Clark: Kill a fallacy to save immigration

2024/08/06 Leave a comment

Good critique but like so many, takes an all good or all bad approach, without acknowledging that a mix of approaches is needed. But all to true on “articles of faith”:

…There is also the notion that the goal of Canada’s immigration should be expanding the labour force to pay for all the costs of an ageing population. This has become such an article of faith that Ottawa has lost a sense of balance.

As Mr. Fortin notes, the overall impact of immigration on ageing will always be minimal unless the number of newcomers is drastically increased to millions every year. There are only so many 25-year-olds coming each year into a population of 41.5 million, and once they arrive, they get older every day.

So, as the Liberal government works to repair its way out of its immigration mistakes, it’s time to question the assumptions. Already, Canada’s immigration system is in trouble. Polls show Canadians are starting to sour on it.

To save the immigration system, it’s time to discard the fallacies that have caused such damage.

Source: Kill a fallacy to save immigration

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Exodus of high net worth Indians economic travesty: Congress on citizenship renunciation data

2024/08/06 Leave a comment

Indian brain drain political debate:

Citing government data of 2.16 lakh Indians renouncing their citizenship in 2023, the Congress on Saturday said the exodus of high-skilled and high net worth Indians is an “economic travesty” that will shrink the country’s tax revenue base over the next few years. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said business personalities are increasingly relocating to places such as Singapore, UAE, the UK and other places renouncing their Indian citizenship. 

In a written response to queries on Indian citizens who have renounced their citizenship, Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh recently told the Rajya Sabha that more than 2.16 lakh Indians renounced their citizenship in 2023. 

Ramesh, the Congress general secretary in-charge communications, said the number was almost double than what it was in 2011, at 123,000.

Many of these Indians who renounced their citizenship are highly skilled and educated, and their leaving the country at a time of a domestic skilled labour supply shortage will “extract a serious toll on our economy,” he said. 

“Many are also financially well-off – earlier this year, a leading global investment migration advisory firm had revealed that over 17,000 millionaires (individuals with total assets greater than $1 million) had left India in the last three years,” Ramesh said. 

This exodus of high-skilled and high net worth Indians could very well have been the result of opaque tax policies and an arbitrary tax administration, quite apart from the overall climate of fear and intimidation surrounding corporate India in the past decade, the Congress leader said. …

Source: Exodus of high net worth Indians economic travesty: Congress on citizenship renunciation data

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Column: The California roots of Trump’s anti-immigrant pitch to Black voters

2024/08/05 Leave a comment

Of note, 1994 Proposition 187:

Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent, and his Dumpster fire of an interview with reporters at the National Assn. of Black Journalists convention in Chicago this week showed the Republican presidential nominee in full, foul mode.

He lied. He insulted. He whined. He was racist and misogynistic. He evaded questions and elided answers, and showed all the grace and gratitude of a kindergartner who pees in a sandbox and expects others to clean up the mess.

Above all, the Republican presidential candidate kept stabbing at the same illegal immigration scapegoat that’s the centerpiece of his 2024 presidential campaign. This time, though, he tried to further his contention that Donald J. Trump is the greatest president for Black people since Abraham Lincoln.

He unveiled the strategy during his June 28 debate with President Biden, when Trump stated that immigrants were a “big kill on the Black people” and were “taking Black jobs.” In Georgia, which he narrowly lost in 2020, his campaign has aired radio and television commercials insisting Biden cares more about illegal immigrants than the Black community.

At the NABJ convention, Trump blamed open borders for endangering the job security of Black workers — never mind that unemployment rates for them have reached historic lows under both the Trump and Biden administrations, a time when illegal immigration has grown to numbers not seen in a generation. When a moderator asked what was his message to all the Black reporters gathered before him and people watching online, Trump responded it was “to stop people from invading our country … who happen to be taking Black jobs.” When asked what he would do on Day 1 of a new term, he blurted out, “Close the border.”

