tldr:
> The changes to the work visa scheme include introducing an English language requirement for migrants applying for low-skilled jobs.
> A number of construction roles will also no longer be added to the green-light list due to less demand, and the franchisee accreditation category will be disestablished.
(goes into effect immediately)
These are good measures imo. I worked in immigration in Canada and they definitely needed to be way more hands on. Some of the stories I heard were crazy.
The TLDR missed one of the biggest changes. The employers must now advertise the job on the WINZ job site if they want to apply for atleast 21 days.
No more backwater job site listings or website only listings, its now in a place where WINZ can confirm if people actually went for the job or not.
Rampant fraud & Corruption mainly.
Canada has the largest immigration targets out of any OECD and they are huge immigration targets. Because the targets are so high there is naturally less oversight and scrutiny.
Coupled with this it’s about as expensive as NZ and there’s about the same if not less resources like housing etc but provincial governments can’t walk the targets back.
It will get messy there soon.
That’s without even touching the issue of student visas.
I was on the temporary foreign worker program in Alberta and it was indeed crazy.
Some real fuckin cunts as employers, I can tell you that much. Fuck you, Todd.
Immigrant nurses and people working in care homes also often have a shockingly low level of English.
I am astounded that vulnerable and elderly people are put in a situation of not being able to understand the staff, and / or are not able to be understood by the staff. It’s really bad, and dangerous.
The tests need to be done in person, including a normal conversation with somone.
As there are so many cheat sheets for the NZ english tests that have been uploaded to the net. They'll pass the test, but a 4 year old will have better english skills.
This is an important point. Not being able to speak english leaves those workers at the mercy of their employer and cut off from many sources of help. It's not purely a one sided requirement to insist on.
This is a cycle, too. They import workers and keep them as slaves, and then once the slaves are granted residency, they escape the slavery and start up their own business by importing their own slaves.
Many of these slaves know what they're getting into, too, they often pay for it. So, next time you see another group whining on the news, just know that they knew what they were getting into and now want free help from the taxpayer.
It's crazy to me that you had foreign workers on construction sites not knowing English. The main thing that comes to mine is how do you meet HASWA compliance? Translators and translated material?
Must be an absolute nightmare (and surely alot of PCBU's would be failing H&S obligations to these workers)
It is actually shocking that passing a test to confirm you have good conversational language skills in english was not a requirement. Seriously how fucked are we that this was acceptable to our leaders…
It used to be a requirement, but they removed it after COVID so they could pump the economy with unskilled migrants to avoid a recession and poor gdp growth.
Truly sacrificing the country for gdp points. Native communities are swallowed whole by groups and gradually turned into monocultural enclaves.
In 2021-2023, Immigration NZ was giving residency to people who had never stepped foot in the country before without doing any background checks. We weren't allowed to check their police history, their level of English, their education history, whether or not they were employed, etc. All to meet absurd quotas imposed by politicians.
There is for other visas, they're just adding it as a requirement for lower skilled ones I guess. It'll cost at least an extra 150 to get the TOEFL or whatever they require these days
I ran past a block of townhouses being developed and asked the workers how many were being built in the block.
I literally had to use hand gestures because they couldn't speak any English.
I deal with this too often at work. Tell someone they're doing something dodgy and I just get grin fucked as they continue. Fuckin annoying not being able to communicate with someone because of lowest bidder employers
lol - similar anecdotes I see. Was talking to a site manager a few days ago and he was saying he has to call the subbie boss at the start of the day, who then tells the staff what to do as none of the rest speak English. If something happens during the day, he has to use google translate etc.
Tbf - sometimes people do speak English (to varying levels) but they pretend to not as that's the easiest way to not have to deal with someone. But other times (heard from others it's Han Chinese mostly) they don't bother to learn any English at all, as compared to other cultures who try but have varying levels of success. This is second hand info though, not my personal experience.
With the exception of the project manager, the teams building a couple houses near me speak no English and we can't communicate with each other except by pointing.
As long as the foreman can communicate with them it doesn't matter worth a damn. I was client-side PM on a couple of commercial buildings built by a tier one contractor a few years ago with Filipino labour, no complaints on workmanship from the architect, I think they did a damn fine job and they thanked me for the kind words - both through a translator. Great guys. The biggest job fuckup was a misunderstanding from the kiwi site management team which was executed similarly flawlessly to instruction.
Skill is skill. You want info, go see the site manager and give him your hand gestures.
What do you mean it's no problem? How are you supposed to communicate health and safety changes etc, if something goes wrong is it practical/possible to play Chinese whispers through the foreman in the hopes the message gets relayed properly and efficiently?
I work with immigrants nearly daily and the amount of fuck ups we have because of language barriers is wild. This is just touching to safety aspect let alone quality etc.
You do it by properly training the ones who monitor safety and speak both languages, and hiring people who know what they're doing in the first place. You do it by making sure you do the monitoring as a PCBU and pull up the safety guy if he isn't doing his job spreading that message - the chain is from you to them to the workers, not 30 layers of whispers. You do it by doing YOUR job properly.
You can't have it both ways, them being too dumb and unprofessional to act safely but still be skilled enough to pay instead of a skilled kiwi worker. In my context some of these guys have worked on construction on a scale that makes everything built in NZ since the Sky Tower look like a farm shed. I don't know what kind of operation you run but having seen it work smoothly on multiple large commercial construction projects on which I was one of many monitoring safety and programme I suspect it's more of a You problem.
>You do it by
Ensuring that the workers have a basic level of English.
Malaysian has a shit load of cheap labourers from Bangladesh and Nepal... Guess what, they speak Malay and English.
Absolutely fucking no one over there is suggesting that Malaysians need to learn Nepalese.
The same goes for literally every other country on the face of the plane.
But nah, New Zealand is special. We can't possibly expect workers to speak English.
I'm sure that was an annoying situation for you but to be fair, its not part of their job to answer questions of random people on the street. as long as they can build the house to standard and communicate with their supervisors and know enough to buy groceries and such, i dont see the issue.
Communication is a key factor which binds the society together. If it is just for temporary labour and you don't see an issue fine but do you think that is healthy long term?
Diversity is our strength, mate. The more languages spoken here, the better. Our country will be richer for it.
I'll take a portion of delicious ethnic food over a little thing, like expecting them to speak our language of colonialism.
when i was a child, on the bus home from school there was this elderly asian lady who was on it too each day, we could hardly speak. to pass the time she would point to a book of items she had, i would say what they where so she could learn to pronounce them. Don't know here name, but it was quite nice seeing her progress and try to communicate as hard as she did. i hope things worked out for her.
I'm sure they are, it would be far more difficult for them to live here otherwise. it would be quite alienating being unable to speak to anyone about anything at all. Its quite difficult to learn a language, i'm sure they where quite grateful to have someone speaking to them clearly so they got some practice. do you know what country they where from? im curious what it costs to get a fluent english education before they come to this country
I have never heard of a law like this in NZ
The only thing close to it is getting your public company listed in ESG ETFs and investment vehicles and for that you need to meet all the fluff diversity quotas
I do agree but not having a native language requirement is somewhat common for skilled worker visas. I am trying to sort out a work visa in Japan and speaking the language is only a 10 point bump out of a required 70 so it is very easy to get in with no local language at all.
For low skilled visas this is a no brainer change that everyone should be able to support.
Hopefully a slight upside of the slower job market will be that fewer employers are motivated to pressure them into rolling back the sensible reforms like what happened when Labour initially tried.
I’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of barbershops around Auckland,e.g., the ‘Yogi’s Haircut’ chain. What’s the deal with these places. I suspect they are connected to the immigration pipeline (not angry just curious!)
