6 / 32
6
/ Canadian Government Executive
// January 2016
Management
Immigration Visa Officers
on the Front Line
Vic
Satzewich
T
he government of Canada’s
rush to welcome Syrian refu-
gees has put the visa officer’s
job in the spotlight recently.
Canadians are concerned: are the right
people being let in? I think the country
can sleep comfortably. We’re in good
hands.
Despite changes in context, the over-
all purpose of a visa officer’s job has not
changed much since the 1970s and 1980s.
To phrase it in the more technocratic lan-
guage of today, the job is to assess, and
balance, credibility and risk. The world
of immigration was, and is, big, messy,
and ambiguous. Immigrants and visitors
come to Canada from every corner of the
globe. The backgrounds and biographies
of individuals, their reasons for travel-
ling to Canada, the documents they bring
to support their applications, and the
countries and contexts from which they
come are all different. So, too, are the so-
cial contexts in which they live and work,
the ways in which they gain their experi-
ence, and the mechanisms that their states
employ to produce and document their
identities.
The immigration system is already high-
ly bureaucratized and rule and procedure
heavy, and adding more rules and proce-
dures to cover every possible contingency
would no doubt produce more problems
than it would solve. And, as some legal
scholars have pointed out, flexibility in the
application of rules is necessary to recog-
nize that some individual cases are special
and unique, and cannot be slotted into a
clearly defined box or processing category.
This is why it would be wrong to inter-
pret visa officers, and their decision-mak-
ing procedures and techniques, as capri-
cious. Capriciousness is not synonymous
with discretion. When it comes to border