Are ethnic restaurants and the food industry in New Zealand living on borrowed time as hiring overseas migrant chefs is becoming more and more difficult under the government’s new immigration rebalance?
While NZ’s entire food and beverage industry is beginning to feel the pressure of the new rules brought under the recent immigration rebalance announcement, the ethnic food operators could be much adversely affected in the absence of any significant local specialised training to possibly replace overseas trained chefs.
Notably, the government has introduced a new requirement of “formal qualification” for any future incoming migrant chefs from overseas under its immigration rebalance announcement that many experts have doubted would render a death blow to the ethnic food industry.
It is largely because most of the ethnic migrant chefs that line up to work in NZ do not have any option available to them in their respective countries of origin for a ‘formal education.’
And expecting them to produce a mandatory Level 4 qualification as per NZQA standards before being eligible for a legitimate visa to enter and work in the country is just a wishful expectation.
According to several media reports, many prominent hospitality operators of Queenstown – the country’s premier hospitality and tourism destination – are already reeling under the insanity of dealing with the new set of rules where seasoned overseas chefs with more than a decade of international work experience are failing to fulfil the new requirement of “Level 4 formal qualification” – leaving the industry experts in shock and desperation.
Many have started casting aspersions on the future of the food and beverage industry.
If this is the level of difficulty in hiring overseas chefs with international experience, how will the ethnic food sector, currently enjoying the exception offered till April 2023 to bypass the median wage and formal qualification requirements, would cope is beyond anybody’s guess.
In recent years NZ has witnessed a massive increase in ethnic food outlets, which has not only added a lot of colours to the country’s gastronomic circuit but also added diversity of options for Kiwi food lovers.
This growth in the sector has primarily been driven by the growing demand for ethnic food with the gradual increase in the share of the ethnic migrant population in the country who consume more ethnic (Asian and South Asian) foods and has largely been underpinned by the migrant chefs hired from overseas, who brought-in their years of honed skills to NZ’s ever-expanding ethnic food circuit.
A majority of ethnic migrant chefs lining up to work in NZ and supporting the strong small businesses sector often face prohibitive language and educational barriers, which is compensated by their years of real-world ground experience.
This explains why till very recently, around 2000-2500 ethnic migrant chefs (largely Indian chefs) were languishing on temporary work visas for more than a decade as they could not qualify English language requirement for a residence visa.
It’s only under the One-off residence visa 2021 that offered exemptions to English language requirement that those temporary ethnic migrant chefs gained eligibility to live and work permanently in the country.
To bring back formal educational qualification requirements for the future incoming ethnic migrant chefs could very well render a death knell on the ethnic restaurant sector.
The sector is already reeling under a crisis of general staff shortage, forcing many operators to keep their businesses closed involuntarily largely because overseas workers (working holiday visas or international students) have not yet lined up in big numbers as expected by the government even after the opening of borders since July 31 after two long years of keeping closed.
The government, it seems, remains either too emotionally committed to pre-2017 election ideological commitments of reducing immigration numbers by 20-30,000 or remains supremely noncognizant of the cutthroat competition for “skilled workers in the global labour market.”
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