Beijing .....But.....

Hi,

I'm new here, so a quick introduction.

I'm British, my wife Japanese. We live in Japan where I work as an English teacher and my wife an accountant. I have a background in science and would like to get back into laboratory work. We both love nature and want to leave Japan. We could go to the UK, but thought we'd give NZ a shot first.

For people living in our part of the world, NZ visa applications are handled through the Beijing branch. Or perhaps I should say 'mishandled' through the Beijing branch. Here is a brief summary of our story so far:

April 2009: Submitted our EOI.
May 2009: Our EOI was selected from the Pool and we were invited to apply for Residence. Deadline set, 31st August 2009.
4th August 2009: Having spent 3 months pulling together medical checks, police checks, evidence of qualifications, etc., we submitted our Residence Visa application, and payment, beating the deadline by nearly a month.
September 2009: Our Visa Advisor contacted us for the first time. Then, silence.

Now, we expected this process to take a while. According to our research on the web, applicants' general experiences seemed to indicate a year to 18 months to go through the process....

April 2010: 1 year after submitting our EOI, our second Visa Advisor contacted us to tell us he was going to set up a telephone interview in the next few weeks.

Great, we thought. Progress.

Then, silence. Strings of emails from me were never responded to, until...

August 2010: Our third Visa Advisor got in touch to inform us that, like our first Visa Advisor, our second Visa Advisor had also been transferred to another section and that he, our third Visa Advisor, would now be handling our case. I informed #3 that #2 had informed us that our telephone interview was imminent. Then, silence.

May 2011: More emails, no responses, finally I gave them a piece of my mind and #3 pulled his finger out.

June 2011: Telephone Interview. No problem, sweet, done and dusted. At the end of the interview #3 informed me he would give us our result in 4 weeks.

July 2011: Silence. Another email, and a reply. Great, I thought. After 2 years from submitting our Residence Application, 30 months after our EOI was selected, we would finally get an answer.

And we did. Quote: "We have concerns" unquote.

The concerns, it turns out, were this. When we submitted our EOI, in April 2009, I ticked a box to indicate a work option for which I was qualified. In July 2009, they changed the criteria for this one box and I became no longer qualified. They did not inform us of this change. So, when our Residence Visa application arrived, in August 2009, 3 weeks after they changed the rule, it was, from that moment, an invalid application. I no longer qualified for 10 of my 140 points. I still had 130, but there was a discrepancy between what was on my EOI and what was in my Residence Application because they had changed the rules.

We were finally informed of this rule change 2 years after the rule was changed.

Needless to say, I was furious. I lambasted the whole process, and threatened legal action.

Advisor #3 emailed to inform me he would meet with his boss.

I was surprised by the response when it came. They offered to reimburse us, to pay back all our application fees in full. But they could not reimburse the time we had been waiting, so I told them to shove it.

Then, they offered us Work Visas.

9 months, from the date of landing in NZ, to find skilled employment, after which, if we were successful, our initial Residence Visa application would move forward as a Work-to-Residence process.

So, here we are, September 2011. At my request, our Work Visas will be issued in December and then we can come to NZ.

2 and a half years. Obviously, we have learnt a lot about NZ in that time, having done loads of research on the internet. But one question now remains, and it is this:

DOES NEW ZEALAND SUCK AS MUCH AS THE BEIJING BRANCH OF NEW ZEALAND IMMIGRATION?

expatexposed.com

Martin