New Zealand needs nurses and critical workers now. So will the Government’s latest immigration changes work?
The Government has announced changes to its immigration settings, including changes to the Green List.
Nurses and midwives have been added to the list along with specialist doctors, something the migrant community have been demanding for a long time.
"We need to attract skilled workers to our shores without pay, without conditions and with certainty. That's why today we're announcing the expansion of the Green List, which provides two fast tracks to residency to help attract people to New Zealand and fill labour shortages," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.
The Green List consists of highly skilled, hard-to-find occupations that guarantees residence pathways for eligible people who are coming to New Zealand. The list comes with a two-tier system. Tier 1 roles provide straight to residence to eligible migrants while tier 2 roles function as a work to residence programme. Currently, you need to work for two years in an eligible role in order to apply for residency. Unfortunately, healthcare support workers like nurses and midwives were in tier 2 until today's announcement.
Aotearoa New Zealand is in desperate need of nurses. The country is short by at least 21,000 nurses but not many are interested to come here for the above mentioned reason, among many.
“Most of our nurses and health workers have lost their trust in the system,” said immigration advisor Katy Armstrong.
Back in September, the New Zealand Nurses organisation called on its 35,000 members to refuse to work extra shifts in the country’s hospitals. New Zealand's nurses say they’re tired and yet, there’s criticism the Government isn’t trying hard enough to recruit more.
And for those who are trying hard to recruit more, it’s not easy either.
The number of nurses applying to work in New Zealand has dropped rapidly over the past few months.
In July, Immigration New Zealand received 174 applications, but interest dropped in August and again in September. In October, there were just 39 applications, the lowest all year.
“Doctors really want to come to New Zealand, nurses, midwives, physios and anaesthetics,” says Prudence Thompson.
The Government’s border rules also split families. That along with easy residency programmes in other countries like Canada and Australia with more salary and other benefits makes New Zealand less attractive for these workers.
“Why should somebody come here when they have to be separated from their families for two or possibly more years? You know, people are looking at other countries and I don't blame them for that," said Migrant Workers Association Spokesperson Anu Kaloti.
And for those who want to come, residency is at least two years away.
The skilled migrant category 2.0 came with a new threshold of 180 points, a bump from the old 160.
The Government only gave a short window of about three weeks for applicants to apply with the older threshold of 160, which pushed visas further out of reach.
Kaloti says that three weeks was not just enough.
For those applicants who missed out of the one-off 2021 resident visa, that three-week window was their one last shot at residency.
All of this comes back to residency.
So why is residency so important for the migrants?
In short, if you’re not a citizen of Aotearoa and want to live, work or study here permanently, you need a resident visa. Residence is also important because it’s key to a few other rights and opportunities. It gives you the right to free education in state schools, tertiary fee subsidies and even student loans depending on your residence status.
And it also makes you eligible for benefits. The right to vote in general elections and local elections also depends on residence. You’ll also be eligible to serve in a jury. Most importantly, it gives you the ability to stay, work or study without an expiration date.
A large chunk of New Zealand’s migrants have traditionally used study and work pathways to get residency. In the past few years, that was not an option mainly because of restrictions that tightened up in the pandemic. And those who were here in the country couldn’t because Immigration New Zealand (INZ) stopped accepting applications.
Our struggling immigration system
Backlogs were always a problem for INZ. Huge backlogs in the residency programme meant years of waiting for many migrants.
And the Government’s solution to solve this problem was the 2021 one-off residency visa.
Former Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi announced the great immigration reset in September 2021. The programme would give at least 165,000 migrants NZ residency within a year of applying. This was also seen as an opportunity to reset New Zealand’s immigration policies.
So, what happened?
The new system had a strong start but then as the number of applications rose, it began to struggle. As of writing, INZ has about 56,000 applications to process. So, another backlog.
That along with the Government reopening the borders and introducing other visas have taken INZ back to a place they were trying to escape from.
“We crunched some numbers, and it looks like Immigration New Zealand has at least 100,000 applications with them and with their current capacity and resources, it could take 4 years to clear that," said Kaloti.
Fast forward to 2022, Michael Wood has brought back skilled migrant category, parent resident visa, investor visa for the wealthy along with other visas along and a border reopening has thrown INZ back to another backlog wagon.
When asked about the struggling resources at INZ, the minister promised 100 more case officers.
But would that solve INZ’s backlog problems? Probably not.
Could these new visas help Aotearoa with its labour shortages? Probably not.
Are we going to lose more nurses and health workers to other countries even after all these measures? Probably yes.
But it's a start.
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