Heartbreaking impact of red tape on immigrants

Advocates say policy guiding Immigration NZ ignores the roots temporary visa holders put down in NZ. When their immigration pathways are unexpectedly cut short, and their right to stay in NZ, life as they know it can cruelly change. Juan reports.

Dinesh Sapra knows he will never be a Kiwi. The 37-year-old has worked, studied and made bonds in Aotearoa since moving from India eight years ago, leaving everything behind. Now he’s living illegally.

Sapra’s visa expired on October 24 and, at most, he has 42 days before he must leave – unless a deportation order is issued earlier.

It is the end of a lengthy and, in his view, unfair fight to remain in New Zealand, which was further complicated by the Covid pandemic. And he’s not alone.

The saga has taken a toll on his mental health. “I'm not able to sleep in my bed, I cannot go and knock at my friend’s door. I cannot call someone. I don’t want to disturb my family. And I don’t know who else to talk to.”

Since his arrival, Sapra’s visa status has changed often. He arrived in 2016 on a Study Visa to get his diploma in business administration, focused on hospitality.

After finishing his studies in 2017, Sapra received a Post Study Work Visa – allowing him to work for any company – and joined American Express. Between 2018 and 2020, he moved onto an Accredited Employer Work Visa – allowing him to work only for the company supporting his application. He applied for a variation of conditions to his visa to change employers and started working for Seiko, which, in 2019, offered to support the application for his next visa, and later, his residency.

Sapra felt his life was taking shape in Aotearoa but the pandemic changed everything. In February 2020, shortly after the first Covid-19 case was recorded in New Zealand, Sapra received news: he would be given a six-month visa extension because of the pandemic.

Two months later, he lost his job at Seiko along with dozens of other workers.

Without an employer, Sapra had no support for his visa.

With his visa close to expiring, Sapra called Immigration New Zealand (INZ) seeking advice about how to stay in the country. An officer on the phone suggested a Tourist Visa. Sapra went online and started the application, only to realise he couldn’t because his passport was expiring within three months.

Sapra called INZ again and asked for the same person that advised him before. His hands were shaking; his breathing fast. When the hold music stopped and the phone played the operator’s voice, he broke down.

“I was crying with this lady on the phone for at least two hours,” he said.

“I was… crying, telling them what was going on with me. I even shared personal things from my life in India, how coming here transformed me and what I wished to do with my life in the future.”

Following the officer’s advice, Sapra applied for Section 61 of the New Zealand Immigration Act, which allows the minister, or any senior immigration officer, to grant a visa to anyone whose visa has expired, if there is no deportation order in place.

In November 2020, Sapra was granted a six-month visitor visa. He could stay but wasn’t allowed to work. Soon, he ran through his life savings, surviving only with the support of the community he had built in Aotearoa and his family in India.

Sapra contacted immigration again, trying to find a way to get his life on track. Nothing changed. He told his story countless times, each of the voices on the phone responding with the same answer in what seemed like unison: apply for a Supplementary Seasonal Employment Worker Visa (SSE). It would allow him to plant, maintain, harvest or pack crops.

He applied and was approved in March 2021. Then he moved out of the city, picking kiwifruit in the morning and packing them at night.

In June of that year, then-Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi announced at a press conference that the SSEs and WHVs (Working Holiday Visas), were being extended for six months and given open work rights – meaning they would be able to work in any kind of industry – to help the labour shortage during the Covid-19 border restrictions.

“It will allow employers across a range of industries to make use of the onshore workforce while our border restrictions are in place, but it’s important to remember that these extensions are only temporary measures,” Faafoi said.

The visas were extended one more time as the workforce shortage continued.

During the visa extensions, Sapra moved back to Tāmaki Makaurau and worked at Whakarongorau Aotearoa (previously Home Care medical), a government-funded enterprise offering mental health support.

Sapra joined the Covid-19 response, answering calls from thousands of New Zealanders and immigrants who faced different crises during the pandemic. “With every conversation,” Sapra said, “I started connecting with the people and found myself being there for strangers that were going through hard stuff, like all of us, and that gave me a sense of duty. I loved my job.”

In December 2021, he was promoted and offered a permanent position with support for his visa application. He felt hopeful.

