Canada’s change to its Roxham Road deal is called a ‘shameful downgrading’

2023/10/17 Leave a comment

Of note. The Temporary Foreign Workers Program is economic, not humanitarian:

The federal government has been accused of downgrading its commitment to welcome 15,000 “humanitarian” migrants that it agreed to in exchange for closing down the land border to asylum seekers.

Instead of accepting 15,000 migrants on humanitarian basis, Ottawa now said 4,000 of the spots will be allocated to temporary foreign workers while the other 11,000 spaces — for permanent residence — are restricted to Colombians, Haitians and Venezuelans.

“It is a shameful downgrading of our commitment to refugee protection in the Western Hemisphere. We are deeply disappointed with the government’s backpedalling on already insufficient targets for refugee protection,” said Gauri Sreenivasan, co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees.

“Let us be clear, the temporary foreign worker program is not a humanitarian program. It is one designed to fulfil Canadian economic needs. It only affords temporary access and is marred by its own serious rights violations.”

In March, Ottawa and Washington expanded the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement across the entire shared border — not just at the official ports of entry.

In doing so, they closed a loophole that had been used by irregular migrants to cross from one country into the other, through unguarded border crossings such as Roxham Road in Quebec, to seek asylum.

Following the announcement, a joint statement said Canada would bring in an additional 15,000 migrants on a humanitarian basis from the Western Hemisphere over the course of the year to expand safe, regular pathways as an alternative to irregular migration. (Canada had set a target of 76,305 permanent residence spots for refugees and protected persons in 2023; the 15,000 will be on top of that.)

“We couldn’t simply shut down Roxham Road and hope that everything would resolve itself,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters at a news conference then.

“At the same time, we continue to be open to regular migrants, and we will increase the number of asylum seekers who we accept from the hemisphere — the Western Hemisphere — in order to compensate for closing these irregular crossings.”

Earlier this week, advocates who were already upset with the arrangement were shocked when Immigration Minister Marc Miller released further details about the new resettlement initiative.

Starting this fall, the permanent-residence pathway will be newly available for up to 11,000 Colombian, Haitian and Venezuelan migrants in Central or South America or the Caribbean. To qualify, they must have extended families in Canada, who are either a citizen or permanent resident.

The Canadian relative must be at least 18 years old and sign a statutory declaration that they will provide supports to the applicant to help their settlement and integration, such as helping them find housing, enrolling children in school, and registering adults for language classes.

While the humanitarian pathway has yet to open for application, immigration officials said they are on track to bring in the additional 4,000 temporary foreign workers from the Americas.

The 15,000 new arrivals would not have to meet the United Nations refugee definition — as those arriving at Roxham Road often sought to — and the Immigration Department has not clarified what the standard of humanitarian need would be.

“This is a far cry from the protection that was promised to refugee claimants when Roxham Road was closed and it is not acceptable,” said Sreenivasan.

“We urge the government to at the very least stick to their original commitment and ensure all 15,000 arrive to permanent safety in the country.”

The Immigration Department said the humanitarian program is open only to Colombian, Haitian and Venezuelans because they make up the largest volumes of irregular migrants fleeing ongoing violence and political unrest in the continent.

Those from other nationalities, it said, can still come under the temporary foreign worker program and the so-called Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot, which grants permanent residence to skilled refugees abroad if they have a Canadian job offer.

“Safe and regular migration pathway are alternatives for irregular movements, which are often dangerous ways to move across borders, where people are made vulnerable by criminal gangs and put in terrible humanitarian situations,” said department spokesperson Mary Rose Sabater.

“By providing access to regular pathways, including through existing temporary foreign worker streams, more people have access to safe migration opportunities to work in Canada.”

Sabater said the yet-to-open humanitarian program will close one year after launch or when 3,500 applications representing up to 11,000 migrants have been approved.

Source: Canada’s change to its Roxham Road deal is called a ‘shameful downgrading’

Filed under Humanitarian, Immigration Tagged with , ,

Canadian immigration update: August 2023

2023/10/17 Leave a comment

Latest monthly update. Highlights:

Two-thirds of permanent residents were former temporary residents, mainly reached a new high, mainly from International Mobility Program and the Post-Graduate Work Program. Year to date: Permanent Residents: 338,000 out of which 189,000 are former temporary residents.

Among temporary residents, the greatest growth is with respect to the International Mobility program, recently driven by “Research, educational or training programs,” over one-third of total IMP. Year to date: 605,000. The number of international students also increased dramatically (school year), year to date: 475,000.

Asylum claimants remain high, year to date: 85,000, the majority of which are inland claims, perhaps reflecting relaxed visa requirements and vetting. 

The number of new citizens remains strong, largely driven by virtual ceremonies being the default option (ill-advised IMO). Year to date: 338,000. 

Visitor visas issued year to date: 1,293,000.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with , ,

How Canada is using AI to catch immigration fraud — and why some say it’s a problem

2023/10/13 Leave a comment

While I understand the worries, I also find that they are overwrought, given that the only way to manage large numbers is through AI and related IT tools.

And as Kahneman’s exhaustive survey of automated vs human systems in Noise indicates, automated systems deliver greater consistency than solely human systems.