Trump’s gambit is yet another legacy of Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants. Then and now, GOP politicians figure that the best way to court Black voters — a longtime bedrock of the Democratic Party — is to argue that immigrants in the country illegally are a burden that hits their community harder than others by taking away social services and bleeding jobs away.

Here’s the thing: There is a historical basis for these concerns, even if Trump has pushed the Illegal Immigrant Bogeyman dial to 11.

When South L.A. began to turn from the heart of the city’s Black community to a Latino-majority enclave during the 1980s and 1990s, the subsequent tensions were real. In the wake of the L.A. riots, groups protested outside work sites and blasted contractors for giving jobs to Latinos instead of Black workers because the former group would work for cheaper than the latter. The assumption by Latino political leaders during the fight against Prop. 187 that Black people would join them without question offended leaders and community activists.

Incidents like that led to 47% of Black voters favoring Prop. 187, a margin that helped the resolution pass comfortably.

Some of the most prominent Black voices in the anti-immigrant movement over the past 25 years — homeless activist Ted Hayes, the late radio show host Terry Anderson, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, former gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder — came from that era. One of the loudest anti-immigrant voices in Southern California today is Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren, a Compton native who has scolded immigrants from the dais for not speaking English and has waged an aggressive campaign against street vendors. Throw in deep-rooted anti-Black sentiments among Latinos that got a prominent showcase during the 2022 L.A. City Hall racist tape leak scandal, and no wonder Trump thinks banking on getting Black voters angry enough against a supposed south-of-the-border invasion is a winner.

The reality is that Black people aren’t as receptive to an anti-immigrant message as Trump and the GOP would like to think.

A 2006 Pew Research Center study showed that 47% of Black people thought immigrants in the U.S. without legal documents should be allowed to stay, compared with 33% of whites. But by 2013, a similar Pew report showed 82% of Black peoplefelt there should be a path toward legalization for those immigrants, compared with 67% of whites. The figure dropped in a Pew survey released this year to 73%, but it’s still far higher than the 53% of whites who feel the same, and just two percentage points behind Latinos, who have increasingly turned to the right against illegal immigration since the Prop. 187 days.

This general acceptance doesn’t surprise L.A. Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson. He campaigned against Prop. 187 in 1994, going door-to-door in his native South L.A. to argue that the initiative was a wedge issue being used by Republicans to divide Black and Latino neighbors against each other and make them forget their shared working-class status.

“One line I would tell people is, ‘Do you hear them [Prop. 187 supporters] talk about people from Canada? From Germany?” Harris-Dawson said. “Black and Latino people I talked to understood it clearly.”

Harris-Dawson didn’t have to make the same argument recently in Atlanta, where the subject of illegal immigration came up in conversation.

“They said, ‘We support immigration reform, because we don’t want working-class people who can’t play defense,’” he said. In other words, it was better for the Black community for immigrants to have full rights instead of keeping them without papers and thus easier to use to undercut Black workers. “The sophistication of that! They get that workers don’t take jobs; employers give jobs.”

He can see Trump peeling off Black voters from the Democrats by continuing to hammer on the illegal immigration issue — but “he’ll also lose them” because of Trump’s long history of racist dog whistles. Besides, the councilmember argued, “people have seen it play out. … You see new neighbors come in and think, ‘Oh, there’s a good family.’ And they are. And then 10 years later, the parents still don’t have papers and the kids can’t go to college.

“Black folks can sympathize,” Harris-Dawson concluded, with “people who deal with systems that are ostensibly there to help you, but in fact do the opposite.”

Source: Column: The California roots of Trump’s anti-immigrant pitch to Black voters

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GOLDSTEIN: High immigration policy undermining housing, healthcare and climate goals

2024/08/05 Leave a comment

Nothing new here but another Postmedia commentary:

It’s hard to know what the Trudeau government was thinking two years ago when it dramatically increased its immigration targets given the added pressure this has put on three issues it says are priorities — housing affordability, improving healthcare and reducing industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, 271,845 immigrants became permanent residents of Canada.

