Chinese students frustrated by lengthy security checks as school year nears

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

Some Chinese international students say their study permits have been tied up in security screenings, leaving them in the lurch for months after being admitted to Canadian universities.

Yunze Lu, a master’s student in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Ottawa, has already completed a year of coursework online and successfully applied to the school’s co-op program.

“I have a very simple and clear background. It’s OK to be checked, but I don’t think it needs to be checked for so long,” he said.

“It makes me feel they are doing nothing but just don’t care about my application, just throw it away.”

Lu said he didn’t even know his application was under security review by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) until he filed an access to information request to the CBSA to find out more about his file.

Through social media, he has now connected with other frustrated study permit applicants, some of whom spoke to CBC News.

‘This is unfair to all of us’

Xinli Guo has also been waiting months for the study permit that will allow him to take up an offer from the U of O’s master’s program in systems engineering.

“This is unfair to all of us,” he said.

Through proactively tracking his file, Guo helped resolve an issue with a financial document and learned that he’d been placed under security review in May.

“I don’t think I deserve a security check because I don’t have anything related with Canadians’ national security. I’m just a normal student going to study engineering courses in Canada,” he said.

Given the delay, Guo is worried he’ll lose his admission offer and could miss the opportunity to apply to study in other countries.

In a statement, the University of Ottawa said it’s aware of students from “many countries” facing visa issues and is working to develop contingencies.

The university says it continues to advocate for a fair, efficient and transparent immigration system that allows students to plan their future with confidence.

In a statement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said China is one of the top sources for international students and the department is receiving a record number of applications.

Since January 2021, there have been nearly 181,000 study permit applications from China. Of those, 1,832 have not been processed.

“All study permit applications from around the world are assessed equally and against the same criteria, regardless of the country of origin,” IRCC said.

“Security screening is one, but not the only, factor that can result in higher processing times.”

The department said processing times vary on a case-by-case basis depending on complexity, responses for additional information and the ease of verifying the application’s content.

According to the department’s website, a study permit should take about seven weeks.

Delays ‘problematic,’ immigration lawyer says

Will Tao, an immigration lawyer at Vancouver’s Heron Law Offices, said the worsening geopolitical situation between China and Canada may be combining with the increasing use of algorithms to contribute to a rise in certain files being caught in review delays.

“Grad students working in the computer science/tech space, and especially folks with government experience or with parents that are in the government, those are the ones that are being flagged in our experience,” he said.

“It’s very, very problematic how this has become almost a predictive analytics exercise.”

Tao said applicants from Iran, another country with fraught geopolitical relations, have faced similar screening delays. He said while he understands there is a national security need for screening, and international diplomacy complicates the issue, students are being left uncertain about their futures due to the lack of transparency.

“They could be pursuing other stuff or going to other countries,” Tao said.

More Chinese visa applicants are resorting to using mandamus applications in court to compel a government decision, he said. The applications are used to compel IRCC to issue decisions in a timely fashion after considerable delays.

Chinese applicants account for 12 per cent of mandamus applications, second only to India and just ahead of Iran, according to Tao’s analysis of IRCC data.

Source: Chinese students frustrated by lengthy security checks as school year nears

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Porter Robbins: How Immigrant-Friendly Is Canada?

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Lacks historical perspective and international comparisons with rather shallow take on immigration and multiculturalism:

Canadians like to think of their country as a nation built on immigration. Canada, the story goes, is a bastion of multiculturalism. This narrative has been refined through smug comparison to the United States and other Western countries. At first glance, it may seem that Canada is more welcoming: While other Western nations have faced heavy criticism for their migration policies, Canada has garnered a reputation as being immigrant-friendly. Since 2019, the Canadian government has resettled more refugees than any other country, with little public backlash.

So in November, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to expand immigration, it seemed like a politically savvy move. Since Trudeau took office in 2015, immigration has already increased from around 300,000 to 400,000 new residents per year. Now, Canada plans to welcome 500,000 permanent residents each year by 2025. Laid out as a way to build up the Canadian economy, which faces labor shortages and a declining birth rate, the plan prioritizes bringing in skilled immigrants. It was met with praise from major corporate advocacy groups, such as the Business Council of Canada.

Ten months later, Trudeau’s plan is facing skepticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Criticism from the far right is no surprise. But as the government has struggled to integrate and support migrants, the prospect of bringing in significantly more of them has led immigration experts and advocates to air grievances about what they see as the administration’s failings in related sectors, notably refugee resettlement and housing.

Meanwhile, public opinion on immigration has started to shift. As cost of living and housing prices stay stubbornly high, anti-immigration sentiment—long boiling—may rise to the surface.

In early 2019, controversy arose over billboards put up across the country with the slogan “Say No to Mass Immigration,” which promoted then-MP Maxime Bernier’s far-right People’s Party of Canada in the campaign for the upcoming federal election. Complaints and citizens’ petitions ultimately led the advertising company to take down the signs.

Those who complained about the billboards, including candidates from Canada’s center and left-wing parties, saw their removal as a victory for Canadian pluralism, thrown into relief by then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s xenophobic, anti-migrant policies to the south. On election day in 2019, Trudeau’s Liberal Party triumphed, while Bernier’s party received meager support.

The Liberals’ success, combined with the outcry over the far right’s weaponization of immigration, signaled to Trudeau that most Canadian voters were resolutely pro-migration. Polling seemed to back this up. The month before the election, the Environics Institute for Survey Research found that 85 percent of Canadians surveyed agreed that immigration has a positive effect on the economy, while 69 percent supported the current immigration rate.

Yet these figures obscured Canada’s long-standing challenges with diversity and inclusion. “Because Canada is pro-immigration, there’s a perception that conflates this with Canada being an open society and not being racist,” said Pallavi Banerjee, a sociologist at the University of Calgary who researches how discrimination affects young migrants’ futures.

