Canada faces calls to suspend asylum agreement with U.S., saying Trump orders undermine migrants’ rights

2025/02/06 Leave a comment

Real dilemma for the government given that USA is becoming less safe and the risk of significant increases in asylum claimants from the USA without the STCA to help control and manage inflows:

The federal government is facing calls to suspend a long-standing agreement with the U.S. to return asylum seekers at the border, with immigration experts saying the United States should no longer be considered a safe place for people fleeing persecution.

They say U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive orders that make it easier to deport or detain migrants – including plans to hold 30,000 migrants accused of criminality in Guantanamo Bay – undermine their rights to such an extent that Canada should halt returning asylum seekers to the U.S.

Under the Safe Third Country Agreement, which came into effect in 2004, asylum seekers must make a claim at the first country in which they arrive. The agreement means that most asylum seekers arriving at the Canadian border are automatically returned to the U.S., with some exceptions such as people facing the death penalty.

Immigration lawyers and refugee advocates say Mr. Trump’s policies that make it easier to deport asylum seekers without a court hearing and increase detention may breach international law and should prompt Canada to rethink or suspend the agreement.

“The executive actions in the U.S. will materially impede access to asylum, and result in the routine imprisonment of refugees, contrary to UN standards,” says Erin Simpson, a partner at immigration law firm Landings LLP in Toronto.

“When Canada returns refugees to the U.S. under the Safe Third Country Agreement, they risk deportation to persecution and torture, and prison. Canada has the authority to suspend the agreement, and should exercise that authority until it is satisfied the agreement is not harming refugees.”

…But some experts warned that scrapping the agreement could lead to an influx of asylum seekers to Canada, who could not be turned back.

James Yousif, a Toronto-based lawyer who was director of policy to former Conservative immigration minister Jason Kenney, said the move would be “reckless” and “risk destabilizing Canada’s social and economic foundations.”

“Canada would face a surge in asylum claims from undocumented migrants in the United States, overwhelming public systems. Provinces and cities would be required to provide health care, social assistance, education and housing supports,” he said, adding they would be “severely strained.”

Source: Canada faces calls to suspend asylum agreement with U.S., saying Trump orders undermine migrants’ rights

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This licensed Canadian immigration consultant was impersonated by a fraudster. How migrants are being scammed by ‘ghost agents’

2025/02/06 Leave a comment

Sigh…:

About a year ago, immigration consultant Kerry Molitor started to get email alerts from the Immigration Department: letters for her clients had been sent to her online account. The problem was she had never heard of these clients.

Concerned about the consequences of the missed letters intended for the actual study and visitor permit applicants, she reported the incidents to immigration officials. 

Then last August, Molitor stumbled upon an Instagram account that used her name and her old office address and promoted a website that looked almost like hers. She clicked on the link that led her to an immigration company that showed her as the CEO, but with the photo of a white male. It also posted a fake licence certificate purported to be hers.

“These people are committing frauds in my name,” said Molitor. “I’m very fearful for the people that are contacting these scammers because I’ve had several victims or potential victims contact me to verify. They are getting a lot of attention, a lot of customers. According to Instagram, they’ve been active since December 2023.”

For a long time, the immigration consulting industry has been tackling the “ghost agents” who pretend to be accredited consultants. Canadian law only allows a consultant licensed by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants and a lawyer by a law society to give immigration advice for a fee.

But with business increasingly conducted online, combating these frauds — many of them originating abroad — is getting even harder.

Someone looking for help in immigration may come across a fake website or post on social media, find a matching name on the directory of the regulator and fall into the trap.

While the professional reputation of the impersonated consultants is certainly at stake, victims of the scammers ultimately pay the price as their applications will likely never be filed, or they will be refused for not having all the required documents….

Source: This licensed Canadian immigration consultant was impersonated by a fraudster. How migrants are being scammed by ‘ghost agents’

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Desai: Canada can’t afford a long immigration pause. We must reorient the system now

2025/02/05 Leave a comment

Part of the issue is that many Canadian businesses are addicted to lower cost lower skilled workers, whether temporary or permanent:

For generations, Canada’s approach to welcoming migrants had a strong consensus across partisan, sectoral and geographic lines. It was the result of immigration fuelling our economy and is still a distinct feature of a uniquely Canadian identity; a tangible expression of our compassion.

This consensus has been broken as a result of the system being manipulated for political ends and short-term economic arbitrage. If Canada is to achieve its full potential, we will not only need to reform our immigration system to flourish under our current circumstances, but we also must rebuild the broad immigration consensus.

