Canada’s foreign worker program ‘breeding ground’ for modern slavery: report

2024/08/15 Leave a comment

Not that surprising that little change from the interim report. Still find the language overly dramatic and over stated in describing the abuse:

A recently released international report says Canada’s temporary foreign worker program is a “breeding ground” for contemporary slavery.

The final report by a United Nations special rapporteur who visited Canada last year says a power imbalance prevents workers from exercising their rights.

A worker’s status is dependent on a closed work permit that is specific to their employer. If an individual is fired, they may be deported from Canada.

Workers are subject to a wide range of abuses and aren’t always aware of their rights, the report says.

It notes the government puts much of the responsibility for informing workers about their rights on the employer, “despite the obvious conflict of interest.”

Special rapporteur Tomoya Obokata cites reports of issues including wage theft, long working hours with limited breaks and insufficient personal protective equipment.

The report also notes allegations of sexual harassment and exploitation, along with physical, emotional and verbal abuse.

Obokata also found that workers have difficulty accessing health care.

In some cases, employers prevented people from seeking treatment, the report says, with some workers denied the necessary time off, encouraged to “take painkillers or home remedies instead” or even fired.

The report notes that rules implemented in 2022 require employers to make a reasonable effort to provide workers with access to health care if they are ill or injured.

It also points out that many employers end up providing housing for their workers. That can result in overcrowding, such as 20 to 30 people sharing a single washroom, it says.

The report calls for Canada to “end labour migration arrangements that foster exploitation by creating dependency situations that tie workers to their employers” and in which employers control the worker’s housing, health care and status.

The number of permits under the program increased 88 per cent from 2019 to 2023, though Ottawa recently indicated it plans to reduce the number of such workers in Canada.

Mathis Denis, a spokesperson for Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault, said the government has increased fines for employer non-compliance under the program. He said the government levied $2.1 million in fines for violating program rules last fiscal year, up from $1.54 million issued the previous year.

He said the minister is considering increasing fees to pay for “additional integrity and processing activities,” and is looking to put in place new regulations covering employer eligibility.

Source: Canada’s foreign worker program ‘breeding ground’ for modern slavery: report

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

U.S. speeding up asylum claim processing along the Canadian border

2024/08/15 Leave a comment

Of note, an area that Canada has to improve upon:

The U.S. government is moving to speed up asylum claim processing at its northern border in an attempt to deter migrants from illegally crossing over from Canada.

Washington is making two changes that fall under the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which calls for asylum seekers to apply for refugee status in the first of two countries they enter.

First, migrants looking to prove that they’re exempt from the STCA will have to provide their documents to U.S. border officials at the time of their screening. Migrants previously were allowed to postpone screenings to gather necessary documentation.

Second, migrants will only have four hours — down from 24 hours — to consult a lawyer prior to their screening.

CBS News first reported on the changes. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed the changes to CBC News.

“DHS carefully reviewed its implementation of the Safe Third Country Agreement with Canada and concluded that it could streamline that process at the border without impacting noncitizens’ ability to have access to a full and fair procedure for determining a claim to asylum or equivalent temporary protection,” the department said in a media statement.

The U.S. has seen a sharp increase in illegal crossings into the country from Canada in the past few years.

Border agents have taken 12,612 migrants who crossed the U.S.-Canada border illegally into custody in the first six months of 2024, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s up from 12,218 in all of 2023 and is more than the number that were taken into custody in 2021 and 2022 combined.

Earlier this year, Ottawa reimposed some visa requirements on Mexican nationals visiting Canada, in part to answer a request from Washington to help stem illegal border crossings into the U.S. The number of Mexican migrants attempting to cross into the U.S. from Canada has since dropped.

In 2023, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden announced that they were making changes to the STCA by expanding its application to the entire Canada-United States border, rather than just official points of entry.

