Immigration department refused more than 20,000 visas from World Cup fans

2026/07/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

The immigration department refused more than 20,000 visa applications from foreign nationals who applied to come to Canada for the FIFA World Cup, official figures show. 

Canada played host to 13 games in Toronto and Vancouver in June and July, issuing 26,000 visas to visitors, including people invited by FIFA to work at the tournament. 

However, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada refused another 20,845 visa applications related to the tournament. It refused an additional 205 electronic travel authorizations for visa-exempt foreign nationals. 

Among the refused visa applications were 3,135 from Ghanaian fans. IRCC approved only 470 visas for Ghanaians, whose national team played Panama on June 17 in Toronto. …

According to new data provided to The Globe, the department refused applications from 1,965 Nigerians who wanted to come to Canada for the international soccer tournament, which Canada co-hosted with the United States and Mexico. Only 220 Nigerian fans who applied for visas were approved to come here for the World Cup….

Toronto immigration lawyer Stephen Green said Canada’s immigration officers would have closely vetted applications, including to see if applicants had enough money to support themselves while they were here. 

“They were checking for whether or not someone would leave at the end of their proposed visit,” he added. 

Templar Kalundu Iga, director of policy and global strategy at the Canadian Centre for African Affairs and Policy Research, said the comparatively high volumes of visa applications from Nigeria and Ghana were not surprising, with both being major footballing nations. 

But he said there was a “pronounced disparity between approvals and refusals,” noting that 90 per cent of applications from Nigeria were declined and 87 per cent from Ghana.

“The World Cup could have been used to deepen our understanding of African tourism, diaspora mobility and investment flows, while connecting immigration policy to the objectives of Canada’s Africa Strategy,” he said in an e-mail. “Instead, the data risk presenting African mobility principally through the language of immigration risk.”…

Source: Immigration department refused more than 20,000 visas from World Cup fans

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MPI: Population Aging Is Here. Immigration Can Offer Half an Answer.

2026/07/30 Leave a comment

Another analysis on the limits of immigration to address population aging and low fertility rates:

Countries around the world face a demographic transition that is arriving faster than many governments have planned for, as falling fertility and aging populations place growing pressure on workforces, tax bases and the public systems that support retirees. 

The scale of the change is now visible well beyond the wealthy countries that have long grappled with aging populations. China’s annual births have fallen to levels not recorded since 1949, and comparable declines are underway in countries across Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, leaving many countries old before they grow rich, with shrinking workforces and rising costs for pensions and health care. 

A new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) policy brief finds that treating immigration as a numbers game—rather than planning for integration and workforce participation—leaves much of its demographic dividend on the table. 

In many fast-aging, wealthier countries, governments have long leaned on immigration as a response to shrinking, aging workforces, but the math does not support that expectation at scale, Meghan Benton, director of MPI’s Global Program, writes in Population Aging Is Here. Immigration Can Offer Half an Answer. Holding worker-to-retiree ratios steady through migration alone would require a 75 percent increase in the combined population of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries by 2050—a level of growth few, if any, publics would accept. 

Immigration should be understood as a partial lever rather than a substitute for broader demographic strategy, which must include retirement-age extensions, productivity investments, family-friendly policies and social security reforms, the brief notes. 

On the immigration front, Benton argues that governments need to pay greater attention to whether newcomers and their families can participate fully in the economy; failure to do so leaves real fiscal value on the table when integration is treated as secondary. 

The brief sets out several principles for better leveraging immigration, including prioritizing the skills and career stage of arriving immigrants; treating integration programming, including language training, as an investment rather than a cost; folding immigration into the same long-term planning governments already apply to pensions, housing and infrastructure; addressing pension gaps for aging immigrants through portable retirement funds; and ensuring immigration narrows rather than widens global inequality by investing in skills partnerships that connect training, mobility and local development. 

The brief also cautions against assuming artificial intelligence can quickly substitute for immigration. Benton notes that prioritizing high earners may be difficult given rising low-skilled labor shortages in sectors such as elder care, agriculture, hospitality and construction, which remain largely resistant to near-term automation. Governments will need to prioritize those with flexible skills. 

“While immigration cannot solve population aging, it can be a useful demographic and economic lever—if it is employed more effectively,” Benton writes. “The next few years will provide a real-time experiment in the success of policies that prioritize immigration versus other economic levers to help countries navigate population aging, including extending retirement age, investing in productivity advances and reforming social security systems. Different models are already taking shape.” 

Source: Population Aging Is Here. Immigration Can Offer Half an Answer.

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Immigrants to Canada have adopted the country’s low-fertility rates, new research finds

2026/07/30 Leave a comment

Not new but further confirmation that immigration has a limited impact on overall population growth:

Economic migrants, who make up the bulk of Canada’s immigrants, have adopted their new country’s behaviour in one significant area — they have very low fertility rates, new research suggests.

