Families desperate to see their relatives say the border reopening has not brought an end to their wait.
They say there is no priority being given to families, and a promised speeding up of visitor visas for relatives and tourists has not materialised.
A couple waiting to be reunited say families and relationships should be prioritised over tourists. Photo: Supplied
By last Thursday, 1000 visas had been issued out of 19,000 applications – 11,000 were waiting in the queue to be processed and passports had not been received for another 7000.
“While the rest of New Zealand is celebrating the ‘full reopening’ of the borders, I, a New Zealand resident, am being forced into another painful separation from my partner in Canada,” a woman living in Wanaka said.
“It seems a bit crazy that somebody with personal ties to New Zealand is having to wait that long, where some miscellaneous person who just on a whim decides to go on holiday can can get online and apply and have no issue.”
They have been waiting since May for a partnership visitor visa to come through in time for her partner to fly back to New Zealand with her last week.
As a Canadian, he could have been one of the 100,000 visitors to fly in visa-free last month, but the couple have been told he has to apply for a partnership visitor visa. That category opened before tourist visas, but so far has taken three months.
An Auckland woman waiting for her parents to visit from South Africa said not just relatives but also the tourism industry would be suffering from the visa delays on general visitor visas, which reopened on 1 August.
The immigration (INZ) call centre told her it will take three months to get her parents’ visa, despite the INZ website saying half of all visitor visas get turned around in five days and that longer wait times would be reduced.
The INZ website shows the waiting time for visitor visas in autumn, and says it expected new applications when the border reopened to be much faster. Photo: Immigration New Zealand
“The minute it opened, my parents went online and applied,” she said.
“We thought it would be pretty straightforward because they have been granted a visa before, pre-Covid. The first opportunity they can come spend some time with us, they are ready to just drop everything in their life and be here.
“We’re not the only people in that situation – the Facebook groups are flooded with people asking ‘has anyone got a visa yet?’.
“It’s been an emotional roller coaster because we’ve been so excited for things to open and now the uncertainty continues. I am one of the thousands of immigrants who can’t wait for the grandparents to come visit us here in NZ.
“The government’s done their bit to open it [the border] but no-one’s going ‘hey actually, no one is visiting’ – because people haven’t actually got their visas yet.
“Outside of families who are still just devastated that they haven’t seen one another and can’t wait for that, what does that mean for tourism for people coming from non-visa waiver countries?”
Despite having previously used their passports to travel to New Zealand and reverifying them the following day, INZ only confirmed it had them 10 days later.
The long wait on hold for call centre updates. Photo: Supplied
“You’ve got people who have been on hold for five hours for the call centre – that’s just madness, especially if you’re phoning from abroad,” she said.
“My dad phoned yesterday, he held on the phone for more than two hours. It cost him about $100 just to have that call – only for the call to drop. And the lady on the call answered the call at home, said to him if she lost him she’d call him back. The call dropped and she never called him back so that was a huge waste for him and obviously he’s not the only one calling from outside of New Zealand.”
Figures show a similar number of visitor visa applications since 1 August to a normal pre-Covid year.
INZ said 1080 visas had been granted as of last Thursday and call wait times averaged 47 minutes.
Erica Stanford. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
National Party immigration spokesperson Erica Stanford said she believed the wait time for the dedicated immigration adviser line was being included in that figure.
“I’ve never heard of anyone getting hold of Immigration New Zealand in under two hours. In fact, people send me screenshots for three, four hours and then they get disconnected so it doesn’t marry up with the figures we get from Immigration New Zealand.
“The licensed immigration agents have a much shorter wait time. So potentially they’re including that number in the figures as well to make it seem a bit better.
“It is incredibly frustrating for migrants, who have often been asked for information that they’ve already provided, or their application is stuck in the system and [they] haven’t heard anything and they’re just trying to get information.”
Glitches in the new online system had also not been ironed out, she said.
“It was supposed to make processing much faster because it was automated but unfortunately it’s not able to recognise when a passport has already been viewed by an office and authenticated in the past and therefore doesn’t need to be authenticated again. So I think it’s why you’ve got all of these thousands of requests for a passport.
“We obviously want tourists to come to New Zealand; we’ve said we’re open to the world. It’s looking like weeks and weeks to get visitor visas processed. We really needed to hit the ground running when it came to this and unfortunately it looks like we’ve hit the ground and stumbled somewhat.”
Split families were still waiting, she added. “It was very frustrating that the very last cab off the rank was reuniting families in terms of our border reopening. It doesn’t say much about us as a country when the very last people that we allowed in through our border were those families who haven’t seen each other for nearly three years.”
Visas were being processed in the order they were received and there were no plans to prioritise applications for those who have family in New Zealand, said general manager of border and visa operations, Nicola Hogg.
*The two New Zealand residents asked to be anonymous while the applications for their parents and partner remain ongoing.
Copyright © 2022, Radio New Zealand
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