When the pandemic restrictions relaxed, the Covid-19 response became non-essential and the government stopped funding the program where he worked. Sapra lost his job again.

“Life felt like a déjà vu,” he said. Life was escaping from his grip again, disappearing amid a bureaucratic process. Immigration policies had shape-shifted the human into a replaceable, easily measurable item – he is not, nor has been, the only one.

“This is the reality for thousands of immigrants in Aotearoa,” said Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March. “These cases are far too common. “People end up in a limbo without access to residency because politicians keep making the way to it impossible for many workers, particularly those in lower incomes.”

A study published by Unitec Institute of Technology estimated that in 2022, there were between 13,000 and 14,000 overstayers or undocumented migrants in New Zealand. Many of them will never obtain a residency pathway under the actual legislation.

The Government views immigrants as “economic units”, Menéndez March said, and this lack of humanity acts as a barrier when it comes to reforming the system.

Menéndez March said that vacancies at low-paying yet highly-needed jobs such as fruit picking, hospitality and age-care work are often filled by immigrants on temporary work visas, who are denied a path to residency, even sometimes after years of service. Whatever path they are on is suddenly blocked, and years of life are thrown aside.

Other immigrants shift between work visas and study visas, in an attempt to fill the requirements that the minister on duty decides to set as goalposts.

“Immigrants came in on student visas, before entering the pathway towards residency,” explained Anu Kaloti, president of the Migrant Worker’s Association and licensed immigration advisor.

“Then the skilled migrant requirements were made stricter; they returned to study, before the rules were made stricter once again.”

The policies guiding INZ ignore the

“After so many years you feel like your life is here, and then I ask myself, do I keep on building a life here? Should I just leave before this is all I I know?” Emanuela Della Valle, right

roots put down by migrants, Kaloti said, and don’t consider the depth of those roots: “how many memories they have built, how many lives can be destroyed”.

In fact, Sapra remembers vividly the first place in Aotearoa he called home. It was at 85 Airedale St, in Auckland Central; his first date was at Wendy’s in Ellerslie; his first ever cast given to him at Auckland City Hospital after he broke his hand in a fall while biking. He survived Covid-19 and paid his taxes. He made friends that he later called whānau – the family that helped him through the worst, hugged him in the cold and celebrated the good times.

Auckland’s cartography slowly replaced his mental maps of New Delhi, leaving only traces of memories and names and places that might not exist any more. Tāmaki Makaurau became the place Sapra considers his tūrangawaewae.

After he lost his job a second time, he felt his life disappearing in a slow, painful blink. One night in April last year, feeling anxious and depressed, he decided to try and reach Kris Faafoi – as he considered the then-Immigration Minister would have power to help him. The subject line of his email was “Seeking help”.

The email reads like a referendum on his very existence.

He set out the reasons for why he should be allowed to stay. He explained why he is a good human being and a good immigrant; why he loves New Zealand and why he should be allowed to fight for his life in this country.

He tried to inject humanity into what is otherwise a simple tick-box exercise for immigration officials; to give it arms and legs and feelings.

“After having these sleepless and stressful nights, I finally decided to draft this email to you seeking help finding a wellearned path to residency,” Sapra wrote.

Two weeks later, there had been no response. He tried again. “I’m very stressed out every day and night!” he wrote. “Someone needs to hear this out please.”

The next morning, an email from an official in Faafoi’s office landed in his inbox. It seemed automated, as if copied and pasted from a template. It told him the Government was “not looking to amend the [resident visa] eligibility criteria” and suggested those who weren’t eligible might explore other pathways, such as the skilled migrant category.

But, the official went on to say, that category “has been closed to new applications since April 2020” and wasn’t expected to reopen until the second half of 2022.

Sitting there, alone, Sapra looked through his window; the cars speeding along Karangahape Rd seemed small from the 14th floor. He realised how high up he was, how easy it would have been to finish everything.

Sapra applied for an exception, again, under Section 61. The decision arrived seven days later: Denied.

Unlawfully in the country once more, he waited to be deported. He felt like a criminal waiting for his sentence after being charged with the crime of existing here.

He had one option remaining. He hired an immigration lawyer, who lodged a request with the Immigrant Protection

Tribunal, preventing a deportation order while his case was reviewed.

