INSIDE THE DELAYS AT IMMIGRATION NZ

Critics say the immigration office is a shambles as it struggles to meet the resurgent demand for visas, writes

Aformer contractor to Immigration New Zealand says its IT systems are a ‘‘f...ing shambles’’, a former immigration officer says staff are ‘‘not reading the policy instructions properly’’, and an Immigration adviser says so many changes have been made that the system is cracking under the pressure.

They are all answering a question that is being asked at business conferences, lunches and dinners up and down the country: what is going on at Immigration New Zealand?

The question has been asked in different forms by migrant groups over the years: why is it taking so long to process my residency application? Will I be allowed to stay? Will I be allowed to work? Or, why haven’t I been allowed to see my daughter for a tenth of her life?

Now business groups are asking why there are long delays around simple work-visa applications that once made their way through the system with ease.

BusinessNZ education skills and immigration manager Rachel Simpson says there is a growing sense that the immigration system needs to get moving again, and an increasing frustration that it isn’t.

‘‘We need fast and efficient processing from Immigration [NZ] . . . the skill-shortage issue is absolutely the biggest barrier, not just to growth, but to actually being able to keep lights on.’’

Visa delays for travellers, workers and students have been seen all over the world. The Economist magazine puts these down to postCovid demand from both workers and countries seeking workers, along with staffing issues at foreign embassies after the pandemic.

However, in New Zealand none of these barriers seem to exist: work-visa applications to New Zealand rely less on embassies, immigration has been ‘‘rebalanced’’ at lower levels than before the pandemic, and businesses have already managed to become accredited employers without much fuss.

Immigration Minister Michael Wood was given several days to make himself available for an interview on the subject, but eventually declined the request.

Instead, Wood argues via written statement that Immigration NZ is performing strongly in several areas, including with an average 10-day processing time for job checks where the target time is 10 days.

IntoNZ Immigration adviser Katy Armstrong says while there have been improvements in some areas, the situation has been ‘‘chaotic’’ right through the pandemic, and still is.

She says there have been more than 70 amendments to immigration rules in the last 12 months, when in a normal year you would get 10.

‘‘I would not want to be managing this. There are so many working parts that are not gelling, and it’s all out of control.’’

National’s immigration spokesperson, Erica Stanford, says INZ did not do enough work to plan for the re-opening of the borders after the pandemic. Then the July deadline for the border re-opening was suddenly sprung on it by the Government and it was left scrambling to keep up.

‘‘That has put huge pressure on staff. So they’re running around doing the best they can. I don’t blame them at all, I feel like they’re under huge pressure with multiple competing demands.’’ Immigration New Zealand general manager Richard Owen says, via written statement, that INZ had been planning for a border re-opening since the middle of last year, but it was for an unspecified date. ‘‘Forecasting has been particularly challenging given the uncertainty around when our borders would reopen, what that would look like, and what demand there would be from offshore migrants.’’ Owen says there has been high demand from New Zealand employers for skilled overseas workers, and the demand for visitor visas has been three times higher than expected.

‘‘We have more work to do to process work and visitor visas at the speed employers and applicants expect.’’

He says a type of emergency response team called the incident management team has been brought in from MBIE to Immigration NZ to ‘‘leverage the scale of all MBIE’s resources’’ to solve some of those visa issues.

This might sound like good news but a contractor to MBIE, who requested anonymity because of his tie-ups with other Government contracts, says this kind of ‘‘emergency’’ approach of jumping from fire to fire is why things keep going wrong at Immigration NZ.

‘‘They tend to throw people and spreadsheets at problems, but the leadership is very poor.’’

The contractor uses the example of the March 15 terrorist attacks in 2019, when he says Immigration NZ went into crisis-mode to deal with the visa applications for relatives of terror-attack victims who might need to come to New Zealand.

He argues a well-functioning Immigration department should have been able to handle the visaprocessing requirements of a few

hundred people at short notice without needing to go into ‘‘war room’’ mode.

The contractor says Immigration NZ’s information technology systems are one of the most dysfunctional parts of its operations.

