The government’s new Parents’ residence policy is currently hugely criticized. The government is quite right if they wanted to develop an immigration policy which is meant to favor New Zealand. But this newly introduced parents residence policy is apparently in no way in favor of the country.
At one side, the high salary threshold as set for sponsorship would discourage the highly skilled migrants to select NZ in the future to migrate rather they would prefer to move towards the country like Canada and Australia who have more to offer for their parents.
On the other hand, already settled skilled migrants in NZ would also start thinking to relocate to other countries and NZ would definitely struggle in next few years to retain them.
This predictable negative outcome can be avoided if the government devised a policy which is WIN/WIN for both NZ and for the skilled migrants. This can be possible if some long term temporary visas should also be introduced alongside for the migrants’ parents that I believe would be useful to mitigate the negative impact of this new parents residence policy.
The objective of the proposed long term temporary parents visa policy should be, to not only retain the skilled migrants in the country but also to keep NZ an attractive destination for highly skilled migrants in the future.
To achieve the purpose, Australia and Canada’s types long term temporary parents’ visas can be taken as examples. The parents of the below categories of the migrants can be facilitated with such types of long term temporary visas:
- Those who are residents for 7+ years in New Zealand
- Those who are working under current LTSSL occupation
- Those who can provide long term medical insurance for their parents