In 2022, his government set a target of 465,000 for 2023, 485,000 this year and 500,000 in 2025, followed by another target of 500,000 in 2026, announced last year.

Simultaneously, there has been a huge increase in non-permanent residents during the Trudeau era (international students, temporary foreign workers and asylum seekers).

Trudeau himself said in April that in 2017, they constituted 2% of Canada’s population, while today it’s 7.5% or almost three million people, a number the PM described as “far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb” and “something that we need to get back under control.”

All of this has directly contributed to rapid population growth — Canada’s population hit 41 million people on April 1, an increase of one million people in less than a year, almost all of it due to increases in permanent and temporary immigration.

While the Trudeau government is sticking with its previously announced permanent immigration targets, it has now set a goal of reducing the number of temporary residents to 5% of Canada’s population by 2027.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller has announced plans to cap and reduce the number of international students and foreign workers, and in an interview with Reuters last week said more measures are coming to end “the era of uncapped programs.”

Asked if the government made a mistake by allowing rapid growth in temporary residents, Miller said, “Every government makes mistakes. I think we are all human.” But “coming out of COVID, in particular, we were facing massive labour shortages.”

Asked about a recent Leger poll that found 60% of Canadians surveyed believe too many immigrants are coming to Canada, Miller responded: “I’m not naive enough to think Canada is immune to the waves of anti-immigrant sentiment,” although he acknowledged Canadians want a system that is not out of control.

The Trudeau government often blames anti-immigration sentiment when questioned about its immigration policies, despite the fact years of polling have shown Canadians are generally supportive of immigration.

The reason there is concern now comes from statements by Trudeau that temporary immigration needs to be brought under control and by Miller that the skyrocketing number of international students was a source of concern about the integrity of the immigration system itself.

The federal government has long argued Canada needs high immigration because of its low domestic birth rate, which is not providing enough future workers to grow the economy.

But that policy has also undermined the goals of the Trudeau government on three major issues it says are priorities — housing affordability, healthcare and climate change.

Internal government documents obtained by The Canadian Press earlier this year revealed that in announcing its significant boost to immigration targets in 2022, the Trudeau government ignored warnings from its own public servants that doing so would increase the cost of housing and negatively impact Canada’s already beleaguered healthcare system.

“In Canada, population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units,” the documents said.

“As the federal authority charged with managing immigration, IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply, and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth … Rapid increases put pressure on healthcare and affordable housing.”

Last month, a peer-reviewed study by Lauren Eastman, Sukhy K. Mahl and Shoo K. Lee published by the Canadian Health Policy Journal — A Growing Problem: Is Canada’s Health Care System Keeping Up With Newcomers — found that, “newcomer demand for health human resources including family physicians, specialists and registered nurses, far out-strips new supply in recent years, leading to a shortage of 1,122 family physicians, 690 specialists and 8,538 registered nurses in 2022. Immigration and healthcare resource policies should work in tandem to ensure the healthcare shortage facing Canadians is not exacerbated.”

Herbert Grubel, a former federal MP and emeritus professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, and Patrick Grady, a former senior official in the federal finance department, estimated in a 2021 article in the Financial Post that based on higher immigration levels, “greenhouse gas emissions will be 7.5% above what they would have been otherwise” in 2030, and “this gap will be much larger by 2050, the year the government has promised to reduce emissions to net-zero as required by the Paris accord.”

Source: GOLDSTEIN: High immigration policy undermining housing, healthcare and climate goals

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Todd: Quixotic Trudeau finally getting pushback over asylum-seeker chaos

2024/08/03 Leave a comment

Inevitable although most asylum seeker and refugee stakeholders remain largely in denial:

Reality is teaching some important lessons to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about flirting with the ideal of virtually open borders. So are Canada’s premiers and the public.

Particularly in regard to asylum seekers.

