From earlier experience with similar issues at Service Canada, the issue is not limited to website design or organization but more significantly reflects the intrinsic complexity of programs and processes. A more productive approach often involves simplification and streamlining of programs rather than trying to address more fundamental issues through web redesign:
It turns out Canada’s immigration officials are as confused as prospective immigrants and travellers by the information provided on their own department website.
“We expect clients to know just what to do because ‘it’s on the website,’ ” says an internal Immigration Department document from last year.
“Yet, even for immigration officers like ourselves, we often find the website to be confusing and not user-friendly.”
The document, prepared for an immigration management retreat last winter, shows senior officials grappling with how to improve communication with clients, including ways to simplify government response “to make it more responsive to the client’s actual needs.”
Also on the meeting agenda was a discussion about ways to combat the misinformation that clients face in bulletin boards, by immigration consultants and fraudsters.
Immigration lawyer and policy analyst Richard Kurland, who obtained the document through an access to information request, said he was not surprised by management’s concerns.
“Reducing correspondence is good for everyone. All that needs to be done is to allow (applicants and their lawyers) more access to their own file information,” said Kurland in an interview.
The ride-hailing service Uber, which allows users to follow the driver’s route on a phone app, should inspire change, he added.
“You should be able to see what is happening in your case all along the processing journey.”
The managers also complained about the huge workload created by people applying for visas to visit Canada. Many were initially refused because they were confused what documentation was required. However, they do get approved in their second attempt.
“While it is obvious to officers what we need to see, there is very limited information available on our official outlets helping to point applicants in the right direction,” said the immigration management’s meeting agenda.
Canada processes more than a million visitor visa applications a year and one out of five is rejected. Someone applying for a visa may just state the purpose of the visit as “travelling,” for example, without specifying he or she is here to see a Canadian sibling.
The department’s “vague and generic” refusal letters is the main cause of repeat applications from confused people over Canadian requirements, according to the document.
Kurland said the document underscores the need for immigration officers to be more flexible when processing applications that may include mistakes.
“How is the public supposed to get it right when these managers struggle?” he asked.
Immigration lawyer Andy Semotiuk in Forbes offers his solutions to the increased number of asylum seekers. The first one, essentially applying the safe third country agreement to those who arrive at border points that are not designated ports of arrival, appears more realistic than expecting the current US admin to take back asylum seekers:
An American solution Canada could use
The American Immigration and Nationality Act has a provision that better deals with this problem than anything Canada has in its legislation. Section 235(b)(2)(C) of the U.S. act states:
Treatment of aliens arriving from contiguous territory –
In the case of an alien … who is arriving on land (whether or not as a designated port of arrival) from a foreign territory contiguous to the United States, the Attorney General may return the alien to that territory pending a proceeding under section 240.
The provision, though not always popular with all quarters in the legal community, enables American officials to hold migrants at bay in Mexico until their removal proceedings are held.
What needs to be done immediately
In my view, three things need to be done immediately in the Canadian situation.
Firstly, the government of Canada needs to clearly state publicly that, as a general rule, while migrants from America who seek to come to Canada may or may not be facing prosecution for their illegal presence in the U.S., they are definitely not currently facing imminent persecution from the U.S. government. Therefore, they should not be crossing illegally into Canada.
Secondly, Canada should adopt a measure similar in nature to the American one mentioned above, so the country can turn migrants away when they cross the border illegally.
Finally, Canada should make immediate arrangements with the U.S. to return illegal entrants to U.S. officials until hearings can be scheduled at a later date. In this way the migrants can be dealt with fairly through appropriate hearings when they can be scheduled, but not at the cost of their immediate presence in Canada. In this way their cases will not negatively impact the debate about welcoming genuine refugees and immigrants to Canada but will be dealt with fairly in deserving instances.
We shall see how well the regularization process works and consequent impact on the numbers of asylum seekers:
The Liberal government has a contingency plan for a potential flood of Salvadoran asylum seekers, but it is not expecting a sudden surge of people crossing the border from the United States.
Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said the government has been “engaging intensely” with the El Salvador diaspora, among others, and believes they are deeply embedded in their American communities with children, jobs and mortgages and not likely to abruptly flee.
Hussen said because there’s a lengthy 18-month time frame for people to leave or seek legal residency, he expects many will use the time to regularize their status.
“Their first choice is to remain in the U.S.,” Hussen told reporters on Parliament Hill after meeting with a joint intergovernmental task force on irregular migration.
“Having said that, we are not being complacent. We are making sure we are prepared for any eventuality, including a future influx of asylum seekers crossing our border irregularly and, in that regard, we are using the lessons that we learned in the summer to do so.”
Since August last year, the government has embarked on an outreach campaign to spread the word about Canadian laws and immigration system. MPs have been dispatched to meet with various community groups and stakeholders in Miami, New York, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles and used social media and online marketing tools to correct misinformation.
