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Ever wondered why so many vape shops, dairies and bottle stores you see these days are staffed by Indians?
You’re not imagining things and it’s not racist to notice. It’s called pattern recognition, a survival strategy humans evolved over millennia for a good reason.
It also raises the question - why is it happening? Part of the answer lies in a major change to New Zealand’s immigration system.
In 2022, New Zealand replaced the Essential Skills Work Visa with the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV). We still had a points-based Skilled Migrant Category for residence, but the temporary work-visa system was fundamentally reorganised around employers.
The AEWV was intended to solve a genuine problem. Employers were complaining that they could not find enough New Zealanders to fill vacancies. Between 2018 and 2022 there was a steady stream of stories about shortages in aged care, hospitality, construction and trades, engineering, architecture and transport.
The political response was to make it easier for employers to recruit overseas workers where they could demonstrate that suitable New Zealanders were not available.
Okay, fine, but then something else happened. Many of the migrants arriving under the new system were not going into the large companies whose labour shortages had helped drive the political debate. Increasingly, migrants could be found working in small businesses: dairies, liquor stores, convenience stores and other low- and medium-skilled occupations.
The INZ list of accredited employers gives an indication of how widespread accreditation has become. Go on the immigration website and put ‘vape’ in the search engine. This produces over 80 results. The word dairy, over 430 results, and the word liquor (bottle shops) gets you over 200 results.
So what is going on? What’s going on is a high trust model being exploited by people from a low trust society.
An employer first applies for accreditation. Standard accreditation currently costs $775. The employer then applies for a job check for a particular vacancy.
Employers must declare that they have made genuine efforts to recruit New Zealanders. They must provide information about the advertising and recruitment process. INZ can check the information and take enforcement action.
But this is still an employer-led system. Not every employer and every vacancy is independently investigated before a migrant is hired.
Indeed, INZ says it aims to conduct post-accreditation checks on about 16 per cent of accredited employers each year. That’s an aim, not necessarily an outcome. Sixteen per cent. No one would call that a lot.
Under the previous essential skills system, employers generally had to demonstrate that they had genuinely tried to recruit New Zealanders. Evidence could include advertising, recruitment-company records and the outcome of recruitment efforts.
The AEWV shifted much of the responsibility for identifying and recruiting overseas workers onto accredited employers. It also opened the door to overseas recruitment for jobs at lower ANZSCO (the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations) levels.
That creates an obvious question: how much protection does an employer-led, high-trust system provide when an employer is prepared to abuse that trust?
The migrant’s position is particularly vulnerable.
An AEWV is tied to the employer, occupation and location specified on the visa. A worker cannot simply leave and take another job. They must obtain a job change or another visa if they want to continue working legally.
That doesn’t amount to legal slavery, of course. But it can create a kind of indentured-labour dynamic: the worker’s right to work is tied to the very employer on whom their livelihood depends. And when the employer is exploitative, the imbalance of power can become extreme.
That’s what happened to the worker at Thirsty Liquor in Mount Maunganui. In a case reported earlier this year, the Employment Relations Authority ordered more than $35,000 in unpaid wages and holiday entitlements, together with about $33,000 in penalties, against Thirsty Liquor Mt Maunganui and its sole director and shareholder, Inderpreet Singh.
The worker had held a series of temporary visas while working for Singh’s company, Hot Spot Liquor Ltd. A complaint to an MBIE Labour Inspector led to an investigation. The worker had been required to work at another bottle store owned by Singh and had not been paid on a number of occasions.
It would be foolish to assume that one case represents every employer. But it raises an uncomfortable question: how many migrant workers are trapped in arrangements we never see?
The problem is particularly acute where migrants have paid large sums to obtain employment in New Zealand. A worker who arrives heavily in debt is not in the same bargaining position as an ordinary employee. The threat of losing the job can become the threat of losing the ability to remain and work legally in the country. The power imbalance is built into the visa structure.
