How a Sludge-Filled Policy Stoked Uncertainty and Fear for Immigrant Families – By Kelli Garcia

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Sludge is a new term for me (variant of nudge, but negative):

As a child growing up in Texas, I sometimes worried about getting caught up in an immigration raid. It was, in many ways, a fantastical fear. I was born in the United States, as were both my parents and all of my grandparents.

And, yet, my fear had some basis in reality. Cheech Marin’s 1987 film, Born in East L.A., about an American citizen being deported to Mexico and trying to get back to the United States, captured both the fear and absurdity of the moment. The United States does, after all, have a long history of deporting American citizens that continues to this day.

The climate of fear created and fanned by anti-immigrant rhetoric was and is real, not just for me but for many others. In 2018, one study estimated that about 50 percent of the United States’ Latino citizens reported fearing that they, a family member, or close friend could be deported.

This fear and anxiety have real consequences on individuals, families, and society. Several years ago, a harsh immigration policy implemented by the Trump Administration led people not to apply for benefits that they were eligible for. Because the consequences of running afoul of the rule could be dire, these changes created a chilling effect on who applied for benefits, reducing applications even for those who weren’t targeted by it.

This is an example of what behavioral scientists call sludge—when a policy’s design or implementation makes wise decisions more difficult through “friction and bad intentions.”

The United States immigration laws and regulations are full of sludge. Complicated and costly immigration processes have compounded disparities in who is able to apply for and obtain U.S. citizenship. The public charge rule I’m focusing on is an over-100-year-old law, rooted in racist and xenophobic beliefsthat people should not be admitted to the United States if they are “paupers or likely to become a public charge.” The law’s inexact language leaves ample room for policymakers to add or reduce sludge. The Trump-era change added sludge. Now, changes made by the Biden Administration aim to reduce it. But fear and uncertainty linger, preventing people from accessing the benefits they need.

From 1999 to 2019, the only things considered when determining whether someone was likely to become a public charge was whether they had received cash assistance from the federal government or had been institutionalized for long-term care at the government’s expense. In 2019, the Trump Administration’s new regulations expanded the types of programs the government would consider. The rule now factored in the use of housing, nutrition, and health programs. It also listed characteristics that would be weighted negatively against a person, such as having an income below 125 percent of the federal poverty line. The rule was long, complicated, and confusing.

In reality, the public charge determination applies to very few people in the United States. Refugees, asylees, and other groups of immigrants admitted to the United States for humanitarian reasons are excluded from the law. In addition, most immigrants in the United States who could be subject to the public charge rule are also excluded from using the types of safety net programs that would have been considered in the public charge determination.

But when the stakes are high and information is unclear, people err on the side of caution. The mere announcement of the now-defunct rule reduced the number of eligible immigrants enrolled in health, nutrition, and housing assistance programs, including in programs that were not affected by the rule.

For example, at ideas42 we found that Minnesota counties with higher proportions of noncitizens experienced larger declines in enrollment in food assistance through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program than did counties with fewer noncitizens. This occurred even though participation in WIC was not considered part of the public charge determination. Applied nationally, our results suggest that the public charge rule announcement reduced overall WIC enrollment by over 28,000 people. Similarly, after the announcement of the Trump public charge rule, enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Minnesota declined 6.3 percentage points more for noncitizens than citizens, even though nearly all of Minnesota’s noncitizen SNAP enrollees were exempt from the rule.

The rule also required certain immigrants who apply to become permanent residents to provide extensive and complicated documentation about any public benefits programs they used. Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that many immigrants chose not to apply.

As a kid in Texas, my friends and I were careful not to be too loud in the movie theater or linger too long in a store for fear of drawing the attention of authorities. Similarly, many immigrants and citizens in mixed-status households stayed away from benefits programs for fear of running afoul of the confusing rule.

This fear persisted even after the Biden administration halted enforcement of the rule in March 2021. A September 2021 survey of 1,000 families with at least one immigrant family member found that 46 percent did not apply for assistance when they needed it because they feared it could harm their immigration status. Some immigrants expressed fear that merely seeking medical care could affect their immigration status. This fear contributed to vaccine hesitancy among Latino communities.

In September, the Biden Administration issued a new rule that provides clear guidance on when receipt of public benefits will be considered in the public charge determination. Unlike the 2019 rule, the new public charge regulations strive to be “clear, fair, and comprehensible.” Under the new rule, the Department of Homeland Security will only consider public cash assistance, including Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and state, local, and tribal cash benefit programs and government funded long term institutional care. The rule specifically states that nutrition programs, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, housing benefits, and any benefits related to immunizations or testing for communicable diseases will not be considered in the public charge determination.

In developing these new regulations, the Department of Homeland Security considered the importance of reducing the chilling effect, not just for the benefit of individual people but also for society at large. Government benefit programs are supposed to help people when they need it. Making sure people can access medical care, have enough to eat, and have a roof over their heads helps society as a whole. By reducing immigrants’ participation in these programs, the 2019 public charge rule contributed to the very harms these programs were meant to address. The clarity of the new rule is intended to restore eligible immigrants’ participation in government benefits programs so that these programs can once again achieve their goals.

No parent should be afraid that accessing public benefits to feed their children or get medical care could lead to losing their right to remain in this country. No child should fear that a parent could be deported if they get reduced-priced lunches at school. As our and others’ research has shown, policies that create fear and uncertainty can undermine our social safety net and public health systems. I know from my own experience how easy it is for fear to change behavior in ways that can seem irrational. People respond to confusion with fear. By providing clarity, the new public charge rule should reduce fear and help ensure benefits programs serve those who are eligible.

