Inside the delays at Immigration New Zealand – Stuff

Dileepa Fonseka is a senior Stuff journalist who writes on business and politics.

ANALYSIS: A former contractor to Immigration New Zealand says its IT systems are a f.....g 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 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 havent I been allowed to see my daughter for a tenth of her life?

READ MORE:* Catch-22: Immigration says sorry, and welcome back - but won't let her into NZ* Migrants helping govt investigation upset they're ineligible for fast-tracked residency* Nearly 165,000 migrants eligible for fast-tracked residency* Eight years on a work visa: The long 'waiting game' for residence

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 manager for education skills and immigration Rachel Simpson says there is a growing sense that the immigration system needs to get moving again and an increasing frustration that it isnt:

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.

Eda Tang/Stuff

A long line of people waiting for immigration medicals for the R21 resident visa.

Visa delays for travellers, workers and students have been seen all over the world. The Economist magazine puts these down to post-Covid 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 would 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 a 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.

Into NZ 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 now.

She says there have been more than 70 amendments to immigration rules in the past 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 is all out of control.

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Immigration New Zealand's visa account was already $58 million in the red before borders closed last year but that more than doubled in the following four months and continued to grow. (File image)

National Party immigration spokesperson Erica Stanford says Immigration New Zealand did not do enough work to plan for the reopening of the borders after the pandemic. Then the July deadline for the border reopening 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 are running around doing the best they can. I dont blame them at all, I feel like they are under huge pressure with multiple competing demands.

Immigration NZ general manager Richard Owen says, via a written statement, that the organisation had been planning for a border reopening 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 also 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 (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment) to Immigration NZ to leverage the scale of all MBIEs resources to solve some of those visa issues.

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Katy Armstrong says the whole immigration system has been chaotic right through the pandemic.

This might sound like good news but a contractor to MBIE, who has 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 visa processing requirements of a few hundred individuals at short notice without needing to go into war room mode.

The contractor says Immigration NZs information technology systems are among the most dysfunctional parts of its operations.

ROBERT KITCHIN/Stuff

Erica Stanford believes immigration officials were unprepared for the border reopening.

Immigrations new IT systems failed the day the Governments major residents visa was launched but this contractor claims the problem lies not in the new IT system but with the legacy systems and paper-based business processes that the new system hooks into.

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

The whole system is just poorly run, it is cobbled together, they have got three independent systems ... it is 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.

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Immigration NZs IT systems failed the day applications for the R21 visa opened.

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, setting 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 does not 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 Zealands 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 is no number target any more, we just want to see how good your decisions are.

Abigail Dougherty/Stuff

Immigration Minister Michael Wood declined to be interviewed about the state of Immigration NZ but says that it has performed well in some areas.

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, which would further delay things and lead to more decisions being overturned later on by the Immigration Protection Tribunal.

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 would eventually create a backlog of applications too large to process and the Government would introduce a new R21 resident visa to clear it granting residency to more than 165,000 people.

The ex-immigration officer argues the removal of processing targets for individual officers did not improve the quality of the decisions but instead did the opposite.

Between 2015 and 2017, fewer than 40% of tribunal residency cases were successful on average 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 an average success rate of more than 60%.

The ex-immigration officer says this was in part because the quality of immigration 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 Governments 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 rate 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%.

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David Cooper says the funding model behind Immigration New Zealand needs to be re-examined.

Malcolm Pacific chief executive David Cooper, an ex-immigration officer himself, argues Immigration NZs funding model also needs to be revisited.

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

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

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

They, like any other employer, are struggling to get people and then we are all sitting back wondering why this has not worked out that well.

Well, what did we expect?

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Inside the delays at Immigration New Zealand - Stuff