Michael Barutciski: Gruesome beheading attempt in Belfast a warning against fast-track asylum processes

2026/07/23 Leave a comment

Valid concern but even thorough vetting will not catch everything and everybody:

…This is somewhat similar to the “file review” policy adopted by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), which was recently criticized by The Globe and Mail’s editorial board. This expedited process does involve a background check, which could result in these individuals being found in security databases, and brief interviews with immigration officers and Canada Border Services employees still occur, but experts suggest the questioning during these interviews isn’t sufficient. They believe that in-person hearings are required to probe for inconsistencies in their application details or any connections an applicant may have to terrorist groups.

Contrary to Canada, the U.K. dropped its fast-track process on July 2. British politicians appear to now recognize it was naive to establish a hearing-free process. The Canadian Parliament, on the other hand, continues to allow the IRB to maintain its distinct approach, which the UN considers a gold standard, even though critics see it as a major pull factor which makes it attractive to asylum seekers. Legislation will be needed to limit the IRB’s independence and its tendency towards overly generous procedures.”

“As western countries reform the institution of asylum, the Belfast situation should warn us of the dangers when governments tolerate porous borders and allow their generosity to be abused. The unacceptable violence of extremist protesters in response to the attempted beheading should be dealt with by police and not provide cover for ignoring legitimate concerns that were left unaddressed for too long.

Moreover, we need to stop the cosmopolitan naiveté masquerading as moral superiority: it is not xenophobic to suggest that asylum seekers who have barely been vetted could represent a potential security risk. The challenge is to develop appropriate procedures that balance humane treatment with prudence in a way that reassures local populations.”

Michael Barutciski is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a professor at York University’s Glendon School of Public and International Affairs.

Source: Michael Barutciski: Gruesome beheading attempt in Belfast a warning against fast-track asylum processes

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ICYMI: The math of Canada’s immigration enforcement no longer works—and organized crime knows it

2026/07/23 Leave a comment

Correct assessment of the incentive structure and the relative neglect of enforcement:

…None of this implicates the overwhelming majority of newcomers, who are law-abiding and who are organized crime’s primary victims. Their exposure is the sharpest measure of the failure. As Sundberg put it: “Canada expanded migration without expanding enforcement. We built a much larger system, but not a stronger one—and organized crime has taken advantage of that.”

What these numbers describe, taken together, is an incentive structure. When 550 officers face 33,000 warrants—and net the pile down by barely a thousand a year—low removal figures signal not a low threat but a low probability of being caught, and syndicates recruit accordingly. If nothing changes, CISC’s estimate, already north of 4,000, will keep climbing; screening will remain conviction-based while the threats are network-based; and the next tranche of indictments will again be unsealed in an American courtroom rather than a Canadian one. The syndicates have already run these numbers. There is little evidence, so far, that Ottawa has.

Source: The math of Canada’s immigration enforcement no longer works—and organized crime knows it

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Thousands of home care workers are stuck in limbo as permanent residency stream faces delays

2026/07/21 Leave a comment

Another policy and operational failure:

…In March, 2025, they applied for permanent residence through a dedicated immigration stream for home care workers. The program took 5,500 applications on a first-come, first-served basis, a fraction of total demand. Those who managed to get their applications accepted through an online portal were ecstatic, convinced that they were now on a straightforward path to obtain Canadian permanent residency. 

But more than 15 months later, they have received no updates from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on their applications. Many are now living in Canada on expired work permits, unable to legally work. Others hold work permits that are expiring in the near future, and are frantically searching for alternative immigration pathways. All are hoping that someone in the group chat will provide a sliver of information or a positive update that will offer them a lifeline to remain in the country.

IRCC’s website states that the current PR processing timeline for home care workers is a whopping 76 months – far longer than the average wait time for other immigration streams. There are roughly 38,000 total applications in the queue for home care workers, including those from other years….

“When you reduce the total permanent resident quota, you have to make tough decisions on what applications you want to process first. Right now, it is clear that care workers are not being prioritized,” said Lou Janssen Dangzalan, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer. …

Source: Thousands of home care workers are stuck in limbo as permanent residency stream faces delays

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Tombe: Population aging doesn’t have to slow us down

2026/07/17 Leave a comment

Good discussion and analysis of an aging population and the economy:

…The lesson for Canadian policymakers is not that we need not adapt to rapidly changing demographics. It is that slower growth is not a necessary consequence of them.