So by all means, IRCC has to make every effort to ensure no untoward bias and discrimation is embedded in these systems and ensure that the inherent discrimination in any immigration or citizenship processes, who gets in/who doesn’t, is evidence based and aligned to policy objectives:

Canada is using a new artificial intelligence tool to screen would-be international students and visitors — raising questions about what role AI should be playing in determining who gets into the country.

Immigration officials say the tool improves their ability to figure out who may be trying to game Canada’s system, and insist that, at the end of the day, it’s human beings making the final decisions.

Experts, however, say we already know that AI can reinforce very human biases. One expert, in fact, said he expects some legitimate applicants to get rejected as a result.

Rolled out officially in January, the little-known Integrity Trends Analysis Tool (ITAT) — formerly called Lighthouse or Watertower — has mined the data set of 1.4 million study-permit applications and 2.9 million visitor applications.

What it’s searching for are clues of “risk and fraud patterns” — a combination of elements that, together, may be cause for additional scrutiny on a given file.

Officials say that, among study-permit applications alone, they have already identified more than 800 “unique risk patterns.”

Through ongoing updates based on fresh data, the AI-driven apparatus not only analyses these risk patterns but also flags incoming applications that match them.

It produces reports to assist officers in Immigration Risk Assessment Units, who determine whether an application warrants further scrutiny.

“Maintaining public confidence in how our immigration system is managed is of paramount importance,” Immigration Department spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald told the Star in an email.

“The use of ITAT has effectively allowed us to improve the way we manage risk by using technology to examine risk with a globalized lens.”

Helping with a big caseload

Each year, Canada receives millions of immigration applications — for temporary and permanent residence, as well as for citizenship — and the number has continued to grow.

The Immigration Department says the total number of decisions it renders per year increased from 4.1 million in 2018 to 5.2 million last year, with the overwhelming majority of applicants trying to obtain temporary-resident status as students, foreign workers and visitors; last year temporary-resident applications accounted for 80 per cent of the decisions the department rendered.

During the pandemic, the department was overwhelmed by skyrocketing backlogs in every single program, which spurred Ottawa to go on a hiring spree and fast-track its modernization to tackle the rising inventory of applications.

Enter: a new tool

ITAT, which was developed in-house and first piloted in the summer of 2020, is the latest instrument in the department’s tool box, one that goes beyond performing simple administrative tasks, such as responding to online inquiries, to more sophisticated functions, like detecting fraud.

MacDonald said ITAT can readily find connections across application records in immigration databases, which may include reports and dossiers produced by Canada Border Services Agency or other law enforcement bodies. The tool, he said, helps officials identify applications that share similar characteristics of previously refused applications.

He said that in order to protect the integrity of the immigration system and investigative techniques, he could not disclose details of the risk patterns that are used to assess applications.

However, MacDonald stressed that “every effort is taken to ensure risk patterns do not create actual or perceived bias as it relates to Charter-protected factors, such as gender, age, race or religion.

“These are reviewed carefully before weekly reports are distributed to risk assessment units.”

A government report about ITAT released last year did make reference to the “adverse characteristics” monitored for in an application, such as inadmissibility findings (e.g. criminality and misrepresentation) and other records of immigration violations, such as overstaying or working without authorization.

The report said that in the past, risk assessment units conducted a random sample of applications to detect frauds through various techniques, including phone calls, site visits or in-person interviews. The results of the verification activity are shared with processing officers whether or not fraudulent information was found.

The report suggested the new tool is meant to assist these investigations. MacDonald emphasized that ITAT does not recommend or make decisions on applications, and the final decisions on applications still rest with the processing officers.

Unintended influence?

However, that doesn’t mean the use of the tool won’t influence an officer’s decision-making, said Ebrahim Bagheri, director of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s collaborative program on responsible AI development. He said he expects human staff to wrongfully flag and reject applicants out of deference to ITAT.

Bagheri, who specializes in information retrieval, social media analytics and software and knowledge engineering, said humans tend to heed such programs too much: “You’re inclined to agree with the AI at the unconscious level, thinking — again unconsciously — there may have been things that you may have missed and the machine, which is quite rigorous, has picked up.”

While the shift toward automation, AI-assisted and data-driven decision-making is part of a global trend, immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo says the technology is not advanced enough yet for immigration processing.

“Most of the experts are pretty much saying, relying on automated statistical tools to make decisions or to predict risk is a bad idea,” said Bellissimo, who takes a personal interest in studying the use of AI in Canadian immigration.

“AI is required to achieve precision, scale and personalization. But the tools aren’t there yet to do that without discrimination.”

The shortcomings of AI

A history of multiple marriages might be a red flag to AI, suggesting a marriage of convenience, Bellissimo said. But what could’ve been omitted in the assessment of an application were the particular facts — that the person’s first spouse had passed away, for instance, or even that the second ran away because it was a forced marriage.

“You need to know what the paradigm and what the data set is. Is it all based on the Middle East, Africa? Are there different rules?” asked Bellissimo.

“To build public confidence in data, you need external audits. You need a data scientist and a couple of immigration practitioners to basically validate (it). That’s not being done now and it’s a problem.”

Bagheri said AI can reinforce its own findings and recommendations when its findings are acted on, creating new data of rejections and approvals that conform to its conclusions.

