‘Shocking and unjustifiable:’ Canada is deporting migrants at its highest rate in more than a decade [or is it?]

2024/07/19 Leave a comment

Cue the outrage. Cite statistics without context and you get a header like this.

Rather than absolute numbers, which indeed show the Liberal government having lower numbers that the previous Conservative government and a sharp spike in 2023/24, it is the percentage of removals compared to the number of temporary residents admitted that is relevant.

The last 9 years when numbers of temporary residents increased dramatically presents a different picture of removals compared to international students and asylum claimants:

Fiscal RemovalsStudentsAsylum ClaimantsTotal  %
201511,938219,03516,055235,0905.1%
20168,696264,28523,860288,1453.0%
20178,014314,98550,375365,3602.2%
20188,220354,27555,035409,3102.0%
20199,707400,58564,030464,6152.1%
202011,577255,57023,690279,2604.1%
202111,258443,61524,885468,5002.4%
20227,522548,43091,700640,1301.2%
202310,222682,430143,580826,0101.2%

So perhaps the header should have read: “‘Shocking and unjustifiable:’ Canada is deporting migrants at its lowest rate in more than a decade:”

Canada has spent more than $115 million deporting nearly 29,000 migrants since 2022, an unprecedented rate that flies in the face of the federal government’s promise to regularize the status of undocumented workers, advocates say.

In 2023, Ottawa spent more than $62 million on deportations, the highest amount spent in a year in over a decade, according to data from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) dating back to 2011.

The deportation rate in 2023 was the highest since 2012, when more than 19,000 people were deported under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. The deportations include “all removals enforced in each fiscal year,” the CBSA said, including refugee claimants, and migrants residing, working or studying in Canada who have overstayed their legal status.

When asked about the growth in deportations, the agency said “the number of removals enforced in any given year will fluctuate,” adding that the March 2023 expansion of the Safe Third Country Agreement, aimed at limiting asylum seekers entering Canada through unofficial entry points, has contributed to this year’s increase.

About 90 per cent of the total deportations since 2005 are due to “non-compliance,” the CBSA added, referring to migrants living in Canada without authorization. “Criminality,” the second most common reason for deportation, accounts for just over seven per cent of removals.

“The fact that $200 million has been spent to deport tens of thousands of people since 2020 — and after this promise has been made — is shocking and unjustifiable,” said Syed Hussan of the Migrant Rights Network, a national advocacy group for farmworkers, care workers, international students and undocumented people.

Advocates for migrant workers say the surge in deportations runs contrary to the government’s December 2021 commitment to a ‘regularization program’ for undocumented migrants. Such a program would allow migrants to stay in Canada as the government responds to historic labour shortages by ramping up immigration and issuing work permits to non-Canadians in record numbers.

Source: ‘Shocking and unjustifiable:’ Canada is deporting migrants at its highest rate in more than a decade

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What Would It Take to Deport Millions of Immigrants? The G.O.P. Plan, Explained

2024/07/19 Leave a comment

Good long read on the practicalities and virtual impossibilities of doing so. Any such efforts would of course be divisive, disruptive, costly and likely only partially successful (like the partially completed wall in his presidency):

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he vowed to build a wall to seal the border and keep criminals from entering the country. This campaign season, his immigration agenda has a new focus: a mass deportation program unlike anything the country has seen.

His party’s platform, ratified at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, promises the “largest deportation effort in American history,” and immigration was the theme of Tuesday’s gathering.

What would it take to deport millions of people? Is it even possible?

There were 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States in 2022, according to the latest government estimates, and more than eight out of 10 have been in the country for more than a decade. Mr. Trump said during the debate last month that there were 18 million, which is unsubstantiated.

Fleeing political and economic turmoil, migrants from countries like Venezuela have crossed the border in record numbers during the Biden administration.

Mr. Trump and the Republican platform have made broad declarations but thus far offered scant details about their intended operation.

