Vancouver Immigration Consultant - CIP Canada - Spinning the Globe: Landing on Canada – A Guide to How We Became Vancouver Immigration Consultants

Vancouver immigration consultants spinning the globe

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my father. He spun our blue and tan globe, I closed my eyes, and ran my finger along its surface until it stopped. When I opened my eyes I was pointing at Canada.

We would play this game often and he’d tell me stories about the countries to which my finger pointed. I’d learn about its weather, what it produced, and its religion, politics and more. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for travel and adventure – and, later, a purpose. A purpose summed up by this memory: I remember asking him why there were so many lines on the map, and whether you could cross them.

More than 15 years after we started our own business we are still helping others navigate immigration borders. Helping people realize their dreams of a better future is the “why?” behind Canada Immigration Partners. To this day we still get the same amount of enjoyment at helping people achieve that happiness, which is why we are still Vancouver immigration consultants in 2023. 

You might recognize your own motivations for immigration to Canada below, or in my story on how I immigrated to Canada. If you can relate, we are well placed to help you permanently cross those lines on the globe. Immigration is a narrative with human relationships at its core. Let Canada Immigration Partners contribute to your story.

Vancouver Immigration Consultants, our take on why people immigrate

I’ve been fortunate enough to realize my childhood dreams of travel and adventure. Wherever I went there were immigration stories happening right in front of me. Now, I get to hear those stories on a daily basis. Understanding them is at the core of a successful immigration plan.

Vancouver Immigration Consultant Matthew Sell and Miho Shimizu

Economic Betterment

When I was 12 years old my Dad took me on a motorcycle trip to Spain. From the back of his bike I remember seeing North African immigrants cooking over an open fire with only tarps for shelter, undergoing considerable hardship in pursuit of the opportunity to seek a better life.

Years later, I taught English in Hong Kong. Visiting Central Park Avery on Sundays, I would see hundreds of Filipino workers sitting on blankets with picnic baskets and talking to one another in Tagalog. Many had left home in order to earn money that they would then send home to their families.

According to the World Economic Forum: “Migration is motivated, first and foremost, by lack of economic opportunities at home.” It’s also a win-win situation: despite representing just 3.4% of the population, immigrants are responsible for over 9% of global GDP. Thankfully, enlightened countries like Canada recognize that fact.

To Avoid Inefficiency or Corruption

While in India at 18 years old, I waited for nearly six hours in a stuffy room with a tired fan watching my passport being passed from desk to desk. I was attempting to get a visa that would let me cross a line on the map – only to be told that the officer whose stamp I needed to complete the application had gone home and wouldn’t be back till tomorrow morning. As it turns out a bribe would have gotten me a visa in less than half the time.  

Canada’s bureaucratic process is not as difficult to navigate as India’s, but it can be incredibly complex. Applying for immigration to Canada has been compared to removing your own appendix with an incomplete “how-to” manual. You might pull it off, but you’d be a lot better off with professional help. 

An international education and a path to residency

At university in Oxford, I was privileged to learn alongside a host of students from all around the world. Each offered a different perspective and made my university experience so much richer.  

Canada hosts more than 600,000 international students each year and provides a route to permanent residency through study and the Postgraduate Work Permit program. If that’s a channel you’re interested in exploring, we’ve got a full guide

Talent ignores borders

A stint with an investment bank gave me a front row seat to the cosmopolitan nature of talent, where specialist and knowledgeable workers at the top of their fields came from all corners of the globe. I quickly came to recognize its importance in bridging cultural divides and fueling innovation. 

So has the Canadian government. Canadian businesses are experiencing severe talent shortages across industries and regions. Those skills gaps are set to increase as an aging workforce retires. The Global Talent Stream, Temporary Foreign Worker Program and a host of trade agreements have been established to encourage immigration and ease the shortage. They’re important routes for working in Canada and moving towards permanent residency. 

Security

More recently, we’ve been receiving urgent calls and emails from families in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Russia wanting to learn more about how to move to Canada. It has highlighted the peace and security on offer in this country that many Canadians take for granted.

Canada Immigration Partners — removing borders to your Canadian immigration dream. Your Vancouver Immigration Consultants Partners

By sharing my backstory, love of travel and helping people, and by highlighting the driving factors motivating migration hopefully you are informed enough about our honest motivations and love of giving other people the same joy we felt and winning our permanent residency and then citizenship. Every time we receive a card or a testimonial from happy clients it always makes us smile.

