mikeymyke said:
Well of course I'm bitter. The question is whether I'm "just" bitter or have some genuinely well-founded criticisms. In January the Dept of Homeland Security reported a fiscal 2015 overstay rate of 0.9% versus 1.18% for Canada for all visitors (as an aside, for US visitors needing a visa, the overstay rate was 1.6%). Now how is that possible (a greater overstay rate in Canada) when, accordingly to you, American visa officers’ lack of interest in visa application supporting documents is the probable reason why they have so many illegals in the US?
The most recent Australian stats I could find are here:
https://www.border.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/visit-australia/quarterly-report-june-2013
and they indicate an overstay rate of 0.7% for all nationalities. For Chinese, it was 0.3% (this is a ways off your 10% guesstimate). Meanwhile, Australia issued tourist visas to more than 96% of Chinese applicants. Can you explain to me, as an outspoken fan of the Canadian visa issuance system, how the Australians manage to combine much lower refusal rates with lower overstay rates? The Canadian system worked for you. Well, that’s great, but that doesn’t mean much of anything when your case represented one of a million or more.
both of us spent 3 days compiling our documents and constantly exceeded the 4MB file limit, that we had to compress our font, remove some pics, to make the file fit. We absolutely did all our power to show she will not overstay, and my wife was then granted this TRV.
And that explains your success, does it? What everybody else needs to do is raise their attitude and their energy to your level. The fact you had a different visa office and a different visa officer doesn’t factor: you're the master of your fate. Care to hazard a guess at how much time my wife and I spent on her mother’s application? You don’t think we were not compressing fonts and removing pics? In the end, we decided the 4 MB restriction was restricting our chances however marginally and we had the mother apply in person. No removing anything and presentation of the originals, no copies or scans. No limitation on the size of the file.
These anecdotes of ours in fact don’t’ mean much of anything. You previously claimed that suggesting the mother will take care of her grandkid will get a “Purpose of Visit” reason for refusal, did you not? Well I stated that and that wasn’t a reason for refusal. We instead got an incomplete financial documentation reason. But I don’t just call on my experience to say I don’t believe the given reasons are the true ones, I call attention to others in a position to know who say that, like the Toronto immigration lawyer who testified on Parliament Hill and whom I quoted in another thread. I happen to have a law degree myself, but that’s beside the point when the point is that the experts and evidence I’ve called attention to stand regardless of whether I’m just “bitter”.
