Immigration Minister Michael Wood’s announcement on October 12 to restart Parent and Skilled Migrant Residence Category visas is avowedly aimed at reconnecting New Zealand with the rest of the world.
It proceeds on the premise that labour shortages are a global symptom and recruiting internationally is the prescribed remedy to fill skills shortages at home.
For NZ, it primarily means diverting the skills flow away from Australia towards its own shores.
For that, the government has chosen to tweak the points system of selection. When the new immigration regime kicks in next month, job recruits will be selected on the basis of 160 points, which will be followed by an increased threshold of 180 points “to align with rebalancing goals.”
The present exercise is an intermediary step to phasing out the points system altogether and moving closer to achieving the Labour government’s long-term goal of capping immigration at manageable levels.
The government says the new regime will work in tandem with the immigration changes put in place earlier.
This means that, during 2023, all employers must be accredited in order to hire migrant workers, in compliance with the Accredited Employer Work Visa programme, which has been in force since July. This puts the onus on employers to provide basic information about visa holders and also put them through training during working hours.
But this will have a knock-on effect on small and medium businesses, and herd them towards protecting their accreditation status.
However, the Work Visa and Residence Visa categories have always been convoluted and complex, and that scenario worsened during the two years of Covid-related border closures. Overseas hiring hit a trough during that period. The government did have a plan in place, for both Work Visa and Resident Visa categories, well before 2020, but its implementation was delayed.
The driver behind the latest changes is to attract high skilled migrants from overseas and, concomitantly, reduce the dependence on low skilled migrant workers.
Employers are also obliged to prioritise local over overseas hiring.
A Green List was introduced for sectors such as construction, engineering, trade, health and ICT. Exemption from this formality was granted to roles paying two times more than the national median salary (pegged at NZD 55.52 per hour).
Reopening the Skilled Migrant Category, after a long freeze, aligns it with this Accredited Employer Work Visa programme and provides pathways to residency for visa holders in those occupations that are on the government’s Green List.
Under the new immigration settings, the two-step pathway that existed earlier for hiring highly skilled workers from overseas under the Covid 19 border policy, namely, the Border Exemption and Critical Purpose Visa, is now defunct.
But where does all this leave the “guest worker” category or temporary visa holders?
The pathways to residency for the low skilled migrant worker remain uncertain under the new rules. Increasing the score threshold of the points system for selection puts this category of migrant worker at a disadvantage.
Similarly, lowering the income threshold for sponsoring the Parent Visa has not made it any more affordable to this category of worker.
The new policy may have opened the door for letting parents into the country, but the door has not been opened wide enough for low skilled migrant workers to benefit from the change.
There is a case to be made for shifting the emphasis away from the needs of businesses and, instead, shaping the immigration process around the rights of the low skilled migrant worker.