Immigration Canada

If they don’t know the rules, how are we supposed to?

So we get a request from Immigration Canada for police background checks. Because my girlfriend had lived in Hungary, she needed a Hungarian police background check. We didn’t include one in the original application because we had included one already for the student visa, and figured they would still have it. No biggie, we can get another one. Then Immigration says they need police reports from the State of New York AND the FBI! She would have to go to the RCMP and be fingerprinted and then mail those into the FBI and New York state police.

Problem is, she was still in Europe at that time, so she obviously can’t make it to the RCMP to be fingerprinted. So I call the helpful (read: useless) Immigration telephone line to ask a few questions.

The operator is nice enough. She tells me that because my girlfriend was never in the US for more than six *consecutive* months that she didn’t require the US police checks. She had only been there for maybe 4 months at a time (the length of a semester) and then would return to Europe. We were told to just explain that in a letter and mail it to immigration and it would be taken care of. Great relief there.

She also says it’s no problem that we’re in Europe at the time. That yes, technically we should be in Canada for the Inside Canada class, but we are returning so it’s not a problem.

So I start looking online at a few sites and find out that maybe it’s not so good that we’re in Europe. I decide to call the immigration hotline again and ask another operator to see if I get the same answer. I don’t. She freaks out and tells us that immigration may cancel our case because we aren’t in Canada. And no, we can’t just switch our case to Outside Canada class, we’d have to withdraw our current application and re-apply. Screw that. So now we don’t know what to do. I hang up and call back later and ask another operator.

Now she tells me the same as the first operator! So now it’s two for OK, one for not. So I ask this operator if I can speak to her supervisor, because I want a straight answer. She says no you can’t speak to the supervisor, it’s not allowed. But she will ask for me. Which is annoying because the other two operators asked their supervisors as well. So I just don’t know what to believe anymore. I start asking for agent names and their ID numbers and have kept track.

So either way, it sounds like the police report thing for the US isn’t necessary. Great - I just hope we won’t have any problems being outside of the country for awhile..