For months B.C. Premier David Eby and Quebec Premier François Legault have been almost frantically trying to send a message to Trudeau and his childhood friend, Immigration Minister Marc Miller, that they should no longer indulge in their romantic rhetoric of the past.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. #WelcomeToCanada,” Trudeau told the world on Twitter/X on Jan. 28, 2017.

It was the day after newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning refugees from Muslim-majority countries. Trump had also proposed the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trudeau promised to be their saviour.

Even though Eby and Legault are among the most bold in their pushback, they haven’t been alone in trying to educate Trudeau about the costs, in public dollars, of such grandstanding on asylum seekers.

As with the categories of guest workers, international students and immigrants under Trudeau, the number of refugee claimants has soared during his nine-year-old Liberal regime.

There are now 363,000 asylum claimants in the country, according to Statistics Canada — double two years ago.

A couple of years ago most claimants were walking across the U.S. border into Eastern Canada, which U.S. President Joe Biden last year helped to tighten up.

So now most arrive at airports in Toronto and Montreal, and to some extent Calgary and Vancouver, particularly from Asia. They come in  legally with study or travel visas and then make their claims after leaving the airport, saying they’re escaping various forms of persecution.

It normally takes about two years, and often longer if there is an appeal, for the refugee board to research backgrounds and make a ruling on a case, says Anne Michèle Meggs, a former Quebec immigration official who now writes independently on the subject.

This year the average number of asylum claims made per month in B.C. has jumped to 640 — up 37 per cent compared with last year, says Meggs.

B.C. has the third largest intake of asylum claimants in the country. Most still go to Ontario, where she says average monthly claims have leapt by 53 per cent, or Quebec, where they’re up 20 per cent.

Canada’s premiers have been telling Trudeau for the past few months that, regardless of the validity of their assertions, asylum seekers cost taxpayers a great deal of money.

Most arrive with no financial means. And while they wait for their cases to be evaluated to see if they get coveted permanent resident status, federal and provincial agencies often provide social services, housing, food, clothing, health care, children’s education and (in Quebec) daycare.

Stories of an out-of-control refugee system are likely contributing to fast-changing opinion poll results. Last week Leger discovered 60 per cent of Canadians now think there are “too many” newcomers. That’s a huge shift from just 35 per cent in 2019.

It’s the highest rate of dissatisfaction in decades — based in part on demand pressure on housing and infrastructure costs. The negative polling result is consistent across both white and non-white Canadians.

In response to complaints out of Quebec, Trudeau has this year coughed up $750 million more for that province to support refugee claimants who arrived in recent years, mostly at the land border. Last year Quebec dealt with a total of 65,000 claims and Ontario with 63,000, with the largest cohorts from Mexico and India.

But B.C., as Eby is telling anyone who will listen, has received no dollars from Ottawa. The premier described how “frustrating” it is for B.C. to “scrabble around” for funds in the province, where housing is among the most expensive in the world, while Quebec gets extra.

“Our most recent total for last year was 180,000 new British Columbians,” Eby said last month, including asylum seekers among all international migrants to the province. “And that’s great and that’s exciting and it’s necessary, and it’s completely overwhelming.”

Eby didn’t even publicly mention the increasingly bizarre anomaly, based on the three-decades-old Quebec Accord, which each year leads to Quebec getting 10 times more funding than B.C. and Ontario to settle newcomers.

Postmedia News has found Metro Vancouver’s shelters are being overwhelmed by the near-doubling of asylum seekers in B.C. in the past year.

The Salvation Army, which operates 100 beds in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, said that since last summer, the proportion of refugee claimants seeking shelter has climbed to about 80 per cent. Meanwhile, about 60 per cent of beds at the Catholic Charities Men’s Shelter in Vancouver were occupied by refugee claimants. Shelters are predominantly funded by taxpayers.

Government statistics show B.C. is now home to 16,837 asylum claimants, says Meggs. That doesn’t include the 5,300 who last year arrived in the province on a more orderly track as government-assisted refugees.