Canada has a history of racist policies related to immigration, from the late-19th-century Chinese head tax, which forced Chinese immigrants to pay a fee when entering the country, to Quebec’s highly controversial Bill 21, a law passed in 2019 that prohibits the display of religious symbols from public servants’ attire, including crosses, turbans, kippahs, and hijabs. In one high-profile incident in 2021, Bill 21 led to the removal of a Muslim teacher from her classroom for wearing a hijab.

In a 2022 Environics survey, 46 percent of respondents agreed that “there are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values.” The term “Canadian values,” though vague, points to respondents’ desire for immigrants to assimilate. The same poll has been conducted for three decades, and while that figure has decreased from 72 percent in 1993, it still indicates that Canada has yet to fully embrace multiculturalism.

Even at current immigration levels, Banerjee said, migrants are segregated from established Canadians, limiting opportunities for them to integrate into the social fabric of their new country and thrive. According to Statistics Canada as of 2021, 41.8 percent of nonpermanent residents and 16.1 percent of immigrants who moved to Canada in the past five years lived in poverty.

The government’s failure to fully integrate newcomers has spurred skepticism of Trudeau’s new program on the left. Columnists for center and left-wing outlets have writtenthat Canada has an “immigration elephant in the room,” referring to racism against newcomers, and that the country is “woefully unprepared for the coming immigration boom” due to funding cuts for newcomer settlement organizations, which are typically funded through a combination of federal, provincial, and private donor funds.

Advocates for refugees and other migrants are some of the loudest voices demanding reform to Canada’s immigration and settlement processes before expansion. Directors of settlement and refugee organizations, who may have otherwise endorsed Trudeau’s plans, say the system is already overloaded. Newcomers categorized as “highly skilled” have publicly complained about being stuck in a bureaucratic limbo with the immigration ministry and not receiving decisions on their residency permits for years.

Public opinion appears to have shifted as well. Even before Trudeau’s plan, anti-immigration sentiment was already worsening online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Banerjee said, as some Canadians blamed immigrants, particularly those of Asian descent, for the spread of the disease. In July, David Coletto, CEO of Canada’s Abacus polling firm, wrote on his Substack that 61 percent of Canadians polled believe that 500,000 immigrants per year is too high, including 37 percent who feel it is “way too high.” In addition, a July Abacus survey found that four in 10 Canadians polled would vote for a politician who promised to reduce immigration levels.

Now, some Canadians are conflating a different issue with immigration: the housing crisis that Trudeau has been unable to stem in his nearly eight-year tenure. In the many think pieces about immigration, commentators have complained of already overburdened services, from health care wait times to the availability of language lessons. But the most common criticism of Trudeau’s plan to expand immigration is the lack of affordable housing.

“Canada doesn’t have a refugee problem. Canada has a housing problem,” said Francesca Allodi-Ross, who runs Romero House, a nongovernmental organization in Toronto that connects migrants with people who have spare rooms. She worries about newcomers being blamed for a housing shortage that has been a long time coming.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada has the most expensivehousing market in the G-7. Vacancy rates for rental housing are at a two-decade low, and the Royal Bank of Canada expects the country’s rental housing gap (the difference between available rental units and those seeking them) to surpass 120,000 by 2026—quadrupling today’s deficit. In early August, Stefane Marion, the chief economist of the National Bank, called on the government to revise the immigration target until housing supply could match demand, citing “record imbalance” between the two.

Meanwhile, as housing shortages threaten to affect the coming “highly skilled” migrants prioritized by Trudeau’s plan, social justice-oriented groups such as Romero House have pointed out that the government has so far neglected to provide enough housing for other newcomers who have already arrived: specifically, refugees and asylum-seekers. The government’s failure to arrange temporary housing for them was glaringly apparent over the summer, when hundreds of asylum-seekers campedoutside Toronto’s emergency shelter intake center.

The way the government responds to the needs of newcomers, and especially refugees, is “very reactive—and it’s been this way for years,” Allodi-Ross said. It was only after the Toronto shelter crisis, when many media commentators questioned Trudeau’s immigration expansion program, that the municipal, provincial, and federal government committed $71.4 million to housing for refugees and asylum-seekers, and the city freed up more hotels for emergency shelter.

Directors of temporary shelters and refugee settlement programs say there is a chronic lack of state funding and support for recent arrivals. John Mtshede, the executive director of Matthew House, a shelter for asylum-seekers in Ontario’s Niagara region, said his shelter is stretched to capacity. For years, the government has repeatedly denied Matthew House’s requests for funding to develop a plot of land for additional housing. Matthew House has found its most sustainable support through private fundraising and religious groups, rather than government funding.

Like many others who work at refugee and immigration NGOs, Mtshede is frustrated with the lack of coordination between the municipal, provincial, and federal governments about who bears responsibility for housing the government’s target of a little more than 70,000 new refugees each year. “Nobody wants to take the blame for this situation,” he said.

Despite the pushback, the Liberal government appears to be doubling down and ignoring accusations that it has not funded the services required to process and settle newcomers. At a press conference in early August, a reporter asked Marc Miller, the new immigration minister, if the government would reduce the immigration targets.

“Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at,” he said. “But certainly, I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.” In the meantime, newcomers will increasingly become the fall guy for the housing crisis that has unfolded under Trudeau’s watch.

Claire Porter Robbins is a journalist in Calgary, Alberta, and the founder of Btchcoin News. She has worked as an aid worker in the Middle East and in strategic communications for a United Nations peacekeeping mission.

Source: How Immigrant-Friendly Is Canada?

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Barutciski: Canada’s overly inclusive definition of ‘immigrant’ threatens to upset the apple cart 

2023/08/29 Leave a comment

Fully agree with need to include temporary residents in the annual levels plan but no need for the government to await an amendment to IRPA: in the interim, the government could decide to do so on its own volition if inclined to do so and be more transparent about actual levels of immigration.

