I'll speak from our experience. We have seen a great deal of variability in terms of how quickly applicants in the special immigration measures program are processed. That is somewhat of a black box. We are unsure as to what is holding those applications up in many cases. That information is not passed to us; it's passed directly back and forth to the applicants, so we don't always know. Often I would say we do not know.
I can tell you certainly that one of the challenges that is hampering the evacuation effort to get people out of Afghanistan is the fact that they are required to go to a third location to perform a biometric verification before they can come to Canada. This means they need to go to Pakistan, to the UAE, to any neighbouring country that is accessible, and that introduces the requirements for passports and visas in order to get into that country.
We're talking about a family that may be applying, which may be 20 individuals. The going rate for a passport now in Afghanistan, according to what people are telling us, is anywhere between $1,000 and $2,000 U.S., and $500 U.S. for a Pakistan visa, for a family of 20 people. That is both an enormous administrative and financial burden that is placed upon applicants and makes that process very difficult to get them out of Afghanistan for the final step of processing.
In July and August we saw an agreement that the Pakistan government put forth to allow a fixed period of border facilitation where individuals could cross without passports and without visas. IRCC approached us to help move people through that facilitation agreement. We were hoping to move many people. In the end there were 77 names that we received to move, who did get across the border, but—