Source: U.S. speeding up asylum claim processing along the Canadian border

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

ICYMI: Trudeau’s plan to reduce temporary immigration risks economic harm: business groups

2024/08/14 Leave a comment

Could hardly expect her to welcome any restrictions, even if all the evidence points to the need:

Canada’s independent business advocate says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plan to reduce temporary immigration risks dire economic consequences, underscoring the pressures the government is facing as it tries to slow population growth.

Nancy Healey, who holds a government post knows as commissioner for employers, penned a letter to three of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers warning that a plan to cut temporary residents by 20% over three years is likely to make it harder for firms to grow.

“In the context of the current and future labor shortages that Canada will experience, it is crucial not to reduce the labor pool,” she said in the Aug. 1 letter, which was signed by business groups including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and Canadian Federation of Independent Business. “Such a reduction would have catastrophic economic consequences for companies and limit their growth potential.”

A surge in temporary residents — including international students, foreign workers and asylum seekers — pushed Canada’s population growth rate to 3.2%, one of the world’s fastest. The influx of new arrivals exacerbated a housing shortage and helped sink Trudeau’s popularity.

The government is already implementing a cap on student visas, and businesses fear the government will next shrink the program that allows them to bring in temporary employees, said Healey.

Indeed, Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault told business groups on Tuesday he intends to limit their use of temp workers — a program that has drawn mounting criticism for allowing fraud and abuse.

The number of temporary foreign workers in Canada has continued to grow even as the unemployment rate rises — it reached 6.4% in June, 13.5% for the youngest workers. Temporary foreign workers have increasingly been recruited for low-wage, unskilled jobs, including in retail stores and restaurants.

Healey defended the program in the letter, calling it “much maligned despite the rigor that has characterized it for many years,” driven by “unsubstantiated anecdotes.” The system requires employers to advertise jobs to Canadians before seeking a foreign worker, to pay market wages and to take part in a compliance regime that protects against abuse, she said.

She urged the government to maintain the number of workers admitted under the program, speed up approval times and avoid increasing the C$1,000 ($727.5) fee for permit applications, already costly for small businesses.

Business groups have long raised alarm about Canada’s aging population and low birth rates, a phenomenon experienced by many advanced economies. Healey pointed to a Royal Bank of Canada report that said 46% of projected structural labor shortages are in occupations that don’t need a university or college education, but instead require “occupation-specific” or on-the-job training.

“We need better paths for newcomers to come and stay in Canada,” Healey said in the letter. “It is clear that immigration streams that attach a job offer to the application result in improved outcomes.”

While business groups have a right to lobby the government, what’s good for businesses isn’t necessarily good for the economy, said Mikal Skuterud, a labor economist at the University of Waterloo.

Labor shortages are challenging for firms, but they can spur competitive wages and investments in equipment and technology — which is particularly important as Canada grapples with poor productivity, he said.

“I’m not saying it’s not difficult for businesses sometimes — for sure it is,” he said. “But the idea that this is some kind of an economic crisis the government has to respond to is really economic nonsense.”

Source: Trudeau’s plan to reduce temporary immigration risks economic harm: business groups

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Jena: As an immigrant, I’ve experienced Canada’s promise — a promise now at risk

2024/08/13 Leave a comment

Another legitimate warning:

…Despite these mounting crises, the federal government fixates on arbitrary immigration targets. It’s clear that the government needs to invest more in its health-care system, and in getting more homes built to meet the needs of a growing population. But it should also slow immigration growth until these investments take hold. Each year, more than half a million new permanent residents and hundreds of thousands of temporary workers and students arrive. This relentless, poorly planned surge deepens our crises. With 97 per cent of Canada’s population growth driven by newcomers. In 2023, Canada’s population growth rate was higher than the average of the world’s top 38 economies, the OECD countries….

Dr. Debakant Jena is a first-generation immigrant, an Orthopaedic Surgeon in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. 

Source: As an immigrant, I’ve experienced Canada’s promise — a promise now at risk

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Sweden’s ‘snitch law’ immigration plan prompts alarm across society

2024/08/13 Leave a comment

Of note:

Doctors, social workers and librarians are among those in Sweden who have sounded the alarm over a proposal being explored by a government-appointed committee that would force public sector workers to report undocumented people to authorities.

