The following is an abridged version of remarks made by David Manicom, Director, Operational Coordination, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), during a question and answer session with the Immigration and Refugee Board on 2 June 2004. From 1999-2001, David Manicom was Manager, Non-Immigrant Visa Section, at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, People's Republic of China. He also served as Operations Manager and Deputy Program Manager for CIC in the Chinese capital.
David Manicom began his presentation by providing an overview of the Embassy in Beijing. Following this, his comments focused on steps taken by the Embassy to assess and verify visitor visa applications, with a view to managing the risk of asylum claims in Canada.
Overview of the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, Non-immigrant Visa Section
Surpassed only by that in Taipei, the visa office in Beijing issues the greatest number of non-immigrant visas out of CIC's network of offices. The office issues approximately 60,000 to 70,000 non-immigrant visas per year of which two thirds are temporary resident visas (or "visitor visas") and 10,000 to 15,000 are study permits and work permits.
The office has a total of approximately 125 staff, with 25 officer-level individuals ("officers") in the visa section who are able to render final decisions on visa applications.
On a busy day, the office receives over 300 temporary resident visa applications. The non-immigrant visa program grew rapidly from the mid 1990s until 2002; the staff quadrupled over this time and there was particularly rapid growth in the study permit program. Growth of the program stopped in 2003, largely due to the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
Because of the high volume of applications, the visa office is tasked with background and verification work on various levels. The overall caseload is considered to be high risk for asylum claims in Canada in general, but it does contain large components of low risk cases within it; for example, those involving senior government delegations, as detailed below.
Temporary Resident Visas
Temporary resident visa applicants can be grouped into three broad categories: (1) those who are members of official or government delegations, (2) those going on private business (for example, visiting family or as tourists) and (3) those going as members of trade delegations. Each category of applicant is associated with various risk factors and is dealt with accordingly.
Applicants Travelling with Official or Government Delegations
These applicants, particularly when travelling on PRC diplomatic passports, are very low risk and their applications are usually approved "on paper" without delay. Lower level government officials travelling on "green passports" and senior officials in some state-owned companies are also considered very low risk and, unless evident anomalies exist on the application, these applicants are processed routinely.
Applicants Travelling on Private Business
Applications for those travelling as tourists and visiting family members represent a relatively small proportion of the total number of visitor visa applications, approximately 25 per cent. Those travelling on private business have a relatively low propensity for making refugee claims. If an applicant is going to visit a friend or distant relative and does not have an extensive record of international travel, their application for a visa tends to be denied. If an applicant is going to visit their child or children in Canada, the embassy is inclined to issue a visa if the children in Canada are well established and financially capable of sponsoring their parents to immigrate. Documentation examined in these instances is that provided by the person in Canada making the invitation.
Applicants Travelling as Part of a Business Delegation
Visa applications for business delegations can vary widely in their profile, their risk factors, and how they are processed by the embassy. They have a relatively high approval rate at approximately 80 per cent. This rate, however, hides the fact that there are large groups of legitimate invitees of large Canadian multi-national corporations (such as Nortel and Bombardier), that do business in China and that have a well-established track record of vetting the hundreds of individuals per year that are invited to Canada on their behalf. These invitees have a very high approval rate based primarily on the track record of their inviting company. The embassy maintains careful records of the companies and the number of individuals they have invited in the past and records the percentage of asylum claims resulting from business travel associated with the company.
Business applications are normally submitted by companies or state-owned business couriers in groups of three to fifty applications, occasionally larger, and are not normally presented in person by the applicant. These visa applications are processed on a standard five-day working turn around time, although complex cases may take longer (up to several weeks). Verifying the applications of those individuals invited by large, well-established companies consists of ensuring that the letter of invitation is a bona fide letter from the authorized and credible contact person at the company, and ensuring there is no known negative information about the individual applicant. If there are no complications, the visa request for the invitee is normally approved on paper.
There is also a subset of business applicants who are often refused on paper; in order to have their applications approved, individuals must be able to prove that they are genuine businesspeople with genuine business to conduct in Canada. The embassy receives a large number of applications on a daily basis from non-existent or non-identifiable Canadian companies that are inviting people for the first time or, possibly, the second or third time. In some of these cases, first visits by delegations have resulted in claims for asylum. Typically, such groups consist of between three to ten middle-aged applicants who have never travelled before, and who have new passports that have just been obtained. Because of the high volume of these applications and the embassy's desire to focus its resources on balancing the risk versus the benefit to Canada in these "grey zone" cases that have at least a moderate potential for visa issuance, applications of this nature are generally refused on paper.
Applications for some business delegations cannot be immediately approved or denied on paper and require further verification work before a decision is reached. Much of the non-immigrant visa section's resources focus on reaching a decision in these more complex, "grey zone" cases. Initially, a file preparation assistant will conduct basic research on the invitation and the company. The applicant will be asked to produce a letter from their own company stating who they are and their position, and a letter of invitation from the company in Canada providing information on the purpose of the business trip.
If either company is unknown, basic research on each company is done to determine its legitimacy, to check whether they have a credible Website, whether the links on the Website are operational, whether the phone number is actually a business number, whether the phone numbers on the letterhead are operational, and so on.
The file preparation assistant provides an electronic summary of the initial verification information to the visa officer. A summary of the travel records of the applicants is also provided to the officer, who then must decide how to proceed. Typically, an officer must make 40 to 100 decisions of this nature each day. Many of these applications, rather than being approved or denied at this point, will then require an interview or further documentation verification before being approved or denied.
Further Document Verification
Further document verification involves sending the file to local staff that, through independent means, attempt to verify the facts in the file. Embassy staff may contact the Canadian company to ask about the business delegation and the nature of the business and to ask for evidence of business transactions leading up to the travel request. For example, if the applicant intends to sign a contract in Canada, evidence of previous business transactions or negotiations between the companies and/or the individual should exist and should be available for verification.
