MPI: Rollback of ‘Golden Passports’ Shows Their Elusive Shine

2022/10/18 Leave a comment

Good in-depth discussion of the practice and related issues.

Money quote: “greater concerns have emerged when CBI programs interfere with good governance, resulting in corruption of public officials, scandals, money laundering, or tampering with elections. These have been a rule rather than an exception in every single existing investor citizenship program:”

Little more than a month after Russian forces invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta began to heed the call of the European Union’s institutions advocating the abolition of “golden passports” by cracking down on Russian oligarchs, who were among the key beneficiaries. Formally known as citizenship by investment (CBI) programs, these schemes enable individuals to become citizens of a country by means of an economic contribution, often without any other substantive conditions such as residency periods, local language knowledge, or civic tests.

These programs have been a heated topic in the European Union ever since October 2013, when Malta decided to offer its passport in exchange for investment in the country’s economy. Its Individual Investor Program ran between February 2014 and September 2020, and that November the country introduced a new route for investors to receive citizenship after three years of residence, which could be reduced to one year on the basis of providing “exceptional services.” The pushback from EU institutions against these schemes has been driven by three main concerns: that national citizenship is a gateway to rights such as free movement across the bloc, that these programs often lead to corruption of public officials, and that investors do not have a genuine connection with their new country. In late September, the European Commission referred Malta to the Court of Justice of the European Union, claiming its program was incompatible with the concept of EU citizenship and violated the Treaty on European Union.  

Previously, these concerns did not substantively resonate with Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta, but security unease amidst the war in Ukraine did. Bulgaria and Cyprus have since discontinued their CBI programs; Malta has fully abolished it for Russian and Belarussian citizens. On top of that, authorities of Cyprus and Malta have already initiated several withdrawals of investment-based passports previously granted to sanctioned Russians and Belarusians supportive of the war in Ukraine; at this writing, Bulgarian authorities were reviewing the beneficiaries of their CBI program to see if any were under sanction.

CBI programs are a part of a much broader phenomenon of investor migration, which also includes the more widespread “golden visas,” or residence by investment (RBI) programs. These kinds of schemes enable investors to gain residency rights in a country by purchasing a house, as is the case in Greece, Portugal, and Spain; making a financial investment, as in Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom; or creating a certain number of jobs, as required under the American EB-5 visa.

Unlike the RBI programs, which frequently require investors to effectively migrate to the destination country, CBI documents are often used only for international mobility or as insurance. So why are they so controversial?

This article discusses the history of citizenship by investment, the main beneficiaries of CBI programs, the benefits and criticisms associated with them, and what the future might have in store for these programs.

Are “Golden Passports” a Novelty?

Investment-based citizenship is often perceived as a new phenomenon. Yet obtaining legal status through wealth is not a historical novelty. Romans, too, offered citizenship to men who could afford it, provided they also met other requirements such as residence, ethnicity, and military service. Things have changed since. Nowadays, a financial contribution is all that is needed to secure the passport of a country running a CBI program. The amount can be as low as USD 100,000, as in the Commonwealth of Dominica. It can be as high as 3 million euros, as was required in Cyprus in 2014 and 2015 to address consequences of the 2013 international bailout from the financial crisis.

What has caused this development, where is it possible to obtain citizenship in exchange for an investment, donation to the government, or real estate purchase, and why?

The first modern-day CBI programs emerged in islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, shortly after they became independent from large colonial powers. The process of decolonization took a particular toll on these microstates. As a result of their small size, unfavorable climate and terrain, or remote geographic location, these new nations were faced with major economic adversities, often threatening their survival as sovereign states. These conditions stimulated the sale of passports in the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu in the 1980s and the 1990s. Such practices were often done informally by public officials, who would provide investors with passports short of full citizenship. For instance, people who leased land in uninhabited parts of Tonga would receive a Tongan Protected Person Passport (TPPP). This document did not give holders the right to enter the country or live in it but rather served as a travel document.

The first official CBI program was established by Saint Christopher and Nevis in 1984. In the years that followed, the island state introduced legislation that enabled the grant of citizenship for those who invested in real estate or donated to special funds. One such fund was aimed at diversification of the workforce previously employed in the country’s now nonexistent sugar industry. In the two decades that followed, citizenship by investment was an oddity, confined mostly to tropical islands. It was an issue that attracted hardly any public attention.

The scene changed substantively with the 2008 global financial crisis, which drew a number of countries towards alternative mechanisms for raising revenue, including the development of three main investment migration routes. More than 140 states have general provisions in their existing citizenship laws to naturalize individuals who contribute to their national interest, such as artists, athletes, scientists, and investors. A few other countries such as Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, and Turkey developed CBI schemes similar to those in the Caribbean and Pacific states. And a majority of the world’s countries opened routes for investors—coupled with tax relief—to become residents, with the possibility of obtaining citizenship after a number of years and subject to meeting language, civics, and other requirements.