The proposal – which has been referred to as the “snitch law” by some – was among the many measures included in a 2022 agreement struck between four rightwing parties in the country. The deal paved the way for a coalition government involving three centre-right parties with parliamentary support from the far-right anti-immigration Sweden Democrats (SD).

Nearly two years after the SD, a party whose manifesto seeks to create one of Europe’s most-hostile environments for non-Europeans, became Sweden’s second-biggest party, work is under way to turn the proposal regarding public sector workers into law. The committee has been instructed by the government to present proposals on how this could be drafted into law, with plans to present their findings to the government by the end of November.

Despite being in the early stages, the idea, which could result in up to a million workers, from dentists to teachers, being forced to report any contact with undocumented patients, students and authorities, has faced widespread opposition from rights campaigners and professional associations.

“This proposal is utterly inhumane,” said Michele LeVoy of the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants. The impacts could be far-reaching, with people potentially hesitating to send children to school and more reluctant to access healthcare or report crimes committed against them.

“People will be, in a sense, terrified. Why would anyone want to go somewhere when they know that the main thing that will happen is not that they can get care, not that they can go to school, not that they can go to the library – they’ll just be turned in,” she said.

Professional associations have said the proposal could erode the trust they have worked to build and instead fuel racism and amplify stigmatisation.

LeVoy described the measures as part of a growing trend across Europe to criminalise solidarity with people who were undocumented. The Finnish government is also considering expanding obligations to report undocumented people, while in Germany, social welfare offices have for two decades wrestled with reporting obligations.

Another example lay in the measures introduced in the UK by Theresa May in 2012, said LeVoy, citing the “hostile environment” policies that sought to limit access to work, benefits, bank accounts, driving licences and other essential services for those who could not prove they had the legal right to live in Britain.

It later emerged that many who were in the UK legally were unable to prove their status and that the Home Office was frequently misclassifying legal residents as immigration offenders, leading the National Audit Office to conclude in 2018 that hostile environment policies did not provide value for money for taxpayers.

If the Swedish proposal were to become law, Sweden could end up grappling with similar consequences, said LeVoy. “Everywhere where obligations to denounce undocumented people have been applied, the result has been more discrimination, suffering and fear.”

Jacob Lind, a postdoctoral researcher in international migration at Malmö University, said the Swedish proposal was likely to have little impact when it came to reducing the number of people without papers in the country.

“A lot of people are not going to leave,” he said. “They’re just going to end up in further misery. You’ll end up with the opposite effect; society will have even less contact with people who are in this situation, further increasing their vulnerability and making them even more exploitable.”

It is a view that could explain the broad-based opposition to the plan; as of December 2023, more than 150 Swedish regions, municipalities, trade unions and other civil society groups had come out against the idea. “There’s a unique alliance right now around this issue and it’s become a key issue,” said Lind.

Among the groups that have spoken out is the Swedish Medical Association (SMA). “I became a doctor to help people, not monitor and report them,” said Sofia Rydgren Stale, the SMA chair.

For months, the association has argued that reporting requirements would run contrary to the professional ethics rules and principles that state that care must be provided as needed and that patients must not be discriminated against. “We see it as very likely that it will lead to people not daring to seek care for fear of being reported,” Rydgren Stale added.

The Swedish government said the committee looking into how this could become law was also examining whether the duty to provide information would conflict with professional values, such as within healthcare. “To ensure that the regulation is legally sound and does not result in unreasonable consequences for individuals, certain situations may need to be exempted from the duty to provide information,” the minister of migration, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said.

She described the reporting requirements as playing a key role in supporting legal migration by allowing the state to more efficiently deport individuals who are denied asylum. “Unfortunately, many remain and become part of a growing shadow society,” she said. “In such situations the duty to provide information helps in upholding government decisions and does not erode trust, quite the contrary.”