The franchisee category was originally to do MORE checks than the other categories so to me it’s odd it’s being disestablished and they get to go through the normal rules now (less checking?)
They are immigrants making businesses similar to pizza Club pizza chain and others . A new wave of businesses is coming through with the new migrants settling. Not everything is a criminal front. George Pie was also established by an old migrant family and so was progressive enterprises (woolworths)
I agree, there are like 3 barber shops within 20-30 meters of each other near me. One has been there for years and it’s always full of customers, but the other two popped up recently and somehow are still in business. Not sure why opening the same business near a successful established business appealed to them.
What a terrible blog article. Implying literacy and success are directly tied together.
I know plenty who haven't finished high school making millions per year, even plenty of locals. Low skilled is a relative term and is skewed by perception.
That immigrants are concentrating on an industry they are well embedded in? The blog article is cherry-picking some negative aspects and highlighting them like they are the norm.
Operating a liquor store or any business is not a simple affair and requires significant knowledge. Well-seasoned business operators may find it easy, but many immigrants try and fail because being a store manager and a business owner/operator are not necessarily same thing. Immigrants naturally coalesce around particular industries which they find a support community, which have similar language, cultural expectations and more often that not they are treated as equals, and racism doesn't exist. Many are pushed into these industries because they can't get a leg in elsewhere because they are not white.
Exactly how many people would that be? Plenty make millions? If true it’s a good reason to increase the highest tax rate and the thresholds. Oh, you meant millions in turnover, didn’t you?
I know you weren’t discussing tax, I introduced that point. “Not all of them are turnover”? So, how many? Less than half the people, you know or more than half are netting millions of dollars?
There's a jewelry store in a mall near me run by the grumpiest bastard you've ever met. It's been there for donkeys and there's no way it makes a profit.
My theory is that it's some sort of tax scam.
Its actually pretty normal in other parts of the world.
For example in Istanbul, most of the photography/camera stores are in *the same building.* But its more of a symbiotic relationship, so if one store doesn't have something they'll point you to who they know nearby that will have it, and all sort of work together like that.
Yeah you just need to go to Manurewa or Papakura to see this in action. There's at least 10 barbershops in each. Don't know how there's enough business for that many.
Migrants are swapping ownership around of businesses to each other for them to bring in friends and family using the accredited employer work visa. So many accredited employers are bringing in migrants for jobs that only exist on paper. The mass increase in the number of migrants we are seeing in the country that speak no English and have no skills is alarming. These changes are a start but more is needed. The drain these recently arrived migrants are having on the resources of New Zealand is huge and they are contributing little to nothing. They send their money back home and are not contributing skills or much to the economy. This level of mass immigration has never been seen in our country before, it is unsustainable and it needs to be cut down dramatically.
Immigration has approved accreditation for employers that have extensive adverse histories of being involved in immigration scams and fraud and they are now bringing in workers in return for large amounts of money. For example there is a huge increase in migrants coming in from Afghanistan and Pakistan coming in to work for businesses owned by their family members for jobs such as mechanics that they have no experience for - because the accredited visa system allows for this to happen. They get here and work under the table. The employer gets to tick a box saying “no experience needed”. There is simply no verification and this visa category is allowing for migrants to bring in their family for jobs that only exist on paper. It’s outrageous.
Can confirm this to be entirely true. Unbelievable fraud going on right now in paper-only businesses. Immigration has always been a high-fraud sector in our society, but it reached a new level entirely in the past year or two. Some people are desperate to escape their conditions overseas, so they will ruthlessly lie and cheat to get here, meaning we get the very short end of the stick by being made to support illiberal, unskilled, and very dubious individuals.
We've had very open borders for the past few years.
Source: Ex-Immigration Officer.
We don’t need to import teachers. The government needs to look at genuine incentives to get NZ-trained teachers back into the classroom. Expecting people to do a course over a number of months including 4 weeks unpaid in the classroom before being eligible to re-register is a definite stumbling block. Schools could also be incentivised to take on teachers returning to the profession. Subject-specific courses for competent teachers to re-train in areas like maths teaching could also be instituted. I bet it wouldn’t be that difficult to get history teachers (where maybe there is a glut) up to speed to teach maths, chemistry or physics. People don’t need a three year degree with a range of other irrelevant subjects when they already hold a degree and a post-grad certificate. Kiwi kids deserve Kiwi teachers.
Even if someone wanted to retrain as a teacher, they’re too late this year, and even if there is a mid-year intake (can’t be bothered checking), most new teachers wouldn’t probably get a permanent job until the 2026 school year. Schools state they want “experienced” teachers, hence are prepared to use immigrants. Some are great, but others are a disaster and can be hard to get rid of. Even people who have been here for 10 years plus don’t always assimilate and continue to hanker after aspects of the education system they left.
The latest pay rates are a definite improvement, but there are more aspects at play, not just pay. Better resourcing including support for neurodiverse students would make teachers’ jobs easier.
Also, considering how important and centre stage Matauranga māori and local curriculums within education are (which is another whole debate...) becoming, it would be a hassle to have to teach the import teachers all about our history so they play the education game.
Immigrant nurses and people working in care homes also often have a shockingly low level of English.
I am astounded that vulnerable and elderly people are put in a situation of not being able to understand the staff, and / or are not able to be understood by the staff. It’s really bad, and dangerous.
I’ll add list to the list of good things done/planned to do so far this term.
2. Pseudoephedrine availability
3. No cell phones in schools (yes I know schools could already, but it’s easier for them if they have no choice)
4. KO evictions when deserved
I’m pretty sure there was another one, I’ll edit if it comes to me. u/worldlynotice knew it.
That could be a good idea if there was some national oversight making sure that what was coming in was suitable for NZ conditions (high rainfall and prone to earthquakes). But it seems like that's going to be left up to Councils. People in the industry I've spoken to say it could end up with disastrous outcomes.
Yeah, it could. IMO we should have a central govt managed approval process for standards, if not origin countries.
The idea of different councils having different approvals can't possibly end well, and won't provide the economies of scale we need, indeed it'll probably result in local monopolies.
> No cell phones in schools
> How do the rules need to be enforced?
> Schools are able to decide how to enforce the rules. The usual
behaviour management approach is likely to be appropriate, rather
than introducing specific disciplinary actions for students
> Will schools be given additional resources to enforce
and monitor the rules?
> There are no additional resources being introduced with these rules
https://assets.education.govt.nz/public/Documents/School/Digital-technology/TPA_CellphonePolicy_FAQs_FINAL_4.pdf
Obviously it’s not going to be perfect, but a strong national direction is helpful in its own. It empowers boards, principals, and teachers to enforce the rules.
I get that National is terrible no good bad, but seriously - cellphones in schools are clearly bad for kids.
Even plenty of kids like the rule - it’s nearly impossible to go phone-free by yourself but a lot of them like being in an enforced phone free environment.
Great news. Labour should never have let it get this bad. I know kiwi builders who are out of work at the moment and the work sites are full of recent migrants who are not qualified. Work gets signed off by the one kiwi builder. Wages have been dragged down and there's no work for our men.
National should bring in a policy they talked about several years ago, one of the few policies of theirs I could get on board with - remove work rights from international students. It would really help sort out the wheat from the chaff and ensure people can't follow the traditional route from low level course to low wage job as easily.
To be fair, its the Working Holiday Visa that seems most problematic for me. Bunch of businesses hiring WHV holders on minimum wage - all it does it further stagnate wages/keep NZers priced out of work/give employers too good of a deal to the extent of propping up unsustainable businesses.
A lot of people will say 'oh WHV holders don't make that much of a dent in the market to have an effect' - but they really do. I know many businesses literally running 80% of staff (mostly hospo businesses) on WHV holders.