“Let’s think about an AI system that’s telling you who’s the risk to come to Canada. It flags a certain set of applications. The officers will look at it. They will decide on the side of caution. They flag it. That goes back to the system,” he said.

“And you just think that you’re becoming more accurate where they’re just intensifying the biases.”

Bellissimo said immigration officials have been doing a poor job in communicating to the public about the tool: “There is such a worry about threat actors that they’re putting so much behind the curtain (and) the public generally has no confidence in this use.”

Bagheri said immigration officials should just limit their use of AI tools to optimize resources and administer its processes, such as using robots to answer emails, screen eligibility and triage applications — freeing up officers for the actual risk assessment and decision making.

“I think the decisions on who we welcome should be based on compassion and a welcoming approach, rather than a profiling approach,” he said.

Source: How Canada is using AI to catch immigration fraud — and why some say it’s a problem

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

Yalnizyan: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is ballooning — creating a new class of wage slaves from abroad

2023/10/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary with reasonable recommendations:

This time last year, the media buzz about the labour market was over The Great Resignation, a bigger phenomenon in the United States but occurring here too, as workers took advantage of record-high job vacancy rates to abandon suboptimal jobs for better ones.

This year there’s an emerging made-in-Canada phenomenon that has barely generated a whisper, let alone a buzz: wage slaves from abroad. It’s a result of public policy.

The idea of owning workers seems like an abomination from another time and place. In Canada, in 2023, it’s difficult to comprehend how any worker could be beholden to a single employer.

Nonetheless, this year the government of Canada has issued more than 142,000 permits to employers to hire temporary foreign workers who are not allowed to work for anyone else. It’s the highest number ever issued, and that figure only covers up to August. Intake through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program has grown by 45 per cent across Canada this year compared with the same eight months in 2022, a record-breaking year of population growth, almost exclusively (96 per cent) due to newcomers.

Permits are issued to employers who make the case that they cannot find a Canadian to do the job — at “prevailing wage rates,” that is. When the federal government finds the reasons provided on the Labour Market Impact Assessment form acceptable, it permits a foreign worker to enter Canada to work only temporarily, and only for that employer.

Just since August 2021, the federal government has expanded the categories of occupations eligible for such a permit and increased the allowable proportion of migrant workers working for an individual employer to 30 per cent from 10 per cent. That gives such employers huge influence over not just their migrant workers but all their workers. It is far from clear this was necessary policy reform. It should be reversed.

Ontario’s employers are escalating their dependence on the permanently temporary in sectors such as warehousing and transport trucking, personal care workers in long-term-care facilities, restaurants and fast food outlets, and farm workers.

The vast majority of employers are moral. But tying permits to a single employer increases the odds of exploitation and abuse.

Although the federal government conducts investigations of employers using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, employers are often given a heads-up before the inspection takes place. Last year, more than 2,100 inspections were carried out. Only 116 were found non-compliant.

Of the 766 employers on a public registry of employers who broke the rules over the past seven years, the most frequent violation was wage theft — not providing the pay promised in the contract. Only seven employers were banned even temporarily from hiring migrant workers through this program; 23 were just given warnings.

Wage theft is not the only issue. Farm workers had an extraordinarily high incidence of disease and death during COVID because of their living conditions. Abuse and assault of workers providing care to people in their homes and institutions remains all too common. These are the very categories of migrant workers least likely to find a pathway to permanence.

Migrant workers may have the same rights as Canadian workers on paper but are less likely to know what those rights are and even less likely to exercise them for fear of jeopardizing their jobs and futures. That kind of contagion needs to be contained. It spreads rapidly in an uncertain world.

The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology is studying this area of public policy. Last week, Tomoya Obokata, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, presented testimony to the committee about his recent visit to Canada, expressing concern for “low-wage and agricultural streams of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as the workers at the higher risk of labour exploitation, which may amount to forced labour or servitude.”

I appeared before the committee as well and presented some ideas for policy reform.

First: end the practice of tying work permits to an employer. An open work permit, tied to a region (for example, in parts of the country that are aging more rapidly) or in an industry or sector with high vacancies (such as hospitality or long-term care) would mean workers could leave terrible workplaces without risking deportation. This change could reduce the number of bad jobs and improve the quality of life in communities. Addressing potentially crippling labour shortages, while limiting the abuse of workers, seems a promising avenue of reform.

Second: create simpler pathways to permanent residency for all those who seek it and make those pathways clear before people arrive. Canada has developed an incredibly complex system, with more than 140 types of temporary permits in the immigration database, according to Rupa Banerjee of Toronto Metropolitan University.

In 2022, three times as many people were permitted temporary resident status versus permanent resident status in Canada. Less than a third of those who came here to work or study for a restricted period transitioned to permanent status, even after 10 years of temporary residency; but many more will grab at the chance, without knowing the odds.

There is a whole industry designed to lure international students and migrant workers here on what often turns out to be the false hope of permanent residency; and the relationship between temporary and permanent admissions to Canada is getting more lopsided every year.

Although Canada’s job creation rate has been remarkable, including for Canadian-born and landed immigrant workers, the fastest-growing rate of job creation has been among migrant workers: 61 per cent more jobs than pre-pandemic levels.

