From:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/04/17/jason-kenney-huffington-post-canada-immigration_n_1432940.html
Q: We received many reports that the wait time to process spousal immigration applications has increased in recent months, particularly for applicants currently residing in Syria and other Middle Eastern countires. What is driving this backlog and is the government doing anything to address it?
A: We had to shut down our embassy in Syria. There's a war going on there, a civil war. We had to close our embassy and our immigration office, which was our main hub for the Middle Eastern region and we've had to move most of those employees up to Ankara (Turkey), some to Beirut (Lebanon). So we'll try to get on top of that, but because of the closure of our office, that's one of those unforeseen circumstances you can't really plan for.
Typically, on a global basis we process spousal sponsorship applications in under 12 months. In some places it becomes more difficult, where there are higher rates of fraud. I'll give you an example, we have very long processing times in Pakistan, in part because the Pakistani government wouldn't give visas to our officers to go in and make decisions and, in part, because a lot of people there do Shariah marriages which are not registered in the civil courts and we can't verify them.
And we have a huge problem with fraudulent immigration marriages around the world. In fact, a couple of years ago we identified that 50 per cent of the spousal sponsorship applications coming out of China to our Hong Kong office were fake. Apparently being organized by Triads (Chinese Mafia) who were establishing relationships with biker gangs in Canada. So we had this weird situation where all these Canadian biker gang members were sponsoring these Chinese girls who they had never met to come to Canada. Apparently, the Chinese girls were promising up to $60,000 to the Triads to facilitate the bogus marriage. We caught on to this when our officers started to see ... to support their application they submitted photos of their honeymoon, but all of the honeymoon photos were taken in the same apartment, the same furniture. Bad Triads, they're not very sophisticated. Ans so we started calling them for interviews and their stories would just fall apart right away.
The better example is in Pubjab, we hired a network of fraud detection experts, a lot of former cops who are good at documentary fraud, and we started to see pictures that were being submitted in immigration marriage applications where the face of the bride and groom were being crudely Photoshopped on top of a real wedding picture. So then we changed the rules, that's not working, we want a full shot of the wedding reception so we can see context, see it's real. And then the Punjabi wedding palaces started offering special discount fake wedding reception packages. Welcome to everyone in the village, you're going to get a free meal, wear your wedding finery and the couple that was arranging the fake marriage would show up and they'd submit the pictures. It goes on and on. It's a constant cat and mouse game.
My apologies to the folks from Syria that are waiting, we'll try to get to those applications.
So the last quarter neither Ankara or Beirut improved their processing times... Furthermore, 40 of 46 VO's did not reduce their processing times. In fact, the HK VO went from 13 months to 10 months and this is one of the examples he gives as a problem VO with lots of fake apps. Cripes...
