Steve Watson: Immigration New Zealand Compliance General Manager on changes to deportation rules and overstayer numbers

Immigration New Zealand's working on picking up immigrants who have overstayed their visa, following a surge.  

New figures estimate there's 21 thousand overstayers in the country, up from 14 thousand in 2017.  

The Government's also cracking down on immigrants who commit serious crimes and could deport them if they've been here under 20 years, instead of the current 10. 

Immigration New Zealand Compliance General Manager Steve Watson told Mike Hosking they still pick up on overstayers, even if they're not criminals. 

He says they quickly speak to people staying past their visas, and they usually depart quickly and easily. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So the greater illegal immigration debates finally arrived on New
Zealand shores. Have they say about twenty one thousand overstairs?
Or people shouldn't be here? Tonga, China and the US?
Are you top offenders? Apparently so the government's now change
of the law crackdowns on we're linking crime and deportation,
with the limit going from ten years to twenty years.
Steve Watson's GM of Compliance and Investigations at Immigration New
Zealand And is with us.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Good morning, Good morning Michael.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
There's twenty one thousand ish number that we've got. How
rock solid is that? Do we actually know what we're
dealing with or not?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yes, we do. The previous estimate was based on from
twenty seventeen, was based on data that was the best
we had at the time. But the current estimate we
have spent a lot of time cleaning the data well,
things like removing people who have become citizens, so we've
cross checked with other agencies people who have subsequently become lawful.

(00:52):
And also with one point six million border movements, there
will be some errors and we've done a really good
job in correcting, say, for example, people who come on
dual passports are right on one and left on another.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
You've got information sharing and is it good information sharing?
Would somebody who's a bit dodgy trigger somebody somewhere?

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah? We for example criminality, we get referrals from police
where a person on a temporary visa or a person
who's own lawfully in New Zealand has committed a crime
and we would then commence a case to deal with that.
Likewise with corrections, where people are in prison, people serve
their sentences and then are deported straight from prison. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
That's why I'm asking the question. Is it just crime
that triggers it? Or could you be in the country
illegally and you could do that forever? Unless you can
inder crime, No one's finding it.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
No, we have a number of other good methods of
finding people. We work with a lot of other government departments.
We have a good investigative techniques with our frontline staff,
and we also have our own data that we are
getting much moremuch better at interrogating and being much better
at data driven.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Is this going to be a what is this design
to do apart from clean up a few scumbags? Is
that essentially what it's about? Or is it a chilling
effect that if you come to the country illegally, you
just don't want to go around committing a crime.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
So we take our roles regulators very seriously and there
is an absolute obligation on anyone who comes to New
Zealand to comply with the terms of their visa, which
includes leaving before the expiry of that visa. We expect
people to do that and we have a number of
different ways of connecting with people, so we do connect

(02:37):
with people before the expiry of their visa to tell
them to go home. Sometimes some of my team, all
that's needed is for them to speak to someone who's
become unlawful and they will just depart at their own costs,
which of course as the best outcome.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Indeed, all right, have a good week in Steve Steve
What's out of Immigration New Zealand.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
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