Humanitarian message
“Our message is not only a deterrent message but it’s also a humanitarian message, because we don’t want people uprooting their lives, their deep roots in the United States, based on misinformation,” he said.
Haitians began crossing in to Canada even before a final decision had been made on their temporary status, with more than 200 people a day in the summer months.
Hussen noted that irregular crossings have declined dramatically in the last four months, and said fluctuations in numbers are seen from year to year, and from month to month.
The U.S. granted protected status to people from El Salvador in the wake of two devastating 2001 earthquakes that left hundreds of thousands in the country homeless.
And a good overview by CNN of the 10 countries currently with TPS
TPS is ending for these countries
Sudan
Status:Ends November 2, 2018, DHS announced in September 2017. This means Sudanese under TPS will have to find a different way to stay in the US or prepare to leave.
Cause: Sudan was designated for TPS based on the “ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions.” Sudan has been beset by conflicts, most notably the Darfur conflict, which began around 2003 when several rebel groups took up arms against the government in Khartoum. The situation in Sudan has improved in recent years, but concerns persist about its stability and human rights.
Why TPS was terminated: DHS’ then-Acting Secretary Elaine Duke had”determined that conditions in Sudan no longer support its designation for Temporary Protected Status.” The agency said nationals of Sudan could return “without posing a serious threat to their personal safety.”
Cause:Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm, devastated the country in October 1998. Mitch was particularly destructive in Nicaragua and Honduras, killing about 11,000 people in Central America.
Why TPS was terminated: “It is no longer the case that Nicaragua is unable, temporarily, to handle adequately the return of nationals of Nicaragua,” according to DHS. The agency stated that conditions affected by Hurricane Mitch have stabilized and that many of the homes destroyed by the storm have been rebuilt.
Cause: A 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck in January 2010, and an estimated 220,000 to 300,000 people died. That year, DHS announced temporary refuge for Haitian nationals who were already in the US and “whose personal safety would be endangered by returning to Haiti.”
Why TPS was terminated: After seven years, the DHS stated that “extraordinary but temporary conditions caused by the 2010 earthquake no longer exist. Thus, under the applicable statute, the current TPS designation must be terminated.”
Cause: A 7.7-magnitude quake struck El Salvador in January 2001 and was the worst to hit the country in a decade. The devastation, along with two more damaging quakes the following month, spurred a decision allowing immigrants from El Salvador who’d been in the United States since mid-February 2001 to apply for TPS.
Why TPS was terminated: After nearly 17 years, the “original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist,” DHS said. It added that the US government has repatriated more than 39,000 Salvadorans in the last two years, “demonstrating that the temporary inability of El Salvador to adequately return their nationals after the earthquake has been addressed.”
Cause: Syria was designated for TPS because of the ongoing armed conflict. Since the civil war began in 2011, an estimated 400,000 Syrians have been killed, according to the United Nations. The Syrian conflict broke out in 2011 with the Arab Spring uprising and rebel groups’ attempts to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Cause: TPS has protected Nepalese living in the United States since a destructive, 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck near the country’s capital, Kathmandu. The April 2015 earthquake killed more than 8,000 people, and millions of homes cracked or collapsed.
Why it was extended: Conditions in Nepal have improved following the earthquake, DHS said in its 2016 decision to extend TPS for 18 more months. But the disaster resulted “in a substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions,” the agency stated.
Cause:Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm, devastated the country in October 1998. Mitch was particularly destructive in Nicaragua and Honduras, killing about 11,000 people in Central America.
Why it was extended: DHS postponed its decision, triggering an automatic six-month extension. Its then-acting secretary Elaine Duke had announced there was not enough information to make a formal decision.
Cause: A civil war broke out when Houthi rebels drove out the US-backed government, led by President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, and took over the capital, Sanaa. The crisis quickly escalated into a multi-sided war leading to airstrikes in 2015. At least 10,000 people have been killedin the war, according to the United Nations, with millions more displaced.
Why it was extended: DHS granted an 18-month extension in 2017, because of the ongoing armed conflict in Yemen. It cited “continued deterioration of the conditions for civilians in Yemen” and said returning Yemeni nationals to the country would “pose a serious threat to their personal safety.”
Cause: Somalia was designated for TPS after the country descended into civil war after dictator Siad Barre’s ouster in 1991. Nearing three decades of conflict, much of the country’s governance structure, economic infrastructure, and institutions have been destroyed.
Why it was extended: “The security situation in Somalia remains fragile and volatile,” according to DHS. The agency said Somalis couldn’t safely return to the country. “Somalia continues to experience a complex protracted emergency that is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world,” it stated in 2017.