The government’s stance has seemingly done little to quell concerns. In May, the professional ethics council founded by two Swedish unions representing teachers said the obligation to report would put them in an impossible situation. “If the proposal were to become reality, it could lead to such serious ethical problems for teachers that our conclusion is that civil disobedience would probably be the only reasonable way out,” it said on its website.

The idea was also opposed by more than 90% of librarians, said Anna Troberg of the trade union DIK. “Many say they would rather lose their jobs than report those in need,” she said. “If the Swedish government advances this law, the librarians will come out on the right side of history. Ultimately, this is a question of trust, humanity and democracy.”

Source: Sweden’s ‘snitch law’ immigration plan prompts alarm across society

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Canadian Immigration Tracker: June 2024 Update

2024/08/13 1 Comment

Half-year highlights, January to June year over year increase. Study permit applications and issues most notable change, highlighting impact of caps on international post-secondary students.

Summary tables of impact on international students (permits issued, applications and web interest), all showing a significant decline for the April-June quarter:

—–

Permanent residents: Slight decrease of 2.9 percent (likely to be made up in subsequent quarters)

TRs-IMP: Overall increase of 8.9 percent but April-June shows a decline of 8.5 percent compared to the 27.7 percent increase January-March

TRs-TFWs: Overall decrease of 3 percent, 1.4 percent in April-June

Students: Number of applications have decreased by 32 percent, but April-June highlights the impact of the cap announcement with a decline of 47.2 percent. With respect to post-secondary study permits issued, while the overall number decreased only by 1.7 percent, April-June declined by 21.4 percent, a sharp contrast with an increase of 34.3 percent January-March. 

Asylum Claimants: Increase of 55.4 percent, quarterly numbers largely the same

Citizenship: Increase of 16.2 percent, quarterly numbers largely the same

Visitor Visas: Decrease of 10.2 percent, with a greater decrease in the second quarter of 24 percent.

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/canadian-immigration-tracker-key-slides-june-2024/270924210

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

Globe editorial: Fraud in the temporary worker program isn’t the problem. The rules that rig the labour market are

2024/08/12 Leave a comment

Indeed. Not seeing much impact yet in numbers in government rolling back some of the earlier ill-advised facilitation under former immigration minister Fraser and his DMs:

…As is the case with much of the immigration file, the Liberals have moved only slowly to undo what have become clearly damaging changes. Last October, the government decreased the validity period for labour market impact assessments to 12 months, when the national unemployment rate had hit 5.7 per cent, up from 5.1 per cent in the spring of 2022.

In March, the validity period was reduced to six months, a belated recognition of the realities of the labour market. At the same time, the government said only two sectors would still be allowed to use foreign workers for up to 30 per cent of their workforce. But it kept in place the 20-per-cent rule for all other sectors, despite rising unemployment.

On Tuesday, Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault hinted that further tightening may be on the way, as he announced several anti-fraud measures. Of course, companies who abuse the rules and their workers should be punished.

But the real problem with the low-wage temporary foreign worker program is not abuse of the rules – it’s the rules themselves. The press release from Mr. Boisonnault’s office boldly stated that the temporary foreign worker program “is designed as an extraordinary measure to be used when a qualified Canadian is not able to fill a job vacancy.”

That may have been the case once. But now that is demonstrably untrue – and a slap in the face to unemployed workers struggling to find a job while the Liberal government allows businesses to continue to import cheap labour.

Source: Fraud in the temporary worker program isn’t the problem. The rules that rig the labour market are

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

‘A new kind of slavery’: Skyrocketing use of temporary foreign workers in restaurants and fast food chains has advocates concerned

2024/08/12 Leave a comment

Alternate header: Restaurants rely on cheap foreign labour undermining wages:

Source: ‘A new kind of slavery’: Skyrocketing use of temporary foreign workers in restaurants and fast food chains has advocates concerned

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Keller: How can the Trudeau government fix its immigration mess? Press ‘Rewind’

2024/08/10 Leave a comment

More from Keller on selectivity (Permanent Residents are selective unlike the demand-driven worker programs and international students):

…Over the last few years, work visas have been issued in unlimited numbers, with effectively no questions asked. That’s not how things used to be.

