The Immigration Branch's overseas operations are run by External Affairs and International Trade Canada who deliver the Immigration Program abroad through the network of 65 full immigration processing centres and 34 other centres that process only visitor visas. These immigration centres are located across the globe in regions such as: Africa, the middle East, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States, serving potential immigrants, visitors and refugees wishing to come to Canada.
The Foreign Operations Branch is responsible for overseeing and administering the Department's overseas posts. The Branch's officers, in turn, are responsible for recruiting, selecting, and processing immigrants and non-immigrants abroad. They also provide counselling services to potential immigrants or visitors, and distribute information in the form of published material on Canada to interested candidates. In addition to these responsibilities, the foreign officers must also ensure that an effective reporting system is developed for the foreign service which will serve the needs of the Department, that the posts abroad will be able to perform the role of interpreting departmental policies and programmes, that reports are received from all areas of the world which will keep the Department informed about conditions and developments in matters related to employment and immigration in foreign countries, and to gather, store, and retrieve intelligence information of relevance to the Department about the source countries.
In addition to the tasks related to ovrseas operations and policy, the Foreign Operations Branch during the period when these records were created, was comprised of three support services: Personnel Service, Financial Management, and Management Service, which were responsible for overseas recruitment, classification and staff relations, audits and estimates, and all other management functions respectively.
The records in this collection are comprised of operational and administrative files that were created by the operations staff at headquarters, the foreign officers from the overseas posts, and staff from the three support branches that were responsible for the personnel, financial, and management functions of this programme. This material is in the form of committee and council minutes and reports, post reports, contracts, estimates, classification of position reports, briefing documents, copies of speeches given by the DM and the Secretary of State for External Affairs, employee appraisals, competition results, directives, information on salary and wages, advertising, and publicity.