Why it was extended: The ongoing armed conflict and the conditions have “persisted, and in some cases, deteriorated, and would pose a serious threat to the personal safety of South Sudanese nationals if they were required to return to their country,” according to DHS.
The federal government has made changes to a problem-plagued lottery program for those wishing to bring their parents or grandparents to Canada, but immigration lawyers warn the updated system is still deeply flawed.
The 2018 sponsorship program for parents and grandparents opened Tuesday. This year, those interested will have to provide more information about who they want to sponsor and whether they meet the program’s income requirements before their names are entered in the lottery. The change is an attempt to winnow out those who aren’t eligible to apply, after thousands of people selected last year failed to follow through with their applications.
“Helping more people reunite with their parents and grandparents in Canada demonstrates the government’s commitment to keeping families together, leading to successful integration and stronger ties to Canada,” said Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen in a statement from Dec. 22, when the 2018 program was announced.
But Elizabeth Wozniak, a Halifax-based immigration lawyer, said the lottery system is “just a bit of a crapshoot.” She believes ineligible applicants will still submit the initial paperwork, bogging down the system and making it harder for those who do meet the criteria to bring their loved ones to Canada.
“Anyone can throw their name in once again, same as last year,” she said. “It’s just going to be more of the same.”
In years past, the sponsorship program for parents and grandparents was first-come, first-served. People submitted full applications during the earliest days of the new year, and the first 5,000 would be processed. In 2016, that number was doubled to 10,000.
But last year, the government decided to change the rules and use a lottery system instead. Those interested had to submit only basic information using an online form between January and February, after which 10,000 names were randomly selected to submit complete applications.
The change was intended to make the system fairer for those living further afield and for those who couldn’t afford a lawyer to help them prepare the full application on time.
Last year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada received 95,000 online forms, and randomly chose 10,000 of them. But according to information presented by Hussen in the House of Commons in December, the department only ended up receiving 6,020 applications.
Wozniak said the program’s income requirements are the biggest obstacle for would-be applicants. The government requires that sponsors prove they meet income thresholds for the previous three years, which vary depending on the size of their family.
But the 2017 online form didn’t ask for any information about income, which meant ineligible people could be selected from the lottery and only then realize they couldn’t actually apply.
This year, the new online form asks whether would-be applicants meet the income thresholds — but it doesn’t require proof. Wozniak said that’s not good enough. “Ineligible people can still be selected and they won’t be vetted out,” she said.
Last year, the immigration department eventually sent out a second round of invitations to make up the rest of the 10,000 spots. The applications were due in December. The government has yet to say whether it reached its target.
Wozniak said she had about 25 clients who were in the pool last year, and none were selected in either draw. “It was a real letdown for people who were eligible,” she said.
Toronto-based immigration lawyer Matthew Jeffery said the new online form is a “definite improvement” over last year, but cautioned that it will still be difficult to weed out ineligible applicants.
“At the end of the day, I consider the process arbitrary and unnecessary,” he said. “It boils down to luck. So someone who’s qualified to sponsor their parents and has been for a long time, if they’re unlucky, they may never be able to sponsor their parents.”
He believes the 10,000-person limit should be scrapped altogether, and said he thinks the income threshold and other requirements are enough to limit the number of applicants.
Wozniak said the old first-come, first-served system was working fine.
“It wasn’t great, it wasn’t perfect… but we had no issues getting eligible people into processing,” she said. “It’s much more certain and it was faster, easier, more predictable.”
As for her 25 clients from last year, she said, their parents and grandparents would be permanent residents by now under the old system: “No doubt.”
An interesting analysis of the correlation between increased immigration and xenophobia in Europe. Not encouraging:
The era after WWII was mostly devoid of populist party influence. Instead, Europe was on the mend, and integration at the forefront of European if not global policy agendas. Integration ensured peace. The postwar-prosperity was phenomenal, productivity and social welfare programmes expanded rapidly. Given the changes in the past decades, in particular after the latest European expansion and Eurozone crisis, a new era is upon us.
Beginning in the 1970s in Western Europe, populism has risen yet again amidst the waves of immigration that began in the 1960s. The new populist parties are often unidimensional with explicit xenophobic, anti-immigrant positions. Their messages scapegoat non-white, non-native born persons; often with a diametric opposition to Muslims or Islamic culture. In Western European countries, anti-immigrant populist parties – sometimes labelled the ‘populist radical right’ or ‘neo-nationalists’ – expanded from below 5% of the national vote share in 1962 up to 13% by 2017, on average.
Figure 1: Immigrants and observed/predicted future support for anti-immigration parties in Western Europe (1962-2035)
Note: This chart is based on 17 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Data from OECD, Global Bilateral Migration and ParlGov.