Disclosure: Kelli García is an employee of ideas42, which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as a Founding Partner. Founding Partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

Source: How a Sludge-Filled Policy Stoked Uncertainty and Fear for Immigrant Families – By Kelli Garcia

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Axworthy and Rock: The Safe Third Country Agreement is unsafe – and unconstitutional

2022/10/12 Leave a comment

Reflections of former ministers (easier when no longer in government) but will see what the Supreme Court rules:

Former ministers As Canadians, we take pride in our well-deserved reputation as a caring society that offers a humane and generous response to those seeking asylum. Yet last week, the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments that since 2004, Canadians have been complicit in the mistreatment of refugees arriving at our border from the United States.

At the heart of this issue is the 2004 Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which requires that refugee claimants seek protection in the first country in which they arrive, be it Canada or the United States. On a practical level, this means that a person seeking asylum from a country other than Canada or the U.S. cannot seek protection in Canada if they have already landed in the U.S., and vice-versa. For the past 18 years, the STCA has operated on the premise that both countries are “safe” for refugees.

In July, 2020, a federal court judge determined that the STCA is unconstitutional and that Canada’s treatment of STCA returnees violates those provisions of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantee liberty and security of the person. The Federal Court of Appeal took a different view and upheld the STCA. Hence, the matter is now before our highest court for a final decision.

The problem here is not the agreement itself. In fact, similar arrangements have succeeded when all participating countries truly offer safety to asylum seekers. Instead, the problem is that the fundamental premise of the STCA no longer holds true. Put simply, the United States is not safe for many refugees. As a result, there are two distinct reasons why, in our respectful view, the Supreme Court should strike down the STCA.

First, while it is not the Court’s role to judge another country’s legal system, this case asks the Court to ensure that people who seek protection in Canada are not sent back to unjustifiable risk and real harm. Yet in returning people to foreseeable consequences in the U.S. – namely, detention in deplorable conditions and a serious risk of return to persecution – that is exactly what is occurring.

In the evidence before the Court, there are numerous examples of asylum seekers who were jailed in the U.S. after being turned away from Canada. They include a family with toddlers who were forbidden from sleeping with their parents; people kept for long periods in solitary confinement; and a 50-year-old woman forced to bathe naked in full view of security personnel.

Those who we send back to be detained in the U.S. face enormous barriers in claiming protection, leading some to be deported and persecuted in their home country. For example, the evidence in the case before the Court includes testimony from a Sri Lankan man who was turned away from Canada and then detained for a year and a half in the U.S. He was then deported and faced the exact persecution he feared – detention, interrogation and beatings by Sri Lankan authorities.

Second, our government has not been respecting the limits created by our own domestic laws. Canadian law implementing the STCA requires that our government monitor circumstances in the U.S. and only continue its designation as “safe” when it truly is. Here, the Court will hear the argument that Canada has neither adequately monitored what’s happening in the U.S. nor responded effectively to what it has seen. Given these circumstances, the Court will be asked to intervene.

Although Donald Trump is no longer in power, the reality for too many refugee claimants in the U.S. remains terrifying. We are by now all too familiar with last year’s images of U.S. border patrol agents on horseback chasing down Haitian migrants. And four years after the implementation of a disastrous policy at the U.S.-Mexico border that separated children from their parents, many are yet to be reunited. Immigration detention conditions in the U.S. remain deplorable, with staggeringly high rates of sexual assault and racially motivated attacks. Is Canada not properly monitoring these developments, or have we grown complacent in turning a blind eye to them? In either case, the STCA can no longer be allowed to stand.

It is important to note that even if the STCA is declared invalid, asylum seekers will still have to establish that they qualify for refugee status under international law. But they will no longer be automatically deemed ineligible for that status merely because they crossed into Canada from the United States.

It is said that the measure of a society is how it treats those on its margins. When vulnerable asylum seekers arrive at our border, they deserve to be treated lawfully and with dignity. We can no longer assume that if we send them back to the U.S., they will be safe. Indeed, the evidence establishes the contrary. It is time for us to abandon the STCA, an agreement no longer worthy of its name.

Lloyd Axworthy is chair of the World Refugee and Migration Council and a former Canadian foreign minister. Allan Rock is president emeritus of the University of Ottawa, and former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations.

Source: The Safe Third Country Agreement is unsafe – and unconstitutional

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Clark: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the broke ATIP system and how this impacts service to the public, particularly with respect to immigration (IRCC does a good job in publishing most of its operational data on the government-wide open data site):

Thirty-nine years ago, after a wave of post-Watergate epiphanies about government secrecy, the Canadian government passed the first federal Access to Information Act. Ever since then it is has been building a denial machine.

It would be easy to pin the blame on secretive politicians trying to obstruct the public’s ability to know what is going on inside government, because they have done that. Prime ministers including Justin Trudeau and his predecessor, Stephen Harper, have broken promises to open government.

But it’s not just that. There is bureaucratic aversion to openness, and a default assumption that making the public’s business public would be tricky. Complicated. Impractical.

And there is another problem: The government’s failure to provide information about simple things is gumming up the system.

Take a look at the recent The Globe and Mail story in which Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard is quoted telling a House of Commons committee that every department in government is failing to keep up with Access to Information requests. Should there be reforms? Ms. Maynard told the committee, in a phrase that should leave us all gobsmacked, that “respecting the law as it currently exists would represent an important first step.”