Canada’s approach to immigration is often presented as disparate pillars. The most prominent is the economic stream, which allows migrants to apply based on our broad labour-market needs. They are supplemented with international students and temporary foreign workers.

The family reunification class aims to allow a settled resident to sponsor their loved ones. Our refugee class was originally set up to support the world’s most vulnerable.

What made Canada’s system successful is the mutually reinforcing nature of each pillar. Fundamental to the success of a migrant is their ability to contribute economically and socially.

The Environics Institute has been gauging Canadians’ support for immigration since 1977. From 2000 to 2020, more than half of those polled disagreed that “overall there is too much immigration to Canada.” This isn’t to say there weren’t issues with our system, but those problems paled in comparison to the systemic rot that resulted in 58 per cent of Canadians believing we accept too many immigrants in 2024.

Labour-market demand information often lags or doesn’t align with the specific needs of, or accreditations required by, employers. The temporary foreign workers program has been used to reduce employers’ cost bases at the expense of domestic employees or investing in productivity-generating technologies.

International students have been used as a cash cow for postsecondary institutions, including many institutions with dubious credentials. The generosity of our refugee system has also been taken advantage of by those with the means to reach Canada’s borders. This ties up scarce resources to resettle those most in need around the world.

These issues are contributing to some of our greatest challenges: our housing and food-bank shortages, and slumping productivity, are the most prominent.

Amidst this rotting foundation, our federal government was virtue signalling and trying to out-manoeuvre their political opponents; they offered a blanket welcome mat to any would-be immigrant the U.S. turned away under the last Trump administration. They made a top-down commitment to welcome 1.5 million immigrants over a period of three years without a clear plan for how we would absorb this volume of newcomers.

While the government has issued a mea culpa, it alone will not suffice. Reducing targets and cracking down on those who manipulate our system with harsh penalties is a start, but alone these measures will not contribute to addressing our broader economic woes.

On top of Canada’s immigration challenges, we’re also facing a bleak demographic reality: by 2035, Canada’s worker-to-retiree ratio will be 2:1. For reference, it was 7:1 in 1971. This is coupled with our stark productivity lag, which immigration helped mask for decades.

The hope that Canadians will become more productive overnight, or that the world’s top talent will simply come to the conclusion that they should call Canada home, is wishful thinking.

Canada is going to require a radical reform of our immigration policy, one which reorients all stakeholders to an aggressive, co-recruitment model of the top talent we require. We will have to invest in real-time, labour-demand data to inform our recruitment strategy, so that we actually address our economic needs while balancing considerations like housing availability.

The government has some experience with an employer-driven approach to immigration. It created the Global Skills Strategy that allowed employers to fast-track work-permit processing to two weeks.

Our consensus on immigration will have to be rebuilt over time by demonstrating its contribution to addressing our economic woes. The government’s strategy of top-down targets must be shed and replaced with a structural focus on recruitment based on demand. Our immigration officials will have to act less like passive application processors and more like head hunters for the entrepreneurs, health care professionals, engineers and other talented individuals required to fuel Canada’s economy and vibrant society for generations to come.

Neil Desai is an executive in the tech sector and serves as a senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He previously served in senior roles with the government of Canada.

Source: Canada can’t afford a long immigration pause. We must reorient the system now

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ICYMI – Don Kerr: The Liberals utterly failed to control Canada’s population growth. Here’s what the next government can do better 

2025/02/05 Leave a comment

Solid analysis but skimpy on what a population policy should look like:

…Although this estimate is preliminary and has yet to be finalized by Statistics Canada, this is likely close to what our population size would be if in fact the federal government meets its 2024 targets on both immigration and NPRs. In working with this estimate for Jan. 1st, 2025, this implies an annual population growth of about 780,000 persons in 2024, or a growth rate of 1.9 percent (see Figure 1). While down from the astronomical heights of 2023 (3.2 percent), this is still close to twice the historical norm for Canada.

In my view, it is almost an understatement to suggest that the federal government “opened the taps,” but then failed to close them quickly enough. As I have argued elsewhere, in policy terms, a steady, gradual upturn in population growth is far better for planning future labour force, housing, and infrastructure needs.

With this in mind, the government moving forward might be well advised to develop a population policy, in order to avoid this sort of situation in the future. The Canadian population would be well served by a government that could quickly accommodate unexpected challenges while maintaining a predictable and relatively stable rate of population growth.

