Chinese immigration and visitor visa applications to Canada plunge since arrest of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou
- Permanent residency and visitor applications hit their lowest point in recent years after Beijing issued a travel warning about ‘arbitrary detention’
- Some would-be Chinese immigrants now ‘choose not to even look at Canada’, an expert says, while the growth rate in Chinese visitor numbers has plummeted
Chinese applications for Canadian immigration and visitor visas both fell to their lowest levels in recent years after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver and Beijing issued a travel warning to its citizens about “arbitrary detention” in Canada.
The explosive growth rate in Chinese tourism that had seen mainlander arrivals in Canada nearly quadruple since the start of the decade has also plummeted, official figures show, with potential losses of hundreds of millions of dollars in visitor spending.
There were 1,574 mainland Chinese immigration applications in June, the lowest monthly total since March 2015, according to the latest data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). And this February’s 1,754 applications had represented a 45-month low at the time.
Jean-Francois Harvey, a Hong Kong-based immigration lawyer, said three mainland Chinese immigration consultants had told him that Meng’s December 1 arrest and the resultant diplomatic chill had had an effect on business, although it was not necessarily a “deal breaker”.
But one consultant told him that now “people simply choose not to even look at Canada as an option so they [the consultants] do not hear about it”.
“More importantly, he mentioned that his staff are definitely not too keen about the [Huawei] situation, hence it may influence their view and therefore what they recommend to the clients,” said Harvey, who is Canadian.