Welcoming, safe and fair pathways to make Aotearoa home.
The Green Party will make sure that everyone who comes to Aotearoa is treated with respect and dignity.
Migrant workers are not disposable, and deserve a fair go to settle in Aotearoa. If any one of us feared for our life or our family or strived for a better life, we’d hope that we’d be supported to take that big step.
But because of the rules put in place by successive governments, too many migrants and refugees are exploited, denied basic rights and unfairly targeted by immigration compliance officers.
Meanwhile, multimillionaire investors are exempt from many of the same immigration requirements that stop ordinary workers from putting roots down in their community.
The current coalition Government wants you to turn against your migrant neighbour, instead of the billionaires wrecking the planet.
The Green Party will create fair and achievable pathways to residency for all people coming here to work, ensure nobody is unfairly separated from their families or their communities, and scrap the rules that fuel exploitation and abuse.
The Green Party will ensure that asylum seekers arriving in Aotearoa after escaping war or persecution are treated with dignity, and supported to rebuild their lives as part of our communities.
Our plan
- Create residence pathways for migrants who have settled long-term, including for people living in Aotearoa whose visas have expired.
- Abolish the Acceptable Standards of Health requirements, so that migrants and refugees are not discriminated against based on their health conditions or disabilities.
- Allow migrant work visa holders to switch employers and remove the 12-month stand-down period that requires workers to leave Aotearoa between visas.
- Unite families by clearing the backlog for refugee family reunification, expanding work rights for partners, restoring birthright citizenship and removing income barriers to sponsoring a parent visa.
- Implement Māori aspirations for an immigration system based on Te Tiriti, including devolving resources and decision-making to hapū and iwi to strengthen traditional whanaungatanga connections. Provide Te Tiriti education to new migrants and refugees.
- Progressively increase the refugee quota to 5,000 by 2029, increase funding for refugee resettlement programmes and create a humanitarian visa for family of New Zealanders in conflict zones.
- Resource Immigration New Zealand to clear tier 1 and tier 2 family reunification categories and process asylum claims quickly, and stop the unjust detention and electronic monitoring of asylum seekers.