Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
A Chinese man has been living in an Auckland garage for three months and working illegally after paying more than $17,000 for an accredited employer work visa.
The construction company who was supposed to give him work said it did not realise he was in the country even though the visa was approved in January.
He was among dozens of workers who had been left jobless and destitute after paying thousands of dollars for the visas, which tie them to employers and make it illegal for them to find new jobs.
The man, who RNZ is not naming, said he had been paying $120 a week to live in the garage of a West Auckland house.
There was just room for four beds, which were separated by curtains, and RNZ did not see any sign of heating when we visited.
The man said he was barely getting by after paying more than $17,000 for his visa to a China-based labour export company.
He said the day after he arrived here in March the agent he had been dealing with - Johnson Yang (also known as Yang Dong Qiang) - told him the employer no longer wanted him.
RNZ had previously spoken to two other workers who had also come through Yang, and were left unemployed - one had paid directly to Yang, and another had paid to another company Yang was working with in China.
The worker said he believed he had been scammed by both his agent and his employer.
"I come here and never get to meet my employer, this is suspicious. If they genuinely want to employ me, they wouldn't just fire me before even meeting me," he said.
Welldone Construction manager Jerry Zhang said the man did have a contract with the company and it knew his visa had been approved in January.
He said the agent Johnson Yang only told the firm this month that the worker had arrived and had been doing other jobs.
The company decided to cancel the man's visa.
It also denied taking a cut from the agent fee the worker had paid.
Yang had hung up on RNZ when asked about what had happened, but just days after RNZ made contact, the worker was reimbursed half the money he had paid.
The worker claimed Yang had been arranging other jobs for him, which was illegal, and he wanted Immigration to give him an open work visa.
"I want the immigration department to give me a legal work visa, so I don't need to be scared when working, because I came here through normal and legal processes, I don't want to work illegally," he said.
He said employers take advantage of him knowing that he was working illegally, and the lowest he had been paid was $18 per hour.
The Migrant Workers' Association's president Anu Kaloti said it had dealt with about 30 cases of workers in similar situations over the past three months.
She said the majority were on accredited work visas and in every case there were offshore agents involved but also complicit employers.
"The employer together with the agents cooked this scheme up [bringing over workers], so they fully know what's going on. And I've also come across the odd licensed immigration advisor unfortunately, who's also in this nexus," she said.
Kaloti said the exploitation was happening in many sectors, including construction, hospitality and aged care and involved workers from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and South America.
She was calling for Immigration New Zealand to give open work visas to affected workers, or to extend the migrant exploitation protection visa from 6 months to a year.
But ultimately, Kaloti said she wanted to see the accredited employer work visa scrapped so that migrants would not be tied to a single employer.
Another advocate, May Moncur, was also representing more than a dozen workers who had paid between $10,000 to $20,000 for visas then lost their jobs.
Moncur said it was very hard for workers to seek redress when they could barely afford to continue living here.
"It's time consuming and a very stressful process, I have two clients, they have already left New Zealand because they could not survive here, and they received some assistance from charity, however they could not make a living here," she said.
Immigration said it was investigating about 36 employers involving migrants on accredited work visas or cyclone recovery visas.