The vote share and percentage of foreign-born members of the population observed from 1962-2017 reveals a pattern. They rise in tandem. This is not a paradox of pooling Western European data. In each country on its own, the stock of foreign-born persons explains 50 to 97% of the variance in anti-immigrant party vote share (i.e., the range of correlation coefficients in 17 countries). This does not mean immigration causes anti-immigrant voting; however, social and political research explains why it is part of the causal process.
Immigration appears to be the only stable component of new populist parties and their limited policy victories. Thus far, new populist parties have successfully ushered in policies banning or criticising inter-ethnic marriage, the construction of Mosques, immigration flows and the human right to asylum (to name a few). Meanwhile, the UK voted to leave the EU; the Social Democrats in Sweden, after bleeding votes to the Sweden Democrats, introduced bureaucratic regulations against immigration; and perhaps most dramatically, 12.7% of German voters voted for the AfD, which is now Germany’s third largest party.
This marks a new era. The post-war spring season of growth has turned to autumn, with a fall in votes for mainstream parties, falling GDP growth and a potential decline in human rights. Anti-immigration views and aggressive displays of national pride, which might once have been confined to private dinner table conversations, have now moved into the public sphere, on the streets, in the media, and in political debates. The 2014 launch of PEGIDA and the sudden growth of the AfD are evidence of this public sphere change in Germany, the last place on earth one expects to find populism. At least 5 million Germans lost their lives under populist leadership last time around, not to mention those from other countries. Once out in the open, history suggests that nationalism reproduces itself because individuals see the public sphere as a safe space for them to express, if not grow their dissatisfaction with society and politics.
This is particularly acute when rates of immigration are increasing. Immigration provides a tangible basis to support narratives among the media and social networks that then shape the perceptions and experiences of natives. This leads to an increased salience of group boundaries. The native population may feel threatened by immigrants geographically and economically, challenging both group and national identities. These feelings magnify when native populations face increasing risks to their social and material security, a situation that lower income workers have had to confront since the 1980s due to a combination of economic crises, stagnant wages and welfare state retrenchments. Thus, redrawing or redoubling group boundaries is an active response, a defence mechanism built on the belief that the group will prosper if other groups are marginalised. This belief then fuses with the rhetoric of anti-immigration parties. As Figure 1 shows, this effect is likely a function of the number of immigrants in wider society.
Figure 2: Ageing population figures and observed/predicted GDP growth in Western Europe (1962-2035)
Note: Observed and predicted data from the OECD for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
And immigration must continue to increase. The ageing population in Western Europe demands services and resources that the native working-age population cannot provide. Figure 2 demonstrates conservative estimates of both population ageing and GDP growth stagnation until 2035 from the OECD. Today a country is lucky to have 3% growth on average. Using predictive multilevel modelling and these statistics, we can tentatively predict that anti-immigration populist parties will increase their vote share.
The most conservative prediction suggests that the vote share for such parties will cross 15% by 2035, as shown by the solid red line in Figure 1. However, the development of this support follows distinct phases. After an anti-immigration party enters the political arena and acquires support, the average time before it gains 5% of the national vote is 3.2 years (albeit with a large variance). After this 5% threshold is met, anti-immigration parties follow a trajectory of swift gains in the early phase (within 10 years of crossing the 5% mark), stability if not turbulence in the middle phase (up to 15 years) and then ultimately more gains in the mature phase (up to 30 years) as sown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Trajectory of national vote share for anti-immigration parties after crossing the 5% threshold
Note: The three country phases include the following countries: Phase (a) includes Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, the UK, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands. Phase (b) includes Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark and Italy. Phase (c) includes Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Norway.
Using these phases as an alternative augmentation to statistical prediction, suddenly 15% turns into a 20% vote share by 2035, shown by the dotted red line in Figure 1 after 2017. In most if not all countries, 20% of the national vote would put an anti-immigration party in second place and make it a serious contender as a coalition partner, as seen in Austria’s recent election.
Even with UKIP gaining much lower levels of support than this, the UK opted for a drastic undermining of European integration with its vote for Brexit. Meanwhile in other countries, support of between 5 and 25% of the vote for anti-immigration parties has coincided with more restrictive asylum rules or bureaucratic practices being put in place in Austria, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Switzerland in recent years. A 20% vote share for anti-immigration parties would equate to a roughly 5-10% increase in the overall level of support for these parties in Western Europe. Moreover, if nationalist policies undermine international actors such as the EU or international frameworks such as the Geneva Convention, supranational arbitration will become increasingly difficult as states come into competition with one another.
How likely are these estimates? Nothing is certain and exogenous shocks are commonplace. Yet demographic science suggests that increased labour force participation, higher contributions from workers and employers, and lower benefits provided to retirees would be inevitable without an increase in immigration. In hyper-ageing societies such as Germany, the necessary increase would equate to a population where as many as 60% or more of citizens are foreign-born. Using these drastic estimates, the models outlined above also predict a 20% foreign-born population by 2035. Either way, the suggestion that support for anti-immigration parties will reach 15% on average by 2035 is potentially conservative, and 20% support is entirely possible.