Likely inertia will prevail, nothing will be done by the government and no amendment to IRPA will come before Parliament. Happy to be proven wrong…:

That Canadians have been debating aspects of immigration policy this summer is, on its own, unusual. After years of record-setting admission numbers, systemic problems such as the generalized housing shortage and the surge of homeless asylum seekers have prompted debates about whether the number of admissions is too high – though admirably, Canada’s traditional widespread openness and commitment to immigration remains unquestioned. But what’s also unusual is the way we are talking about immigrants, because official and media sources have presented the yearly number of immigrants to the country in a way that hasn’t been as clear and upfront as possible about recent changes in immigration policy.

In the past, the term “immigrant” was generally used to designate permanent residents who had been admitted to the country. As a consequence, Canadians had grown accustomed over the past few decades to hearing that their country was admitting roughly 200,000 to 400,000 immigrants a year. In March, however, then-immigration minister Sean Fraser announced that Canada had brought in a million new immigrants in the previous year. While the sudden huge increase was largely unexplained, careful observers figured it out: the new statistics included temporary residents, such as international students, along with the usual permanent resident numbers.

This has stemmed from an explosion in the granting of temporary resident permits since the Liberals came to power in 2015. The Liberals were also still able to issue a large number of permanent-resident permits during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the borders were closed, by relying on the selection of temporary residents who were already in Canada. This approach is becoming the new way of selecting many of the country’s permanent residents.

In other words, temporary migrants already have become a significant part of the country’s immigration policy; the data has just caught up with that reality. The problem is that nobody has actually explained this major change to the host population. The implications need to be discussed openly and honestly, and it is impossible to do so if the relevant information is not made public.

According to s. 94 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the immigration minister is supposed to provide Parliament with a report that explains many details focusing on the permanent residents who are admitted every year. This provision is now incomplete given this shift in reporting basic statistics. Parliamentarians should amend the legislation so that Canadians can be properly informed not only about permanent residents, but also temporary residents.

All opposition parties should push for this amendment. The Liberals have somewhat downplayed their role in the evolving language, maintaining that temporary permits depend on demand from employers and postsecondary institutions. Yet the federal government ultimately controls the authorization and issuance of visas. If employers looking for cheap labour and cash-strapped educational institutions really are able to guide the country’s immigration policy based on their own narrow interests, that would disregard the implications for the rest of the country.

There seems to be an ideological dimension to the shift, and it has been implemented in a way that goes beyond the traditional consensus amongst Canadians. When she was foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland illustrated this vision when she rushed to Toronto’s Pearson Airport in 2019 to greet the newly arrived asylum seeker Rahaf Mohammed. Her characterization of the Saudi teenager that day as a “brave new Canadian” was technically premature if we go by the country’s Citizenship Act. Some have similarly started to refer to asylum seekers as “newcomers,” even though in most cases, their ultimate status and right to remain in Canada is unknown. This generous use of inclusive terminology regarding community membership is not understood by average Canadians, and threatens to upset the informal agreement that positively informs our politics: that immigration enriches Canada.

All these changes to Canada’s immigration policy may represent potentially interesting new ideas, but they need to be clearly presented and debated to keep the public on board. Marc Miller, who took over for Mr. Fraser as Immigration Minister in July, would be wise to proceed cautiously and reassure Canadians that their country is not being transformed too quickly by the improvised and ad hoc application of new concepts. The place of temporary permits in the overall immigration scheme provides one important example where recent developments need to be properly scrutinized. An amendment to Canada’s immigration legislation is needed to make sure this happens.

Michael Barutciski is a faculty member of York University’s Glendon College. He teaches law and policy with a focus on migration issues.

Source: Canada’s overly inclusive definition of ‘immigrant’ threatens to upset the apple cart

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Mahboubi: Canada’s underemployed economic immigrants: How to stop wasting talent

2023/08/29 Leave a comment

Usual list of factors and issues. Regulated profession credential recognition is under provincial jurisdiction and that is where some of the movement is. Was always amused when at IRCC foreign credential recognition that appeared to me as all process with little substance.

And if economic principal immigrants are largely not using settlement services, the government needs to understand why and make necessary program adjustments (or just accept that for most economic immigrants, these services may be less necessary).

Would be nice if IRCC would publish settlement services on open data!

Canada consistently fails to fully utilize immigrants’ skills, limiting its efforts to address labour-market needs and imposing a loss on the economy.

Economic immigration is Canada’s largest and most popular admission category. To make such immigration more responsive to labour-market needs, Canada recently launched category-based selection that prioritizes in-demand occupations facing shortages, such as those in health care and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

However, once they get to Canada, foreign-educated immigrants, particularly recent immigrants, often encounter difficulties finding employment that aligns with their qualifications, and experience persistent skills underutilization. This phenomenon exists even among immigrants in targeted occupations in category-based selection, limiting the benefit of immigrants’ influx in those occupations.

According to Statistics Canada, more than 25 per cent of all immigrants (aged 25-64) with a foreign bachelor’s degree or higher worked in occupations requiring only a high-school diploma or less in 2021.

Earlier evidence from 2016 also shows that only two in five economic immigrants with a health-related degree worked in health-related occupations. The mismatch rate is also high among immigrants with a degree in the STEMfields (more than 50 per cent).

While admitting more immigrants in targeted occupations can help combat some chronic labour shortages, addressing underutilization issues is far more critical.

Obstacles that prevent economic immigrants from fully utilizing their skills include regulatory, language and cultural barriers, nonrecognition of foreign credentials and work experience, lack of Canadian experience, and discrimination.

To better integrate economic immigrants, provincial governments need to work with regulatory bodies to streamline foreign-credential and work-experience recognition. Some provinces are already moving in the right direction. For example, eight provinces offer practice-ready assessment programs for internationally trained family physicians.

