The number of new migrant workers has plummeted to the lowest level since the border re-opened two years ago - but complaints against employers have soared to record levels.
More than 550 migrants, advocates or others laid complaints last month - which is more than double the average number this year - and brings the total since the border re-opened to 4300.
The Immigration Advisers Authority is actively investigating complaints against 24 licensed advisers.
Immigration New Zealand (INZ) and the Labour Inspectorate investigate issues such as exploitation, trafficking, paying a premium for jobs and modern slavery.
Cam Bower - who worked for INZ's serious offences unit before setting up his own company - is part of a charity that works to help migrants and break the cycle of exploitation in New Zealand. He wants a central support point for migrants, and policy change to prevent companies profiting from migrants' desperation and misery.
"Many people think of it as, 'it's just under the table payments' or that it's not that serious. These are really serious criminal offences. It is all organised crime. It's all for profit, and we've literally had our industries infiltrated by criminals, and we do nothing about it to stop them or to provide a deterrent.
"Everything we see is industry related, or it's subcontractor related, and it goes hand in hand with all sorts of offending like money laundering, invoice writing schemes, deception, tax evasion.
"We're trying to get industry to respond and fight back, to make the supply chain safe and understand that it's not a race to the bottom and it's not the cheapest, because there's still people that are getting victimised, and generally one or two people getting extremely rich off it."
Migrants may make a complaint to the Employment Relations Authority for lost wages or unfair dismissal, he said, only to find the company has gone bust, pointing to a "ridiculously high" amount of compensation ordered by the authority that goes unpaid.
"All we're doing is allowing these guys to then go operate another business and exploit migrants again. There needs to be a change. They are not even worried about getting caught or being investigated, and sadly enough, the victims will just get passed around, and be re-victimised and then deported back home.
"The different regulators don't have a victim response. INZ has nothing available, they do it themselves while trying to investigate. These victims are in a pretty horrible situation, and they don't have anyone, and they need constant monitoring and care and support and advice and everything else that goes with it."
The MERF charity - Migrant Exploitation Relief Foundation - of which Bower is a trustee, helps migrants through finding accommodation, offering food vouchers, or putting them in touch with loved ones, as well as raising awareness of the extent of the problem and influencing policy.
The former South Auckland police detective said some of the rise in complaints would be from migrants who lost money and jobs and were hoping to find work on a six-month migrant exploitation protection visa.
Exploited migrants needed good information from trusted sources or "they'll get sucked into different scams by the same people," he said, even being convinced to apply for refugee status by bogus advisers.
Migrant worker arrivals down
INZ has 271 active investigations underway and has already revoked the accreditation of 500 employers, with a further 130 suspended. It aims to check about 16 per cent of accredited employers each year.
"Since 1 January 2024, MBIE has received 2361 allegations related to accredited employers," said INZ visa director Sarah Clifford. "We do not collect data on the role of the person who submitted the allegation."
When it comes to financial premiums paid by a migrant to agents or employers for a job - sometimes many thousands of dollars - its investigations manager Jason Perry said it does not have the ability to recover that money.
"However, we do have a range of options available to hold employers to account if they are found to be charging migrants for jobs. These include formal warnings, suspending or revoking their accreditation, and prosecution, depending on the severity of the offending. A prosecution will be considered where there is sufficient evidence and it is considered to be in the public interest to prosecute.
"We also educate employers where appropriate, and provide accessible information on their responsibilities to make it easy for them to do the right thing.
"Anyone who is a victim of a visa scam should report it to their local law enforcement agencies in their country of residence, or the country were the scam occurred. They can also report it to Crime Stoppers New Zealand. If the scam occurred overseas, it is unlikely to be investigated by INZ. We also strongly encourage any New Zealand employer or entity affected by an immigration scam to report it to police or Crime Stoppers."
Anybody seeking work in New Zealand needed to be careful that they were not being tricked out of their money and falsely offered jobs, he said.
"We advise people to protect themselves by checking with the companies involved, to ensure any offers are genuine before handing over any money."
Visa numbers drop
Meanwhile, changes to accredited employer work visa (AEWV) criteria, tightened immigration checks and a contracting job market appear to be having an effect on visa numbers.
At its height, 4000 overseas workers arrived in a single month on the accredited employer work visa, but in July that fell to fewer than 850. The high point of AEWV applications was 11,000 in March and that fell to less than 2000 by last month. The largest pre-Covid number of essential work visas was 5,400 in 2019.
Clifford said that followed policy changes in April. "These included introducing an English language requirement for migrants applying for lower skilled roles, a minimum skills and work experience threshold for most AEWV roles, a requirement for employers to advertise for longer and engage with Work and Income before approval to bring in migrants will be granted for low-skilled roles and reducing the period a migrant worker can stay in New Zealand continuously (or maximum continuous stay) for most of these roles from five years to three years."
The immigration minister has previously signalled she wants to make more changes to the accredited employer work visa, to address some of the issues that remain.
A review this year into how the AEWV was processed by INZ outlined the mistakes made - an unprepared workforce, an uncompleted IT upgrade; opportunities ignored to listen to whistleblowers who tried to alert their superiors, huge volumes of applications, lack of risk assessments on decision-making.
That led to agents and employers being able to 'sell' jobs and visas and start the cycle of exploitation. "You've got a person that is so desperate that they're finally speaking about about a fraud they've essentially been complicit in before, because their life depends on it, and we're not giving them the correct response," said Bower. "You know, their families depend on it, though they're in massive amounts of debt, or debt bondage that just doesn't get wiped. They've got to work that off in other ways, or other family members have to work that off."
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