Visa processing goes downhill
While I’m a web-first kind of person, Saturday isn’t Saturday without a broadsheet newspaper and a jumbo-sized cup of fresh drip coffee.
I was halfway through my second cup, deep inside the freshsmelling pages of the Dominion Post last weekend, when I came across a huge Immigration New Zealand advertisement for staff. Senior ones. Eight general managers, 11 national managers and a chief investigator.
The advertisement proudly announced that Immigration had a new strategy and was realigning its organisational structure to reflect that. Hence 20 new roles and an associated annual employment cost of close to $5 million.
Apart from the vocational component, the advertisement was also a communication to the outside world that things are changing at Immigration. And change they have to.
Before I go on I should explain I started my graduate career in what was then called the New Zealand Immigration Service.
I worked there for two years in Wellington and later on spent a year running its first overseas marketing pilot for a brilliant immigration manager in the United Kingdom.
I saw up-close that it’s often a thankless job, when the objectively correct decision can also be a subjectively painful one that affects human lives and loved ones.
Although there were a few people at the place who were straight out of Gliding On, there were also a lot of genuinely good people trying to do the right thing in a tough situation.
I know there are still good people at Immigration, including some at a high level, but since previous chief executive Nigel Bickle left the place to run the Provincial Development Unit in 2018, its delivery has gone off the boil.
Although I haven’t had any contact with Immigration directly for many years, it comes up regularly in the various board
papers I read each month.
This includes tech companies having trouble recruiting senior developers to spur the next stage of growth, education companies starved of paying international students, or skifields simply wanting snowhounds for a few months.
Using the latter as an example, skifields typically take on ski instructors, snowboard technicians and snowmakers in late May and hang onto them until September.
The talent pool is shallow here, so they have to look elsewhere – typically about a third of the 3000 people employed in the local snowsport industry need to be sourced overseas.
Skifield businesses start the recruitment process in January, with job offers being made in March. This has traditionally allowed plenty of time for overseas workers to apply for a five-month employer-assisted work visa.
Historically this application process has taken two to three weeks, which means the foreign snowhounds have had plenty of time to arrange flights, find accommodation and extricate themselves from existing employers before arriving here in May to prepare for the season kickoff in June.
This year the skifield-bound applicants received an automated message from Immigration saying that decisions could take more than three months. For many applicants this meant they would only find out if they had been successful in getting a visa after the ski season had started.
If this is jolly frustrating for the workers, it’s diabolical for the many skifield companies trying to run a business and look after customers.
Looking at the Immigration website as I write this column, the essential skills work visa processing time is four months for 95 per cent of applications. So it’s not getting any better.
It doesn’t take long to find other industries also dependent on foreign visitors which are experiencing similar problems.
Tourism, our number one export-earning industry, is one.
Take India as an example. Holiday arrivals from India in 2018 were growing at 16 per cent yearon-year and had doubled in the past four years.
Fast-forward to April of this year and Indian holidaymaker numbers were in decline, down 1 per cent in April year-on-year.
The Indian market is sensitive to visa processing times, and these have ballooned out in 2019. Immigration data shows 80 per cent of Indian applications were processed within 40 working days in the year to May, compared with 17 days in 2018.
The short booking window in India – about 60 days from booking
Less official sources reference high staff turnover and on-again, off-again restructuring.
to departure – means confidence around visa processing determines where Indians travel. If they are doubtful they will receive visas in time to firm up travel plans, they will happily spend their dollars elsewhere.
In terms of dissecting the underlying problems, it’s hard to pin down one thing.
Official comment has included seasonal volume uptick, consolidating processing operations, training demands and system constraints.
Less official sources reference high staff turnover and on-again, off-again restructuring.
I think the nub of the issue comes down to execution. Consolidating visa processing in regional hubs should enable processing based on time of receipt rather than being constrained by country issues.
But to do this they need to have an absolute focus on tight execution.
And that word was noticeably absent from the ad in last Saturday’s Dominion Post. I hope that was just an oversight.
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director, adviser and broadcaster. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he loves coffee and newspapers. While this is his personal opinion MOD is or has been a director of Tourism NZ, RAL Skifields and Positively Wellington Tourism.