The Industry Secret Most Hong Kong Immigration Consultants Don’t Want You to Discover
Posted by The Visa Geeza / in Employment Visas, Family Visas, Investment Visas, Long Stay & PR, Musing, Refusals & Appeals, Special Programmes, Visitor Visas / 31 responses
First Published December 14, 2012
[Looking around furtively…]
Shussh… You are probably paying too much for your Hong Kong visa service.
It’s true, and here’s the reason why.
Your ‘easy’ Hong Kong visa application costs just as much as a ‘hard’ or ‘very hard’ case – yet your visa services provider does not distinguish them.
They are all just ‘cases’.
Those which go through quickly and easily are super-profitable for Hong Kong immigration consultants and those which need strident argument barely break even.
We know this because our 30 years of experience in the Hong Kong immigration services business tells us the following:
–Â 70% of Hong Kong visa cases tend to be merely administrative in nature and 30% need to be aggressively argued.
–Â Of the cases that need arguing, 50% require a lot of work and 50% somewhat less work.
–Â Immigration service providers typically charge flat fees irrespective of complexity.
–Â Visa consultancies are not able to advise a client theirs is an ‘easy’ case for fear of mis-setting expectations.
– Moreover, at the point of agreeing a fee, immigration consultants are not in a position to know if a case will in fact be easy or hard as they have not yet opened a file, read all the available papers nor understood the full case background.
This all means that easy cases inadvertently end up subsidising the hard ones and the majority of clients end up paying for the privilege!
Clients are not in a position to know the true level of complexity on their case and so justify the size of their payment as a fee for convenience, service and peace of mind.
There’s nothing wrong with this of course.
It’s a perfectly ethical way to provide an immigration service and tens of thousands of Hong Kong clients every year get good results from their consultants and are very pleased with the service.
But there is an alternative.
It’s why I publish this Blog 4-5 times each week.
And wrote the Hong Kong Visa Handbook.
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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.
Sara
We want to engage an advisor (no renumeration at al) who is on a working visa. Wonder if hat would get him into trouble.
The Visa Geeza
Yes – he can only take up employment for his sponsoring employer – and it matters not that you are not planning to pay him.
Sara
I see. Also would like to know whether it is common for people to “lose” their visa when they apply to change the employer?
We heard that some immigration officers actually told an applicants that if they changed their employer again, they would dismiss the application and terminate the visa (people in question change job around every 1.5 year).
Many thanks!
The Visa Geeza
Always possible. ImmD are wary of ‘job hoppers’.