We are expediting the intake of migrant workers for entrenched needs, not temporary ones.

Increasing reliance on temporary foreign workers to do the work that needs doing, while not allowing them to form families, get sick, age or retire may be an employer’s dream and a labour market “solution.” But it risks creating a dystopian future for Canadian society.

Armine Yalnizyan is a leading voice in Canada’s economic scene and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers. She is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star’s Business section. Follow her on Twitter: @ArmineYalnizyan. You can write to her at ayalnizyan@atkinsonfoundation.ca.

Source: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is ballooning — creating a new class of wage slaves from abroad

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Lisée: Les expulsions barbares

2023/10/12 Leave a comment

More Quebec commentary on the need for Quebec to exercise the same control over the IMP, whose numbers have ballooned as elsewhere in Canada, as it does for TFWP:

De mauvaises langues accusent le député Sol Zanetti d’avoir atteint le summum de l’exagération en gonflant, puis dégonflant, une balloune depuis son siège de l’Assemblée nationale jeudi dernier. Je ne suis pas d’accord. Juste avant, en point de presse, un autre député solidaire avait fait pire.

Au cas où on déclare atteinte, voire dépassée, la capacité d’accueil du Québec et qu’on veuille limiter le nombre d’immigrants temporaires au Québec, passés de 47 000 en 2007 à 470 000 cette année, il a dit ceci : « Si on définit qu’elle est remplie [la capacité d’accueil], on coupe qui ? On va commencer à faire des déportations massives ? On va commencer à dire que ces 100 000 là, qui sont de trop, peut-être, qui ont déménagé ici, qui ont eu des contrats, qui ont eu un logement, qu’on leur a donné un permis, qui travaillent dans le réseau de la santé et dans l’éducation… On va leur dire : “C’est terminé ? […] Vous savez quoi, là, on s’excuse, on vous a fait venir pour rien, on s’est trompé, finalement, on n’a pas la capacité de vous avoir” ? »

Je vais vous étonner. Il s’agit d’un député qu’on estimait jusque-là crédible et posé : Guillaume Cliche-Rivard. Il est avocat, expert en immigration. Comment peut-il ne pas savoir qu’on parle ici des temporaires qui, comme leur nom l’indique, sont bien temporaires. L’immense majorité des étudiants étrangers qui peuplent McGill et Concordia et anglicisent le centre-ville prennent la poudre d’escampette dès qu’ils ont leur diplôme en poche. L’immense majorité des travailleurs agricoles volent retrouver leur famille latino-américaine une fois la récolte terminée. Les autres savent tous que leur séjour affiche une date de péremption, ce à quoi ils ont librement consenti.

Bref, si on décidait, selon le chiffre évoqué, d’admettre désormais 100 000 personnes de moins, ce qui nous maintiendrait toujours à un niveau historiquement excessivement élevé, il suffirait d’attendre que ceux qui souhaitent repartir repartent et de ne donner des autorisations qu’à 370 000 candidats, plutôt que 470 000.

L’introduction du terme « déportation » dans un débat sur l’immigration qui se déroulait depuis quelques mois dans un contexte apaisé est simplement honteuse. S’il tient à sa crédibilité, Cliche-Rivard doit faire amende honorable.

Sur le fond, il affirme ne pas savoir si, oui ou non, notre capacité d’accueil est atteinte. Il voudrait qu’une équipe d’experts se penche sur la question. C’est une idée tellement bonne que je la proposais en 2018 lorsqu’on ne comptait sur le territoire que le quart du nombre de temporaires actuel.

On peut bien, comme le fait la ministre de l’Immigration, Christine Fréchette, par un appel de projets de recherche, en obtenir une analyse plus fine et régionalisée. Mais refuser d’admettre aujourd’hui que l’ajout depuis cinq ans de centaines de milliers de personnes supplémentaires aggrave les crises du logement, de la santé et des garderies me rappelle ceux qui, face aux méfaits du tabac ou du réchauffement climatique, réclamaient davantage d’études.

Heureusement, un grand nombre de Québécois ont entendu parler de la loi de l’offre et de la demande. Début octobre, 71 % d’entre eux (comme 68 % des Canadiens) ont déclaré au sondeur Ipsos qu’imposer un plafond d’admission aux étudiants étrangers serait une bonne façon de réduire la pression sur les logements abordables. Logiques, 75 % des Québécois (71 % des Canadiens) pensent qu’il faut revoir à la baisse les cibles d’immigration le temps que se résorbe la crise du logement. (Mémo au politburo de QS : ce sentiment est partagé par 66 % des 18-34 ans, votre électorat principal.)

Qui, parmi nous, à part les élus solidaires, figure parmi les dissidents de la loi de l’offre et de la demande ? Le gouvernement fédéral, bien évidemment. L’inénarrable ministre de l’Immigration, Marc Miller, a redit récemment qu’il fallait davantage d’immigrants pour construire davantage de logements. (Marc, ça ne marcherait que s’ils les bâtissaient avant d’arriver ou s’ils les emmenaient avec eux. Un pensez-y-bien.)

Plus terre à terre, son collègue Pablo Rodriguez, qui semble admettre l’existence d’un problème, a prétendu que l’augmentation du nombre de temporaires était la faute du Québec. Mme Fréchette affirme au contraire que c’est la faute du fédéral. Peut-on savoir qui remporte la palme de cet édifiant concours de Ponce Pilate ?

