Glad my family is through this nightmare already.
Wealthy parents jump the queue
Ally Wang wants to work fulltime but says she can’t do so until her parents Zhi and Ying Xu are given residency and can help look after her son Kevin and daughter Cathy. New immigration schemes aimed at wealthy retirees have attracted 27 applicants who are prepared to invest a total of nearly $26 million. The parent retirement policy, launched last year, has drawn 22 applications from nine countries, with the highest numbers coming from China and the United Kingdom. Each applicant has to have a settled child here and invest at least $1 million over four years to gain permanent residency. They need to have good health but will not need to have health insurance, and as permanent residents they will be entitled to the normal health and welfare assistance. However, the scheme has been criticised as being unfair, as applicants jump the queue of the regular parent immigration schemes.
I beleive I said that a while back.
MP Raymond Huo, Labour’s Chinese community affairs spokesman, said the scheme gave New Zealand a bad look overseas. “It is one thing for a country to be selling off its assets, but this policy shows the world that even our immigration visas can be bought,” he said. Mr Huo said letting rich parents jump the queue over legitimate applicants who are less wealthy would just create resentment within migrant communities.
I could not agree more. While I understand the need to bring foreign money into the country up to a point – the miniute you make immigration more about money than skills and settlement facorts you change the entire ethos of the system. Its not about how good you are for the country – its about how much money you will pay to get in.
Immigrant single-mother Ally Wang says she desperately needs her parents here to help her look after her children so she can find fulltime employment. The 36-year-old, who works part-time in a GP clinic as an administrator, feels it’s “extremely unfair” for the Government to overlook her needs “just because mum and dad do not have $1 million to spare”.
Ms Wang, who has a 12-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter, has been waiting since 2009 for Immigration to give the nod for her father, Zhi Wang, 67 and mother Ying Xu, 61, from Guangzhou, to come and live with her. Instead, what she received last week was a request from the department to “update her income details” because it said her current income wasn’t enough to support her parents.
“The the only way I can earn more money is to find fulltime employment, and I can only work fulltime if my parents are here to help me take care for my children,” Ms Wang said.
Now – this is a bit odd to be honest. You have to have the required income BEFORE you can sponsor your parents. Not “if you let my parents in I will be able to work more and thus afford to sponsor them because they will provide childcare”.
When you sponsor family – you have to prove an income of just under $30,000 a year – which is not a whole lot. But that’s the deal we all have to work with. Unless your parents have a stack of cash they can bribe NZ with of course.
The main issue here is that 22 parents did not have to wait till thier children proved thier worth to New Zealand, and are willing to pay $1,000,000 each to jump the queue ahead of the rest of the people who are sat there waiting for INZ to do its job. I personally think this is shameful. NZ has said quite clearly it can be bought, and that the wealth of our parents is vastly more important than the skills we bring. I guess that why our MP John Hayes asked if my dad was “a man of means”. Thats all he cared about when we needed his help. He must be so proud of this new system.
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