But although this program can help speed up the credential recognition process, it is not open to all physicians and the number of assessments seems to be low, failing to keep pace with demand: Only 50 applicants will be accepted this year in Ontario. Provinces should expand this program based on the outcome evaluation and consider a similar program for other regulatory professions.

Provinces can also learn best practices from abroad. For example, Australia offers four assessment pathways for international medical graduates to register to practice. It has also taken several actions to reduce red tape and to streamline and expedite the assessment and registration process. The changesinclude increasing senior staff and cutting the processing time for initial risk assessments, fast-tracking admission of practitioners from trusted countries, and reviewing standards and requirements.

Professional Engineers Ontario recently removed the requirement of Canadian work experience for qualified foreign engineers. This change is a welcome strategy for other regulatory professions and other provinces to follow.

In addition, investing more in bridging programs such as Canada Work Experience that connects immigrants with experienced professionals in their respective fields through experiential learning, internship, or unlicensed opportunities helps immigrants understand the local job market. It also allows them to learn the workplace culture and gain Canadian experiences and new skills.

Governments need to support programs focusing on employability skills and develop targeted job-matching programs to facilitate connections between employers seeking skilled workers and immigrants looking for opportunities. They also need to educate employers on the benefits of hiring immigrants and encourage employers to hire recent immigrants.

A McKinsey report found that organizations with more ethnic and cultural diversity are 36 per cent more likely to outperform their competitors in profitability. According to a Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council’s survey, 80 per cent of GTA employers who intentionally hire immigrants noticed a positive impact on their organization.

Raising awareness of, enhancing access to, and encouraging participation in employment services, language learning resources and bridging programs helpprovide better and faster labour-market integration of newcomers. Between 2016 and 2020, only 8.5 per cent of economic principle applicants accessed federally funded employment and community connection programs, far less than other immigrant groups.

According to a survey in 2021, only 8 to 9 per cent of skilled newcomers who used employment services learned firsthand about the available services from government offices (e.g., upon arrival at the border). The federal government needs to actively reach out to newcomers, educate them about employment assistance services and improve the usage of prearrival employment services.

As Canada plans to attract more skilled immigrants to fill gaps in the labour force and support the economy, better use of their skills and integration of this talent are becoming more crucial. Their prosperity means generations of benefits to come.

Parisa Mahboubi is a senior policy analyst at the C. D. Howe Institute, where Tingting Zhang is a junior policy analyst.

Source: Canada’s underemployed economic immigrants: How to stop wasting talent

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Korea struggles to shift immigration policies amid demographic changes

2023/08/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

Korea’s demographic challenges, marked by the lowest birth rate in the world and an aging population, are fueling discussions on the need for more comprehensive immigration policies.

The National Assembly Research Service released, Monday, a report titled “Relationships with Foreigners in Korean Society: Exploring Directions of Immigration Policy.”

In light of the increasing societal interest in immigration policies, the report aims to provide an overview of the status of foreigners residing in Korea and the need for a unified strategy on immigration.

As of December 2021, foreign nationals made up approximately 3.8 percent of Korea’s population, totaling around 1.96 million residents, according to the report. Statistics Korea predicts the number to rise to 3.23 million, or 6.4 percent of the population, by 2040.

These statistics highlight the urgency for formulating an inclusive immigration policy.

Getty Images Bank
Front page of the report, titled “Relationships with foreigners in Korean society: exploring directions of immigration policy”, released on Monday by the National Assembly Research Service / Courtesy of National Assembly

“As the percentage of overseas Koreans decreases, immigrants from various nations continue to grow. It’s imperative to establish a societal environment and institutional framework capable of accommodating them,” said Lee Sang-jic, author of the report and associate research fellow of the Quality of Life group at the National Assembly Futures Institute.

However, public sentiment on this issue remains mixed. Results from the World Values Survey (WVS) showed a complex perspective among Koreans towards immigrants, characterized by both an increased willingness to embrace immigrants and a simultaneous psychological resistance.

While 80.5 percent of Koreans believe immigrants should be welcomed, up from 71.9 percent in 2019, negative biases based on race and nationality also increased to 67.5 percent from 62 percent over the same period.

One of the key challenges in addressing immigration issues is the fragmented approach within the government.

Currently, different ministries handle different aspects of immigration. Labor-related immigration policies are overseen by the Ministry of Employment and Labor; the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy; and the Ministry of Justice, whereas multicultural-related issues are managed by the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

Experts attribute this fragmentation to a focus on economic solutions to demographic challenges. The policies often position migrant workers merely as a labor resource, while marriage-based immigrants are perceived as a fix for declining birth rates.

The report suggests first gaining an understanding of Korea’s perspective on a society with immigrants and then developing a comprehensive policy for effective social integration.

In May 2022, Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon proposed establishing a dedicated immigration agency. A team was set up in November 2022 to improve the immigration system, but no concrete plans for the agency have yet been discussed.

Source: Korea struggles to shift immigration policies amid demographic …

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Integrity of immigration system at risk as international student numbers balloon, minister says

2023/08/28 Leave a comment

Smart communications to link to integrity issues but test will be what he and the government does about it. Too late for the upcoming academic year and the education associations are already protesting:

Immigration Minister Marc Miller says the concern around the skyrocketing number of international students entering Canada is not just about housing, but Canadians’ confidence in the “integrity” of the immigration system itself.

Canada is on track to welcome around 900,000 international students this year, Miller said in an interview that aired Saturday on CBC’s The House. That’s more than at any point in Canada’s history and roughly triple the number of students who entered the country a decade ago.

That rapidly increasing number of international students gained increased attention this week when the country’s new housing minister, Sean Fraser, floated the idea of a possible cap on the number of students Canada brings in.

Fraser framed a cap on international students as “one of the options that we ought to consider” during a cabinet retreat earlier this week in Prince Edward Island.

Miller, who took over from Fraser at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, told guest host Evan Dyer that the rising number of students was a concern for housing, though he says it is important not to overstate that challenge.

