Immigration Process Step 2: Background Checks

New Zealand requires that all immigrants be of "good character," and to show this, all applicants must provide a background check certificate from any country of which they are citizens AND any country they've lived in for five years or more since turning 17.  

To fulfill this requirement, US citizens/residents must provide an FBI Identification Record.  If you are a citizen, these are fairly easy to obtain - you go to one of a number of different FBI-approved third parties, they take your fingerprints electronically, send them to the FBI, and within 24 hours you have your background check.  You can request to get it either electronically through the channeler's website or by mail (or both). Non-citizens must apply directly to the FBI, which can take longer. Rob and I are both US citizens, and neither of us has a criminal background, so this was a fairly painless and quick process.

However, Rob is also a Canadian citizen, and getting a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Certificate was a bit more of a process. A Canadian resident can also go to an RCMP-approved third party to get fingerprinted electronically, and the results are ready within 72 hours. They come directly from the RCMP and are available only by mail. 

Unfortunately, there are no RCMP-approved fingerprinters outside of Canada. Non-residents are asked to have their fingerprints taken on paper by the local police office, and then mail them to the RCMP.  Obtaining these results can take 3-6 months. We didn't have 3-6 months to wait for this, and so we had to spend one of our few spare weekends driving to Windsor to the nearest RCMP-approved fingerprinter. Thankfully it's not a long drive (about 5 hours), and we were able to take a side trip to spend the night with Rob's grandparents (where Gwen and I proceeded to massacre Grump and Rob at Euchre).  We also had the RCMP mail Rob's background check to his grandparents' Canadian address so that they could express mail them to us, as the regular postal service between Canada and the US can take a couple of weeks.