Immigration Minister Erica Stanford. Photo / RNZ, Nick Monro
By Anneke Smith of RNZ
Immigration officers will soon have the power to ask suspected overstayers for identification in homes and workplaces.
The Government said it was closing a compliance gap in the deportation system, while critics argued it was a step towards the immigration conditions that had allowed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids seen in the United States.
In September last year, the New Zealand Government announced a suite of immigration settings changes aimed at strengthening deportation levers.
Among them was giving immigration officers the power to ask for identity-based information from individuals they suspected were in breach of their visa conditions.
“Often they’re in a situation where they are looking for a particular person, they find that particular person, and then at that residence or workplace, there are other people who are either fleeing or acting suspiciously,” Immigration Minister Erica Stanford told RNZ.
“At this point in time they cannot act on that. We want to give them the ability to be able to act on that.”
Stanford said the law change was “narrow and designed to close a specific compliance gap” – giving immigration officers the tools they needed to do their job.
“We have a big overstayer problem, tens of thousands more than we suspected, and we have to arm [immigration officers] with the tools to be able to request information from people when they have a reasonable suspicion that they are in breach of their visa conditions.”
Immigration lawyer Alastair McClymont said undocumented migrants or those in breach of their visa conditions were a very small problem in the immigration system.
He argued legislation had previously given “almost unfettered discretion” to immigration officers and the devil would be in how this law change was drafted.
“There is the risk, not necessarily that this current government is going to do something immediately, but in the future, what if we have a government that decides that enforcement on immigration is something which is really good for their particular politicking, I’m referring to dog-whistle xenophobic politics.
“Then they decide that they want to start making an example of particular migrant groups by using the legislation to be enforced in a very harsh way, which is basically what has happened now in the United States, where they’ve used the framework of immigration law to target particular ethnic communities.”
McClymont said overstayers were actually a pretty small problem in New Zealand and if the Government did not clearly define the “reasonable basis” on which an immigration officer could ask someone for ID, it could lead to a situation where New Zealand citizens going about their business at home or work could be asked to prove who they were.
US President Donald Trump has overseen aggressive and sometimes deadly immigration operations in his second term in office – conducting weeks of sweeping raids and arrests in what the administration claims are targeted missions against criminals.
The Green Party’s immigration spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said these ICE raids did not happen overnight.
“They were enabled by American politicians slowly allowing their immigration officials to have more powers to search, to detain and to target migrant communities.
“Every time that we allow this to happen without adequate justification we create the conditions to have in New Zealand what we’ve seen overseas.”
Stanford said the proposed change was narrow in scope and “very different” from powers available to US immigration officers.
She was clear it would not give New Zealand officers general stopping powers – or allow them to stop people at random in the street.
“Of course we never want to get to a situation where they’re ... patrolling the streets, that’s not a situation we’re going to be able to get into.
“But a reasonable person would expect, where there is [reasonable] suspicion when they’re executing their normal duties, that they’d be able to [do so in] people’s houses.”
The legislation would be introduced to Parliament next month, with the aim of passing it into law before the end of this term.