Depending on the results of the file verification work, the applicant may be refused on paper or approved on paper. If the officer is still in doubt, the applicant will be interviewed. The purpose of the interview is to satisfy the officer that the applicant is a genuine businessperson conducting legitimate business. Approximately 10 to 15 per cent of applicants are interviewed in the Beijing office.
Manufactured Delegations
Applicants that go on to become refugee claimants in Canada may legitimately claim to have known nothing of the arrangements of the business delegation. In such cases the "delegation" has been fabricated and a smuggler, arranger or "snakehead" may have produced items such as bogus letterhead. Conversely, a delegation may be genuine but a smuggler, arranger or "snakehead" with connections may have approached someone in the company and offered a certain amount of money to include the would-be refugee claimant in the delegation.
A genuine delegation can also arrange to sell extra spaces, unbeknownst to the Canadian business partner, to a driver or nephew of the legitimate business employee in China, for example. Situations such as these make assessing the legitimacy of the business delegations more difficult.
Provincial Origin of Applicant
The particular region or province from which an applicant originates bears some consideration, given the very differing levels of economic and social development within the PRC but such information is only one of the many factors used in assessing an individual application. Provinces such as Fujian and Liaoning, for instance, have in the recent past been particularly high risk, but these patterns shift over time. Fujian province has a long history of irregular migration and a strong cultural imperative to migrate among its young males. Applicants from higher risk areas are still approved regularly, but the refusal rate will normally be somewhat higher than for other areas, as a variety of risk factors are balanced against the individual's own attributes.
The embassy is also aware that at various points in time, and sometimes for reasons unknown, various areas and regions will produce bogus applications for visas or produce business delegations that result in several claims for asylum. Liaoning province, particularly in 2000-2001 but to some extent still in 2004, has been such a place, and obtaining a visa has become very difficult for applicants from Liaoning.
The Canadian Embassy in Beijing retains paper copies of rejected visa applications for six months, and electronic documents are retained indefinitely. The files are available to CIC upon request.
Study Permits
Fifteen to twenty thousand study permit applications are received annually, of which over ten thousand are approved, meaning an approval rate of approximately 50-60 per cent. Applications of this nature are considered very high risk given the potential for fraud and irregular migration associated with them. Based on the information the embassy receives from CIC, those who travel to Canada on a study permit and then go on to claim asylum tend to do so one to three years after arrival in Canada and rarely immediately upon arrival.
Risk regarding study permit applicants is determined bearing in mind two criteria: (1) whether the applicant is knowledgeable of the study program on which they are about to embark and whether it is suitable for them as an individual, and (2) whether they can demonstrate through documentation that they come from a family that can clearly afford the applicant's study abroad.
In its verification process, the embassy focuses on verifying financial documentation as much as possible with the resources available. As of June 2004, it is estimated that one-third of financial documents are verified; however, there is a prevalence of very sophisticated fraudulent documentation that presents a challenge to the verification process. For example, there have been instances of senior bank officials being paid to produce perfectly genuine but fraudulently issued financial records.
Interviews with younger students and interviews to discuss financial background are not deemed to be particularly useful.
The embassy maintains databases of spreadsheets that contain information on every asylum claim, which can be sorted by purpose of visit, name of business delegation, etc. This data is studied to determine trends.
Supervision of Visa officers
The rates of approvals and refusals by various visa officers are tracked. There are expected variances in decision making between officers but officers with unusually high or unusually low approval rates will receive extra guidance or training. There are no Chinese nationals with decision-making authority in the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. Decision makers are Canadian and third-country nationals. All third-country nationals with visa-issuing authority have at least one year of prior work experience in the embassy and have successfully completed an officer-level training course in Canada.
Travel Arrangers
The embassy's database on asylum claims does have a column for "agent." A large number of business delegations do have an arranger of sorts, but it might only be an individual from the company's international affairs business office, for example. The embassy tends to be more sceptical of business delegations put together by travel agents.
The organizer or travel agent per se cannot be "black listed;" however if a clear pattern of activity emerges, most applications made by the organizer will be refused.
Identity Documents
The embassy sees bogus identity documents from time to time but focuses mostly on the passport, as it is the most standardized document with which the embassy contends. Low quality fraudulent documents are generally easy to detect, while genuine documents that are illegitimately issued are very difficult to detect. Because China is very decentralized in its record keeping, it is very difficult to get information on some other identity documents (e.g., household registration cards). Local authorities can be contacted for verification with limited success. It is very easy to obtain "medium quality" forgeries of some documents but it is generally considered to be harder to get a fake passport than any other identity document in China.
Generally, two types of verification are carried out on documents submitted with the visa application: random sampling and verification of those documents that seem suspicious. Documents that are investigated through random sampling produce a "fraud rate" of 20 to 25 per cent while approximately 50 per cent of documents that are investigated because they seem suspicious are deemed fraudulent. Document verification is carried out for the most part over the telephone due to resource constraints.
Average Processing Time
The average processing times for visa applications are as follows: for a standard tourist or visit to a family member, same day; for official business delegations, five days with routine applications in two to three days and more complex ones in ten to fifteen days; mail-in applications, usually from people in southern China visiting their children in Canada, two to three weeks, unless there is a requirement for a medical examination, in which case it could be six to eight weeks; and study permits, in six to eight weeks.
This Response was prepared after researching publicly accessible information currently available to the Research Directorate within time constraints. This Response is not, and does not purport to be, conclusive as to the merit of any particular claim for refugee protection.
Reference
David Manicom, Director, Operational Coordination, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Ottawa. 2 June 2004. Question and answer session with the Immigration and Refugee Board.