Immigration Minister Erica Stanford. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
A newly-released Cabinet document shows migrants who have been defrauded with a fake job offer will no longer be eligible for a Migrant Exploitation Protection Visa.
Immigration Minister Erica Stanford announced a fortnight ago the maximum time migrants could hold a protection visas (MEPV) was being halved to six months.
But the Cabinet paper shows the changes also make migrants ineligible for the MEPV if they have paid premiums for jobs overseas and arrived to find no job existed.
In the paper, Stanford pointed to figures showing 2000 MEPVs were approved in the last financial year, compared to 200 the year before. One factor she suggested was being able to renew the MEPV, and $100-a-day support offered to affected jobless migrants from last October to March this year.
"While a single cause is hard to isolate, I consider these numbers indicate that the current settings (and previous short-term financial support) may have created an incentive for offshore agents to charge premiums for non-existent jobs knowing that the highly facilitative MEPV settings provide open work rights for up to 12 months.
"This poses an undue risk to the immigration system and creates perverse incentives for migrants to try and get to and stay in New Zealand. This may lead to further non-genuine employment offers and/or false exploitation claims.
"There is also a risk that the current facilitative settings, coupled with a light touch approach, is encouraging people not in genuinely exploitative situations to apply for the MEPV."
The duration of the MEPV must provide enough time for an exploited migrant to find alternative work, but not create "perverse incentives" to falsely apply for an MEPV, she said.
"A year is too long for migrants to be looking for alternative work. Migrants with in-demand transferrable skills should be able to find alternative work within the initial six months. A year may also result in migrants being in a more financially precarious situation as they have no eligibility for financial support while on an MEPV."
In announcing the changes, Stanford said the government was updating the "definition of migrant exploitation to specify exploitation must be linked to a genuine employment relationship". In the paper to Cabinet, she makes it clear this means that "non-genuine" jobs should not be considered as migrant exploitation.
"There are other protections in place for such scenarios," she said. "These migrants may apply to have the conditions of their visa varied, or they may apply for a new visa.
"Restricting the definition of exploitation to exclude people where there was no employer is likely to exclude some people who have paid a premium or excessive payment."
Migrants who are made redundant lawfully or who are not paid because the business has been liquidated are also now excluded.
"While unfortunate for individual migrants, redundancy is not exploitation. Those made redundant should use any notice period to make arrangements to return home to avoid being made liable for deportation.
"I also intend to explicitly exclude the non-payment of final wages due to liquidation from the definition of migrant exploitation for MEPV purposes. Without other poor practices, this is a relatively minor employment breach (noting that the scale of wages could be significant) which can be remedied under existing claims processes."