INZ’s new IT systems failed the day the Government’s major residents’ visa was launched but the contractor claims the problem lies not with the new IT system but with the legacy systems and paperbased business processes the new system hooks into.

If you want to know what this means, he says people should imagine a Ferrari with the engine of a lawnmower inside.

‘‘The whole system is just poorly run, it’s cobbled together, they’ve got three independent systems . . . it’s just a hodge-podge of years of mismanagement.’’

Owen says the new IT systems are still bedding in but asserts a new online portal is working well.

‘‘We acknowledge that there were initial issues that caused some frustration.’’

Former Immigration NZ officer Erin Goodhue of Goodhue Immigration says Immigration NZ keeps throwing people at these problems when the problem is often the process itself.

Goodhue was involved in an efficiency drive within Immigration NZ where they set target timeframes for visa processing, something she understands has gone out the window.

‘‘You can throw as many people as you want at a process, but if the process itself is inefficient and broken, it doesn’t really matter.’’

Goodhue left Immigration NZ in 2015; however, a former immigration officer who was involved in residency applications confirms what she says around the abandonment of targets.

The former immigration officer has requested anonymity because he thinks speaking out could affect his career, but says the abandonment of targets was one of the key causes of a major backlog in residency applications, one that had ballooned out to more than 36,000 applications by April 2021 – the largest residency queue in New Zealand’s history.

‘‘Officers used to have to make one decision a day, but then they scrapped that target,’’ he says.

‘‘It would have been 2018 or 2019, when the Labour coalition came into power, and they said ‘there’s no number target any more, we just want to see how good your decisions are.’ ’’

This meant the job became less about allowing people through if they met policy criteria and more about finding reasons to delay things, he says.

He also claims cultural and personal biases would creep into decisions, further delaying things and leading to more decisions being overturned later by the Immigration Protection Tribunal (IPT).

Some of those delays would occasionally bubble up into the public arena around issues like partnership visas for people in arranged marriages, or same-sex cross-cultural couples being unable to prove their relationships were genuine.

He says it got worse when Labour and NZ First could not come to an agreement on the New Zealand residence planning range – a target for the number of residence places that could be granted.

The political stalemate eventually created a backlog of applications too large to process and the Government introduced a new R21 Resident visa to clear it – granting residency to more than 165,000 people.

The former Immigration officer says the removal of processing targets for individual officers didn’t improve the quality of the decisions, but instead did the opposite.

Between 2015 and 2017, fewer than 40% of IPT residency cases were successful – meaning the appeal by the migrant was allowed, or the decision was referred to the associate immigration minister.

However, between 2018 and 2021 that appeal success rate jumped by half to a success rate of more than 60%.

The former immigration officer says this was in part because the quality of officers was poor and many of the newer recruits could not read policy or apply it properly.

He put this down to poor pay which led to staff churn, because staff often saw Immigration NZ as a stepping stone to a better job within the bureaucracy.

The Government’s career website, which is based on MBIE data from 2018, says immigration officers with up to three years’ experience can expect to earn between $45,000 and $55,000 a year.

Owen says staff turnover at Immigration NZ is not high, noting that in the financial year ended 2022 the rate was 10.5% and the year before it was 7.3%.

Malcolm Pacific chief executive David Cooper, a former immigration officer himself, argues Immigration NZ’s funding model also needs to be revisited.

Immigration NZ is wholly funded out of the visa fees paid by migrants, so it experienced a major cut to its cashflow when the borders closed and has had to significantly increase its fees now that the borders have re-opened.

Overall, Cooper doesn’t blame the organisation for a lot of the problems it has been facing recently because he thinks many of them have been driven by Government decisions.

‘‘You have thrown at Immigration New Zealand the 2021 RV, the biggest residence programme in living history, you’ve then thrown at them this new accredited-employer job-check work visa, you’ve opened up the borders,

‘‘They, like any other employer, are struggling to get people, and then we’re all sitting back wondering why this hasn’t worked out that well.

‘‘Well, what did we expect?’’