Work permits from India: we file the visa, not the job

We do not place people in jobs abroad, and we would be breaking the law if we tried. Recruiting Indians for overseas employment requires a Registration Certificate from the Protector General of Emigrants under the Emigration Act, 1983, and we do not hold one. What we do is prepare and file the visa or work permit application once you have an offer of your own, which is a different service with a different licence behind it. That distinction is worth carrying into every conversation you have on this subject. Anyone offering you both the job and the visa in one package is either licensed as a recruiting agent, in which case ask to see the certificate and check the number, or is selling you something they cannot deliver. The second is far more common, and the money is rarely recoverable once it is paid.

An LMIA is not recruitment, and the difference is who the client is and which way the money runs. An LMIA is the employer's own application for permission to hire a foreign worker, so when we prepare one the company is our client and the company pays us. Recruitment is the opposite arrangement: taking a worker's money to find them a job, which in India needs a Registration Certificate from the Protector General of Emigrants that we do not hold. Canadian rules also bar an employer and a third-party representative alike from recovering the LMIA fee or recruitment costs from the worker, so the fee cannot reach you even indirectly through the employer. We assess the role before taking employer work, and we decline files that look like a permit being manufactured for somebody to buy rather than a job somebody needs filled.

For most countries and most routes, a work permit needs a job offer first. Employer-sponsored permits are the bulk of what exists, and they need a named employer who has already obtained their own permission to hire a foreign worker before your application can even begin. The exceptions are real but narrow, and they are narrower than the advertising suggests. Open work permits usually depend on a status you already hold, and Canada says plainly that most applicants from outside the country cannot get one. Post-study permits depend on a course you already finished in that country. Job-seeker routes such as the German Opportunity Card do let a qualified person enter to look for work, and they have their own eligibility tests around qualifications, language and funds. If somebody is offering you a work permit with no offer and none of those apply, ask which route they mean.

An LMIA costs the employer CAD 1,000 for each worker they want to hire, and the employer must pay it. This is not a convention or a matter of negotiation between you and the company. IRCC states it on the page it publishes for applicants in India, and Canadian rules bar employers and third-party representatives alike from recovering that fee, or recruitment costs, from the worker afterwards. So there is no lawful arrangement in which the money comes out of your pocket, whether directly, through a deduction from your first salary, or through a fee described as something else. If somebody is asking you for LMIA money, that request is itself the warning, and it is worth treating as one before you check anything else about the offer. A genuine employer with a genuine vacancy pays this without being asked.

We prepare and file work permit applications for 40+ countries. Canada, the Gulf, Germany and the wider EU, and the UK, Australia and New Zealand are the ones we handle most often, which is a reflection of where people from Gujarat are actually going rather than a limit on what we will look at. One distinction runs through all of it and we would rather state it than blur it. Canada is the only country where we act as your authorised representative, under RCIC licence R710507, which means we can deal with the department on your behalf and are accountable to a regulator for how we do it. Everywhere else we prepare and submit the application with you, because no equivalent licence exists in those jurisdictions to hold. The work is the same standard. The legal relationship is not, and you should know which one you are buying.

Emigration clearance is a permission the Protector of Emigrants grants before an ECR-passport holder leaves India to take up a job in one of 17 notified countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman. It is processed through the eMigrate system rather than at the airport, and it exists to protect workers going to those destinations rather than to obstruct them. Two conditions have to be true before it applies to you. Your passport must carry the ECR endorsement, which depends on your education, and you must be travelling for employment. Both, not either. The same passport going to Dubai on holiday needs nothing, which is why plenty of people are convinced the requirement does not exist until the day it does. Check the endorsement page of your own passport rather than assuming, because most people have never looked at it.

Paying an agent up front for a Canadian job offer is not normal, and it is the single most common work-permit fraud run against Indian applicants. The money is almost never recoverable. Three facts sit behind that. The job offer and the LMIA behind it are the employer's to obtain and to pay for, so there is nothing for you to be buying. IRCC says plainly that agents have no special connections with visa officers and cannot influence a decision, so speed and certainty are not for sale either. And a fabricated offer or experience letter leads to refusal and a misrepresentation ban from Canada of at least five years, which you carry rather than the agent who wrote it. If you have already paid, talk to us before you file anything, because what you submit next decides whether this becomes a refusal or a ban.