Hong Kong visa and immigration processes can be profoundly simple or extremely complicated. It all depends on the unique blend of conditions you locate your self in. In a pure linear planet of task supply-visa application-approval-then get-up the task, it can be comparatively simple to align your functioning visa permissions to your job as nicely as the time put in doing work for that a single approved employer.
But what takes place, say, if you get manufactured redundant six months before your employment visa is thanks to expire – and you have no new task provide in hand by the time your existing time period of continue to be beneath the work visa endorsed in your passport comes to an end? Do you have to leave the HKSAR? Will you be offered an extension to your employment visa even though it is no for a longer time sponsored by an employer you have now ceased doing work for? Do you go into a type of visa-limbo land? Do you leave HK for a working day or two and occur back again as a customer? If you do that, does it indicate you shed your continuity of residence for the reasons of an eventual software for a Long term Hong Kong Identity Card, securing proper of abode in the approach?
These are all-important concerns faced frequently adequate by international countrywide residents of HK to warrant answers to. So here we go:
one. Without having a occupation provide you can not apply to extend your employment visa permissions.
2. Consequently, when Work Visa Application of stay runs out, you will have to go to Immigration Tower in Wanchai and get your self a customer visa on the pre-textual content that you need to have to continue to be in the HKSAR to proceed to locate an alternate work.
three. The HKID should accommodate this kind of requests for several months/a number of limited months, specially as the more time you’ve lived in the HKSAR, the a lot more amenable they are to empowering you to continue to be in situ to support you get by yourself back on a seem work footing when again.
four. When you have a work offer you in hand, you must re-use for an work visa by way of the 24/F of Immigration Tower after much more using the forms ID990A and ID990B (even although these forms are developed for candidates who are presently residing outdoors of Hong Kong). Employing the sort ID91 (extension of continue to be for a visitor searching for to change status again to work even though in HK via the five/F is no more time the approach adopted by the HKID). Note that if you intend to commence your very own enterprise a individual procedure applies that goes outside of the scope of this discussion.
five. Under this system, after your new visa software is authorized, you will be issued with a new visa label which you have to activate by exiting HK (generally through Macau or Shenzhen for the working day) and re-getting into with the new visa label positioned in your passport for activation when you recross the border back again into the HKSAR.
six. Any accompanying loved ones customers with expired dependent visas merely follow in the stead of your employment visa applications so you can tackle the circumstance for each of you in exactly the same way.
None of this approach guidance, by the way, signifies you may automatically move the approvability examination for your new employment or (potentially) investment visa application, but does drop necessarily gentle on the twilight globe for expats who uncover by themselves quickly visa-less soon after possessing made Hong Kong their residence.
One last stage. Typically, any time spent in this sort of visa-limbo-land will not compromise your continuity of home in Hong Kong for the needs of your eventual appropriate of abode software. But don’t enable also much time go. Get on with regularising your work visa situation as quickly as you can.
It’s going to preserve you a world of grief.