Today’s Immigration Rant
So yesterday I heard back about the educational equivalency evaluation for my H1-B. The line I’m being given is that the letters from my previous employers didn’t give enough technical information on my responsibilities. My reply was that maybe they should have asked for that, instead of giving me a form letter for them to fill out suggesting a brief sentence or two. So now there will be another delay of a week or so, unless a second evaluator decides the information is good enough. I should know whether that works out by end-of-day tomorrow.
In addition to this, my wife & I found out yesterday that the advice from an immigration officer—that we should submit our Canadian Experience Class residency applications in person at Buffalo for a much quicker turnover—was in fact incorrect in every possible way. The Buffalo office doesn’t even handle in-person residency applications. AT ALL.
So instead, I look through the Buffalo consulate website and the general Canada Immigration for information on the CEC application handling times. Answer: they hit 12 months since the class became available a couple months ago, so average processing times will be published January-February. sigh.
Buffalo’s site says that you must mail in your application along with non-refundable $450/person processing fee, in some form which means you lose money up-front (i.e. not a cheque or card details). You’ll then receive notice that your case has been opened, along with a processing number, sometime with 20 weeks. Which is another way of saying “5 months”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t break this down between the very-long-waiting-list Skilled Worker Class applications and the ‘prioritized’ Canadian Experience Class. Since the wife & I have—AGAIN!—been given inaccurate information by immigration officials, we’re left with anywhere between one and three months before our work visas become invalid (either when they expire, or when I take up a new job at Apple in the US). At that point, if we haven’t completely moved out of the country, we lose any eligibility to apply for residency (i.e. we’d have remained in the country illegally). That’s really not a viable option, not only because of a lack of funds to pay for such a move, but also because at the start of the year we invested $25’000 into my wife’s new business. Leaving the country means walking away from that business, and therefore losing the investment. Although we’d still have to pay back half of a $200’000 business loan at that point. Possibly immediately (when the business closes down), but I’m not certain of that.
Because of all this, I attempted to find out what the real likely time frame would be for both processing of the application, and (most importantly) how long it would be before the case would be opened. In the latter case, I didn’t expect any trouble, since the Canadian work permit office in Vegreville, Alberta has been happy to tell me before now exactly how far behind they are in opening the applications they’ve received by mail (i.e. “we opened applications we received on October 7th today”). So, since the Buffalo consulate doesn’t accept telephone enquiries, I duly emailed them. I provided lots and lots of information, explained who I’d spoken to already, both in person at the Canadian border (Toronto Pearson Airport and the Peace Bridge in Niagara) and on my many many phone calls to the immigration call centre. I explained why this information was very important to us (we can’t afford to throw all our money into a black hole unless we know we won’t need it to move back to the UK within 3 months). I explained that our only other option to avoid losing my wife’s business was to plead for a work visa on her own behalf (not usually possible for workers in a non-established business), that we’d need to do so by early January at the latest, and that we’d need the reference number from an in-process permanent residency application to have even a chance of making that work.
This morning I got their reply:
“This office will only answer questions from clients who have submitted applications here which have been accepted for processing. Unless you have included a Buffalo file number in the subject line of your message, we will not be able to respond.”
They then went on to direct me to the exact same places I told them I’d already been.
Evidently they didn’t even read so much as a single line of my email, they just saw that it didn’t have a case number in the subject and hit the ‘default reply’ button.
So, I’m now being dicked about by immigration officials in two different countries. On one hand is the US, which doesn’t provide any details, just tells me that what I’ve provided isn’t good enough after I’ve spent a month getting it together. On the other hand is Canada, whose immigration employees all swear up & down that we can do XYZ, only for us to be told, upon attempting to do so, that we absolutely can’t. This happened last year too, by the way— the call centre advised me to apply for a work permit as a consultant, showing a signed work contract. Upon doing so, we were told this was in no way an option, whatsoever. Our Plan B would have worked perfectly, however, had we not been given inaccurate information leading us to rely on Plan A. By this time, however, everything upon which Plan B was reliant had expired.
So, yeah. Not in the best mood today.
Currently I’m waiting for some inane requirement from the US that they can then use to arbitrarily refuse me entry. “Please provide a photograph of your dick.” “Sorry, your dick is too small, we cannot grant you a work permit unless you get a bigger one.” “No, we won’t tell you how big it needs to be.”
sigh
