Immigration minister faces questions over deportations, parent visas, asylum and Gaza

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford.
Photo:
RNZ / REECE BAKER
Medical insurance for the new parent boost visa will cost migrants up to $8000 a year, according to the immigration minister.
Erica Stanford was quizzed on Tuesday by MPs in the Education and Workforce Committee, as part of budget scrutiny week in topics that covered everything from skilled migrants, to children born as overstayers and visas for people from the Middle East.
The new five-year parent visa allows parents of New Zealand citizens and residents to visit and possibly renew their visa - with a maximum stay of 10 years.
Health insurance prices vary according to age and health, with costs over the five-year visa period estimated at between $10,000 and $40,000.
But Stanford said those costs were less than half the annual policies they looked at initially, which would have required comprehensive cover for all doctors' fees and specialists.
"It was like $15,000 to $20,000 for full insurance and we just thought it's not doable and it's going to defeat the purpose of the visa. So we didn't go with comprehensive. We went with literally the minimum, which is emergency only. We added cancer [treatment] in there as well because it really made very little difference to the amount."
Other
financial requirements of the visa
were designed to make sure families could support their visiting parents' other health, housing, and living costs, she said.
Labour's immigration spokesperson Phil Twyford said it risked being viewed as a visa reserved for families of a wealthy minority. Stanford said other visas were available.
"Are you saying it's easy for migrant families to bring their parents in on those other visas?" asked Twyford. "Because that's not at all what people in the community say." Stanford disputed that, and also stressed that the government was being careful to ensure parents were being looked after on a long-term visa.
Under questions about whether the criteria were set to ration the number of potential applications, she said the government had not looked at rationing or numbers, and feedback had been overwhelmingly positive.
"When you draw a line somewhere, there are always people below and always people above - that's just the nature of drawing a line."
INZ head Alison McDonald, immigration minister Erica Stanford and MBIE chief executive Carolyn Tremain at Tuesday's hearing.
Photo:
Screenshot / Education and Workforce Committee
Stanford told the committee there were four children born since 2006 to parents without residence visas or citizenship who had been deported in the last five years. She said lawyers had suggested to her that affected numbers of youngsters were 'likely to be very low'.
Others say
increasing numbers of those babies
are now turning 18 and 19, and some cannot get a work visa or a university education - and in some cases face deportation.
Neither she nor Immigration New Zealand answered a question on how many affected children and young people were being worked with by compliance staff.
Green Party immigration spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said if numbers were low it may be because they had already been pressured into 'removing themselves from the country'.
INZ head of compliance Steve Watson said they would not be deported until 'they had exhausted every other option available to them.' Teenagers or their parents could also approach the associate minister for a decision.
Twyford said the numbers being seen was a tip of the iceberg because they lived in 'extreme insecurity'. He asked whether Stanford thought the system was right, saying the current crop of teenagers facing deportation was a feature of the system, 'not a bug'.
"It is important that people stick to the conditions of their visa, because we can't have a situation where if you have a child and wait long enough, then everything will be okay," Stanford replied, first noting it was Helen Clark's government which introduced the law change.
"Everyone has to abide by the conditions of their visa. And I'm not sure why in this case we would say 'well, you are okay' because the very next question you are going to ask me after we say yes to the child ... is 'oh, but what about their parents? And that's exactly what's happening."
Twyford asked whether she had considered what Australia and the UK do, granting citizenship after the first 10 years of a child's life. "We are not Australia and the UK," she said. "There is already a process for these children, and I understand that they're in a difficult situation but there is a pathway. Apply to the associate minister of immigration."
Twyford asked her whether in hindsight, not creating
humanitarian visas for relatives of Palestinians
living here was the right decision, given the scale of the tragedy unfolding there. A special category visa category had been opened in similar circumstances for families of Ukrainians.
Stanford said the difference between Ukraine and Gaza was that Palestinians could not physically escape to get to New Zealand. Cabinet's decision was not being reviewed.
"At this point, it's not something that we've considered, it would have to go through Cabinet, and Cabinet have decided at this time that they're satisfied with the settings that are in place." INZ was facilitating people from Gaza who were applying for other visas, she said.
Asked about Palestinians already here, INZ head Alison McDonald told the committee that staff would look carefully at those cases. "Not just from Gaza, from Israel, from Iran, from Iraq, people who can't return home... we'll find a way to regularise [their visas] until they can get home."
The immigration minister told the committee that changes to skilled migrant visas are coming soon, the numbers of high-rolling investors are increasing and entrepreneur visas will also be given a makeover.
The update to the entrepreneur visa would drive productivity, GDP and employment, and help in finding buyers for businesses whose owners needed to sell, said Stanford.
AEWV (work visas) were now much quicker for businesses to navigate and more overseas workers were arriving to fill skill shortages.
Overseas investor visa application numbers had outstripped expectations, she said, and many of them were also 'huge philanthropists', hinting that some would be well-known names.
"I remember saying...if we got 200 in the first year, I'd be really happy - we've had 175 since April and almost half of those are out of the States, lots out of Germany, some from China, Hong Kong, Singapore - so a mix, but certainly more than we thought.
"There's a billion dollars about to be invested - but it's not the money, it's the people, their skills, their talent. Some of the applicants and where they've come from, you would all know. They're amazing people."
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero
,
a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