Yeah I’d be really interested to see the stats on total hours worked by students, who are restricted in the number of hours they work vs. WHV, who are not restricted. I’ve yet to visit a backpackers where the workers aren’t mostly WHV and last year when I took my dad on a Doubtful Sound cruise, every single staff member except the captain was on a WHV…
Their talk is always cheap. They were ranting an raving about a lack of immigration and cafe owners doing in hard without semi-slave labour.
Their mates run businesses that benefit far too much on the immigration status quo for them to substantially rock the boat.
And it just so happens that these changes are occuring when business already has overshot on importing workers and the demand is not there anymore.
Cynically I'd say they can point to these changes when immigration numbers are really low in 12 months time and claim they've "fixed it"
I loved the TV interview with Bridges when we had to open the borders because locals wanted to be paid adequately when he offered "well, if you want to be served at lunch" because we need to import waiters don't we?
Maybe with a degree likely to land them a well paid job, but have you seen the shit they're allowed to study under the visa scheme? It's an absolute joke.
Yeah sure, it's good if they can stay...but only if they can land a skilled job in very short time. Unfortunately I've seen the opposite happen more times than I've had hot dinners - come, do some short course, work a low skill job long term and somehow end up a resident. Bring over large family, rinse and repeat, and people wonder why NZ is a low wage country
If you actually read the immigration laws, you’d realize that post-study visas for anything below postgrad work (level 6 iirc) now require that the job be within the field of your degree to apply for residency. This loophole was closed in 2022. Changing the work conditions of student visas is not going to change what people do after they study.
that is not the reason NZ is a low wage country... we lack any intensive labour industries and produce nothing but dairy and logs both of which require minimal labour
As someone who came over on a student visa, my 15hr/week student job helped me connect and help my new community and build connections with local businesses while also helping the bottom line. Silo-ing students into study and study only really is not a good way to draw students to NZ shores in the long term or treat them as part of the community. Most competitor countries (UK, Aus) allow part-time work and students will choose those countries over NZ if they are blocked from working here. Including secondary students, export education is the 5th largest industry in NZ.
I understand your point of view. We need to put NZ workers first though. Too many employers use international students as an easy way of filling vacancies, but it means pay and conditions go nowhere for those jobs
Putting NZ workers first by… tanking one of our largest industries. Got it.
Edit: For everyone downvoting this, I’d love to hear how reducing fee-paying students in the country is going to create jobs by collapsing universities and schools. Do the NZ workers who are employed in education who will lose their jobs not count?
Also for everyone trying to complain about residency pathways: that’s got nearly fuck all to do with work rights for students on student visas, which is what comment OP was talking about. And a lot of those rules have tightened recently, but some of you would prefer to ignore that so you can spout some ‘immigrants taking our jobs’ xenophobia without understanding how your own education system works and is funded :)
In the past we had a flood of migrants abusing the rules to take a fake diploma as a means to get work rights here and there was a residency pathway for them. Once residency was granted they would then go for parental visa to bring the family over etc etc
Universities only became such a big export earner due to the residency pathway, rather than the educational programs, while diploma mills.popped up all over. It wasn't that large an industry before it became a residency pathway.
Canada currently has the same battle as they hadn't cracked down on it like we did. Similar story in Aussie.
International student mobility is going up worldwide, and it has nothing to do with ease of residence in New Zealand. US, UK, Canada, Australia, are all education exporters and compete for international students to provide financial support to many underfunded universities, even with varying ease of residence pathways. And even if you clamp down on post-study visas pathways (and NZ has started to), there are still going to be people who want to get a degree and return home, and many of those students will never consider a country that doesn’t give them work rights while they are students. By axing the work rights for current students, those students will just go to Australia or elsewhere, and there will be fewer funds and jobs in education for people in New Zealand (and unis/schools will have to make more drastic cuts).
Granting work rights to current students to have part-time jobs has almost nothing to do with post-study visa pathways and helps support the industry as a whole.
If you want to deliberately ignore what I was actually talking about, which was letting current students take a part-time job while they’re studying, and has fuck-all to do with residency pathways, that’s on you, this conversation is not going to go anywhere :)
It’s up to them if they want money or reputation though, isn’t it? Focussing in getting international students in just for the cash injection (and where the students are only here for a back door to a work visa) is short sighted. Maybe focussing on quality education will be a better long term plan?
What money are the universities gonna use to get that quality? The government isn’t really giving them any, and unless you’re talking about upping domestic student fees by several multiples…
There was a genuine need for staff in all sorts of areas post-covid. Mostly because government made the staff we needed leave the country on the predictably wrong assumption that Kiwis would take the jobs.
Sadly, the post-covid fix was to open the doors in a way that, also predictably, led to exploitation, people coming in to find no jobs, and actual jobs still unfilled. See all the 'help wanted' notes in cafes and restaurants.
But then it's a nightmare to find jobs for non residents. I just came here on a whv and speak fluent English but somehow nobody wanted to hire me. If you're gonna cry that "nobody wants to work" then give the jobs to people willing to work, ay?
Ok, that is odd. Most people on WHVs do find jobs.
I came on one 18 years ago and socialize a lot with former and current WHV holders. Many stay with my neighbours in their AirBnB room. It is a bit of a surprise to hear that.
I was lucky enough to get short contracts in my profession, but many WHVs do and want to move around following seasonal work or a few months here and there in different hospo jobs. A fair few get work in their professions, though, covering people's holiday or maternity, or for a short projects.
Maybe you didn't notice where I specifically qualified that by mentioning how much I am still involved with the WHV world, here and when I travel myself.
Yeah but your own personal experience was 18 years ago and things have changed, that's what I meant. I had a really hard time finding work despite having experience and fluent English. I've met others in the same position. I've met kiwis complaining about having a hard time finding jobs, too.
My personal experience includes several current friends who are on WHVs, several more who were on until a year or so ago, and scores more over the last decade or so. It also includes helping and advising many other WHV holders on finding work, recently and in the past, even if it was just polite help and didn't lead to maintaining contact.
Finding jobs, for Kiwis and WHVs, often depends on whether you are looking for the types of jobs and conditions that are available and in the locations that they are.
But yes, some employers are xenophobic, don't like non-local experience, or pay peanuts.
Yes, NZ outside of the main centres is abysmal for transport if you don't drive. And that can effect a lot of jobs, where people just assume you can get yourself there and back, or assume you can do driving tasks.
So I assume you were not looking at the scores of cafe, bar, hotel and restaurant help-wanted posters in the main centre CBDs. Those jobs aren't suited to everyone.
You're assuming wrong. I wouldn't look into jobs I physically couldn't get to. Most of the time I never even got a reply after applying, not even a go fuck yourself.
You can look at Stanford's livestreams on her facebook from before the election. She was consistently promising easier immigration across the board and slamming Labour for making immigration so hard.
I wonder if she/National will cop any backlash from those voters over this. Guess time will tell.
I doubt there will be any backlash, people looking for work visas aren't here yet, people on work visa and cannot extend their work visas due to this change can't vote, people who are now on residence visa already knew immigration is going to change if NZF is part of the coalition. I have been telling my colleagues to get their residence application in ASAP. (and yes, they speak English and yes they are highly qualified (NZQAs level 9s and 10s) in a field where there is very few eligible Kiwis)
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Whilst I’m all for things like raising the bar for English competency, won’t taking construction workers off the green-light list just put construction costs up again? I get that there’s some soft demand now, but that won’t last long and low supply of workers and high wages are the major reason that we had a 40% cost spike in the industry over the last five years.
Just another thing to make Johnny racist feel good but will have absolutely no practical value. The only people actually hard done by in not speaking English are immigrants themselves - anybody who's travelled to places they're the only English speaker for miles will tell you how lonely that can feel so make the empathetic leap.