Discretionary provisions in citizenship legislation, CBI, and RBI programs have often been conflated, despite having distinct roots, objectives, and target beneficiaries, and despite raising different concerns in the context of good governance (such as corruption and money laundering) or the economy (such as skyrocketing real estate prices).

The Growth of a Citizenship Industry

Lack of understanding of the different ways in which CBI and RBI schemes operate has, in part, been caused by the growing market for investor citizenship and residence. Over the past two decades, this market has given birth to and raised a citizenship industry composed of companies that act as intermediaries between states operating these programs and individuals seeking to benefit from them. This industry includes large multinational companies such as Arton Capital, CS Global, and Henley and Partners, which often provide a wide range of services to states including designing and marketing the new program or running it through a concession. These companies may also offer their services to individuals to assist with the application, manage funds, or lease and purchase property. The industry has also branched out through specialized firms such as BDO, Exiger, and Thomson Reuters, which are engaged in due diligence of applicants, or Astons and JM, which manage real estate purchases. The industry’s final component is local law firms and agents, which facilitate investor applications through their knowledge of the language and the local context.

Citizens used to be unaware of the growth of this industry. That is until they read an in-flight magazine in which companies acting as intermediaries advertised specific programs and their own services, or passed through the Zurich Airport where until recently the passport of Malta was displayed in a shop window next to a luxury watch retailer. The industry is no longer unknown, due to a combination of factors including new marketing strategies and engagement of intermediary firms with the media. There has also been a growing public interest in the profile of beneficiaries, corruption scandals, and public protests associated with these programs.

A Connection to Mobility and Life Opportunities for a Select Few

As the international order became reconstituted after World War II, the governance of cross-country mobility became highly diversified. With the growth of global interconnectedness, possessing a particular passport determined the number of countries one could access, the countries in which one could settle, and where one could do business. Passports became connected with mobility and life prospects—both highly unequal around the world and both very much dependent on one’s birth. The increasing tolerance of dual nationality since the 1960s also enabled individuals to acquire additional passports without losing that of their country of origin, as had previously been the case.

Those obtaining citizenship by investment are, however, a tiny minority compared to the total pool of people who become citizens of a foreign country. This is nearly always the case in countries that grant citizenship to investors on grounds of national interest, where numbers are capped (for example Estonia limits these to ten applications annually) or where parliamentary approval is required, as in Bulgaria and Latvia.

The exact numbers of people who obtain citizenship through official CBI programs in most cases are not in the public domain. The majority of countries have no reporting obligations and public authorities are often slow or unwilling to provide the information. The background study for a 2019 European Commission report revealed that 12 applications were approved in Bulgaria in 2017 and at least 738 were approved in Malta from the program’s launch in 2014 until 2017. While no information on the number of applications in Cyprus was available in the report, a subsequent Al Jazeera investigation discovered that between 2007 and 2020 Cyprus granted citizenship in 6,779 instances to investors, mainly of Russian origin. In September 2020, Malta’s authorities confirmed that program reached its 1,800 approved applications cap; the more recent program is capped at 400 certificates annually and 1,500 overall, however there is no information on how many have been granted so far.

Numbers of those who obtained a passport from countries outside the European Union are even more difficult to ascertain. Grenada and Antigua and Barbuda reported 303 and 330 applications respectively in 2017; in 2018, the government of St. Kitts and Nevis reported that, since the opening of the program in 1984, a total of 16,544 investor citizenships had been granted. After lowering the investment threshold to USD 250,000 in 2017, by September 2021 Turkey had granted 7,242 passports to foreign investors, mostly of Iranian, Yemeni, Afghan, and Iraqi origin.

Whose Passport Is “Golden”? 

Different passports come with different opportunities. Being born a U.S. citizen or a citizen of an EU country comes with substantively more personal and travel freedom than, for instance, being born as a Kosovan or Congolese citizen. This fact sets the financial parameters of the global market for investor citizenship and has a major impact on the structure of beneficiaries.

Unsurprisingly, “price tags” on passports of Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta were substantively higher than those of the Caribbean and Pacific countries, or of Moldova, Montenegro, and Turkey. The program running in Malta between 2014 and 2020 entailed an overall investment in the range of 1.15 million euros, and the one introduced in 2020 refers to an unspecified direct investment. Cyprus, which required investments between 2 million and 3 million euros between 2014 and 2022, had the scheme with the highest contribution. These two CBI programs directly offered rights of EU citizenship, such as free movement across the European Union. Passports of Cyprus and Malta also grant visa-free access to 176 and 183 countries, respectively, slightly more than the 173 accessible to holders of a passport from Bulgaria, where the recently terminated CBI program required an investment in the range of 500,000 euros.  