If we respond to labour scarcity by adopting new technologies, shifting the composition of economic activity, and boosting productivity, we may fully offset the drag of an aging population on growth.

That requires investment. If barriers prevent firms in Canada from investing at the levels they otherwise would, or prevent economic activity from reallocating toward more capital-intensive sectors, then we may well find that aging is a drag on growth after all. But it is not a future we are stuck with.

There is also value in ensuring that policy is not artificially increasing labour scarcity, just in case innovation doesn’t save the day. Some policies encourage people to exit the labour force. Others weaken work incentives by raising taxes to fund ever more generous elderly benefits. Considering reversing these policy choices should be a part of the conversation.

Canada’s population will age. Whether it slows our growth is a separate question, and the answer largely depends on us.

Trevor Tombe is a professor of economics at the University of Calgary, the Director of Fiscal and Economic Policy at The School.

Source: Population aging doesn’t have to slow us down

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Court ruling opens door for Canadian immigration delays — and minister’s power — to be challenged

2026/07/17 Leave a comment

Hard to argue against“transparent and intelligible justification” in any area of government, unfortunately “more honored in the breach than the observance”:

…In a judgment released last week, Federal Court Justice Michael Battista said the minister, despite the legal authority to set priorities, still has the duty to provide “transparent and intelligible justification” for application processing delays.

“What Justice Battista is saying is that implementing ministerial instructions in itself doesn’t make them reasonable and doesn’t justify a delay,” said Ottawa-based immigration lawyer Jacqueline Bonisteel, who is not involved in the case.

“It’s not enough for you to have suddenly pivoted and said, ‘Now this is the processing time.’ They still need to provide a reasonable, intelligible justification for the delay … (this ruling) allows us some fuel to push back on the use of these instructions in all different areas.”…

Source: Court ruling opens door for Canadian immigration delays — and minister’s power — to be challenged

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Immigration department pauses applications to sponsor parents, grandparents to settle in Canada

2026/07/17 Leave a comment

Of note (endemic problem in terms of demand always exceeding allotment):

…In a statement, Taous Ait, a spokesperson for immigration minister Lena Metlege Diab said the measures are “part of broader efforts to restore balance across immigration programs and support timely processing, while maintaining public confidence in Canada’s immigration system.”

She said decisions to open or pause new intakes to the program follow assessments of the number of people in “its inventory and application inventory, each year.”

“IRCC will continue processing up to 15,000 individuals this year who have already applied, in line with our Immigration Levels Plan,” she added. 

The Parents and Grandparents Program (PGP) is a lottery-like pathway to permanent residence for family members who are foreign nationals. Demand to settle here under the program has far outstripped the number of permanent residence spots available under the government’s immigration targets. 

In the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan, published in last year’s budget, the government cut its target for new permanent residents under the parents and grandparents program to 15,000 in each of the three years. 

…Calgary immigration lawyer Yameena Ansari said the waits are so long for people wanting to bring their parents and grandparents to Canada some have died during the process. 

She said there is a scramble to apply when windows to do so are opened as they were from July to October in 2025. 

Ms. Ansari said the current system “is kind of like a lottery, but there’s hundreds of thousands of people in the pool.”

“Every two years or so they open the lottery and people have a limited amount of time to submit to the lottery and then they close it. The majority of time it’s closed.”

“I do think there should be a rethink,” she said, adding the government did not seem to want older people to come here from abroad because of the strain on the health care system. …

Source: Immigration department pauses applications to sponsor parents, grandparents to settle in Canada

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Colby Cosh: Ontario’s welfare-for-illegal-migrants scheme could be dropped overnight

2026/07/16 Leave a comment

Valid observation:

…There’s a point in the Social Benefits Tribunal ruling that is easy to overlook. When the appellant originally applied for welfare in 2023, there was a check of immigration records to see if he was subject to deportation or a removal order, which would have disqualified him under the current law. There was no second check at the time of the administrator’s decision in 2025. A second search, we’re told, was not conducted by a caseworker “in order to avoid possibly jeopardizing the appellant’s situation in Canada.”

