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Hong Kong Immigration… What Does It Mean… Twilight Zone?

November 15th, 2024

Posted by / in Employment Visas, Family Visas, Investment Visas, Musing, Special Programmes / 2 responses


 

Over the last 20 years or so I have coined a number of phrases in Hong Kong immigration parlance.In this short video, I discuss the Hong Kong visa Twilight Zone.

The twilight zone is where you’re an existing resident, your current conditions of stay prevail, but because you’ve made an application to the Immigration Department to change your employment visa sponsor, they’not in a position to endorse your passport with anything new until such a time as they positively finalised your application to change your sponsor, which will take four to five weeks all things considered.

So now that you’re sitting in the twilight zone, essentially you can’t leave Hong Kong without first getting a departure memo from the immigration officer that’s tasked with considering a change of sponsorship application. But by the same token, you are not deemed to be an overstayer at this point because you’ve essentially regularised it previously and the Immigration Department have kind of moved past that issue and are now focusing on determining whether or not you should be granted the ability to take up this new employer.

Now normally, whilst the immigration Department absolutely frown on overstay, if you are genuinely now seeking to change your employer and that employment is for all practical purposes for employment, you can go into that application with a reasonable level of confidence that you’re going to get approved, notwithstanding the fact that there were these overstay problems associated with you actually formally moving your application into the department for your change of employer.

So, if you get stopped on the street, the immigration Department essentially know all about you. They are not in a position to endorse your passport with anything new presently, as I say, until your new employment visa application has been finalised.

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The Hong Kong Visa Geeza (a.k.a Stephen Barnes) is a co-founder of the Hong Kong Visa Centre and author of the Hong Kong Visa Handbook. A law graduate of the London School of Economics, Stephen has been practicing Hong Kong immigration since 1993 and is widely acknowledged as the leading authority on business immigration matters here for the last 24 years.

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RESPONSES
  • CS

    5 May 2021 pm31 9:20pm
    01

    Thanks for coming up with a phrase for this! My question is if the new visa is ultimately refused. Could there be consequences for overstay?

    • The Visa Geeza

      14 May 2021 pm31 12:18pm
      02

      No. ImmD will convert you to a temporary visitor visa to give you time to leave HK in an orderly fashion.

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