The immigration ‘meat’ market
Ruthless employers see visa reforms as a way to make money out of migrant staff. Dileepa Fonseka and Lucy Xia report.
LAW changes to prevent migrant worker exploitation will make workers more vulnerable to it, if conversations between some of the country’s worst employers are anything to go by.
The Government has announced changes to accredit employers under an Accredited Employer Work Visa , which will combine six different types of visa into one ‘‘employer-led’’ scheme. This will put employers in charge of most parts of the visa process and leave migrant workers unable to secure a work visa on their own.
Conversations on the Chinese-language forum
Skykiwi show some current employers see these changes as an opportunity to make even more money off migrant workers.
In a long conversation thread on the forum, employers openly discuss how the new scheme will allow them to charge migrant workers an additional premium for something they refer to as the ‘‘meat card’’.
From the context of the conversation it is clear the ‘‘meat card’’ refers to schemes publicised through numerous investigations, where employers charge their employees large sums of money for supporting their residency or work visa applications.
The ‘‘meat’’ in this case is the migrant worker; the ‘‘card’’ is the piece of paper the Government gives the worker – residency or work visas allowing them to work, live or stay here.
ACT Party immigration spokesman James McDowall said that when Immigration New Zealand held workshops pitching the changes to immigration lawyers and advisers, many in the audience raised concerns: ‘‘The shake-up in the work visa category is touted as ‘employer-led’. Well yes, it is, but the risk is that it enables some of the bad employers to exploit migrants,’’ McDowall said.
Green Party immigration spokesman Ricardo Menendez March said the visa changes were the opposite of what many had been calling for to stop migrant exploitation: ‘‘By attaching migrants a lot closer to a single employer we’re not fixing the issue many unions have raised over the years – which is, by coupling migrants with a single employer, we’re creating a really toxic dynamic.’’
Immigration lawyer Alastair McClymont said he had received reports of similar messages between members of the ethnic Chinese community on messenger service WeChat after the Government’s announcement last month.
McClymont heard figures of 500,000 yuan (NZ$100,000) being thrown around by employers who were telling their employees: ‘‘Look, this is what it’s going to cost you. . . As I say it’s a petri dish for mass exploitation and fraud, which is exactly what this Government wanted to get rid of.’’
Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi said ‘‘if this type of behaviour were to eventuate, employers would be at risk of losing their accreditation and therefore not able to hire any migrants . . . Any employer wishing to employ migrants will need to be accredited under the new system. This will help to combat migrant exploitation as requirements on employers will be strengthened.’’
However, National Party immigration spokeswoman Erica Stanford questioned whether the system would change anything when it came to migrant worker exploitation.
She pointed out that an employer accreditation system exists now, although Faafoi said the new system would be stricter.
‘It’s a petri dish for mass exploitation and fraud, which is exactly what this Government wanted to get rid of.’ ALASTAIR McCLYMONT IMMIGRATION LAWYER
‘‘My issue with Immigration New Zealand is so what? They’ve never had the capacity, for a very long time, to actually enforce any of their rules,’’ Stanford said.
‘‘You hear stories all the time of business owners who are exploiting people, and they never get investigated. Immigration New Zealand know who they are, they know what’s going on, but they just don’t have the resources. It’s not their fault.’’
Migrant Workers Association president Anu Kaloti said she too did not understand how the new visa system would change much around migrant exploitation.
‘‘We’ve got all those provisions at the moment as well, but how much enforcement is happening . . . I don’t think it will change a thing in practice.’’
McDowall said migrant exploitation appeared to have dropped off the Government’s radar as it moved to deal with a multitude of self-inflicted problems within the immigration system, including an unprecedented backlog of residency applications.
The visa will be introduced in November, and companies will be able to apply for accreditation from September. Accreditation will be available for 12 months and then renewable every two years after that. Immigration has signalled to the immigration industry that there will also be a pathway to residence through the Accredited Employer Work Visa, but details have not been released yet. Migrant worker exploitation in the Chinese community has been hard to stop, partly due to poor English language skills among workers and a poor understanding of employment law and rights. On top of this, publicised enforcement successes often involve deporting workers for visa violations. This week lawyer Matt Robson criticised this approach as cutting off a source of information on migrant exploitation. He told RNZ it showed workers they would spend a lengthy time in prison, then be deported, if they spoke out against exploitation. New heightened salary requirements don’t seem to be scaring these employers either. Immigration New Zealand has said employers won’t need to run their job vacancies through a labour market test under the Accredited Employer Work Visa, a check to see if New Zealand citizens and permanent residents are not willing to take a job, if the role pays more than twice the median wage ($106,080).
On Skykiwi, several discuss methods of how they can pay their workers higher salaries on paper but reroute most of it back to their own bank accounts.
This is a new version of a well-reported practice where migrant employers pay their employees high salaries to meet residency and visa requirements, then get those employees to pay most of it back. It means these migrant employees end up working for less than minimum wage in some cases.
March said it would not do anything for either the country or migrant workers if employers were being paid high salaries on paper, but not in practice.
Salary requirements well out of the usual range for the industries these migrants were employed in created the conditions for this kind of deception to take place: ‘‘Of course we should be lifting wages across the board, but we should not be creating the conditions where, in order to meet that salary band, employers will then be exploiting migrant workers . . . no one wins. That actually ends up suppressing wages, and that’s not good for migrant workers or anyone else.’’