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Thread: How many visas?

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Sep 2013
    Location
    United Kingdom
    Posts
    6

    Default How many visas?

    Hi all.
    Hopefully my family and I moving to Christchurch mid Jan 2014 and I have a few questions.
    I will shortly be starting the ball rolling with Skilled Migrant Category Visa application and I'd like to know if I pay separate fees for each of us or are we all covered on one application?
    Is it advisable to use an immigration agent, if so what fees should I expect for their services?
    What kind of time scale should I expect from EOI online 'till visa?
    Will I need a temporary work visa?

    I'm sorry if I've repeated any earlier threads but any info would be greatly appreciated.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    37,824

    Default

    If you apply for Residence under SMC, the main applicant applies and the rest of the family (partner and dependent children) are secondary applicants on the same application. In that situation, there is just the one case (and initial fee), but each person ends up with a Residence visa in his/her passport.

    If you have to get a temporary work visa for some reason (see later), you would then have to get also a partner-sponsored temporary work visa for your partner, student visas for any of your children who are of school age, and a visitor's visa for any children below school age - that is, separate submissions for each person.

    Most people do not need to use an agent. They can charge a LOT of money, and you still have to find the information and evidence yourself. INZ themselves, and people on the forum, can usually sort out any misunderstandings or questions you have. The INZ website and the INZ operational manual carry huge amounts of information, free.

    Every application takes as long as it takes. It's impossible to tell you how long YOUR application will take, since each person is an individual and the evidence of their qualifications and working life will be different from everyone else's. Verification of the evidence depends on third parties (e.g. universities and past employers) and nobody can say how urgently such people will treat the matter. Working conditions and workload fluctuate within INZ offices, and delays can happen which are nothing to do with individual cases. However, by Googling "NZ immigration London branch processing times" (or whichever branch you will have to apply to) you can get to a page which gives their most recent estimates based on recent averages. But no timing mentioned is ever a promise.

    If you were to get a job offer from a NZ company while your SMC application is being processed, and the INZ officials told you your Residence visas were unlikely to come through in time for you to start work at the time the employer would hope for, then you might want to apply for a temporary work visa, which could be processed more quickly, to enable you to start the job while the Residence visas were taking the necessary time. (But ALL visas take the time they take, and it's never advisable to agree a near-future start date based on average processing times, without stating firmly that this is subject to the visa coming through.)

    As you suspect, all these points have come up plenty of times before on the forum, so if you want more details/more angles, you will find many old threads by using our Search, or by entering in Google "site:enz.org" followed by whatever key words, which is a more sensitive search, often, than our own.

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