It is hard to understand this as anything other than a sign that the Ontario welfare apparatus — full of social workers no doubt pledged to the sacred principle that “no one is illegal” — is already unwilling to recognize technical citizenship requirements. In this case, the technical requirements turned out not to exist at all. But what do you suppose will happen if Premier Ford gets on the phone this afternoon and orders that the welfare loophole be closed?

It seems welfare caseworkers have a lot of discretion to avoid “jeopardizing situations,” and perhaps it is not their job at all to enforce the (federal) law of citizenship. But even assuming they are willing to safeguard the public treasury against unscrupulous and potentially infinite exploitation, which is definitely part of their job, there’s still another problem. Any new Fordist regulation written to limit public welfare to persons lawfully present in Canada is bound to face near-immediate Charter scrutiny in front of a real court — and how do we imagine that might go these days?

Source: Colby Cosh: Ontario’s welfare-for-illegal-migrants scheme could be dropped overnight

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Trucking companies deemed unsafe permitted to employ temporary foreign workers

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

Another breakdown in immigration:

Nearly 100 trucking companies with a history of safety infractions, labour violations and other regulatory failures have been granted approval by Ottawa to hire temporary foreign workers since 2019, a Globe and Mail investigation has found.

The compliance issues ranged from flunking safety audits to concerns over forged documents. In some cases, companies were approved by Employment and Social Development Canada to use the migrant labour program despite failing to comply with wage theft orders issued by the same ministry. 

One carrier identified by The Globe’s analysis was decertified by Manitoba authorities over chronic safety issues, yet subsequently granted permission to hire temporary workers on three occasions. 

The Manitoba government accuses the company of setting up a related carrier in Alberta linked to a fatal collision in Brandon, Man., in late May. The incident prompted the province to call for the creation of a national trucking registry to better track bad actors in the sector. …

Source: Trucking companies deemed unsafe permitted to employ temporary foreign workers

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The Population Forecasts Are Grim. They’re Still Too Optimistic.

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

More on demographics:

…There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office.

Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home. The supply of would-be migrants will shrink as more countries run out of young people, and the skilled ones every aging country covets will be fought over. With most countries staring down the same cliff, and with emigration from the United States rising, permanent high net migration is more of an aspiration than a forecast.

But the second act of wishful thinking has an even bigger effect. Many forecasters are assuming that current low fertility rates are temporary, that women are merely delaying having children rather than forgoing it entirely. But this isn’t true: Research shows that delays in childbearing are usually not made up, and, anyway, estimates that take deferred childbearing into account have fallen by just as much as the headline fertility rate.

Up until quite recently, the Social Security trustees’ main scenario assumed that fertility rates will rise from now until 2050, and stabilize at 1.9 children per woman. In 2023, the Census Bureau predicted that fertility rates will only gradually decline from 1.64 to 1.58 by 2075. Spoiler: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already shown a 1.57 fertility rate for 2025. The U.N. expects that the U.S. fertility rate will be flat at about 1.65 through the entire 21st century. To its credit, Social Security trustees released new numbers just last month that revised their expectations down to 1.75 in 2050, but that is overly optimistic. The Congressional Budget Office is more realistic, but even it predicts that fertility will decline to 1.53, then stabilize….

 Lyman Stone is the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies and the director of research for the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence.

Source: The Population Forecasts Are Grim. They’re Still Too Optimistic.

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Triandafyllidou: How AI and digital data shape our understanding of migration

2026/07/10 Leave a comment

Captures some of the challenges well in terms of integrating and understanding what the various data sources and the need to ensure the underlying data is solid. Data is rarely perfect:

…No single dataset offers a complete picture. Administrative records provide legal and demographic precision but often arrive slowly. Surveys reveal motivations and lived experiences but are costly and difficult to conduct during crises. Digital traces offer speed and scale but may overlook important populations and contexts. 

Each source captures different dimensions of migration. Together, they provide a richer understanding than any could alone.

As governments invest in artificial intelligence and data-driven governance, this lesson becomes increasingly important. The availability of real-time big data should not obscure other types of data that complement the picture.

If AI is truly to work for all, as the Canadian AI strategy suggests, we must look beyond algorithms themselves and pay closer attention to the data on which they depend.

The question is not whether we use proxies to understand migration. We always have. The real question is which proxies we use, what they reveal and what they leave unseen.

Source: Triandafyllidou: How AI and digital data shape our understanding of migration

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