Mardi, dans ces pages, la spécialiste Anne-Michèle Meggs a mis clairement la responsabilité sur les épaules du Québec.

À l’exception des demandeurs d’asile, le Québec a indubitablement le pouvoir de réduire le nombre d’étudiants étrangers, qui comptent pour 44 % des temporaires, mais il ne le veut pas ; il a indubitablement le pouvoir de limiter le nombre de travailleurs temporaires (17 %), mais il ne le veut pas.

Sur le reste, les 36 % du Programme de mobilité internationale, Québec a omis d’exiger un droit de veto lors de sa création pendant l’ère Harper. Le gouvernement Legault — au pouvoir pendant l’explosion des temporaires et en possession depuis avril 2022 d’un rapport des experts Pierre Fortin et Marc Termotte l’avisant de sa « perte de contrôle » du dossier — a choisi de ne pas utiliser le levier à sa disposition : réclamer, comme le lui permet l’entente Canada-Québec, l’ouverture de discussions qui lui permettraient d’en reprendre le contrôle.

Bref, alors que 7 Québécois sur 10 savent que l’explosion du nombre d’immigrants rend intenable — et probablement insoluble — la crise du logement, entre autres, nous sommes en présence d’une opposition solidaire fantasmant sur des « déportations » massives et d’un gouvernement caquiste qui se prétend nationaliste, mais refuse d’utiliser les pouvoirs que détient déjà la nation.

Bref, bienvenue au Québec.

Jean-François Lisée a dirigé le PQ de 2016 à 2018. Il vient de publier Par la bouche de mes crayons, aux éditions Somme toute/Le Devoir. jflisee@ledevoir.com

Source: Les expulsions barbares

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

HESA: Canada’s Internationalization Strategy [spoiler, not a strategy]

2023/10/12 Leave a comment

Another insightful analysis by HESA that applies to other areas of government than Global Affairs:

A couple of months ago, I was invited to participate in a Global Affairs Canada (GAC) stakeholder roundtable on its Strategic Plan for the next five years.  It was very kind of them to invite me and a few others to be part of the consultation.  It was an interesting window into how the federal government thinks about policy and – especially – strategy.

It seems to me that GAC is in the education business for three reasons.

  1. It has a commercial function in that it exists to make things easier within the limits of existing provincial and federal legislation to assist in increasing educational imports. 
  2. It has a diplomatic/soft power function in that it is, in conjunction with institutions, meant to generate ongoing goodwill towards Canada with current and future world leaders through programs of educational and cultural exchange. 
  3. It has an immigration function is there to promote immigration via education.  That’s been the policy of the Government of Canada for a decade and a half now. 

But instead of talking about goals and the role of GAC in these three areas, the department chose to jump straight into talking about four “pillars”: digital marketing, diversification (in the sense of widening the international student base beyond India and China), scholarships and education agents. The background papers for those four pillars are available here (there are also another 9 or so background papers here, and kudos to the folks at GAC for making all of this public…it would be normal in other countries, but in Canada, this counts as a major act of transparency).

I don’t want to dismiss these pillars – they are all important – but they don’t really amount to a strategy.  They are more like issue management.  And as a result, what pervaded the discussion was a mixture of presentism and mission confusion.  By presentism, I mean that the conversation tended to focus on “how do we make minor changes to things we do now” rather than “what should we be trying to achieve in this area”?  This was most evident in the discussion about the small suite of scholarships that that GAC runs such as the Canada-ASEAN Scholarships, the Canadian International Development Scholarships Program, and the CARICOM Faculty Leadership Program.  All the questions were about “how can we make these work better?”, where “better” means “in line with educational objectives with respect to student recruitment diversification.  This was disappointing.   The possibility of aligning these with actual foreign policy objectives, like, say, our vaunted turn to the Indo-Pacific?  Not on the table.

Similarly on the question of digital marketing – the Government of Canada spends $5 million year, spread across 25 countries (not India and China), on “promoting the benefits of studying in Canada as they relate to the primary drivers influencing international students’ choice of study destination” (which,  apparently do notinclude immigration – more on that below).  What was at issue was not “is spending this money a good idea?” either in the sense of “is there any evidence that this advertising is working” or “is there any evidence that there is a market failure here given how much institutions themselves spend on marketing?”.  Just, again, “how could we do it better” in the sense of more “efficiency”, not “should we be doing this at all”?

The issue of agents was a bit more intriguing.  As a host of recent news stories have suggested, there are some serious cases of study permit fraud in Canada and we could certainly stand to gain from being more pro-active and adopting stricter controls on agents as other countries have done through the London Statement (which is a good policy in theory, though I suspect over-rigorous enforcement of such policies are a potential nightmare).  But tucked into the paper is a sentence which suggest that from GAC’s perspective the problem is not fraud per se, but “the wrong kind” of students, to wit:

This advising fee model [among student agents] has led to a lack of quality control with respect to study permit applications, resulting in a huge increase in applications from students who have no chance of being approved for a Study Permit, increasing IRCC workloads and contributing to the backlogs in the system, negatively impacting genuine, high-quality prospective students. [emphasis added]

The sharp-eyed will see links here back to the whole “trusted provider” approach that IRCC is taking, only for some reason it’s taking aim at agents rather than institutions.  In any event, we see here that a group of Ottawa officials have a very clear idea in their heads with respect to “genuine” students vs. fake ones, “high-quality” students vs low-quality ones, etc.   And I’m guessing once again it has something to do with the use of the immigration tack.

