Written by Travis
We’re not immigration experts. So don’t base your life on our advice. Research the New Zealand Immigration site. Use your own judgement, and don’t break the law.
If you’re over 30 years old and/or don’t have a bachelor’s degree then you probably don’t qualify to emigrate. If that applies to you then here are some tips to get into New Zealand legally.
1. Get married to someone who is qualified.
Point in fact, I didn’t qualify to move to New Zealand because I’m a year short of a university degree. However, Amber has a degree in teaching. So she’s qualified. When married couples file for immigration you’ll list one person as the primary applicant, and that’s the person who will be judged. Whatever else the secondary applicant brings to the table is just icing on the cake, and if they don’t bring anything to the table you’re not penalized for it. If you’re already married and neither of you have a degree then do whatever it takes to push one of you through school as fast as possible. Either way, be warned that you have to be married for two years prior to submitting your application.
2. Get a degree
Every accredited university is equal in the eyes of the immigration board. You won’t get any extra points for going to Harvard than you will for going to Joe Bob’s University. This means you can take advantage of universities like The University of Phoenix, which offers relatively easy online classes and gives you credit for life experiences. Using schools like this will allow you to punch out a degree relatively quickly. But make sure to check out the Essential Skills in Demand list. Getting a degree in one of these fields will give you extra points towards your application. Also, this list is update regularly.
Remember, it’s much harder to qualify to move to New Zealand after you turn 30. So if you’re in your late twenties and need to finish a degree quickly this path could be your best option.
3. Fall in love with a local
As hard as it is to emigrate anywhere you’d think the entire world would collapse if one more person moved to a new country, but for all the red tape involved in keeping you in your birth country there’s a gigantic back door that will let you waltz right into to just about anywhere. If you fall in love with a person from a foreign country you can bypass most of the legal requirements.
Now, marrying solely for the purpose of emigration is illegal. So when you get a holiday visa or a working holiday visa and visit your prospective country and go to the first bar you see and ask the first 30 people you see if they’ll fall in love with you for an American green card, make sure your love is real. As long as you really care about the person you just met, your mutually beneficial partnership will be completely legal. Be warned though, you have to go through a pretty lengthy process of proving to the immigration board that your love is real. This involves references, photos, financial ties and a bunch of other stuff I don’t know about.
4. The Hail Mary
The whole purpose of making the immigration process so difficult is to keep freeloaders with no viable job skills out of any given country. If you can prove you have job skills they’ll let you in, but you’ll still need a job offer before your residency visa gets its final approval. This means you have to apply for your visa, pass several preliminary approvals and then get a job offer. This is tricky, because unless you have amazing credentials in a highly specialized, undermanned career field nobody is going to give you a job offer while you live in your birth country. They don’t want to take the chance that your plans will change when they have 10 people standing right outside their door who can start work tomorrow.
As a result you’re going to have to move to New Zealand (or wherever) on a working holiday visa (while you’re residency visa is still in limbo), apply for jobs and hopefully get one before your working holiday visa runs out.
Now here’s the interesting part. You can move to New Zealand (or wherever) on a working holiday visa, get a job and then apply for your residency visa. Since you’re already in the country and you already have a job you’ve already proven to the immigration board that they’re not letting a freeloader into the country by approving your application for a residency visa. This will make the immigration paperwork a little easier and a little quicker. However, this is a very dangerous tightrope to walk. You can still fail your residency application if you have bad health or if they don’t deem your work skills sufficient. Getting a job at McDonalds won’t impress the immigration board. If your job falls under the Essential Skills in Demand list then you’ll have the best chance of getting your residency visa approved.
There are probably other factors I’m not aware of that could affect your application, but if you’re really desperate and you’re willing to take a risk, this path could potentially work. If nothing else, you could fall in love with one of your coworkers while you’re in country and legally use the marriage loophole to get your citizenship.
5. Get Rich Quick
Laws and restrictions are for poor people. If you can get $3 million in your bank account the immigration board will role out the red carpet for you. But then again, if you’ve got $3 million then why not just buy your own island?
6. Get Professional Help
The process of immigrating to New Zealand is stressful enough that a small industry has bloomed to help people through the immigration process….for a fee of course. If you need professional help, then help is just a Google search away.
What if none of these legal loopholes apply to me?
Too bad. All the governments of the world have colluded to set the bar to immigration so high that they’ve effectively made the poor and loveless prisoners in their birth country, and they’ve done it in a way that every country can claim plausible deniability. You can justify the systemic imprisonment of the majority of the world’s population however you want, and your justifications may have logic to them, but in the end you’re justifying a system that allows corrupt governments the freedom to exploit and kill their border-locked citizens. On a more philosophical note, if we don’t have the freedom to live where we want then we can never truly say we’re free; what freedom we do have is merely a matter of degrees. But that’s the way of the world, and statistically speaking you’re probably one of the billions of humans beings whose fate and tax dollars are limited by the whims of your politicians…who never miss a chance to “remind” you how free you are.
Filed under: general tips on moving, the immigration process
