By Ab, ibtalk.blogspot.com
All the time I was being asked by people about immigration to Canada and so I decided to write this article to help me and others save our precious time. Because it’s difficult to cover immigration process for all sort of cases in short article I will focus on students and young families who are currently residing in Canada or living outside of Canada. Essentially the application process is the same whether you are already in Canada or outside of it. The only difference is that when you are outside of Canada you have to apply to the Canadian visa office that serves your region while if you are inside the Canada and lived there for at least one year you are eligible to apply to any of the several Canadian visa offices located in the US. (If I’m not mistaken there is a new law that permits international student who graduated from Canadian university to apply to immigration office within Canada. I will find out about this more information and update this article.)
In addition there are two types of application – regular and simplified. Here you can find out which application to use.
Like any other country Canada has its own minimum requirements for you to be eligible to immigrate as a skilled worker. Every applicant is assessed based on six factors: Education, Knowledge of English/French, Work experience, Age, Arranged Employment in Canada and Adaptability. For every item in the above list you will be given certain points – the minimum you need to apply is 67 points out of 100.
There are many combinations of getting 67 points but I will provide one as example: If you have Master’s degree (25 points), one to two years of full time paid work experience (15-17 points), scored at least 7 out of 9 points on every section of IELTS English test (16 points) and your age is between 21 and 49 (10 points), you should be able to get minimum of 67 points to apply. In addition if your spouse or common-law partner has a Master’s degree you will get additional 5 points for Adaptability. It’s worth noting that you don’t have to have Canadian education, the one you got from your country will be just as good.
Once you collected and applied all documents to Canadian visa office you will be issued a unique file number which you will have to use in all your correspondences with visa office.
After your documents are reviewed and immigration officer has no questions regarding your application you will be asked to go through medical examination in the nearest clinic authorised by Canadian visa office. Once your medical examination is complete and it’s confirmed that you have no “serious” health issues you will be issued a letter of promise stating that you are now entitled for getting your immigration visa within 90 days after receiving the letter which means your process was successively complete. In addition you will be asked to show a proof of funds (about CAD $10,000). At this stage you need to take your passport or travel document along with canadian bank letter, cash or traveler's checkues and arrive to the visa office to obtain your immigration visa.
Note that the application process that I described above was a regular process, not simplified. The only difference between regular and simplified processes is that in the latter one you first submit a very simple form where you state all the facts about your education, experience, age etc. Only if visa officer satisfied that you meet immigration requirements you will be asked to provide all the documents that prove and support information that you provided in the simplified form. From this point the process is the same as in the case of regular application process.
Canadian Immigration Office states that the whole process from applying to getting the approval takes up to 3 years. However, based on experience of several people who I know, had similar qualifications as in the example I provided above, on average their applications were successfully processed in 12 months ranging from 6 months to 18 months.
I will be updating this article as time goes by and new immigration laws will be introduced. Below I'm providing some useful links on this topic:
Citizenship and Immigration Canada website
Who can apply—Six selection factors and pass mark
Who can apply—Proof of funds
How to apply – Regular and Simplified Applications
Provincial Nominee Program – For faster application process
1 comment:
Well said.
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