Populism rises and falls in its myriad variants, but the explicitly anti-immigration version is likely here to stay. This carries additional baggage, as anti-immigration parties take aim at European integration while sometimes allying themselves with neoliberalism as both are in opposition to ‘the establishment’. These parties are not normally anti-democracy, but their authoritarian tendencies, their lack of coherent economic or educational policy and their willingness to foster division are all symptoms of the new season Europe is now entering: a European fall.
Another story on the Canadian immigration advantage:
A Flatiron district artificial intelligence start-up was recently looking to expand, adding new engineers who happened to know a niche computer language.
The people it hired hail from Morocco, Belarus, France, Georgia and Canada. But they are not working in New York. They are in Montreal, where immigration policies make it possible to get work permits within two weeks, and the Canadian tech industry is aggressively trying to woo foreign companies.
“It’s becoming less and less sexy to be going to the United States,” said Tim Delisle, 26, a founder of the start-up Datalogue, which uses artificial intelligence to prepare and synthesize data for other businesses. He added that skilled foreign workers crave the greater stability that he said immigrants have in Canada compared with the United States.
While much attention has been paid to President Trump’s policies cracking down on illegal immigration, the administration has also moved to restrict legal immigration, especially in the tech industry, which draws many workers from abroad. In April, Mr. Trump introduced an executive order, Buy American and Hire American, which included requests to reform a visa program known as H-1B as a way to benefit American workers.
The program awards 85,000 temporary visas annually to highly skilled foreign workers in what are deemed “specialty” occupations through a lottery. Between application and legal fees, the process of applying for one H-1B visa can cost a company up to $6,000, lawyers say, and can take months; it is also as uncertain as roulette, with hundreds of thousands of applicants for the spots.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security published a set of proposed rule changes that would make the visas even harder to qualify for, to ensure that only “the best and brightest” foreign workers were selected. It also hoped to eliminate a work permit for spouses of some of these visa holders.
In contrast, Canada’s immigration agency in June started the Global Skills Strategy for high-skilled workers from abroad to get a work permit in two weeks.
“That is, excuse my English, goddamn fast,” said Hubert Bolduc, the chief executive of Montreal International, a public-private partnership that recruits foreign companies to move to Canada and offers support once they arrive in Montreal. “We’ve been loving government on this because we know it’s a talent game.”
In 2017, the organization conducted eight international recruiting missions, in London, Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Its directors have made several informal visits to New York, where it came this month to woo a video game company.
With the Trump administration’s immigration policies, “We’re almost saying, ‘Don’t come,’” said Sunil Hirani, the co-founder of trueEx, an electronic global interest rates exchange, also in the Flatiron neighborhood. He came to New York as a child 40 years ago from India. “How can you have a ‘Come to New York City’ program if the people of New York City are going to get kicked out? How do you sell that?”
Last year, trueEx’s chief executive and president, Karen O’Connor, was looking at options to expand the company’s computer engineer group. A consortium related to Montreal International invited her to Canada for a visit that made her feel like a foreign dignitary, she said. There was the elegant lunch, the precisely coordinated meetings with potential business partners and a visit to the Montreal Stock Exchange.
Ms. O’Connor said the 50-person company could save more than $1 million in wages if it hired engineers based in Montreal. In part, that was because the cost of living was far less compared with New York and because the company could qualify for certain tax benefits.
But after Mr. Trump was elected, trueEx hesitated, to gauge the climate; now, it is again considering expanding north of the border in 2018, Ms. O’Connor said, in part because it got a spot site visit from the Department of Homeland Security this summer to verify employment records for its H-1B visa holders. They were in order, but the company’s executives found the process nerve-racking.
Photo
Datalogue’s founders, Tim Delisle, left, and Bryan Russett, in their Montreal office. “It’s becoming less and less sexy to be going to the United States,” Mr. Delisle said.CreditRenaud Philippe for The New York Times
“My advice to other companies would be: Hold on for dear life, but explore other options,” Mr. Hirani said.
But John Miano, a lawyer who represents American workers who say that they have lost jobs unfairly to low-skilled H-1B visa holders, thought it was “posturing” for companies to say they are moving north of the border to find the best talent. “The problem is, you got to go to Canada,” Mr. Miano said. “The reality is, the place to do business is still the United States.”
Datalogue’s expansion to Montreal, Mr. Delisle’s hometown, evolved swiftly. He and a partner founded Datalogue in 2016 at Cornell Tech in Manhattan and were lucky when a tech mogul, Charles E. Phillips Jr., the chief executive of Infor, gave him two desks on the fifth floor of Infor’s elegantly restored Flatiron headquarters.
