http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications ... nt-3798106
Mr. Thomas Richter (Immigration Program Manager, Kiev, Department of Citizenship and Immigration):
The visa section in Kiev is a full-service office, with 13 staff serving clients residing in Ukraine.
In 2010, Kiev processed over 8,000 temporary resident visa applications, which represented an increase in applications from 2009, when 7,650 were processed.
The acceptance rate is 79% and has remained constant. Family visits represent roughly 70% of our caseload, while business-related and official travel is approximately 25%, and only 5% of applications tend to be purely for tourism purposes.
Students destined to "English as a second language" programs, especially those offering paid work as part of the curriculum, feature significantly in this movement. Given the higher levels of fraud encountered with this movement, extra focus is placed upon document verification, which requires more time and resources on our part. The result of this fraud is a high refusal rate among these applicants.
In 2010, Kiev finalized 528 study permit applications, with an acceptance rate of 65%. In 2009, Kiev finalized 588 study permit applications, with a similar acceptance rate.
In relation to temporary foreign workers,
in 2010 Kiev processed work permit applications for 800 persons, including those in two major agricultural projects involving 175 applicants. Given the global economic recession, fewer provincial nominee applications were received when compared with previous years.
In 2010, Kiev issued 2,194 immigrant visas, a 20% increase over 2009. Our overall target for 2011 should be met with little difficulty. Kiev's current inventory of immigrant cases as of February 4, 2011, is very small at 776.
In the family class, spouses and common-law partners represented 55% of the total family class caseload in 2010.
Document fraud and misrepresentation continue to be challenges faced in most immigration application streams. Marriages and divorces of convenience, as well as submission of fraudulent employment and education documents, are the primary types of this fraud. The presence of a migration integrity officer in Kiev to address fraud issues has made a significant improvement and has allowed us to address fraud issues more efficiently.
Kiev has seen a decrease in the number of provincially sponsored immigrants, for the very simple reason that the recruitment in the last couple of years has dried up, given the world economic recession. Now, with the economy picking up, we expect Saskatchewan and Alberta to start larger recruiting, which will bring first temporary workers to Canada, and then subsequent to that we will expect to see the immigration applications from this movement.
Family class processing is priority number one. When the files come in weekly, there's almost a battle between officers to deal with the files, so there are actually no files awaiting processing. For skilled worker cases, I have dealt with those over the last several years myself, especially the Bill C-50 cases, simply because there is a high degree of misrepresentation of employment experience. Again, the inventory there is 20 cases awaiting assessment. All the other cases are at various stages along the processing stream. It's monitoring the bring-forward dates to ensure that the files don't just disappear into a void and keeping on top of them. So the inventory is actually decreasing literally daily as we issue visas, simply because we're finalizing more cases than new cases come in. So we're well on track to meeting our targets this year, and I suspect we won't have any difficulty meeting our targets in future years.