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Denied

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Martin:
David...this is really great advice!  I am going to "sticky" this thread, so that it is near the top always...because this kind of advice can help so many people.  Thank you.

David K:
An Aside: A Trap for young ( or in my case, not so young) players.
I logged on, read a few threads, and then settled down to give Neil
some more encouragement. Wrote quite a bit, and then hit [Post].
It came up [denied], because the interval in which I was writing
exceeded 60 minutes, and the system had silently logged me off. :-(

From memory it was about the strategy of appeal, which is mostly the strategy
of paperwork.

Get onto their case and find out who is deciding the appeal (Case Officer??)
and where they can be contacted.
Then keep in contact on a regular basis. The squeaky wheel gets the oil :-)

Keep in mind that this Dude is going to peruse your file, with a view to making a decision
So the trick is to make it easy for him to see things your way.
Even thought you might feel like choking the living daylights out of him, or feel
outraged at being unfairly treated, bear in mind the words of the good book:
" A Soft answer turneth away wrath"
So your letters should be short, clear and emotionally neutral.

Here in NZ the operations manual states right up front:
"All immigration officers must act on the principles of fairness and natural justice when
deciding an application". So I always mention being guides by the principles of
fairness and natural justice in the first paragraph. The rest of the letter is a
one page summary of the detail that follows ( i.e attached are Yahoo logs etc )
so the guy (or guyette ) does not switch off

What I finally did was assemble all my correspondence as a series of linked Word documents
that I burned to CD, compleat with a nicely formatted lightscibe label. So reviewing
the case became point and click, easy peasy, and where's that big Approved stamp.

I also made it clear (politely) that I was not going to go away, and was quite prepared
for a war of attrition ( which is what transpired).
Regrettably there is also the potential for covert racism. Most of the case officers in
Hong Kong are not native english speakers, and are a touch adverse to what they perceive
as interference in their patch. Whether it was memories of the Boxer rebellion or the Opium wars
O don'y know, but I had a distinct underlying feeling of "Kung Fu to you Mr BigNose".
Things improved once we transferred to debate "Onshore" to NZ

So there you go:
Good luck, Keep persevering and keep us updated with the results


Peace
David K

Smaug:
Any updates Neil? I hope you are silent because you are together now. ;)

Neil:
I contacted an immigration lawyer the other day.  As I figured, at this point in our case, he can't do much more than is already done.  He has no better ways to contact immigration than I do.  Apparently he has as much difficulty communicating with a human being in the immigration appeal division as I do.  He suggested I continue to send faxes requesting the status of my case until someone contacts me.  It's been 6 months since my interview and still no decision has been made.

I'm tempted to start looking for offshore work, or head to the oil fields, if we are denied again.  I could probably find a camp job that runs two or three weeks in, one or two weeks out that would facilitate me travelling back and forth to China more often.  I'm an industrial electrician, but I don't have a whole lot of experience yet.  I've been a journeyman for 3 years.

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