KEY POINTS:
Last week the Labour Department said it was considering giving more time to job-seeking migrants here on the work-to-residence visa.
It might extend the six-month-limit and give skilled migrants a year to find those elusive jobs they were told New Zealand needed them to fill.
Some 617 permits were issued in the first six months after the policy was introduced slightly over a year ago. But only 19 of those skilled immigrants have stayed. Surely, any policy with just a 3 per cent success rate needs a rethink.
Permit holders say it is too hard to find employment, and giving them more time - as helpful as that sounds - will do little to correct the glitches in the scheme.
Apart from the tight deadline, there is also a requirement that these migrants find a job which is related to their qualifications or work experience.
On the surface, everything sounds reasonable and workable. New Zealand is short of a doctor, we let one immigrant doctor in, he finds the job in six months and we all live happily ever after.
The reality, however, can be vastly different.
A friend of mine, a Fijian-born Chinese, who is an established architect here, explained why it was sometimes impossible for a skilled immigrant to land a job in his field in such a short period.
Like many potential employers, he had been approached by several immigrant architects wanting work but he said it had been impossible for him to take any of them on.
He reasoned that an architect fresh from Singapore would not understand New Zealand's earthquake requirements, someone from Japan would probably design houses with windows that are too small, and an architect from Europe would not understand Kiwis' love for homes with an indoor-outdoor flow.
And, like most New Zealand employers, he operates a small business so has neither the time nor the resources to retrain employees.
Even if there were a shortage of architects in New Zealand, it is still unlikely that an architect, fresh from overseas, would be able to get a job here.
Migrants in some skilled areas will need time to adapt to the local situation, and possibly complete some retraining courses before they are employable.
But because of the time limit, this is near impossible for work-to-residence scheme visa holders to do.
Skilled migrants do get back into their professional fields, eventually. I know of immigrants who are teachers, bankers and accountants - and even myself, as a journalist - who did eventually find employment in their respective fields.
But to get to where we are today we had to work many different jobs, most of them unrelated to our qualifications or work experience.
This seems to be a natural process for many immigrants, a process which those on the WTR scheme are being denied.
A group calling themselves ENZ, or Emigrate New Zealand, quoted a line from my last column and used it as a basis for an online survey: "A good policy must be one that ensures that, even after successfully attracting skilled people here, it is able to help these immigrants find the jobs to plug the worker shortage we're supposed to be facing."
The survey asked whether people thought the Government should help to find jobs for approved skilled migrants. More than half of the respondents said no, about 18 per cent said yes and 30 per cent said they were not sure.
One respondent expressed concern that New Zealanders would be made to pay for a Government service job hunting for migrants.
I think the cost to New Zealand would be far greater if the WTR scheme was left in its current form, which continues to fail employers and migrant jobseekers alike.
One of the more disturbing responses I received was from a reader who felt that the failure of migrants to get jobs was actually a good thing for New Zealand: "Let the migrants continue to bring their money and spend it here, and let them go when they are out of it. It can only be a good thing for New Zealand, at least economically."
Is it really? How can this "use and discard" mentality for fellow human beings ever be a good thing for New Zealand? How does it speak for a country which has been marketed globally as a welcoming and friendly place?
Have we not learned from the losses our international education sector faced because of bad policy and lack of support for international students, which led to bad press overseas?
Labour Department policy manager Leslie Haines says the whole skilled migrant category is being re-evaluated. Let's hope that the wrongs can be rectified.
The root of the problem is not only that job-seekers are not given enough time, but also that few employers are open-minded enough to take them on. This is compounded by the fact that the department did little to educate employers when the new scheme was launched.
Minister of Immigration David Cunliffe acknowledged there was a continued need by New Zealand employers for overseas staff in an environment of low unemployment and shortages of Kiwi workers.
New Zealand's human resources problem is real, including a brain drain with skilled Kiwis going overseas, a labour shortage and a greying population.
Immigration can be the answer. But first we need immigration policies and systems that work.