The former president has suggested that any undocumented immigrant is subject to removal.

The party platform states that “the most dangerous criminals” would be prioritized.

It also said: “The Republican Party is committed to sending illegal aliens back home and removing those who have violated our laws.”

The consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Mr. Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term.

“It’s enormously complicated and an expensive thing to decide to deport people who have been here years,” said Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

Currently, ICE agents focus on locating and deporting convicted criminals, such as child molesters and others suspected of being a threat to public or national security.

Some one million immigrants with final removal orders living in the country could be a targeted group.

“Let’s say you find these people. You then have to detain them,” said Mr. Neifach. “How are you going to expand detention in a way that won’t blow the bank?”

Every potential deportee is held in a detention facility, and in the current fiscal year, Congress funded the detention of 41,500 immigrants daily at a cost of $3.4 billion, which would need to increase exponentially.

And many immigrants hail from countries that do not have diplomatic ties with the United States or that refuse to take back their nationals. They cannot be immediately flown out of the country, and the Supreme Court has ruled that people cannot remain detained for limitless periods awaiting removal.

The ICE budget for transportation and deportation in fiscal 2023 was $420 million, and the agency deported 142,580 people that year.

Another Trump administration could speed up deportations by terminating programs that the Biden administration has introduced.

For example, since 2022, some 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been allowed to fly to the United States and live and work for two years, provided they have a financial sponsor. Mr. Biden has also allowed nearly 700,000 migrants who make an appointment on a mobile app to cross the border through an official port of entry and receive work permits.

“Trump could flick the switch and revoke it,” said Mr. Neifach. But, he added, many of the migrants could make asylum claims and become part of the clogged courts.

Expedited removal at the border enables the swift deportation of migrants without a hearing, unless they convince an agent that they would face the threat of violence back home, and Mr. Biden in June issued an executive order currently being challenged in court to amplify use of this tool.

Mr. Trump could try to extend it to the interior, though he would likely face court challenges.

Mr. Trump has not addressed whether he would exercise any discretion, or make any exceptions.

More than one million Americans are married to an undocumented person, and a large share of undocumented immigrants have children who are U.S. citizens.

“When you are talking those kinds of numbers and law enforcement presence, you have to think at the end — what does that do to the atmosphere in the country?” said Ms. Napolitano, the former Homeland Security secretary.

Source: What Would It Take to Deport Millions of Immigrants? The G.O.P. Plan, Explained

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Immigration Minister Miller admits gang members exploit vulnerabilities to gain entry

2024/07/19 Leave a comment

Not overly sugar coating:

Liberal Immigration Minister Marc Miller admitted that gang members were exploiting vulnerabilities in Canada’s immigration system and slipping into the country undetected.

In a press conference with ethnic media outlets on Monday, Miller was asked how criminals from India can slip through the vetting process and come to Canada.

Miller admitted that gang members are coming into the country, implying that it was inevitable when dealing with sophisticated criminal organizations.

“Well-determined actors regardless of the country, and particularly sophisticated gangs, are often able to get around even the most stringent immigration requirements,” said Miller.

“Canada has some of the most robust requirements in the world when we are checking people, but it’s not perfect.”

While Miller did not specifically name India, he said that the Canadian government often admits immigrants from countries whose governments are unreliable, allowing gang members to slip in with phoney police background checks.

“We all know how unreliable at times depending on the country that police certificates can be and if we were to rely on a country that is sometimes not the most – well I would say a reluctant partner, those certificates often become quite questionable as to their reliability.”

Miller touted the federal government’s immigration vetting process, however, admitted that criminals are coming into the country to commit crimes.

“Regrettably at times people do get in and they do commit crimes. Well-determined actors do have an ability despite best efforts to get in.”

Source: Immigration Minister Miller admits gang members exploit vulnerabilities to gain entry

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McLaughlin: There’s a troubling amount of churn at the top of Canada’s public service

2024/07/19 Leave a comment

Valid commentary.

