Illegal immigrants?

Upon our arrival in Canada we were to go through the process of immigration and applying for a work permit, which, following advice from our immigration lawyer (”It’s a piece of cake, completely standard, there will be no problems at all, no, you definitely should not do it from Denmark but wait until your port of arrival”) we had not done before arriving in Canada. This had already caused me a bit of extra sweating and heartbeats, as having worked in the field for the past years, I know that things aren’t always what they seem and people without problems are not always people without problems.

You are, after all, dealing with persons who might have a good day, a bad day, or anything in between, and even though there are laws and regulations to follow, they might be applied in slightly different manner from one person to another.

Once our plane landed, we walked to customs, produced our papers and were then rightly referred to the immigration officials at St. John’s airport. Those of you who have been to the airport will know that it’s small and there’s not much happening, so it was not strange when the immigration officers told us just to leave our luggage standing in the luggage hall – they would still be there when we’d be finished. “This will just take a minute”. Then the time began running. Our daughter was hungrier and hungrier but luckily our flight snacks were still untouched in the backpack.

 

Autumn leaves in St. John's

Then they called my husband in. I played endless games of hide and seek behind pillars, had to change our daughter, and was getting hungry myself. It was about an hour after our plane had landed and there were no other persons apart from us and the immigration officer at the door in sight. Then the colleagues came out and told their colleague at the door also to leave – this would take a while.

My suspicions grew and once my husband came out and said: “They also have some questions for you”, I grew nervous. Was this “a piece of cake? Completely standard? No problem at all?”

In I went with our daughter in tow and the first word I heard was a “red flag”. The system had given the immigration officers a red flag and they had to investigate. Could I tell them more about my visit to Canada in 2012? Why was I there? How long did I stay? Had I been employed in Denmark since then? Where was our daughter born? Had my husband been with me to Denmark? Why had we BOTH been to Canada in 2012 but not in the same city?

All very suspicious. The “system” had told the immigration officers that me and my husband had arrived in Canada in the summer of 2012 (him in June in St. John’s, me in August in Montreal) and that we had never left the country since then. The suspicion was that we had been illegally residing in Canada for the past over two years and were now covering for this by applying for a work permit.

Luckily we were well prepared with a bunch of papers, employment records, birth certificates and I’m sure the look on my face when I heard these ridiculous suspicions was also a good indicator of just how funny and silly a mistake they had made. Having been employed in Denmark the whole time, both me and my husband could easily show that whoever had flagged us had done a poor job.

We all laughed about it at the end, but this made me think a lot about other people, of other backgrounds and reasons and colors and religions and statuses. Canada does not provide an exit stamp when you leave the country, so unless you can actively prove that you have been elsewhere, you cannot really prove that you have left the country either. 

For suspected illegal immigrants, the officials at St. John’s airport treated us very nicely. Our daughter got crayons and a booklet to paint in, they were keeping us up to date on the developments and their progress with producing our papers once they decided that we were indeed arriving with “clean flour in our bag” as we say in Finland. 

At the Cape Spear lighthouse

For those of you who have an interest in the topic, Citizenship and Immigration Canada have a good overview of immigration statistics available on their website: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/index.asp. As you can see here: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/data-release/2014-Q2/index.asp the persons who apply for temporary residence in Canada, such as ourselves, are in any case very likely to be allowed in the country. In Jan-Jun 2014 of the 1,1 million applications for temporary residence, 1 million were accepted and only 170,000 rejected. From that basis and knowing our background in terms of employment history and education, it is understandable that our immigration lawyer would call our case “piece of cake”. However, a red flag is a red flag and having visited Canada in August 2012 without my husband, I could not have imagined that more than two years later I would be questioned about the reasons and duration for the trip. Lessons to learn: never trust that things are as easy as they seem, and never expect that the system forgets you. 

(And for the record: the pictures are in no way related to the above text - only there for you, my dear readers! The credits for the photos go, as much of the time, to JK.)