The combination of the type of investment required and mobility rights attached to citizenship determined who would be interested in and able to become a CBI program beneficiary. For instance, the Cypriot program has had a disproportionate number of Russian applicants, in part because in 2014-15 it provided a special route for individuals who had lost more than 3 million euros due to a levy on foreign deposits imposed as a result of the economic bailout. Turkey’s program largely attracts investors from the Middle East, for whom the mobility rights attached to the Turkish passport are much higher than those of their countries of origin. As of September 2022, a Turkish passport provided visa-free access to 110 countries worldwide, while those of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen offered access to fewer than 35 countries each.

Beyond mobility rights linked to different passports, there are a series of other motivations that wealthy individuals may have in obtaining citizenship by investment. First, additional passports might offer a Plan B for escaping political and economic instability.

Second, most CBI programs are coupled with preferential tax regimes, which may be an important motivation for individuals with very high incomes. This potentially exempts them from paying taxes in jurisdictions in which they are not physically present or of which they are not citizens. For instance, St. Kitts and Nevis, with no personal income tax and low value-added tax (VAT), has become an attractive destination for wealthy Americans seeking to renounce their U.S. citizenship.

Third, for the rich from poor countries, a passport from a nation in the so-called Global North is also a status symbol that differentiates them from less affluent conationals. Speaking to Bloomberg News in July 2018, the chairman of one of the intermediary companies involved in the citizenship industry noted, “If you have a yacht and two airplanes, the next thing to get is a Maltese passport. It’s the latest status symbol. We’ve had clients who simply like to collect a few.”

Finally, obtaining a passport through a CBI program may serve some less noble purposes. In 2010, the former Prime Minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, who had faced corruption charges in his native country, was able to avoid extradition by having obtained a passport from Montenegro. Indian diamond mogul Mehul Choksi, charged with embezzlement in India, sought shelter in 2018 in Antigua and Barbuda, a country where he had previously become a citizen by investment. Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin, as well as Ukrainian rent-seeking billionaires have gained protection on EU soil by acquiring Cypriot and Maltese passports.

The Dark Side of CBI Programs

The box of questions surrounding CBI and RBI programs is yet to be fully prized open. So far, there have been no systematic studies of the economic impact of these programs, which would highlight potentially beneficial aspects such as job creation or construction of roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure projects. However, a 2015 report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) highlighted that funds from investor citizenship in recent years have come to account for substantive portions of gross domestic product (GDP) in some small island states. Recent IMF studies point out that, between 2012 and 2021, as much as 30 percent of the GDP of St. Kitts and Nevis and the Commonwealth of Dominica came from investments from CBI programs. In 2020, revenue from Vanuatu’s CBI program amounted to 42 percent of the national budget, raising questions of potential overdependence on CBI.

Yet balancing economic benefits and potential dependency is not the most contentious aspect of these programs. While many have questioned whether it is just to exchange passports for investment, greater concerns have emerged when CBI programs interfere with good governance, resulting in corruption of public officials, scandals, money laundering, or tampering with elections. These have been a rule rather than an exception in every single existing investor citizenship program.

For instance, since 2017, citizens of the Commonwealth of Dominica have been protesting the country’s CBI program, which international observers such as Freedom House also regard as controversial. The protests were sparked by the country’s opposition, which demanded the prime minister resign because of corruption linked to construction fraud involving CBI beneficiaries from Iran and China. Initially focusing on domestic issues raised by the CBI program, the protests gained an international dimension when concerns emerged over how the program helped the growth of Chinese and Iranian influence in the Caribbean islands, and the potential adverse effects of such influence on Dominica’s relationship with the United States.

In the same vein, the program in Malta had been connected not only to abuse of power by public officials whose family members had a stake in CBI services, but also to the October 2017 assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Prior to her death, Caruana Galizia had been investigating connections between high-ranking government officials involved in investor citizenship and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. The scandal that unfolded around the murder investigation eventually led to the resignation of Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. These and many other instances of institutional corruption, including allegations that the citizenship industry used the political strategy firm Cambridge Analytica to influence elections to create a favorable environment for introducing CBI programs in places such as Malta and St. Kitts, have sparked substantive international criticism of investor citizenship.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Transparency International, and Global Witness are among the organizations that have highlighted the potentially contentious aspects of CBI programs. The European Commission and the European Parliament have been particularly active in seeking to phase out programs in Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta. Given that CBI programs in the European Union are connected to the rights of European citizenship—including free movement—any citizen of Malta has the right to settle in any of the 27 EU Member States. For this reason, even though granting citizenship is the sole prerogative of sovereign states, the citizenship regimes within the European Union are interconnected and can obligate other Member States.