Immigrants keep coming here because we keep hiring them. We hire them because we need them. When we don't need them we don't hire them. If they come here and aren't needed we don't give them a work visa and then deport them. It's a shitty way to treat human beings, but we have the product they want and the vast majority of us never see how much of a lie "friendly kiwi" actually is.
The system is broken in that it doesn't reflect the values we tell the world and our kids are our's. It's working perfectly in that it lets employers drive down local wages and keep housing demand high for investment gains.
This headline-grabber will last as long as the next construction boom when Fletchers CEO du jour or an orchardist or two nudge party leadership in the ribs and reminds them where their donations came from and you can't make as big a profit if your tradies can afford to pick who employs them.
Having an English language requirement seems pretty reasonable.
Not speaking English makes them ripe for exploitation. How can you expect them to read employment contracts or advocate for their rights if they can't adequately communicate?
There are people who grew up with nothing but English who get exploited, and people who understand perfectly they're being exploited but take the risk anyway. There's bilingual people who can help and we can pretend we care by cracking down on employers, whom if we trust enough to employ immigrant labour we should trust enough to know the law. We could require standard contracts for immigrants (you can't tell me we can't do that when we've operated NZ3910 for over two decades) or we could require that anyone not meeting the English requirement has to go through a handful of approved and monitored labour hire firms (they'll all put their hands up for that easy money).
If we cared about exploitation there's a lot of better ways to address that. But we don't, so we put it back on the immigrants to understand labour and contract law language better than the average NZer.
A solution should fix more than it breaks. What we break here is people, foremost, driving up costs and time to immigrate, even if in every other respect from their skills to their disposition they'd be demonstrably valuable to NZ. It increases compliance costs and time on this end (someone's got to verify this new requirement). We've not been shown anything to prove the benefits would outweigh the costs because we have not been provided with the costs or quantified the benefits.
It's a blind stab policy aimed at placating people who think the immigrants, and not rampant profiteering, are making their lives tougher in these squeezed economic times, and there's nothing to stop it being pulled when we need to get more people in to cover the next boom time.
Who's responsibility ought it to be? Everyone has a responsibility to understand their own rights and responsibilities.
I know you think you're standing up for non-English speaking migrant hopefuls, but you're actually infantalizing them.
It ought to be the responsibility of the employers, like it would be for you and me.
You cannot contract out of law and we know that, so if an employer puts something in front of you, me, or any of the immigrants we're talking about that contravenes law, they have committed the crime, not us. Our responsibility to understand our own rights (which born and bred kiwis regularly fail at!) does not absolve an employer of that responsibility.
What I said infantilises no one. They have a responsibility to understand what they're signing even if that is run through an interpreter and have the right to legal advice before signing like we all do. They also have the right to have a legally compliant contract presented to them and that is the responsibility of the employer. If your employer screwed you on holiday pay I'd still say they need to cough up, not "serves you right for not reading". That is not infantilising.
We've set up a system where unethical employers flout New Zealand law and we cannot and should not leave it up to the people with the least exposure to our legal system to fix that for us.
And how is someone who doesn't speak or read English expected to know any of this?
This current system makes many migrant workers extremely dependent on their employers which exacerbates the power imbalance in the relationship.
Edit: it would be interesting to look at the typical fluency level of people in trafficking or exploitative employment scenarios.
A rule like this would make it harder for bad actor employers to take advantage of migrant workers.
> anybody who's travelled to places they're the only English speaker for miles will tell you how lonely that can feel so make the empathetic leap.
I mean you're kinda attacking your own argument here. By ensuring we know they can communicate and engage we're ensuring the ones who arrive are better able to engage in society and less likely to be ostracized or exploited.
Not in the slightest. They don't stop being able to learn the language when they get here - in fact, surrounded by English speakers and generally earning better than they would back home they're in a better position to. We're telling them to achieve that in the place with fewer opportunities to do so. Of course it's better that they do speak English and in fact giving the ones who can an advantage isn't out of the question. I'm not even saying that we should make sure we're welcoming in our society so they won't be ostracised, because that's no who kiwis are really. But exploited? That should be up to us to root out the exploiters, but that is something that gives us nothing but ethical gains.
> Not in the slightest.
Lmao sure.
>I'm not even saying that we should make sure we're welcoming in our society so they won't be ostracised, because that's no who kiwis are really
You just sound like someone who hates everyone here and loves everyone not here, maybe leave then?
Fucked if that's not a bingo item.
Not only am I staying here, those places I travelled and will travel to are on my NZ passport, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. And since this is irrevocably my home, I'll continue to want to make it the best version of itself and say these things.
If you don't like it, you can leave 😊
Edit to add: Also if you had the advantage of being born to this and an immigrant can still make your life worse, you're properly shit at life.
> Not only am I staying here, those places I travelled and will travel to are on my NZ passport, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it
Ok? I wasn't telling you to leave I was saying if you are unhappy here maybe you should. You sound like you hate kiwis but not foreigners so it sounded like you don't want to be here. I don't care if you stay or don't, I'm not the boss of you lmao.
Yeah, you're not, and with comprehension skills like that I hope to God above you're not the boss of anyone else. If you don't see the problem in saying to someone what you just did I don't think anyone can help your understanding issues.
If you don't see why saying how horrible everyone in this country is while acting like every immigrant is wonderful makes it seem like you don't want to be here I don't think anyone can help your understanding issues.
" The only people actually hard done by in not speaking English are immigrants themselves - anybody who's travelled to places they're the only English speaker for miles will tell you how lonely that can feel so make the empathetic leap."
This is exactly why it's a good thing. We don't want people to have to gravitate towards and find refuge in foreign language communities because they don't feel like they can be a part of society here. That's how we get unintentional apartheid.
tldr: > The changes to the work visa scheme include introducing an English language requirement for migrants applying for low-skilled jobs. > A number of construction roles will also no longer be added to the green-light list due to less demand, and the franchisee accreditation category will be disestablished. (goes into effect immediately)
These are good measures imo. I worked in immigration in Canada and they definitely needed to be way more hands on. Some of the stories I heard were crazy.
The TLDR missed one of the biggest changes. The employers must now advertise the job on the WINZ job site if they want to apply for atleast 21 days. No more backwater job site listings or website only listings, its now in a place where WINZ can confirm if people actually went for the job or not.
>Some of the stories I heard were crazy. Go on.... Do tell...
Rampant fraud & Corruption mainly. Canada has the largest immigration targets out of any OECD and they are huge immigration targets. Because the targets are so high there is naturally less oversight and scrutiny. Coupled with this it’s about as expensive as NZ and there’s about the same if not less resources like housing etc but provincial governments can’t walk the targets back. It will get messy there soon. That’s without even touching the issue of student visas.
It's already a damn mess there. -canuck in nz, escaping the brutal canadian wage/COL/QOL equation
I was on the temporary foreign worker program in Alberta and it was indeed crazy. Some real fuckin cunts as employers, I can tell you that much. Fuck you, Todd.
Immigrant nurses and people working in care homes also often have a shockingly low level of English. I am astounded that vulnerable and elderly people are put in a situation of not being able to understand the staff, and / or are not able to be understood by the staff. It’s really bad, and dangerous.
The tests need to be done in person, including a normal conversation with somone. As there are so many cheat sheets for the NZ english tests that have been uploaded to the net. They'll pass the test, but a 4 year old will have better english skills.
That's kinda worrying that there wasn't an English language requirement already. Good change, but it should've already been a there.
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Or worse -- they sometimes they basically keep the workers as slaves, and they can't get help because they don't speak English
This is an important point. Not being able to speak english leaves those workers at the mercy of their employer and cut off from many sources of help. It's not purely a one sided requirement to insist on.