It took the tribunal eight months to get to his file. He could not work, nor plan his life. He couldn’t even sleep. He ran down his savings, again, and was forced to rely on support from friends and family in India and New Zealand.

Sapra’s depression and anxiety grew stronger, fed by the fear of walking for the last time through K Rd; of loving and having to disappear; of not having food the next day.

Eventually, in April of this year, the tribunal granted Sapra a six-month work visa to get a job and get sponsored, or sell everything and leave.

Kaloti, from the Migrant Workers Association, said the disadvantages faced by immigrants in visa limbo are not just financial. Immigrants lived “under immense fear”, the visa process like a rollercoaster with “ups and downs” that often left people traumatised.

“So, you know, while they’ve been here all these years, and they belong here, they contribute to the economy of this country, they're part of the workforce. Someone else is telling them that they do not belong.”

Menéndez March, from the Greens, said the problem was ever-changing policies that rule the immigration system.

Immigrants hopped between study and work visas, trying to keep pace and upskill themselves every time the Government changed the requirements.

“Immigration ministers are the ones changing the rules and what they often forget is that whenever they shift the goalposts, when it comes to accessing residency, these are the people whose lives will be thrown upside down.”

Kaloti said a first step to change this reality is giving amnesty to overstayed immigrants, or at least giving them work rights so they can test themselves on a fair residency pathway.

This process, she said, would benefit

Aotearoa’s economy.

“It also prevents exploitation, and gives them their self respect and their dignity back. The feeling that they are contributing, properly contributing, as members of a society, so they can work with their heads held high.

“The rules of this game are not just affecting the overstayers, but highly skilled people in other visas trying to build a life.”

Those “highly skilled people” include Nafiz Ahmed. The 28-yearold arrived in Aotearoa from Bangladesh six years ago on a student visa. He spent around $30,000 just in tuition for his two diplomas in business management and is now on an Accredited Employer Work Visa that expires next year. He was left out of the Resident Visa 2021 – a residency pathway open to people whose primary purpose was working in Aotearoa – because he had moved to a student visa to upskill his profile and get a better job.

“After six years I have nothing,” he said. “I am still on a working visa and I’m not sure where I’m going, and where my road ends, I don’t know.”

Emanuela Della Valle, 29, is an Italian expat living in Wellington. Before coming to Aotearoa she finished a Bachelor’s degree in Intercultural Mediation, and then an Executive Master in Hotel Management and Digital Tourism.

She arrived in 2020 on a Working Holiday Visa, initially for just a year, but ended up staying three years with the extensions and changes the Government applied during the pandemic to help employers. Now, she is on an Accredited Employer Work Visa until 2026, working as an assistant manager in a renowned restaurant and retail shop in Wellington.

It might seem like she has security, but Della Valle already worries about whether she will be allowed to stay beyond 2026. “After so many years you feel like your life is here, and then I ask myself, do I keep on building a life here? Should I just leave before this is allI I know?”

Sapra, Della Valle, Ahmed and thousands of others ask the same question to successive governments, and ministers, and to themselves: “Can I keep my life?”

Menéndez March said the only way to give them an answer is to start treating immigrants as humans “with respect and dignity”.

The way to respect immigrants, he said, was to create a non-changing residency pathway, a set of rules that doesn’t vary with the minister on duty.

Menéndez March referenced the RV21 visa, enabling people who hold specific types of visas to access residency if they have lived in the country more than three years.

“That could be reworked so it is extended to everyone and made a permanent criteria rather than part of a one-off scheme.”

Changing the existing criteria as Menéndez March proposes would not make New Zealand an outlier. Many other countries in the world already have a similar pathway.

Sapra’s visa expired on October 24. He is now unlawfully in the country. A life in a loop, returning to the same unnecessary and painful battle.

If he isn’t allowed to stay, he just wants an explanation – not another email or a letter.

“Someone have a conversation with me, please, and then convince me that I don’t deserve to be here. And then I’ll give up and I’ll go.”

Any day now, an immigration compliance officer could knock on his door with a deportation order.

Within a matter of days, he could be taken into custody and put onto a plane, finishing everything.

But that is what life is like today for Sapra: it could be hours, days or weeks before he’s told to go.

He doesn’t know where. His life vanished.