To be eligible for Canadian government immigration, a foreign national must apply for and be granted Canadian Permanent Resident (Immigrant) Visa. Individuals to whom an immigrant visa has been issued present themselves to an immigration officer at one of Canada's official ports of entry in order to be granted Permanent Resident Status.


Canadian permanent residents are entitled to live and work anywhere in Canada, enjoy most of the privileges of Canadian Citizenship. After 3 years of residence in Canada a permanent resident may be eligible to apply for Canadian Citizenship. Permanent residents may sponsor their non-Canadian family members wishing to obtain permanent resident status in Canada.

On June 26th, 2010 , Citizenship and Immigration Canada announced changes to the processing of immigration application in the federal skilled worker category.

For the first time in Canadian history hard quotas have been imposed. CIC has always used processing targets in controlling immigration levels, however, restrictions were not imposed for filing an application. Canada always had a broad criteria for skilled workers. The conservative federal government of Canada pushed to afford the federal minister responsible for citizenship and immigration more powers in shaping immigration policies and controlling new applications intake. The result was an amendment to the Immigration and Refugee protection Act of Canada which included new provisions giving the minister the authority to issue instructions to the department on processing of immigration applications.

The first set of ministerial instructions, published on November 28th, 2010, created three preliminary eligibility categories. Only applicants who qualified under the requirements of one of the categories could assess themselves against the federal skilled worker selection grid with its 67 points passmark. The biggest change caused by the instructions was the Priority Occupation List (POL) of category 1. Following the publication applicants outside Canada without arranged offer of employment from a Canadian employer could only apply if they had professional experience in one of the 38 occupations on the POL.

The smaller pool of qualified applicants and the moratorium on processing of the pre-amendment inventory led to faster processing of the new applications, just as the government promised.

The second set of instructions is a step further towards reducing the number of applications received in the main economic immigration stream to Canada. For the first time a cap is imposed on new applications. A total of 20,000 application with no more than 1,000 per occupation on a priority list now consisting of only 29 occupations. The inventory of new FSW application will continue to shrink.