Issue#36 What would you ask an immigration official?

Have you wondered what a day in the life of Tim Cook or Elon Musk looks like? Are they…normal people?!?! Do they share any of my concerns?

Does Barack Obama ever do laundry himself?

The object of my curiosity has often been more accessible - immigration officials. Are they normal people? Do they recognize the power they hold over the lives of immigrants?

I never thought I’d actually get to ask an immigration official all these burning questions.

Imagine my delight when I chatted with Neil Cochrane!

Neil is an immigration veteran - he worked in Canada’s immigration service, both at home and at Canadian diplomatic missions abroad, from 1982 - 2005.

He is also the author of Beyond Numbers: Stories From an Immigration Insider - a memoir of his experience as an immigration official.

The book draws from Neil’s experiences as a front-line immigration official to reveal a history lesson of immigration.

There’s so much to talk about.
I come to this conversation from the other side of the immigration counter.

My 13 year immigration journey comes with me to this conversation - a journey that did not start in Canada. It all started on a bleak July morning in 2012, outside the US consulate in Mumbai. Curtains of rain poured around me. I fought the downpour under a precarious, shuddering umbrella, a backpack with precious documents pressed to my chest.

I wondered if this was a premonition. Big events make you superstitious. They also have a way of etching themselves into your mind.

My interview went well that day. But I watched numerous students, visitors, and - I distinctly remember this - one old woman requesting to visit her son - raked over the coals by visa officers. That day has stayed with me - through 9 years in the US, a move to Canada and building life here.

The old woman, by the way, was denied.

That was the day I learned that immigration was serious business. That lesson has been reinforced too many times to recount since. What I never questioned though, is how immigration could be different.

This is where Neil’s book - “Beyond Numbers” - comes in. To imagine a better future, it sometimes helps to know the past!

The book takes us into the world of Canadian immigration in the period of 1982 - 2005. The book is filled with scenes of officers sitting with “clients”, trying to tease out what’s going on. BUT, also fixing errors in documents, suggesting alternative strategies, offering support!

And this one was particularly unbelievable -
Going to university campuses to renew study permits for international students!!
Immigration services, DoorDash style?!?! Unreal.

Neil tells me what a typical immigration experience was like at a time when face-to-face service was the norm -

…people were grateful for the assistance and the guidance you would offer and also you would often, detect when there was misrepresentation and you would have a chance to say to the person, “So, I’m having a real hard time believing this”, and just let them explain themselves, you know, we’ve lost all that.

Ok, this image of immigration feels more wholesome. It also feels entirely alien to a generation of newcomers. But then again, Neil left the immigration agency 20 years ago.

Is it even possible to restore a system more connected with the people it most impacts, or has that ship sailed?

That’s a really good question and I fear because it’s not only in immigration but this is a society-wide evolution, not necessarily for the better.

But as I argue, the impacts of the loss in the immigration context are amplified. Immigration programs are not like other government programs. Where, you know, you have three criteria. You meet them or you don’t. And it’s pretty objective. In the immigration regulations, in many instances, it’s not that simple. You’re dealing with documents from all over the world, cultural and language barriers.

That’s why I think it is unfortunate, but I think it is a reality.

It saddens me but I think I have to say that that ship has mostly sailed.

In reading the book, I was struck by the use of the word “client” to refer to immigrants seeking benefits through Canadian immigration programs.

Neil says this was an intentional change -

When I started at the immigration department in 1982, I think the term commonly used was the subject and it might have been the applicant. And there was a directive saying you know we want to…make it more respectful and…we were instructed to use the term client and that represented, especially for people who had been in the department for a long time, a major shift in nomenclature. But words matter and you know after a while you it just sort of became the norm

I agree. Words do matter. They set a tone. But words are where a good system starts.

I’ve navigated immigration in 2 countries for 15 years now. I have to admit, it hasn’t occurred to me to use the word “client” to describe my relationship with an immigration agency, until now. That’s because I’ve rarely seen accountability and acknowledgement from immigration agencies, when mistakes are made - in both the US and Canada.

”Applicant” is the most neutral term I can think of, to define my place in that relationship.

