Family Sponsorship: The 2 year wait Update.
Finally we got around to sitting down with an excel spreadsheet, calculator, enormous amounts of coffee and a chocolate bar or two and crunched some numbers on Family Sponsorship.
The problem is that people are being told there is an 18 months to 2-year wait before a case officer is assigned. INZ have even put a news item up on their website about it.
Timeframes for Family Capped Applications
Thursday, 26 November 2009
New Zealand carefully plans allocation of permanent residence places.
The Government’s annual residence programme gives priority to skilled and business migrants and the partners of returning New Zealanders. The family capped stream (which comprises parent, adult child and sibling residence cases) is currently allocated 4,950 – 5500 places per year. Demand for these places currently exceeds supply.
There is a current waiting time of 18 -24 months for a place to become available within the cap. In practice this means that an application will usually take from 18-24 months from the time of lodgement to be allocated to a case officer for assessment.
On top of the three years you have to wait before you are eligible to sponsor your parents (and then even longer if like us you have a sibling you want to sponsor) it is becoming incredibly traumatic for people.
So – we have tried to see what is going on by looking at the fortnightly stats that come out with the Skilled Migrant EOI selections. Although this has nothing to do with Family Sponsorship – at the bottom of each PDF file is a little box which gives the numbers of applications currently being looked at. The numbers cumulate over the year, and reset in July – the end of the year for Immigration purposes.
This is total and utter bollocks. The queue is simply because the staff at INZ have been told to hold back applications until they get to the head of a “queue” in applications. It has absolutely nothing to do with the number of spaces available. The number of spaces is renewed each year. Are INZ suggesting that we should go and kill a couple of NZers to free us some space for our families.???
I think I may have been wrong!
I think what I actually should have said is thati t is a piss-poor attempt at an explanation because it make no sense whatsoever. But having actually looked at the numbers – I think I know what they were trying to say – but failed miserably.
So – what do the numbers really tell us?
1. By the end of January, 2454 of the maximum 5500 spaces have been allocated.
2. This leaves 3046 spaces that can be filled by the end of June (55% of the allocation is free with 5 months to go.)
3. INZ are processing on average 224 people each fortnight. (Starting with 12.8.09 -declines + acceptances)
4. Even with this being done – the number of people in the queue is increasing by an average of 75 people every fortnight.
5. Basically this means that there are about 300 people applying, and 224 decisions being made.
6. Only one fortnight have INZ actually managed to process more applications than came in.
7. Most depressingly – despite the huge overdemand for spaces – INZ let in just 41 people over its minimum allowance for this policy last year.
8. They could have allowed an extra 509 people to join thier families last year – those spaces are gone – they do not get rolled over into the next year allocation.
Now – how can you work out when you family should (very roughly speaking) get processed and get a decision?
See the highlighted line above? My Brother is one of those 131 people that entered the queue.
1. You need to know how many people were in the queue ahead of your family. (9897)
2. Take away how many applications people have been processed since then. (People declined + people accepted = 2459)
3. Which leaves 7438 people that need to be processed before my brother.
4. Work out how many fortnights that should take if they process an average of 224 people a fortnight (33 fortnights)
5. Get a strong drink.
Basically this means that from now – all else going well – we can expect to get a decision on my brothers application in 66 weeks, or about 15 months time. And he has already been in the queue for 6 months – giving a total of 21 months for the process.
And it’s just going to get worse.
The fact is that INZ are right in saying that more people are applying than there are spaces. They just utterly screwed up the explanation and have left people dazed and scared. There are “spaces”. There’s 3046 left this year! But there are 10,000 people waiting for them, and more lining up every week. Even if no one put in an application for the next 12 months, and INZ accepted everyone in the queue – that still accounts for 2 full years worth of spaces sitting in the pile right now.
You are not actually waiting for a space to become available as such – but you do have to wait in line till INZ have decided on all the cases that went in before you. In some ways I think what INZ have done in forcing the applications to be handled in turn is making the situation fairer -it’s not then a lottery about which branch you use or which case officer works faster. I just think they need to be more honest and clear about what is happening and why. (They can pay me to write their news items for a start!).
Please note: we have no way of knowing if this is the true reflection of what is happening. Please feel free to have a go at working through the numbers – and tell me if you get a different answer. The only way to know for definite what is going on would be to have an inside track at INZ – and we don’t. Working through the publicly available info probably won’t tell us everything – but hopefully it will help some of you to see WHY the wait is so long.
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Related posts:
- The 2 year family sponsorship wait.
- Glad my family is through this nightmare already.
- Fascinating numbers
Comments
3 Comments on Family Sponsorship: The 2 year wait Update.
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Hubby on
Mon, 1st Feb 2010 12:19 am
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Juli Ryan on
Mon, 1st Feb 2010 7:42 am
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Suzie on
Tue, 2nd Feb 2010 1:36 pm
In terms of different numbers, Avalon worked from the fortnightly news updates, and worked on averages. Which gives a fair picture over the year.
I worked on numbers which came out of the statistics pages, and worked backwards. Based on actual numbers, to tell us (statistically) what is happening now.
By my reckoning people getting their ‘parent/sibling sponsorship’ Residency visa’s now (January 2010), actually put in their applications around February 2008. Of course this assumes a single queue, and that every application works smoothly through the queue taking an average duration.
Working backwards on this basis for us, that means about February 2011 before Brother-in-law gets his. Avalon’s numbers give us approx April 2011.
This is ridiculous. These applications should not take so long to process. I wonder how many people leave NZ because their families are not able to join them in a reasonable period of time.
I agree the time frame is totally ridiculous especially for parent applications. Most families that apply have elderly parents and the stress involved for them is overwhelming.
I also wonder how many families leave NZ because they cannot abandon their parents while they wait. How many skilled migrants feel the benefits of coming to NZ are not worth the stress and leave as a result taking their shortage of skills with them !
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