Got a refusal?

Refusal management

Naturaly, people are always disappointed when their application gets refused:

We have determined that your application does not meet the requirements of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and Regulations. We are refusing your application.

Is there anything that can be done in this situation? Visa applications to Canada are denied from time to time and this happens due to various reasons, such as

• Missing documents, incomplete application.
• Essential pieces of information are missing, which makes it impossible to render a positive decision.
• Wrong application type, that is not allowed in the given circumstances.
• Miscommunication resulted in a request being left without attention.
• Procedural errors made by immigration officers while working with the application.
• Updated application requirements that were not taken into account.
• Lack of strong arguments to satisfy an officer that all requirements are met.
• And many more.

As you see, there can be dozens of possible reasons that may lead to a refusal. If you are willing to re-apply again and be approved, the very first thing to do is to understand how an officer came to a negative decision in your application.

The main issue here is that a typical refusal letter is not more than a template document with a list of generic refusal reasons, with officer's checkmarks against one or more of them. All unlucky applicants receive the same letter with just checkmarks that make the difference.

Obviously, it gives only a generalized understanding of why an application had been refused.

But there is a way to find out how and why the officer decided to refuse your particular application. Though no detailed information is present in a refusal letter, it can be found in the visa file that is maintained by the Canadian immigration authorities. So the very first thing to do if your application was refused is to request and receive a complete record from your individual immigration file, which procedure is made possible by the Canadian legislation.

Receiving this information is an essential part of refusal management, since the officer's remarks in your immigration file are in fact the brief description of the decision-making process. It is analysis of this process which allows to understand application deficiencies and officer's concerns in order to address the issues upon re-submitting the application.

Understanding the reasons for a refusal will dictate further approach, which can be as simple as re-submitting an application with appropriate explanations in the cover letter or as complex as filing an application for juducial review to the court, if it is obvious that a refusal was ill-grounded.

It is important to mention that not every refusal can be dealt with. For example, if an application was refused for the fact that some supporting documents were not genuine, or an applicant have misrepresented some essential information, an individual can be banned from entering Canada for years, in which case subsequent applications will be doomed to fail unless the ban is overcome.

In most cases it is possible to receive a positive decision sooner or later even after two or more refusals in a row. However, it should be noted that refusal management can be a lengthy, costly and stressful process, since receiving information from an immigration file takes several weeks, and application processing is not instantanious as well.

A determined and insistent applicant can finally end up with a positive decision in his application even if it takes months to receive it. Unfortunately, most people are discouraged by the very first refusal and they do not make any attempt to work further towards receiving a favorable decision.