It is interesting to hear Neil’s perspective from his time in immigration —

I’m sure even back then there were many people that didn’t feel like they were clients.

ln my experience…there were times where we weren’t able to help people and we explain it and people get upset but there’s nothing we can do. And they remain upset. But…when I chat with other immigration people, I’m sure a lot of people don’t expect me to say this, it’s the stories where they’re able to help people that stuck with them.

Nobody in my experience, ever took pleasure in saying no. But it was an important part of the job.

So, what are we left with? This is a situation where most immigrants try to do the right thing. And most immigration officials, no doubt, do too.

And yet, in their interactions with immigration agencies, so many of us are left feeling that — to borrow Mark Carney’s phrase from the now-famous Davos 2026 speech — the immigration agency will do what it wants and applicants will suffer what they must.

I’ve recently been asking my Mom what things were like when she was my age.

Oh, no. This is major…What’s evolved in the last 5-10 years, is a puzzling failure to plan, to coordinate, and to evaluate risk.

It’s irresponsible management of the program and there are many tragedies upon tragedies but certainly one is that many people were sort of dumped into a situation where they’re vulnerable and their future is uncertain. They don’t even have the supports they need because you have people who came here have no place to live and the municipalities couldn’t provide for them adequately because the federal government didn’t say we are sending this wave of people who are in need to you and they’re arriving tomorrow.

It just happened and it’s inexcusable.

The long-term tragedy is the reversal in support for our immigration program…It’s terrible what’s happening. You have a certain segment of the population that, instead of being angry at politicians, they’re angry at people [immigrants] and so you start to have social disorder.

And it’s avoidable. All of this was avoidable. When I was working in policy at immigration, we knew you have to balance things carefully.

You have to plan things carefully.

So much seems to have gone wrong with immigration in Canada in the last 5-10 years. But Neil points to one glaring failure -

I really think this whole student [”Study, work, stay”] scheme deserves a place in the history of our immigration program as one of the major failures that showed that Canadians aren’t above mistreating people.

And why this scathing indictment?

We are only just starting to come to grips with the level of sheer dysfunction in the international study program in Canada. For years, international students who simply could not afford to come to Canada to get a decent education that would set them up for success, were approved in droves.

With no caps, little control over institutions accepting international students, the program seemed unburdened by concern for the financial vulnerability of students, their future prospects or indeed their health and well-being.

Unsurprisingly, international students have found themselves in dark circumstances - in over-crowded strip-mall “colleges”, economic and sexual exploitation, food insecurity and forced into survival jobs.

And when it all becomes too much, even addiction and suicide [1].

Neil’s book lifts a pretty heavy curtain - showing us how immigration actually worked behind the scenes in his time. Its just refreshing to see the people on the other side of a very slanted power dynamic as, well…human.

As immigration becomes increasingly distant and bureaucratic, has it maybe become less forgiving?

...the first thing I would say is some people would tell you that it was also unforgiving back then. You know, we would tell people face to face, you do not meet the requirements. But we did have flexibility.

And also you become invested when you meet people face to face. It’s really hard to not treat people as human beings…

I’m not sure about this, Sindhu, but somebody told me recently that you know there’s still situations where officers have some discretion but I don’t know how you use that discretion very effectively if you don’t have a chance to sit and talk with the people.

A lot of that discretion revolves around - Are they going to adapt? Are they going to be go-getters?

There’s more than a little mystique surrounding immigration. That’s probably why so many newcomers think that lawyers and other professionals have “connections” behind the scenes that can shake things loose in their favour.

So, what do us normies not understand about how immigration works?

Neil has 2 examples for us -

Canadians want laws upheld, except…

The public would say, “Oh we want the laws to be upheld and enforced. There should be controls and the people who are allowed to stay here should meet our immigration requirements.”

Within weeks of such a survey, we would have a family that’s being removed.

Once you personalize it, people will go, “Oh, not them. We want the law to be applied, but not to them. They’re such a nice family!” Its…a real contradiction in Canadian sentiment. When it’s a faceless person, oh, let’s apply the law, but once you see their face, you’re like they look really like nice people, which, you know, used to make me laugh a little bit.

You know, they’re all nice people. There’s so many nice people.

Another thing we normies don’t get? There’s more than one (reasonable!) way to crack an egg in immigration -

…I talk about one case where a convention refugee was facing deportation, but there was one last step to get the executive director’s approval. And in that interim period, the man had not gotten into trouble with the law again.

