A welcoming and safe Aotearoa for everyone
The Green Party will make sure people who come to Aotearoa are supported with everything they need to provide for their families and put down roots in their community.
If any one of us feared for our life or our family, or needed to travel for work, we’d like to know that others would help us.
But because of the rules put in place by successive governments, thousands of people looking to set up a safe home in Aotearoa are treated unfairly and denied basic rights.
People who come here to work, for example in a school or hospital, can be forced apart from their families because they do not earn enough to support a parent visa. Other people who travel here to care for our elderly, build our infrastructure and homes, and process our food are forced to work and live in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
Immigration rules can cause a huge amount of stress and anxiety for people and their loved ones.
Everyone who wants to make Aotearoa home deserves a fair go. Our plan will create fair and achievable pathways to residency for all people coming here to work and remove the exploitative rules that bind people to a single employer.
The time is now to make sure everyone arriving in Aotearoa is treated with fairness and compassion, so they can get on with building their lives in our communities.
Our plan
- Provide residency pathways for migrants on all categories of work visa, and people living in Aotearoa whose visas have expired, and who have been failed by a system that does not provide long-term security.
- Repeal the Acceptable Standards of Health test, so migrants and refugees and their children are not discriminated against based on health conditions or disability, when seeking residency.
- Decouple work visas from single employers to enable migrant workers to switch employers.
- Unite parents, partners and families by supporting refugee family reunification, restoring partner work rights, and ending income barriers to sponsoring a parent visa.
- Actively support Māori aspirations for a Tiriti-based immigration and refugee resettlement system, including devolving resources to whānau, hapū, and iwi to strengthen traditional whanaungatanga connections with Pasifika communities.
- Ensure that hapū and iwi have the opportunity for input into Te Tiriti education for new migrants and refugees, and are adequately resourced to do this.
- Progressively increase the refugee quota to 5000 by 2026, and increase funding to refugee resettlement programmes, to enable a high standard of care and service.
- Provide resettlement support for refugees arriving as asylum seekers, and implement the recommendations of the Casey report on asylum seeker detention.