Take the extraordinary case of Jaswinder Singh, the Thames Four Square operator who was ordered to pay $44,000 in penalties after two migrant workers paid a combined $120,000 to secure their employment. The two workers paid $60,000 each.
According to the Employment Relations Authority findings reported by Inside Retail, the company actually used the workers’ own money to pay their wages. Think about that. Workers paid $60,000 each for the privilege of coming to New Zealand to work. Their own money was then used to pay the wages they were owed.
In effect, Singh had imported slave labour: workers who had paid to obtain their jobs were then being used to finance the wages they were supposed to receive.
The arrangement collapsed within a short period. Singh dismissed the workers, claiming they had misrepresented their English-language ability. The Labour Inspectorate intervened and the $120,000 was ultimately repaid.
Whatever terminology one chooses, the underlying facts are extraordinary. A system designed to give employers access to overseas labour had created an opportunity for an employer to extract $120,000 from two workers seeking a better life. This is where the high-trust model becomes vulnerable.
The problem isn’t that New Zealand has no rules. It is that rules are only as effective as the information supplied to the authorities and the willingness and capacity of the state to detect breaches.
THE REVOLVING DOOR
What happens when an AEWV expires?
We know that some migrants move from an AEWV into other temporary visas or residence pathways when they qualify. What we do not know, from publicly available data, is how many do so after their employment ends, rather than leaving New Zealand.
The immigration system provides routes for some migrants to remain beyond their original employment. A worker who loses a job may obtain a job change, another temporary visa, or - if they meet the requirements - a student or partnership-based visa.
For lower-skilled AEWV jobs, the maximum continuous stay is generally three years. Higher-skilled occupations generally have a five-year maximum, with a number of exceptions.
A genuine move into a higher-skilled occupation can change the applicable visa rules. But simply changing a job title does not magically turn a three-year visa into a five-year one.
The broader point remains: a temporary work-visa system can become a stepping stone to a much longer-term presence in New Zealand.
As at 31 August 2026, INZ had approved more than 209,000 AEWV applications since the scheme opened. There were more than 29,000 accredited employers and more than 94,000 current AEWV holders.
That is no longer a small programme designed simply to plug temporary labour shortages. It is a major component of New Zealand’s immigration system.
THE WIDER CONSEQUENCES
There are other uncomfortable examples.
In Australia, India was moved in January 2026 to Evidence Level 3, the highest level of evidentiary requirement for student-visa applications. The change came amid concerns about visa integrity and a major fake-degree scandal in India. Indian authorities investigating the scandal reportedly uncovered tens of thousands of forged certificates and warned that the wider network could involve more than a million fraudulent documents.
New Zealand has had its own warning signs.
Baltej Singh was sentenced after pleading guilty to importing more than 700kg of methamphetamine, described at the time as the largest known methamphetamine importation into New Zealand.
Two kiwifruit labour companies associated with Ajaypal Singh subsequently went into liquidation amid allegations of approximately $57 million in unpaid tax. The collapse was reported as apparently the largest business collapse in New Zealand in 2025.
And NZTA cancelled 459 commercial truck licences after an audit uncovered fraudulent licence conversions. All 459 drivers were born in India.
The fact that Singh was the most common surname registered for newborns in New Zealand in 2024, for the seventh consecutive year, is one small illustration of how rapidly the country’s demographics are changing.
That change is not inherently bad. Immigration can be beneficial but immigration on this scale needs a system capable of distinguishing genuine labour shortages from opportunities for labour exploitation. It needs employers who can be trusted - and a government prepared to check when they cannot.
Some Indian New Zealanders I have spoken to privately are deeply concerned about the behaviour of a minority of recent arrivals. They tell me they believe the immigration system has admitted people who are damaging the reputation of a community they themselves have spent years building in New Zealand. They want the scale and character of migration reconsidered.
So do many other New Zealanders. The question is not whether New Zealand should have immigration. The question is whether we are still choosing our migrants - or whether the migrants, and the employers who recruit them, are increasingly choosing us.