In an article in Inroads magazine, a social policy journal, Meggs says her ”jaw dropped” when Trudeau said in April the number of temporary immigrants, including asylum seekers, was “out of control” and “growing at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”

The cognitive dissonance, she explained, is because Trudeau’s government is entirely responsible for the system spinning out-of control since 2015 — and not only in numbers, but in selection criteria, or lack thereof.

Trudeau has admitted chaos particularly characterizes the dilemma with international students, whose numbers have tripled under his reign to 1.1 million. Many are now claiming asylum. B.C. has 217,000 foreign students in post-secondary institutions and another 49,000 in kindergarten-to-Grade-12 programs.

Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland is among those suggesting it would be best if Canada processed about 50,000 refugee claimants a year, since it doesn’t have absorptive capacity for more — like the 144,000 who applied last year.

One big problem is the government knows little or nothing about a lot of asylum seekers, say Kurland and Meggs (who generally shares the centre-left leanings of her brother, Geoff Meggs, former chief of staff to NDP Premier John Horgan.)

The immigration department’s ignorance is in part because many make their claims online. Officials don’t even know where tens of thousands live. Meanwhile, Meggs laments, countless claimants are both aided and exploited by people smugglers, landlords and underground employers.

Meggs doesn’t really know how Ottawa is going to get things under control. And, if Trump is re-elected in November and follows through on his vow to get rid of millions of undocumented migrants, it’s virtually guaranteed many will head north to Canada, trying to find ways to pass through what Meggs describes as an incredibly long and understaffed border.

Even though Meggs isn’t optimistic about the future of asylum-seeker policy in Canada, at least the premiers and public are making noises. The thing is, given the Liberals’ defensiveness, it’s just far too soon to tell if their criticism will inspire not empty words but authentic change.

Source: Quixotic Trudeau finally getting pushback over asylum-seeker chaos

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Keller: Canada is about to lose more than 100,000 farming jobs. That’s great economic news

2024/08/03 Leave a comment

More on innovation, productivity and immigration:

….Back in 1891, it would have called for a large (and mostly poorly paid) work force. Progress since then has been remarkable, spurred by massive investments in labour-saving farming equipment and technology. The Conference Board study predicts more of the same.

All of which should be a reminder that labour shortages and rising wages have economic benefits. Yes, benefits. They are the mother of business innovation and investment, because they force businesses to chase ever greater labour productivity. Particularly when it comes to low-wage jobs, a tight labour market and upward pressure on pay should be the goal of government policy.

However, Canadian businesses in recent years persuaded Ottawa that, no matter the state of the economy or the level of unemployment, they can’t fill hundreds of thousands of low-wage jobs. But these alleged labour shortages are mostly just businesses facing the pressure to compete for workers by raising wages.

Those pressures have been alleviated by allowing businesses to recruit an effectively unlimited number of temporary foreign workers, at the lowest legal wage, or less. Absent that low-wage release valve, businesses would have to innovate and invest more in new technologies to use less labour, and get more out of each hour of (increasingly expensive) labour.

That’s how we raise productivity. That’s how we grow the economy….

Source: Canada is about to lose more than 100,000 farming jobs. That’s great economic news

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US border migrant crossings fall for fifth month in a row

2024/08/03 Leave a comment

Of note. Unlikely to change much of the political discourse, however:

The number of unlawful crossings by migrants at the US southern border has dropped for the fifth consecutive month, according to official data.

US Border Patrol agents apprehended around 57,000 migrants along the border in July – the lowest recorded since September 2020.

The numbers are down significantly from December, when around 250,000 migrants were caught crossing the border.

President Joe Biden’s administration has credited the decrease to recent actions by him to tackle illegal immigration into the US, an election-year political vulnerability for the Democrats.

“This is the product of a number of actions this administration has taken,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in an interview with CBS this week.