“It is an ecosystem in Canada that is very lucrative and it’s come with some perverse effects: some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen as a backdoor entry into Canada, but also pressure in a number of areas — one of those is housing,” he said.

But Miller shied away from committing to the idea of a hard cap on the number of students entering Canada.

“Just putting a hard cap, which got a lot of public play over the last few days, is not the only solution to this,” he said.

“Core to this is actually trying to figure out what the problem is we’re trying to solve for. It isn’t entirely housing, it’s more appropriately the integrity of the system that has mushroomed, ballooned in the past couple of years.”

Miller said there were a number of “illegitimate actors” who were trying to exploit the system, which was eventually having a negative effect on people trying to come to Canada for legitimate reasons. Miller referred to one high-profile instance last month of an international student found sleeping under a bridge.

He said he would not get involved with “naming and shaming,” but said his focus was on some private colleges. Work would need to be done to tighten up the system, he said, to make sure institutions actually had space and suitable housing for people who are being admitted. Miller also said closer collaboration with provinces was key to solving the problem.

Cap opposed by major universities

In a statement to The House, the National Association of Career Colleges said “regulated career colleges provide efficient, high-quality, industry-driven training for domestic and international students to produce the skilled workers Canada most desperately needs.” That includes workers in the construction trades that build housing, they said.

Philip Landon, interim president and CEO at Universities Canada, also pushed back on the idea of a cap, seeking to position major universities as part of the solution to the problem.

“I think we can say that the housing situation is a crisis for Canadians broadly,” Landon said in a separate interview with The House. “I do not think that the blaming newcomers or international students … is the right way to go.”
With Canada facing an acute shortage of affordable housing, the federal government is considering putting a limit on the number of international students it allows in each year.

Speaking to The House, a number of international students in Ottawa pushed back on the idea that people like them are making housing unaffordable. In fact, said Rishi Patel, a student from Zambia, international students often have a more difficult time finding housing than domestic students as they often lack credentials.

“I just came to Canada. I don’t have any credit checks yet. I don’t have any employment references,” he said.

Mike Moffatt, an assistant professor at the Ivey Business School who specializes in housing policy, agreed with that sentiment when he spoke in P.E.I. earlier in the week.

“This is a systemic failure, I would say, of both the federal and provincial government and as well that the higher education sector in which I work to ensure that there’s enough housing for both domestic and international students.”

“Domestic and international students are the biggest victims of this, not the cause of it,” he said.

Housing has become a top political issue federally, with the Tory opposition hammering the government as Canadians struggle with the cost of living.

“We as Conservatives will make sure that international students have homes, health care and when they want it, jobs so that we can get back to a system that supports our universities, attracts the world’s brightest people, helps the demographics of our country but does not leave people living in squalor,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said.

Talking with Dyer, Miller said the focus of his department was on ensuring the system was working properly for those trying to come to Canada.

“What we don’t want to see is hopes dashed based on a false promise,” Miller said.

Source: Integrity of immigration system at risk as international student numbers balloon, minister says

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Did discrimination keep this couple out of Canada? A Canadian court delivers a ‘bittersweet’ ruling

2023/08/28 Leave a comment

Of note, ongoing challenge of indicators used to indicate likely refugee claims and overstays:

The Canadian government has been ordered to reinstate a travel document for a Roma couple who were kept from making a trip to this country at least partly because their hosts were former refugees.

The Federal Court ruled this week on a case that put a spotlight on the Canada Border Services Agency’s use of “association with refugees” as an “indicator” to vet travellers.

And although the couple will now get their travel document, Justice Simon Fothergill ruled that the CBSA’s use of indicators did not amount to a discriminatory practice.

The couple said they were disappointed at Fothergill’s decision.

“We have been unable to visit our family in Canada for more than four years now,” said Andrea Kiss, who had set out on the 2019 trip to see her sister, who was about to have an abdominal surgery.

“I am disappointed the court did not recognize the harm and humiliation that CBSA’s discrimination against Roma people is causing.”

Kiss and her husband were set to fly from the Budapest airport in 2019 to visit Andrea’s sister in Toronto, who, along with her family, has refugee status in Canada.

Although the couple had been issued an electronic travel authorization (eTA) — a travel document required for those flying into Canada from visa-exempt country such as Hungary, they were stopped and referred for further screening.

Canadian border officials made a “no-board” recommendation and cancelled the couple’s travel authorization. The case note, among other concerns, cited their hosts as “convention refugees who arrived in Canada via irregular means in 2015 and 2016 respectively.”

The notes suggested the couple had weak ties to Hungary, where they did not own property or a long-term rental lease and were unable to explain what they would do over their three-month stay in Canada, how the husband managed to take such a long vacation from work or why they were carrying $2,000 in cash.

In fact, according to the couple’s claim, not only did they own property in Hungary, the husband had worked for the same employer for 26 years and had received approval for a six-month leave for the trip.

The Kisses challenged the decision in court with a non-Roma Hungarian family that faced a similar experience, claiming CBSA officials did not have the authority to conduct overseas examination and cancel the travel documents, and that the use of “association with refugees” as an indicator was discriminatory.

The government had agreed that their eTAs should be granted, but the complainants insisted on seeking a formal declaration from court to that effect.

“The Court has found that the Officer had statutory authority to cancel the Applicants’ eTAs, although the criteria for exercising that authority were not satisfied in either of these cases. This is conceded by the (Immigration) Minister,” Fothergill wrote in the decision.

However, there’s no evidence established, the judge found, of “the existence of a co-ordinated program by the CBSA to interdict travellers abroad solely on the ground that they are of Roma ethnicity or associated with Roma refugee claimants in Canada.”

The court said the border officials’ decisions were based on information provided by a private security agent employed by Air Canada, combined with other information contained in immigration records.

