Migrant desperate for wife, kids to join him
When Zane Gillbee hugged his family goodbye in South Africa before moving to Wellington, his daughter Lyla was still a baby and his son Callum a happy 7-year-old.
Lyla is now a potty-trained, walking, talking 2.5-year-old and Gillbee has missed it all.
Callum, who is about to turn 9, has been diagnosed with separation anxiety and is on medication.
Gillbee is one of the hundreds of skilled migrants who moved to New Zealand for a better life before Covid-19 hit, expecting his family to follow.
But with borders closing in March last year, spouses and children remain stuck in their home countries around the world.
Immigration advisers, lawyers, National Party MPs and families have been calling on the Government to act urgently to reunite families for months, to no avail.
A Facebook group for families split from New Zealand migrants counts 1600 members sharing increasingly desperate stories.
Immigration lawyer Katy Armstrong conducted a survey through the group, which 700-odd people completed, including 500 who had children. She estimated the total number of split families of temporary visa holders in New Zealand to be about 2000.
The group includes about 200 nurses, along with a number of engineers and other essential workers, Armstrong said.
‘‘The really unfair thing is that if they were coming in now, they could apply and come in as critical workers with their families. But they have been split from their families because they happened to arrive before borders closed.’’
It was hard for them to see sports teams, film crews and entertainers being allowed into the country while they waited to be reunited with their loved ones.
In South Africa, Gillbee’s family were declined a border exception to enter New Zealand on humanitarian grounds six times.
Gilbee, a senior mechanical designer at Aurecon in Wellington, said he could not risk going back to South Africa where unemployment was too high.
While he is alone in the family home he is renting, his wife and children across the ocean are squashed into her parents’ house, ‘‘living from hand to mouth’’.
Tasha Gillbee had quit her teacher’s job in anticipation of the move to join her husband in April last year.
‘‘We are now just existing day to day, empty and tired. The trauma and anxiety that myself and my family have gone through is truly indescribable,’’ she said.
‘‘The emotional toll it has taken . . . is too heavy to bear. Our hearts and spirits are broken.’’
Armstrong said the numbers of families split at the border was finite and diminishing as many could not bear to be separated and had gone home. ‘‘If we just reserved 45 rooms a fortnight to them, they could all be reunited within a few months.’’
An Immigration New Zealand spokesman said the Government suspended the ability for people offshore to apply for a temporary visa for most categories in August last year.
The suspension was extended in November and would be reviewed in May, he said. Exceptions to border restrictions could be granted where people had a ‘‘critical purpose’’ for travel here, which may include humanitarian reasons, he said.
Of the 18,595 people who have requested a border exception under the humanitarian category so far, only 1993 have been granted one.
In a written statement, Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi said: ‘‘The Government is reviewing border settings regularly to see if and when changes can be made.’’
The split families’ Facebook group has organised a dozen peaceful protests in Auckland and Wellington, with another planned in March outside Parliament.