Perhaps the recent example of Christiane Fox, who spent less than two years at IRCC, implemented a major reorganization at IRCC, and then left for PCO without having to live through the implementation nor see whether it was successful, provides an illustration:

…Fresh perspective on a task or mission is always useful, and promoting people into senior ranks is necessary for talent-building. But rampant shuffling has consequences. It commodifies deputy ministers. It devalues subject matter expertise and institutional wisdom in favour of management and system conformity. It weakens the crucial minister-deputy relationship that comes from longer periods of working together, and it does the same for the extensive stakeholder and delivery apparatus that surrounds modern government. It undermines the institutional memory and corporate knowledge that underpins the whole ethos of an independent, permanent public service.

Most importantly, it divorces senior officials from results. Individual responsibility for seeing things through is diminished when you know it will be your successor who will be carrying the can. This accountability serves as a form of collective protectionism – a kind of omerta – for the public service system as a whole.

Post-pandemic, Canadians are expecting that the institutions of government perform better. Right now, that is wanting. From procurement to service delivery to appointments, there are obvious institutional failures.

As voters increasingly clamour for change and accountability at the highest political levels, now is the time for the highest public service levels to adopt this same attitude as their own. Arresting the churn at the top should be at the top of that list.

Source: There’s a troubling amount of churn at the top of Canada’s public service

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Many onboarding processes are poorly suited to a multicultural workforce: McKenzie

2024/07/19 Leave a comment

Practical insights:

When it comes to onboarding recent immigrants and refugees, there’s a good chance your process is moving too quickly, according to Claude McKenzie, founder of Axiome Génie Conseil International.

In a breakout session at the Health and Safety Professionals Canada Professional Development Conference in Edmonton, McKenzie noted that many organizations rely on these workers to fill a labour gap. “We need them now,” he stressed. “Not tomorrow, not next week, now. This is where we have a problem.”

The push to fill a labour gap can lead to an onboarding program that moves too quickly for an employee adjusting to a new language, culture, social structure, or some combination of the three.

In fact, McKenzie shared, the four main causes of injuries in migrant workers are language barriers, lack of training, a mismatch between their education and their job, and the length of their stay in Canada, with workers here for less than five years being more apt to be injured on the job.

“People will take positions that are totally new to them, or they take positions that are similar, but not in the same conditions,” McKenzie said. “So, you are in Africa and you work in construction. You come here, you work in construction. I tell you – those are two [different] worlds.”

He related an experience on one construction site in Africa, where a worker fell from the fifth floor of an apartment building and died. After the fall, his coworkers gathered around him. “What did they say?” McKenzie asked. “Not ‘too bad’, but ‘it was his destiny.’”

This tragic example highlights how people’s understanding of the importance of protecting themselves can be highly cultural.

It also highlights another important cultural factor that health and safety professionals should bear in mind when working with recent immigrant and refugee populations.

“The price of life is not the same everywhere in the world,” McKenzie said. “How much does it cost if we have a worker getting killed on the job here in Alberta? Compared to Pakistan [where it’s] maybe a thousand dollars, maybe not even? So, do they put a lot of effort in health and safety? Do they train people in health and safety? No.”

That’s why McKenzie says health and safety professionals here in Canada need to understand the diversity that currently exists in their organization and how workers approach on-the-job safety. With that understanding, they can develop a plan to overcome any barriers that exist, and tailor onboarding as needed to ensure every new hire gets the information they need to stay safe on the job.