RNZ News

an hour ago

• RNZ News

Polytech job cuts: 'The mood has changed from anger to sadness'

About 300 jobs are under threat at eight polytechs, says the Tertiary Education Union. File photo. Photo: Supplied Job and course cuts across the polytechnic sector are a nightmare, the Tertiary Education Union says. The union estimates that about 300 jobs are under threat at eight of the 16 institutions, with restructuring plans expected shortly from two more. The proposed cuts ranged from performing arts courses in Wellington to agriculture courses in Northland. Tertiary Education Union national secretary Sandra Grey said the institutes were doing what the government had told them to do. "The directive from the government was really, really clear. It was cut, cut, cut until you're financially stable and there's a huge problem with that because when you cut staff numbers, you cut the number of courses, you cut the viability of the institutions. This is a nightmare," she said. Grey said the scale of change was unprecedented. "In any given week I can receive two or three change proposals. That's individual groups of staff being affected, individual courses that are being cut," she said. "In the worst case scenario its almost one-in-five staff and that is massive for those communities as well because not only is that cutting courses for learners but that's taking money out of the local economy." Whitiereia Polytechnic TEU branch president Helen Johnstone said she had never seen anything like it in her 20 years at the institute. "We have had time and time again cuts across that period of time and lots of changes but for me this is the most significant that I have experienced. The most significant in terms of the impact on our particular polytechnic and what services and courses will be available and left for students." Johnstone said staff seemed resigned to the changes. "The mood has actually changed from anger to sadness," she said. "We went along to a staff update meeting and the mood in the room was just silence. I think everybody's in shock... that this is actually happening." Polytechnic and Te Pūkenga managers refused RNZ's request for an interview as did Vocational Education minister Penny Simmonds. But former Otago Polytechnic chief executive Phil Ker agreed the cuts were unprecedented. He said polytechnics had been struggling to make ends meet for years, but they had not all cut courses and staff at the same time. "This so-called viability issue has been around since I took up my chief executive job at Otago in 2004," he said. "There's been all sorts of work put in place at an institutional level to try and survive for the last 20 years plus. So there's always been some staffing reviews and job churn but what we're seeing now is a whole lot happening at the same time." Ker said the current round of cuts was aimed at creating financially-viable, stand-alone institutes but it would not work. "They're standing up on the basis of severe short-term cuts. There isn't a strong under-pinning financial model," he said. "These are all short-term fixes. It's looking for which programmes are the weak links right now, chop them out, shows a short-term benefit on the revenue statement and then a year down the track we'll see something else that's not 'viable' in inverted commas." Ker said the fundamental problem was everyone wanted a polytechnic system but nobody wanted to pay for it, least of all the government. "It's an inconvenient truth that we would like to have a really good vocational education system, but we don't want to pay for it. Employers don't want to pay directly for their training and the government doesn't want to pay adequately their share of the cost." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

