The employees of Immigration New Zealand speak out regarding the AEWV system
Employees argue that "possibly thousands of businesses shouldn't have gotten accreditation."
Employees at Immigration New Zealand (INZ) claim that they have been trying to alert their top management to faults in the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) system for the past year, but their concerns have been ignored by their superiors every time they have brought it up.
In an interview with Stuff, one member of the INZ staff vented their frustrations, saying, "Senior managers aren't being honest about how terrible the AEWV system is. We are aware that it is ridiculous, and for the past year we have been informing senior management that it is ridiculous.
The objective of the AEWV system, which was introduced in May of the year prior, was to make the process of obtaining a work visa more efficient. It extends an invitation to businesses who want to hire employees from other countries to submit an application for accreditation.
According to Stuff, a directive given to staff by Alison McDonald, the deputy secretary for immigration at MBIE, told them to skip inspections on almost all applications under the scheme. It appears that only two employers out of 27,894 applicants have been denied accreditation under the system.
An INZ staff member is quoted in the report as saying, "There was not any appetite for declining accreditations... we had to approve them, and it became a tick box exercise." "Now, what we have is thousands of migrants who have been exploited, in addition to potentially thousands of businesses that shouldn't have gotten accreditation."
According to Stuff, this disturbing picture of a system failing to protect both migrants and New Zealand's interests portrays a worrying picture of a system that is under pressure to process applications quickly without addressing possible concerns. Critics assert that it has led to a surge in the exploitation of migrants; it has been reported that some migrants have paid as much as $30,000 for jobs that do not exist.
After reports claimed that 115 Bangladeshi and Indian migrants were squeezed into six households, McDonald issued a memo to workers on Friday indicating that she "fully supported" the minister's decision to request a review. The report said that the migrants were living in overcrowded conditions.
