Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. I rise with great pain to this House to speak to the many petitions that have been presented on the issue of immigration. I want to acknowledge the people in the gallery who are joining us today who come from our migrant communities who shared with us their pain. I want to acknowledge as well the Minister for being present during the time that they were sharing their stories. The petitions that were presented and that we're discussing today do not call for us to not take a public health approach. If anything I doubt many migrants want us to have a resurgence of COVID-19. In fact most of our migrant communities have supported the public health approach taken by the Government so that we are all safe. None the less what the petitions are asking is for kindness and for justice and for the rights of our migrant communities to be upheld. In fact many of the issues raised in these petitions have to do with the rights of our onshore migrant communities who have been failed by our broken immigration system. I want to make it clear that our immigration system was already pretty broken since before the pandemic and the pandemic has only made the policy failures worse. I want to touch on for example the petition of Ryann Lourenco who called for pathways to residency for our migrant communities acknowledging that migrant communities who are onshore are some of the most vulnerable to a resurgence of COVID-19. When you cannot access assistance through the welfare State when your future isn't certain when you cannot go to school you are far more vulnerable to the pandemic and the right thing to do right now is to also tautoko the contributions that our migrants have made during the pandemic and ensure that they can fully participate in society. I think it's nothing close to gaslighting to imply that what migrants are asking is for us to open our borders to COVID-19. For our migrant communities offshore the petitioners have asked for certainty and for clarity simply for a pathway of knowing when they'll come back. Some people do not mind waiting but they just want to know that they'll be able to be reunited with their families. Post-study work visa holders simply want to know that they'll have a visa once the borders reopen and it is safe. They're not asking for our lives to be put at risk; they are simply asking for there to be a pathway and for there to be certainty.Other petitioners like Polina Chernyshova have asked for some equity in the ability for migrants to be reunited with their families for post-graduate students to be able to apply for the exemptions—and they know that once they apply for the exemptions and apply for visas they still have to wait to get access to managed isolation and quarantine. Our communities know that and they're OK with that but it's about that equity within the process. The fact that our community in India doesn't even have that pathway to apply for the border exemptions just because of their country of origin is absolutely not fair and has been also highlighted by the petitions. The Green Party stands behind many of the calls of these petitioners. We stand for pathways to residency we stand for the extension of visas for our communities offshore and we call on the Government to hear the voices of these petitioners and fix our immigration system so that our migrant communities can have some certainty that they can fully participate in society and that they can be part of our recovery from COVID-19. Because what we have seen is that the recovery from COVID-19 is not equal. There have been groups that have been left behind as we recover from the pandemic either in our unemployment statistics or in their ability to access income support. The emergency benefit provided to our migrant communities has not been successful. It has under-delivered and I wish that our migrant communities would be able to access residency so that if they were to move back to alert level 3 or 4 or were to lose employment they can be fully supported and participate in our recovery.So the Green Party hears the voices of the many petitioners. We will not stop campaigning and working productively with the Labour Party to ensure that we fix our broken immigration system. Now the key thing here as well is that we end visa delays. This is nothing to do with our border rules. This is about the communities here who have been waiting for months—some for years—for their visas to be processed because our immigration system is run as a business as opposed to a core public service. We call for broad systemic changes that ensure that our migrants' dignity is upheld. Kia ora.