Audit of the Immigration Program
Canadian Consulate General – Seattle
5.5. Overall Data Review
In the first 11 months of 2001, Seattle finalized 10,433 visitor applications with a refusal rate of 5.44 percent. During the same period, it made a final decision on 1,083 student applications, refusing some 12.40 percent. With respect to employment authorizations, 862 applications were finalized, and 6.52 percent were refused. These statistics are consistent with refusal rates across all six Canadian missions located in the United States, and they vary little from the 2000 statistics, indicating a healthy continuity in decision making.
Data based on some 12,300 non-immigrant files finalized in 2001 revealed a wider variance in decision making among the six officers at the Mission than expected. While the Mission itself produced statistics that were rather close to the average generated by all of our missions in the United States, individual officer refusal rates varied. This was most evident in student cases, where the refusal rates ranged from 5.10 percent to 19.35 percent, and in worker cases, where the lowest refusal rate was zero percent, by an officer who accepted all 44 workers interviewed. The highest refusal rate for workers was 27.27 percent, by an officer who turned down six cases out of 22 seen. While the difference appeared too wide, the complexity of each non-immigrant case could explain the variance.
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