Why do I think this?  Well, one very intriguing moment in the consultation happened when a fairly senior GAC employee recounted an event he had recently witnessed in Dubai.  At this event, an unnamed university President said something to the effect “come study at my university and you’ll be on a path to Canadian citizenship”.  This was deeply distressing to the GAC employee.  “That’s not what this program is for”, he huffed (he presumably meant both the PGWP program and pathway to Permanent Residency that follows). 

It was on Zoom and most everyone was muted, but I could still hear a lot of jaws dropping at this.  This is of course exactly what IRCC policy is meant to be for.  GAC might not like the policy that IRCC developed, but since it is responsible for selling the policy overseas, you’d think GAC would understand it.  The fact that not everyone there does, combined with the fact that – as noted above – GAC seems determined to ignore the evidence that immigration is a major factor in student choice, suggests some major communications gaps between Ottawa departments.  Maybe not the most auspicious conditions under which to launch a new strategy.

In short, I found this whole exercise to be well-meaning but not particularly strategic.  The strategy focuses on scholarships for students from other countries but refuse to link these scholarships to broader diplomatic or soft power goals.  The strategy wants to attract students from other countries using digital marketing and so forth but refuses to look at the link to immigration, because GAC and IRCC appear to be at cross-purposes on the subject.  It’s the kind of process that might lead to some tiny little improvements but never seems to have even considered the possibility of a strategy that was genuinely transformative.  I don’t feel that’s GAC’s fault, particularly: rather, boldness and ambition just aren’t in a lot of governments’ DNA these days.  Too bad.

Source: Canada’s Internationalization Strategy

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Meggs: Le Québec peut contrôler l’immigration temporaire, et voici comment

2023/10/11 Leave a comment

Former Quebec immigration official on the need to include the IMP in the immigration Accord Canada-Québec:

Il est facile de se perdre dans la répartition entre Ottawa et Québec et on peut se demander qui est responsable de l’explosion de l’immigration temporaire. En fait, les deux gouvernements y contribuent, mais grâce à l’Accord Canada-Québec relatif à l’immigration et à l’admission temporaire des aubains de 1991, le Québec peut la réguler sur son territoire.

Il y a quatre sources légales d’immigration temporaire — les demandeurs d’asile et trois programmes de permis, un pour les permis d’études et deux pour les permis de travail, soit le Programme des travailleurs étrangers temporaires (PTET) et le Programme de mobilité internationale (PMI). Selon les données sur le nombre de titulaires de ces trois programmes au 31 décembre 2022, les permis d’études représentaient 46,3 % du total, le PTET 17,5 % et le PMI 36,3 %.

En ce qui concerne les demandeurs d’asile, la situation géopolitique du Canada le rend unique parmi les pays développés. Depuis l’application de l’Entente sur les tiers pays sûrs à l’ensemble de la frontière canado-américaine, le seul moyen d’arriver au Canada pour demander l’asile est par avion. Le Canada se sert des visas et des permis temporaires pour essayer de limiter l’arrivée des personnes demandant l’asile.

Au début de l’année, une décision du gouvernement fédéral visant à réduire rapidement le nombre, considérable, de demandes de visas de visiteurs semble avoir donné lieu à une augmentation importante de demandeurs d’asile aux aéroports, surtout à Toronto et à Montréal. Le Québec régule, par les seuils d’immigration permanente, le nombre de ceux qui seront admis à terme pour rester au Québec, mais pas le nombre de ceux qui arrivent.

Pour le Programme des étudiants étrangers, les provinces, compte tenu de leur compétence en matière d’éducation, peuvent adopter les politiques visant à réduire le nombre de jeunes de l’étranger qui s’inscrivent dans leurs systèmes. Elles ont aussi la responsabilité de désigner les établissements d’enseignement pour les fins d’un permis d’études.

Au Québec, grâce à l’Accord, le fédéral ne peut délivrer un permis d’études sans le consentement du ministère québécois responsable de l’immigration. Pour signaler son consentement, le Québec délivre un Certificat d’acceptation du Québec pour études. Il établit les conditions afférentes et peut décider d’en limiter le nombre qui sera accordé annuellement. À ce jour, il n’y a pas eu de plafond sur le nombre de CAQ-études délivrés.

Il est évident que c’était l’intention des négociateurs de l’Accord que le Québec régule l’ensemble des admissions, permanentes et temporaires. On le voit dans le titre même de l’Accord et dans le préambule, ainsi que dans le titre et la substance de l’Entente Couture-Cullen (1978) sur laquelle l’Accord a été basé, ainsi que dans l’Accord du lac Meech.

