Kia ora Minister Faafoi,

I am writing to obtain relevant information on the immigration reset announcement. I am still not quite satisfied with your responses to my previous OIRs. You will appreciate I have many questions still related to many aspects of immigration policy. I do also appreciate you are a busy man, but my numerous queries echo those of thousands of migrants in Aotearoa.

I would like to follow-up with the questions below:

I. EOI Selection Resumption and Residency Backlog

a. When will the EOI selection resume for the skilled migrant category? Please inform on any approximate timeframe, e.g. Q2 2021.

b. If no timeframe for resumption is currently set, when are you planning to announce the resumption of EOI selection for the skilled migrant category?

c. If no timeframe is set for the announcement, what is the specific motive hindering this decision? Is there a specific event you are expecting, e.g. borders opening up, SMC backlog being cleared, MBIE’s productivity commission report being submitted to your attention, to resume the selection?

d. In a debate in Parliament during Question Time for Immigration in May 2021, National MP Erica Stanford asked you about work rights for onshore dependent children of migrants stuck in either the frozen EOI pool or the residency backlog. She asked you if there were specific work visa requiring no tertiary-level qualification, no work experience, an 18-year-old child of a residency applicant could apply to, knowing the job would likely be low-skilled and low-paid. Your answer was ‘I’m sure there are many options available to them.’ I looked at the INZ website and could not find a single work visa type that would be suitable for an 18-year-old dependent of a residency applicant with neither tertiary-level qualification, work experience, nor study rights as a domestic student. Could you please indicate which specific visa ‘options’ you were referring to?

e. What is the specific policy reason you are refusing to grant temporary work and/or study rights for the dependent children of skilled migrants in the EOI pool or in the SMC backlog, knowing their parents’ residency process may at best take 2 years or at worst is frozen? What do you think would be the best use of their time for the years they wait for their parents’ residency decision?

II. Split Migrant Families

a. Why did you limit the number of migrants eligible for family reunification to the migrants earning more than twice the median wage and/or critical health workers and/or holding a visa prior to border closure?

b. Are you currently planning a pathway to reunification for split migrant families of migrants not qualifying for the criteria mentioned in the previous question? The Trans-Tasman bubble being open, MIQ is operating with spare capacity with more than 1,000 rooms available per fortnight; MIQ capacity should not be the main constraint.

- If so, when will that plan be announced?
- If not, what is the specific policy reason you have decided not to offer a pathway to reunification for split migrant families of migrants earning less than twice the median wage?
- What is the current number of migrants on temporary work visas that are currently still split from their family because they didn’t meet the criteria for reunification?

III. Migrant Exploitation

a. Since you have said on numerous occasions that you aim to eliminate migrant exploitation, why do you not detach a temporary work visa to a specific employer? For instance, migrant workers could be attached to a profession and a region, e.g. Carpenter in Northland, rather than trapping migrant workers in a potentially abusive employer. What is the specific policy reason you chose not to implement this change in the recent rollout of new work visas?

b. How many staff at INZ work on enforcing regulation against migrant exploitation? Will their headcount increase in 2021 after the recent budget announcement?

IV. Temporary Work Visa Extensions

a. You have recently extended several thousands of temporary work visas due to expire in the second half of 2021. What was the specific policy reason you chose to wait until up to 3 weeks before the earliest visa expiry dates to announce the extension? Why did you not give a more reasonable notice of, say, 2 months, given one could easily foresee borders remaining closed in the short term and INZ documents all visa expiry dates?

V. Ongoing Productivity Improvements at INZ

a. How many residency decisions since the beginning of 2021 has INZ output for the skilled migrant category? How many staff members are working on processing SMC applications?

b. Is the number of residency decisions per INZ employee in the SMC team per week expected to increase in the second half of 2021?

VI. Statistics and Policy-making

a. You have put forward New Zealand’s ubiquitous use of migrant labour as a reason for the immigration reset, citing migrants accounted for more than 4% of the labour force, higher than any country in the OECD. However, that statistic is flawed since:

- It does not include the undocumented migrant workforce - which in the U.S. is estimated to account for 4-5% of the labour force (Source: brookings.edu) - on top of the documented migrant workforce. For instance, there are 13.6 million green card holders (Source: immigrationhelp.org), which (Assuming half of them are in the workforce) already accounts for 4.3% of the U.S. workforce. Including all other temporary work rights and undocumented migrants would further increase that statistic.

- It does not include migrant labour which is granted systematic work rights when entering - Kiwis in Australia, EU workers relocating to other EU countries, Irish in the U.K., etc. There are roughly 650,000 Kiwis in Australia (Source: Parliament of Australia). Assuming half of them are in the workforce, they would account for 2.4% of the country’s labour force, a further 3.6% of the workforce includes visa holders of other nationalities (Including temporary resident, protection, & graduate, working holiday makers, and half of ‘bridging’ visa holders). Australia’s total would be then amount to roughly 6%.

- Australians living in NZ according to the 2018 Census amount up to roughly 30K; not reaching 1% of NZ’s workforce.

- The OECD reported New Zealand had the third highest diaspora of its citizen workforce after Ireland and Portugal in 2015/2016 - thus shrinking the local workforce by roughly 14% (Source: Improving Well-Being in New Zealand through Migration, 2019, OECD).

When drafting the immigration reset, did you not seek a thorough understanding of the statistic you were using to justify new immigration policy, particularly when further research indicates NZ does not use disproportionately more migrant labour, at least compared to Australia and the US?

b. The other reason you mentioned for the immigration reset was NZ’s low productivity. What is the specific causal relationship you established between low productivity and migration?

Yours faithfully,

Paul JM