If one talks about New Zealand’s immigration history, the announcement of a one-off residence visa programme on September 30, 2021, was undoubtedly a historical moment that overnight changed the lives of many migrants.
It is expected that the programme announced by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's government would provide about 165,000 migrants currently in NZ with residence class visas.
The processing of the first phase, phase one, began on December 1, last year, for those who had already applied for residence under the Skilled Migrant or Residence from Work categories on or before September 29, 2021, or had submitted a Skilled Migrant Category Expression of Interest, and had included your dependent child in the Expression of Interest aged 17 years or older on September 29, 2021. Moreover, the second phase for all other eligible migrants was due to begin in March. Still, INZ announced that from February 21, they would open applications early for a group of up to 10,500 individuals with a Skilled Migrant Category (SMC) Expression of Interest (EOI) in the pool that was submitted on or before September 29 2021.
Since it has been more than six months since the one-off residence process began, Indian Weekender got in touch with INZ to get the stock of the situation regarding the processing time frame.
Nicola Hogg, General Manager Border and Visa Operations maintain that the processing applications for the 2021 Resident Visas are a priority for INZ. “We are committed to deciding most of these residence applications as quickly as possible. Our staff have been working hard to process these applications since the category opened, and we are making good progress,” says Hogg.
As of June 6 2022, INZ has received more than 99,300 applications for the 2021 Resident Visa. Of those, more than 23,800 have been approved so far, resulting in more than 52,900 people becoming NZ Residents under the new policy. This is nearly 24 % of the applications approved so far.
Talking specifically about data for Indian applicants, Hogg says, “As of June 6 2022, INZ had received 7,277 applications from Indian nationals in Phase 1 that opened on December 1 2021, of which 6,728 applications have been approved for residence, resulting in 13,518 Indian nationals being granted residence to date.” This means that nearly 92 per cent of applications by Indian nationals that INZ has received in Phase1 have been approved.
And what about Phase 2 ? Hogg says, “As of June 6 2022, INZ had received 23,973 applications from Indian nationals in Phase 2 that opened on March 3 2022, of which 460 applications have been approved, resulting in 499 Indian nationals being granted residence to date.”
Hogg also revealed that INZ is working towards fully opening NZ's borders again and have been making several operational decisions to ensure they are ready to close down the border exception regime and prepare for a return to increased volumes of visa applications from migrants wanting to come here.
“We are building capacity and capability to ensure timely visa decisions for applicants across all visa categories can be delivered. As part of this, we have hired and trained 229 new processing staff over the last 12 months. These staff have been trained across several different visa categories to ensure they can be moved between different visa categories depending on visa volumes. We have also opened an additional processing office in Christchurch to build our capacity. Hiring is underway for this new office,” explains Hogg
Additionally, INZ has made system changes, including moving more visa categories onto their enhanced Immigration Online platform. While Visitor visa applications and 2021 Resident Visa applications are already on the enhanced Immigration Online platform, the new Employer Accredited Work Visa will be next in line to be on the enhanced platform, as per Hogg.
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