En ce qui concerne les travailleurs, au moment de la signature de l’Accord, le PTET était le seul programme visant les travailleurs étrangers temporaires. Il s’agissait d’un programme relativement mineur incluant surtout les travailleurs agricoles saisonniers. Il servait réellement et uniquement de dernier recours pour les employeurs souhaitant pouvoir des postes d’une durée limitée et ayant fait la démonstration que tout effort a été fait pour trouver de la main-d’oeuvre locale.

Il n’est donc pas très surprenant que l’article de l’Accord sur le consentement du Québec pour l’admission des travailleurs étrangers fasse référence à ceux « dont l’admission est régie par les exigences du Canada touchant la disponibilité de travailleurs canadiens ». Il n’y avait pas non plus de politique visant à offrir la résidence permanente aux travailleurs temporaires. Pour demander la résidence permanente, il fallait le faire de l’étranger, une stipulation qui demeure dans l’Accord, mais ne s’applique pas depuis plus de vingt ans.

En ce qui concerne donc ce PTET, la source des fameux « permis fermés », le Québec détermine quels employeurs seront autorisés à embaucher combien d’effectifs et à quelles conditions, et il délivre un CAQ-travail aux personnes embauchées dans le programme. Encore une fois, il établit les conditions du CAQ-travail et peut en limiter le nombre. À ce jour, le gouvernement n’a pas mis de plafond annuel sur le nombre de CAQ-travail.

En 2014, le gouvernement Harper a divisé le PTET en deux pour pouvoir resserrer les règles concernant l’embauche de main-d’oeuvre de l’étranger pour les besoins du marché du travail. Il a créé un autre programme, le Programme de mobilité internationale, pour les personnes étrangères travaillant temporairement au Canada pour d’autres raisons. Normalement, la création de ce programme aurait dû être abordée par le Comité mixte, l’instance bilatérale créée par l’Accord pour gérer son application et résoudre les différends en matière d’immigration, mais on ne sait pas si cela a été le cas. Il suffit de dire que le Québec ne délivre pas de CAQ-travail dans le cadre du PMI.

Deuxième programme en importance après les permis d’études, le PMI a connu une croissance fulgurante dans les dix dernières années et est devenu le chemin principal pour la transition d’un statut temporaire à un statut permanent.

Si le Québec voulait réguler l’ensemble de son immigration, dans le cadre quasi constitutionnel qu’offre l’Accord, il suffirait de donner les instructions au Comité mixte de négocier les démarches nécessaires pour assurer le consentement du Québec aux permis de travail du PMI. Cela étant dit, même avec un tel contrôle, le gouvernement sera-t-il prêt à s’en servir pour inclure l’immigration temporaire dans sa planification pluriannuelle d’immigration ?

Source: Le Québec peut contrôler l’immigration temporaire, et voici comment

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Foreign doctors take up more medical residency spots as Canadians struggle to get in

2023/10/10 1 Comment

Another distortion of higher education objectives through international students (policy dates from 2010):

Canada has an acute shortage of doctors — a staffing crisis that is expected to get much worse in the years ahead as the number of residency positions on offer fails to keep up with rapid population growth.

Despite those challenges, roughly 1,000 Canadian doctors who went to school abroad are turned away every year because they can’t get residency spots in Canada, according to a CBC News review of medical school data. Physicians are required to go through a residency in order to be licensed to practice.

Canadian doctors who want to come home to work are routinely told it’s not possible because resources are limited and there are only so many residency positions to go around.

Source: Foreign doctors take up more medical residency spots as Canadians struggle to get in

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

Canadian universities bet on international students, but global shifts present risks

2023/10/10 Leave a comment

Useful remider:

When the University of British Columbia announced the launch of Vantage College in 2013, the school said it envisioned the program for fee-paying international students would have enrolment of 1,000 by August 2016.

The program would target first-year students who otherwise failed to meet UBC’s English requirements, providing them with extra language lessons in addition to their degree courses.

It would house the students — whose fees are now about $60,000 per year — in a $127 million facility designed by world-renowned architecture firm Perkins&Will, some of its dorm rooms featuring sweeping ocean views.

However, Vantage’s enrolment is currently 172 students, having declined every year since reaching 498 in 2018-2019.

The struggles of Vantage College reflect the unpredictable nature of the lucrative international education sector, as Canadian universities find themselves beholden to geopolitical and economic shifts.

There have been massive changes in the sector, with study permits for Chinesestudents in Canada plunging 40 per cent since 2018. Permits for students from India — where English is far more widely spoken — have meanwhile doubled.

UBC spokesman Matthew Ramsey said in a written statement that “work is underway” to assess the Vantage model.

He said the enrolment shortfalls “come as (international) students are increasingly entering faculties directly and using faculty-specific programming to enhance their English-language skills.”

The federal government said that in 2022  international students contributed more than $22 billion to the Canadian economy, greater than the contribution of auto parts or lumber exports.

In British Columbia, statistics from the province’s Council for International Education showed the sector generated $330 million in government revenue in 2019, creating more than 53,000 jobs.

“It’s a big sector,” said BCCIE executive director Randall Martin, noting the industry covers everything from K-12 education and two-year transfer colleges to language schools and degrees at large universities.

Martin said international students have played an integral role in “keeping the light on” for Canadian universities in rural and remote areas, allowing schools to offer mandated courses they would otherwise struggle to provide.

