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The Bulletin: Expectations of a major immigration speech
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Expectations of a major immigration speech, National continues to linger in poll doldrums, and trace Covid in Wellington wastewater probably doesn’t signal an outbreak.
As mentioned at the end of last week, we’re expecting some sort of announcement on immigration policy from the government this week. Newsroom’s Anuka Nadkarni reports the announcement will involve much tighter targeting of highly-skilled people in migration targets. As the PM said at an event last week, “we are actually using Covid to actually stop and take a look at our immigration settings.”
There are delays, certainly with the skilled migrant category, Faafoi told The AM Show on Friday. We ve been saying for some time demand in that category is well above forecast. Also in terms of simple processing, a lot of the staff at Immigration NZ that would normally do those applications have been taken up with the consideration of border exceptions. We ve let 13,000 people into the country since we closed the border to make sure that we keep the economy ticking, so that is going to take some time too. The issue with the likes of skilled migrant category applications is they aren t rubber-stamped - they are very involved, and we ve got to make sure that everyone ticks all the boxes. So there are delays, we apologise for that. But we ve got to make sure we ve got capacity to process some of the border exception applications that are coming through.