Immigration Minister Erica Stanford is “not worried” the Government’s new visa allowing migrants in New Zealand to sponsor their parents to stay for up to 10 years will lead to an influx of people coming here.
Modelling provided to the minister suggests there could be up to 10,000 applications in the first year of the Parent Boost Visa, which will come online in September.
There is no cap on the visa, but the minister told the Herald she is “not worried” it will lead to a significant rise in migrants entering New Zealand.
“I don’t expect that there will be an explosion of numbers on this visa. It’s going to be a relatively small number and it will cannibalise many of the other visas that we’re seeing,” Stanford said.
The Parent Boost Visa will allow New Zealand citizens and residents to sponsor their overseas parents to visit and stay here. It’s intended to make New Zealand more attractive to potential skilled migrants who want their parents to have access to a long-term visa to visit them.
If their application is successful, the parents would be granted multi-entry access for up to five years, with the opportunity to renew the visa once. That means someone could stay in the country for up to 10 years.
However, there is a list of criteria that must be met.
Key among the requirements is that the applicant has at least one year of health insurance with emergency medical cover, repatriation, return of remains, and cancer treatment. One of three income requirements must also be met by either the applicant or the sponsor.
There are expected to be between 2000 and 10,000 applications for the visa, which Stanford said on Tuesday was modelled by looking at the number of applications for other similar visas these people are currently applying for.
For example, there’s the Parent Resident Visa. This differs from the newly announced visa in several ways, such as that it is a pathway to residency - which the Parent Boost Visa is not - and there are only 2500 of these available annually.
Stanford didn’t believe there needed to be a cap in place for the new visa due to the health and income requirements.
“We know that not every single person is going to be able to apply for this. We try to make it as fair as we can.
“But given the fact there are those settings in place, we feel we didn’t need to have a cap,” she said.
Asked how she would respond to New Zealanders concerned it may lead to a big jump in people coming here, Stanford again came back to the requirements.
“I’m not worried about that. I mean, those people are already coming in the country on other visas with much lower health requirements,” she told the Herald.
“We have been really careful with this visa to get the balance right. To get the visa, you have to be at the highest possible standard of health, which is set at the residency setting.
“That is the first thing. You have to have health insurance while you’re here, you have to have a guaranteed amount of income.”
She also said many of the potential 10,000 applications would come from people who would have applied for other visas already available.
“I doubt there’ll be very many new applications. Most of them will be coming on other visitor visas because there is hardly anyone out there who is not visiting at all. They will be coming on other different types of visas and they will be canabalised.”
It comes as net migration to New Zealand hits a decade-low. Annual net migration to New Zealand in the year to April was 21,317, the lowest (outside of the Covid years) since 2014.
Income threshold questioned
The Parent Boost Visa policy was campaigned on by National at the 2023 election. It was announced earlier this month that Immigration NZ would begin taking applications for it from September 29.
However, some of the requirements associated with the visa have received criticism.
These include the income settings. One of three requirements must be met for an application to be successful. These are:
During a Select Committee session on Tuesday morning as part of Parliament’s Scrutiny Week, Labour immigration spokesman Phil Twyford asked Stanford why the income threshold had been set at a level where “only a well-off minority of families will be able to afford to apply for that visa”.
The current Parent Resident Visa requires 1.5x the median wage for one parent, a higher threshold than the new visa.
Stanford said the Government “wanted to be more reasonable than that”.
“The key thing though is you have to make sure someone is able to be looked after when they are here and setting it at a reasonable rate, of the median wage, we believed is the right setting to make sure people can be looked after,” the minister said.
Stanford said the Government had been “flexible” by providing other options to meet the income test in case the sponsors don’t earn enough money.
“We don’t want parents here who are essentially living in poverty because their children can’t afford to have them. Knowing those people often have children themselves, so there are multiple factors at play there. We thought it was a reasonable thing to do.”
Twyford continued to suggest the visa excluded the “majority of families who would want to sponsor their parents” and was “reserved for a wealthy minority”.
Stanford responded by saying there were other visas for people to apply for.
“This is the longest-term visitor visa we have ever offered and when you do that you need to be responsible with the settings,” she said.
“It’s not okay to say, ‘look, even though you have got a whole family and all these other costs and potentially a mortgage, we are also going to allow you to bring in parents when you’re on the minimum wage’. That is not reasonable.”
Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March asked whether there was any modelling on potential savings of having migrants’ parents in the country.
For example, any financial savings people would have by having their parents look after their children.
Stanford said she had asked if that was possible, but it was “very difficult to do”.
“If we had done that, it would have meant delaying it even more,” she said.
The Green MP told the Herald the minister “needs to account the contributions parents make to things like caregiving of grandchildren, reducing the money that goes from New Zealand to offshore in order to support them and mental health outcomes for their children”.
He’s long been critical of the income thresholds put on visas.
In 2019, before he was an MP, Menéndez March said the previous Government’s parent visa discriminated against migrants on low incomes. Earlier this month, he said the Parent Boost Visa just benefited a wealthy minority.
During the Select Committee, Twyford also began to ask a question around the requirement for “comprehensive” private health insurance, but Stanford jumped in to note the Government wasn’t requiring “comprehensive” insurance.
“When we looked at the health insurance, we wanted to be really reasonable as well. When you talk about comprehensive health insurance, that is everything right. That’s doctors’ fees and specialists and everything. When we looked at that, it was really expensive.”
That wasn’t do-able, Stanford said, and “would defeat the purpose of the visa”.
“So we didn’t go with comprehensive. We went with literally the minimum, which is emergency only. We added cancer in there as well because it really made little difference to the amount.”
Asked by Act’s Parmjeet Parmar about the planned 2027 review of the visa, Stanford said it would provide an opportunity to assess the visa, noting “we are not a set-and-forget Government”.
“The key thing about that review will be for us looking at, is the health system coping? Have we got the health settings right?
“How many people are applying for the visa? We will be able to look at all these things. You know, the income level.”
Jamie Ensor is a political reporter in the NZ Herald press gallery team based at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub press gallery office. In 2025, he was a finalist for Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.