Source: Don Kerr: The Liberals utterly failed to control Canada’s population growth. Here’s what the next government can do better

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Canada’s border cities, bursting at the seams with asylum seekers, brace for more amid Trump turmoil

2025/02/03 Leave a comment

Of note:

Some hotels in Niagara Falls, Ont., are unusually full for the middle of the winter off-season, when many visitors stay home. Normally that would make the mayor of a tourist city happy – but not Jim Diodati.

His community, which says it has more asylum seekers per capita than any other municipality in the country, is ground-zero in Canada’s efforts to house thousands of refugee claimants in hotels while they wait for their claims to be processed. The mayor, who can see the United States from his perch at city hall, is worried it’s about to get a lot worse.

Mr. Diodati is concerned that if more asylum seekers start coming to Canada because of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, his city will be unable to handle it – and he’s not alone. While the federal and provincial governments are trying to demonstrate to Mr. Trump that they’re serious about stopping the flow of migrants going south, mayors of the country’s border towns say there’s not enough talk about these implications of Mr. Trump’s policies.

In Niagara Falls, a city of around 95,000 people where tourism drives the economy, the influx of refugees is pushing local emergency rooms, schools, shelters, food banks and housing supply to the brink, Mr. Diodati said.

At its peak more than a year ago, there were nearly 5,000 asylum seekers housed in 11 hotels in the city’s downtown core, dotted with souvenir shops, arcades, amusement rides, indoor water parks and a casino….

Source: Canada’s border cities, bursting at the seams with asylum seekers, brace for more amid Trump turmoil

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Mahboubi: Canada is wasting the talents of its skilled immigrants

2025/02/01 Leave a comment

Concrete and specific recommendations, some harder to implement than others (e.g., Foreign Credential Recognition, which also should include domestic credential recognition):

…To fully harness immigrant talent, Canada must act. The Express Entry system should place greater emphasis on language ability and incorporate educational criteria that consider the reputations of institutions, fields of study and academic grades – elements often overlooked but crucial for predicting successful labour-market integration. Pre-immigration earnings of immigrants with prior Canadian work experience should also be considered, as they serve as a strong predictor of immigrants’ economic value and their ability to integrate into the work force without facing overqualification.

Streamlining the recognition of foreign credentials and offering clearer guidance on licensing are equally important. Provincial governments need to collaborate with regulatory bodies to simplify and accelerate the recognition process for foreign qualifications. British Columbia and Nova Scotia recently expedited their approvals for health care professionals, showing the potential of such collaboration. At the same time, regulatory bodies should revisit and modernize their licensing processes to reduce red tape and ensure that the requirements are not excessively burdensome.

Immigrants need better support navigating complex recertification processes. Provincial regulatory bodies can partner with professional associations to develop clear licensing roadmaps for regulated professions so that skilled immigrants can better understand their options. Governments also need to expand access to culturally relevant language training and rigorously evaluate settlement programs to scale up what works.

Employers also need to step up. Today, only 15 per cent of employers in Toronto work with immigrant-serving agencies, missing out on a wealth of untapped talent. Promoting job-matching programs, raising awareness of credential-assessment services and connecting with immigrant-serving organizations can bridge gaps. Governments can facilitate this by developing comprehensive databases of credential equivalencies.

Canada’s highly-educated immigrants represent a vast, underutilized resource. Addressing systemic barriers is not just about fairness – it’s about ensuring the country’s long-term prosperity. With bold action and collaboration, Canada can transform this missed opportunity into a major economic advantage.

Source: Canada is wasting the talents of its skilled immigrants

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International study permit data an ‘earthquake’ for Canadian university finances 

2025/02/01 Leave a comment

Overdue correction:

A dramatic decline in international study permits issued last year is quickly becoming an existential threat to the finances of Canadian postsecondary schools, say organizations representing the institutions.

“The drop in international students is like an earthquake hitting an education system that’s already structurally weakened by years of underinvestment,” said Gabriel Miller, president and CEO of Universities Canada.

Provinces where international permit allocations were increased last year are also experiencing a decline in international enrolment, creating gaps in budgets that may lead to program cuts.

The federal government said last week that Canada issued about 40 per cent fewer international study permits among kindergarten to Grade 12, postsecondary and postgraduate students last year, overshooting its 35-per-cent target.

This year, it’s seeking a further 10-per-cent reduction.

A recent report from ApplyBoard, an online marketplace for learning institutions, said the number of permits approved for college students likely dropped by about 60 per cent, while approvals for international undergraduate students fell about 40 per cent.