By spring 2017, Datalogue had grown to five employees and had raised $1.5 million in seed funding. But to bring in more engineers would have cost thousands of dollars in visa fees, Mr. Delisle said, and even then, the process would not be guaranteed. Canada has a burgeoning artificial intelligence sector, and the company opened its Montreal office in April in the trendy Mile End neighborhood; it raised another $1.5 million in seed funding by November.
Still, Mr. Delisle said that his company has better access to customers in New York, and for that reason he has kept seven employees there for sales and marketing.
While tech is still thriving in New York, where it is the fastest-growing industry in the city, losing offices or whole companies to Canada could be a concern, said Kevin Ryan, an entrepreneur who had founded a half-dozen start-ups. The multiplier effect of the start-up world is a powerful one.
“When someone decides not to come here to join a start-up, and they go to Toronto, some of them may break off and start a new company across the street,” he said. “The wider impact will be felt, literally, for decades.”
Mr. Delisle agreed. “I’m not necessarily scared for New York; there’s phenomenal programs there,” he said. “I am more scared for the broader policies being applied right now.”
According to the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, immigration has always been central to the economy of New York. Forty-eight percent of the city’s small-business owners are immigrants, and 45 percent of the work force in the city is foreign-born.
“The No. 1 priority of business today is where they can get the talent they need from the global talent pool,” said Kathryn S. Wylde, the chief executive of the group. “There’s not much a locality can do to incentivize, but we can try to keep the global pipeline open.”
Stimulating the city economy was the impetus for New York City’s Economic Development Corporation to create a program called International Innovators Initiative, or IN2NYC. The idea was to provide H-1B visas that were exempt from the government-imposed cap because entrepreneurs would work in partnership with city universities.
The program was announced in the spring of 2016 and received 144 applications in the first round. The second round, coming on the heels of the Trump administration’s travel ban, attracted half that number. The program received only 41 this fall.
Perhaps even more telling is the small number of foreign entrepreneurs who received visas: six. The IN2NYC program had envisioned at least 25 working at once, but the process, officials say, has been delayed by government challenges to the visas.
One company that was initially rejected has appealed — and set up shop in Canada while it is waiting for a decision.
Test for the government in terms of public confidence in the immigration system and the degree to which its outreach and other efforts, particularly in dealing with claims expeditiously, succeed in reducing the flow:
A sixth borough of New York City might just exist; it could be a realm called Limbo. Twenty thousand Haitians live throughout other neighbourhoods but in a state of temporariness, waiting every couple of years to see if the federal government will allow them to renew their temporary protective status—and stay in the United States—for a processing fee of US$495 per person.
In subway stations, a Brooklyn advocate named Herold Dasque distributes flyers asking New Yorkers to lobby government officials to extend the Haitian status America-wide, at least one more time. “You will have 50,000 Haitians who will try to go in hiding,” says Dasque about the consequences of terminating the designation. “They will not go to work, not go to church,” he says. “You don’t go outside.”
Dasque’s campaign didn’t sway the Department of Homeland Security. It announced in late November that it will end the temporary protective status for Haiti, though it will delay deportations until July 2019.
Since the U.S. first warned in May 2017 that it might end the protected status, thousands of asylum seekers, many of them Haitian, have headed for Canada. In 2018, even more are expected to follow, adding pressure to an already backlogged refugee processing system.
Canadian members of Parliament have already begun meeting face-to-face with Haitians and officials in New York, as well as in Florida, attempting to end illegal crossings into Canada—17,000 asylum claimants from around the world were intercepted by the RCMP this year.
Among the recipient cities and towns, Montreal converted its Olympic Stadium into an emergency shelter in August, and about two weeks before that the Canadian Forces set up tents in Cornwall, Ont. As Canada attempts to warn asylum seekers against going with the flow, 2018 may be the year Canada flips its metaphorical welcome mat.
“They have to be aware of the robust immigration law we have in Canada,” says MP Emmanuel Dubourg, a Quebecois Liberal who was born in Saint-Marc, Haiti, and moved to Canada at age 14. He recently travelled to New York where he spoke with city hall officials, held meetings at the Canadian consulate and did an interview with Radio Soleil, the local Haitian radio station. “The goal, it’s to inform them, to tell them what the consequences are if they cross the border illegally.” Canada welcomes immigrants, he tells them, but “it’s not a free ticket to cross the border like this.”
