The minister of immigration is rejecting concerns proposed changes to the law will unfairly target some of the country's most vulnerable migrants and open the door to US-style immigration raids.
The Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill is essentially an amendment to the Immigration Act. The government is calling it "changes to ensure we have the right, proportionate tools to manage immigration risks", but some say it is disproportionate, at least in parts.
Simon Laurent, chair of Association for Migration and Investment, has concerns about the changes.
"For example, taking away the ability for people who are claiming refugee status to switch to another visa if they withdraw their claim… we see this all the time," he told Morning Report on Wednesday.
"... We're able to say now, 'Well, look, drop it. Move on to something worthwhile. You've got a partner, you've got a job offer or something like that. Switch it over and go and do that. And we do this frequently. Now we won't be able to do that if this bill passes, so it's essentially limiting down the chance for people to straighten out their lives….
"They're essentially being treated as being bad players rather than people who may have made a change in life choice, and they're facing a fairly drastic alternative, which is, well, 'You've just got to leave.'"
He also said an increased number of cases would need ministerial oversight under the changes, increasing backlogs.
Laurent believed violent US-style crackdowns of the kind seen in recent months in places like Minneapolis were unlikely here.
"But the ability, for example, to be able to request information from people on the suspicion that they may be liable for deportation opens the door to quite a lot of speculative fishing around for people, which is the sort of thing we did see happening in the States."
Submissions on the bill closed on Wednesday.
Immigration Minister Erica Stanford told Morning Report on Thursday the government was "trying to take a really balanced approach and close some known gaps" and it was a "very, very small technical change" to a power that immigration officers already had.
"It's just that it's never used because the test is too high," she explained.
"So at the moment, it says to an immigration officer, if they're in the course of their regular duties and they are at an address to pick up somebody else or interview somebody else, and they have reasonable reason to suspect that someone is liable for deportation, then they can ask them for documents. And that's never used. Never, ever used."
The new test would reduce the threshold to "maybe" liable, Stanford said.
"Where an immigration officer is in the case of their everyday duties there to see someone else and they notice somebody who is running away, hiding under a bed or acting [suspiciously]... we're just changing a couple of words to allow them to do that. And I think most reasonable New Zealanders would expect that an immigration officer would be able to do that."
Another concern for Laurent was the plan to enable immigration to serve deportation liability notices by e-mail only if they can't find someone's address.
"If you put those two pieces together, then you essentially create a situation whereby someone who's been in the country for a few years, has moved house, switched e-mail addresses, will never know that they've got a right of appeal.
"So this is a way of those people who've been around for a few years, effectively being denied their rights."
Stanford said any concerns, including those brought up by opposition politicians such as Labour's Phil Twyford and the Greens' Ricardo Menéndez March (who called it a "a Trump administration-inspired, MAGA-loving piece of legislation that deserves to be put in the bin") would be considered during select committee, and could result in further tweaks.
Stanford said US-style raids would require a completely different law change, and were not being considered.
"This does not mean that the immigration officials will be able to walk around and randomly say to people, you know, 'I'd like to see your documentation, please.' That is not possible here and there would have to be further changes to legislation in order for them to do that.
"So this whole 'slippery slope' argument is mitigated by the fact that it would have to go through a very similar process like we're going through now and people will be able to have their say."
As for concerns Pacific people would be targeted by the change, Stanford said it was "a statement of fact and that there are more Pacific overstayers proportionately than there are others" but there was nothing in the bill which would target anyone based on their ethnicity.
"It doesn't allow an officer - and the protections are there - to walk into a work site, for example, and just start picking on people because they think that they might be illegal."
This story was first published on rnz.co.nz |  |
