‘Living in fear’: Teen overstayer in limbo after losing bid for residency

A New Zealand-born teenager who has never attended school because he is an overstayer has lost a bid for residency.

As a result, the 18-year-old faces deportation to India - a country he has never set foot in.

Navjot Singh has lived his entire life in New Zealand without legal status after his parents overstayed their work visas.

His request for residency through ministerial intervention was denied last week by Associate Immigration Minister Chris Penk.

The decision comes months after another overstayer, 18-year-old Daman Kumar, was granted residency through a similar intervention in February.

Kumar, who lived without a valid visa for nearly two decades, told RNZ in 2023 that others like him deserved the same chance.

"It's totally unfair," Kumar said after being approached for comment on Singh's case on Tuesday.

"[The government] should be discussing a compromise so it is fair for people like myself and Navjot, because it was totally out of our control the fact that we were born after a law was changed," he said, referring to the introduction of the 2006 Citizenship Amendment Act, which ended automatic citizenship for children born in New Zealand to non-resident parents.

"Born here [without a visa] or not, this is our home too," he said.

"We're not mistakes. We might not exist on certain papers, but we do talk to people in real life. We still have connections and relationships."

Kumar said the government didn't know how many people like him existed.

Statistics released by Immigration New Zealand in September estimated there are 20,980 overstayers in New Zealand.

Immigration New Zealand told RNZ in February it did not keep accurate data on how many children under 17 were in the country without a valid visa.

The agency said its overstayer data was limited by inconsistencies between border movements and visa records, historical data entry issues, and missing or inaccurate documentation.

In May, three other teenagers also came forward to share their experiences of living stateless in New Zealand.

Singh was born in Auckland in 2007, a year after changes to the country's citizenship law.

As a result of the legislative reform, many children born to undocumented immigrants have grown up without access to basic rights such as education and healthcare.

"[My father] was deported when I was just five days old," Singh said. "I have no connection with my father. I haven't talked to him in the past five years."

Singh said he first learned about his situation when he was eight years old.

"I asked my mum why I wasn't at school, and then she had to tell me," he said. "Ever since, I've been living in fear. I couldn't even be honest with my friends."

His parents first relocated to New Zealand in the early 2000s, eventually getting married here.

Singh's father applied for refugee status, but his application was declined, and he was deported in 2007.

Singh's mother lost her legal right to stay in 2012, leaving him stateless.

The 18-year-old teenager now fears deportation to a country he has never known.

"I don't think I'll survive in India," he said. "I don't speak Hindi. I've heard that people with higher qualifications can't find jobs there, so what would I do?"

Inspired by Kumar's successful appeal earlier in the year, Singh decided to secure legal status himself.

"When I turned 16, I knew I wanted to do something before I turned 18 - at least give it a try," he said. "I didn't want to live my life like this."

He said life as an overstayer had been tough.

"You can't go anywhere," he said. "You have to stay home."

Making friends was also difficult, he said.

"People would ask which school I went to, so I had to lie," he said.

Singh had seen how hard life had been for his mother.

"Raising a child as a single mother is really tough - imagine doing that without legal status," he said. "We only survived with the help of our friends and the community.

He said the pandemic made life even harder.

"Our biggest challenge is healthcare," he said. "We live scared because we don't know what could happen."

Immigration lawyer Alastair McClymont, who is representing Singh, said New Zealand needed to rethink how it treated child overstayers.

"It is incredibly inhumane to deport kids who have grown up here to a foreign country," McClymont said.

McClymont said the government should align its laws with those of countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, which grant citizenship to children who have lived there for 10 years.

"That would resolve the problem for children born to parents without a valid visa or on temporary visas," he said.

"Once a child has lived here for 10 years from birth, they should be eligible for citizenship."

McClymont had received a letter from the immigration minister's office that said cases such as Singh's should be handled through ministerial requests or the Immigration Protection Tribunal.

However, he said that process made no sense for someone born stateless.

"You can only appeal to the tribunal within 42 days - so Navjot would've had to lodge an appeal before he was even 42 days old, which is impossible," McClymont said.

Daljit Singh, president of the Supreme Sikh Society, learned about Singh's plight a few years ago.

"When somebody told me he was 15 years old and had never been to school, that's something I found very difficult to digest," Singh said.

"He was born in New Zealand and is part of our community," the community leader said.

"What harm will children like Navjot bring to New Zealand? We shouldn't punish these children because it wasn't their fault."

Ricardo Menéndez March, immigration spokesperson for the Green Party, said deporting children with no connection to their parents' home countries "risks putting them in hardship and strips them of their support networks."

"Erica Stanford has turned her back on some of the migrants most likely to face exploitation and negative impacts due to our immigration settings, which often do not provide residency pathways and treat migrants as expendable," he said.

Phil Twyford, immigration spokesperson for the Labour Party, called on the government to review the issue and find a "better way" when it came to children of overstayers.

Twyford said cases such as Singh's had prompted Labour to review its position.

"I've come to the view as [immigration] spokesperson that it's untenable ... to be deporting these young people who have known no other country but New Zealand and so we are looking at this policy," he said.

"We've got a cohort of young people who were born here in the period after the 2006 law change ... who are turning 19," he said.

"They have known no other country other than New Zealand and to deport them or to expect them to continue living in the shadows, fearful, always vulnerable to exploitation and not able to access many of the services that we take for granted as New Zealanders because they are undocumented migrants, I don't think that's good enough," he said.

"As New Zealanders, we need to do better."

A spokesperson for Immigration Minister Erica Stanford said there was no policy work underway on people born in New Zealand after 2006 to parents without legal status, but that individual cases could be considered through the Immigration Protection Tribunal or ministerial intervention.

"The minister has confidence in these avenues to consider such cases on their individual circumstances as they arise," the spokesperson said.

Despite Singh's uncertain status, the teenager remained hopeful.

"I just want to live a normal life, that's the dream," he said.

"If you were in the same situation, what would you do?"