The government’s Access to Information system, which cost $90-milion in 2021, is garnering 10,000 complaints a year, the story noted. And it included a statistic that offers a clue to one big chunk of the problem: Access to Information requests to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada have increased so much they now outnumber requests to all other departments.

Why? Because IRCC is so bad at providing basic routine info that people are resorting to freedom-of-information requests.

The Access to Information law is supposed to allow people to pay a small fee to request federal government records or, at least, records that aren’t covered by the extensive legal exceptions.

The system for implementing the Act – the $90-million machine – is based on finding the requested documents, but heavily focused on applying exceptions and blacking stuff out. Ask for a copy of a government contract and often the prices of items will be redacted, even though the Federal Court of Canada has ruled such information should be released. One huge problem is delays, sometimes of years. With information, access delayed is often access denied.

That’s why the volume of requests to the Immigration department is instructive. Many come from people asking for info on their applications, said Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. He publishes an immigration-policy newsletter, Lexbase, which is based heavily on access-to-information releases.

IRCC has for decades been unable or unwilling to provide updates to applicants, so Members of Parliament are often deluged with requests for help. Increasingly, their offices file access requests.

If you’re a regular internet shopper, you might recognize those requests as the immigration version of a common customer-service question: “Where’s my stuff?” Companies such as Amazon have online tracking systems that give customers simple answers: whether the order has been received, or shipped, and so on. If they didn’t, they’d be deluged with inquiries. But IRCC doesn’t do that.

Now the government’s failure to provide basic information is gumming up the system that is supposed to allow Canadians to pierce the veil of secrecy.

More broadly, Ottawa’s failure to make openness routine – even though doing so is easy in the digital age – makes getting access to out-of-the-ordinary information slower, and harder.

Requesters sometimes ask for copies of agreements for “grants and contributions” that set out government funding for organizations and groups. These should be automatically published on a website. So should all contracts except in rare exceptions. And so on.

But politicians don’t much care for that sort of transparency. Why let more people see things that might raise embarrassing questions? When the system is clogged up, as it is now, they don’t have to care. There’s no real penalty for failing to respect the Access to Information law.

If the government spent twice the money on a functioning Access to Information system, it would be well worth it. Instead, over decades, Ottawa has built – by design and by accident – a system that is effectively a machine to deny and delay.

Source: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

Filed under Government, Immigration Tagged with ,

After feds lift 20-hour work rule for international students, immigration consultant calls move ‘short-sighted’

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Worse than short-sighted, makes a mockery of issuing permits for study purposes and essentially is encouraging low wage and low skilled immigration as others have noted. More critical commentary needed and media should not only focus on the activist perspectives:

While the federal government’s move to lift restrictions on how long international students can work in a week is being applauded by many, an immigration consultant in Windsor, Ont., is concerned it could do more harm than good.

In an effort to address Canada’s labour shortage, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced Friday it would be expanding employment limits for international students with off-campus work authorization.

Currently, international students are permitted to work 20 hours per week. The only time of year when that restriction does not apply is during scheduled breaks, such as reading week or summer and winter holidays.

Starting Nov. 15 until the end of 2023, there will no longer be an “upper limit” on how many hours they can work. The new directive applies to those who have submitted a study permit application as of Oct. 7, 2022.

“This means that more than 500,000 international students who are already here in Canada are going to be eligible to work more if they choose to do so,” said Fraser.

University of Windsor master student Kenil Maniya said, on any given day, he finds himself with free time that could be better spent making money at his job. But when he’s already worked 20 hours that week, it’s not possible.

“I’m really happy that we can tell our manager we are ready to work more. We are always ready to give our best,” said Maniya.

He added there’s no reason why the federal government should not be using international students who are itching to work to fill the country’s labour shortage.

“When students come, some of them take a loan back in their home country so they have to manage their finances over here,” he said.

“Utilizing the current student resources will make the students happy in Canada.”

According to immigration consultant Amanjit Verma, however, the federal government’s new policy is “short-sighted.”

“The fact that there was a limit of 20 hours was a bit of a blessing in disguise,” said Verma, adding the time restriction helps international students achieve a work-school balance.

She also has concerns about the information international students receive in their home country before coming to Canada and how the new policy may reinforce that.

“I’ve been amazed and saddened by when these students come and tell me the kind of immigration advice they got from their international student advisor who has no idea how IPA (Immigration and Refugee Protection Act) and everything else works,” she said.

In Verma’s experience, she said, one of the most common “refusal grounds” for postgraduate work permit applications is a student not able to maintain full-time academic status — and many students do not realize that.

“So if someone who’s now working more than 20 hours, because they’re authorized to do that off-campus, goes part-time or reduces his course load, it will negatively affect his ability to get that work permit that will get him his PR (permanent residency) later on,” said Verma.

“I’m just concerned about repercussions for the students with this new policy,” said Verma.

As for Maniya, the India-born student said he is trying his best to achieve a healthy work-school balance and added he’s just happy he no longer has to circle scheduled breaks from school on his calendar until the end of next year.

“We always ask our boss during those times to please provide us with a full-time schedule,” said Maniya, adding he will often “multitask” and work on school tasks while on the job.

“It’s stressful a bit but lifting the hours will be good for us. It’s nice we don’t have to wait for reading week anymore.”

In a statement, Migrant Workers Alliance For Change applauded the lifting of working hours, saying the group has been campaigning the government to do so in the name of “labour rights and mobility.”

“Removing the limit on hours of work while studying gives student migrant workers the power to leave bad jobs, speak up against exploitation and mistreatment, and freedom and flexibility to make decisions about their work,” the group said in a statement.

