Immigration minister faces questions over deportations, parent visas, asylum and Gaza

RNZ News

6 hours ago

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford.
Photo:
RNZ / REECE BAKER
Medical insurance for the new parent boost visa will cost migrants up to $8000 a year, according to the immigration minister.
Erica Stanford was quizzed on Tuesday by MPs in the Education and Workforce Committee, as part of budget scrutiny week in topics that covered everything from skilled migrants, to children born as overstayers and visas for people from the Middle East.
The new five-year parent visa allows parents of New Zealand citizens and residents to visit and possibly renew their visa - with a maximum stay of 10 years.
Health insurance prices vary according to age and health, with costs over the five-year visa period estimated at between $10,000 and $40,000.
But Stanford said those costs were less than half the annual policies they looked at initially, which would have required comprehensive cover for all doctors' fees and specialists.
"It was like $15,000 to $20,000 for full insurance and we just thought it's not doable and it's going to defeat the purpose of the visa. So we didn't go with comprehensive. We went with literally the minimum, which is emergency only. We added cancer [treatment] in there as well because it really made very little difference to the amount."
Other
financial requirements of the visa
were designed to make sure families could support their visiting parents' other health, housing, and living costs, she said.
Labour's immigration spokesperson Phil Twyford said it risked being viewed as a visa reserved for families of a wealthy minority. Stanford said other visas were available.
"Are you saying it's easy for migrant families to bring their parents in on those other visas?" asked Twyford. "Because that's not at all what people in the community say." Stanford disputed that, and also stressed that the government was being careful to ensure parents were being looked after on a long-term visa.
Under questions about whether the criteria were set to ration the number of potential applications, she said the government had not looked at rationing or numbers, and feedback had been overwhelmingly positive.
"When you draw a line somewhere, there are always people below and always people above - that's just the nature of drawing a line."
INZ head Alison McDonald, immigration minister Erica Stanford and MBIE chief executive Carolyn Tremain at Tuesday's hearing.
Photo:
Screenshot / Education and Workforce Committee
Stanford told the committee there were four children born since 2006 to parents without residence visas or citizenship who had been deported in the last five years. She said lawyers had suggested to her that affected numbers of youngsters were 'likely to be very low'.
Others say
increasing numbers of those babies
are now turning 18 and 19, and some cannot get a work visa or a university education - and in some cases face deportation.
Neither she nor Immigration New Zealand answered a question on how many affected children and young people were being worked with by compliance staff.
Green Party immigration spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said if numbers were low it may be because they had already been pressured into 'removing themselves from the country'.
INZ head of compliance Steve Watson said they would not be deported until 'they had exhausted every other option available to them.' Teenagers or their parents could also approach the associate minister for a decision.
Twyford said the numbers being seen was a tip of the iceberg because they lived in 'extreme insecurity'. He asked whether Stanford thought the system was right, saying the current crop of teenagers facing deportation was a feature of the system, 'not a bug'.
"It is important that people stick to the conditions of their visa, because we can't have a situation where if you have a child and wait long enough, then everything will be okay," Stanford replied, first noting it was Helen Clark's government which introduced the law change.
"Everyone has to abide by the conditions of their visa. And I'm not sure why in this case we would say 'well, you are okay' because the very next question you are going to ask me after we say yes to the child ... is 'oh, but what about their parents? And that's exactly what's happening."
Twyford asked whether she had considered what Australia and the UK do, granting citizenship after the first 10 years of a child's life. "We are not Australia and the UK," she said. "There is already a process for these children, and I understand that they're in a difficult situation but there is a pathway. Apply to the associate minister of immigration."
Twyford asked her whether in hindsight, not creating
humanitarian visas for relatives of Palestinians
living here was the right decision, given the scale of the tragedy unfolding there. A special category visa category had been opened in similar circumstances for families of Ukrainians.
Stanford said the difference between Ukraine and Gaza was that Palestinians could not physically escape to get to New Zealand. Cabinet's decision was not being reviewed.
"At this point, it's not something that we've considered, it would have to go through Cabinet, and Cabinet have decided at this time that they're satisfied with the settings that are in place." INZ was facilitating people from Gaza who were applying for other visas, she said.
Asked about Palestinians already here, INZ head Alison McDonald told the committee that staff would look carefully at those cases. "Not just from Gaza, from Israel, from Iran, from Iraq, people who can't return home... we'll find a way to regularise [their visas] until they can get home."
The immigration minister told the committee that changes to skilled migrant visas are coming soon, the numbers of high-rolling investors are increasing and entrepreneur visas will also be given a makeover.
The update to the entrepreneur visa would drive productivity, GDP and employment, and help in finding buyers for businesses whose owners needed to sell, said Stanford.
AEWV (work visas) were now much quicker for businesses to navigate and more overseas workers were arriving to fill skill shortages.
Overseas investor visa application numbers had outstripped expectations, she said, and many of them were also 'huge philanthropists', hinting that some would be well-known names.
"I remember saying...if we got 200 in the first year, I'd be really happy - we've had 175 since April and almost half of those are out of the States, lots out of Germany, some from China, Hong Kong, Singapore - so a mix, but certainly more than we thought.
"There's a billion dollars about to be invested - but it's not the money, it's the people, their skills, their talent. Some of the applicants and where they've come from, you would all know. They're amazing people."
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