And now he has a child or two and…a Canadian wife. Four years ago, the decision made sense when we started this whole enforcement process. Today, are we really going to put him on a plane given his circumstances today?

There are many [cases] in the immigration sphere where either outcome could be seen as reasonable. So the court will look at it and say, “Well, that’s a reasonable outcome even though I may not have agreed with it.”

In most programs—there’s the correct answer.
But with immigration… “Is it reasonable?” - is the test.

I think this is something the Canadian public has a lot of trouble with.

Neil led led many lives within Canada’s immigration machinery.

He worked in public-facing roles, adjudicating applications, conducting interviews - both here at home and abroad at diplomatic missions. He worked behind-the-scenes in roles devoted to complex cases, policy analysis, supporting the immigration minister etc.

In one of these roles, Neil was involved in the creation and rollout of the cross-cultural training. Sounds mundane today, but the heightened sensitive to cross-cultural norms is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Cultural sensitivity sounds like one of those things that overly sensitive people get all tangled up in knots about. But it is serious business - quite literally. It is speculated that among the reasons Walmart failed to get a foothold in Germany is that the American-style door greets they had in their stores put Germans off. Germans found the greeters inauthentic, forced and just overall weird, preferring a professional distance with staff.

How did cross-cultural awareness play out in immigration? Did Neil recall an example where an awareness of cross-cultural aspects or perhaps, a lack of it, impacted his immigration work?

There’s a story in Neil’s book where a young woman and her parents come into the office for the sponsorship of the woman’s soon-to-be-husband. The young woman expressed no emotion. Her parents, on the other hand…

…they’re smiling and it was almost like we were at the wedding reception.

I probably knew that this might be an arranged marriage but I didn’t have a lot of experience. There’s a part of me that would have managed it differently and said, “Okay parents, you go in the waiting room.” I don’t know where it would have gone from there between her and her parents, but she wasn’t ready to tell them what was going on.

As we were concluding, I said, “You know, so if you have any questions or if you want to talk about your case…”,

The girl’s father just went, “What?”

Neil had left the door open for the girl to reach out. And she later did - alone - to discuss withdrawing the application! She did not want to be married to the guy her parents had picked out for her.

His hunch had been right.

I’ll admit it - I love stories that have a generous sprinkle of humanity in bureaucratic, sanitized processes. Like how Judges hand out harsher sentences the Monday after daylight savings time shifts in Spring - the suppressed grumpiness linked to lesser sleep!

This tells us that there’s more than a little subjectivity to the immigration process, even beyond the “there is no one right answer” variety.

Which makes it even more important all of us - Canadian citizens and PRs, newcomers and people involved in immigration outside government - know more about how the cake is baked.

I wish I had read this book when I was in the thick of things with immigration. And I wish more people working in immigration write books like this one. Reading about Neil’s life, his career, the strange personal situations he found himself in and his stint in India was genuinely comforting. That last part probably has a lot to do with the fact that I’m Indian myself.

I don’t want to overstate this, but it matters for immigrants to see the immigration system and the people who work within it as…well, normal.

Sort of like the folks that give us our Health Cards and Driver’s Licenses. It matters that immigrants have the ability and faith to seek answers and information, from the immigration agency if they are not sure what to do.

And that faith is in short supply at the moment.

References

[1] Article from the Walrus on the conditions that international students face in Canada

Guest Bio:

Neil Cochrane grew up in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and is a graduate of the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management. He worked in Canada’s immigration service from 1982 until 2005. He interviewed immigration clients in Canada and at diplomatic missions abroad, later rising through the ranks to become Director of Policy and Legislation in the Admissibility Branch. He served another ten years in the Charities Directorate of the Canada Revenue Agency before retiring from Canada’s public service in 2015. He is the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal and the Head of the Public Service Award.

In retirement, he enjoys time with family and friends, reading, writing short stories and playing the guitar. Twice a week, he can be found at Perley Health, a long-term care home where he is a proud member of the team of volunteers. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Barb, their daughter Laura and Rose, the indefatigable schnoodle.

Beyond Numbers: Stories From an Immigration Insider, a memoir of his experience as an immigration official, is his first book.