“Immigrants are feeling the low-fertility pressure of Canada here, like everyone else,” says demographer and sociologist Rachel Margolis, a professor at Western University, and one of the authors of a new paper on immigration and fertility.

Even groups with relatively high fertility — family stream and refugees — are also below the replacement level of 2.1 children, according to the research. Additionally, the top three source countries Canada draws immigrants from are low-fertility nations. The total fertility rate in India, the top source country, for instance, has dropped to 1.9 children per woman.

At a record low of 1.25 children per woman, Canada has entered an “ultra-low fertility” era. In 2024, it joined a list of several countries, including Finland, Italy and South Korea, with a fertility rate below 1.3.

Canada grows its population and bolsters the economy through immigration. But that short-term solution for population loss doesn’t address long-term population aging, according to the study….

Ramos highlights that it’s probably time for the country to consider a population strategy. “I think Canada’s policy has largely focused on economic issues and treated other issues as challenges to the economy, whereas really, underlying most of the economic issues are demographic issues.

Source: Immigrants to Canada have adopted the country’s low-fertility rates, new research finds

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Barutciski: The UN’s Refugee Convention finds itself at a crossroads 75 years later – because of how it’s being interpreted

2026/07/29 2 Comments

Sort of inevitable that conventions get reinterpreted over time but always useful to assess that reinterpretation and the impact of these changes. But yes, empathy and understanding required in both directions:

…The 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention offers a critical opportunity to change this unsustainable trajectory. Today, the greatest threat to refugee dignity is not domestic xenophobia, though societies must remain vigilant against it. It may be a maximalist and activist reading of the historic treaty pushed by open-border advocates that has stifled candid, pragmatic debate. 

Refugee protection can only survive if it retains the democratic support of host populations. Without it, public goodwill will continue to dry up, leaving governments to scramble with short-sighted, improvised burden-shifting schemes. 

Crucially, sovereign states are not permanently bound by expansive judicial decisions, even if it is reasonable for the interpretation of international treaty law to evolve. National parliaments possess the authority to amend domestic legislation to clarify ambiguous legal terms. By codifying precise thresholds for asylum, most legislatures can effectively override a judiciary and restore the structural parameters originally intended by the treaty.

The central predicament is that few political leaders in the West possess the courage to confront the contradiction characterizing modern refugee law. Instead, mainstream politicians maintain a facade of humanitarian concern, failing to recognize that sustainable policy requires empathy in both directions – toward needy foreigners, and toward the citizens asked to absorb them. 

Source: The UN’s Refugee Convention finds itself at a crossroads 75 years later – because of how it’s being interpreted

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Indian students arranged marriages of convenience for spouse work permits to Canada, warned New Delhi migration official

2026/07/29 Leave a comment

The warnings were there:

The number of Indian undergraduate students applying to come to Canada has dropped over the past few years, in part because Ottawa ended a program granting the spouses of international students work permits, an internal government communication shows. 

The communication discloses how marriages of convenience by some Indian students had enabled their spouses to accompany them to this country to work and to help them pay for their studies.

A 2025 e-mail report, obtained under access to information laws, to immigration department officials from Canada’s High Commission in New Delhi discusses a number of integrity issues involving Indian students, including marriages of convenience.

Marriages linked to immigration to Canada were advertised in Indian newspapers and dating apps, according to the report.

But a change in the rules in 2024 by then-immigration minister Marc Miller closed this avenue to Canada for international students’ spouses. …

Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer who obtained the e-mail through an access to information request, said Canada can pick who it wants to come here to study and “that should mean only the people who can afford to study in Canada without working.”

“Study permits should not be a dating trampoline to Canada,” Mr. Kurland added. 

The number of Indian study permit holders dropped to 93,840 in 2025 from 188,125 in 2024 and 277,950 in 2023, according to IRCC figures, reducing a key revenue stream for many colleges and universities. 

Syed Hussan, executive director at Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, said he thought the drop in numbers was because “people are choosing not to go to countries where they cannot go with their families.”…

Source: Indian students arranged marriages of convenience for spouse work permits to Canada, warned New Delhi migration official

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ICYMI: World Cup leads to 175 asylum claims from visitors who arrived in Canada for matches

2026/07/28 Leave a comment

Not surprising. About 0.07 percent of total visitors:

…Visitors to Canada who applied for visas to attend the FIFA World Cup have so far lodged 175 asylum claims, including from Senegal, Ghana and Egypt.

Canada played host to 13 games in Toronto and Vancouver in June and July, issuing 26,000 visas to visitors. Spain won the international tournament on Sunday by defeating the previous reigning champion, Argentina.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada declined to say how many of the refugee claims were made by soccer players or support staff from visiting teams.

