1、
Can you immigrate by going to Canada to pick mushrooms?
Recently, a friend in the background sent me a private message, asking me if Canada has a "mushroom picking visa", apply for mushroom picking workers there, you can immigrate to Canada, and as long as you have a high school education, you can speak simple English.
Although I have been writing about the history and stories of overseas Chinese, I do not know much about professional immigration policy. But my intuition told me that there must be something wrong with the friend seeing the information. In order to avoid him being deceived, I took a moment to check the information of the Canadian Immigration Bureau, and I really found the relevant information.
Information on the official website of Immigration Canada
First of all, Canada does have such a visa, but it is not called "mushroom picking visa", the official name translates, it should be called "agricultural pilot project immigration".
This immigrant visa was only introduced by the Canadian government in May 2020, mainly because some parts of Canada really can't find enough people to do some jobs that require long-term manual labor. I think everyone knows that this part of Canada has a land area similar to ours, but the population is only about 38 million, which is 10 million more than the population of Shanghai. The land is sparsely populated, and the welfare is high, and the people are lazy, and few locals are willing to do this kind of physical work.
So the Canadian government had to recruit foreign workers to work.
1, you must have qualified work experience: in the past three years, at least one year of agriculture-related work experience. If you're just a programmer and suddenly want to go to Canada to pick mushrooms, it's definitely not ok.
2, you have to get a full-time job opportunity in Canada, and there are limited industries, which can only be meat manufacturing, greenhouses, nurseries and flower production, including mushroom production, cattle industry, pig industry, poultry and egg production, sheep and goat breeding, and other animal production (excluding aquaculture).
3, the English level reaches the level of CLB4, which is equivalent to IELTS G class reading 3.5, writing 4, listening to 4.5, speaking 4.0, basically compared with the domestic English level 4 level is almost the same, this requirement is really not high.
4. Must have a high school degree.
After reading the above application conditions, do you also think it is very easy, this side of the work can also get a green card, how good. You know, salaries in Canada are not low. In 2022, the minimum hourly wage in Canada averages 13 Canadian dollars, that is, about 66 yuan, even if you do not work overtime, you can earn more than 500 yuan a day for 8 hours.
Then this visa should be reliable! Don't worry, this is just a superficial article. You know how hard it is to actually do it.
2、
The cruelty of reality
Why is this visa so difficult to operate in practice?
Canada only opens 2750 places to the world every year, and it is also allocated to various industries, so that the number of places allocated to Chinese applicants is even less, and it may be hundreds of places a year.
Moreover, to apply for this visa, you must first have a full-time job in the Canadian agro-processing industry. If you think about it, you are not familiar with the place in Canada, where did you go to find such a job? Even if there are some overseas labor intermediaries in China now, they can help you introduce, but this introduction fee should not be cheap, right?
I have heard people say before that in order to be able to immigrate to Canada through part-time work, many people pay their employers to pay themselves, just to show the immigration bureau that they have a formal job in Canada and meet the requirements for applying for a MAPLE leaf card (permanent green card).
You first have to ask yourself if you can bear this suffering. Picking mushrooms is not really for you to go to the forest to pick, but also to enjoy the outdoor scenery, quite romantic, but in the mushroom processing plant assembly line work, labor intensity, work is boring. The reason why Canada has set up this visa is because its own people can't bear this hardship and can only find foreign workers.
I carefully checked the entire process of this "agricultural pilot project immigration" visa, and even if it is the fastest speed, it will take two years to get a PR card. Note that the premise here is that you can successfully get a full-time job related to Canadian agriculture.
Application process for "Agricultural Pilot Project Immigration"
In fact, the application quota is small, the application time is long, and the harsh conditions for transferring the MAPLE leaf card are not what I am most worried about.
Because, if you go through the normal process according to The laws of Canada, at most you can't meet the conditions and give up the application, most of the people who don't meet the conditions will not have the hope of immigrating to Canada.
What I am most worried about is that this visa will eventually become a tool for unscrupulous intermediaries to deceive their compatriots.
3、
Don't "lose the lady and fold the soldiers"
This is not without precedent in the past decade or so.
On September 12, 2018, Immigration Canada announced that it would close the Province-Nominated Entrepreneur Immigration Program in Prince Edward Island.
Originally, this entrepreneur immigration program required applicants to have lived in Prince Edward Island for two years. But the more than 1,000 Chinese applicants simply did not have time to live in Canada for so long, according to their conditions, there is no way to apply for this project, but there is a Chinese intermediary, to these applicants, promised that through some clever operations, circumvent the Canadian residency rules, smoothly get the MAPLE leaf card.
It turned out that the intermediary provided its hotel address and home address to nearly 1,000 Chinese applicants as their residential address in Canada, and even privately engraved the official seal, almost "copying" a Canadian and Chinese customs office, just to tamper with the entry and exit records of passports, in order to help applicants prove their residence in Canada to obtain a maple leaf card.
In the end, things were revealed.
It can be said that in recent decades, Canada has not had such a collective fraud immigration fraud incident, and since then, the review of Chinese applicants has become more stringent.
For many friends who want to go abroad to work, if they encounter a black-hearted intermediary, in addition to the dream of immigration can not be realized, they may also be exploited layer by layer and forced to engage in low-paid and insecure black labor. Because some intermediaries may directly apply for a tourist visa for you, and then sell you to the "black factory", then you do not have a legal residence status, and you cannot protect your own interests at all.