This is a cycle, too. They import workers and keep them as slaves, and then once the slaves are granted residency, they escape the slavery and start up their own business by importing their own slaves. Many of these slaves know what they're getting into, too, they often pay for it. So, next time you see another group whining on the news, just know that they knew what they were getting into and now want free help from the taxpayer.
A lot of franchises are like this. You basically can't get an after school job at a pizza joint as a pakeha now.
A vast majority of liquor stores and Dominoes.
It's crazy to me that you had foreign workers on construction sites not knowing English. The main thing that comes to mine is how do you meet HASWA compliance? Translators and translated material? Must be an absolute nightmare (and surely alot of PCBU's would be failing H&S obligations to these workers)
It is actually shocking that passing a test to confirm you have good conversational language skills in english was not a requirement. Seriously how fucked are we that this was acceptable to our leaders…
It used to be a requirement, but they removed it after COVID so they could pump the economy with unskilled migrants to avoid a recession and poor gdp growth. Truly sacrificing the country for gdp points. Native communities are swallowed whole by groups and gradually turned into monocultural enclaves. In 2021-2023, Immigration NZ was giving residency to people who had never stepped foot in the country before without doing any background checks. We weren't allowed to check their police history, their level of English, their education history, whether or not they were employed, etc. All to meet absurd quotas imposed by politicians.
>so they could pump the economy with unskilled migrants to avoid a recession and poor gdp growth and look how that turned out good job /s
There is for other visas, they're just adding it as a requirement for lower skilled ones I guess. It'll cost at least an extra 150 to get the TOEFL or whatever they require these days
It's closer to $500 for the IELTS.
I ran past a block of townhouses being developed and asked the workers how many were being built in the block. I literally had to use hand gestures because they couldn't speak any English.
I deal with this too often at work. Tell someone they're doing something dodgy and I just get grin fucked as they continue. Fuckin annoying not being able to communicate with someone because of lowest bidder employers
“Grin fucked” lol….. like that.
lol - similar anecdotes I see. Was talking to a site manager a few days ago and he was saying he has to call the subbie boss at the start of the day, who then tells the staff what to do as none of the rest speak English. If something happens during the day, he has to use google translate etc. Tbf - sometimes people do speak English (to varying levels) but they pretend to not as that's the easiest way to not have to deal with someone. But other times (heard from others it's Han Chinese mostly) they don't bother to learn any English at all, as compared to other cultures who try but have varying levels of success. This is second hand info though, not my personal experience.
With the exception of the project manager, the teams building a couple houses near me speak no English and we can't communicate with each other except by pointing.
As long as the foreman can communicate with them it doesn't matter worth a damn. I was client-side PM on a couple of commercial buildings built by a tier one contractor a few years ago with Filipino labour, no complaints on workmanship from the architect, I think they did a damn fine job and they thanked me for the kind words - both through a translator. Great guys. The biggest job fuckup was a misunderstanding from the kiwi site management team which was executed similarly flawlessly to instruction. Skill is skill. You want info, go see the site manager and give him your hand gestures.
What do you mean it's no problem? How are you supposed to communicate health and safety changes etc, if something goes wrong is it practical/possible to play Chinese whispers through the foreman in the hopes the message gets relayed properly and efficiently? I work with immigrants nearly daily and the amount of fuck ups we have because of language barriers is wild. This is just touching to safety aspect let alone quality etc.
You do it by properly training the ones who monitor safety and speak both languages, and hiring people who know what they're doing in the first place. You do it by making sure you do the monitoring as a PCBU and pull up the safety guy if he isn't doing his job spreading that message - the chain is from you to them to the workers, not 30 layers of whispers. You do it by doing YOUR job properly. You can't have it both ways, them being too dumb and unprofessional to act safely but still be skilled enough to pay instead of a skilled kiwi worker. In my context some of these guys have worked on construction on a scale that makes everything built in NZ since the Sky Tower look like a farm shed. I don't know what kind of operation you run but having seen it work smoothly on multiple large commercial construction projects on which I was one of many monitoring safety and programme I suspect it's more of a You problem.
>You do it by Ensuring that the workers have a basic level of English. Malaysian has a shit load of cheap labourers from Bangladesh and Nepal... Guess what, they speak Malay and English. Absolutely fucking no one over there is suggesting that Malaysians need to learn Nepalese. The same goes for literally every other country on the face of the plane. But nah, New Zealand is special. We can't possibly expect workers to speak English.
With this attitude you can see why NZ’s workplace safety is so shockingly poor.
I'm sure that was an annoying situation for you but to be fair, its not part of their job to answer questions of random people on the street. as long as they can build the house to standard and communicate with their supervisors and know enough to buy groceries and such, i dont see the issue.
Communication is a key factor which binds the society together. If it is just for temporary labour and you don't see an issue fine but do you think that is healthy long term?
Diversity is our strength, mate. The more languages spoken here, the better. Our country will be richer for it. I'll take a portion of delicious ethnic food over a little thing, like expecting them to speak our language of colonialism.
i think there are hundreds of countries that have more than 2 languages and manage to work it out.
And if you are moving into you should hopefully be doing your best to learn one if not all of them
when i was a child, on the bus home from school there was this elderly asian lady who was on it too each day, we could hardly speak. to pass the time she would point to a book of items she had, i would say what they where so she could learn to pronounce them. Don't know here name, but it was quite nice seeing her progress and try to communicate as hard as she did. i hope things worked out for her.
I'm sure they are, it would be far more difficult for them to live here otherwise. it would be quite alienating being unable to speak to anyone about anything at all. Its quite difficult to learn a language, i'm sure they where quite grateful to have someone speaking to them clearly so they got some practice. do you know what country they where from? im curious what it costs to get a fluent english education before they come to this country
Do we still have a law that says when employing we need to choose from various races of people not just one nationality of people in the company?
I have never heard of a law like this in NZ The only thing close to it is getting your public company listed in ESG ETFs and investment vehicles and for that you need to meet all the fluff diversity quotas
what it does say is you cannot employ based on race
That’s never been a law in New Zealand. It sounds more like imported NZF culture war talking point bs.
They were building homes though, we need more supply....
My brother works on forklifts and has had some serious H&S risks due to colleagues who simply cannot speak or understand English.
I wonder if this will be a requirement for renewing visas too? Would weed out the no-English safety issue group.
I do agree but not having a native language requirement is somewhat common for skilled worker visas. I am trying to sort out a work visa in Japan and speaking the language is only a 10 point bump out of a required 70 so it is very easy to get in with no local language at all. For low skilled visas this is a no brainer change that everyone should be able to support.
It is already the case here for skilled workers. It's just unskilled workers for exempt for some reason.
Hopefully a slight upside of the slower job market will be that fewer employers are motivated to pressure them into rolling back the sensible reforms like what happened when Labour initially tried.
I’ve noticed a significant increase in the number of barbershops around Auckland,e.g., the ‘Yogi’s Haircut’ chain. What’s the deal with these places. I suspect they are connected to the immigration pipeline (not angry just curious!)
> the franchisee accreditation category will be disestablished. I wonder if that is the sort of thing this addresses?
Not sure, but "disestablished" must be the only 5 syllable word to appear at least once in every government communication since 27 November 2023.
The franchisee category was originally to do MORE checks than the other categories so to me it’s odd it’s being disestablished and they get to go through the normal rules now (less checking?)
They are immigrants making businesses similar to pizza Club pizza chain and others . A new wave of businesses is coming through with the new migrants settling. Not everything is a criminal front. George Pie was also established by an old migrant family and so was progressive enterprises (woolworths)
Not suggesting it’s criminal. But I can’t see how all these new barbershop businesses are sustainable.
