Two Americans emigrate to New Zealand from Colorado,
USA.
We talk about
our life in Nelson, New Zealand.
While our immigration officer was on holiday over Christmas and New Years, our lives came to a complete standstill. Counting down two weeks until she returned, undoubtedly to a huge pile of applications, was driving us mad. We were mentally and physically exhausted from the self-induced stress.
But it wouldn’t be the final straw. That came on 21 December 2005 when NZI changed all the rules. Effective on that date, the Skilled Migrant Category selection process was altered. Only those with EOI scores of 140 and above would be automatically selected to apply for residency. What?!! Our score was only 125. Likewise, applicants with jobs in the skills shortage areas received automatic invitations as well.
Additionally, as the score lessened, you would receive less priority for review of your materials at all. In other words, those receiving between 100 and 140 points with a job offer would have total priority; those without job offers would be put back into the pile. Effectively, under these new rules, Don and I would have virtually no chance to obtain residency because we had no experience in a skills shortage area and we had no job offer from a Kiwi employer. Not to mention that none of them would even talk to us, Angela having applied for a few jobs in Nelson during the previous months, to absolutely no avail.
It's a real catch-22 here because NZ employers expressly state that you have to have permission to work in the country for the employer to consider you for a job. But you cannot get permission to work in the country without a job … so??? Somehow, it must work out easier for those filling skills shortage positions. Don, now a recruitment consultant in Nelson, sees this almost daily; people come here for months at a time hoping to get a job. But employers don't want to take them onto permanent staff unless they might be exceptional because the immigration process is costly for the employer too, especially if the employee leaves after all is said and done.
Either way, right before the Christmas holiday and just before nearly everyone in the U.S. and England took two weeks off of work, we were stuck with the news of these new rules. What would it mean for us? How would our application be reviewed in this new light?
The level of freaking out reached a new high, as if we even thought this was physically possible. Angela talked to the Portland marketing director again, but he was not in the loop on this news and had no answer for us. We would simply have to wait until after the holiday for an official determination about for whom these new rules would apply.
And wait we did. Sort of.
Once we heard about these dreadful new rules, we truly panicked. We took a serious deep breath and had a heart-to-heart about why exactly we were moving to New Zealand. For both of us, clearly this move was not just going to an awesome place, but a move to change our lives in some way. We really needed that change.
Because we didn’t know if residency would work, we had to escape our worried minds a bit by coming up with a Plan B. Our Plan B involved moving out of Colorado no matter what. We were determined to make a drastic change, to shake things up a bit regardless. But where to go?
We thought about places in the U.S. we’d like to live and there were very few. We did some basic research, and decided that before any move, we’d use the time to take six months off for travelling in Europe or something. We would sell off our things anyway, but keep our cars. We’d store everything and go travel, then come back and move to that small town. And then we’d focus on finding a way to get into New Zealand under the new immigration rules. Plan B sounded very exotic and exciting, but all along we just wished New Zealand would let us in! Plan B was just that, second-best.
back to Part 6: The queue | Immigration home | on to Part 8: The final leg of the race