It should be quick and easy for a Canadian business to get a temporary work visa to fill a specialized, high-wage position. If an aeronautical engineering firm needs to recruit a senior production manager at $250,000 a year, they should get that visa yesterday.

But visas for $15-an-hour sandwich artists? Particularly when Statistics Canada says the summer jobless rate among students is at its highest level in decades? Forget it.

The temporary foreign worker streams must become smaller and more selective. Jobs paying, say, at least 150 per cent of the average Canadian full-time wage – that’s roughly $110,000 a year – should be possible to fill from overseas. Lower-wage applications should be auto-stamped “Denied.”

Yes, exception will have to be made for the long-standing program of seasonal agricultural workers. But other industries have to be weaned from their addiction to low-wage, low-rights labour. Going cold turkey will leave businesses with no choice but to raise wages and invest in productivity.

Selectivity should also be the rule when it comes to student visas. Immigration Minister Marc Miller is finally putting a cap on numbers, which were long unlimited. Infinite supply spawned an ecosystem of what Mr. Miller correctly dubbed “puppy mill” colleges, selling entry to Canada in exchange for minimal tuition. It’s a racket that Mr. Miller says he’s scaling back, but which he has hardly ended.

Canada should give student visa priority to programs with the best labour market outcomes, and the highest tuition. Some provinces, led by Ontario, appear to be doing the opposite. Foreign students at Ontario’s public universities pay tuitions that are generally several times those at public colleges, yet the lion’s share of Ontario’s student visas are allocated to colleges, not universities.

It’s not anti-immigration or anti-immigrant for Canada to be selective. It’s how we used to do things. It’s also how, from the 1980s until recently, through governments Progressive Conservative, Conservative and Liberal, Canada had higher levels of immigration than the rest of the developed world – and higher public support for immigration.

Source: How can the Trudeau government fix its immigration mess? Press ‘Rewind’

Filed under Immigration Tagged with

‘Our current government hasn’t been heeding national security advice’: Former immigration minister Chris Alexander on how Canada vets immigrants—and how ISIS operatives may have slipped through the cracks 

2024/08/10 Leave a comment

Worth reading, both as an explainer as well as the political commentary:

Significant questions are being asked of Canada’s security and immigrant vetting processes following the arrests last month of Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi, 62, and Mostafa Eldidi, 26, a father and son facing charges that include conspiracy to commit murder for the benefit or at the direction of a terrorist group—in this case, ISIS.

Reports have emerged that the pair were able to immigrate to Canada despite the elder Eldidi having participated in violence, including torture and dismemberment, against an ISIS prisoner. The assault was recorded on video and released by ISIS prior to the pair’s immigration to Canada.

Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi is a Canadian citizen while his son, Mostafa, is not.

Police claimed the father and son were “in the advanced stages of planning a serious, violent attack in Toronto,” before their arrest.

To better understand Canada’s immigration vetting process, Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large, exchanged with Chris Alexander, Canada’s minister of Citizenship and Immigration from 2013 to 2015, who offered his expert insight on how the pair may have slipped through the cracks without raising alarm.

SEAN SPEER: How does the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship draw on intelligence and national security analysis when judging the admissibility of an immigration applicant? Does the department have its own capacity or does it draw on the capacity concentrated in CSIS and other national security agencies? If the latter, what’s the mechanism or process for such analysis to be pulled into the department’s decision-making?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship uses national security-related information to make decisions, but this information invariably originates with CSIS, the RCMP, or our trusted allies and partners that share such information with us. When an applicant has never before been flagged for national security-related concerns, then IRCC is relying on CSIS, relevant police services, and their international partners to ensure nothing new has come to light. Timelines are often short; resources are invariably stretched; and matching applicants to data generated by national security review across languages, alphabets, and administrative systems can pose challenges.

