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We have heard that the New Zealand government departments are not entirely sanguine about making immigration information easy to get. It has been suggested that they sometimes seem to cultivate a certain vagueness on the subject of immigration policy. Under the ‘new’ system there will not be an automatic points pass mark which applicants will have to equal or exceed.  Instead there is to be a floating mark which may change from month to month, no doubt depending upon the "quality" of applicants at that time. Clearly the new system makes it much more difficult to get points in the first place and then much more difficult for applicants to assess if their points total will be enough to obtain a visa. We have been led to believe that  the rationale behind this ‘new’ system and it’s vagueness, is that NZIS, the New Zealand Immigration Service, doesn’t want people figure out ways to 'beat'  the point assessment system. By not making immigration criteria and information entirely clear and precise, the New Zealand Immigration Service lessen the chance of people being able to 'creatively' tailor their applications. We’ll provide more information on the of the New Zealand Immigration Service Passmark System at the end of this article. For this reason immigration consultant firms become more and more of a necessity to assist the prospective migrant through the rapidly changing situation.  We talked with Kim Saull of Malcolm Pacific International a immigration consultant firm in Auckland. Kim Saull is the Manager of Malcolm Pacific. We asked him a series of questions which we believe escapeartists would want answers to - what follows is a compilation of what he told us in reply: In answer to your questions, quite frankly the first answer is for the potentional migrant to make contact with us before they do anything else.  The reason I begin by saying that is Immigration Policy is complex and too many people go through the process only to find at the far end that they simply don't meet any of the policy requirements and they've therefore spent many months working towards a target they actually could never achieve.

Kim Saull is the Manager of Malcolm Pacific International a widely respected New Zealand Immigration Consultancy. Their offices are located at: 7th Floor 70 Symonds Street PO Box 6219 Wellesley St. Auckland, New Zealand Ph 64 9 309-4187 Fax 366-4730  Email: intl@malcolmpacific.co.nz Web Site: http://malcolmpacific.co.nz  The EscapeArtist website has a wide range of resources on Migrating to New Zealand. There are categories for jobs, migration, media, travel, real estate, embassies and related resources. Our index for our New Zealand directories is at: http://www.escapeartist.com/bea/kiwi.htm

Consultants should offer a free assessment service.  I see increasingly people on the internet charging for this service.  It is an attempt to cut down the work load and I would suggest as generally a sign of a one man band who would not have the ability to handle the volume of enquiries.

The professional assessment lets a person know exactly where they stand. As immigration consultants we tell more people not to come to New Zealand than we do to come to New Zealand.
It's simply because the criteria are such that it excludes a significant number of people.  Each of those people, although perhaps bitterly disappointed, now understand the how and why of their personal circumstances. If I was to take an average I would suggest that something like 10% of people who contact us actually meet the requirements of policy without the need for any other additional requirements.  That leaves 90% of people who need to improve their personal circumstances in some way.  For approximately 40% of them that simply will not happen, for a variety of reasons again personal to each circumstance, so I am obviously reluctant to generalise.  The balance of people probably will fall into one or more of the categories available, more likely to be General Skills, Business Investor or Family.  The greater majority will be potentially General Skills applicants and most likely would need a job offer from a New Zealand employer to attain the pass mark current at the time.  That is the very difficult situation that we generally find ourselves in when giving advice as part of our reports. Like any employer around the world few New Zealand employers will take on people "sight unseen".  If there is an exception it would generally be in the IT industry for some people with very high skill levels in very specific areas. Outside that it's unlikely that anyone can produce a job offer "sight unseen".  The prospective applicant is therefore faced with the need to come to New Zealand for a period of time to seek employment.  You have to keep in mind here the situation for the employer.  The employer, when faced by two applicants one a New Zealand resident and one a non-resident of equal skills, will probably tend to choose the New Zealand resident.  An applicant from off-shore is looking at anything from 8 weeks to 12 months depending on which post the application is lodged in and how efficient the immigration officers are.  There may even be no guarantee that the applicant will arrive within that period of time as they would be very silly to sell up on the basis of lodging an application.  Some months the failure rate of applications has been as high as 50%!

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