Immigrate to Canada

Many years ago, on a road trip home to Vancouver from Regina, I stopped at one of the country’s immigration case-processing centres in Vegreville, Alberta. This office closed in 2018, with much of the staff being relocated to Edmonton. Prior to this, it’s where many people wanting to immigrate to Canada would have submitted their applications.

Centralization and ‘cost-cutting’ is nothing new, but AI is presenting novel changes when it comes to case processing efficiencies.

This blog post takes a look at the human side of Canadian immigration case processing. Part 2 will look at its increasing digitization and how a machine is still likely to think like a human as it has been created by one.

The importance, I believe, of this blog post is it highlights the work of a case processing officer and the need for your application to be detailed in how you meet the program requirement and supported with as much evidence and documentation as possible if you want to successfully immigrate to Canada.

Once Upon a Time in the West

The former case-processing centre at Vegreville dealt with Family Sponsorship, Permanent Residency and Temporary Residency applications.

I arrived at 7.30 am. I intended to just drive around the block, but it was such a beautiful morning I thought I’d get out and take some photos. As I did so, the immigration department employees started arriving for work: mainly middle-aged women with their Tim Horton’s coffee cups, replete with ID lanyards around their necks. As I took photos, the centre manager came out and asked if I was press or if I had submitted an application to this Canadian immigration centre. He mentioned that people would drive across the country to find out the status of their Canadian immigration application.

I answered his questions and told him that I was a regulated Canadian immigration consultant, that we (Miho and myself) had applications in process at the centre, and that I was passing by and wanted to take a look at this fabled institution for myself.  It’s worth noting at that point in time, we were sending nearly all our applications to Vegreville. This Immigration.ca article does a great job of explaining the work carried out at the centre and how it helped people immigrate to Canada.

Meanwhile, back in Vegreville… Once he [the manager] knew I wasn’t press or a disgruntled client, he invited me in for a tour of the facilities and to see for myself Citizenship and Immigration processing in action. He walked me through the processes involved from start to finish.

A Bureaucratic Journey: How Visa Officers Used to Process Your Immigration Application

The first stop was the mailroom, where all incoming applications were received, date stamped and collected into bundles to be assigned to visa officers.

After seeing the entry point for Canadian immigration applications, we walked through a massive office, lit with overhead neon lights, that was divided into cubicles containing large tables. Visa officers, with glasses perched on their noses, sat with their coffees in front of them, with red pens in hand, ticking, crossing and annotating paper applications that were being cross-referenced for completeness against a checklist.

Because Canadian visa officers have a defined quota of applications they need to process each day, the completeness check is an integral part of how IRCC employees approach their job. It is far quicker to return an incomplete application than to check off numerous complete applications. Therefore, they look for anomalies in order to fulfil their quota. The point of highlighting this is not to discredit visa officers but to underscore the need for applicants to submit complete and accurate applications. This is where we can help. 

After this walk-through, we went to his office, drank coffee and talked about the opposite ends of the same industry in which we work. We discussed issues such as program integrity, processing times, and IRCC communications that I can remember.

All told, this tour and conversation lasted less than an hour, but it gave me an invaluable experience into the working of the very system that is Miho’s and my lifeblood. 

I share this story for a number of reasons:

  1. Firstly because of the invaluable insight into the workings of how the Canadian government processes people’s applications to immigrate to Canada.
  2. Because it underscores the people processing your applications are as human as you and I.
  3. That attention to detail, evidencing relationships, and submitting information in a timely manner are incredibly important.
  4. Ultimately, visa officers are looking for reasons to refuse an application, not because it’s personal, but because it helps them achieve their daily work quota.

The advent of AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning will expedite this process but not replace humanity’s involvement, nor will the portals and online harvesting of information be perfect, nor change the fact your application needs to be complete and decision-ready.

Where online submissions have helped applicants, either by submitting their own applications or through using registered Canadian immigration consultants, is that you cannot submit an incomplete application online, whereas one could be mailed, then returned to you, then resubmitted. All of which added time and money to the process.

In part two, however, we will look at the issues online-only applications have when, for example, you are locked out of your account and are unable to submit information before the deadline.

If you feel that a Canada immigration consultation would be beneficial, get in touch with us.