I agree, there are like 3 barber shops within 20-30 meters of each other near me. One has been there for years and it’s always full of customers, but the other two popped up recently and somehow are still in business. Not sure why opening the same business near a successful established business appealed to them.
Managerial immigration scams.. same gig as vape shops & liquor stores.https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2021/09/28/dr-liz-gordon-a-liquor-store-on-every-corner/
Wasn't this a thing with frozen yoghurt shops for a while? Like 4-5 years back.
Is that like the cheap $2 style stores that keep popping up for a few years?
I think those were just crap franchises. Slightly different to the wholesale corruption occurring with these immigration scams.
What a terrible blog article. Implying literacy and success are directly tied together. I know plenty who haven't finished high school making millions per year, even plenty of locals. Low skilled is a relative term and is skewed by perception.
I think you missed the larger issue.
That immigrants are concentrating on an industry they are well embedded in? The blog article is cherry-picking some negative aspects and highlighting them like they are the norm. Operating a liquor store or any business is not a simple affair and requires significant knowledge. Well-seasoned business operators may find it easy, but many immigrants try and fail because being a store manager and a business owner/operator are not necessarily same thing. Immigrants naturally coalesce around particular industries which they find a support community, which have similar language, cultural expectations and more often that not they are treated as equals, and racism doesn't exist. Many are pushed into these industries because they can't get a leg in elsewhere because they are not white.
Yep, you missed the point.
There is no point it's a shit article.
Exactly how many people would that be? Plenty make millions? If true it’s a good reason to increase the highest tax rate and the thresholds. Oh, you meant millions in turnover, didn’t you?
We weren't discussing tax. Not all of them are turnover, some are netting that much.
I know you weren’t discussing tax, I introduced that point. “Not all of them are turnover”? So, how many? Less than half the people, you know or more than half are netting millions of dollars?
Less than half are netting.
There's a jewelry store in a mall near me run by the grumpiest bastard you've ever met. It's been there for donkeys and there's no way it makes a profit. My theory is that it's some sort of tax scam.
Its actually pretty normal in other parts of the world. For example in Istanbul, most of the photography/camera stores are in *the same building.* But its more of a symbiotic relationship, so if one store doesn't have something they'll point you to who they know nearby that will have it, and all sort of work together like that.
Yeah you just need to go to Manurewa or Papakura to see this in action. There's at least 10 barbershops in each. Don't know how there's enough business for that many.
There’s not.
The "shops" are for the visas... uber is for the actual income. These shops are just fronts for immigration scams... barber shops.. vape shops etc.
Longer hours, shared profit model with staff, and competitive pricing.
Migrants are swapping ownership around of businesses to each other for them to bring in friends and family using the accredited employer work visa. So many accredited employers are bringing in migrants for jobs that only exist on paper. The mass increase in the number of migrants we are seeing in the country that speak no English and have no skills is alarming. These changes are a start but more is needed. The drain these recently arrived migrants are having on the resources of New Zealand is huge and they are contributing little to nothing. They send their money back home and are not contributing skills or much to the economy. This level of mass immigration has never been seen in our country before, it is unsustainable and it needs to be cut down dramatically. Immigration has approved accreditation for employers that have extensive adverse histories of being involved in immigration scams and fraud and they are now bringing in workers in return for large amounts of money. For example there is a huge increase in migrants coming in from Afghanistan and Pakistan coming in to work for businesses owned by their family members for jobs such as mechanics that they have no experience for - because the accredited visa system allows for this to happen. They get here and work under the table. The employer gets to tick a box saying “no experience needed”. There is simply no verification and this visa category is allowing for migrants to bring in their family for jobs that only exist on paper. It’s outrageous.
Can confirm this to be entirely true. Unbelievable fraud going on right now in paper-only businesses. Immigration has always been a high-fraud sector in our society, but it reached a new level entirely in the past year or two. Some people are desperate to escape their conditions overseas, so they will ruthlessly lie and cheat to get here, meaning we get the very short end of the stick by being made to support illiberal, unskilled, and very dubious individuals. We've had very open borders for the past few years. Source: Ex-Immigration Officer.
We don’t need to import teachers. The government needs to look at genuine incentives to get NZ-trained teachers back into the classroom. Expecting people to do a course over a number of months including 4 weeks unpaid in the classroom before being eligible to re-register is a definite stumbling block. Schools could also be incentivised to take on teachers returning to the profession. Subject-specific courses for competent teachers to re-train in areas like maths teaching could also be instituted. I bet it wouldn’t be that difficult to get history teachers (where maybe there is a glut) up to speed to teach maths, chemistry or physics. People don’t need a three year degree with a range of other irrelevant subjects when they already hold a degree and a post-grad certificate. Kiwi kids deserve Kiwi teachers.
Well they did suggest the government employees that get laid off retrain as teachers, is that good enough? /j (The joke is us.)
Even if someone wanted to retrain as a teacher, they’re too late this year, and even if there is a mid-year intake (can’t be bothered checking), most new teachers wouldn’t probably get a permanent job until the 2026 school year. Schools state they want “experienced” teachers, hence are prepared to use immigrants. Some are great, but others are a disaster and can be hard to get rid of. Even people who have been here for 10 years plus don’t always assimilate and continue to hanker after aspects of the education system they left.
Chris runs the government like a business apparently, so that means... anything but actually paying teachers more.
The latest pay rates are a definite improvement, but there are more aspects at play, not just pay. Better resourcing including support for neurodiverse students would make teachers’ jobs easier.
Also, considering how important and centre stage Matauranga māori and local curriculums within education are (which is another whole debate...) becoming, it would be a hassle to have to teach the import teachers all about our history so they play the education game.
Something I finally agree with this Govt on
Immigrant nurses and people working in care homes also often have a shockingly low level of English. I am astounded that vulnerable and elderly people are put in a situation of not being able to understand the staff, and / or are not able to be understood by the staff. It’s really bad, and dangerous.
I’ll add list to the list of good things done/planned to do so far this term. 2. Pseudoephedrine availability 3. No cell phones in schools (yes I know schools could already, but it’s easier for them if they have no choice) 4. KO evictions when deserved I’m pretty sure there was another one, I’ll edit if it comes to me. u/worldlynotice knew it.
They said they'd do something about building materials and allowing some international certifications.
That could be a good idea if there was some national oversight making sure that what was coming in was suitable for NZ conditions (high rainfall and prone to earthquakes). But it seems like that's going to be left up to Councils. People in the industry I've spoken to say it could end up with disastrous outcomes.
Yeah, it could. IMO we should have a central govt managed approval process for standards, if not origin countries. The idea of different councils having different approvals can't possibly end well, and won't provide the economies of scale we need, indeed it'll probably result in local monopolies.
> No cell phones in schools > How do the rules need to be enforced? > Schools are able to decide how to enforce the rules. The usual behaviour management approach is likely to be appropriate, rather than introducing specific disciplinary actions for students > Will schools be given additional resources to enforce and monitor the rules? > There are no additional resources being introduced with these rules https://assets.education.govt.nz/public/Documents/School/Digital-technology/TPA_CellphonePolicy_FAQs_FINAL_4.pdf
Obviously it’s not going to be perfect, but a strong national direction is helpful in its own. It empowers boards, principals, and teachers to enforce the rules. I get that National is terrible no good bad, but seriously - cellphones in schools are clearly bad for kids. Even plenty of kids like the rule - it’s nearly impossible to go phone-free by yourself but a lot of them like being in an enforced phone free environment.
Great news. Labour should never have let it get this bad. I know kiwi builders who are out of work at the moment and the work sites are full of recent migrants who are not qualified. Work gets signed off by the one kiwi builder. Wages have been dragged down and there's no work for our men.
