How to Prove Your Love (Australian Edition)
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I was on the Work and Holiday visa when Liza and I were spending our year of 2023 in Australia. At the time, she had been planning to stay a few years to finish a university degree there, and so I in turn was trying to figure out a way to legally stay for longer given my complete inability to find a sponsoring tech job. (Actually working one of the jobs the Work and Holiday visa would have you work was highly unattractive, as the visa specifically excludes jobs from the Melbourne metropolitan area, and I wasn’t so hot on making ours a long-distance relationship.)
I first thought of going for the Skilled Independent visa (subclass 189). Since “Developer Programmer” is listed on the skilled occupations list, I decided to try to get a skills assessment, which in turn requires:
- Proof of education, requiring PDFs of your diplomas and school transcripts
- Proof of identity, requiring at least 3 forms of ID (I submitted my passport, driver’s license, and birth certificate)
- Proof of work, requiring for every relevant job you’ve worked:
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Two separate pieces of payment evidence, for both the starting and ending years of your job, that prove it wasn’t a fake job and you actually got paid for it. I’ve kept all my tax returns, so that was an easy first piece of evidence. But I’ve never kept my pay stubs, and my bank account statements only went back 7 years, which was fortunately just long enough to show that I got paid in December of 8 years ago for my first employer.
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A signed letter from the employer themselves, written on official letterhead, testifying what dates you worked there, what position you held, what job duties you held there, etc. Because the official sample letter featured wording that was exactly the same as the ANZSCO descriptions I linked above, I’d assumed that they were looking for that exact wording. It didn’t help that I found another source with a different example letter that also followed the same wording.
It turns out I had missed the one line from the skills assessment guideline that says “References with duties copied directly from ANZSCO description document or from another reference will not be accepted.” To be fair, that information was bolded. But in my defense, it was part of an entire bolded paragraph, in a PDF document that is 21 pages long. And seriously, why would you put up a sample document on your website that has precisely the opposite wording of what you want to see, when you went to the trouble of making fake details for everything else? Oh well, my bad.
The initial email I got said that it would about 8 to 10 weeks to process. It took them almost 4 months before they got back to me about the employer references, and then 7 more weeks after that for them to finally take another look at my application.
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I finally got my skills assessment granted, just to be told by the lawyer I’d hired for the partner visa that with the delays this had taken, it was unlikely that an invitation would come in time for me to apply for the partner visa. Furthermore, even though the official government webpage says you need 65 points or more, in the lawyer’s experience applicants usually need at least 90 points before they are invited to apply.
Ooops. I suppose the sentence “you will be ranked against other intending applicants” should’ve tipped me off that I needed to do more research about how this ranking happens before I started on this whole process. While the official website doesn’t appear to give any indications what the current points required for “Developer Programmer” invitations are, other sites do say that in general what I had was likely not good enough.
Okay, so I try for a Partner visa (subclass 100) instead. Since Liza is an Australian citizen, I would have an opportunity to stay if we were able to show that we are a de facto couple who have been cohabiting for at least a year. I learned my lesson from dealing with the rental market and the skilled migration visa: I would hire a lawyer right away to deal with this application. (If you’re looking for an immigration lawyer in Australia, I would highly recommend Jordan Tew as someone who’s prompt and professional, yet kind and generous.)
This of course required far more proof than anything else I’ve dealt so far. Parts of the documentation we had to provide include:
- Each of our international travel histories for the last 10 years, including dates we entered and left each country, the purpose of the visit, and the visa we used for the visit. (As someone who has traveled a lot in the last few years, this was painful.)
- Every address we’ve lived at for the last 10 years, and the dates we stayed at them. For the addresses that we cohabited at, we needed to submit proof of cohabitation. Apparently our rental contracts (with both our names on them) and multiple months of bank statements showing that we paid rent money to our landlords and each other were not enough; we also needed evidence of packages delivered to our addresses in our names. (Surely anyone who bothers to go to the length of faking rental contracts and rental payments would also bother to fake package deliveries?)
- Details on every member of our immediate families, including their date and place of birth, their citizenships (including the date and the method by which they obtained each citizenship), and whether they’re married (and if they are, who their spouses are and what their wedding date was)
- My entire employment history since birth. For periods of unemployment, I had to explain how I was supporting myself and what I did with my time. (From ages 0 to 6, I was living off of parental income and spent much of my time drooling on people.)
- Screenshots of our private chats where we said “I love you” to each other
- Multi-page essays on how our relationship developed, requiring:
- a timeline of our relationship history, starting from how we first met and then explaining all major events that developed afterwards
- details on how we emotionally support each other
- details on how we function as a couple: the public events at which we have presented ourselves at, the ways in which we split our household chores and other responsibilities, etc.