The total number of international study permits issued by Ontario was also essentially cut in half by the cap. ApplyBoard said it’s projected the province had a 55 per cent decline in international permit approvals for 2024…

Source: International study permit data an ‘earthquake’ for Canadian university finances

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Trump signs executive order to cancel student visas of ‘Hamas sympathizers’ who protested Israel’s war in Gaza

2025/01/31 Leave a comment

Already prompting similar calls in Canada, we article on Poilievre comments below:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order promising “immediate action” from federal law enforcement against noncitizen college students and others in the United States who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations during Israel’s war in Gaza.

The president has pledged to “deport” all “resident aliens” who joined protests, Trump said in a White House fact sheet.

“Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” he vowed.

Trump also pledged to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” he claimed.

The Department of Justice will “aggressively” prosecute what it characterizes as “terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews” after “the explosion of antisemitism” on college campuses in the wake of Israel’s campaign, according to the White House.

“It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence,” the executive order states.

As The Independent has reported, both antisemitism and Islamophobic threats and violence surged after Hamas invaded Israel in 2023, kicking off the war in Gaza and widespread protests on U.S. campuses.

Under the order, government agencies have 60 days to produce a report “identifying all civil and criminal authorities or actions” to “curb or combat” antisemitism, with an inventory of complaints “against or involving” antisemitism in colleges and universities.

The U.S. Attorney General is “encouraged to employ appropriate civil rights enforcement authorities” to combat antisemitism, the order states.

Source: Trump signs executive order to cancel student visas of ‘Hamas sympathizers’ who protested Israel’s war in Gaza

Meanwhile in Canada:

FIRST READING: As anti-Israel rallies continue unabated, Poilievre calls for deportations

We see on our own streets antisemitism guided by obscene woke ideologies that have led to an explosion in hate crimes,” Poilievre said in a brief address at the official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in Ottawa.

He then added, “we must not just condemn these things, we must take action against them.”

“We must deport from our country any temporary resident that is here on a permit or a visa that is carrying out violence or hate crimes on our soil.”

Ever since the October 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, Canada has been hit by hundreds of anti-Israel rallies, blockades, and other actions — many of them organized by a handful of openly anti-Zionist groups including Toronto4Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and student groups such as McGill University’s Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance.

Some of the rallies were initially celebratory, but they quickly shifted to calls for “ceasefire,” often with the claim that Israel was committing genocide.

Now that a Gazan ceasefire has been in place since Jan. 19, rallies have continued unabated, often with calls for Palestinian “resistance” to continue until Israel’s complete destruction.

“The fight isn’t over. In fact, it has just begun,” Toronto4Palestine

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Michael Barutciski: With Trump’s deportations underway, what will Canada’s asylum policy look like? 

2025/01/30 Leave a comment

Useful reminder of limits. But Trump policies undermine the principles underlying the STCA:

In light of the Trump administration’s early moves to deport migrants without legal status in the U.S., there’s been heightened debate here in Canada about how we may (or may not) be positioned to handle a surge of claimants seeking refuge. Beyond the logistical capacity issues of handling high volumes of cases at our border, there are outstanding questions about Canada’s legal obligations to claimants and what, if any, policy and legal scope we have to manage the potential influx. The truth is it is greater than is often understood.

A key source of the confusion is that for years many in Canada have held a false assumption about the legal constraints imposed on our asylum procedures through a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1985, Singh v. Canada. The Globe and Mail’s editorial board recently repeated this mistake, asserting that Canada’s top court decided the Charter guarantees asylum seekers the right to a hearing as soon as they set foot in the country. This misreading of Singh has a real effect on our immigration predicament.

The Supreme Court did establish an important general rule in Singh: all persons who arrive at the border are covered by the Charter, regardless of their immigration status. Yet establishing that the Charter applies is not the same as interpreting the content of these Charter rights in various contexts.

In terms of refugee status determination procedures, the Supreme Court noted in Singh that the claimants, all Sikhs, were going to be sent by Canadian authorities back to their home country. For six of the seven claimants, this meant being returned to India, a country the Court considered dangerous for them given the violent internal tensions at the time. (The other claimant was to be returned to Guyana.)

However, the Supreme Court never generalized by saying that all claimants always have a right to a hearing. That is the exaggerated interpretation encouraged for years by activists and wishful-thinking academics. If claimants come to Canada via a safe third country, such as the U.S., then they can be returned to that country. This is the basic principle at the heart of the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which the Court accepted last year when it refused to declare the agreement unconstitutional (as activists and academics have been demanding for years).

