Permanent Residence Through the Family Class (Marriage)!

I came to Canada on a working holiday (WH) in 2005. I had originally dreamed of LA in the United States, but the US has no WH program, so I chose nearby Canada, and within Canada, Vancouver, which is close to LA.

My husband (Canadian, my sponsor) came in as a customer at the restaurant in Vancouver where I worked part-time. We dated for about 4 years before applying for immigration (about 2 of those years long-distance).

While we were long-distance, we only kept in touch through MSN Messenger and a few phone calls a month. There were no smartphones back then, so it was hard to stay in contact, and I still remember that we even talked about breaking up because of things like the language barrier.

In 2008, I quit my job in Japan and came back to Canada to see him. Partly because of my age, I told him I wanted to settle where our relationship was going. That led us to talk seriously about our future, and we decided to get married and apply for immigration.

English is his native language, but he was busy and rarely made time to research the immigration application with me, and we misunderstood information on the immigration department (CIC) website (for example, thinking that because I was in Canada I could only apply inland), so we started fighting a lot. I thought this would waste time and money and might even hurt our relationship, so I decided to have Jinzai Canada handle our application. Also, he had just left his company and become self-employed, so his income dropped sharply and I was worried whether he could be a sponsor, but that worry disappeared as soon as we had a consultation.

After we asked them to handle the application, our consultant told us which documents to get and when, so gathering documents was easy. During processing, our documents were transferred to a different visa office and additional documents were requested, but the consultant dealt with it right away, and I got permanent residence about 5 months after applying!

Even if your sponsor is Canadian, they have never immigrated themselves, so I’m glad we left everything to the professionals. The stress we felt when we started researching on our own seemed unreal afterwards. When I heard that a friend applied on their own and had their application returned because documents were missing, I thought that if we had applied ourselves… it would have taken much longer and I would not have been able to work for a while. I think it’s worth talking to a consultant once. Good luck, everyone.

For details on the Family Class, see here.