We had a meeting with INZ yesterday ...
... and it was horrible.
As you guys know from my recent posts, I wrote a letter of complaint to INZ about the delay in our PR process. As a result of that I had a meeting yesterday was with the CO and the skilled migrant manager. Turns out that although the CO has approved our application three times, the manager (who is the quality assurance person) is not approving it, and that is because he is not satisfied that my son (21) meets one of dependent child criteria - the one that says he has to be fully or substantially reliant on me financially. Why? Because he has been living in the UK on his OE, earning money and therefore 'supporting himself'. So even though he is now here, unemployed and fully dependent on me with plans in the pipeline to start uni next year, the manager still says NO.
If we withdraw him from our application, PR will definitely be approved for my daughter and myself. If we leave him on it with no additional evidence for his dependence, the application as a whole will be denied.
HOWEVER: there are options, one of which would be to withdraw him from the application, get our PR thru, then apply for him to enter as my dependent child. The difference being that when this new application is submitted, he will be here in NZ, not working, and therefore fully dependent on me financially right now. Isn't it crazy?? We can also resubmit evidence to prove his dependence ... but its a long shot!
They also talked about ways to let him stay here longer, ie getting extensions on his visitor visa, or getting him enrolled in uni and getting a student visa (international student fees? yeah right ....) but none of these really addresses the problem of how to get him PR so he can stay and go to uni as a domestic student next year. So for now we're discounting those options, and we are also for now discounting the option wherein we withdraw him from the application and send him back to South Africa to live his own life over there.
So on it goes. The one thing I still want to know, and I dare not ask it now as I don't want to raise the ire of this manager who holds the power of refusal over our application, is WHY it took my complaint and this meeting for me to find out what the problem was, and to begin looking at ways to address it! He's been *not approving* this since mid-July some time ... it is now October and we've been hanging in just waiting for a reply all that time. What exactly was being achieved by it just sitting there in limbo? How long would it have lain there if I hadn't complained? I don't know. I'm really unhappy about that side of it, as well as being deeply stressed by all the rest and the possibility that my son might not end up living here in NZ after all.
But onwards. At least we now know what the delay was all about and can have a go at trying to fix it!
Originally Posted by elleann