“I don’t even think people would go to that meeting,” says Jeffry House, a human rights lawyer in Toronto, about Ottawa’s outreach efforts. “The number of illegal people who would go to a library to hear some MPs talk about why it’s not a good idea to come—it doesn’t strike me as a crowd-pleaser.” In Montreal, Warren Creates, an immigration and refugee lawyer, also says the delegation won’t reverse the trend. “It’s not going to stop it; it’s not going to stem it; it’s not going to mitigate it,” says Creates. “They’re wise, these communities of people who are fearful. They’ve figured out where they need to go. They’ve figured out the path of least resistance.”
While the number of illegal border migrants is still relatively small, Canada’s refugee system is not equipped to process them. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) predicts that if its backlog grows as anticipated, claimants arriving in 2021 could wait 11 years for hearings. Between February and October, 6,304 Haitian refugee claims were referred to the IRB and just 298 cases were concluded.
Creates says most migrants won’t start presenting themselves at ports of entry, aware they’d be turned away at those sites due to the Safe Third Country Agreement, which allows Canada to turn back an asylum seeker coming from the U.S. who fails to make a claim first in that country, but only if he or she arrives at an official port of entry. “What worries me most is that in darkness, and storms and winter months, people ill-equipped and not properly clothed . . . they’re being forced into a procedure that they know will allow them entry into Canada and have this fair chance, but at the same time they’re risking their health and their lives.”
The delegation to New York, Creates says, only embellishes the Liberal image of taking action. Haitians will not agree to present themselves at official border crossings, as they are not travelling for business or pleasure, but rather for a home more certain than Limbo.
Another example of xenophobia and “othering,” despite labour shortages:
A Danish MP has called for all refugees, even those with jobs, to be deported from the country once their home nations are deemed “safe”.
Marcus Knuth, an immigration spokesman for the governing Liberal (Venstre) party, said all people who have been granted asylum in Denmark should be made to go back to their country of origin regardless of whether they had already assimilated into Danish life.
The government, which is minority controlled by the Liberals with support from the Danish People’s Party, Liberal Alliance and the Conservative People’s Party, is currently negotiating what is being called a “paradigm change” in the country’s attitude to asylum.
The rule change is being demanded by the nationalist Danish People’s Party in return for supporting tax cuts. The new rules would see refugees granted temporary asylum, meaning they will be ordered to go back to their home country when the danger had past and are denied the right to family reunification.
These refugees will also be barred from accessing integration services such as language lessons and the “basic integration education programme” – an apprenticeship scheme introduced last year, The Local reported.
A similar scheme was introduced in Germany last year following a backlash against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door policy to refugees fearing violence in Iraq and Syria.
Over 1 million refugees arrived in Germany in 2016.
But the new rules are likely to create a big hole in the Danish jobs market as the arrival of refugees has made up for a reported decline in the number of people coming to the country from eastern Europe.
A report by the Danish newspaper Berlingske said that workers from outside the EU made up a larger share of foreign workers than EU citizens for the first time.
Meanwhile the Confederation of Danish Industry has repeatedly stressed the difficulty its members have had in filling its jobs – which it said was largely to do with the falling number of people arriving in the country to work.
Figures released by the body in November showed that the number of EU citizens coming to Denmark to work has fallen by 65 percent in the space of 15 months.
According to their analysis EU citizens took just 11 per cent of newly created jobs in Denmark in 2017 – compared with 87 per cent in 2013.
But Mr Knuth is adamant that “overall refugees are an economic burden for Denmark”.
He said: “The number of refugees on the labour market is fortunately increasing. But at the same time, they do not make up a big part of the jobs market”.
“If refugees can make a contribution, that can only be positive. But that does not change the fact that, as soon as there is peace in their home country, that have to go back”.
Moving towards the Canadian and Australian models given priority to the economic class with, of course, falsehoods regarding the percentage of immigrants in jailed (less than non-immigrants) and exaggerations regarding links to terror:
The White House is embarking on a major campaign to turn public opinion against the nation’s largely family-based immigration system ahead of an all-out push next year to move toward a more merit-based structure.
The administration was laying the groundwork for such a drive even before an Islamic State-inspired extremist who was born in Bangladesh tried to blow himself up in Midtown Manhattan on Monday. It is assembling data to bolster the argument that the current legal immigration system is not only ill-conceived, but dangerous and damaging to U.S. workers.
“We believe that data drives policy, and this data will help drive votes for comprehensive immigration reform in Congress,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley.
White House officials outlined their strategy this week exclusively to The Associated Press, and said the data demonstrates that changes are needed immediately. But their effort will play out in a difficult political climate, as even Republicans in Congress are leery of engaging in a major immigration debate ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
The issue is expected to be prominently featured in the president’s Jan. 30 State of the Union address. The White House also plans other statements by the president, appearances by Cabinet officials and a push to stress the issue in conservative media.
The administration was beginning its campaign Thursday with a blog post stressing key numbers: Department of Homeland Security data that shows nearly 9.3 million of the roughly 13 million total immigrants to the U.S. from 2005 to 2016 were following family members already in the United States. And just one in 15 immigrants admitted in the last decade by green card entered the country because of their skills.