Source: After feds lift 20-hour work rule for international students, immigration consultant calls move ‘short-sighted’

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Trichur: Why Danby’s CEO is worried about refugee sponsorship as Canada teeters toward a recession

2022/10/08 Leave a comment

Of note, including the warning regarding the impact of a possible economic slump:

At a time when business leaders are bracing for a recession, Jim Estill is concerned about more than just his company’s bottom line.

The chief executive officer of Danby Appliances, a Guelph, Ont.-based manufacturer and distributor of household appliances, is also worried that an economic slump will further complicate efforts to sponsor and settle refugees.

Not only is the Canadian economy slowing, it has shed jobs for three consecutive months. Companies are still hiring, but the unemployment rate has climbed to 5.4 per cent.

That’s why Mr. Estill – who in conjunction with Danby, has sponsored hundreds of refugees since 2015 – is watching the cooling labour market with trepidation. After helping people from all over the world – including Syria, Congo, Myanmar, Venezuela, Afghanistan and Ukraine – he knows a recession will make it harder for refugees to find work and start new lives in Canada.

“If we end up with an unemployment rate that was higher, I could see people in the general population resenting refugees‚” he said during an interview at The Globe and Mail’s Growth Camp event for Canada’s top-growing companies.

As Mr. Estill points out, he and others faced little societal resistance to bringing in refugees when this country appeared to be swimming in unfilled jobs.

“Nobody was coming and taking your job. Because, okay, did you want the job at McDonald’s? No, there’s no lineup to take the job,” Mr. Estill said.

But social sentiments can shift during tougher economic times.

Sure, some of it is rooted in racism – but those people would have a problem with refugees even if GDP growth was going gangbusters.

Other folks, though, worry about the availability of jobs and affordable housing for their relatives and friends in a sputtering economy. That means a widely expected recession is shaping up to be a critical moment for refugee sponsorship and settlement in Canada.

History teaches us that newcomers often struggle to find and keep jobs during economic contractions. The COVID-19 downturn, for instance, disproportionately affected immigrant women in low-wage jobs.

“Immigrants often have more negative labour market outcomes during recessions than those born domestically,” a 2022 study by Statistics Canada states. It also notes that entering the labour market during a recession can result in a “scarring effect” that hurts immigrants’ earnings for years.

There’s not much research that focuses on refugees. But a 2019 Statistics Canada studydid track outcomes for 830,000 refugees from 13 countries.

Although it found “substantial” employment rates five years after their arrival, it also concluded their earnings varied based on their countries of origin.

“Ten years after entering Canada, the refugee groups with the highest earnings (i.e., from the former Yugoslavia, Poland and Colombia) earned roughly double what those with the lowest earnings did (i.e., from Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China),” the study said.

A separate Statscan paper, published in 2020, found that privately sponsored refugees – such as those helped by Mr. Estill – tend to have higher employment rates and earnings than government-assisted refugees – even if they have lower levels of education.

Although Mr. Estill does not permanently employ every adult he sponsors, Danby’s 90-day program provides them with short-term work, English lessons, assistance with résumé writing and finding job coaches.

”It’s not government money that is that is paying for these people, it’s private money. It’s my money that’s paying to settle them, so it doesn’t cost taxpayers,” Mr. Estill said.

That underscores the importance of private refugee sponsorships, including those undertaken by individual entrepreneurs and corporations.

Danby is not alone in its efforts to help displaced people.

Companies including Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc., National Bank of Canada, Bombardier Inc., KPMG Canada and Stingray Group Inc. have committed to sponsoring Ukrainian refugees displaced by the Russian invasion – but so many others also need help.

Mr. Estill, for one, is calling on the federal government to allow more refugees to enter the country.

Canada was the first country to introduce a private sponsorship program more than 40 years ago. But even so, getting privately sponsored refugees into the country can take years, which is why Mr. Estill advises other executives the program will not address their company’s short-term hiring needs.

He’s right to encourage others to think about the long-term benefits to Canada.

After all, some former refugees, such as Rola Dagher, a Lebanese-Canadian who is currently global channel chief at Dell Technologies, have gone on to make great strides in the business world. She came to Canada via Cyprus.

That brings us back to Corporate Canada. Which companies will be next to offer refugees a lifeline during these uncertain times?

“My problems are very first-world problems,” Mr. Estill explains. “It’s that we might be going into a recession. Oh no, my sales might not be as high as I’d like them to be. But they’re first-world problems.”

Thank you, sir. Well said.

Source: Why Danby’s CEO is worried about refugee sponsorship as Canada teeters toward a recession

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Canada’s Immigration Problem: Not Enough Homes for Newcomers

2022/10/08 Leave a comment

A classic example of immigration policy failing to account for its impact on other sectors. IRCC’s annual report to Parliament on immigration is largely silent on these. Externalities in economist jargon, intersectionality in social science jargon.

Canada’s bid to attract a record number of immigrants, required to fill job openings and drive economic growth, has run into a bottleneck: There aren’t enough residences to accommodate these newcomers.

Immigration into Canada is on pace to hit a record high in 2022 of 431,000, following the entry of about 405,000 the previous year, and the country is targeting entry of another 900,000 newcomers in 2023 and 2024 combined. Because of immigration, Canada’s population over the past half-decade grew at almost twice the pace of its Group of Seven peers, Statistics Canada said.

The aggressive intake, though, has had repercussions for Canada’s housing market, which among G-7 countries has the lowest number of dwellings per capita, economists at Bank of Nova Scotia calculate.

Population growth, a shortage of housing stock and low interest rates helped push up house prices in Canada’s biggest centers, prompting would-be buyers to look farther afield and drive up prices in smaller, far-flung communities unaccustomed to housing booms. The cost of a single-family detached dwelling has doubled over the past decade, according to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association. Data collected by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas indicate Canada had, until recently, recorded some of the fastest growth in house prices among major developed economies.

And the pressure from immigration on housing keeps coming. In the second quarter, Canada recorded the fastest population growth over a three-month period since 1949, when Newfoundland and Labrador joined the country as its 10th province. Immigration accounted for 95% of that growth. Overall, Canada’s population sits at 38.9 million, up from 34.7 million a decade ago, with immigrants representing more than one-fifth of the populace.

“We can’t keep up with the amount of immigration coming to the country,” said Christopher Alexander, president of the Canadian unit of Re/Max Holdings Inc., the global real-estate listing company with 140,000 agents worldwide.

A rush is now under way among Canadian officials to build housing units and ease supply constraints. “There was a lack of forward thinking, lack of planning on the housing side, on what the actual [housing] need was going to be,” said Abe Oudshoorn, a professor at Western University’s nursing school in London, Ontario, and leader of a research group that since 2016 tracked the arrival of 51 immigrant families into Canada and their path to acquiring housing. He said the families his research group tracked remain stuck in housing that is either too costly or too small for their growing families.

Kanishka Noorzai and his wife, his four sons, his parents and his younger sister arrived here in February, from Afghanistan via Albania, and settled in the Waterloo region, an urban center of a half-million people west of Toronto. After a monthslong search that took him to apartments, townhouses and other domiciles, he found a three-bedroom bungalow—at a cost of nearly $3,000 a month for a one-year lease, or “really, really above our budget,” said Mr. Noorzai, 43 years old. He is currently working part time as a security guard but is seeking full-time hours.

“I really was surprised,” he said, “because I did not think it would be that difficult to find a house in Canada. It was a nightmare.” He has heard from friends who fled Afghanistan to the U.S., where they found reasonably priced housing. The bungalow he settled on isn’t ideal, Mr. Noorzai said, “but at least it’s better than a hotel,” where a local immigration agency had put his family up during their housing search.

Real-estate agents, home builders and economists say housing starts—which last year hit their highest level in over four decades—have to accelerate further to deal with immigration-fueled demand, against a backdrop of higher material costs and a labor shortage in the construction industry.

Mike Moffatt, senior policy director at the University of Ottawa’s Smart Prosperity Institute, a think tank, said one reason housing starts lagged is because regional and local officials underestimated population growth and overestimated the amount of housing stock. “Our zoning laws were set for a slow-population-growth country. When our population started growing, our regulatory environment didn’t adapt to that reality,” he added.

The national housing agency, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., said the country will require 3.5 million additional homes above current home-building projections by 2030 to restore housing affordability.

“It takes multiple years to increase housing supply to accommodate the sudden increase in immigration,” said Aled ab Iorwerth, CMHC’s deputy chief economist.

Representatives for Canada’s immigration and housing ministers said officials work closely with provincial and municipal governments in setting annual immigration targets, and the government has provided financing to help regions deal with immigrant-fueled housing pressures.

“Newcomers play a crucial role in the future of our communities and our economy, and we do everything we can to set them up for success,” the spokespeople said.

Canada intends to spend 10 billion Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of about $7.3 billion, to help double home construction over the next decade. Some of the money will be used to encourage municipalities to change zoning laws. Ottawa also wants to tie access to funding for municipalities for services such as public transit and wastewater management to a pledge to increase housing supply. The city of Toronto, a magnet for immigrants, recently allowed the building of self-contained, residential dwellings in backyards, or so-called garden suites, to help alleviate the housing crunch.

Hefty Bank of Canada rate increases this year have triggered a sharp decline in real-estate activity and a deceleration in annual house-price growth, though economists say immigration, and a trend toward smaller households as the population ages, will put a floor on the current price drop.

As for Canada’s rental market, it is tightening in major urban centers, reflecting immigration trends and house prices still at elevated levels. The average rent for all property types across Canada in August rose 11.1% from a year ago to nearly C$2,000, or the highest level in three years, according to data from Rentals.ca.

“Immigration has to be throwing gasoline on the on-fire rental market,” said Scott Ingram, a Toronto-based real-estate agent. Annual rent increases in Toronto and its suburbs and exurbs range from 10% to 26%, said Rentals.ca.

The Toronto Region Board of Trade calculates that one-third of Canada’s immigrants settle in Toronto, the country’s largest metropolitan area with 6.2 million residents. For every two immigrants who arrive in Toronto, at least one resident leaves because of high housing costs and limited supply, said Craig Ruttan, the board’s policy director.

“We’re sort of in a Catch-22. We need the immigration because of the labor shortages and the need for new workers,” Mr. Ruttan said. “At the same time, we’re hearing and seeing the shortage in housing.”

Benjamin Tal, an economist at CIBC Capital Markets who researches real-estate trends, said he is worried Canada lacks the labor capacity to build the required housing. Canada’s focus has been in attracting educated, high-skilled immigrants, he said. “We need to rethink immigration in the sense we also need a segment of newcomers to be lower skilled—because that’s what the shortage is.”

The most recent Statistics Canada data indicate the construction sector had roughly 82,000 vacancies, for a vacancy rate of 6.5%, or above the national 5.4% average. BuildForce Canada, labor-market data provider, anticipates nearly a quarter of home-building workers will retire by the end of 2031, requiring companies to recruit over 100,000 new workers to fill the gap.

“The competition for workers is going to be incredibly intense,” said Bill Ferreira, BuildForce’s executive director.

Source: Canada’s Immigration Problem: Not Enough Homes for Newcomers

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Canada to temporarily allow international students to work more hours due to labour shortage

2022/10/08 Leave a comment

More and more, study permits are becoming effectively work permits, and the education objectives are being diminished:

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser says Canada will temporarily allow international students to work more than 20 hours a week to help address ongoing labour shortages.

Speaking at a coffee shop in Ottawa this morning, Fraser says the changes will start on Nov. 15 and be in effect until the end of 2023.

The labour market remains exceptionally tight, with nearly one million job vacancies reported in the second quarter of 2022.

Fraser also announced a pilot program to help automate the application process for students to extend their study permits.

That will allow for some applications to be automatically approved, but the new process will not automatically reject claims.

Fraser says the pilot is aimed at reducing immigration backlogs and freeing up officers to work on more complex applications.

Source: Canada to temporarily allow international students to work more hours due to labour shortage

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Ottawa working on program to regularize status of 500,000 immigrants

2022/10/08 Leave a comment

Hopefully, the government is not only consulting with advocacy groups (CBA is the only one quoted with some concerns):

The federal government is aiming to create a program that will provide a path to permanent residency for up to 500,000 immigrants who are working in Canada but do not have official standing.

The program would have unprecedented scope and apply to people whose visa or work permits had expired, and to those whose refugee applications may have been denied or blocked due to a moratorium on deportations to their country, according to Radio-Canada.

“We’re looking into ways to regularize people who live in Canada with a precarious status,” a government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Radio-Canada.

Up to 500,000 people could be eligible, according to the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

In his mandate letter to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser late last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked Fraser to “further explore ways of regularizing status for undocumented workers who are contributing to Canadian communities.”

Immigration Ministry spokesperson Rémi Larivière confirmed that work to complete that mandate “is underway,” and that the ministry is consulting with university researchers, experts and industry advocates.

Ministry officers have approached several advocacy groups in recent weeks and over the summer to consult them on the program, Larivière said. Potential criteria and a launch date are still unknown.

“We’re hoping for an inclusive program that will help many people, but it’s still vague,” said Hady Anne, a spokesperson for the Montreal-based Solidarity Without Borders.

While there have been programs to regularize the status of immigrant groups before, none have included so many people, says Rivka Augenfeld, a lifelong refugee advocate and the former president the Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes, a working table of Quebec immigration organizations

“It’s never been seen,” Augenfeld said of the forthcoming program’s expected scope. But she warned that for it to be effective, the program will need “the will of a good minister as well as the prime minister’s support.”

Temporary workers and asylum seekers would not be able to apply — including the thousands who have crossed at Roxham Road in Lacolle, Que., an unofficial crossing point increasingly popular among migrants entering Canada from the United States.

There is a large backlog in processing asylum applications, meaning many people wait years before even having a chance to tell their story before an Immigration and Refugee Board judge.

Lisa Middlemiss, the president of the Canadian Bar Association, says that while the new program would be a positive step for people with precarious status who’ve lived and worked in the country for years, it could appear unfair to migrants who have temporary status in Canada without the possibility of obtaining permanent residency.

“It’s ambitious and interesting, but it could generate a lot of frustrations,” Middlemiss said.

Larivière, the ministry spokesperson, said Ottawa would “continue to support inclusive immigration programs that meet Canada’s economic needs and fuel our growth.”

Would Quebec buy in?

Advocates such as Augenfeld and Anne fear Quebec’s government could intervene to limit the program within the province.

During the pandemic, when the federal government created a program allowing asylum seekers working in health care to apply for permanent residency, Premier François Legault’s government objected to expanding the criteria to workers who did not directly care for patients, such as cooking staff and cleaners.

The move excluded thousands and was strongly condemned by immigration advocates.

In the spring of 2021, Legault also declined to participate in another federal program offering essential workers and graduates a new pathway to permanent residency.

Legault was re-elected on Monday with a resounding majority of 90 out of 125 seats in the National Assembly.

He came under fire leading up to the election after he associated immigration with violence and extremism and later said it would a “bit suicidal” for Quebec to increase its immigration levels, insisting that accepting more immigrants entails a threat to the French language.

“We’re worried Quebec will complicate things,” said Anne of Solidarity Against Borders.

Augenfeld also raised the possibility that Quebec could “throw a wrench” into the plan for immigrants in the province.

Because the program is expected to include people from countries for which Canada has moratoriums on deportations, Haitian nationals, largely based in Quebec, could qualify.

Frantz André, who has helped hundreds of Haitians apply for asylum in the province, hopes Legault will be more open this time around.

“We’re hoping he’ll be more generous,” André said. “These people have been living in system that is broken for too long. They’ve demonstrated that they are real citizens.”

Reached by Radio-Canada, the Quebec premier’s office declined to answer questions on the topic.

“We’ve had no information from the federal government on the subject,” a spokesperson said.

Source: Ottawa working on program to regularize status of 500,000 immigrants

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New online immigration system’s many glitches are putting applicants’ futures at risk, say critics

2022/10/07 Leave a comment

Ouch. Hopefully just teething pains:

Having a tough time logging into your immigration application portal? Running out of space to fill out your information? Failing to upload a document because it’s oversized, or finding you can’t examine the files you just uploaded?

These are some examples of the frustrations that immigration applicants and lawyers say they have encountered in filing applications through the federal government’s online portals, as Ottawa forges ahead trying to modernize and digitize its antiquated system.