It pointed out that the decision-making officer was located in Vienna, Austria, and had no direct interaction with the travellers and did not “exercise any coercive powers,” hence the complainants’ “unauthorized overseas examination” accusation against the border officials was unsupported.

“This did not constitute the examination of foreign nationals, but rather the provision of assistance to an air carrier in meeting its obligation to ensure travellers are eligible to enter Canada,” wrote Fothergill.

During the court proceedings, the complainants submitted evidence that showed CBSA overseas liaison officers made no-board recommendations against 1,252 Hungarian nationals between 2012 and 2018.

An affidavit from a York University law professor said the recognition rate of refugee claims from Hungary, majority of them by Roma minorities, was almost 69.7 per cent, a rate above the refugee board’s overall protection grant rate.

The complainants argued that the border officials’ cancellations of the travel authorization was part of Canada’s broader interdiction policy that seeks to enforce its border and immigration laws extraterritorially by pushing the border out against undesirable visitors such as potential refugees, even before they depart from their country of origin.

Air travel advocate Gabor Lukács, who assisted the families in court, said that while he was happy the complainants were vindicated and will have their travel authorization restored, the ruling was bittersweet.

“If you target people from Hungary who have a refugee history, it is tantamount to targeting the Roma people. The evidence on that point was clear and uncontradicted,” said Lukács, founder of the Halifax-based Air Passenger Rights.

“The court is basically saying that by preventing people to board a flight because they are too brown, because they have the wrong ethnicity, the CBSA is just helping the airlines to meet their own legal obligations. It is a whitewashing of what is quite clearly a systemic discrimination.”

Source: Did discrimination keep this couple out of Canada? A Canadian court delivers a ‘bittersweet’ ruling

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Rudyard Griffiths: Want cheaper housing? Boost supply—but reduce demand too

2023/08/28 Leave a comment

While he is oblivious to the temporary resident numbers, a rare call to reduce permanent resident numbers to earlier levels of around 300,000, the demand side of the equation. Valid points on the financialization of housing but likely untouchable given how it would affect current home owners :

Mike Moffat deserves congratulations for serving up some innovative and impactful policy ideas to address Canada’s gaping housing shortage. The federal cabinet would do well to zero in on his suggestions when he briefs them in Charlottetown this week for what is being billed as an important confab on the country’s housing “crisis.” The key point that government ministers need to hear more from Moffat on is reintroducing accelerated depreciation rates for rental housing. Government cannot and should not try to “solve” the housing shortage on its own. Large pools of private capital need to be attracted back into building rental housing and currently the incentives do not exist for this to happen on any meaningful scale.

What is striking about Moffat’s essay and much of the current conversation about housing is the relentless focus on increasing supply. It is as if the issue of housing demand has been erased from policymakers’ minds when it comes to tackling what has been rightly identified as one of the most complex and important issues facing the country.

Take immigration. Right now in Ontario we are adding every two years the population of Mississauga and building a city roughly equivalent in size to Cornwall. To state the obvious, this is completely unsustainable and likely unfixable in any reasonable period of time that voters could and should expect. Yet we know that returning immigration levels, and student and temporary worker visas, back to the twenty-year average of 300,000 people—versus the one million plus arrivals in the last twelve months—would have an immediate and salutatory effect on demand.

Immigration’s impact on housing looks like a live debate going into the cabinet meeting with the new housing minister (and former immigration minister) Sean Fraser publicly musing about putting a cap on the “explosive growth” of international student enrolments.

Let’s hope this is where government ultimately end ups or acknowledging the impact of record population growth on shelter costs. After all, expectations about the future matter as price signals in the here and now. They give buyers and sellers clues as to the direction of travel of a market, in this case, housing. Indicating to the market that demand via population growth will be slower for the foreseeable future would lower shelter prices today and is an easy win. 

Immigration of course is a sensitive issue that has many dimensions beyond economics and housing. But to argue that Canada wasn’t becoming more diverse and inclusive at annual migration levels a quarter of what they are today is preposterous. Also, migration isn’t the weather. It is a choice. It can be expanded or lowered according to the absorptive capacity of society. Right now that capacity, in terms of not only housing but a variety of other metrics such as health care and public infrastructure, is clearly beyond reasonable limits.

Missing also from the current discussion is some much-needed soul-searching about the role the federal government has played recently in stoking housing demand, and its corollary, a crisis of affordability. Much of the pandemic-era rise in shelter costs has its origins in a little-known mechanism called the Domestic Stability Buffer. This is the amount of capital that banks are required by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions to set aside to cover losses in the advent of a Black Swan-type event.

In the Spring of 2022, OSFI cut the DSB from 2.25 to 1 percent, providing Canada’s banks with a massive $300B in new lending capacity or 15 percent of total annual GDP. These funds overwhelming went into residential mortgage origination during the same period the Bank of Canada was slashing its overnight rate and pushing down borrowing cost by buying bonds hand over fist. The combustion of hundreds of billions in new capital and ultra-low rates explains much of the unprecedented runup in prices with average homes nationally now costing as much as average homes in Toronto in 2019. Think on that for a moment… 

As with immigration levels, OSFI made a policy choice. Some or all of the $300B in new lending capacity created out of thin air could have been mandated for corporate loans to create private sector jobs or fund new capital investment. But it wasn’t. Instead, OSFI joined the alphabet soup of other Ottawa financial organizations (CMHC, FCAC, etc.) and added to a policy environment already highly favourable to increasing shelter costs.

Part of this week’s cabinet deliberations should be a root-and-branch review of federal policy as it relates to the financialization of housing as an asset. What schemes genuinely help lower-income Canadians get into homes and rental accommodation? Which are in fact subsidies to higher-income Canadians, investors, the banks, and the real estate sector as a whole? Proof point: in what world does it make sense to have over forty percent of residential units in Ontario “investor-owned”, with some communities such as Windsor, Sudbury, and St. Catherines seeing that level approach 80 percent or more?