Other planned releases: a report highlighting the number of immigrants in U.S. jails, assessments of the immigration court backlog and delays in processing asylum cases, and a paper on what the administration says is a nexus between immigration and terrorism.
Critics have questioned the administration’s selective use of sometimes misleading data in the past.
The proposed move away from family-based immigration would represent the most radical change to the U.S. immigration system in 30 years. It would end what critics and the White House refer to as “chain migration,” in which immigrants are allowed to bring a chain of family members to the country, and replace it with a points-based system that favors education and job potential — “merit” measures that have increasingly been embraced by some other countries, including Britain.
Gidley said that for those looking to make the case that the U.S. is ill-served by the current system, “transparency is their best friend.”
“The more people know the real numbers, the more they’ll begin to understand that this is bad for American workers and this is bad for American security. And quite frankly, when these numbers come out in totality, we believe it’s going to be virtually impossible for Congress to ignore,” he said.
The public is sharply divided on the types of changes President Donald Trump is advocating.
A Quinnipiac University poll in August found that 48% of voters opposed a proposal that Trump has backed to cut the number of future legal immigrants in half and give priority to immigrants with job skills rather than those with family ties in this country. 44% of those polled — including 68% of Republicans — supported the idea.
The White House hopes to see Congress begin to take up the issue early in 2018 — though it has yet to begin discussions with congressional leaders over even the broad strokes of a legislative strategy, officials said.
Trump has laid out general principles for what he would like to see in an immigration bill in exchange for giving legal status to more than 700,000 young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. These include the construction of a border wall, tougher enforcement measures and moving to a more merit-based legal immigration system. In September, Trump gave Congress six months to come up with a legislative fix to allow the young immigrants known as “Dreamers” to stay in the country, creating an early-2018 crisis point he hopes will force Democrats to swallow some of his hardline demands.
Anecdote-based but incentive structures are there. Hard to devise cost effective detection and enforcement strategies. Surprisingly, Flora has no specific proposals to curb such abuse:
The desire to emigrate has increased so much among the Punjabi community in India that people are doing everything they can to leave their country and reach foreign shores — even employing such extreme methods as using human traffickers, or wilfully violating immigration laws.
But in recent years, a new trend is emerging. It’s very simple: If a person can’t come to Canada on his own or as an international student, they still come to Canada at the price of an international student’s expense.
This was a big surprise to me. I was waiting on my Brampton street for the school bus to drop off my daughter, when a group of young women walked by.
“Oh study is so expensive here,” said one. Another girl said, “Maybe for you, but I’m not even paying a dime!”
The other girls were surprised. “How is that?” asked the first girl.
As the girl explained, there was a family in India whose son badly wanted to emigrate to Canada. They did everything, but no luck. But this girl was a bright student and easily qualified for a student visa.
“So we made the deal,” she explained. “They pay all my expenses, from airline fare to the college fees, books… right down to my boarding and lodging, and all my living expenses in Canada. In return, we’ll get the boy to Canada by proving that we are married.”
Our people are nothing if not creative. But the simplicity of the scheme took my breath away.
According to Canadian law, if an international student is married, they can bring their spouse over and the spouse can acquire a work permit for the duration of the student’s period of study. So the young man’s side takes on the financial burden, while the young woman gets her “husband” across and completes her four-year degree.
Assuming the age of the fiance is about 18 to 22 years at the time they arrive, over the next four or five years they become permanent residents. After that they get divorced, at around the age of 23-26 years. They then find their original life partners and settle their life in Canada. Both sides part ways happily and go their separate ways. A good business transaction indeed.
In recent years, the Punjabi community has already made itself famous for fake marriages. Such fake marriages have not completely stopped, but the system has been tightened up.
According to the Canadian Bureau of International Education, in Canada in 2016, there were 353,000 international students in Canada. Among this tally, 34% were from China and 14% from India. From 2008 to 2015, the number of international students coming to Canada also increased 92%. Data from a 2010 government report tells us that international students brought almost $8 billion of tuition fees into the economy and spurred the creation of 81,000 new jobs.
These figures show Canada needs international students. But it is also true that there is no need for unnecessary attempts to follow the wrong path. Will the Liberal government pay attention to this spurious trend?
One more fallout of such creativity is that the immigration department is unable to tell the difference between true and false marriages. Consequently, genuine cases are affected.
The rise in fake marriages has many Punjabi community organizations concerned about this issue enough to pressure the federal government to make changes in immigration laws to prevent such fraud.
At the end of the day, it’s not the system that’s the problem, it’s us who misuse it by hook or by crook, to fulfill our dreams. And it needs to stop.
Multicultural Meanderings 