Erica Stanford

That is fair, and Immigration New Zealand got absolutely hauled over the coals, and so should have the previous Minister under Labour.

When we opened the borders from COVID and we just let in anyone, we literally closed our eyes and said, you know, welcome to New Zealand, we're not going to check your documents or do a proper risk management.

That was a disaster.

That's how we ended up with 70% low-skilled migrants, couldn't speak English, you know, brought all of their family and were then essentially exploited.

what we've built over the last two years is proper risk management, proper verification, and we've brought in things like English language requirements.

You're not allowed to bring your family if you're low skilled.

You have to have the skill required to do the job, which we didn't have before.

So with all that tightening up, we're just not getting the applicants who are the more dodgy ones.

We absolutely are doing something about it.

We have in the last year done more deportations than any years in the last five years.

It's a huge amount more than the last few years and that's because of this government's tightening up on those who are overstaying and those who are undertaking criminal behaviour.

We're taking a really hard line approach.

You would have heard me in the media talking about it and of course riling up some of those on the left saying that I'm heartless but actually if you are coming to New Zealand we expect you to behave and

and abide by the conditions of your visa.

And if you don't, you're out.

No, and I was very careful and worked with Todd McClay to help set the mandate very carefully to make sure that what we were doing was beneficial to New Zealand, which is why you see the bulk of those 5,000, like 90%, are those high-skilled green list workers.

There is a small handful of what we call iconic occupations.

We did it with the China, sorry, the China FTA as well.

And there's a handful of them.

Typically, out of the Chinese one, I looked at the stats the other day,