Mr Mayorkas said those actions include an executive order signed last month by President Joe Biden that allows US immigration officials to deport migrants without processing their asylum claims.

The measure has been called one of the most restrictive border policies by a Democratic president in recent times, and was criticised by left-wing members of the party.

At the time, the president vowed that his executive order would “help us gain control of our border”. He added that “doing nothing is not an option”.

Government data shows that the number of migrants stopped at the US-Mexico border had dropped even before the order.

Border Patrol recorded 141,000 apprehensions in February, 137,000 in March, 129,000 in April, 118,000 in May and 84,000 in June.

The figures do not include official border crossings, where the Biden administration has been processing around 1,500 migrants each day through a smartphone app that schedules appointments between migrants and US border agents.

On the other side of the border, Mexican officials have also been working to curb illegal migration, including stopping people before they attempt to cross on to US soil.

The southern border has been a political headache for the Biden administration heading into November’s election.

Mr Biden has been repeatedly criticised by Republicans and their party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who said last month that the president had “surrendered our southern border.”

The president hit back, accusing the Trump camp of an “extremely cynical political move” by pressing Republican politicians to block a proposed border plan in Congress earlier this year.

Source: US border migrant crossings fall for fifth month in a row

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More measures coming to reduce temporary residents, Canadian minister says

2024/08/03 Leave a comment

Stay tuned, more signs of reality, both substantive and political:

Canada’s government is preparing to unveil a suite of measures to clamp down on temporary immigration and has no plans to follow through right now on a broad program offering status to undocumented residents, the country’s immigration minister told Reuters.

“The era of uncapped programs to come into this country is quickly coming to an end. This is a big shift. You can’t just slam on the brakes and expect it to stop immediately,” Marc Miller said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.

Canada has long prided itself on welcoming newcomers, and the current Liberal government has overseen a dramatic increase in the influx of new residents, especially temporary ones, as many employers struggled to fill vacancies coming out of the pandemic.

But over the past year the tide has shifted: Immigrants are being blamed for a worsening housing situation along with an affordability crisis in the country. Critics have accused the federal government of bringing in too many people.

A Leger poll conducted in July found 60% of respondents said there are too many immigrants coming to Canada.

“I’m not naive enough to think Canada is immune to the waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. … Canadians want a system that is not out of control,” Miller said in a phone interview.

Canadians “want a system that makes sense. And they want one that still has a lot of welcoming aspects we’ve been proud of, but it’s got to make sense,” Miller said, predicting immigration would be “a top issue, if not the top issue, in the next election,” expected to take place in late 2025.

The Canadian government has already outlined some measures. In January it announced a two-year cap on international students – an area of Canada’s immigration system that got “overheated” and was not meant to be “a backdoor entry into Canada,” Miller said.

In March the immigration minister announced Canada’s first-ever cap on temporary immigration. Canada wants to reduce temporary residents to 5% of the total population over the next three years from 6.2% in 2023. That would be a cut of about 20% from Canada’s 2.5 million temporary residents in 2023.

But in its recent monetary policy report, the Bank of Canada expressed doubts that the government could meet its temporary residents goal, noting that non-permanent residents made up 6.8% of the country’s population as of April and that “the share is expected to continue rising over the near-term.”

The bank is right to say achieving this goal is a challenge, but it is a “reasonable” one given the suite of measures Canada plans to announce over the next several weeks, Miller said.

Miller would not give details but said these measures could include changes to post-graduate work permits and enforcement.

Asked if his government had made a mistake in allowing rapid growth in temporary residents, Miller said, “Every government makes mistakes. I think we are all human.” But “coming out of COVID, in particular, we were facing massive labor shortages.”

REFUGEE INFLUX

Meanwhile, Canada is seeing record levels of refugee claims – more than 18,000 in June, according to the Immigration and Refugee Board. This is despite government efforts to deter people by closing the land border to asylum-seekers through a contested bilateral agreement with the United States and by implementing new visa requirements for Mexicans.

