Vancouver immigration lawyer Erin Roth represented a group of 41 spousal sponsors this year, who had all experienced lengthy processing delays, many predating the pandemic. “So all of these delays that people are having, they’re looking outside their normal course of business and saying, ‘Well, is there anything else we can do?’ And now they’re just becoming aware that there is this option,” Desloges said. In many ways, mandamus applications are nothing new, but what is new is how immigration applicants have begun organizing and sharing information through social media as they try to get help to move their cases forward. “We sent everything to immigration as far as we were guided,” said Dhaliwal. She reached out to the federal immigration department, her local MP and the immigration minister’s office for updates, but no one was able to explain to her what had caused the delay to their application, other than to say it was related to the pandemic. “If there’s a problem with COVID, how do you do all those other files?” asks Dhaliwal, who has now been apart from her husband for two years since filing her spousal sponsorship. Instead, she’s watched on as Canada has reopened its borders to international students, foreign workers and other immigrants. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of last year, and their bid to be together seemed to become frozen in time.Īt first, she said, she thought everything would be back to normal after a short delay for the application and that her husband would eventually be able to join her. Their application was moving along and looked to be on track under the 12-month average processing timeline put out by the department.īy December, Singh had submitted his fingerprints and undergone his physical examination. Immigration applicants have complained about a lack of communication and scant updates from officials about their applications in the queue.ĭhaliwah applied to sponsor Singh, 41, to come to Canada from India in September 2019. Changing immigration rules and priorities throughout the global crisis have served to further frustrate and confuse applicants.Īs of July 31, more than 561,700 people were in the queue for permanent residence and 748,381 had a pending temporary residence application as students, workers or visitors while the backlog for citizenship stood at 376,458 people. The pandemic has caused an exponential growth in immigration backlogs and processing times due to office lockdowns and travel restrictions both here and abroad. Nothing in the legal landscape has changed, but the factual landscape has changed a lot because of COVID.”Īccording to the immigration department, 134 mandamus applications were referred by the court in the first fiscal quarter in 2021, between April and July, including 62 in family class, 66 in economic class and six as refugees. “People are being so delayed and so desperate that they’re looking for other remedies. “I’ve never had so many mandamus files in my life, and I’m not the only one,” says Toronto immigration lawyer Chantal Desloges, who has made more than 70 mandamus applications so far this year, compared to about once a year prior to the pandemic. I don’t know how to cope with this.”ĭhaliwal has now turned to Canada’s Federal Court, joining a growing number of immigration applicants seeking orders from judges through what’s known as a “mandamus application” to compel immigration officials to act on files caught up in unreasonable delays. I carry sadness every second of the day, everyday. It is not shared experiences they are recounts of a day that has passed separately. We get a few hours in between to share our day, but we are not living it. My physical body is here but my heart is in shambles,” said 49-year-old Dhaliwah, who is eight years older than Singh. We are not young will we grow old separated like this? We missed celebrating our first and second anniversary and everything. Today, more than 30 months after the wedding - the last time they held each other - the couple are still stuck in a virtual relationship, as immigration bureaucracy keeps him from joining her in Canada. Over the next six weeks, they would spend all waking moments after work on video calls.Įventually, she flew over to meet him in person, a trip she would make three more times before the pair married in his village in India in March 2019. In that October 2018 conversation, the pair talked about family, politics, interests, movies, exercise, diet and their future plans. “It was clear to me and him that we had found the person we wanted to build a future with.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |