Lederman: Ken Burns has a lesson for Ron DeSantis

2022/09/23 Leave a comment

Great column and reminder:

I can think of a few things that could benefit anyone involved in orchestrating last week’s shameful stunt of sending planeloads of desperate, unsuspecting migrants from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. For instance: sitting them down for six hours and 38 minutes to watch Ken Burns’ The U.S. and the Holocaust, which aired on PBS this week.

I’m unsure anyone who hatched this cruel plan has ever watched a minute of PBS, seen a Ken Burns documentary – or seen a documentary, period – but this three-part series should be required viewing for them. (For anyone, really.)

The central point of the documentary (co-made with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein) is that while Americans might see their country as a haven for immigrants, and a saviour during the Second World War, the U.S. in fact closed its doors pretty tightly during that critical period – to Jews, in particular. The State Department, lobby groups such as one called America First (sound familiar?), and average Americans didn’t want Jews entering the country. When asked two weeks after Kristallnacht whether the U.S. should allow more Jews into the country, 70 per cent of respondents said no.

“The exclusion of people and shutting them out has been as American as apple pie” says historian Peter Hayes, in episode one.

(Canada is not the focus of this project, but we do earn a mention in our turning away of the MS St. Louis, filled with hundreds of Jewish refugees, who were then sent back to Europe.)

Episode two opens with a scene from a Nazi rally, before the war, but after Hitler had made his thoughts about the Jews clear.

“You will make a statement as to whether you consider my work to be right, whether you believe that I have been diligent, that I have spent my time decently, in the service of my people, and thus entitle me to say that what I am declaring here and now is what Germany desires, what the German people desire.”

A roar of approval fills the packed house, as the crowds stand, arms outstretched.

It was particularly chilling to watch that scene shortly after photos emerged of an Ohio Trump rally where some attendees stood in a similar pose. Even if their outstretched arms included a pointed finger, associated with Trump’s “America First” rallying cry, it was a stomach-turning image. It happened last Saturday.

The Burns documentary is about history, but it is also a warning about what is happening now. Not just the references to Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally (“Jews will not replace us!”) and the January 6 insurrection, including the guy in the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt, but about increasingly alarming attitudes toward immigrants.

The parallels are striking. Sickening.

During the Second World War, Americans were concerned about the influx of Jews; that they were being “replaced” – the narrator emphasizes this word, surely a nod to the Great Replacement Theory that certain far-right, white nationalist elements have adopted.

In 1941, U.S. senator Robert Reynolds stated: “If I had my way, I would today build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of this Earth could possibly scale or ascend it.”

It was a humanitarian crisis, yet there was great reluctance to help. There were open calls for the status quo – a “white, gentile-ruled United States.” There was suspicion about German-Jewish refugees entering the U.S.

“Something curious is happening to us in this country and I think it is time we stopped and took stock of ourselves,” wrote first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. “Are we going to be swept away from our traditional attitude toward civil liberty by hysteria?”

Something is happening – again, still – in the U.S. There is probably a better word for it than “curious.”

It should be shocking to every American, to every human being, that officials paid by tax dollars – that anyone, in fact – devised this nasty scheme for these migrants. That others agreed to it, carried it out. That human beings approached these vulnerable people, lied to them, loaded them onto planes and dumped them not where they were told they were going.

And these prankster perpetrators maybe even laughed, amongst friends, about it. And in the case of Donald Trump, claimed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had stolen the idea from him. Mr. Trump wanted the credit.

This is the country that put children in cages, children who want to live in America. Well, who sends a child out alone to try to cross a border, some people tut-tut.

I’ll tell you who: Desperate parents willing to do the unthinkable for a shot at safety for their children, a good life. It happened during what we now call the Holocaust. And it’s happening now.

Historian Deborah Lipstadt says in the film, “The time to stop a genocide is before it happens.”

The time to stop anti-immigrant madness is before it happens. The next best time is now.

Source: Ken Burns has a lesson for Ron DeSantis

Filed under Antisemitism, Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Documents senator sent to family trapped in Afghanistan weren’t authentic, says federal immigration department

2022/09/22 Leave a comment

Embarrassing for Senator McPhedran but good that IRCC caught the error. And I think the Senator has to be more forthcoming on which “trusted high level Canadian government official” reportedly provided advice.

That being said, understandable that those desperate to leave Afghanistan after its fall to the Taliban would resort to such means:

In the final days of a chaotic and inadequate government effort to rescue people from the Taliban last summer, Senator Marilou McPhedran and one of her staff members sent travel documents to a family attempting to flee Afghanistan. The documents, called facilitation letters, were supposed to help the Afghans bypass checkpoints that had been set up around Kabul’s airport, so they could catch one of the last evacuation flights out of the country.

The letters, copies of which were obtained by The Globe and Mail, have the appearance of official Canadian government documents. They say that each of the Afghans named on them has been “granted a VISA to enter Canada” and ask that the group be given “safe travel to the Hamid Karzai International Airport so that they can board their organized flight.”

A year later, the people who received those documents are still stuck in Afghanistan. And the Canadian government has at last explained why: The facilitation letters they received from the senator and her office were not authentic, and the people named on them had not been approved to come to Canada.

Behind the scenes, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the federal immigration department, had conducted an internal investigation and referred the matter to police.

Ms. McPhedran, a long-time human-rights activist and lawyer, says she was trying to help, and that she acted in good faith. But communications obtained by The Globe show that receiving the documents from her office could have hampered the Afghans’ efforts to escape by giving them the mistaken impression that they had been cleared for travel.

The family had formally applied for resettlement in Canada, but they would later discover their application had been lost. A second application, which they made this year, was rejected because Canada’s immigration programs for Afghans were already at capacity. The group remains at risk in Afghanistan, hunted by the Taliban.

“The use of inauthentic facilitation letters is a serious matter,” IRCC spokesperson Rémi Larivière said in an e-mailed statement. Following the department’s internal investigation, he added, it “made a referral to the appropriate law enforcement partners.”

The RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency declined to say whether they have launched investigations, adding that it is generally their policy not to comment on cases unless charges are laid.

E-mailed statements from IRCC about the matter do not name Ms. McPhedran, but two government sources said the internal investigation was directly related to the documents sent by the senator and her office. The Globe is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

One source said the government is not aware of anyone coming to Canada using the inauthentic documents, but they were unable to say if anyone had successfully used them to get out of Afghanistan.

In an interview, in e-mails to The Globe and in letters sent by her lawyer, Ms. McPhedran defended her efforts to save vulnerable Afghans, who are now subject to the Taliban’s brutal fundamentalist regime. She acknowledged using a template version of a government facilitation letter, but she denied that the documents were fake, or that she had used them in an unauthorized way.

She said the facilitation letter template was sent to her by a “trusted high level Canadian government official,” whom she declined to identify. She also would not say who added the names to the facilitation letters sent by her and her office. And she did not answer a question about whether she knew the Afghans had not been approved for resettlement in Canada.

“There is nothing fraudulent or illicit about any actions I took with regard to the Afghanistan rescue efforts last August,” she said in an e-mail.

”That my good faith efforts to help save Afghan lives are now being mischaracterized as unauthorized or an overreach is a sad commentary about our governance and nothing more than a politically motivated smear campaign.”

Despite repeated requests to IRCC and Global Affairs Canada, the government has refused to say whether any federal officials helped Ms. McPhedran. IRCC’s Mr. Larivière said he would not comment further, to “protect the integrity and privacy of investigations.”

The senator said she had worked around the clock with advocates and non-governmental organizations in August, 2021, as she tried to rescue the people most at risk from hard-line Taliban rule – namely, women and girls. She has spent most of her life fighting for women’s rights. In 1985, she was invested into the Order of Canada for her work ensuring equal rights for women were enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recommended her for a Senate appointment in 2016.

For years before the events of 2021, the Canadian government had promised Afghans who had worked closely with the country’s military and diplomatic missions in Afghanistan that they and their families would be able to resettle in Canada. In 2012, embassy staff in Kabul asked the government to launch a special immigration program for those Afghans. Such a program was finally created in July, 2021, just weeks before the Taliban took over on Aug. 15.

On the same day as the takeover, 10,000 kilometres away from Afghanistan, Mr. Trudeau called a snap election, and the government shuttered its mission in Kabul and evacuated its staff from the city.

The speed of Afghanistan’s fall surprised NATO countries. They were left scrambling to evacuate Afghans whose work with foreign governments put them at risk of Taliban reprisals.

Ms. McPhedran’s lawyer, Matthew Gottlieb, said the senator received the facilitation letter template from a government official on Aug. 25. Flights out of Afghanistan were about to end, and the federal government’s immigration programs for Afghans had buckled under overwhelming demand and a cumbersome application process. Advocates say the eligibility criteria were opaque, and that the process was difficult to navigate in a war zone.

At the time, Kabul’s airport was constantly surrounded by thousands of Afghans hoping to be among the lucky minority allowed to pass through military guards and board flights out. The stakes were so high that some resorted to desperate measures. In at least one instance, parents passed an infant to American soldiers over a barbed wire barricade. In other cases, people tried to cling to the outsides of planes as they took off. On Aug. 26, a suicide bombing at one of the airport’s entrances killed scores of civilians.

Ultimately, tens of thousands of people who had helped NATO in its war in Afghanistan were left behind. Some are being tortured by the Taliban.

Ms. McPhedran told The Globe she acted how anyone would have in a life-or-death situation. She said her efforts “were known by high level government officials.” In some cases, she said, those officials “participated directly in these rescue efforts.” She added that there are e-mails that show people in government knew about her work.

Her lawyer, Mr. Gottlieb, said the senator lacked “the authority or permission” to provide those e-mails.

Mr. Gottlieb added that she “understood, and was told,” that the facilitation letters “could and should be used in assisting Afghans to get to the tarmac” at the Kabul airport.

IRCC’s Mr. Larivière said the government was using facilitation letters in August, 2021, to help ensure Afghans were able to get through security checkpoints on their way to the Kabul airport. But he said authentic documents were sent only by Global Affairs Canada and IRCC, and only through official government e-mail addresses.

Ms. McPhedran and her staff member sent at least two identical e-mails to a recipient of the facilitation letters in Afghanistan. The messages said Ms. McPhedran had learned the person’s name from the New York-based Global Network of Women Peacebuilders, where the senator is a board member. The organization did not reply to questions from The Globe.

The e-mails were brief. They said there was “no guarantee” the attached documents would help. They directed the recipient to a specific gate at the Kabul airport and ended by saying: “Please do not discuss; just present this document first to any Canadian soldier – flights end on the 26th!” The Globe is not naming the recipient of the e-mails or the other people named on the documents to protect their safety in Afghanistan.

The Globe also obtained a letter sent by MP Michelle Rempel Garner, whose constituent’s family members in Afghanistan are the people who received the inauthentic documents.

Ms. Rempel Garner’s letter, dated July 7, was sent to the constituent, as well as Immigration Minister Sean Fraser, Global Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Ms. McPhedran.

The letter detailed almost a year of work that Ms. Rempel Garner’s office had done to help the constituent’s family navigate the immigration system. It said her office at first believed the facilitation letters were legitimate government documents and tried to help the constituent understand why some members of her family had been approved to come to Canada while others had not been.

Over the course of that work, the letter said, Ms. Rempel Garner’s office began to have concerns about the validity of the facilitation letters. Ms. Rempel Garner wrote that, despite 10 months of work and after corresponding with government officials more than 30 times, no one in government had said whether the documents her constituent’s family had received were legitimate.

The letter also said that, because the family had believed they possessed legitimate documents, they had come out of hiding to travel to the airport and exposed themselves to danger.

Mr. Fraser clarified the status of the facilitation letters in a response to Ms. Rempel Garner later in July. He said IRCC did not issue the documents, nor did it have a record of the first of the family’s two resettlement applications.

“Since finding no record of the application, IRCC took steps to understand the nature of the letter you raised and related communication,” Mr. Fraser wrote. “The use of inauthentic facilitation letters is a serious matter, and IRCC has treated the matter with the attention it deserves.”

Source: Documents senator sent to family trapped in Afghanistan weren’t authentic, says federal immigration department

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , , , ,

The future for tens of thousands of international students is in jeopardy. Here’s why

2022/09/22 Leave a comment

More on international study permit delays, yet another unfortunate example of government and IRCC failure in service delivery:

Leila Ghodrat Jahromi should have been sitting in class at Simon Fraser University this week, studying for her master of education degree.

Instead, the Iranian student is sitting in her temporary home in Turkey as she waits for a Canadian study permit some 14 weeks after applying for one.

“I have gone through a difficult path in my life,” said Ghodrat Jahromi, who sold off a marriage gift of land from her parents and her car to cover her tuition in Canada. “Studying abroad is a milestone in my occupation towards prosperity. This situation is shattering all my planning for the future.”

The 30-year-old is among tens of thousands of international students whose fall semester has been put in jeopardy thanks to a processing backlog of permits at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). As of Sept. 1, just days before classes began, 151,000 applications were still working their way through the system, according to IRCC’s latest figures, provided to the Star on Tuesday.

Universities and colleges, which have mostly returned to in-person learning, have been scrambling to offer alternatives.

But where online options don’t exist, schools are warning international students they need to be in seats this week — or else it will be too late to catch up.

Deferrals are being recommended at this point, and in most cases, tuition and residence fees are being refunded. But such deferrals come at a huge cost for both students and institutions.

“Canada is now getting a reputation on the global stage that perhaps it’s better to go to the U.S. or it’s better to go to the U.K.,” said Deborah MacLatchy, president and vice-chancellor of Wilfrid Laurier University, where at least 71 of its approximately 1,336 international students have been impacted by delays.

Canada has become the third-largest destination for international students after the U.S. and Australia. Post-secondary institutions across Canada, including Laurier, have been actively working to attract international students, who, as of 2020, made up 18 per cent of the student body nationwide.

Last year, a record 560,000 study permit applications — which are considered a step towards permanent residency — were processed by IRCC. In the first eight months of this year, the government finalized 452,000 study permits, but has struggled to keep up with demand.

A spokesperson at the University of Toronto, which has more than 20,000 international students, said that, as of last week, more than 600 permits for U of T students were still outstanding, and that the university “sympathizes with the frustration of those experiencing long delays in processing.”

Despite IRCC’s promise to hire 1,250 new employees to tackle the problem, the current wait time for a study permit from outside Canada is 12 weeks. Industry agents and consultants say processing in Canada is taking longer than in rival destinations, although IRCC told the Star that 62 per cent of the 150,000 applications in the system are within the service standard of 60 days.

IRCC told the Star it is “moving towards a more integrated, modernized and centralized working environment in order to help speed up application processing globally,” including the hiring blitz and digitizing applications.

“Honestly, I am starting to regret not having an alternative,” said Ghodrat Jahromi, who was accepted to the B.C. university in February and applied for her study permit in early June, together with her husband, who sought an open work permit so he could accompany her. They were asked for additional documentation in early July, which they provided immediately. “With such an academic background, I could simply have been admitted to top universities around the world with much less painful processing time.”

Having co-founded an online English academy, Ghodrat Jahromi is hoping to enhance her credentials by getting a M.Ed. in teaching English as an additional language. She said Simon Fraser, which has about 6,860 international students, has been helpful, but ultimately her program had to be completed in person, and time just ran out.

She has, regretfully, decided to defer to spring 2023.

Because she had already resigned from her job and broken her lease in Antalya, Turkey — where she had moved to escape Tehran’s pollution that was exacerbating her asthma, and to better access COVID-19 vaccines — she is now faced with a huge rent increase and finding work to tide her over to the next semester, assuming her permit comes through.

“Right now, I am applying to other countries, just in case,” she said, adding that through an online forum, she has been tracking similar frustrations from many other Iranian students facing delays.

University of Waterloo economics professor Mikal Skuterud has for weeks been receiving emails from students worried about what they’re missing. Of the 600 students in his Economics 101 course, about a fifth are international students.

For those still waiting on a permit, the window is nearly closed, said Skuterud: “Once you are missing two of 12 weeks, a sixth of the course, to me that’s a problem.”

Waterloo’s faculty of arts is recommending students not in class by Sept. 20 defer admission. Laurier, meanwhile, has suggested Wednesday as the last date to start in-person classes, given group work and assessment expectations.

“This is really quite unnecessary stress that we’re putting these students under. Why? Because the IRCC is a bit of a mess right now,” said Skuterud.

“This is a big, big move for many of them,” leaving behind families and homelands. And, he added, “students are paying a lot of money.”

Tuition for international students is, on average, three times higher than for domestic students, making it a vital revenue source in schools across the country. Undergraduate tuition for engineering at Waterloo, for example, is $66,000 per year compared to $18,000 for Canadian citizens.

At Laurier, permit delays this year alone could have a financial impact of $2 million, climbing to $10 million over the course of four years if those students choose to go elsewhere, according to MacLatchy.

“My worry is that if they’re not going to be able to come this year, by next year, will they have made other decisions about other opportunities?”

Although delays are not isolated to this year, MacLatchy said they are having a cumulative effect, and Laurier and other institutions like Waterloo have been advocating for solutions.

Having university-educated international students, said MacLatchy, is one of the “smartest ways for the country to get great talent” that will bring entrepreneurship and global experience to the workforce.

“We want (international students) to think of Canada as their destination for their education and also for their future careers and lives. To have visa delays be what stops them is really unfortunate.”

Source: The future for tens of thousands of international students is in jeopardy. Here’s why

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Mother loses appeal in custody case, Ontario court sends her three children to Nigeria

2022/09/22 Leave a comment

Of interest and an illustration of some of the complexities of international custody issues:

An Ontario appeal court has sent three children back to Nigeria and the custody of their father, rejecting their mother’s arguments that she could not get a fair shake in that country because of patriarchal attitudes and anti-gay prejudice.

The case of Olubukola Ajayi and Eyitope Ajayi is one of a growing number of disputes in Canada that set concerns about international child abduction against arguments about unfairness and discrimination in foreign jurisdictions.

Ms. Ajayi argued in court that she was justified in bringing their three young children to Canada without the father’s consent last November, because of discrimination, abuse (which Mr. Ajayi denies committing), patriarchal attitudes and the influence of her ex-husband’s family in Nigeria.

She asked the Ontario Superior Court to assume jurisdiction for the couple’s parenting issues and grant her sole decision-making authority over the children.

On the same day, Mr. Ajayi asked a Nigerian court to dissolve the marriage.

In Nigeria, homosexual acts may be punished with jail sentences. Mr. Ajayi made reference in a court document filed in Nigeria to Ms. Ajayi being linked to the LGBTQ community. That forced Ontario judges, in an initial ruling and an appeal, to grapple with how Nigeria’s legal system operates, and determine whether its courts would put the children first.

“I ran here just for a fair shot at protecting my rights as their mom,” Ms. Ajayi, who trained as a lawyer in Nigeria, said in an interview. Both she and her ex-husband are dual citizens of Canada and Nigeria, as are the children; Ms. Ajayi travelled to Canada to give birth to the children here.

But the courts here, she said, “did not understand how being a man in Nigeria gives all this extra privilege and power. I had never planned to alienate my children from their father and his family. But I knew that that’s what they wanted to do to me in Nigeria.”

Paul Riley, a lawyer for the father, said the decision showed that Ontario courts will stand up to child abduction.

“I think what the decision shows this week is that Canada is not going to embrace those who involve themselves in child abduction. You are not going to leave your country and then wrap yourselves in the warm embrace of the Ontario judicial system.”

Canada is a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which sets out the legal rules for returning children to their home jurisdiction. But Nigeria is not a member of the convention, and Ontario law provides that the province’s courts may take jurisdiction in such a case where it is satisfied that the foreign country does not put children’s best interests first.

A two-woman, one-male panel of Ontario’s Divisional Court released a written ruling this week explaining why they had upheld Family Court Justice Tracy Engelking’s decision to reject jurisdiction in the case. Having taken the children without consent, Ms. Ajayi needed to show they would suffer serious harm if returned to Nigeria, Justice Elizabeth Sheard, Justice Katherine Swinton and Justice David Aston said.

The judges said they accepted Justice Engelking’s ruling from May that Ms. Ajayi had failed to do so. Justice Engelking found that Ms. Ajayi had only ever said she might be asexual, and that Mr. Ajayi himself had testified in Ontario that he supports gay rights. An expert in Nigerian law testified that none of this would be a factor in determining the children’s best interests in a Nigerian court.

Justice Engelking also ruled the children were not at risk of harm with their father, noting that Ms. Ajayi had left the two older children in their father’s care for an extended period when she came to Canada to give birth. As for the father’s family’s influence, Justice Engelking pointed out that Ms. Ajayi’s mother is a superior court judge in Nigeria.

The children are now back in Nigeria. Ms. Ajayi said she will not return to Nigeria but her lawyers will fight in that country for primary custody for her, “and to have them returned back to me.” If they do not succeed, they will ask for video call access and holidays with Ms. Ajayi in Ottawa.

Nicholas Bala, a professor specializing in family law at Queen’s University, said that more mobile societies have produced growing numbers of international family law disputes.

“In the absence of persuasive evidence of abuse or discrimination, it’s appropriate to send these cases back to the country of origin – which also has the effect of telling people that Canada is not going to become a haven for child abduction,” he said.

He said it is also a “question of balance.” In some countries, politics may wrongly enter family-law disputes. “I think the court was satisfied that Nigeria in 2022 is not one of those countries.”

Ms. Ajayi’s lawyer Valerie Akujobi said it’s a challenge when Canadian courts have to make determinations based in part on attitudes and sentiments in a foreign jurisdiction.

“The court does try to strike the right balance; in this case, we just felt that certain aspects had been perhaps lost in translation.”

Source: Mother loses appeal in custody case, Ontario court sends her three children to Nigeria

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

CILA: “We Apologize for the Inconvenience”: A Cautionary Tale of IRCC’s Decision to Move PR Applications Online

2022/09/22 Leave a comment

Hopefully only teething problems but IRCC seems to have a number of them post-pandemic, not limited to digital services:

Excitement spread through our office upon learning that IRCC will resume Express Entry draws in July, after almost a one-year hiatus. In anticipation of this much-welcomed return, we made sure to review and update all our client’s profiles so that once the “we are pleased to invite you to apply for permanent residence” correspondence came in – we were ready.

After the first round of invitations, we had a few fortunate clients who had received such correspondence. We immediately began completing the eAPR’s and uploading documentation onto my authorized representative portal. For one client, however, each time we attempted to access the eAPR – we were met with a message from IRCC that their system was down as they are either updating the website or experiencing technical difficulties.

Given the frequency of portal glitches and technical issues myself and fellow immigration lawyers have experienced while using IRCC’s portal, I was not too alarmed and figured to try again later. Unfortunately, the technical issue did not resolve the following day, or even after performing the common ritual of clearing my browser history and using different search engines.

On its website, IRCC states that if you are experiencing any technical difficulties, you can submit a webform. If an application cannot be submitted online and requires accommodations, one can contact IRCC to request an alternative format. Following this advice, we submitted multiple webforms enclosing screenshots of the glitch, and requested for alternative instructions to submit the application given that Express Entry PR applications can only be submitted online.

None of our webform pleas for help and assistance received a response. Emails which were responded simply included links to IRCC’s webform. Calling the IRCC helpline is a task I would only assign as a form of punishment.

Alas – I receive an email response from the Immigration Representatives Mailbox:

“We regret to inform you that your client’s EE profile has now expired due to a technical issue with our online tools. You must create and submit a new EE profile and wait for another ITA to be issued before you can apply for permanent residence. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

This response is alarming, as it ultimately places the burden on the applicant to deal with the consequences of a dysfunctional portal. This response does not take into account that, perhaps, there was an expiring LMIA, work permit, English test results – or that the applicant’s score may not be high enough to make the CRS cut-off on a future round.

The response is also an example that supports the concern fellow Canadian immigration lawyers have expressed with respect to the recent announcement by IRCC, whereby it will be mandatory to submit most permanent residence applications online.

The ability to submit PR applications by paper or online has been imperative, given the poorly functioning platforms and lack of timely user technical support. It is not uncommon to see the ‘rep portal is down’ email in our inbox and responses to webforms which were submitted over 30 days prior. IRCC has been made aware of these issues, but fully functional portals and timely responses to calls for help remain to be delivered.

Document upload size along with symbol size limits on IRCC’s Permanent and Temporary Residence portals have led applications to be filed on paper versus online, as the difficulties in navigating these restrictions and lack of technical support caused undue stress and delays for the immigration lawyer community and their clients – especially when there are impending deadlines.

No system is perfect, and technological issues may occur with the various tools legal practitioners have the ability to utilize these days. What is problematic, however, is the lack of support and guidance available to both immigration law practitioners as well as to unrepresented clients when dealing with IRCC’s online portals. Most of the time, inquiries are not answered, or responses to critical inquiries are significantly delayed, which has led applicants to postpone their work, studies or even miss PR submission deadlines which ultimately decide the fate of their future in Canada

There is room for improvement in how IRCC’s technical capabilities can be facilitated. For example, IRCC can provide explicit instructions on their website to those who are experiencing technical issues with submitting an application by listing a designated email address or location to which the application can be sent via courier accompanied by screenshots or explanations. A designated, live support chat or inbox for communicating errors or glitches would also be welcome, especially in time-sensitive situations.

Until IRCC can assure the public that the platforms will be fully functional and there will be ways to access timely assistance in case of technical issues, it should pause the transition of moving PR applications to be fully digitized or allow paper applications to be submitted as an alternative method in the event applicants face technical challenges with IRCC’s portals.

Source: “We Apologize for the Inconvenience”: A Cautionary Tale of IRCC’s Decision to Move PR Applications Online

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Canadian banks look to newcomers as key source of client growth

2022/09/21 Leave a comment

Not really a new trend:

Canada is banking on newcomers to help keep the economy humming along, while banks themselves are eying the hundreds of thousands of people coming to the country every year as a key source of client growth.

Those efforts have been growing along with the number of newcomers, including more efforts to secure people as customers before they even arrive in Canada.

“We’re seeing it as a big focus across all categories of banks, not just the big banks,” said Abhishek Sinha, banking transformation leader at EY Canada.

“Whether you talk to the Big Five or you talk to the next tier after that, or even the credit union segment, newcomers and penetrating that market segment is super important.”

The efforts come as Canada has been welcoming record numbers of newcomers, with an aim to bring in 432,000 permanent residents this year, rising to 451,000 by 2024, while the first half of the 2010s saw the average number of newcomers sit around 260,000.

The segment, which the federal government says accounts for almost all of Canada’s labour force growth and roughly three quarters of population growth, has pushed banks to create partnerships like one recently announced between RBC and ICICI Bank, India’s largest.

“With immigration levels expected to rise to record levels, we’ve announced a collaboration agreement with ICICI Bank Canada,” said RBC chief executive Dave McKay on an analyst call in August.

Some student visa classes require students to put down cash deposits, and the program allows those to seamlessly be transferred to an RBC account in Canada. The program is starting with students but RBC wants to later expand the pipeline of account transfers to a wider field.

“As part of our agreement, ICICI Bank Canada will refer all newcomer clients to RBC over time, making it easier for them to open a bank account upon arrival,” said McKay.

The program, only the second initiative in another country for RBC after it launched a program with a separate focus on China a few years back, taps into an increasingly large source of newcomers, said Amit Brahme, head of the newcomer and cultural client segment at RBC, in an interview.

“We know that the international students segment is one of the fastest growing segments within different visa classes. So we’re really excited about the fact that we are going to be tapping into a growing segment.”

Overall, the number of international students coming to Canada more than tripled in the decade leading up to 2019, reaching 638,000. The pandemic then led to a dip in numbers with 2021 drawing about 622,000.

And while many students will only be in Canada temporarily, a growing number return as potential long-term clients. Statistics Canada says about three in 10 international students become landed immigrants within 10 years of arrival.

Other banks have also been ramping up their efforts, such as Simplii Financial last year rolling out a digital identity verification program that allows clients to open accounts before they even land in the country. Some efforts to secure clients before they come to Canada however, such as Scotiabank’s partnerships in China, go back more than a decade.

The rise of fintechs has also opened new avenues to solve old challenges for newcomers, such as using more global data and international bank partnerships to solve the challenge of credit histories, said Sinha.

“We’ve seen a few fintechs come up who are creating credit models which are based on a more holistic history of the individual than just their history in Canada, and that’s starting to get more mainstream traction.”

Efforts once people arrive in Canada also continue to evolve. Banks, such as CIBC at Toronto Pearson International, have established themselves at airports to be a first point of contact, while banks have also worked to expand and adapt their product offerings, including credit cards without a need for credit history, which is a key stumbling block for many.

At VanCity, the credit union’s efforts have included supporting financial literary courses to help both immigrants and refugees, while it also looks to help newcomers on the business side, said Gurpreet Jhaj, vice president of marketing.

“We support them with micro-financing. And we provide that with financing at favorable terms. And we look really beyond just credit history. We consider what their ambition, character determination and things like that.”

It also provides loans for newcomers to help them write exams to allow their foreign credentials to be recognized, a key barrier for many, and has also been working with the B.C. government to support arriving displaced Ukrainians.

Refugees, such as people fleeing the war in Ukraine, are set to make up about 77,000 of the wider permanent residency goals for this year, so it’s an important segment for banks while for those arriving a bank account is absolutely critical to getting established, said Effat Ghassemi, executive director of the Newcomer Centre of Peel.

“It’s like oxygen, they have to have a bank account.”

She said banks have helped out by bringing teams to the hotels where refugees are staying to help set them up with the accounts necessary to get government aid.

The biggest barrier really for newcomers is trust, said Ghassemi.

“Put yourself in their shoes, you know, they’re new, they came from war. They don’t trust anybody. They don’t trust government or banking.”

Banks are working to build up the trust factor in part by becoming general resources for clients. RBC has created hubs near cultural centres and on campuses where newcomers can get answers to all sorts of questions beyond banking such as getting a drivers’ licence or daycare, along with apps as general resources to get settled, as it works to differentiate itself in a tough market said Brahme at RBC.

“The space is extremely competitive, because newcomers are the source of new clients to majority of the organizations.”

Source: Canadian banks look to newcomers as key source of client growth

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Quebec election: Immigration becomes political fodder as parties spar over ‘capacity’

2022/09/20 Leave a comment

More takes on the Quebec immigration election debates. Appears, however, that immigration has receded somewhat as a focus of the campaign. But the hope of the Conseil du patronat for discussions “in a calm, factual and rational way” is likely a stretch:

The head of a major employers’ group in Quebec says an election campaign is not the time to have a serious discussion about immigration.

Campaign slogans and political messages aren’t suited for rational conversations about how newcomers contribute positively to the economy, Karl Blackburn, president and CEO of the Conseil du patronat du Québec, said in a recent interview.

“And we are very much aware that these are sensitive issues, particularly around language,” Blackburn said.

But three weeks in, party leaders have not shied away from putting immigration front and centre in the Quebec campaign. The debate has so far been su

Blackburn, meanwhile, says Quebec has the capacity — and desperately needs — to accept up to 100,000 immigrants a year in order to address labour shortages that are negatively affecting the quality, price and availability of goods and services across Quebec. That number is a non-starter for Legault, whose party has a commanding lead in the polls and who wants to keep the level of immigrants at 50,000 per year — the maximum, he says, that Quebec can integrate properly and teach French.

Political scientists and economists, however, say there isn’t any research that offers definitive answers to the question of how many immigrants a society — including Quebec — can welcome.

For Pierre Fortin, professor emeritus of economics at Université du Québec à Montréal, Blackburn’s number is “wacky” and would bring “administrative chaos” to society. Increasing immigration levels to more than 80,000 a year, he said, risks creating “xenophobia and racism” toward immigrants and pushing voters into the arms of people who would drastically cut the number of newcomers to the province.

But Mireille Paquet, political science professor at Concordia University, strongly challenged that theory, adding that the research is inconclusive.

“What we know for sure,” she said, “is that what causes the backlash (against immigrants) is not, per se, the number of immigrants but feelings of insecurity in the non-immigrant population, and that feeling can be brought up by public policies, such as cutting social services … it’s something politicians can address,” she said in a recent interview.

Paquet said the idea that there is a limited “capacity to integrate” is often touted by restrictionists and people on the right as a reason to curtail immigration. The debate, she said, should not be around the rate of arrival or the number of annual immigrants, but on what the government is going to do to ease feelings of insecurity in the local population.

“It also depends on what is our expectation of integration,” she said. “What is good integration? That has changed over time, and that will continue to change.”

The debate over immigration during the election campaign has also focused on whether more newcomers would help solve the labour shortages plaguing the province. 

Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon says it won’t, and he is promising to cut immigration to 35,000 a year and only accept people who already speak French. The Liberals’ number is 70,000 newcomers a year, and Québec solidaire says it wants to accept up to 80,000 immigrants a year in order to have enough people to help build its ambitious climate change projects.

Fortin is adamant that immigrants do not address labour shortages but could even exacerbate them. Even if a company solves its labour problems by hiring foreigners, he said, those newcomers will be looking to spend money, consume services and products, seek health care, and enrol their children in school.

That extra spending creates demand and requires more production from Quebec companies, Fortin said. “You solve a shortage in one area and it reappears in another.”

His solution, however, is not politically palatable — especially during an election campaign. The only way to solve labour shortages, he said, is to increase unemployment.

Blackburn, for his part, is calling on whichever party wins on Oct. 3 to convene a forum with stakeholders to discuss — in a calm, factual and rational way — the best way to address the labour shortages that he says are causing billions in dollars of losses to companies across the province.

“We should not see immigrants as consumers of public services,” Blackburn said. “They are here to contribute to the economic vitality of Quebec.”

Source: Quebec election: Immigration becomes political fodder as parties spar over ‘capacity’

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Increase in Cuban Migration Has No Historical Precedent

2022/09/19 Leave a comment

Interesting and significant shift:

When it comes to immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border, media coverage tends to focus on the increasing numbers of migrants attempting to cross it. What’s missing from the conversation, however, is the changing demographics of these migrants.  

Historically, the majority of people who attempted to cross the southwestern border between border crossing stations — officially called ports of entry, or “POEs” — were Mexican nationals. This began to change in recent years, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) began encountering  large numbers of Central American migrants also attempting the crossing. Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are known as the Northern Triangle, and many migrants from these countries frequently attempted the crossings in family units. 

Beginning in 2020, however, CBP began to encounter increasing numbers of immigrants from outside Mexico and the Northern Triangle. According to CBP data, the number of migrants from countries other than these four has increased 11,000% since 2007, with the sharpest increase occurring in the past two years. Border Patrol apprehensions involving migrants from countries beyond Mexico and Central America’s Northern Triangle were 9% in fiscal year 2019, but climbed to 22% in 2021 and 40% in 2022. In fact, encounters by CBP with migrants from these “other” countries are on track to outpace encounters with migrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle. 

Migrants from these “other” countries come from a handful of nations, including Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Each of these countries has seen dramatic increases in encounters at the southwest border over the past two years. The rapid increase in Cuban migrants is particularly notable. 

Cubans who remain on the island face widespread poverty, inflation, power blackouts, basic supply shortages, and intense government repression following massive anti-government protests in 2021. These conditions are driving a historic increase in Cuban migration, surpassing the 1980 Mariel boatlift. CBP has reported nearly 176,000 encounters with Cuban migrants at the southwest land border since October. 

Hundreds of unaccompanied Cuban children have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in the past year, as more parents appear to be sending their children to safety amid deteriorating conditions in Cuba.  

Since October 2021, CBP reported 662 encounters with unaccompanied Cuban children at the southern border, compared to 32 encounters in the FY 2021 and 57 encounters in 2020, marking an increase of 1,969%. 

In the midst of these increased numbers, USCIS has restarted the Cuban Family Reunification Parole program “to provide a safe, orderly pathway to the United States for certain Cuban beneficiaries of approved family-based immigrant petitions.” 

Source: https://www.boundless.com/blog/boundless-weekly-immigration-news/

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U.S. Population Growth Has Nearly Flatlined. Is That So Bad?

2022/09/16 Leave a comment

Well worth reading, a useful and needed counterpoint to all the fretting about demographic decline and an aging population. Canadian policy makers and others need to think more about how to manage an aging population that mainly advocating for increased immigration to slow the trend:

“A Demographic Crisis.” “A Blinking Light Ahead.” “The Death of Hope.” Those are some of the dire headlines that have been written in recent years about the sluggish pace of U.S. population growth, which in 2021 fell to its lowest rate ever — just 0.1 percent.

While the pandemic played a major role in driving last year’s decline, the country’s population growth has been slowing for much of the last decade, depressed by declining fertility rates, a surge in “deaths of despair” and lower levels of legal immigration.

But is a population slowdown as much of a crisis as some have made it out to be, or could it actually bring welcome changes? Here’s a look at a longstanding demographic debate.

For a population to replenish itself in the absence of immigration, demographers estimate that there must be, on average, about 2.1 births per woman. In the United States, the fertility rate has been consistently below that level since 2007. And it’s not alone: While some countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are still growing rapidly, the global average fertility rate has been falling for decades, and even China’s population, the world’s largest, may very soon reach its peak.

As a result, the United Nations now predicts that the human population will start declining by the end of the century. (Other demographers have projected an even earlier peak.) Some countries — notably Japan and South Korea, whose fertility rates are among the lowest in the world — are already shrinking.

Why are fertility rates falling? The trend is typically attributed to a combination of economic prosperity, which leads to lower infant mortality, and greater gender equality. “As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born,” Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun reported for The Times last year. Because many of those babies then go on to have smaller families than their parents did, they added, “the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff.”

It’s a stark reversal of the demographic trends of the 1900s, during which the coincidence of high fertility rates and lengthening life spans caused the global population to nearly quadruple in size, from 1.6 billion to six billion. And for much of the 20th century, it was the specter of overpopulation, not stagnation or decline, that animated dystopian visions of the future.

Which raises a question: How much stock should we really be placing in population forecasts? As David Adam explained in Nature last year, medium-term projections are usually quite accurate, as most people who will be alive in 20 to 30 years have already been born.

But over the longer term, projections diverge and become less reliable, in part because technological and environmental shocks that could cause demographic swings are impossible to predict, as Vox’s Kelsey Piper has written: “If, for example, climate change drives currently developed countries back into poverty and drives their birthrates back up, the estimates are poorly equipped to account for that. On the other hand, if more reliable contraceptives are developed and virtually end unintended pregnancies the world over, birthrates could fall much faster than predicted.”

For many futurists, the primary challenge posed by declining population growth is economic: When people live longer and have fewer babies, the population ages, leaving fewer working-age adults to support a country’s swelling number of retirees.

“Older people are more prone to illness, and many rely on publicly funded pensions and eventually require caregiving,” Stephanie H. Murray wrote in The Atlantic in February. “Many countries, including the U.S., are already struggling to meet the needs of the rapidly growing elderly population.”

This can create a kind of national languishing, as the Times columnist Ross Douthat argued last year: “If you assume that dynamism and growth are desirable things (not everyone does, but that’s a separate debate), then for the developed world to be something more than just a rich museum, at some point it needs to stop growing ever-older, with a dwindling younger generation struggling in the shadow of societal old age.”

Aging may take a particularly heavy toll on middle-income countries. Historically, as industrialized countries have become richer, their labor force grew more rapidly than their nonworking population, providing a “demographic dividend.” But in some developing countries, including Brazil and China, fertility rates have fallen to around or below replacement level much more quickly than they did for their higher-income counterparts, and their populations now face the risk of getting old before getting rich.

A population slowdown can be a symptom of other national problems. For example, as Derek Thompson has noted in The Atlantic, while declining fertility is often a sign of female empowerment, it can also be a sign of its opposite, as suggested by the growing gap between how many children Americans say they want and how many they have. “There are many potential explanations for this gap,” Thompson wrote, “but one is that the U.S. has made caring for multiple children too expensive and cumbersome for even wealthy parents, due to a shortage of housing, the rising cost of child care, and the paucity of long-term federal support for children.”

