Immigration Woes

Continuing in our series of Migrant Stories: first hand accounts of migrant life in New Zealand, taken from locations around the net.

Today’s story is from a migrant on the British expat web forum. In it the poster tells of how they cannot work,  how they have had to sell their home and car and their child can’t even attend school all because their temporary visa ran out and cock-ups have prevented them from getting PR granted in time.

“Hi guys.

We are having some major immigration woes at the moment. As I write this my wife sits in tears due to the frustration of it all.

I won’t bore you with all the details but in brief : as our temporary residency was coming to an end, we applied for permanent residency. We applied in time, passed all the relevant police checks and medicals, and my wife qualifies under the essential workers list so as far as we were concerned it was just a case of waiting to hear from immigration before the dead line of January 10th.

Since then it’s been an absolute nightmare, we have had nothing but wrong advice, incompetence and shear bloody mindedness. I can only give you my word that we have followed procedure at each and every turn but despite our best efforts we are now in a position where, technically, my daughter cannot attend school, I cannot work and we cannot even get a date from immigration as to when we will hear if we are allowed to stay here.

As a (worst case scenario) precaution we have had to sell our lovely house and one of our cars in case we are uplifted at any moment. Their advice? we can do nothing but wait and their position on the predicament we find our selves in due to their incompetence? tough luck it’s not our problem.

The question then kind people is, is there anything at all we can do, does anyone know where we can get help to fight against the appalling treatment we have received at the hands of the untouchable Immigration department. We are desperate to resolve this as we so want to stay and we have done nothing wrong and we qualify on all counts, frankly we are at a loss as to what to do short of hurling abuse down the phone and I’m darn sure that wouldn’t help our cause.

Please help in anyway you can with advice, running up a blind alley and banging your head against a brick wall roughly equates to where we are at.”