SEAN SPEER: What type of national security review is typically used for immigration applicants compared to more extraordinary cases? What’s the triage process for determining the level of national security review?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: Applicants for permanent residence receive a more thorough review than say, international students or temporary workers. Anyone with a background in police, the military, or security services will receive additional vetting, especially if they come from a country with a less-than-stellar human rights record. The country of origin and any other places where the applicant lived, studied, or worked are also taken into account: if any of these countries are theatres where significant terrorist or extremist groups operate, where wars, civil wars or other armed conflicts are underway, or where hostile intelligence services may be recruiting assets, then there will be additional vetting as well. The parameters for Canada’s national security vetting are always shifting as the threat environment evolves, and our assessments catch up (or fail to catch up) to fast-changing realities on the ground around the world.

SEAN SPEER: Based on what we know about this particular case, what might have happened such that this individual’s participation in an ISIS-related execution was not factored into his admissibility?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: The information on the file might have been incomplete. For sound operational reasons, those monitoring ISIS comms and participants in ISIS war crimes may not have made their information fully available to national security databases. Stove-piping still happens; delays happen. Names also get garbled: “credible” sources may have claimed this was not the same person. Mistakes are human nature. In addition, our national security machinery has shifted gears in recent years away from terrorist threats to focus more on China, Russia, and homegrown extremism—the flames of which are often fanned online by state actors that engage in large-scale disinformation and active measures, such as Russia.i

SEAN SPEER: Is this a widespread problem in your view? To what extent does it suggest that there are others—perhaps many others—in the country with broadly similar backgrounds or past actions?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: Our system is not prone to widespread, systemic failures—it’s quite solid. But over the decades we have failed on several fronts. One example is the number of Iranian and Syrian regime officials—some with allegations of having committed terrible crimes in those countries—who somehow slipped through our vetting system. But the main challenge today is that the number of threats—from terrorist and criminal groups, as well as hostile foreign states—has grown significantly while our national security capabilities have failed to keep pace.

Add to this tension the unprecedented numbers of immigrants, temporary workers, international students, asylum claimants, and other visitors flowing into Canada over the past two years—roughly double the usual levels, with asylum backlogs rising rapidly—and you have a recipe for more frequent failures. For instance, over the period when Mexicans were coming to Canada visa-free, how many drug cartel operatives eager to open new routes into the U.S. came to Canada? We may never know. The same may be true for ISIS, representatives of China’s United Front Work Department, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) or Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and even Hamas or Hezbollah, which have historically had quite robust networks in Canada.

As we have all observed to our dismay, our current government has not been heeding national security advice and, to put it very mildly, has not been vigilant on these issues over the past nine years. Our allies (particularly in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing community) have noticed, and our reputation has been tarnished as a result.

SEAN SPEER: What, if any reforms, do you think should be undertaken to strengthen the process for assessing immigration applicants through an intelligence and national security lens?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: The key to successful national security review is rapid, continuous, skillful integration of available information. The right insights are out there, but they only shape immigration outcomes in the right ways when the data is well-organized, easily accessible, and properly brought to bear on decision-making. My guess is that those responsible for these issues have been run ragged in recent years: they need backup, a full review of our procedures, and (where necessary) modernization and integration of the relevant secure communication systems and databases.

We need to put sound national security practices back at the centre of our immigration policy—as well as our policy across government. In a world where all categories of threat actors are looking for the line of least resistance worldwide to launder money, move operatives, recruit new supporters, and disrupt democracy, Canada has become an easy mark in recent years. We need to restore our reputation for a best-in-class immigration and refugee programmes rooted in sound, reliable national security vetting. We also need to harden our defences, increase our military spending, and upgrade and broaden our national security capabilities to protect Canadians in general as well as the integrity of our immigration and refugee determination system at a time when hostile state and non-state actors have become more hostile almost across the board.

Source: ‘Our current government hasn’t been heeding national security advice’: Former immigration minister Chris Alexander on how Canada vets immigrants—and how ISIS operatives may have slipped through the cracks 


Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →