Asylum-seeker surge at Quebec border choking Canada’s refugee system, data show

2018/09/13 2 Comments

Good in-depth analysis of the numbers:

The wait time for a refugee claim hearing in Canada increased more than a third over the past two years, to 19 months, as more than 30,000 asylum seekers arriving via unauthorized border crossings placed significant pressure on the system.

Overwhelmed by the number of migrants, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) has only managed to finalize 15 per cent of the 27,674 asylum claims made by people who illegally entered Quebec – where the majority of the crossings took place, mostly at a single location near St. Bernard-de-Lacolle – between February, 2017, and this June.

The resulting backlog has created a growing queue for any and all asylum seekers. Under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1985 Singh decision, all refugee claimants on Canadian soil are entitled to an oral hearing.

Asylum seekers who cross illegally at the U.S.-Canadian border eventually face the same questions as all other refugee claimants: Are they genuine refugees, fearing persecution in their home countries? Data from the IRB show that less than half of the claimants in finalized cases – 1,885 – have been accepted as legitimate refugees in Quebec, significantly lower than the proportion for all refugee cases in Canada.

Canada has only deported a small number of the nearly 30,000 asylum seekers who
illegally entered Quebec through unauthorized border crossings since last year, accord-
ing to statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency.

The majority of border crossers have entered Canada through Quebec, mostly at an
unauthorized port of entry in St. Bernard-de-Lacolle. While a breakdown of adjudicated
cases was not available for Quebec, national statistics paint a picture of a refugee deter-
mination system that has been slow to finalize asylum claims.

But a separate data set from the Canada Border Services Agency shows that only a handful of those who have been denied refugee status have been deported. The CBSA said it had removed just 157 people who entered Quebec through unofficial border crossings since April, 2017 – about one in every 200. It said another 582 are being processed for deportation.

Canada-wide, the CBSA said it has deported 398 of the 32,173 people who crossed into Canada illegally since April, 2017. Of those, 146 were sent back to the U.S., while the rest were deported to 53 other countries, including Haiti (53), Colombia (24), Turkey (19) and Iraq (15).

Refugee lawyer Lorne Waldman said the relatively low number of deportations is simply an indicator of the system.

“It doesn’t surprise me because it takes a while for cases to make their way through the system. So people who came a year ago, if the system works efficiently, they should be at the end of the system and subject to removal if their claims are rejected,” he said.

But the situation at the border has put pressure on Canada’s already-strained refugee determination system. The projected wait time for a refugee claim hearing is currently 19 months, up from 16 in September, 2017, and 14 in September, 2016 – just before the influx of asylum seekers.

Tens of thousands have flooded the Canada-U.S. border since last year. Initially, many of the border crossers were Haitians who had been living in the U.S. under a temporary protected status (TPS) they had been given after the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti. When the Trump administration announced its intention to end the TPS for Haitians, word spread among the community there that they could apply for refugee status in Canada if they headed north and found a way into the country.

But it wasn’t as simple as showing up at the border and claiming asylum. The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S. requires both countries to refuse entry to asylum seekers who arrive at official border crossings, as both countries are considered safe for refugees. However, since the agreement applies only to people who arrive at official points of entry, asylum seekers can avoid being turned away by entering between official border crossings – a loophole thousands have taken advantage of.

This year brought a new wave of asylum seekers in St. Bernard-de-Lacolle: Nigerians travelling on valid U.S. visas. It’s not exactly clear why Nigerians choose to travel on U.S. visas instead of Canadian ones, but Mr. Waldman said the U.S. visa system is seen as more generous than Canada’s. Many of the Nigerian asylum seekers obtain visitor visas and use them to fly into the U.S. They then head north to the Quebec border, cross into Canada and apply for asylum.

Earlier this year, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen and senior government officials travelled to Nigeria to raise their visa concerns directly with U.S. officials there. Mr. Hussen said the Nigerian government also pledged to discourage its citizens from claiming asylum in Canada after crossing between official points of entry along the U.S. border.

The IRB has finalized just 4,181 asylum claims made by border crossers in Quebec between February, 2017, and June of this year (more current data were unavailable), of which only 45 per cent – 1,885 – were accepted. Another 1,614 claims were rejected, and 682 were abandoned or withdrawn.

That number of accepted claims is significantly lower than the Canada-wide acceptance rate for all refugee claims. As of June, the IRB had approved 7,831 of 13,687 – 57 per cent – of all processed asylum cases made since Dec. 15, 2012, including claims made by asylum seekers who crossed illegally into Canada. Another 55,567 claims were still pending. A small number of refugee claims made before 2012, when the refugee determination system underwent significant changes, are documented separately.

As a part of the 2018 federal budget, the government invested $72-million in the IRB, which will be used to hire 64 new decision-makers in an effort to improve processing times.

Montreal refugee lawyer Mitchell Goldberg said he is optimistic processing times will start to decrease as the government dedicates more resources to the matter.

The deportation process can take even longer, especially if an asylum seeker chooses to exhaust all their appeal options – a source of concern for the Conservative opposition.

“It’s completely unreasonable for our asylum system to be backlogged for years and then for us to not have a functioning system to remove people who don’t have a legal reason to be in Canada,” said Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel.

However, NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the former Conservative government, in which Ms. Rempel served as a cabinet minister, is also to blame for the delays at the IRB.

“There’s been pressure on the system for many, many years, from the Conservatives to the Liberals. Successive governments have not resourced the IRB accordingly so that they can get the job done,” Ms. Kwan said.

Asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be heard have had to find accommodation, with thousands heading to Toronto, where the city has paid to house them in hotel rooms, dormitories and shelters for the homeless. Ottawa has pledged $50-million to defray the costs incurred by the provinces, with Quebec receiving $36-million, Ontario $11-million and Manitoba $3-million. But Toronto and Ontario have been pressing the federal government to pay much more, with the provincial Progressive Conservative government demanding a reimbursement of $200-million.

Mr. Waldman also said the government must do more to address the IRB delays, as the long wait times serve as a “magnet” for illegitimate asylum claimants who know they can potentially spend years in Canada while their cases linger in the system.

Source: Asylum-seeker surge at Quebec border choking Canada’s refugee system, data show

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By campaigning to cut immigration, Quebec’s opposition parties are playing politics with their province’s future

2018/09/12 Leave a comment

Great piece by Chantal Hébert, pointing out the sweetheart deal that Quebec has with respect to funding for immigrant integration and how it compares with federal funding to other provinces.

The numbers tell the story. Last time I looked, the federal government transferred $345 million to Quebec (2016-17 budget). While comparisons are inexact, the 2015-16 Rapport annuel de gestion of Quebec’s Ministère de l’immigration, de la diversité et de l’inclusion indicates about $97 million in direct program spending for language training (francisation) and integration services (65 percent of the total budget of about $150 million). 

Quite a gap!

Among Canada’s larger provinces, none is greying faster than Quebec. For the first time in its modern history, the province is struggling with labour shortages. To varying degrees all its regions including Montreal are affected.

Those shortages are projected to become more acute as the last of the baby boomers retire over the coming decade. Attracting workers from other provinces —as Alberta, Ontario or British Columbia routinely do — is less than an optimal solution. There is not in the rest of Canada a big supply of skilled workers readily able to function in French.

Why then are the province’s two main opposition parties campaigning on a promise to cut down on immigration?

If elected to power on Oct. 1, the currently leading Coalition Avenir Québec would reduce the number of immigrants coming to the province by 20 per cent as of its first year in office.

A CAQ government would also force newcomers, who do not after three years meet a government-set level of proficiency in French, to leave Quebec.

For its part, the Parti Québécois would limit admission to applicants who are already fluent in French. At this point, less than half of Quebec’s annual immigration intake falls in that category.

Under either plan, the number of immigrants admitted to the province would decline significantly.

By virtue of a longstanding federal-provincial agreement, Quebec selects all its immigrants except for those who apply for refugee status from inside Canada or who qualify under the family reunification program. But the citizenship process itself remains a federal responsibility and the national norms set by Ottawa apply in all provinces.

Quebec awards more points to applicants who are already fluent in French; it also proactively tries to woe them.

If there were a neglected pool of would-be immigrants — with the language skills the PQ considers essential — somewhere in the world, the province would have already found it.

On its face, the CAQ’s proposal to expel from Quebec those who fail to meet its language requirements is unconstitutional. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right of permanent residents to move from one province to another as they see fit.

But even if it did not, the proposition that the federal government — regardless of the party in power — should undertake to remove immigrants from Quebec to forcibly settle them elsewhere in Canada or, alternatively, to send them back to their country of origin would be dead on arrival on Parliament Hill.

Indeed, if CAQ Leader François Legault does become premier this fall, he might want to question the wisdom of shining a spotlight on the Quebec/Canada immigration accord, especially in a federal election year.

The agreement was last renegotiated in the immediate aftermath of the demise of the Meech Lake Accord — at a time when then-prime minister Brian Mulroney was desperate to blunt the impact of the failure of his constitutional bid in Quebec. It can be amended but not terminated by the federal government.

There is a reason why no Quebec government — including the PQ-led ones — has wanted to reopen the deal. It is one of the most advantageous federal-provincial agreements ever struck in the history of the federation.

It includes an escalator clause that ensures the funds Ottawa transfers to Quebec for immigration purposes do not decrease from year to year.

After more than two decades, there is a significant gap between the money Quebec receives per capita for integration purposes versus the funds transferred to the other provinces. That gap is larger than the extra costs involved in offering French-language training services. One would think no Quebec government would go out of its way to highlight this.

But then to look to common sense for the rationale of the PQ and the CAQ’s immigration proposals is to look in the wrong place.

By casting immigration as a threat to Quebec’s francophone identity, the CAQ and the PQ are playing to an audience of swing nationalist voters who could make or break their respective hopes on Oct. 1.

In this spirit, at mid-campaign Legault is casting his immigration platform as a firewall designed to prevent a French-language Quebec from disappearing within two or three generations.

There are no statistics to support the CAQ leader’s doomsday scenario. Quebec requires all immigrant children to be schooled in French until the end of high school. Even if their parents never managed to master the language, they would.

Were a future Quebec government to deliberately decrease its immigration intake even as the other provinces go the other way, it would be at a cost not only to its economy but also to its demographical weight and its influence in the federation.

Source: By campaigning to cut immigration, Quebec’s opposition parties are playing politics with their province’s future

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Douglas Todd: Indo-Canadians in uproar over surge of foreign students

2018/09/11 Leave a comment

Another interesting profile by Douglas Todd of some of the tensions and debates within one of the ethnic communities:

The Indo-Canadian community is in turmoil over a recent surge in foreign students from India, whose presence is feeding community tensions amid allegations of financial exploitation, an Indian brain drain, exam cheating, mistreatment of young women, employer abuse, drug dealing and the “stealing” of South Asians’ jobs.

The number of international students from India in Canada has jumped by roughly five times in the past few years, after the federal government in 2012 bucked the trend of other Western nations and made it easier for international students to work and to go to the front of the immigration queue.

In the past it was mostly well-off Indian families who sent their children to Canada to study. But now tens of thousands of low-income Indians, including farming families, are stretching their meagre finances to get their children into the Canadian education system, job market and family immigration stream.

South Asian media outlets in Canada and India are buzzing with articles and commentary on the changes, often revolving around debate on whether the 130,000 foreign students from India, mostly from the Punjab region, are being victimized by the system or exploiting it. Canada’s South Asian population numbers more than 500,000, mostly in Metro Vancouver and Greater Toronto.

Indian education officials, especially in the Punjab, are complaining about losing students to Canada. They’re also alleging many of the foreign students are being exploited by unscrupulous immigration agents and English-language trainers in India, as well as by money-hungry colleges and universities, landlords and South Asian business owners in Canada.

Meanwhile, Indo-Canadians concentrated in Greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver have been holding public meetings to complain about how many students from India are skipping classes to work longer hours in Canada than they are permitted, leading to the Times of India running the headline: “Indo-Canadians say international students ’stealing their jobs.’”

Desi Today, an Indo-Canadian magazine, said in an editorial “There has been a simmering reaction of anger and protest by the Indo-Canadian community, especially of Surrey, against these students.

“There are YouTube videos made by Indo-Canadians displaying the behaviour of the students (and) their unhygienic lifestyle, criticizing them for their focus on earning money instead of studies. A few are leaving studies altogether to enter into illicit activities, like drug trading,” said Desi Today.

Balraj Kahlon, of Guru Nanak’s Free Kitchen, a Surrey organization that helps low-income individuals, told Postmedia News his members were discovering that “many students from India are under financial stress and there is a problem of labour exploitation, and sexual exploitation of young women.” Some Indians students are alleged to be working 16 hours a day, when their Canadian study permit allows only 20 hours a week.

The number of Indian foreign students at Surrey’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University has skyrocketed in the past couple of years, while Langara College’s cohort of Indian foreign students has catapulted 40 times in just three years. Many students from India are also attending small private colleges in Canada, which some critics dismiss as “one-room” fake diploma-and-immigration factories.

Langara College sociology instructor Gagun Chhina said Canadian institutions can’t handle the extraordinary influx of foreign students, who are flocking here because of Ottawa’s simplified process for obtaining permanent resident status. Students from India make up the second largest cohort of international students in Canada, after those from China.

Chhina said Indian foreign students are struggling to balance study with long hours on their jobs, which many need to survive in costly Vancouver and Toronto. Some are sending money home to their Indian parents, many of whom hope their sons and daughters will sponsor them to come to Canada to work temporarily or immigrate.

Indian foreign students have unfortunately become big business in both India and Canada, say the critics, and some of those enterprises are illicit.

A radio station in the Punjab, SBS, reported that English-language schools have been fined for charging students $15,000 for phoney passing marks in English tests, so they can get into Canada. Punjabi officials have ordered a crackdown on immigration consultants, some of whom take large sums and make false promises to manoeuvre young people into Canadians schools. India’s Tribune newspaper also maintains Canada’s “relaxed immigration policy” is draining tens of thousands of young people and their low-income families’ hard-earned money out of the Punjab.

Things are so strained among some South Asians in Canada that fights have broken out between domestic and foreign students in Ontario colleges.

“This is the talk of the town in the Punjabi community. The newspapers and radio shows all talk about it,” Balraj Deol, editor of the Khabarnama Punjabi Weekly, told Postmedia.

While many Indo-Canadian landlords and business owners are financially exploiting and abusing foreign students from India, Deol said the other side of the phenomenon is that Indian foreign students who break the rules by working long hours are adding to large “underground” ethnic economies in Ontario and B.C.

Said Deol: “People are angry at this poor immigration policy in Canada.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Indo-Canadians in uproar over surge of foreign students

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Labour board slams department over handling of closure of Vegreville centre

2018/09/11 Leave a comment

To note:

A federal labour board ruling has upended the way Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada handled the relocation of more than 150 workers when it closed its Vegreville processing centre and moved the jobs to Edmonton.

The Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board decided that the department breached the employees’ collective agreement when it refused to offer departure benefits, such as buyouts and education allowances, to employees whose jobs were moved 100 kilometres west.

The board gave the department and Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) 60 days to deal with the ruling or it will impose a remedy. The government can also seek a judicial review to overturn the decision.

The ruling offers the possibility of buyouts, re-training, pension penalty waivers and other benefits for the 30 employees who couldn’t make the move and found themselves jobless.

The ruling, however, won’t affect the government’s decision to close the immigration processing centre, one of Vegreville’s largest employers. It closed for good week ago after nearly 25 years in operation. The new centre at Edmonton’s Canada Place opened this week.

“What is missed is that in small rural communities this was about more than closing an office. It was more like a close-knit family than a workplace. Many people came and worked there for a long time,” said Michelle Henderson, a vice president at the Canada Employment and Immigration Union.

“I am so thrilled with this decision… “But it opens a can of worms because I am not sure what will happen. I don’t want to speak to what people will do but it opens up options that people have said ‘will be life-changing for me’.”

A big question when the government and PSAC sit down to negotiate is whether employees, who believing they had no other option but to move, will have the right to departure benefits. Say someone decided to move ‘under duress’ or opted for the move because they are too young to retire without facing pension penalties. Are they entitled to departure benefits?

How about those people who did move to Edmonton, a pricier place to live, but got caught in the collateral damage of a plummeting housing market caused by the shuttering of largest employer in a town of 5,000 people? Henderson is moving and she has been unable to sell her home.

The centre opened in 1994. The decision to put the centre in Vegreville was made by the Conservative government that was defeated in 1993. The office location was roundly criticized at the time as a parting political gift to Don Mazankowski, the local MP and a Mulroney era heavyweight.

It instantly became the major employer and Henderson said the centre was considered the most productive of the country’s four processing centres. With a workforce of 280 people, the centre processed temporary and permanent residency applications, work permits, visitor records and study permits, while also backing up other centres across the country.

The decision to close the centre came out of the blue for the town and employees. A huge campaign was mounted to protest the decision; dig into the business case as to why and come up with compromises to save the jobs. In a separate move, PSAC filed a policy grievance with the labour board.

The workload of processing visa and permanent residents has increased with Canada’s growing immigration.

The government argued it was too difficult to recruit workers with the needed analytical and bilingual skills in Vegreville. With the lease for the centre expiring, the government decided to move the operation to Edmonton where it could also add another shift. It offered 159 permanent employees a job in Edmonton and gave them six months to decide.

The union proposed the department keep a satellite office for those who couldn’t move or let them telework. The department rejected both.

According to PSAC, about 105 decided to relocate; 28 resigned, retired or left. Of the 30 or more who decided not to move, some had farms; others were caring for elderly parents; some had spouses who couldn’t relocate or they had small children and couldn’t get the day care to cover the commute into the city.

The union argued the employees were effectively declared surplus and entitled to departure benefits under the Workforce Adjustment Agreement enshrined in their collective agreements. The directive governs how employees are managed when they lose their jobs whether to downsizing, relocation or privatization.

The department, however, argued it had made a ‘reasonable job offer” which meant they were not entitled to buyouts and other departure benefits.

The union, however, maintained that turning around and offering the move to Edmonton to those who had already turned down the move was not a real job offer.

It also pointed to a new clause that was negotiated in the last round of bargaining which required departments to offer departure benefits for all ‘workforce adjustment’ situations that affected more than five employees.

In the end, adjudicator Bryan Gray accepted the union’s argument and said language of the new clause is “clear and unambiguous.” He said those given the option to move or face layoff were in a situation that could lead to “their services no longer being required because of workforce adjustment situation” which triggers an obligation to offer departure benefits for those who volunteer to leave.

In fact, PSAC will be demanding changes in the upcoming round of bargaining on how ‘reasonable job offers” are used in relocating work.

Union officials have argued they have never seen a department as inflexible on its ‘take it or leave’ job offer.

The government has managed major downsizing of the public service under the Chretien and Harper. Those who aren’t offered guaranteed job offers had three options: a buyout based on years of service to a maximum of 52 weeks; education or training allowance up to $15,000 or go on a priority list for another job in the public service. (That’s not really an option in Vegreville where the only other federal jobs are the handful at the RCMP detachment and the post office.)

The Phoenix disaster highlighted one of the most publicized relocation of federal employees. The Harper government consolidated pay operations in Miramichi N.B. and moved all compensation advisers working in departments there.

All compensation advisers were offered jobs in Miramichi and those who refused -almost all of them – found other federal jobs or were offered buyouts and departure benefits.

It’s unclear how the board’s ruling will affect the cost which was originally estimated at $7.3 million if everyone relocated.

Source: Labour board slams department over handling of closure of Vegreville centre

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Germany Chases a Fix for Its $35 Billion Immigration Problem

2018/09/11 Leave a comment

The other side of Germany’s immigration issues:

Germany has an immigration problem, but it might not be what right-wing extremists think it is. Rather than too many foreigners in the country, economists fret there won’t be enough.

With baby boomers retiring and not enough young people joining the labor market, the country needs at least 400,000 people coming to work in Germany every year to maintain its competitiveness, according to the IAB Institute for Employment Research. A shortage of skilled workers means businesses won’t be able to produce as much as they could, holding back the economy by about 30 billion euros ($35 billion) a year, research by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research shows.

Labor Squeeze

Germany’s job market is expected to get tighter as older workers retire

https://www.bloomberg.com/toaster/v2/charts/8d8436331b5147f5a7393f075c6c757a.html?brand=politics&webTheme=politics&web=true&hideTitles=true (link to chart)

Source: German Federal Labor Agency

It’s a delicate issue for Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her open-door policy to refugees — more than 1 million asylum seekers came to the country since 2015 — helped foment social tensions and facilitated the emergence of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party. That puts pressure on her to respond to these concerns, while also helping businesses clamoring for more talent.

“It can take up to six months before employees from non-EU countries get their visa,” said Michael Bueltmann, who runs the German operations of digital mapping company HERE Technologies. “This has a negative impact” on recruitment and complicates planning. The company employs 1,200 people in Germany, including programmers from Bangladesh and the Middle East, who lack certainty about their residency prospects.

To address these concerns, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who recently referred to migration as “the mother of all problems,” is finalizing a law aimed at helping skilled workers come to Germany, while also controlling the influx of low-skilled people who might take advantage of the country’s generous welfare system.

The refugee situation and immigration may be linked in the legislation, with the SPD — Merkel’s junior coalition partner — calling for refugees to be able to switch out of asylum status if they find a job. The so-called “lane change” proposal has been rejected by Merkel, setting up a potential showdown.

The final immigration bill is to be presented this fall, and critics are already concerned it won’t go far enough.

“The planned legislation is a first step, but not what Germany really needs,” said Wido Geis, a senior economist at the Cologne Institute. “A truly modernized German immigration law would need a restructured administration” that centralizes approval processes rather than relies on local authorities.

Source: Germany Chases a Fix for Its $35 Billion Immigration Problem

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Immigration: Legault se défend d’avoir envoyé un message de fermeture

2018/09/10 Leave a comment

Nuancing or spinning his earlier comments:

François Legault s’est défendu vendredi d’avoir envoyé un message de fermeture aux nouveaux arrivants lorsqu’il a affirmé que l’immigration pose un « risque » pour la survie du français. Il affirme au contraire que ses propositions aideront les immigrants à « avoir du plaisir à vivre au Québec. »

Le chef de la Coalition avenir Québec a provoqué de vives réactions, jeudi, lorsqu’il a dit craindre que « nos petits-enfants » ne parlent plus le français si le système d’immigration n’est pas réformé.

À ceux qui y voient un message de fermeture, M. Legault a assuré que c’est tout le contraire. En fait, a-t-il dit, les immigrants seront les premiers à profiter des réformes d’un éventuel gouvernement caquiste.

« Ce qu’on dit aux immigrants, c’est que si vous voulez avoir du plaisir à vivre au Québec, il faut vous intégrer, a dit M. Legault. Pour s’intégrer, il faut parler français. C’est bon pour le Québec, c’est bon pour les nouveaux arrivants. »

« Ce qu’on souhaite, c’est qu’ils soient des citoyens qui participent pleinement, d’abord à l’emploi, mais aussi en parlant avec les voisins la langue commune, le français », a-t-il ajouté.

Les positions de la CAQ ont souvent été critiquées à Montréal, où le parti n’a jamais fait élire un seul député. M. Legault a abordé le problème de front lors d’un point de presse dans la circonscription de Pointe-aux-Trembles aux côtés de sa candidate, la mairesse Chantal Rouleau.

La veille, cette dernière avait semblé contredire son chef en affirmant qu’elle n’a « pas peur » pour l’avenir du français au Québec. Vendredi, elle a assuré être sur la même longueur d’onde que M. Legault.

« L’inquiétude, elle sera pour les générations futures, a-t-elle expliqué. Si on n’agit pas maintenant, ça pourra être inquiétant plus tard. Mais c’est toujours l’histoire de la langue française au Québec : il faut toujours être vigilant. »

Cette dernière n’a cependant pas été en mesure de dire combien d’immigrants habitent sa circonscription. Il y en a 6200 selon le dossier socio-économique du Directeur général des élections, soit environ 12 % de la population.

Immigration économique

M. Legault propose de réduire à 40 000 le nombre d’immigrants qui arrivent au Québec chaque année, une baisse d’environ 20 %. Il souhaite aussi obtenir d’Ottawa le contrôle sur le programme de réunification familiale, par lequel environ 12 000 immigrants arrivent chaque année.

Ce programme fédéral permet à une personne déjà installée au Québec d’être réunie avec d’autres membres de sa famille en parrainant leur demande d’immigration. M. Legault lui reproche de n’imposer aucune exigence quant à l’apprentissage du français.

Or, même si le gouvernement Trudeau refuse de céder le contrôle du programme, un gouvernement caquiste restera ferme sur son objectif de réduction global. Quitte à réduire le nombre d’immigrants économiques qui sont sélectionnés par Québec.

« Ça pourrait être ça », a-t-il convenu.

Source: Immigration: Legault se défend d’avoir envoyé un message de fermeture

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Canadian border agency has deported 398 ‘illegal migrants’ out of 32,000

2018/09/10 Leave a comment

The latest numbers:

Nearly 400 people who crossed the U.S. border illegally for asylum in Canada have been deported since authorities began tracking irregular migration in April of last year.

That number is a small fraction of the 32,173 so-called “irregular migrants” who came through unguarded land borders from the United States during the period ending in late August. Most are still waiting for their asylum claims to be heard.

Of the 398 failed refugee claimants Canada has deported, 146 were sent back to the U.S., where 116 of them have citizenship, according to data provided to the Star by the Canada Border Services Agency. The rest were deported to 53 countries, with most sent to Haiti (53), Colombia (24), Turkey (19) or Iraq (15).

The deportees, 48 of whom were under the age of 17, included 238 males and 160 females, said the border enforcement agency.

“What happens is people come to the U.S., establish themselves and have children while they try to regularize their immigration status,” said Ottawa immigration lawyer Betsy Kane.

“The number of deportees captures these American-born children who accompanied their parents to Canada for asylum.”

The Canadian border agency said the decision on where an individual is deported depends on from where they came into Canada, their last permanent residence, their citizenship and country of birth. All deportees have seen their asylum claims rejected by the refugee board and exhausted all legal avenues of appeal and due process.

All 32,173 irregular migrants have been declared inadmissable simply for crossing the Canadian border illegally, including six who failed the criminal checks, said border agency spokesperson Nicholas Dorion.

Queen’s University immigration law professor Sharry Aiken said she was not surprised by the low number of deportations as the majority of asylum claims by border-crossers are still to be determined by the refugee board. That board has long been underfunded and only recently got the money from Ottawa to hire additional decision-makers.

Of the 12,190 overall claims processed in the first six months of this year, 64 per cent were granted asylum.

“When removal orders become effective and are not enforced, it undermines the integrity of the system and the confidence in the system,” said Aiken. “But due process does take time with other legal remedies when a claim is refused. We shouldn’t say something must have gone awry because only 400 people have been removed.”

The latest refugee board statistics show it still had 55,567 new claims in the backlog by the end of June after 13,687 had been processed and finalized — 7,831 claims being accepted, 4,359 rejected, and the rest either abandoned or withdrawn. The backlog includes claimants from other countries who didn’t come through unguarded land borders via the U.S.

Source: Canadian border agency has deported 398 ‘illegal migrants’ out of 32,000

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Legault réduirait le nombre d’immigrants dès sa première année au pouvoir

2018/09/07 Leave a comment

Given increasing federal numbers, this would mean a relative decrease in Quebec population relative to the rest of Canada and thus decreased political importance over time:

Un éventuel gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec réduira dès la première année de son mandat le nombre d’immigrants de 20 %, a confirmé l’entourage de François Legault, mercredi. Une précision qui est survenue après qu’une candidate eut indiqué qu’il faut baisser ce seuil « graduellement ».

M. Legault a visité une production maraîchère en serre à Sainte-Clotilde-de-Châteauguay, en Montérégie. Sur les 250 employés de l’entreprise, 170 sont d’origine étrangère. Il s’agit pour la plupart de travailleurs étrangers temporaires.

Dans cette région agricole, l’immigration est un enjeu important, a convenu la candidate caquiste dans Huntington, Claire IsaBelle. Car plusieurs entreprises agricoles peinent à trouver des employés.

« On n’a pas cette pénurie de main-d’oeuvre quand on va chercher les étrangers, la population immigrante, la main-d’oeuvre immigrante, a expliqué Mme IsaBelle. Ils nous aident beaucoup. Il faut considérer qu’ils sont essentiels. »

Or, la CAQ propose de réduire de 50 000 à 40 000 le nombre d’immigrants admis chaque année au Québec. Questionnée à savoir si cette proposition est compatible avec les besoins des agriculteurs, la candidate a indiqué que la mesure n’entrera pas en vigueur immédiatement.

« On ne va probablement pas baisser à 40 000 tout de suite, la première année qu’on est au pouvoir, a indiqué Mme IsaBelle. On va baisser probablement graduellement. »

Contredite

Cette affirmation a été contredite quelques minutes plus tard par l’entourage de M. Legault. On a précisé aux journalistes que la baisse du nombre d’immigrants aura lieu dès 2019, première année complète d’un éventuel gouvernement caquiste.

Plus tôt dans la campagne, François Legault a argué que la réduction temporaire des seuils d’immigration permettrait d’améliorer l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants à la société québécoise. Il a fait valoir qu’environ le quart des immigrants quitte la province.

Cette prise de position lui a valu de vives critiques du Parti libéral, qui juge que la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre est le plus grave problème qui pèse sur l’économie québécoise.

Une « erreur massive », selon Couillard

Pour Philippe Couillard, promettre une baisse du seuil d’immigration est « une erreur massive ». « Pour cette seule raison, parce qu’il y en a d’autres, la CAQ ne devrait pas être autorisée par la population à former le gouvernement », a lancé le chef libéral, de passage à Sherbrooke.

Il a fait valoir que la promesse de M. Legault est « antiéconomique ». « Le problème économique le plus important au Québec, je ne l’invente pas, tout le monde nous le dit au Québec : la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre qualifiée, moins qualifiée. L’immigration fait partie de la solution. »

C’est d’autant plus nuisible pour l’économie selon lui que M. Legault serait forcé de diminuer le nombre de nouveaux arrivants de la catégorie de l’immigration économique (30 000 des 50 000 personnes que l’on accueille chaque année). C’est la seule catégorie sur laquelle le gouvernement du Québec exerce un contrôle. Le reste est sous la responsabilité du fédéral : il s’agit des réfugiés et des nouveaux arrivants issus de réunifications familiales. Pour M. Couillard, « François Legault a une méconnaissance des faits et des pratiques d’immigration ».

Le chef libéral reste évasif quand on lui demande ses intentions au sujet du seuil d’immigration. Il a d’abord dit vouloir le « maintenir » à 50 000, mais il a entrouvert la porte à une augmentation au cours d’un prochain mandat. « Ce pourrait être le même nombre, par exemple si on pense qu’on a besoin d’un an de plus pour bien stabiliser, voir l’impact de cela », a-t-il déclaré, laissant entendre qu’une hausse pourrait survenir par la suite.

Avant d’annoncer une intention, « je veux m’assurer que les efforts qu’on va déployer (en intégration et en francisation) soient au moins au niveau des personnes qui arrivent. Je pense qu’on est là maintenant ». Il souhaite également voir « comment les besoins de main-d’oeuvre évoluent ». Il a rappelé que le seuil d’immigration est proposé par le gouvernement et fait l’objet d’un débat parlementaire avant son adoption.

Source: http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/elections-quebec-2018/201809/05/01-5195331-legault-reduirait-le-nombre-dimmigrants-des-sa-premiere-annee-au-pouvoir.php

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Peter Dutton Shapes Australia’s Immigration Policy in His Image

2018/09/07 Leave a comment

Good long profile on Dutton and his approach to immigration. As always, it is the apparent hypocrisy and preferential treatment that highlight the issues:

When a suicidal 10-year-old boy in an offshore detention camp asked to come to Australia for psychiatric care, Peter Dutton’s answer was no.

When an Australian combat veteran requested a refugee visa for his Afghan interpreter, Mr. Dutton — Australia’s top immigration official — also refused.

But when an Italian au pair, who worked for a former colleague, needed a reprieve from deportation, Mr. Dutton obliged. It was at least the second European au pair for whom he made an exception in 2015, calling the visa a “humanitarian act.”

Critics across Australia are calling it something else: hypocrisy that reveals an unjust immigration system.

“I’m totally disgusted that the minister has used his powers to intervene in those cases,” said Jason Scanes, 41, a former Army captain who has campaigned unsuccessfully for years to get a visa for his Afghan interpreter. “I’m just asking for a fair process and a fair go.”

Australia has always struggled with who belongs. The first British settlers slaughtered the Indigenous population, and xenophobia has shaped the nation since its earliest days when the government restricted migration to whites. In some ways, Mr. Dutton, 47, a former police officer who has been in Parliament since 2001, is simply the latest in a long line of Australian leaders to seize on concerns about foreigners and security to advance their political careers.

But since taking over the immigration portfolio in 2014, he has also made the job uniquely his own.

Promoted last year to oversee even more of the country’s security apparatus as minister for home affairs, Mr. Dutton has become the country’s unsmiling face of enforcement, defending Australia’s harsh offshore detention camps, delaying citizenship applications, and arguing for cuts in overall immigration.

The approach has won accolades from conservatives at home and abroad, including President Trump. Just two weeks ago, Mr. Dutton also nearly became prime minister, leading a party coup only to be defeated by Scott Morrison, another former immigration minister known for strict enforcement.

Mr. Dutton has not ruled out another go. With Australia’s Senate holding hearings this week on whether he appropriately approved the au pair visas, he has defended his decisions with righteous indignation.

“I am a person of integrity,” Mr. Dutton said in a recent radio interview. “I’ve never been compromised. I never will.”

But legal experts and former officials argue that the trouble with country’s immigration system extends beyond one man. Few other developed democracies imbue a single elected official with so much power and so little public oversight.

Australia has given “God powers” to its immigration ministers, legal experts said, allowing Mr. Dutton to make Australia’s already opaque border control and immigration system even more vulnerable to cronyism, secrecy and abuse.

“Our migration system has never been as fair or transparent as it claims when it comes to race or disability,” said Susan Harris Rimmer, a law professor at Griffith University. “The treatment of the au pairs combined with the dreadful tales of traumatized children on Nauru underscores the juxtaposition of this kind of leniency for some, with cruelty to others.”

A history of racism?

Australia’s first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, assumed the job in 1945, the last year of World War II, aiming for both nation-building and national security.

Australia must “populate or perish,” he said — and the immigrants must be white.

“Immigration policy always had this duality,” said Gwenda Tavan, an immigration historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne. “On one hand Australian officials for successive generations knew they needed people to populate the country but they also only wanted certain types of people.”

Even after Australia fully abandoned the White Australia policy in the 1970s, few checks and balances followed. Since 1989, the immigration minister has actually gained power, with Parliament and the courts expanding discretion and control.

One result is now clear: Mr. Dutton has had the right to grant visas as he favors with limited scrutiny.

In one case from 2015, according to leaked emails that emerged last week, Mr. Dutton halted the deportation of Alexandra Deuwel, a 27-year-old Frenchwoman who had worked as an au pair for the cousin of Gillon McLachlan, the chief executive of the Australian Football League.

Ms. Deuwel’s tourist visa had been canceled after she told border officers she would receive free accommodation for “helping the family’s children, cooking and riding horses” — a violation because tourist visas do not allow people to work.

The McLachlan family is both popular and generous to Liberal Party causes. The emails show Ms. Deuwel’s visa was granted a few hours after Mr. Dutton’s office received the request.

In another case in 2015, an Italian woman linked to the family of a former police colleague of Mr. Dutton’s was also released from detention after he intervened.

A Senate inquiry, launched by the opposition Labor Party, is now scrutinizing his actions. Last week, senators demanded details about Mr. Dutton’s use of his power of “discretion” in immigration cases, including 4,129 visa interventions since 2014, of which 25 involved tourist visas.

Previous investigations into discretion reaching back to 2004 yielded little reform or transparency, and former officials say Mr. Dutton’s intervention in the au pair cases were probably legal.

Under Australian law, the immigration minister can overrule an immigration decision as long as he (most have been men) deems the reversal “in the public interest.” These exceptions must be exercised personally by the minister and the courts have resisted restricting them.

Philip Ruddock, a politician in the governing party and former immigration minister, said such discretion was necessary.

“It’s inevitable that the black and white law fails you from time to time,” he said, citing examples from his time in government: parents with work visas and a disabled child who had been denied entry, and a school principal denied a visa on medical grounds for a disease that would not manifest for a decade.

“I’d much rather a system where you have politicians making these judgments who are accountable to the people as opposed to judges you can’t sack,” Mr. Ruddock said.

Still, he acknowledged that requests for ministerial intervention have risen to thousands of cases under Mr. Dutton from a few dozen cases in the late 80s, adding pressure to intervene and making the job harder.

Each intervention, he said, must be carefully considered. “You have to think to yourself, ‘What would the implication be if this were to be more widely known?’ ” he said.

A culture of secrecy?

In many other countries, discretionary powers are more limited and transparent.

The American system is decentralized: The State Department oversees visa approvals, the Department of Homeland Security handles admission, immigration benefits and deportations, and the Department of Justice oversees the immigration courts.

“It’s not housed in one individual,” said David Leopold, a Cleveland immigration attorney and former president of the Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington.

In Canada, a Commonwealth country like Australia, discretionary powers come with more specific guidelines. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, an independent body, rules on asylum claims, and annual reports with data on temporary admissions decided through discretion are published online.

Similar reports used to be part of Australia’s public calendar too, until recently. After Mr. Dutton rose to take over the new Ministry of Home Affairs, information became harder to obtain.

In July, The Australian, a conservative newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, reported select details from what appeared to be the ministry’s annual report, crediting Mr. Dutton for reducing the annual permanent intake of immigrants by 10 percent.

But the ministry has declined to release the full report. Mr. Dutton did not respond to requests for the report, or an interview.

“Why is it secret?” asked Abul Rizvi, a former senior immigration official, “Why can’t we look at it?”

An ambitious minister

Those who have worked closely with Peter Dutton describe him as civil until crossed, less interested in policy than politics, and quick to see the world in black and white. Mr. Dutton rarely smiles in public, and sounds most passionate when condemning critics.

He first ran for office at 19, losing a campaign for the Queensland State Senate, then became a state police officer. Wealth came later through property deals.

“He’s just a Queensland cop of the past,” said Cheryl Kernot, whom Mr. Dutton defeated to enter Parliament. “He is an old-style cop, and I don’t think he’s changed from that at all.”

Mr. Dutton’s appeal to voters has long been based on his working-class roots and family-values conservatism. He has said the hearings on his actions are motivated by politics and threatened to publicize “quirky” cases that opposition politicians have asked him to intervene in.

“I’m gobsmacked by the hypocrisy,” he said.

His supporters seem unfazed. “I can’t condemn him,” said Andrew Schloss, general manager for a health care business next to Mr. Dutton’s district office in a Brisbane suburb. “He holds a conservative view. I am relatively conservative.”

The larger problem, critics of discretion said, is that Australia has given too much leeway to immigration ministers at a time when the fear of foreigners can be easily exploited.

Ministerial discretion has become a metric of compassion.

The Senate hearing last week examined cases in which Mr. Dutton intervened, but also those he did not — for example, that of a Tamil asylum seeker whose wife and children had already received protection visas. The man was deported in July, despite requests for ministerial intervention.

The most damning examples for Mr. Dutton may yet come from beyond Australia’s border.

Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Australia finalized plans for the so-called Pacific Solution — a policy under which migrants (mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan) who tried to reach Australia by boat were sent to detention centers on the island nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

Thousands of migrants, many of whom later qualified for resettlement as refugees under international law, have since been held in these offshore camps, which have become a global human rights embarrassment for Australia.

Under Mr. Dutton, government support for the detainees has been cut and conditions have deteriorated. Twelve people put in the detention campshave died since 2014.

On Nauru, where 900 people are still detained, “children as young as 7 and 12 are experiencing repeated incidents of suicide attempts, dousing themselves in petrol, and becoming catatonic,” according to a recent reportby the Refugee Council of Australia and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

Leaders from both of Australia’s major parties have defended the policy, saying it eliminates incentives for human smuggling and dangerous sea journeys.

But this week, photos of dark-skinned children stranded on Nauru have competed with images of the white au pairs smiling and enjoying Australia’s beaches.

The women have since returned to their home countries.

The children remain in limbo off the Australian coast.

Source: In Australia, One Man Can Decide a Migrant’s Fate. Did He Abuse That Power?

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HYDER: No crisis with newcomers arriving in Canada

2018/09/05 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Goldy Hyder of Hill+Knowlton Strategies and board member of the Century Initiative.

Perhaps more important is that this appeared in the Toronto Sun to provide a different perspective than their usual contributors (just as the Star and Globe could benefit from a broader range of views):

Over 25 years ago, I wrote my master’s thesis on how the crisis label applied to public policy is both an opportunity for governments and a problem for its citizens.

The example I used to make the point was the “refugee crisis” generated by the dramatic boat arrival of 174 Sikhs off the coast of Nova Scotia in August 1986. This was preceded in equally dramatic fashion by 155 Tamils also arriving on a boat a year earlier.

In the first case, the government of the day responded with openness, generosity and willingness to embrace those who claimed to be fleeing persecution.

The public response was less generous, particularly upon learning that the boat and its occupants were in fact arriving not from India (hardly a refugee producing country) but in fact a safe country (Germany) that could have and should have applied its own refugee laws to determine legitimacy of the claims.

An RCMP officer standing in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., advises migrants that they are about to illegally cross from Champlain, N.Y., and will be arrested, Monday, Aug. 7, 2017.

When fate afforded the government a do-over upon the next boat arrival, the response by the same government — clearly feeling both duped by the circuitous manner in which the first boat arrived, and with the full knowledge of public sentiments on such arrivals — was to label the issue as a “refugee crisis.”

This dominated headlines, debate in Parliament and the public’s attention. It allowed a government under pressure on other issues to leverage the advantages that a “crisis” label affords any government: Namely the public’s demand and expectation that the government will — as a matter of priority — focus on and put an end to the “crisis.”

In 2018, history is repeating itself.

It was no more a crisis in the aforementioned incidents than there is one today from a purely statistical perspective. But that didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now.

There are many reasons we stand to be worse off if the debate heads in the direction it currently is driven by emotion, stoked by political agendas on both sides.

Canadians, I believe, are smarter than that. But, they must be heard.

We know our history. Unless Indigenous, we are all immigrants. What we cherish as a value is fairness and rule of law. We do not like our generosity and compassion to be abused.

While much attention goes to how the so called “alt-right” or those labelled racists, the fact is that masks what is taking place much more broadly in society albeit less overtly.

In the modern era, these debates cannot be suppressed, nor do they function uncomfortably underground. Rather, they play out in the open and that, frankly, is an opportunity.

Migration in all its forms has long been used as an issue to debate because it is deeply personal and goes to who we are as a people and as a nation. We need to be reminded from time to time about the role immigrants, refugees and migrants (not all the same thing) have played in making Canada what it is today.

We know study after study has proven time and again that immigrants put more into the system than they take out of it. Yet, people here in Canada, and in many other countries, are reaching a point of saying either “no more” or “not so many.” Whether there is a crisis or not (there isn’t), this is an opportunity to hear the voices of Canadians, left and right and those in between to understand what is driving their emotions.

If there is one thing I have learned about we Canadians, it is this: Given the right information, provided an opportunity to speak and be heard, there is a collective wisdom in the Canadian public consciousness that usually gets the answer right in the end.

Source: HYDER: No crisis with newcomers arriving in Canada

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