Canada cannot dictate how many people file refugee claims but it can make it difficult for asylum-seekers to reach the country. Miller said the government may impose stricter criteria on temporary resident visas to prevent asylum-seekers from coming.

The government had also previously said it would pursue a regularization program to give status to undocumented residents.

That is not on the table before the election, Miller said, but he noted there is a possibility of sector-specific programs.

Source: More measures coming to reduce temporary residents, Canadian minister says

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Clark: Ottawa has to do something about immigration boom, but it doesn’t have any good options 

2024/08/02 Leave a comment

Good capturing Miller’s dilemma as he tries to address the failures of this government and previous ministers:

…So what can Mr. Miller do instead? He can turn a lot of those temporary residents into permanent residents. He has already suggested that is part of the plan.

The problem is that means turning the goals of Canada’s economic immigration program upside down.

It is supposed to bring in people with the best potential to help Canada’s economy – highly educated or highly skilled applicants. But in recent years, the big growth in international students has come in private and public college students, with less education and fewer skills. Turning large numbers of temporary residents into permanent residents means accepting lower-skilled applicants.

And like it or not, those immigrants will take the place of others. There’s a target of 301,250 economic immigrants for 2025, and if the government creates a special program for lower-skilled temporary residents, that means fewer spots will be available for highly qualified applicants. Whiz kids with bachelor degrees in math or computer science will be left in the queue.

But for the next few years, the government will be digging the immigration system out of a hole. The big mistake has been made.

Ottawa didn’t stop provincial governments, particularly in Ontario and B.C., from letting their foreign-student industries grow to excess. The Canadian population grew at its fastest rate since the peak of the baby boom because of unchecked growth in temporary residents, rather than planned immigration. That fuelled a housing crisis.

Now Ottawa has little choice but to do something. And Mr. Miller doesn’t have any good options to choose from.

Source: Ottawa has to do something about immigration boom, but it doesn’t have any good options

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Canada’s refugee system is overwhelmed by skyrocketing claims. What can Ottawa do to reduce backlogs?

2024/08/02 Leave a comment

It starts with reversing some of the visa waivers or relaxed requirements for source countries that are experiencing a major increase along with some of the post-arrival suggestions mentioned by lawyers. And while some will not like it, AI should be part of the triage process:

Canada’s refugee system has been the envy of the world. It’s recognized as being orderly, fair and efficient when compared to any other western country.

But as the number of asylum seekers keeps surging here — and with the queue and processing times getting longer, the beleaguered system is in desperate need of a rethink to save it from spiraling out of control and being clogged up in endless backlogs.

“It didn’t take long for me to realize with the team that we needed to maintain our ability to render fair decisions despite the growing intake,” Manon Brassard, who was appointed as the chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board a year ago, told a Senate committee in June. “We need to do something about that.”

In 2023, the country’s largest independent tribunal received 138,000 new claims, up by 129 per cent from the year before and by 136 per cent in 2019, before the pandemic halted international travels and slowed the inflow. In the first three months of 2024, already 46,700 claims were lodged, with a total of 186,000 cases in the queue.

In the spring, the federal government tried unsuccessfully to ram through some much-needed changes to the asylum system through an omnibus bill that it said were necessary to streamline the process and tackle a growing backlog.

Those changes would have simplified the initial registration of a refugee claim; imposed “mandatory conditions” and timelines that claimants must follow to avoid their cases from being deemed abandoned; and allowed immigration officials to hold on to a file before referring it to the refugee board for hearing. 

Immigration Minister Marc Miller told the Star in a recent interview that the status quo is unsustainable.

“It was unfortunate,” he said of the foiled reforms carved out of the budget bill amid complaints by advocates for the lack of consultation. “Those amendments were fair in nature, and they were intended to accelerate some of the processing.”

Miller said he has some decisions to make in the coming months and is not ruling out reintroducing the proposed changes in a new bill.