RNZ News

an hour ago

• RNZ News

US-Iran conflict 'extremely worrying', NZ backs diplomacy

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters says NZ will continue to call for diplomacy and dialogue. Photo: RNZ/Calvin Samuel Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters says the government wants to know all the facts before taking a position on the US strike on Iran's nuclear facilities . The United Nations Security Council was meeting in emergency session on Monday (NZ time) on the US on three key nuclear facilities at the weekend. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said the US bombing marked a perilous turn in a region already reeling. Iran called on the 15-member body to condemn what it called a "blatant and unlawful act of aggression", Reuters reported. Peters told Morning Report he was looking for evidence on the level of Iran's nuclear preparedness. "I'm looking for the evidence to do with the nuclear enrichment programme that was way outside the negotiated position they've been taking all this time. "That is, they've been marvellously good at negotiating their way out of things and the question is have they kept to their commitments, have they breached their international obligations. Let's find that out before we rush to judgement." A Defence Force C-130J Hercules is leaving for the Middle East on Monday to help any New Zealanders stranded in Iran or Israel. Peters reiterated New Zealanders should do everything they can to leave now if they could find a safe route. He said the crisis could get far worse. "We just don't know, and if we don't know you've got to take the greatest precaution you possibly can." On Sunday, Peters said ongoing military action in the Middle East was "extremely worrying". It was critical escalation was avoided, and New Zealand strongly support efforts towards diplomacy and urged all parties to return to talks, "Iran's nuclear activities have long worried New Zealand. We want Iran to comply with its international obligations. Our concern is that further military action is not going to deliver a sustainable solution to this problem." Labour's defence spokesperson Peeni Henare backed Peters' calls for a return to talks, but said the government should acknowledge the US breached international law and be "perhaps a bit stronger" in the first instance. Henare said Trump's statements had made it "quite clear" what had happened. "Countries can't call for peace and de-escalation, only to take the action that's been taken." Waikato University law professor Alexander Gillespie said the airstrikes were "clearly" illegal in terms of international law. "There's nowhere in the UN charter that says you can bomb someone who won't negotiate with you. But whether you get to a point where that is actually condemned is going to be very different," he said. "There's the theory of international law, with the UN Charter, and then there's the reality of international politics at the moment, which means that America will not be condemned internationally by the Security Council or even through the International Court of Justice." The prime minister is heading to NATO this week. New Zealand is not a member, but in recent years has been invited as a partner along with fellow Indo-Pacific Four nations Australia, Japan and South Korea. While Christopher Luxon would be "on the margins," Gillespie expected he would be watching closely to see what like-minded partners were saying. "This is an act which is not self-defence, and even if you argued it was pre-emptive self-defence, it wasn't necessary because there were other options of diplomacy still open. It will create difficulties if we speak out and say that, I don't think we're in a position to do that right now, for fear of the reaction that you get from America." Australia's government has already issued a statement on the airstrikes. "We have been clear that Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile program has been a threat to international peace and security," the statement said. "We note the US president's statement that now is the time for peace. The security situation in the region is highly volatile. We continue to call for de-escalation, dialogue, and diplomacy." The government is sending a C-130J Hercules plane to the Middle East, along with Defence Force and Foreign Affairs personnel, to assist New Zealanders stranded in Iran and Israel. Defence minister Judith Collins said the plane was a contingency, and would not be able to aid in evacuation flights until airspace restrictions in the region eased. In the meantime, those who were able to leave via a safe route were urged to do so. Peters said the flights would get people to a safe place. "We're not bringing them home. We're getting them to where they can make arrangements to get home." The government has been warning New Zealanders in the region to leave for a long time, Peters said. The number of New Zealanders registered as being in Iran or Israel had increased in recent days. The decision to send the Hercules was made even before knowledge of the airstrikes had come through. "Our anxiety was enunciated and formulated into policy, warnings, and collections of views months ago. We've been saying it, and it's a sad circumstance here, but we said 'look this is very dangerous, get out,'" Peters said. Citing security reasons, Collins would not say where the plane and personnel would be based. Both Henare and Gillespie supported the move. "I think if we're ready and on standby, at the very least, to make sure we can respond to our citizens and their needs, and also those of our diplomatic staff, I think that's a really smart move," Henare said. Gillespie said sending a plane was prudent in case the situation worsened quickly, and the damage became more indiscriminate.

RNZ News

an hour ago

• RNZ News

Iran ambassador to NZ on US strikes

The US airstrikes come amid increasing violence in the Middle East, with Israel and Iran trading missiles for more than a week now. Iran ambassador to New Zealand Reza Nazarahari spoke to Corin Dann. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.