Source: Many onboarding processes are poorly suited to a multicultural workforce: McKenzie

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Rudyard Griffiths: The curse of events and what a second Trump presidency means for Canada 

2024/07/18 Leave a comment

More speculation on what a Trump administration implementation of mass deportation could mean for Canada. The Northern border was already an issue and may have facilitated expanding the STCA to the entire border:

…The security argument could also help in the context of managing the chaos that is likely to occur at our shared border in the instance of mass U.S. deportations of migrants. As amply demonstrated in recent years, we lack the state capacity to effectively police our own border and will need American assistance in the face of a migration crisis. Having a secure northern as well as southern border is a core, high-conviction policy of Trump’s MAGA movement and one we can and should help with…

Source: Rudyard Griffiths: The curse of events and what a second Trump presidency means for Canada

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Lang: Why Ottawa won’t come to grips with Canada’s productivity problem

2024/07/18 Leave a comment

Dispiriting but likely correct even without the exacerbation by ill-designed immigration policies (knew Lang when he worked in Deputy PMs office in the late 90s):

…Three reasons spring to mind for why Canada has done so little on the productivity front.

First, federal policy change is often driven less by the importance of the issue and more by a sense of urgency – it’s the classic dilemma: urgent crowds out the important. Unfortunately, long-run economic decline is never seen as a matter of urgency in government. It is the quintessential boiling-frog problem.

Second, persistent productivity weakness suggests deep-seated structural problems in the Canadian economy. You can’t meaningfully get at that without paradigm-shifting policy change. That entails risk, and all governments are masters of risk aversion. The irony here is that over the years the federal government has routinely chided Canadian business for insufficient investment in R&D, inadequate pursuit of foreign markets and weak entrepreneurialism, all of which boils down to risk-taking.

Third, when governments do get down to discussing innovation, the regional political imperative rears its head. Meaning innovation policies, especially spending programs, are usually designed to confer benefits on all regions of the country, seriously diluting their impact.

All previous federal innovation reports have tripped over some or all of these three hurdles. And this will likely continue. When the next government comes along, expect either indifference to Canada’s productivity crisis, or yet another study and report into the problem, which will be largely ignored. Then turn the heat up one more notch on the frog in the pot.

Source: Why Ottawa won’t come to grips with Canada’s productivity problem

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New Report: 9 Million Immigrants Eligible to Become Citizens in 2024

2024/07/18 Leave a comment

Impossible, however, that such a large number can be processed within the next few months:

The Biden administration has made significant progress in streamlining the naturalization process. By the end of May 2024, the average processing time for citizenship applications had decreased to five months (or less depending on the city), a 15% reduction from the previous year and a more than 50% decline from 2022. This improvement means that eligible green card holders who apply for citizenship in July 2024 could conceivably be approved in time to participate in the presidential election, depending on where they live.

High Concentration in Key States

According to the report, California, New York, Texas, and Florida are the states with the largest population of lawful permanent residents eligible to become U.S. citizens. These states account for nearly 60% of all eligible residents, These states account for nearly 60% of all eligible residents, highlighting where voter registration efforts could be most impactful.

Backlog Reduction

USCIS, the federal agency responsible for processing citizenship applications, has made notable progress in reducing its backlog. In 2023, the backlog of citizenship applications fell to 416,034, a 44% decrease from the high of 942,669 in 2020. This is the lowest backlog since 2015, signaling a more efficient processing system.

Potential Policy Changes

The report also highlights the potential impact of the upcoming election on immigration policies. While the Biden administration has made naturalization more accessible, a shift in administration could reverse these gains. Former President Donald Trump has already stated his intention to end birthright citizenship and deport millions of undocumented immigrants if re-elected.

Source: New Report: 9 Million Immigrants Eligible to Become Citizens in 2024

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630,000 expats expected to reapply for Turkish citizenship

2024/07/18 Leave a comment

Of note, following changes to Germany’s citizenship law:

Some 630,000 expatriates who previously relinquished their Turkish citizenship to obtain German nationality are expected to reapply under Berlin’s new law, a senior Turkish official has said.

The naturalization law in Germany, which also facilitates dual citizenship, came into effect on June 27. This regulation now allows for the acquisition of additional nationalities alongside German citizenship, ending of the automatic revocation of another citizenship upon acquiring German nationality.

Particularly for individuals possessing multiple citizenships by birth, the obligation to choose between German citizenship and another nationality upon reaching adulthood has been eliminated. Following the implementation of this legal amendment, attention has turned to the status of approximately 1 million individuals of Turkish origin residing in Germany, who can now maintain their German citizenship while reacquiring Turkish citizenship.

İbrahim Taşyapan, the head of the Turkish population and citizenship body, provided information about the status of Turkish citizens in Germany during a parliamentary committee session.

He recalled that Germany abolished dual citizenship in 2000. In the same year, Ankara increased the permissions for expatriates wishing to obtain German citizenship to renounce their Turkish citizenship.

“They [Turkish citizens] obtained permission and exited citizenship, and we issued them a ‘blue card.’ The blue card can perform nearly all the functions of an identity card except for voting, military service, etc. It functions almost identically to a national ID card.”

“We facilitated their situation, but our citizens faced challenges with some German state practices. Now, our citizens can easily hold dual citizenship and return to Turkish citizenship,” Taşyapan said.

Based on the number of blue cards issued, Taşyapan estimated that approximately 630,000 German citizens of Turkish origin might reapply.

However, he noted that these applications are expected to be submitted gradually rather than immediately, with the obligatory military service for young men reclaiming Turkish citizenship being a potential deterrent.

Almost 3 million of Germany’s 83.2 million residents are Turkish. Turkish immigrants started arriving in Germany in significant numbers more than 60 years ago, when Germany recruited “guest workers” from Türkiye as part of an agreement.

During a visit to Türkiye in April, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier paid tribute to the contributions of the Turkish community in his country, recognizing their role in the country’s economic reconstruction since the 1960s.

Source: 630,000 expats expected to reapply for Turkish citizenship

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Fewer immigrants are deciding to become Canadian citizens: Institute for Canadian Citizenship

2024/07/17 Leave a comment

More coverage:

Abisoye Akinpelu and her children were among the 25 immigrants at a Calgary citizenship ceremony on Saturday, ready to become Canadian citizens.

“I feel so accomplished. It’s a long journey for us and it’s been filled with ups and downs, but it’s worth it,” Akinpelu, who came to Canada from Nigeria, said.

Akinpelu says she enjoys Canada’s multicultural community, and how Canadians from different backgrounds can live peacefully together. Immigration Minister Marc Miller was also at the citizenship ceremony where he said citizenship is not a choice to be made lightly.

“This is the best country in the world to be in. I think you know that … Otherwise, perhaps you wouldn’t have made that choice.”

However, the 2021 and 2016 Census reported fewer immigrants are choosing to become Canadian citizens. According to new data released by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), the proportion of people becoming citizens within 10 years of their arrival in Canada has dropped by 40 per cent.

“People are less interested in becoming Canadian. Let that sink in,” Daniel Bernhard, the ICC’s CEO, said. “It’s not because they are not interested or not grateful. It’s in many cases because they are trying to contribute and we’re not allowing them to.”

The numbers indicate citizenship uptake is the lowest among highly educated economic immigrants, and Bernhard said it’s because they are weighing their options before taking the oath.

“Not feeling welcome is not just whether your neighbours are nice to you, or whether your kids have a good place in school, but whether your employer thinks that you have something important to contribute,” Bernhard said.

“The cost-of-living crisis in Canada continues to bite, and (their) skills and experience are not recognized in the labour force here,” Bernhard said, adding that many immigrants may feel frustrated and potentially decide to move on from the idea of becoming Canadian citizens.

As well, a recent poll by Angus Reid found the housing affordability crisis is forcing more newcomers to rethink their place in Canada and consider moving to a different province, or a different country altogether.

Bernhard said the lack of affordability is already having an impact on citizenship uptake, but confirmed the ICC is calling on Ottawa to provide more opportunities for people to celebrate and appreciate the value of citizenship, and to put a cap on virtual citizenship ceremonies.

Source: Fewer immigrants are deciding to become Canadian citizens: Institute for Canadian Citizenship

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