in a residency queue that is going nowhere or they’re split from their families.

‘‘If we want them to stay here, we need to treat them better.’’

On the residency front there are two controversial immigration queues, one of which is a creature of Covid-19 and another which had backlogs long before then.

Solomon is stuck in the expression of interest (EOI) queue, which is a queue to get into the residency queue and has grown to 24 times the size it was before the pandemic: from 461 when selections were paused in March last year to 11,130 applications on Tuesday of last week.

This EOI queue feeds applications into the residency queue. The residency queue has also risen to stratospheric heights, but the backlog started well before Covid.

The residency queue backlog built up because the number of temporary migrants being let into the country increased markedly during the previous National Government, and the pre-Covid part of Ardern’s Labour Government too.

As the number of temporary migrants increased governments of both stripes slashed the New Zealand Residence Programme planning range, which effectively meant greater numbers of temporary migrants were competing for a smaller number of places.

In April Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi told RNZ he had received advice on what should happen with the EOI queue, and expected to make a decision soon.

Three months after he made this statement the most significant announcement has been an ‘‘immigration reset’’ which, while low on policy, seems to have played a part in making highlyskilled migrants with options rethinking their status here too.

For teacher Kyle MacFarlane, it was one of the trigger points for deciding it was time to head back to South Africa to be with his wife after 18 months away from each other. ‘‘I think it was the next day I decided, you know what, I think I’ve had enough now. It doesn’t look promising for us.

‘‘I watched the immigration reset, man it was depressing. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.’’

Kyle MacFarlane couldn’t believe it because he was initially paid a relocation grant to move here. Both he and his wife Jade MacFarlane are qualified maths teachers, a speciality in hot demand.

Jade MacFarlane was meant to move over too, but after the borders closed she wasn’t able to get in because partners of work visa holders were not able to secure border exceptions.

Kyle MacFarlane says they tried everything to get her through, and he started to notice himself burning out from the emotional strain of it, with the time between episodes of burnout getting shorter and shorter.

‘‘We never knew what was going on, we did not have a timeline, we had no idea what Immigration were going to do. It was just 18 months of desperately looking for some hope.’’

Jade MacFarlane says it was a life spent glued to immigration announcements, and getting a rush of anxiety every time a new piece of immigrationrelated news, or even Faafoi’s picture, came up on their newsfeeds.

‘‘It has definitely affected us, and I kind of feel like maybe you have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] in a way.’’

The Government has opened up border exceptions for teachers who fit the MacFarlanes’ profile, and they are hoping they will both get the opportunity to fly back to New Zealand under this.

And while a ‘‘priority’’ system is prioritising the residency applications of professionals like teachers and high-income professionals, no such system is possible when it comes to expressions of interest without changing immigration rules.

Figures obtained under the Official Information Act by IntoNZ immigration adviser Iain Macleod showed that at the end of April there were 901 teachers, 235 doctors, 114 electrical workers, 26 dentists, and 17 vets in the queue.

People on temporary work visas applying for residency who want their residency applications considered under the points system have to put in ‘‘expressions of interest’’ then face a possible wait of over two years once their application is selected out of the EOI pool.

Since the end of March the number of skilled migrant residency applications in the queue has shrunk from a peak of 38,940 at the end of August to 36,213 at the end of June.

With no new expressions of interest applications coming through, Immigration is whittling down the skilled migrant residency application queue at a rate of 273 applications a month.

This means it would take 11 years for the department to make its way through the current crop of skilled migrant residency applications, if EOIs were kept on pause for that entire time.

And afterwards it would have to deal with all those applications stuck in the EOI queue too.

Immigration NZ border and visa operations manager Nicola Hogg says ministers are working through advice from officials on the reopening of skilled migrant category EOI selections.

‘‘Immigration has continued to accept EOIs, as there was no mechanism at the time to stop EOIs coming in without closing the [skilled migrant category] and closing the category would have required an amendment to immigration regulations,’’ Hogg says.

‘‘Suspending EOI selections, while still allowing individuals to submit an EOI, was considered the most efficient and pragmatic approach.’’

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2021-07-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282875143813602

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