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On May 6th, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has officially released six temporary to permanent resident pathway streams. Due to IRCC’s unprecedented lenient requirements, the stream for international graduates reached its cap in less than 24 hours.
The stream’s rapid closure caught many potential applicants off-handed, most of them have yet to apply. However, the good news is: international graduates who satisfy the minimum job hour requirements may still have a shot at the two workers’ streams.
3 Essential Requirements to Apply
In its recent immigration policy briefings, IRCC elucidated the viability for international students to apply through the worker streams. In order to be considered eligible, applicants must fulfill the following three prerequisites:
- Applicant is currently employed in any job listed in the National Occupation Classification (NOC).
- Applicant’s language scores reaches the minimum requirement of Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB) Level 4.
- Applicant accumulated a total of 1560 work hours in the past three years. Unlike the applicant’s current employment, the past job experience must fall under one or more eligible NOC occupations.
Similar to other immigration pathways, the family members of international graduate applicants are also qualified for temporary residence.
Temporary Residence Pathway Submission Status
The following graph shows the number of applications that have been submitted for the two streams by 11:00AM, May 25th:
Currently, there are still plenty of seats available in the two streams above. Nevertheless, considering the immigration fad at hand, we cannot guarantee the availability of seats in the future, especially that of essential workers.
We suggest international graduates who still intend to apply for the temporary residence pathway to promptly collect the necessary documents. Given the preparation process entails significant complexity, we encourage applicants to reach immigration consultants for information and help.
On the day the international graduates stream maxed out, we alleged a minute possibility for a pathway re-opening. Yet in Marco Mendicino’s speech, “Modernizing Canada’s Immigration System”, delivered on May 12th, the IRCC Minister addressed that the phenomenal speed of application submission has gauged his contemplation on raising caps on temporary immigration programs.
With that said, IRCC’s current priority still falls on evaluating the applications they have at hand. Any further considerations will be based on the quality of these applications.
No matter IRCC raises the caps or introduces new immigration programs, we are sure of one thing: the prospect of Canadian immigration in the 2021 is of an optimistic one.