Here the biggest tool the federal government wields to increase housing affordability is the capital gains exemption on Canadians’ primary residences.

When this policy was instituted in 1971 it was never envisioned as applying to the housing market with an average home price at ten times the average national income. Nor was it meant to shelter millions of dollars of capital gains in luxury home sales in Canada’s major cities for the 1 percent. We need to have an adult conversation about this exemption. Is it really still in our national interest? Beyond its effect on shelter costs, are we OK with the large intergenerational wealth transfers it is increasingly facilitating? Transfers that allow the children of high-income families to “afford” housing in our largest cities, through nothing other than their birth, and price out the less fortunate. One-third of people don’t own a home, and don’t benefit from the subsidy—many not out of choice.

The cautionary tale for not using all the tools at our disposal to address our national housing crisis is what is happening right now to real estate in China.

The Chinese also took housing to their largest asset class by far and trebled, like Canada, over a generation, its contribution to GDP. They used similar tools such as cheap credit from government via the banking sector and tax subsidies to individuals and corporations to engineer a massive explosion of real-estate-related wealth.

Their entire real-estate-led economic growth model has hit a wall. High prices slowed family formation. Ever higher debt levels curbed purchases. The real-estate portion of Chinese GDP is now falling precipitously, and it seems Beijing has few if any tools left to prevent a deep recession that could end up structurally damaging their economy.

Canada has all the same raw ingredients to replicate the toxic housing and real-estate endgame China now faces. The stakes are high. We need bold action and yes there is a case for increasing housing supply. But let’s also think about the policy levers that we have to sensibly curtail demand and unwind the financialization of housing as an asset class. Both are factors that China’s experience indicates can quickly flip an unaffordability crisis into long-term, intractable economic malaise.  For all our sakes let’s hope the policy deliberations needed to avoid this “own goal” begin this week in Charlottetown.

Source: Rudyard Griffiths: Want cheaper housing? Boost supply—but reduce demand too

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Cornellier review of Meggs: Immigration 101

2023/08/28 Leave a comment

Good summary of her book and of interest more generally given Quebec indépendantiste perspective and areas where future Quebec governments may push for additional powers with respect to temporary workers, students among others. Relatively silent on the imbalance of settlement service funding where Quebec maintains its share of funding irrespective of its declining share of immigrants to Canada:

Les enjeux liés à l’immigration au Canada et au Québec n’ont pas fini de faire la manchette. Au Québec, l’an dernier, selon l’Institut de la statistique du Québec, il y a eu 80 700 naissances et 78 400 décès. Comme la tendance devrait se maintenir, cela signifie que, désormais, seule l’immigration pourra contribuer au maintien et à la croissance de la population québécoise.

On peut toutefois se demander, dans l’état actuel des choses, si une telle croissance est nécessairement un bienfait. Quand on considère le problème aigu de la pénurie de logements, le manque de places dans les services de garde et l’état précaire de notre système de santé et de services sociaux, sans parler des défis engendrés par une croissance de ce type dans le dossier de l’avenir du français au Québec, ce n’est pas une évidence.

Pour réfléchir rigoureusement et sereinement à cette question, Anne Michèle Meggs est la personne toute désignée. D’origine ontarienne, Meggs est diplômée en études canadiennes et vit en français, à Montréal, depuis des décennies. Elle a dirigé le cabinet du ministre ontarien des Affaires francophones avant de travailler comme directrice de la planification au ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration du Québec.

Dans L’immigration au Québec. Comment on peut faire mieux (Renouveau québécois, 2023, 204 pages), un recueil de chroniques d’abord parues dans L’aut’journal depuis 2019, elle montre avec efficacité que le dossier de l’immigration au Québec est complexe, souffre d’une gestion désordonnée et charrie son lot de mythes.

Meggs ne s’oppose pas à l’immigration. Cette dernière, note-t-elle, « fait partie de l’histoire de l’humanité » et n’a rien de condamnable. On migre pour avoir une meilleure qualité de vie, pour fuir les conflits, la persécution ou les catastrophes naturelles, et ça se comprend. « L’immigration est un projet foncièrement humain », écrit Meggs.

Pour être couronnée de succès, cette démarche doit se faire dans le respect des personnes qui migrent, de la société d’accueil et de la société d’origine. Cela exige, de la part de la société d’accueil, d’avoir « une vision claire soutenue par une infrastructure législative et administrative efficace ». Or, au Canada et au Québec, cette vision, pour l’instant, fait défaut.

D’abord, les idées fausses entretenues au sujet de l’immigration nuisent à la rigueur du débat. Non, redit Meggs en citant des experts, l’immigration n’est pas une solution à la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre et au vieillissement de la population. Non, ajoute-t-elle, le déclin du français n’est pas d’abord le résultat de l’immigration, mais celui du faible taux de natalité des francophones, de leur anglicisation et de leurs comportements linguistiques : engouement pour la culture et pour les cégeps anglophones, indifférence à l’égard du statut du français, exigence de l’anglais en entreprise, etc.

« La société d’accueil, écrit Meggs, a le devoir de créer un espace propice à l’intégration en français [des personnes immigrantes]. » Elle est souvent loin d’être à la hauteur de cette mission. Les efforts de francisation déployés par le gouvernement du Québec, notamment en milieu de travail, ne méritent pas non plus la note de passage.

Le principal obstacle à une bonne compréhension du dossier de l’immigration au Québec est toutefois le tripotage des chiffres. Alors qu’on se demande si notre capacité d’accueil — une notion qui n’a jamais été rigoureusement définie — est de 30 000 ou de 70 000 immigrants, le Québec en accueillait, en 2022, 155 400, c’est-à-dire 68 700 personnes admises à la résidence permanente et 86 700 personnes détentrices d’un permis de séjour temporaire (étudiants étrangers et travailleurs), cela sans compter les demandeurs d’asile.

