September 26, 2024....
Immigration New Zealand has made a quiet change. From from October 7 2024, accredited employers seeking to hire migrants in lower-skilled roles could no longer be represented by their immigration professionals when dealing with Work and Income.
At first glance, this looks technical. A small line in the operational manual. But small lines carry big signals. What this really suggests is that when a licensed professional shows up, the system does not see assurance. It sees risk.
For large companies with HR teams, this is another process to navigate. For small and medium-sized businesses, arguably the backbone of New Zealand’s economy, it is a burden that increases their chance of tripping up.
The irony is obvious: take away professional guidance and you don’t reduce mistakes, you multiply them.
I am not writing about this announcement in terms of a sad professional being attached to paperwork, nor about losing a stream of professional fees. I am writing about this change in terms of what regulation is supposed to mean.
A licence should be a guarantee of competence and integrity, not a trigger for exclusion.
INZ’s justification is that employer's direct contact makes the labour market test more “genuine,” less open to conflicts of interest. Advisers, it is feared, tilt the process toward migrant outcomes.
But let's breath and pause for a moment. if licensing itself cannot guarantee trust, then what is licensing for? If a Code of Conduct, statutory oversight, and the power to be struck off are not enough to earn credibility, then what could ever be?
Look abroad. In Australia, migration agents handle labour market testing every day. In Canada, licensed consultants prepare LMIA cases for employers. In Ireland and the United Kingdom, regulated lawyers and advisers support businesses with labour market obligations.
Conflict of interest exist in all these places and in many regulated industries and more prominent in a country as small as New Zealand.
The issue then, is not the risk of a perceived conflict as such but how the risk of that conflict tainting a process or favouring an outcome is managed. Examples of how it can be managed are through disclosure, audits, and professional discipline.
When it comes to assisting employers to test the labour market test via WINZ, New Zealand has chosen a different path. We have decided not to manage the risk, but to erase the immigration professional from such an important stage in the labor market test.
And so the message between the lines is clear. If an immigration professional is involved, something must be wrong. If a professional stands beside an employer, the process itself is suspicious. If regulation says we are competent, INZ does not believe it. What I am seeing here is not just a policy change; to me this signals the redefinition of our professional standing.
The alternative in my opinion, did not need to be complicated. Require immigration professionals to declare their involvement in the WINZ process and affirm that they will not influence the outcome. Build that declaration into the form. Audit the cases where professionals are engaged. And if misconduct occurs, sanction it through the Immigration Advisers Authority or the Law Society.
These are proportionate safeguards. They use licensing as the protection it was designed to be and not as a reason for exclusion
What worries me most as a Licensed Immigration Adviser is the precedent. In my humble yet strong opinion, this is not about losing one step of a process I might otherwise be paid to handle. It is about the principle.
If government and Immigration New Zealand assume that regulation is meaningless, if licensing becomes a reason to exclude rather than include, then we have set the wrong signal.
We tell employers: you are on your own. We tell professionals: your qualification makes you suspect. We tell migrants: trust is optional. And that message extends far beyond this single (meaningless to many colleagues) policy change. It goes to the heart of what professional regulation is supposed to mean. Beyond what the right to representation means.
A small line in an operational manual can have large consequences. Today it is the Work and Income process. But tomorrow? Is this a one-off adjustment, or the opening chapter in the erosion of a (regulated) profession? Was this a correction, or the inauguration of something much larger?
Because if licensing no longer signals trust, then what lies ahead are more wrong signals. And each one chips away at the very idea of a profession at all.