On Sept. 23, the immigration department kicked off its transition to mandatory electronic applications for most permanent-resident programs; people can no longer submit paper applications unless they are exempted due to an accessibility issue. However, some of the technical headaches predate that switch.

The stakes are high. A flawed application can be sent back months later for missing documents, omitted information or missed deadlines — delaying and jeopardizing a migrant’s chances for permanent residence.

Canadian immigration lawyers are urging Immigration Minister Sean Fraser to roll back the change and continue to accept paper applications at least until the system is perfected or proper technical support is put in place to assist users who need help.

“The government is … moving very quickly and the technology has not kept the pace,” said Lisa Middlemiss, chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration law section, who spoke to the Star in her personal capacity.

“The online PR (permanent resident) portal and online PR representative portal are fraught with technical glitches. And these glitches impede counsel or applicants from submitting their applications.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly hampered Canada’s capacity to process immigration applications because officials had to work from home, with limited access to traditional paper files and documents.

As of the end of July, there were 2.4 million immigration applications in the system, 1.3 million of which have already exceeded the standard wait times.

In response to surging backlogs, Fraser’s department ramped up the effort to expand its online applications beyond its temporary immigration programs (visitor visas, study permits, work permits) and what’s known as Express Entry, a management system to process permanent residence for selected skilled immigrants.

Last year, officials soft-launched several new online portals to accept electronic applications for a string of permanent-residence programs for family reunification and skilled workers. The government is spending $428.9 million over five years to deliver a new, departmentwide digital platform — but online applications remained optional until now.

Immigration department spokesperson Isabelle Dubois said officials have taken the necessary time to ensure the successful transition to online applications by thoroughly testing the platform, training employees and deploying it in a phased approach. A small-scale controlled group of applicants was used to test, adapt and improve the user experience before expanding it to a wider audience.

“Checks and balances were in place to make sure that any issues are identified and fixed before the system is rolled out more broadly,” said Dubois, adding that officials also closely monitor performance to avoid any system crashes.

She said there has been only one outage impacting clients, in June 2022, since the launch of the permanent residence portal.

Officials did identify an issue with the portal for authorized paid representatives, which prevented some representatives from receiving a confirmation email after submitting a payment and application, an issue Dubois said the department is trying to fix.

Ottawa immigration lawyer Tamara Mosher-Kuczer said some of the technical issues preceded the new portals but they have multiplied because now every application must be done online. Despite the department’s efforts to assist applicants, the online guidance for users is confusing to say the least, she said.

For instance, there are online forms that one has to actually fill out within the portal, and there are regular paper forms. However, the new guidelines say that those regular paper forms must now be signed digitally (using an encrypted and authenticated electronic fingerprint created by the signer).

“They say they must be signed in different places electronically, but they don’t exist on the form. On one of the forms, it says, ‘sign it digitally and type your name here.’ The instruction is on the form and not in the guide,” said Mosher-Kuczer.

“There’s no explanation of what digital means. So does it mean typing your name? Does it mean … print a PDF and then attach the electronic signature with a stamp in it? And then on one of the forms that now must be signed electronically, you can’t actually type in the signature.”

She said many lawyers have raised these issues with immigration officials over the past year but the majority of the problems have not been addressed. To safeguard the interests of clients, lawyers have to screenshot every page along the process for their records in case of disputes, which means an “insane” duplication of work, said Mosher-Kuczer.

The immigration department’s Dubois said applicants and their legal representatives can find answers to their questions on the department’s FAQ page. If no solution is found, they can ask for help through a web form.

In one recent post on the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association’s website, a Toronto lawyer said she submitted numerous web forms looking for help regarding an issue with the portal. Instead of responding to the questions, officials simply replied by emailing links to a web form.

The lawyer finally got a reply from the department, informing that her client had missed the deadline to submit a permanent-resident application. Officials apologized via email for the mishap “due to a technical issue with our online tools.”

Mosher-Kuczer said it can take weeks for people to get a response from immigration this way, if they get a response at all.

“Officials have been very clear that this is just their initial iteration and they will be building on these portals and making them better,” Mosher-Kuczer said. “But I don’t think you can force people and make it mandatory to use minimum viable products that have not been properly tested.”

There are also other issues such as the limit in some forms on the number of characters allowed, and problems with filing supplementary information without omitting something, creating grounds for applicants to be refused or pursued by officials for potential misrepresentation.

The system also restricts the size of documents one can upload, which becomes particularly problematic for complex cases, said Ronalee Carey, another immigration lawyer based in Ottawa.

“The new portal has no ability to upload (more) documents once it’s submitted. It’s basically an electronic courier service. They don’t communicate with you through that portal,” said Carey.

“You can only send an initial application. You can’t use it to submit any supplementary documentation.”

As it is, she said, the system is a “stopgap” way of accepting electronic applications, so immigration call-centre staff can manually determine which office is responsible for an inquiry.

Carey understands immigration officials must forge ahead with the digitization plan to address the backlog issue but tech support has to be there to support users 24/7, especially for overseas applicants in different time zones.

“My biggest issue is not being able to get into my portal. They need to stabilize the old system so that it’s not going offline so often and we’re not getting all of these error-403 messages,” said Carey, who was unable to access her own portal for over two weeks earlier this year, with requests (via web form) for help going unanswered.

Middlemiss said these problems are system-wide and her members are frustrated because immigration applications are time-sensitive; supporting documentations must be filed by deadlines or applicants might face devastating consequences.

“There are so many bugs and errors with the system. It also slows down everyone’s work enormously and it provides uncertainty. It would be better if we could continue with the paper-based option till all these problems are fixed,” said Middlemiss.

