Asked to prove a decades-long marriage with WhatsApp chats
Immigration New Zealand has been asking elderly couples, some married for 50 years or more, to prove their marriages are genuine with WhatsApp and text-message logs. Immigration lawyers have called this culturally insensitive and impractical, arguing the Western-centric evidence checklist of joint accounts, bills and digital trails disadvantages couples from arranged-marriage or different cultural backgrounds.
What happened
- Officers asked older couples, including long-married ones, for message logs as evidence their relationship was genuine.
- Immigration lawyers said the expected evidence, joint assets, utility bills, digital communications, is biased toward Western, paper-trail relationships.
- Immigration New Zealand said officers consider whatever evidence a couple can provide, and the Minister acknowledged the culturally arranged marriage rules need reform.
As reported by RNZ, 28 October 2025: “Elderly couples applying for visas asked to prove marriages are real with WhatsApp chats”.
The lesson
Immigration New Zealand assesses a genuine and stable relationship against a fairly Western template of evidence, and couples whose lives do not produce that paper trail, older couples, arranged marriages, cultures with different property norms, can be unfairly caught. The answer is to build the strongest evidence you can in the forms that do exist, and to explain the gaps, which is where experienced help makes a real difference.
The visa in this story
Partner of a New Zealander Resident VisaResidence for the partner of a New Zealand citizen or resident, based on a genuine and stable relationship and time living together.
Don’t let this be your story
Most partnership visa heartbreak is avoidable with the right advice before you apply. Have a lawyer assess your situation honestly, backed by our money-back guarantee.