“In many ways, the sector is a real success. It’s over $7 billion coming into the provincial economy because of international education, and that includes tuition, housing, accommodations, meals … and, yes, I think it’s fair to say that the international student numbers will follow geopolitical trends.”

The industry in Canada — as in most popular international education destinations — largely relies on the high number of students from two countries: China and India.

Statistics Canada data show that students from the world’s two most populous countries accounted for more than half of the almost 550,000 study permits issued by Canada in 2022.

But permits given to Chinese students have fallen from 85,000 in 2018 to just short of 52,000 last year.

A similar slide has been reported by the BCCIE, with the number of Chinese international students in B.C. down from 50,000 in 2015 to 29,670 last year.

Martin said the decline began after the legal saga of Meng Wanzhou, the Chinese tech executive who was arrested in late 2018 and held in Vancouver until 2021, triggering a deep decline in China-Canada relations.

“I think Canada was portrayed as not a safe place for Chinese students in the Chinese media, and our numbers did go down a bit,” he said.

Karin Fischer, who writes a weekly international education newsletter called Latitudes, said while pandemic travel restrictions made the biggest dent in student numbers, the number of Chinese students in the West has not rebounded in the way numbers from India or elsewhere have.

Fischer said higher travel costs and a reluctance among Chinese families to endure lengthy separations from children post-pandemic are contributing factors. But deteriorating economic conditions in China — reducing both students’ ability to pay and find work after graduating — may be a key reason their numbers haven’t recovered.

“Going to study in another country is an enormous investment, even for a middle-class Chinese or Indian family,” Fischer said. “What is the expectation that they have about earning that degree? What is their return on investment?

“I wonder if some (Chinese) families are thinking, ‘God, should we spend all this money up front if we’re worried about (whether) our child is going to graduate and not have a job to come back to?'”

Tuition for Vantage College in 2023-2024 costs around $60,000, while other international students at UBC pay from around $42,000 to $58,000.

Domestic students’ tuitions range from around $6,000 to $9,000 a year.

The drop in Chinese students, Fischer said, tends to disproportionately affect Vantage College and other similar “pathway” programs for students needing English-language support.

The University of South Florida shuttered a similar pathway centre for international students recently because it wasn’t profitable, Fischer said.

“If you don’t have the volume of students, they’re really challenging,” she said of pathway programs. “And they worked particularly well for Chinese students because they had that combination of students who needed the extra language but who were generally academically prepared — and who could afford to pay for that.”

Indian international students tend to be proficient in English and do not require pathway programs, Fischer said.

Ramsey said UBC originally built the 1,049-room Orchard Commons complex to house both Vantage’s students and domestic first-year students, boosting integration and helping “create a positive experience for all students.”

A recent visit to the complex’s cafeteria at lunch time showed little sign of students in need of language support, with fluent English the language of choice.

Ayumi Yamamoto, a Japanese exchange student who started attending Vantage in September, said she does not live at Orchard Commons but at nearby Fairview Crescent.

She described Orchard Commons as “not crowded” and offering ample space for her and other Vantage students.

“They always have empty seats, at least one of them,” Yamamoto said.

While the number of Chinese students have fallen across Canada, overall international student numbers are on the rise, largely due to students from India.

Statistics Canada showed study permits issued to Indian students rose from 107,000 in 2018 to almost 226,000 last year. In B.C., their number went from 12,040 in 2015 to almost 75,000 in 2022.

Martin said much of that growth stemmed from immigration policy changes that allowed students seeking a two-year diploma to stay in Canada and work here for three years, opening the door to permanent residency.

But recent strains between Canada and India over the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in Surrey, B.C., have created more uncertainty. After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month said New Delhi may have been involved in the killing, India issued a travel advisory that warned of violence against Indian nationals and students in Canada.

Fischer said there is a precedent in Canada’s dispute with Saudi Arabia over the kingdom’s arrest of human rights activists in 2018. Permits issued to Saudi students fell from 5,080 in 2017 to 1,185 in 2019.

But Fischer said Saudi Arabia had been paying for students to go abroad and pulled their scholarships during the dispute.

“A place like India, it is almost entirely students paying their own way,” she said. “So it’s hard to know (of India’s impact) because it’s individual students making all sorts of individual choices.”

Canadian universities have been looking to diversify their international student populations beyond India and China.

Graham Barber, assistant director of international relations at Universities Canada, a national advocacy body for universities, said recent outreach has focused on countries such as Mexico, Nigeria, Vietnam, Brazil and the Philippines — places with growing middle-class populations and young people willing and able to travel to study.

“We (have) world-class institutions that are really, really good at this,” Barber said about finding new markets. “One of the great things about being in Canada is there’s such a diverse population here. They really have those people-to-people ties to be able to pivot quickly to different areas and to work with new partnerships.”

UBC’s Ramsey said while the Vantage model may be under assessment, its supportive approach to international students isn’t going away.

“It’s too soon to say what form that may take in the years ahead,” he said. “What we can say is there is a need for this type of instructional model on our campuses now and moving forward.”

Source: Canadian universities bet on international students, but global shifts present risks

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , ,

COVID-19 Immigration Effects – July 2023 update

2023/10/09 Leave a comment

Regular monthly data. Unfortunately, Permanent Residents source country not updated on open data and web data for study permits also not available.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →