Growth NZ wants visas for ‘exceptional talent’ with no job offer required
A growth advocacy group wants to let up to 300 “exceptionally talented people” a year move to New Zealand with no job offer required.
Growth New Zealand is floating the idea of a “Catalyst Visa”, where unlike other options people would not need a job offer or sponsor ahead of their arrival.
Applicants would have to prove they’re top talent in their field, with a record of ” internationally exceptional achievement”.
Successful applications would need to start “qualifying work” within 12 months of arriving, and after three years they’d be eligible to apply for residency, if they’re still in the right kind of work.
Growth NZ co-founder Maya Pan told Checkpoint while there was already “outstanding” talent in New Zealand, the country was still lacking specific capibilities.
“People who have scaled global companies, if they’ve raised serious capital overseas, if they’ve taken breakthrough ideas from the lab into the market or built high performing technical teams and seen rapid growth, there just aren’t as many people like that within a small country.”
Pan said that there were a number of areas in need of specific skills.
“Even within existing large corporates in New Zealand, you start to need specialists at that strategic layer.”
She said dozens of companies had told her product management was one key area that was missing workers with certain knowledge.
“That’s kind of a relatively new domain within New Zealand, and there aren’t as many examples of strategic product managers in technical roles here where they actually set a vision for a product area.”
Pan said an independent panel would set the specific criteria for the visa applicants, and a dedicated team within Immigration New Zealand would assess individual applications.
While other visa options are already available, Pan said the catalyst visa offered entry on conditions that didn’t currently apply to any other visa.
“[One] thing that is not provided with current visa pathways is the ability to be self-employed and start your own business or the ability to work on multiple advisory roles across many companies.”
“They could figure out a path with the accredited employer work visa, but one issue with that is you do need to have that job offer up front. So that’s quite a lot of pressure both ways to commit in terms of making sure it’s the right fit and the right scope and that you’d like living in New Zealand.”
After living in the Silicon Valley for the last 13 years, Pan said she had seen first hand the desire to move to New Zealand.
“I have friends and colleagues, former colleagues there, and it’s on a weekly basis that I’m hearing from one of them… I’m really interested, I’m seriously looking into moving to New Zealand.”
“If you look at the geopolitical environment, if you look at the safety and natural environment and of the benefits of raising a family here, it’s never been more appealing.”
Pan said 300 was a “modest initial cap” for the number of visas granted, and nowhere near as high as other countries offering the scheme.
“The UK, Singapore, Australia, the US all offer this exceptional talent type of visa where you don’t need a job offer… if we were using the same ratio in the US or UK use, we would have 900 of these exceptional specialists a year.”
“It’s not a high volume of immigration. We have 40,000 or 50,000 accredited employer work visas issued a year. So it’s really a drop in the bucket if you look at it that way.”
She said talent was “critical” to allowing local companies to innovate and offer their products and services to the global market.