OPINION: When the Government uses the phrase “reset” in relation to migration, migrant workers hear something very different.

The public hears: population policy, productivity, higher wages and an infrastructure catch-up.

Migrants just remember what happened more than a year ago when a “once in a generation” lockdown and global pandemic changed their lives forever.

During lockdown Government ministers were able to provide few details on what would happen to these migrants, but told them to be patient. Other politicians started mumbling about double-digit unemployment and calling for migrants to “go home”.

A lot of migrants kept their jobs, but some didn’t. The unemployed were left out of work, unable to legally change jobs, ineligible for welfare benefits, and queueing for food as their bank accounts were whittled down to single digit or negative balances.

The unluckier ones were outside New Zealand on summer holidays when the borders closed and faced prolonged, soon to be permanent, separation from their families and friends. Family and cultural heirlooms that were left behind like wedding jewellery, graduation photos and marriage certificates were chucked into landfill, or sold off to thrift stores by landlords who started to realise their migrant tenants were never coming back.

Our country never carried the warning most city car parks do: take your valuables with you.

Ever since they were locked out of the country this group of exiled migrants have flooded politicians with complaints, ruining the carefully curated social media feeds of many a Government MP.

Ethnic Affairs Minister Priyanca Radhakrishnan put a voice to the frustration of her fellow MPs when she wrote back to these migrants on Facebook in February: “I understand you’re upset, but spamming my social media won’t change anything.”

Radhakrishnan later edited the post to remove this sentence, but not before even more of them had piled in, including one who said:

“Tell me, what would you say if your life problem was called ‘spam’? Have you ever even thought about looking at this problem from our perspective?”

You can imagine, from their perspective, what these migrants must have felt when they saw Stuart Nash take to various news media livestreams, in Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi’s place, armed with only the vaguest of ideas about why he was there.

Nash was there to officially announce an immigration reset, yet every time a major immigration issue was brought up he would put on an awkward smile and say he didn't know the answer. At one point, when asked about the huge backlog of residency applications, he openly took cues from somebody nodding behind him.

“My understanding is, and I think there's a guy behind me nodding? It is going to be a priority? Yes,” he said.

Here we go again, many migrants thought. And they started calling up anybody who would listen.

Take one who spoke to me shortly after the announcement. The guy and his family have been in the residency queue for 18 months. A few months ago he started experiencing what felt like a major health problem, heart issues and high blood pressure.

His doctor told him nothing was physically wrong with him, but the sleepless nights spent worrying about what might happen to his family probably had something to do with it.

The doctor said he would usually prescribe something like mindfulness classes, but in this case it would probably be counterproductive because Immigration New Zealand would find out, and it could cause complications with his residency application.

The migrant is doing without mental health support because the ability to live here with the same freedoms we enjoy is everything to him.

Migrants are hungry for education, money, social status, good school zones, a better life for their children. They do not come here aspiring to drive taxis, clean toilets, or be paid less than they are worth.

Back when this migrant moved to New Zealand the horror stories migrants told each other were about well-qualified engineers and doctors who ended up in low wage jobs because no local employer would hire them.

Migrants who survived all the above told him the big mistake they made was to think their foreign qualification would be recognised in New Zealand.

The government of the time also started to recognise this, so migration settings were tweaked in favour of people who studied towards qualifications here, or were able to secure on-the-job experience quickly.

So when Nash expresses his amazement that “around 80 per cent of the applications for the skilled migrant category come from on-shore applications”, he shouldn’t. This wasn’t a glitch, it’s the way it was designed.

As for wage suppression, I’ve stumbled onto enough migrant exploitation scams to know the issue of people working for well-below what they’re worth is not about skill levels but work rights.

This migrant and his wife saved for years to pay for a computing qualification from a reputable institution. If he’s guilty of suppressing wages it’s because he thinks he’ll fall out of the residency queue if he takes on a higher-paying job or changes anything to do with his application.

How then does an employer-led visa system now being touted by the Government fix this imbalance between employers and temporary migrant workers? Why are visas still being linked to employers? How will leaving the door slightly open to a seasonal workforce, who have even less of an ability to complain, solve this either?

Then again, if this were really about New Zealand’s long-term population settings, the grumbles would be far fewer.

There are a suite of policy settings the Government has left unchanged despite the reset rhetoric. They could boost residency targets to grant residency to those already here, or they could close them off so that migrants get the message they should seek out a life elsewhere.

They’re not doing either because the Government doesn’t want to suddenly deprive capacity-constrained businesses of a huge number of workers, but it also doesn’t want those workers to stay.

Yet if the prospect of residency is permanently removed then few temporary migrants will actually choose to live here, even with a pandemic raging across the globe.

Which makes the pandemic not just a ‘once in a generation opportunity’ to reset immigration, but a unique chance for the Government to not make any real decisions around immigration either.

Source: Stuff, Dileepa Fonseka