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Can you swap from a foreign domestic helper visa to a dependant visa whilst in Hong Kong?

QUESTION

My domestic helper, from the Philippines, is married to a Hong Kong Permanent Resident.

Her contract with me expires in April and they want to apply for a dependent visa for her.

Is this possible, what are the criteria and what would be the time line?

Can I extend her domestic helper visa whilst her dependent visa application is being processed, so she is still able to work?

Many thanks

ANSWER

It is entirely possible to convert from foreign domestic helper status through to dependent visa status, and the timeline is typically six to eight weeks for the finalisation of the dependent visa application. So given that your foreign domestic helper contract with you expires in April, and that her working visa, her foreign domestic helper visa is going to expire two weeks after that date, then effectively you’ve got enough time (or she’s got enough time) to make an application for a dependent visa.

And the details are contained in the Hong Kong Visa handbook, under legal dependent visa, you just follow that entire process irrespective of what your current immigration status is, and then when the Immigration Department have finalised the dependent visa application and approved it, a label will be issued to her that says that she now has a dependent visa and she’s going to have to relinquish her foreign domestic helper visa status and activate her dependent visa status.

And the way that this happens is that typically during the time that she’s holding her foreign domestic helper visa, she makes an exit from Hong Kong and relinquishes her foreign domestic helper visa status at the point of exit. And then when she re-enters Hong Kong, she places the new dependent visa label on a clean page in her passport and she enters as a dependent at that time.

So given that, we do have her contract expiring in a few weeks and it’s going to take six to eight weeks for the Immigration Department to finalise her her dependent visa application, it just seems to me that she can carry on working for you through to the April termination of contract date, and have her dependent visa application pending throughout all of that time, anticipate that it’s going to get approved prior to April and then, as I say, relinquish her foreign domestic helper visa at the time that it expires, naturally, and take her dependent visa out off to Macau and come back and activate her dependent visa status upon re-entry in the way that I described a little bit earlier.

So it seems to me that you’ve got all the necessary dynamics in place to make that conversion happen. And it seems to me that you’ve got more than sufficient time for all of that to play itself out until her current contract expires. And naturally enough, even though she has a dependent visa application in the pipeline that’s not yet approved until it does get approved.

So until such a time as it gets approved, her foreign domestic helper visa status will prevail nonetheless. And, of course, she’s here in Hong Kong under that status, to provide services to you. So she will certainly be able to work for you during all of that time.

I hope you found that useful.

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