To see how population stagnation or even decline need not spell disaster, you can look at countries where it’s already occurring, as Daniel Moss, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian economies, did last year. Take Japan: “Despite the caricature of the country as an economic failure in the grip of terminal decline, life goes on,” he wrote. “True, growth in overall G.D.P. has been fairly anemic in past few decades, but G.D.P. per capita has held up well.” What’s more, he added, Japan’s unemployment rate is very low and has remained so throughout the pandemic (it was 2.6 percent in July).

Japan’s example lends some credence to the view of Kim Stanley Robinson, a widely acclaimed science-fiction writer, who believes that an aging population with a smaller work force could actually lead to economic prosperity. “It sounds like full employment to me,” he argued in The Washington Post last year. “The precarity and immiseration of the unemployed would disappear as everyone had access to work that gave them an income and dignity and meaning.”

The challenges of an aging population could push countries to pursue policies that improve quality of life:

  • One 2019 analysis estimated that if the European Union eliminated inequities in educational attainment and in women’s and immigrants’ labor force participation, it could cancel out more than half of the labor force decline it might otherwise experience by 2060.
  • Another way governments have responded to labor shortages caused by population aging is by investing more in the automation of work, an M.I.T. study found last year. As The Times’s John Yoon reported last month, “The prospect of a shrinking work force has put South Korea at the forefront of developing robots and artificial intelligence for the workplace.”
  • In the view of the Times columnist Paul Krugman, the biggest economic problem of an aging population isn’t increased strain on the social safety net, but rather weak investment from businesses anticipating reduced consumer demand. If that scenario comes to pass, though, “why not put the money to work for the public good?” he wrote last year. “Why not borrow cheaply and use the funds to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, invest in the health and education of our children, and more? This would be good for our society, good for the future, and would also provide a cushion against future recessions.”

Fertility rate declines may also be making climate change easier to combat, albeit not in the way many think: As Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post has explained, fossil fuel consumption is driven primarily by increases in affluence, not the number of people on the planet per se. So while population growth in poor countries hasn’t led to large increases in planet-warming emissions, a sudden baby boom in high-income countries like the United States almost certainly would.

For some demographers, the prospect of population stagnation or decline isn’t any more a cause for alarm than population growth was; it’s simply a change that governments will need to manage. “Rather than panicking or trying to forestall this for ourselves,” Leslie Root, a demographer and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in The Washington Post last year, “we should be thinking about what that transition will mean globally — both for rich countries and for poor ones that will be far more burdened by aging populations than we will.”

Source: U.S. Population Growth Has Nearly Flatlined. Is That So Bad?

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Activists push Trudeau to broaden permanent-residency plan for undocumented migrants

2022/09/16 Leave a comment

As activists do:

As MPs return to business after the summer break, advocates are calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to offer a pathway to permanent residence for the estimated 500,000 undocumented migrants in the country.

“The next Parliament must not wait. It cannot wait. The time for comprehensive, immediate and inclusive regularization is right now,” Syed Hussan of the Migrant Rights Network told a news conference on Wednesday to launch the call for actions from Ottawa.

“Half a million people in this country are undocumented because of failures of immigration policy. Finally, Mr. Trudeau now has the historic opportunity to begin to correct these wrongs and be remembered for ensuring equal rights for these members of our society. There is cross-country support for such a move.”

Since the spring, the minority Liberal government, backed by the New Democrats, has been quietly working on a so-called regularization plan for non-status migrants, many of them precariously employed with often-exploitative jobs in construction, cleaning, caregiving, food processing and agriculture.

They face a range of vulnerabilities, including poor mental and physical health caused by social isolation and abusive working conditions.

The Star has learned that the new program builds on a previous smaller-scale initiative that helped undocumented construction workers obtain permanent status in Canada, and would likely focus on workers in particular sectors.

However, advocates are urging the government to take a broader-based approach.

“We are all here to insist that absolutely each and every undocumented person should be included. No one should be left behind. Equality is equality. And there can be no exceptions. All exceptions are discrimination,” said Hussan.

The Migrant Rights Network’s campaign is endorsed by 480 civil society organizations, including Canada’s largest human rights, climate, health, legal and labour groups.

Caroline Brouillette of the Climate Action Network Canada, a coalition of 140 groups, said the climate crisis forces more and more people from their homes, and ensuring equal rights for migrants is fundamental to climate justice.

“Transforming our unequal, exploitative system into one that ensures dignity and safety for all is a key step toward addressing Canada’s climate debt,” she said. “We urge the federal government to seize this opportunity.”

Like the majority of undocumented residents who came to Canada legally, Danilo De Leon arrived in Edmonton in 2009 from the Philippines under the Temporary Foreign Worker program as a cleaner.

In 2018, he was issued an exclusion order by border enforcement agents after his work permit and temporary resident permit expired.

“We came here to work because you need workers. We are more than just workers that feed your economy. We are human beings who have the rights to live in Canada with dignity,” said the father of two, whose deportation was only recently stayed by the court. “We need a regularization program that does not discriminate.”

Advocates say more and more migrants are arriving in Canada as temporary residents, but many struggle to extend their stay to gain permanent residence.

“Most temporary permits, whether a work permit, study permits or refugee-claimant permits, are the only gateways to Canada for low-waged and racialized people. But these pathways are actually a path off a cliff,” said Hussan.

“At one point or the other, these permits expire and cannot be replaced. The only choice, which is no choice at all, is living in Canada without any status or returning to a country that you may not be able to live in, whether it’s to escape war or poverty, climate catastrophe or discrimination.”

The Migrant Rights Network recommends a moratorium on deportations and detentions, and a free and simple application process that can be easily completed without immigration advisers.

Rallies will be held this Sunday in 12 Canadian cities, including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to support the call for immigration justice.

Source: Activists push Trudeau to broaden permanent-residency plan for undocumented migrants

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