What happens if you move abroad during a visa application?

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It depends. If you move during the application, depending on the stage of your application, it may be reassigned to another visa office, or maybe not. It may not matter eventually that much.

With the backlogs any visa office in the world may process your application. The differences in wait time come from many factors, for example, the political stability of the country (concerning notably reliability of documents), cooperation of governments, behaviours of past applicants (e.g. overstays, asylum claims), propsects in the residing countries etc.

For example, one reason people (legally) in the U.S. may have a faster processing time is that U.S. has capibility to do extensive screening and shares a lot of security and immigration data with Canada (and vice versa), so the processing is greatly facilitated. There is/was also no additional risk for unwanted asylum claims since they could simply go across the land border (illegally) to do so.

Whereas countries like India and China have relatively short processing times even if there are much more applicants exactly because the visa offices have a huge amount of experiences to rely on and have developed routine procedures on how to treat these applications.

The wait time is not necessarily what you expect, especially for relatively small countries. Some countries may have a higher concentration of certain types of applicants that require longer processing times than usual (e.g. asylum seekers or refugees) which unduly skew the data. The wait time is when they historically processed 80% of applications within the time, so even if 20% of applications from residents in one country are complicated, it can skew wait times by a lot. If they need to verify your history at another country, this may contribute to a longer treatment period. They may even send your file to the local visa office if your main history can only be found there. In UAE for example, I would speculate that it is due to a large number of migrant workers making applications in an attempt to go to Canada, even if the hope of getting one is low.

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