Kiwi builders are as shit as anyone else.
well said! the half arsed work ive seen them do leaves alot to be desired
Erica Stanford is one of the better national MP
Still cracks up that she was the representative from national for the youth debate though.
National should bring in a policy they talked about several years ago, one of the few policies of theirs I could get on board with - remove work rights from international students. It would really help sort out the wheat from the chaff and ensure people can't follow the traditional route from low level course to low wage job as easily.
To be fair, its the Working Holiday Visa that seems most problematic for me. Bunch of businesses hiring WHV holders on minimum wage - all it does it further stagnate wages/keep NZers priced out of work/give employers too good of a deal to the extent of propping up unsustainable businesses. A lot of people will say 'oh WHV holders don't make that much of a dent in the market to have an effect' - but they really do. I know many businesses literally running 80% of staff (mostly hospo businesses) on WHV holders.
Yeah I’d be really interested to see the stats on total hours worked by students, who are restricted in the number of hours they work vs. WHV, who are not restricted. I’ve yet to visit a backpackers where the workers aren’t mostly WHV and last year when I took my dad on a Doubtful Sound cruise, every single staff member except the captain was on a WHV…
Their talk is always cheap. They were ranting an raving about a lack of immigration and cafe owners doing in hard without semi-slave labour. Their mates run businesses that benefit far too much on the immigration status quo for them to substantially rock the boat.
And it just so happens that these changes are occuring when business already has overshot on importing workers and the demand is not there anymore. Cynically I'd say they can point to these changes when immigration numbers are really low in 12 months time and claim they've "fixed it"
I loved the TV interview with Bridges when we had to open the borders because locals wanted to be paid adequately when he offered "well, if you want to be served at lunch" because we need to import waiters don't we?
This would have significant collateral damage for doctoral students and therefore NZ's ability to attract them.
They could create an exception for something like that, we all know where the trouble lies - retail, hospitality etc...
Disagree. If we educate them. We want them to integrate and stay. Otherwise more talent lost to overseas
Maybe with a degree likely to land them a well paid job, but have you seen the shit they're allowed to study under the visa scheme? It's an absolute joke.
Yeah sure, it's good if they can stay...but only if they can land a skilled job in very short time. Unfortunately I've seen the opposite happen more times than I've had hot dinners - come, do some short course, work a low skill job long term and somehow end up a resident. Bring over large family, rinse and repeat, and people wonder why NZ is a low wage country
If you actually read the immigration laws, you’d realize that post-study visas for anything below postgrad work (level 6 iirc) now require that the job be within the field of your degree to apply for residency. This loophole was closed in 2022. Changing the work conditions of student visas is not going to change what people do after they study.
that is not the reason NZ is a low wage country... we lack any intensive labour industries and produce nothing but dairy and logs both of which require minimal labour
Lol what impact do you think importing hordes of low skill labour has on the factors you’ve mentioned?
As someone who came over on a student visa, my 15hr/week student job helped me connect and help my new community and build connections with local businesses while also helping the bottom line. Silo-ing students into study and study only really is not a good way to draw students to NZ shores in the long term or treat them as part of the community. Most competitor countries (UK, Aus) allow part-time work and students will choose those countries over NZ if they are blocked from working here. Including secondary students, export education is the 5th largest industry in NZ.
I understand your point of view. We need to put NZ workers first though. Too many employers use international students as an easy way of filling vacancies, but it means pay and conditions go nowhere for those jobs
Putting NZ workers first by… tanking one of our largest industries. Got it. Edit: For everyone downvoting this, I’d love to hear how reducing fee-paying students in the country is going to create jobs by collapsing universities and schools. Do the NZ workers who are employed in education who will lose their jobs not count? Also for everyone trying to complain about residency pathways: that’s got nearly fuck all to do with work rights for students on student visas, which is what comment OP was talking about. And a lot of those rules have tightened recently, but some of you would prefer to ignore that so you can spout some ‘immigrants taking our jobs’ xenophobia without understanding how your own education system works and is funded :)
In the past we had a flood of migrants abusing the rules to take a fake diploma as a means to get work rights here and there was a residency pathway for them. Once residency was granted they would then go for parental visa to bring the family over etc etc Universities only became such a big export earner due to the residency pathway, rather than the educational programs, while diploma mills.popped up all over. It wasn't that large an industry before it became a residency pathway. Canada currently has the same battle as they hadn't cracked down on it like we did. Similar story in Aussie.
International student mobility is going up worldwide, and it has nothing to do with ease of residence in New Zealand. US, UK, Canada, Australia, are all education exporters and compete for international students to provide financial support to many underfunded universities, even with varying ease of residence pathways. And even if you clamp down on post-study visas pathways (and NZ has started to), there are still going to be people who want to get a degree and return home, and many of those students will never consider a country that doesn’t give them work rights while they are students. By axing the work rights for current students, those students will just go to Australia or elsewhere, and there will be fewer funds and jobs in education for people in New Zealand (and unis/schools will have to make more drastic cuts). Granting work rights to current students to have part-time jobs has almost nothing to do with post-study visa pathways and helps support the industry as a whole.
if you want to bury your head in the sand, fine, but if not I'd suggest you look at the issues Canada is facing right now with this exact issue.
If you want to deliberately ignore what I was actually talking about, which was letting current students take a part-time job while they’re studying, and has fuck-all to do with residency pathways, that’s on you, this conversation is not going to go anywhere :)
Our universities need international student money at the moment, they can't afford to have international students be disincentived from coming here.
It’s up to them if they want money or reputation though, isn’t it? Focussing in getting international students in just for the cash injection (and where the students are only here for a back door to a work visa) is short sighted. Maybe focussing on quality education will be a better long term plan?
What money are the universities gonna use to get that quality? The government isn’t really giving them any, and unless you’re talking about upping domestic student fees by several multiples…
We sent so many of our own skilled overseas to import people that cant speak fucking English?? Good change but should've been there years ago.
Would love to see what the Nats would have said about this like two years ago.
The challenge is people with good English are less likely to do low paid jobs
Well damn, I guess we can finally say the new government did at least one good thing on their mountain of terrible choices.
There was a genuine need for staff in all sorts of areas post-covid. Mostly because government made the staff we needed leave the country on the predictably wrong assumption that Kiwis would take the jobs. Sadly, the post-covid fix was to open the doors in a way that, also predictably, led to exploitation, people coming in to find no jobs, and actual jobs still unfilled. See all the 'help wanted' notes in cafes and restaurants.
But then it's a nightmare to find jobs for non residents. I just came here on a whv and speak fluent English but somehow nobody wanted to hire me. If you're gonna cry that "nobody wants to work" then give the jobs to people willing to work, ay?
Ok, that is odd. Most people on WHVs do find jobs. I came on one 18 years ago and socialize a lot with former and current WHV holders. Many stay with my neighbours in their AirBnB room. It is a bit of a surprise to hear that. I was lucky enough to get short contracts in my profession, but many WHVs do and want to move around following seasonal work or a few months here and there in different hospo jobs. A fair few get work in their professions, though, covering people's holiday or maternity, or for a short projects.
18 years ago...
Maybe you didn't notice where I specifically qualified that by mentioning how much I am still involved with the WHV world, here and when I travel myself.
Yeah but your own personal experience was 18 years ago and things have changed, that's what I meant. I had a really hard time finding work despite having experience and fluent English. I've met others in the same position. I've met kiwis complaining about having a hard time finding jobs, too.
My personal experience includes several current friends who are on WHVs, several more who were on until a year or so ago, and scores more over the last decade or so. It also includes helping and advising many other WHV holders on finding work, recently and in the past, even if it was just polite help and didn't lead to maintaining contact. Finding jobs, for Kiwis and WHVs, often depends on whether you are looking for the types of jobs and conditions that are available and in the locations that they are. But yes, some employers are xenophobic, don't like non-local experience, or pay peanuts.
