WTF…?

Guillermo Zieglers and his fam­ily emi­grated from Argentina and they cur­rently live in Ottawa. His blog, Los Zieglers En Canada, is very pop­u­lar with the Spanish-speaking com­mu­nity. How­ever, he must pay a price to fame: he occa­sion­ally gets what he calls the WFT ques­tions. Non-native Eng­lish speak­ers, note: WTF stands for “what the fuck”. And my… what the fuck indeed when I see some of the ques­tions he gets!

Appar­ently, I’m also famous enough to receive my fair share of WTF ques­tions. These ques­tions gen­er­ally revolve around immi­grat­ing to Canada, prefer­ably using the faster and most ille­gal way pos­si­ble. The per­son who asks the ques­tion or the favor typ­i­cally comes out of the blue and never offers more explanations.

I don’t mind answer­ing ques­tions from read­ers, but some really make me raise my eyebrows.

And this WTF ques­tion cer­tainly did:

Sub­ject: SAMPLE FILL –UP FORMS

I have read your post and I would like to ask your help about apply­ing for per­ma­nent res­i­dence in canada. Is it ok if you can give me fill up form so that I have a ref­er­ence in fill­ing up the forms for skilled worker I mean forms that already been filled out. Thanks. Hop­ing for your response.

Er… no, it’s not okay. Let me get that straight: you want to immi­grate to Canada. Sure. Now, you have to fill out the forms. I’m fol­low­ing you. Yet, you can’t do it your­self and you want me to pro­vide you my own immi­gra­tion forms that I must have filled out when apply­ing for per­ma­nent res­i­dence to help you.

This is wrong on so many levels.

First, I did not apply for per­ma­nent res­i­dence in the skilled worker cat­e­gory but in the fam­ily cat­e­gory, since my part­ner is Cana­dian. So my forms wouldn’t be much help.

Sec­ond, I did not keep a copy of the forms – yes, I know, stu­pid. When I applied for per­ma­nent res­i­dent in 2005, it took me a few months to gather all the paper­work I needed, such as my secu­rity clear­ance, emails, pic­tures, bank state­ments etc. Fill­ing out the appli­ca­tion forms took a while too: I wanted to do things right to make sure my appli­ca­tion would be processed as fast as it could (turned out it was processed very fast, so maybe spend­ing a while on the appli­ca­tion is a good thing). Any­way, by the time I was done and every­thing was ready, I just wanted the big ugly file out of my sight (and off the liv­ing room table). I made a backup of all the Word files I attached to my appli­ca­tion and I send it. I didn’t make a copy of the forms I filled out because I was in a gam­bling mood – all or nothing.

Finally and above all, I would never let a stranger see my per­ma­nent res­i­dence appli­ca­tion for one very good rea­son: it con­tains all kind of per­sonal infor­ma­tion. An immi­gra­tion appli­ca­tion is a lengthy and thick file that includes your date of birth (noth­ing to be ashamed of yet, I’m “only” 27), your social insur­ance num­ber (even if mine was tem­po­rary at the time), all your work and per­sonal his­tory, pos­si­bly bank­ing infor­ma­tion and med­ical files, copies of var­i­ous IDs such as pass­port… I’m not being para­noid, but hand­ing this out to some­one (who requested it out of the blue via email) would be pretty dumb. Iden­tity thief, anyone?

I still replied to the email say­ing basi­cally that. I wasn’t mean and I didn’t say no out of spite, because I assume the per­son asked the ques­tion a bit lightly and in good faith. Yes, at one point, you must real­ize that immi­grat­ing is a seri­ous mat­ter and they are just too many scams around for a ran­dom per­son to give you access to such per­sonal documents.

How about you? How would you have reacted? Ever got some WTF ques­tions on your blog?

Related arti­cles:

1. The Two Immi­gra­tion Myths (1÷10)
2. If You Immi­grate To Que­bec (4÷10)
3. First Steps As A Per­ma­nent Res­i­dent (9÷10)
4. Immi­grat­ing to Canada: 6 Years Later, What Changed?
5. Immi­gra­tion: The Spon­sor­ship Cat­e­gory (3÷10)