New entrepreneur visa   28 Sep 2016

Wednesday 28 September 2016 12:30 PM

Edmund Hillary Fellowship chosen to deliver migrants for new entrepreneur visa

By Sophie Boot

Sept. 28 (BusinessDesk) - The government has picked the Edmund Hillary Fellowship to work with Immigration New Zealand on a new visa which it hopes will attract young entrepreneurs to the country.

Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse announced the plan for the global impact visa in April. The visa will be run as a four-year pilot and limited to 400 people over that period, beginning early next year.

In a cabinet paper from April, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment proposed the visa to offer a work-to-residence pathway where migrant entrepreneurs would first get a work visa with open conditions, with the ability to apply for a permanent resident visa after three years.

The current policies for investors and entrepreneurs were working well, the ministry said, but weren't designed to bring in innovative, global entrepreneurs who New Zealand needs to support its growth. They miss out younger entrepreneurs who lack investment capital, start-up teams whose value as a team can't be assessed by current policies, and experienced global entrepreneurs who can't liquidate their assets to meet the investor policy nor commit to spending two years here full-time for one business as is required under the entrepreneur policy.

Edmund Hillary Fellowship is co-run by Kiwi Connect, a Wellington-based organisation which seeks to promote and connect entrepreneurship in New Zealand, and the non-profit Hillary Institute for International Leadership.

It will be responsible for promoting the visa, identifying applicants and building a regional network to integrate visa holders, while Immigration New Zealand will process and make decisions on the visas.

Woodhouse said up to 80 New Zealand entrepreneurs and investors will be accepted into Edmund Hillary Fellowship over the four years, which will provide an opportunity for collaboration with migrants using this visa.

David Cooper, an immigration adviser at Malcolm Pacific Immigration, welcomed the initiative, saying "the government needs to experiment a little bit more in the immigration space".

"There are definitely some gaps in the policy for people who want to come to New Zealand and make a contribution, but may not have all of the money in order to do that," Cooper said.

"I think there have been some people that have come to New Zealand as investor migrants, primarily out of the States, who have said to the government 'hey, we could tap into some really smart, young, clever people in places like Silicon Valley, who could come to New Zealand and potentially be the next Mark Zuckerberg or something like that, but your visa rules are getting in the way - it's hard for those people to be able to come here and do what they potentially could do for New Zealand'. That's where the thinking has come from."

Cooper said the control on numbers is welcome and necessary to make sure the visa attracts migrants the government wants.

"The government's got to be careful they don't lower the benchmark and get inundated. I don't think that's going to happen, but we have seen that kind of thing before, where hordes of people apply and it puts the system under pressure, or to get a new visa off the ground the benchmark gets a bit low, and then when the masses apply, there's a reaction and a whole lot of unhappiness."

Woodhouse said Kiwi Connect and the Hillary Institute "have an exceptional combined record of recognising, rewarding and nurturing emerging entrepreneurs and leaders."

“By drawing on private sector strengths and knowledge in this space, the government is better positioned to accelerate innovation and continue to grow the contribution migrants make to the economy.”

(BusinessDesk)

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