Straight-To-Residency visa for nurses is a big fail: only 19 overseas nurses were given fast-tracked visas
Straight-To-Residency visa for nurses is a big fail of Immigration New Zealand. Most of the people who have been given visas have already worked here.
From the time it began in mid-December until the end of February, only 19 nurses from outside the country were given visas.
According to Immigration New Zealand, 162 visas were given to the nurses. Out of these 162 visas, 139 nurses were already working in New Zealand under different visas, such as the special skills visa or the accredited employer visa.
The other four were in the country but needed jobs. After nurses were left off the list of jobs that could go straight to residency, the Nurses Organisation worked hard to add them.
Kaiwhakahaere Kerri Nuku said it was sad that so few people had been hired, but the government had moved too slowly to add them to the list.
She said that the international job market had become more competitive during that time, and international nurses were leaving their jobs to go somewhere else.
She said it would likely take some time, but the number of people getting the visa might slowly rise. Due to current conditions, many nurses don’t want to work in New Zealand.
Even here, many nurses were choosing to go to Australia instead, so there was work to be done to improve things here.
She also said that it was important to get school dropouts interested in the job.
Even though most people who got the fast-track visa were already working here, she said it was still helpful because they knew they could stay.
According to the spokesperson for the Immigration Minister, they never considered the straight-to-residence visa a silver bullet, but they hoped that it would help in making the country a more attractive place in the long term.
They said that the immigration numbers didn't give a complete picture of the nurses who came to the country because some came on visitor visas to take a course that let them apply for a work visa. After that, any application would be called an "onshore" application.
