05/07/2024
Martine Levine - Former CANADIAN Immigration Officer has the following to say…….. read till the end
As a visa officer, what do you wish applicants knew?
I am a retired Canadian visa officer and what a question!
I would like to expand this question a little bit to, “what do you wish applicants and their counsel knew.” A lot of visa applicants to Canada have representatives.
A Visa Officer is a Career Bureaucrat
Visa Officers are not doing visa work because they are on some sort of holy mission. It's a job. They want to get promoted. They work in a hierarchy. They have to please their bosses. Emotionalising about visa officers and speculating about their views on immigration approaches being meaningless. They aren't there to impose their views and their supervisors, plus their headquarters in Ottawa, wouldn't let them get away with it.
Visa Officers are unionized. Management and labour stresses are not uncommon. When I was working many of the managers liked to claim that the overseas section of Citizenship and Immigration had an “authoritarian tradition”, meaning they had a right to be mean and abusive to the lower downs. My response was, Government of Canada departments aren't entitled to traditions. They are there to obey federal labour standards, human rights legislation and their contracts with their bargaining units. This did not make me popular with some of the managers.
That authoritarian thing had a legal wrinkle to it. Some managers wanted total control. However, court decisions had established that “he/she who hears must decide” and that managers must not “fetter the discretion” of visa officers.
However, that fettering manager may be the one who is writing your all-important annual performance appraisal. One bad appraisal could kill your career. This created a certain amount of pressure to bend the rules and make that manager happy. Let the manager fetter you and you might get ahead. (This sounds a little bit like a certain lifestyle!)
I hope the specious “authoritarian tradition” argument is now long gone.
The Law's the Law
Visa officers are required to implement the law, not to make it. Other than a very few senior officers visa officers have little or no input into immigration legislation. There is no point whatsoever in haranguing them about the injustices of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Really, in the words of the immortal Elvis, they just work there. Write your Member of Parliament and stop wasting visa officer time.
Visa Officers Are Not There to Help
The visa officer's client is the Canadian public, not the applicant. It's nice to let a good immigrant in but that's not the point. Visa officers are law enforcement officials, not social workers or immigration advocates.
Visa Officers are Only Visa Officers When They Are at Work
As my career went on I got increasingly tired when I was at some party or bar, somebody found out what I did for a living and felt they needed to “vent” their frustrations on me. At 5:00 P.M. I ceased to be a visa officer and reverted to being a bisexual Jewish-Canadian from Winnipeg. Sometimes I had to remind the venters of this rather forcefully.
Living Outside of Canada Is Not Necessarily Jolly
For some years now the Government of Canada has been trying to centralize visa processing in Canada. It's way cheaper, it's much more technologically feasible than it used to be and other countries do it.
However if a visa officer is working abroad it does not at all mean that they are living some sort of privileged life.
When I started working as a visitor officer in 1978 Canada had a lot of visa offices in “nice” places, Madrid, Athens, Stockholm, Birmingham, Marseilles, San Francisco, Atlanta, etc. Some of these visa offices had a rather “collegial” atmosphere. The manager’s door was always open and you could sit down and have a talk.
However, visa demand in the developed world dried up. The number of applications from the developing world increased massively. The solution from International Region of Citizenship and Immigration Canada was to set up big “factory” offices in places like Beijing, New Delhi and Manila. Places like that tend to be horribly polluted and quite unsafe. You see very poor people in front of you all the time. Working in a factory is kind of impersonal and your professional status isn't necessarily very high.
I was posted in New Delhi and Manila. I met good people but these cities were not fun, not at all. Daily life had a lot to do with survival.
How Much Longer is There Going to Be Visa Officers?
By the time I retired single assignment and temporary duty officers were taking over a lot of the overseas visa work. More and more of the rest of it was being sent back to Canada for processing.
When the Canada Border Services Agency came into existence the role of visa officers in overseas fraud investigations largely came to an end. The CBSA took it over.
Not very many visa applicants get interviewed anymore so that iconic “visa interview”, the encounter between that legendary visa officer and the beseeching applicant, has drastically faded down. Applicants and their counsel maybe should know that the day of the career visa officer may be coming to a close. A different type of system seems to be replacing it.
Martin
(Additional Answer)
Today is August 31, 2017. Just now I responded to a comment about my original answer of yesterday. The topic is, is visa officer work monotonous with no intellectual contribution?
It occurred to me that my response is really an additional answer to the original question. Here it is:
Certainly in the latter part of my career it was. (monotonous with no intellectual contribution.)
One met managers who were so pleased with the “authoritarian tradition” that they saw anybody who was actively thinking as a threat.
At one time most visa applicants were interviewed. Immigration applicants sometimes received counselling. There was also recruitment and promotion, actively looking for good immigrants. As work stresses increased (and as more information about Canada became available on the Web) these activities withered away.
Career visa officers are part of the rotational Canadian Foreign Service. That is, they make a career-long commitment to live overseas as required. However, by the end of my career, a lot of the best foreign assignments were being given to single-assignment and temporary duty officers from the domestic side of Citizenship and Immigration Canada who had made no such commitment.
At one time visa officers did “reporting”, that is they would file analyses of social and economic issues that were effecting the emigration climate in our source countries. However the political officers from what is now Global Affairs Canada considered that this was an infringement on their professional “turf”, and objected strongly. Reporting was curtailed.
I did fraud investigation work as a visa officer. It was at times very interesting. However CBSA took over this work.
While line-level visa officers had very limited opportunities to transfer to other work streams within the foreign service or to a permanent job in Canada, senior managers did. Not infrequently managers saw the visa service as a stepping-stone to a more prestigious political, aid or trade job. Once the “collegial atmosphere” that I mentioned had evaporated there was little or no solidarity between senior managers and line-level officers and very little concern about the quality of visa officer working life.
In the long-term, over my career, there was a lot of pressure to reduce visa processing to a clerical activity. The Treasury Board was never at peace with the cost of maintaining visa officers and their families overseas. Clericalizing the work meant that much of it could be returned to low-wage processing centres in Canada. I should mention that much of the work in Canada’s visa offices is done by locally-engaged staff, often working at a low-waged clerical level.
In general what I am describing is a “dumbing down” of line-level Canadian visa officer work. This served both the purposes of Treasury Board and managers who deeply resented any sort of challenging behaviour by line-level visa officers. Much of what happened was poor labour relations and abuse of line visa officers and their careers.
Martin
