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Scenario: obtaining permanent residency but one year to go?

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  1. #21

    Join Date
    Aug 2013
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    Quote Originally Posted by HowardCoombs:
    Your bank account only matters in cases of dependant visa.
    No one will ask you anything about employment either.

    As long as you've been here 7 years, legally with a correct visa type - you'll get PR, no matter how much or little you have worked and no matter how much or little you have in the bank before or after 7 years.
    You can be on a tourist visa for a part of those seven years btw, you don’t necessarily need seven years of consecutive employment visas to prove you were ‘ordinarily residing’ in HK.

  2. #22

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mrs. Jones:
    You can be on a tourist visa for a part of those seven years btw, you don’t necessarily need seven years of consecutive employment visas to prove you were ‘ordinarily residing’ in HK.
    You need to be residing in HK through lawful means with explainable temporary absence to claim “ordinarily resident”. Tourist Visa/Visitors or illegal means cant be used for claiming ordinarily resident.
    shri and Bernadette J W like this.

  3. #23

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    No, not quite accurate. I know families who were on a tourist visa for up to eight months while in between jobs and zero issues obtaining pr as they were still ‘ordinarily residing’ in HK during that time. So it’s NOT necessarily visa dependent.


  4. #24

    That is quite surprising to know if it's true! I have a colleague who was on a working visa from 2011 to 2016, then left his job and applied to change to a dependent visa, but he left HK for holidays before the dependent visa got approved. His work visa expired during the time he was away and he came back on a tourist visa (as his dependent visa wasn't approved yet at the time). It was probably just a week or two that he was on the tourist visa, but when he tried to apply for PR last year, the immigration considered this as a gap between his two visas, and said he had to recount starting from the date of his dependent visa issued in 2016. So if your friends really got PR given that they were on the tourist visa for a couple of months, they were just really lucky.

    TheBrit and HK_Katherine like this.

  5. #25

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    Generally when out of job, unless your visa so nicely expires with the previous job and you had to do visa runs, otherwise you are probably still on employment visa and counted towards your 7 years...


  6. #26

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    Feb 2009
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    Quote Originally Posted by junichitsuyo:
    That is quite surprising to know if it's true! I have a colleague who was on a working visa from 2011 to 2016, then left his job and applied to change to a dependent visa, but he left HK for holidays before the dependent visa got approved. His work visa expired during the time he was away and he came back on a tourist visa (as his dependent visa wasn't approved yet at the time). It was probably just a week or two that he was on the tourist visa, but when he tried to apply for PR last year, the immigration considered this as a gap between his two visas, and said he had to recount starting from the date of his dependent visa issued in 2016. So if your friends really got PR given that they were on the tourist visa for a couple of months, they were just really lucky.
    Well I personally was in a similar situation whereby I was on a tourist visa for a few weeks in the middle of my 7 years but I still got PR at the end.

    Basically when I applied to extend my employment visa, I was a bit late and did it only a week or so before expiry. Immigration dept told me "Dont leave HK until extension has been approved", but then I had to go on a business trip a few days AFTER my visa ran out so ignored their advice, alarm bells rang at the immigration gates when I tried to exit the country (they let you in but start flashing after the fingerprint and that's when they handcuff you and drag you away), then I had to pay money for an on-the-spot tourist visa to cover the previous few days that I was technically 'illegal' and was allowed to leave, then when coming back in a week later I had to enter as a tourist, remained a week or so on this status until employment one was granted again and then rocked up to Wan Chai offices to convert myself back to an employment visa.

    During my PR application 3 years later, I was wondering whether this debacle would cause some complications or at least some line of questioning. But it never even came up. Either they didn't pick up on it, or common sense prevailed and they could see was just a mistake. Perhaps your colleague was a bit more complicated as he was switching to a dependent at the same time, whereas mine was a continuation of the same visa and I only needed a tourist visa to cover the time that immigration was processing my extension.
    Elegiaque likes this.

  7. #27

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    What BDW says. We have friends who were in similar situation two years ago, they were on a tourist visa for eight months so had to do three visa runs to Macau as well. No issue obtaining their pr however, no questions asked. Same with a colleague of mine, he was made redundant and his employment visa expired shortly after. He was therefore on a tourist visa for three months or so while job hunting, but also obtained his pr a year later.


  8. #28

    I guess my colleague was just unlucky then. He's okay with waiting for a couple more years anyway, all he wants with the PR is just to have an APEC card which saves him the trouble of immigration queues and visas for APEC countries.

    Mrs. Jones likes this.