Source: New online immigration system’s many glitches are putting applicants’ futures at risk, say critics

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Raj: Ottawa should scrap the logistical and political nightmare that is the Safe Third Country Agreement

2022/10/07 Leave a comment

Interesting that while the government defends the STCA, a “senior” IRCC official is quoted as saying “in our estimation, it might not change that much, because what would happen is you wouldn’t have a Roxham Road, the people could cross at the ports of entry and they might therefore go to different ports of entry.”

Politically, of course, it appears to undermine the assertion that immigration is managed and controlled, a point that the Conservatives have hammered in the past before IRCC backlogs became a top issue:

It challenges our conception of who we are as a country, questions the values core to the Liberal Party of Canada and yet, Thursday, the federal government is expected to be at the Supreme Court defending a longstanding agreement with the United States that it should have ditched years ago.

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) aims to reduce the number of refugees crossing into Canada from the United States. By blocking access to asylum seekers at official ports of entries, however, it encourages them to use a back door, known to most of us as Roxham Road. That loophole is becoming untenable politically, especially in Quebec, and it’s causing logistical nightmares and year-long delays in refugee processing that even the government’s own immigration department suggests could be alleviated if the deal was scrapped.

Under the STCA, asylum seekers arriving by land at official crossings are turned away and handed back to U.S. authorities, where they often end up in detention in questionable conditions — unless they fall in specific exemption categories (e.g. if they have family in Canada, are an unaccompanied minor, or face the death penalty in the U.S.).

That’s at the core of the case before the Supreme Court. Does handing asylum seekers back to the United States — where they are detained, reportedly in freezing conditions without proper food, where they have fewer chances of being accepted as a refugee, and can face persecution when returned to their homeland — breach the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms? 

Refugee advocates say yes. The government says no. In fact, Ottawa has been unsuccessfully trying to get Washington to expand the STCA all across the border to address Canada’s current asylum crisis — a miniature one the Biden administration must envy.

The STCA came into effect in 2004, but it wasn’t until Donald Trump became president of the United States in 2017 and started deporting undocumented immigrants that people began to pay much attention. 

Eight days into Trump’s presidency, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”

It was on-brand for Trudeau and the Liberals who were elected two years earlier on a promise to bring in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing persecution.

The welcome mat was laid out at Roxham Road. This illegal border crossing is really a ditch at the Quebec-New York border that’s now surrounded by infrastructure to handle the thousands of people arriving there each month. It’s a well-publicized route to enter the country quickly and have your case heard (not so quickly) with the tiny wrinkle that you must break the law (in a consequence-free manner) to cross into Canada.

There are no statistics for RCMP interceptions of asylum claimants on the government’s website prior to 2017. But that year, the numbers in Quebec jumped from 245 in January to 1,916 in December. In total, 18,836 persons were apprehended crossing the border irregularly into Quebec. That yearly trend continued up until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down Roxham Road and the Canada-U.S. border in 2020 and asylum seekers were told to wait to make their claims. In December 2021, the numbers were back up and so far this year, 23,196 irregular migrants have been intercepted at the Quebec border — more than any other year. Perhaps, it’s pent-up demand from the pandemic, or perhaps it’s just the new normal settling in.

It’s no wonder Quebec politicians are alarmed. Coupled with Premier François Legault’s focus on identity politics and concerns over the survival of the French language, provincial politicians fervently denounced the situation on the election trail, demanding the road be closed.

Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, for example, suggested the federal government left Roxham Road open purposefully to “destabilize” Quebec society. 

Ottawa is uninterested in closing Roxham Road. It argues blocking access would lead asylum seekers to more dangerous crossings and could line the pockets of organized crime. Making it an official crossing would have the same impact — and is unlikely since the U.S. would have to agree to place agents there. (Imposing the STCA on the entire border would also lead migrants to find underground routes, but I digress.)

Instead, an official in Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s office said the situation is “difficult, but it’s also not unmanageable.”

Right now, the system is breaking down. It gives the appearance of queue-jumping (it’s not), but does reward for circumventing the law. It’s also costing Ottawa hundreds of millions of dollars — so far more than $761 million in accommodation, security, health and transportation costs. It’s squeezing Quebec’s resources too, and a lack of personnel is forcing asylum seekers to wait nearly a year or more before obtaining a work permit and many years before having their cases heard. 

In court, the federal government has argued scrapping the STCA would lead to a flood of asylum claims at Canada’s official ports of entry. 

But a senior official from Immigration and Citizenship, speaking to the Star Wednesday, said that while Ottawa is contingency planning in case that happens, “in our estimation, it might not change that much, because what would happen is you wouldn’t have a Roxham Road, the people could cross at the ports of entry and they might therefore go to different ports of entry.”

In fact, suspending the STCA might relieve the bottleneck at the Quebec crossing and spread the burden of supporting asylum seekers across provinces.

“It might help a bit,” the official said, noting that bringing Roxham Road migrants who intended to go to Ontario to that province had helped them get their interviews faster.

Of course, scrapping the deal won’t solve everything. “The numbers are such that even if they were spread across the country, it would still lead to some problems,” the official noted.

Canadians have shown themselves ready to do more to respond to refugee crises around the world. But the system must be seen to be fair. People must be processed quickly, and given the tools to help them support themselves.

In the meantime, if the government’s own department doesn’t believe there is pent-up demand beyond what we’re already seeing, why is the Liberal government insisting on defending the status quo?

Source: Ottawa should scrap the logistical and political nightmare that is the Safe Third Country Agreement

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