Your gateway to Canada

By Attorney Henry Moyal

SPOUSE IN USA WITH NO STATUS CAN STILL BE SPONSORED BY CANADIAN CITIZEN

Q. I am a Canadian Citizen. I live part of the year in Canada and part of the year in USA. I married a man in Las Vegas last month. I want to sponsor him to Canada but the problem is that he has no status in USA. He entered the USA many years ago as a crew ship worker but jumped ship. I do not know what to do to legalize his status and to have him immigrate to Canada.

A. You cannot legalize his status in USA. He has been illegal for years and it is unlikely he will be able to adjust his status from within the USA. The good news is that you can sponsor him to Canada. As you are a Canadian Citizen, regardless of whether you live in Canada, you have the right to sponsor him. If he has no legal status in USA, it still can be done and as long as the marriage is genuine, it seems that there are no bars to having it approved.

Q. I applied for permanent residence in Canada under the provincial nominee program (PNP) via Manitoba. I just received a letter refusing my application. I thought that Manitoba needed skilled workers. Why was I refused? I do not have any relatives or job offer.

A. In an earlier article we titled “ Do PNP’s Really Work?”, we discussed what is required to be successful under a PNP. Many have the mistaken impression that it is simply a faster way to get to Canada. This is not true. While the timing is faster, each province has a quota of applicants that they approve and most provinces need you to have a guaranteed job offer and/or a relative to help support you. If you have neither, then the federal system would be obsolete.

IMMIGRATION UPDATE: NEW IMMIGRATION LAW PASSES SENATE VOTE

This past week, the Canadian Senate voted in favour of C-50 – the bill that includes changing the immigration laws in this country. The new laws will give the Federal Minister sweeping powers to basically do what she wants and to prioritize the economic category in accordance with the labour market. The next step now will be for the Federal Minister to go from province to province and to hold meetings with relevant stakeholders on what this country needs. For example, if the provinces declare that nurses are in great shortage, it is then expected that the visa offices abroad will have to manually sift through their inventory and pluck out the nursing applicants. This is obviously going to be painstaking and tedious. We will have to wait and see which categories will be prioritized and what the details of the new laws will be.

Until then, it seems obvious that some visa posts are putting some applications on hold in anticipation of the new laws. In my opinion, this is quite unfair and a) no laws have been announced to amend the status quo and b) applicants have paid the government fee which allows them to have their applications processed. The good news is that some visa posts (i.e Manila) is continuing to receive and process new applications but again, we will have to wait and see what will transpire once the new regulations are announced.

Attorney Henry Moyal is a certified and licensed immigration lawyer in Toronto, Ontario. The above article is general advice only and is not intended to act as a legal document. Send questions to Attorney Moyal by fax, phone or email canada@moyal.com