The refugee board’s dilemma

Despite an extra $87 million in federal funding over two years — and new rules to crack down on irregular migration through U.S. land border — the refugee board only has the capacity to process 50,000 claims a year. With more than 186,000 cases pending, it would take almost four years to clear its inventory, even if new intakes were halted.

And the board is not going to get more money. As part of the federal budget cuts, the tribunal must reduce spending by $8.3 million this year, $10.5 million in 2025 and $13.6 million in 2026 and beyond.

Without the proposed legislative changes, the tribunal has few tools at its disposal.

“Money is part of the solution, but it’s not the only solution,” Brassard, who declined the Star’s interview request for this story, told senators in June. “We need to improve the way we do things.”

The board is developing a plan, known as “Horizon 26-27,” to streamline its operations and processes with the help of technology and automation, but few details are available. The aim is that by next March it will be able to process 80 per cent of claims within two years, as opposed to the current 37 months.

Critics urge for greater efficiency 

Critics say that while the board does need more decision-makers, it must also improve efficiency, and the government could help take some of the asylum seekers out of the queue by providing them with alternative pathways.

The tribunal already has policies to expedite less complex claims, such as those that appear to have solid evidence and are from clearly troubled countries.

Brassard told the Senate committee that the board has a task force to review cases — covering Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Venezuela — for quicker processing and about a third of the claims go through the screening.

However, immigration lawyer Robert Blanshay said even if an asylum seeker is selected for less complex screening, the case is still required to go before a refugee judge for a decision.

He said the board could hire trained administrative staff to review cases and interview claimants to make a record for the adjudicator to just sign off on, to save time and resources for formal hearings.

“On paper, it has been implemented, but it’s been severely underutilized,” said Blanshay, vice-chair of the refugee and litigation committee of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration section.

Immigration lawyer Maureen Silcoff, who served as an adjudicator on the refugee board in the 1990s, said there used to be refugee protection officers — neutral parties — tasked with interviewing claimants where credibility was the only concern.

“You had an opportunity to ask questions and get clarification about some points that might be troubling you and could be resolved,” she explained. “The member (adjudicator) who signed off on the decision did so with more comfort.”

Silcoff said it’s worth bringing back the eliminated administrative position and triaging cases into three streams based on complexity: those requiring a full hearing, an interview if there are a few questions, or just a paper review for the most solid claims.

Aviva Basman, president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, said the current asylum process is complicated and cumbersome, and the online portal, launched in 2021, takes a long time to fill out, especially when a claim involves multiple applicants.

Currently, foreign nationals can seek asylum at port of entry or make an inland claim after entering the country. However, there continues to be inconsistent and confusing information, for example, about deadlines to file documents, depending on the entry point into the refugee system. 

The less complex file review process is also somewhat unclear, which discourages counsel from even making an attempt because it requires substantial resources to make a case.

“What you have is a complicated, cumbersome refugee claim process where a lot of people are having a hard time,” said Basman. “Having simpler, streamlined processes would be a good thing.”

Alternative pathways for refugees

In addition to adequately resourcing asylum processes, a recent international report recommends governments alleviate pressure on their refugee determination systems by providing safe, orderly alternatives through resettlement programs and regular immigration pathways.

“Narrow- or short-sighted policies that focus on only one piece of the puzzle are likely to merely push the problem elsewhere,” warned the report by Washington-based Migration Policy Institute and the Robert Bosch Stiftung, a German foundation. 

Silcoff said Ottawa could expand on initiatives that offer immigration status to asylum seekers employed in fields with labour shortages, such as a one-time program during the pandemic that granted permanent residence to asylum seekers working in health care and a current pilot that resettles skilled refugees abroad to fill in-demand jobs here. 

“That could be a win-win,” said Silcoff. “It meets our labour market needs and it helps relieve the pressure from the refugee board.”

Source: Canada’s refugee system is overwhelmed by skyrocketing claims. What can Ottawa do to reduce backlogs?

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