Tout le débat, dans ces conditions, est faussé puisque les temporaires, plus nombreux que les permanents, échappent à la réflexion sur les seuils et aux efforts d’intégration en français qui devraient être déployés par le gouvernement du Québec.

En vertu de l’Accord Canada-Québec sur l’immigration signé en 1991, explique Meggs, le Québec pourrait exiger que les immigrants temporaires soient inclus dans le calcul annuel du nombre d’immigrants qu’il veut recevoir. Il pourrait aussi ajouter des conditions linguistiques à cet accueil, mais il ne le fait pas, sauf quand il déplore, mollement, le refus fédéral des demandes de permis d’études pour de jeunes Africains francophones.

Pour avoir une politique d’immigration efficace et humaine, le Québec devrait pouvoir gérer seul l’ensemble du dossier, c’est-à-dire être indépendant, note justement Meggs. En attendant, Justin Trudeau et François Legault disent et font un peu n’importe quoi.

Chroniqueur (Présence Info, Jeu), essayiste et poète, Louis Cornellier enseigne la littérature au collégial.

Source: Immigration 101

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How to fix Canada’s international student system? These experts have a plan

2023/08/26 Leave a comment

Another proposal to address the excessive growth of international students:

Amid a raging debate over how to manage Canada’s international student sector, some say the federal government should adopt a different kind of system for granting visas to foreign students — one that could reset expectations and help weed out “bad actors.”

And such a system, advocates say, has already been proposed.

For years, critics have been calling for reforms to this country’s fast-growing international education program. Thousands of international students are lured to Canada each year, many by the prospect of gaining permanent residence as a result of getting a Canadian education and ensuing work permit.

This week, facing public pressure over the housing crisis, the federal government mused about reining in the surging number of students who have filled the classrooms of post-secondary institutions from coast to coast.

“It’s critical to signalling first that there is a real problem,” Toronto immigration lawyer and policy analyst Mario Bellissimo told the Star.

Though caps have never been placed on visas for foreign students, workers or visitors before, advocates point out the idea of restricting how many people can apply for entry into the country is not a new concept. Many permanent residence programs already have annual quotas, such as for the sponsorship of parents and grandparents.

“The mechanism of how they’re going to do this is as important as establishing a cap. If it’s not set out in a way that’s sustainable, we’re meeting back here in a year or two.”

What Bellissimo and others say they believe would help is a two-staged system similar to the existing economic immigrant selection process to both cap and manage the international student intake.

Earlier this year, Bellissimo led an effort with other lawyers and MPs to submit a proposal to reform the international student program to then immigration minister Sean Fraser, who is now in charge of the housing portfolio.

The proposed Expression of Interest Study Permit Program is modelled on the current economic immigration application management system. That system requires interested applicants to enter into a pool and be invited to submit an application based on their scores in a points-ranking system.

Points would be allocated based upon factors such as the applicant’s education history, previous degrees, grades, language ability, financial sufficiency and educational institution to which they were admitted.

The pool would be divided into streams between those accepted by colleges and universities, as well as those who are pursuing a study permit for “in-demand” occupations in Canada or who have no interest in remaining in the country after graduation. There could also be the option for provinces and municipalities to support the applications destined for their regions.

Once all the study permit spots are filled, the remaining candidates in the pool would wait for the next round of invitations in the following school term. Their applications would be disposed of after a year and they would have to reapply to be considered again to avoid a backlog.

“Capping is not necessarily a bad thing, because if you allow everyone to apply, inevitably many are going to be turned away or are not processed at all,” said Bellissimo. “So you’re actually squeezing the door shut as opposed to opening it.”

The approach would reset applicants’ expectations of their ability to come to Canada either temporarily or permanently, and redirect them to other programs if one were close. For international students, it could mean picking other countries if it was too competitive to get admitted to Canada.

Bellissimo says he was told the proposal was being considered.

Education is a provincial jurisdiction and post-secondary education institutions are currently charged with admissions of international students. The Immigration Department can control the intake by wielding its power in issuing study permits or inviting eligible applicants to apply without overstepping on the provincial jurisdiction.

“Managed intake is probably a first priority versus cap. The idea of a management system is you don’t necessarily have to refuse 50 per cent of applicants. You can somewhat control the number of applicants that are actually competitive to apply for study permits,” said Vancouver immigration lawyer Wei William Tao, who was part of the effort with Bellissimo.

“Now … schools throw off letters of acceptance kind of blindly to as many people they can, knowing that a large proportion will never make it here, but (are) still eager to.”

By limiting the number of spots schools could feed in the pool, said Tao, it would encourage their administrations to be more “prudent” in handing out letters of acceptance to candidates.

But the idea to cap the intake has already upset the post-secondary educational sector that has increasingly counted on international students as a source of revenue amid declining domestic enrolments and provincial cuts to education.

Employer groups that rely on international students to fill job vacancies have also raised concerns over the proposed cap.

The Quebec government has already publicly rejected the idea.

“This has developed into a huge industry. So people are upset if there’s a cap, then some colleges or some universities are going to miss out on income,” said Toronto immigration lawyer Zeynab Ziaie.

“It’s a very short-sighted way of looking at this, because if we’re just having them go through programs or colleges that are just for show and just to give them permission to remain here, is it really helping Canada?”

Ziaie said both Canada and shady recruiters have marketed the international student program as a pathway for immigration. However, there has been a huge gap between the number of students who are being admitted and who end up qualifying as permanent residents.

She said immigration officials have the power to impose stricter and more cumbersome requirements on student visa applicants such as higher language test scores and the minimum $10,000 bank balance, which has remained unchanged for years.

“It might limit who can come in and study in Canada, but at the same time, it might be more fair if you were someone who is likely not going to ever be able to apply for permanent residency,” said Ziaie.

“You shouldn’t really have to come and incur all of these costs and then not have a pathway to permanent residency later.”

Source: How to fix Canada’s international student system? These experts have a plan

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