What is the standard processing time for family reunion immigration applications?

Applicants and sponsors may realize that the standard processing time for sponsoring parents and grandparents' family reunion immigration applications is longer than in the past. The Canadian Embassy in China hopes to provide applicants with the reasons for this change and how long the new processing time will be.

Deciding the priority of different visa categories requires the embassy to make difficult decisions. Existing resources and different public policy objectives are factors to be considered. Every year, the Canadian government publishes the quantitative indicators that each immigrant category needs to achieve. It is very important to manage immigrants within the prescribed objectives and make use of the resources allocated by Parliament to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which is also part of the cooperation between embassies and provinces, which are responsible for providing social and other services to new immigrants. In order to achieve the policy objectives announced by the government, the quantitative indicators are further divided into economic and non-economic categories.

At the same time, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) will invest all available resources to ensure that the applications of family reunion immigrants (sponsored couples, partners and children) who enjoy priority treatment are processed as soon as possible. The expected processing time of these applications is 6 months, but only a few of them can reach this speed at present, and 80% of the applications need about 1 1 month to process. The embassy hopes to concentrate on making improvements in this regard. The embassy also undertakes the obligation to achieve the goals set by the humanitarian project, that is, to resettle refugees from abroad and provide permanent resident status for those protected by Canada. In other words, these applications enjoy priority in the non-economic category. According to different categories, these global indicators will be divided into more specific indicators and handed over to foreign visa officers.

On April 6, 2005, the Honourable Joe Volpe, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration of Canada, announced a series of measures aimed at speeding up the processing of applications for family reunification immigrants.

Measures to speed up the processing of applications for family reunion sponsored by parents and grandparents include: increasing the number of parents and grandparents who can sponsor immigration to Canada from 6,000 per year to18,000 in 2005 and 2006. At the same time, issue multiple round-trip visas to parents and grandparents as much as possible so that they can also visit their families in Canada during the immigration application process. The Canadian government will invest 36 million Canadian dollars each year in the next two years to process applications for family reunion of parents and grandparents.

Visa offices across Canada will use 2005 to process applications submitted in 2002 and the first quarter of 2003 or earlier. It is difficult to determine how long it will take for applications received after April 2003 to be accepted, but it is unlikely that these applications will be processed in 2005.

Guarantors want to know whether their parents' and grandparents' applications will be heard this year, and they need to judge according to the date on the notice of acceptance of immigration applications issued by the visa offices in various places, not according to the date of submitting the guarantee application to the Mississauga Application Hearing Center.