Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the committee for inviting me to speak. My name is David Manicom, and I am Program Manager of the New Delhi visa office, and Area Director for South Asia. I would like to provide a short overview emphasizing topics which I understand are

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It varies from category to category, of course, sir. With regard to parents and grandparents, for example, local staff in the local office have a great deal of experience with the types of fraud that tend to be used. When we have children in the upper end of the eligibility ra

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I was the director in headquarters at that time, and Mr. Frank was in Delhi doing the work. At that time, the government had reduced for a brief period the levels objective for parents to 6,000. Early in the calendar year, there was considerable public discussion of that and th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm afraid I don't recall; to my memory, we focused on the oldest inventory globally.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are two main mechanisms, or perhaps three. The first one is that of document verification by the Indian authorities, and these documents are sometimes fakes. The second tool, that is mostly used when the documentation is not verifiable or when the results are not clear, is

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Generally speaking, long wait times are not the result of processing admissions. Long wait times are generated when the volume of applications received is larger than the targets we are permitted to issue. That is for the overwhelming majority of wait times at missions abroad. I

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We issued 102% of our visa target. Most of the overage was due to achieving 109% of the target for priority family class spouses, where our policy globally is to process as many as we can and as fast as we can, so as not to keep immediate family members apart. Aside from our fam

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think that's perhaps a question for my minister, sir.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This program was launched two and a half years ago in New Delhi. We are interested in those companies that have proven their reliability in the past and that have obtained a very high approval rate based on very reliable applications. We established direct links with these busine

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. Officers in Delhi have a main duty and a back-up duty. All the officers are cross-trained, so we can move resources on a daily and weekly basis into the temporary resident unit to make sure we are always current on our temporary resident/visiting processing times. It's our c

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In New Delhi, we answer them almost always within 24 to 48 hours. We do in the order of 5,000 to 6,000 a year. But that number is actually dropping. We hope that our MP newsletter has helped with that, and also the fact that our family class priority processing time has remained

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd probably focus more on process efficiencies and therefore better use of tax dollars than directly reducing processing times--although it should, of course, over time achieve that as well. It is early days. We're learning all of its capacities. It has many wonderful capaciti

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We don't require officers to spend their entire career in India, for example, though we certainly have some who would like to do that. It's a fascinating country. We have a local training program for new officers, where they learn a great deal about local marriage law, which is v

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'd put it a little bit the other way. We have the largest family class program in the world. We issue visitor visas to parents who are in process all the time; it's absolutely routine. As a matter of fact, if they're in process, they've generally already demonstrated that they h

Finance committee  There are no changes envisaged at this time with regard to agriculture or temporary foreign labour. There are no provisions in the budget or other policy plans to make any changes to that at this time.