In other words, dealing with asylum claimants coming from the U.S. is a different situation than the one addressed in Singh and the legal constraints are not the same. This nuance is recognized in both the 1951 Refugee Convention and Canadian legislation. The convention does not even mention anything about hearings. Its most basic protection is the principle of “non-refoulement,” which stipulates that refugees cannot be returned to a country where their “life of freedom would be threatened.” It allows claimants to be returned to safe countries, which is why the adoption of the STCA was possible in the first place.

Section 101 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act specifically includes eligibility clauses that should suggest caution to anyone who believes automatic access to a hearing is part of Canada’s system. There is an initial determination as to whether the migrant is eligible to make a claim, including various security-related grounds of inadmissibility.

Moreover, there is also a clause rendering claimants ineligible when they come “directly or indirectly to Canada from a country designated by the regulations.” This is the legislative provision that enables return to the U.S. Even a cursory reading of the act should make clear that an automatic right to a refugee hearing was never intended or established by Parliament.

Despite these legal provisions, the Liberals have spent years reinforcing the confusion regarding Singh, constantly asserting that asylum seekers trying to enter “irregularly” at Roxham Road had the right to a hearing. When the government’s inaction regarding the illegal crossings led to record numbers of asylum claimants and public anxiety over the lack of border control, the government eventually negotiated an amendment to the STCA that essentially closed Roxham Road. Nobody seemed to notice that the supposed right to a hearing in Canada disappeared.

It is ironic that Prime Minister Trudeau recently acknowledged in the French version of a YouTube video that asylum seekers at Roxham Road were actually abusing the system. This incoherent and unserious approach was again revealed when Immigration Minister Marc Miller repeated the false argument about a supposed unqualified right to a hearing during a press conference explaining the reimposition of visas on Mexican nationals (who he claimed were abusing the asylum system).

After many years of lax asylum policies, followed more recently by continual controversies, there now appears to be an attempt to debate the country’s genuine asylum dilemmas with the Globe’s editorial board suggesting “new thinking is needed.” Most reasonable Canadians realize that tightening the current asylum system in a manner that treats claimants fairly is sufficiently challenging; we do not need to make it even more difficult by inventing legal constraints.

Singh established that asylum seekers in Canada who risk being returned to a dangerous country benefit from a right to a hearing if they claim protection. The corollary is equally important if we are to explore creative solutions to Canada’s asylum problems: there cannot be a Charter violation if asylum seekers are sent to a safe country. Although it will disappoint activists, the future of a sustainable asylum system will inevitably involve extraterritorial procedures and an extension of the safe third-country idea. We need to properly grasp basic legal constraints to make sure these procedures are as fair and humane as possible.

Source: Michael Barutciski: With Trump’s deportations underway, what will Canada’s asylum policy look like?

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Trump bump: U.S. citizenship renunciation inquiries surge in Canada, lawyers say

2025/01/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

…Alexander Marino, director of U.S. tax law at Moodys Tax Law in Calgary, said that most people renounce U.S. citizenship for tax reasons — the U.S. is one of the few countries that imposes tax based on citizenship, not residency.

This often involves expensive reporting and filing obligations that include estate and gift taxes, even after death.

Marino is also expecting a Trump bump in business.

“I can’t deny that most U.S. expats, in my experience, tend to be more left-leaning than right-leaning. For a lot of people, the election results are a bit of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Marino said.

“We’re seeing a bump due to the election results.”

Marino said he has seen year-over-year demand increase since specializing in renunciation 12 years ago.

He said the spike in interest now is greater than in 2017 after Trump’s first presidential win, and he expected 2025 to see a record number of people try to give up U.S. citizenship.

Moodys typically offers five to seven renunciation information webinars each year for U.S. citizens living in Canada; this year, they may schedule up to 12, Marino said.

Anyone giving up U.S. citizenship shouldn’t expect the matter to be secret — the U.S. Federal Register publishes quarterly lists of everyone who has surrendered their citizenship. In May 2014, the list named singer Tina Turner, and in February 2017, future British prime minister Boris Johnson.

There were only a few hundred names on the lists in 2005, but numbers have risen sharply since 2014, when the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act went into full effect. It requires that foreign financial institutions report on the foreign assets held by U.S. account holders.

In 2016, about 4,100 names were listed, but the next year, in Trump’s first year in the White House, numbers jumped by more than 50 per cent to about 6,900 names….

Source: Trump bump: U.S. citizenship renunciation inquiries surge in Canada, lawyers say

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