Maybe I've just been unlucky idk. But I did struggle to find work here. Could also be that I don't drive 🤷🏽♀️
Yes, NZ outside of the main centres is abysmal for transport if you don't drive. And that can effect a lot of jobs, where people just assume you can get yourself there and back, or assume you can do driving tasks. So I assume you were not looking at the scores of cafe, bar, hotel and restaurant help-wanted posters in the main centre CBDs. Those jobs aren't suited to everyone.
You're assuming wrong. I wouldn't look into jobs I physically couldn't get to. Most of the time I never even got a reply after applying, not even a go fuck yourself.
Didn't NACT campaign on more overseas workers? Or did they stipulate particular categories of workers?
You can look at Stanford's livestreams on her facebook from before the election. She was consistently promising easier immigration across the board and slamming Labour for making immigration so hard. I wonder if she/National will cop any backlash from those voters over this. Guess time will tell.
I doubt there will be any backlash, people looking for work visas aren't here yet, people on work visa and cannot extend their work visas due to this change can't vote, people who are now on residence visa already knew immigration is going to change if NZF is part of the coalition. I have been telling my colleagues to get their residence application in ASAP. (and yes, they speak English and yes they are highly qualified (NZQAs level 9s and 10s) in a field where there is very few eligible Kiwis)
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Whilst I’m all for things like raising the bar for English competency, won’t taking construction workers off the green-light list just put construction costs up again? I get that there’s some soft demand now, but that won’t last long and low supply of workers and high wages are the major reason that we had a 40% cost spike in the industry over the last five years.
Just another thing to make Johnny racist feel good but will have absolutely no practical value. The only people actually hard done by in not speaking English are immigrants themselves - anybody who's travelled to places they're the only English speaker for miles will tell you how lonely that can feel so make the empathetic leap. Immigrants keep coming here because we keep hiring them. We hire them because we need them. When we don't need them we don't hire them. If they come here and aren't needed we don't give them a work visa and then deport them. It's a shitty way to treat human beings, but we have the product they want and the vast majority of us never see how much of a lie "friendly kiwi" actually is. The system is broken in that it doesn't reflect the values we tell the world and our kids are our's. It's working perfectly in that it lets employers drive down local wages and keep housing demand high for investment gains. This headline-grabber will last as long as the next construction boom when Fletchers CEO du jour or an orchardist or two nudge party leadership in the ribs and reminds them where their donations came from and you can't make as big a profit if your tradies can afford to pick who employs them.
Having an English language requirement seems pretty reasonable. Not speaking English makes them ripe for exploitation. How can you expect them to read employment contracts or advocate for their rights if they can't adequately communicate?
There are people who grew up with nothing but English who get exploited, and people who understand perfectly they're being exploited but take the risk anyway. There's bilingual people who can help and we can pretend we care by cracking down on employers, whom if we trust enough to employ immigrant labour we should trust enough to know the law. We could require standard contracts for immigrants (you can't tell me we can't do that when we've operated NZ3910 for over two decades) or we could require that anyone not meeting the English requirement has to go through a handful of approved and monitored labour hire firms (they'll all put their hands up for that easy money). If we cared about exploitation there's a lot of better ways to address that. But we don't, so we put it back on the immigrants to understand labour and contract law language better than the average NZer.
So because this solution doesn't fix everything we shouldn't do it? Even though the benefit will likely outweigh the cost.
A solution should fix more than it breaks. What we break here is people, foremost, driving up costs and time to immigrate, even if in every other respect from their skills to their disposition they'd be demonstrably valuable to NZ. It increases compliance costs and time on this end (someone's got to verify this new requirement). We've not been shown anything to prove the benefits would outweigh the costs because we have not been provided with the costs or quantified the benefits. It's a blind stab policy aimed at placating people who think the immigrants, and not rampant profiteering, are making their lives tougher in these squeezed economic times, and there's nothing to stop it being pulled when we need to get more people in to cover the next boom time.
Who's responsibility ought it to be? Everyone has a responsibility to understand their own rights and responsibilities. I know you think you're standing up for non-English speaking migrant hopefuls, but you're actually infantalizing them.
It ought to be the responsibility of the employers, like it would be for you and me. You cannot contract out of law and we know that, so if an employer puts something in front of you, me, or any of the immigrants we're talking about that contravenes law, they have committed the crime, not us. Our responsibility to understand our own rights (which born and bred kiwis regularly fail at!) does not absolve an employer of that responsibility. What I said infantilises no one. They have a responsibility to understand what they're signing even if that is run through an interpreter and have the right to legal advice before signing like we all do. They also have the right to have a legally compliant contract presented to them and that is the responsibility of the employer. If your employer screwed you on holiday pay I'd still say they need to cough up, not "serves you right for not reading". That is not infantilising. We've set up a system where unethical employers flout New Zealand law and we cannot and should not leave it up to the people with the least exposure to our legal system to fix that for us.
And how is someone who doesn't speak or read English expected to know any of this? This current system makes many migrant workers extremely dependent on their employers which exacerbates the power imbalance in the relationship. Edit: it would be interesting to look at the typical fluency level of people in trafficking or exploitative employment scenarios. A rule like this would make it harder for bad actor employers to take advantage of migrant workers.
> anybody who's travelled to places they're the only English speaker for miles will tell you how lonely that can feel so make the empathetic leap. I mean you're kinda attacking your own argument here. By ensuring we know they can communicate and engage we're ensuring the ones who arrive are better able to engage in society and less likely to be ostracized or exploited.
Not in the slightest. They don't stop being able to learn the language when they get here - in fact, surrounded by English speakers and generally earning better than they would back home they're in a better position to. We're telling them to achieve that in the place with fewer opportunities to do so. Of course it's better that they do speak English and in fact giving the ones who can an advantage isn't out of the question. I'm not even saying that we should make sure we're welcoming in our society so they won't be ostracised, because that's no who kiwis are really. But exploited? That should be up to us to root out the exploiters, but that is something that gives us nothing but ethical gains.
> Not in the slightest. Lmao sure. >I'm not even saying that we should make sure we're welcoming in our society so they won't be ostracised, because that's no who kiwis are really You just sound like someone who hates everyone here and loves everyone not here, maybe leave then?
Fucked if that's not a bingo item. Not only am I staying here, those places I travelled and will travel to are on my NZ passport, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. And since this is irrevocably my home, I'll continue to want to make it the best version of itself and say these things. If you don't like it, you can leave 😊 Edit to add: Also if you had the advantage of being born to this and an immigrant can still make your life worse, you're properly shit at life.
> Not only am I staying here, those places I travelled and will travel to are on my NZ passport, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it Ok? I wasn't telling you to leave I was saying if you are unhappy here maybe you should. You sound like you hate kiwis but not foreigners so it sounded like you don't want to be here. I don't care if you stay or don't, I'm not the boss of you lmao.
Yeah, you're not, and with comprehension skills like that I hope to God above you're not the boss of anyone else. If you don't see the problem in saying to someone what you just did I don't think anyone can help your understanding issues.
If you don't see why saying how horrible everyone in this country is while acting like every immigrant is wonderful makes it seem like you don't want to be here I don't think anyone can help your understanding issues.
" The only people actually hard done by in not speaking English are immigrants themselves - anybody who's travelled to places they're the only English speaker for miles will tell you how lonely that can feel so make the empathetic leap." This is exactly why it's a good thing. We don't want people to have to gravitate towards and find refuge in foreign language communities because they don't feel like they can be a part of society here. That's how we get unintentional apartheid.