When Canada Refused Entry to our Infant Son (Our Immigration Story)

If you’ve been reading about our immigration to Canada, you already know all about How We Got Permanent Residence for Canada and our Immigration-Vacation to Toronto. After completing our landing procedure and receiving our PR cards, we had about three years’ buffer to make a decision. One’s PR status can be extended after five years, if one has lived in Canada for two out of five years. That gave us some time.

Toronto Skyline

While moving to Canada could wait, starting our family couldn’t. My biological clock was running and if we waited to have a baby after we had settled down in Canada in a couple of years, we would be pushing things quite a bit. So, we decided to give ourselves two years to notch up some savings, have a baby and then take a final decision on whether we were immigrating.

In all of this, we did not for a minute think that having a baby outside Canada would lead us to a very unpleasant predicament. Imagine our horror when some chance research after our son’s birth told us that the little one was going to be refused entry into Canada. The thing is that Canada does not issue a dependent child of immigrants a tourist visa since the child is not going on a ‘temporary’ visit. What they want you to do is go to Canada and sponsor the child from there. After the kid receives his own Permanent Residence status, he can fly in and join you. Sounds easy enough, right? Small problem- the process can take up to ten months.

We were like, “What? Are you kidding me?” I mean, you throw your job and life to the winds, then split family for a year, not see your little one until paper work is over, which is practically half of their tiny lifetimes, and hope to hell that the PR comes through. Because if it doesn’t, then what? You’ve already lost everything and a year of your life. You now return to India, where your kid has been waiting for you?

Our hearts sank. As much as we wanted to immigrate to Canada, the cost was too high. We decided to push things to the back-burner and focus on the blessing we had received, our little son.

Us with our little one

Time flew by and we started approaching the deadline for our move. If we wanted our PR status to not go down the drain, we needed to move to Canada and soon. The closer the deadline approached, the more our hearts ached at the thought of letting go of something we had fought so hard to achieve. Moreover, neither Africa nor India could compare to the promise Canada held for a future for us and our little one.

We started to rack our brains. We did some more research. We had intense discussions.

And we made a life-changing decision.

We were going to move to Canada. And we were going to get our son there.

Want to know what happened next? Read my next post on How We Got Our Baby Across to Canada.