The Indian Weekender

8 NEW ZEALAND
New Windsor now
part of Mt Roskill
Electorate this
election
I am delighted the Mt Roskill electorate
will include New Windsor and the main
western boundary will be Whitney St. Go
to www.vote.nz for detailed information.
Dr Parmjeet Parmar
National List MP
based in Mt Roskill
09 620 6707
parmjeet.parmar@
parliament.govt.nz
Funded by the Parliamentary Service.
Authorised by Parmjeet Parmar MP,
Parliament Buildings, Wellington.
Friday, October 02, 2020
The Indian Weekender
Immigration NZ does not have data
on the number of 'General Visitor
Visas based on relationship' issued
• From Page 6
This practice was arbitrarily stopped in May
2019 by the Immigration NZ’s Mumbai office,
in order to get rid of burgeoning processing
queues, which resulted in mass rejections
of visas, resulting in media scrutiny and
intervention by the government.
Since then, however, the issue has not
been fixed completely, and a gap between
Wellington-based head offices of INZ and
the frontline visa processing officers have
remained, and the process has quietly reverted
to the pre-May 2019 system, where GVV
based on relationship visas were issued.
Border closure have
disadvantaged “General visitor
visa based on relationship”
Unfortunately, these “GVV based on
relationships” are not treated as par or equal to
partnership visas, despite having been issued to
couples, and are not allowed to enter NZ, even
when travelling with their NZ based partners
(citizens and residents).
That disadvantage persists even after
Immigration Minister’s latest announcement on
September 14 in an interview with the Indian
Weekender allowing partners of NZ citizens &
residents from non-visa waiver countries to be
eligible for an exception to enter the country.
To be fair to Immigration NZ, it is indeed not
possible to find numbers of general visitor visas
issued on the basis of relationships, as many
industry stakeholders concur, purely because
INZ is not collecting data in that way.
“General visitor visas are visitor visas,
regardless of the basis on which they are issued
by INZ. So its completely understandable
why INZ could not produce accurate figures
on GVV based on relationship,” a prominent
Immigration Lawyer told the Indian Weekender.
However, that does not takes away the gross
discrimination meted out to partners of Indian-
New Zealanders who are currently punished by
the immigration system purely for following
their own cultural practices when marrying
with their partners, and being denied the same
border exceptions that are available to people of
other ethnicities.
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