The number of claims could still increase, including from foreign nationals who overstay the terms of their visa and later claim refugee status. ….

Source: World Cup leads to 175 asylum claims from visitors who arrived in Canada for matches

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ICYMI – Urback: Canada does not owe international students a path to residency

2026/07/28 2 Comments

Suspect this represents a majority view even if federal and provincial governments, along with education institutions, were complicit:

…None of this is fair in the very colloquial sense of the word. The Canadian government was explicitly marketing student visas as a path to permanent residency by inviting foreigners to “study, work and stay in Canada,” and prospective students responded in droves. In 2023-24, there were 428,077 student visa-holders in Canada, which was up nearly 50 per cent from just before the pandemic. And the reason why that number exploded was not because people from Punjab were suddenly ecstatic about the opportunity to learn hairdressing at the Eikonic Academy in Mississauga, but because everyone knew it was an easy way to start a new life in Canada. You could even work as much as you wanted while you ostensibly studied for a degree to take back home.

The Canadian government cannot and should not do anything now to placate the international students protesting for PGWP access, even though Ottawa played a major role in setting their expectations in the first place. Canadian residency cannot be for sale, even if the Canadian government dangled the prospect just a few years ago. This is an unfortunate outcome for those who risked everything to start a new life in Canada, but the process was always that: a risk. 

Source: Canada does not owe international students a path to residency

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Nicolas | Tiers pays sûr, vraiment?

2026/07/27 Leave a comment

Hard to see the STCA surviving the court challenge:

…Empêcher les demandes d’asile de personnes ayant transité par les États-Unis est décrié comme un problème majeur par les défenseurs des droits de la personne depuis des années. Mais avec Trump et la violence politique de l’ICE, la situation s’est lourdement encore aggravée. Lorsque le statut de protection temporaire pour les Haïtiens prendra effectivement fin, et que les expulsions massives reprendront malgré la gravité de la situation à Port-au-Prince, comment Ottawa pourra-t-il se justifier de toujours considérer les États-Unis comme un « pays sûr » ? Et sinon, ces personnes devraient aller où, au juste ? Quelle avenue, quel avenir leur restera-t-il, encore ?”

Source: Chronique | Tiers pays sûr, vraiment?

… Preventing asylum applications from people who have passed through the United States has been decried as a major problem by human rights defenders for years. But with Trump and the political violence of the ICE, the situation has worsened even more. When the temporary protection status for Haitians actually ends, and mass expulsions resume despite the seriousness of the situation in Port-au-Prince, how can Ottawa justify still considering the United States as a “safe country”? And if not, where exactly should these people go? What avenue, what future will they have, again?”

Filed under Immigration, Refugees, Trump administration Tagged with ,

U.S. deportation roundups are surging while staying out of the public eye

2026/07/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

…The experience here is indicative of what is happening across the country. Mass roundups are escalating even as the White House has mostly stopped publicizing ICE raids since federal agents gunned down two U.S. citizens during immigration operations in Minneapolis in January.

ICE arrested 39,563 people in June, its highest-ever monthly total, according to figures released this week by the agency. That same month, Republican lawmakers authorized a further US$70-billion for the deportation campaign. In July so far, ICE is approaching an average of 1,500 arrests a day.

And after being largely out of the public eye since January, the dragnet is attracting renewed attention after ICE shot and killed two immigrants – Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Joan Sebastián Guerrero in Maine – during traffic stops this month….

Source: U.S. deportation roundups are surging while staying out of the public eye

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Immigrant volunteers provide a safety net to help newcomers navigate life in Canada

2026/07/23 Leave a comment

Important supports:

…Language barriers, unfamiliarity with the system and, sometimes, their immigration status can daunt newcomers when they receive health care in Canada – a process that can be profoundly different from what they were used to in their home countries, and sometimes more expensive. 

To alleviate these problems, many immigrant volunteers go beyond the confines of formal organizations and programs, bridging fellow newcomers to the Canadian health care system and other supports. Many of them are aunts, uncles, sisters and brothers in diaspora communities where kinship extends beyond blood relations. They translate, manage documents and connect people with resources. Often, their presence is all that’s needed, especially for those who are alone in Canada.

Ms. Simbre, 46, has been assisting immigrants from the Philippines since 2012 with health care, labour and legal issues – both through formal networks such as Migrante Ontario and Kababayan Multicultural Centre, and informally through word of mouth. She came to Canada in 2007 as a live-in caregiver. She now serves on the board at Kababayan and works as a research assistant at the York Centre for Asian Research. …

Source: Immigrant volunteers provide a safety net to help newcomers navigate life in Canada

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