I come from migrant stock and my parents (both of whom have passed away), made the big bold move to shift their lives from the Netherlands to New Zealand in the 1950’s. Back then, migrating was a very different exercise - the New Zealand Government was actively seeking out tradespeople from specific countries (we had a very geographically targeted program) and my father attended an interview at the local New Zealand consulate.

Qualifying was more about whether the particular assessing “officer” liked you and if you came from the right country as opposed to meeting specific criteria, points or skills systems. There were very few targeted policies in place and the system was largely discretionary, with a focus on people being settled here to add to our labour pool. Their was a strong focus on migrants from the UK and other European nations and migration from other parts of the world was significantly more controlled.

It’s incredible how quickly we can access information in the current era, and a far cry from my early years in the immigration industry when getting policy updates was a far more ceremonious and drawn out affair (because most of it was handled in paper form). New rules were often a highly guarded secret, prepared behind closed doors, with little to no external input, and announcements generally happened on the day the rules went live.

Once you finally had those rules, getting the message out to clients was equally time consuming - there was no easy means to broadcast updates, and certainly nothing like we have now. Today, within minutes of a policy change, clients are already reading about these changes, being pinged by a dozen social media apps.

The backbone of our residence program is the Skilled Migrant Category (SMC) for short. which is actually several different visa categories all under one umbrella.

As the name suggests, the SMC is all about bringing skilled, employable applicants in to New Zealand and giving them the chance to reside here permanently. However, the key component of this category - your level of skill is not quite as straightforward as it might sound.

Visa applications are complicated…not because they were intended to be that way, but because when you are trying to ensure that you bring the right people in to your country, you need a very well structured set of criteria and rules.

However, I am not sure that they should require a degree in quantum mechanics to decode - and for some applicants, trying to understand some of these rules is a little bit like calculating the trajectory for Rocket Lab’s next launch program.

New Zealand is a nation full of people doing stuff, and usually the stuff they are doing is the source of their livelihoods. Small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy and they are the source of some pretty amazing innovations, particularly in the tech and engineering sectors. New Zealanders are well know for their DIY approach to things (we call it the number eight wire mentality - you can do anything with number 8 wire) and running your business has naturally become an extension of that. Although there is no official description of what a “small business” is, our statistics gurus, tend to use the measure of any business that has less than 20 staff.

If you are a parent, and have children that have reached the stage of being able to vocalise their opinions, you will know how terrifying that first “are we there yet” can be, when you are in the car and on the road. It is terrifying because the first one, is usually followed by an uncannily timed series of the same sentence, on repeat, with gaps just long enough to make you think they might have moved on.

It is easy to forget or overlook what is right in front of you and I think many New Zealanders do this on a daily basis. Occasionally however we are reminded of why we are quite lucky to live in a country like this. I was personally reminded of this yesterday, when I was lucky enough to join my youngest daughter (Miss 9) on a school outing to Okoromai Bay and Shakespear Regional Park, to plant some grasses along the dunes.

English language and more specifically the testing of it as part of the visa process has surfaced once again, amongst the migrant grapevines and rumour mills, with renewed calls from various parts of the migrant community to lower the standard from where it currently sits. Logically most advisers tend to favour any petition for lowering anything as it potentially makes more people eligible and of course the migrant community would have it abandoned all together.

I have been asked more than once this week, by prospective clients, why paying for advice might be a good idea…of course, I can only offer a semi-biased answer, because I do what I do for a living, but you dont do what I do for this long, without actually being able to add some significant value. So whether you use me or someone else, getting advice to assist with the New Zealand visa process, is a good idea.

The Green List has made a few headlines recently, largely because in August 2025, ten new trade-related occupations will be added to it, expanding the list substantially and opening up more opportunities for applicants to secure a pathway to residence. This potentially helps to fill a gap for trade related roles that don’t (currently) have a pathway to residence, yet there is a pretty consistent demand for them.

There are a number of things within the immigration process that can be confusing (in fact most of it is), but the one thing that seems to pop up the most is the difference between residence and permanent residence and it can be one of the hardest things to explain to a client, despite it being relatively simple.

In the world of New Zealand immigration, one of the most common points of confusion, and something we are asked about a lot more than we probably should be, is the difference between a work visa and residence. While it might appear obvious to some, for many applicants, the difference between these two visas and what they provide is not so clear and can lead to disappointment when one doesn’t necessarily turn in to the other.