EU institutions have continuously voiced concerns over whether the bloc’s citizenship should be for sale and have raised questions over the potentially adverse effects of CBI programs run by Member States. The 2019 European Commission report on investor citizenship and residence schemes highlighted some of the effects and their implications across the bloc. A year later, the European Commission took legal action against Cyprus and Malta on the basis that CBI programs are not “neutral with regard to other Member States and the EU as a whole,” and that individuals obtaining passports in such a way have no “genuine connection” to the country of which they are becoming citizens. While Cyprus has terminated its scheme, Malta is as of this writing facing a process at the Court of Justice of the European Union for continuing to apply its 2020 scheme, which the European Commission finds to be incompatible with the concept of “Union citizenship” and the principle of “sincere cooperation,” both of which are enshrined in treaties governing the bloc.

The Future of “Golden Passports” 

The future of CBI programs will depend on how countries decide to respond to a range of global events and dynamics.

Issues such as major natural disasters linked to climate change or global security concerns could amplify demand on CBI programs due to individuals’ need to have a Plan B. The same issues might equally reduce the number of countries offering such programs due to fears of foreign influence increasingly associated with these schemes. These two trends are perhaps not even mutually exclusive. But they will influence the market for investor citizenship going forward.

As countries become more selective as to whom they want as citizens and under what conditions, they may decide that beneficiaries of CBI programs have a risky background and stop offering such passports. Alternatively, as intermediary industries become more powerful due to growing demand, they might be able to exercise political and economic influence on some countries to keep running their CBI programs, or on others to open new ones.

The most likely scenario is that of Cyprus or Malta, where CBI schemes have transformed into residence by investment programs or grants of citizenship based on exceptional service with unspecified contributions. These may be different legal routes but raise similar issues. Governments looking to address such concerns might ensure that these residence permits and any subsequent grant of citizenship be accompanied by mandatory physical presence and socialization requirements that require the holder to relocate to the destination state and actually live there. The question is whether the shine of such golden visas will be as elusive as that of golden passports.

Source: Rollback of ‘Golden Passports’ Shows Their Elusive Shine

Filed under Citizenship, citizenship-by-investment Tagged with

How Social Media Amplifies Misinformation More Than Information

2022/10/17 Leave a comment

Not surprising but useful studyÈ

It is well known that social media amplifies misinformation and other harmful content. The Integrity Institute, an advocacy group, is now trying to measure exactly how much — and on Thursday it began publishing results that it plans to update each week through the midterm elections on Nov. 8.

The institute’s initial report, posted online, found that a “well-crafted lie” will get more engagements than typical, truthful content and that some features of social media sites and their algorithms contribute to the spread of misinformation.

Twitter, the analysis showed, has what the institute called the great misinformation amplification factor, in large part because of its feature allowing people to share, or “retweet,” posts easily. It was followed by TikTok, the Chinese-owned video site, which uses machine-learning models to predict engagement and make recommendations to users.

“We see a difference for each platform because each platform has different mechanisms for virality on it,” said Jeff Allen, a former integrity officer at Facebook and a founder and the chief research officer at the Integrity Institute. “The more mechanisms there are for virality on the platform, the more we see misinformation getting additional distribution.”

The institute calculated its findings by comparing posts that members of the International Fact-Checking Network have identified as false with the engagement of previous posts that were not flagged from the same accounts. It analyzed nearly 600 fact-checked posts in September on a variety of subjects, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the upcoming elections.

Facebook, according to the sample that the institute has studied so far, had the most instances of misinformation but amplified such claims to a lesser degree, in part because sharing posts requires more steps. But some of its newer features are more prone to amplify misinformation, the institute found.

Facebook’s amplification factor of video content alone is closer to TikTok’s, the institute found. That’s because the platform’s Reels and Facebook Watch, which are video features, “both rely heavily on algorithmic content recommendations” based on engagements, according to the institute’s calculations.

Instagram, which like Facebook is owned by Meta, had the lowest amplification rate. There was not yet sufficient data to make a statistically significant estimate for YouTube, according to the institute.

The institute plans to update its findings to track how the amplification fluctuates, especially as the midterm elections near. Misinformation, the institute’s report said, is much more likely to be shared than merely factual content.

“Amplification of misinformation can rise around critical events if misinformation narratives take hold,” the report said. “It can also fall, if platforms implement design changes around the event that reduce the spread of misinformation.”

Source: How Social Media Amplifies Misinformation More Than Information

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Australia: It’s on and off again for foreign students wanting to work [hours cap]

2022/10/17 Leave a comment

Removal of cap on the number of hours students can work when courses in session, with same weak policy rationales as in Canada apart from low-paid service jobs:

Before and after Australian borders were closed during the pandemic, it was common to see young Indian and Nepali women working in cafés and as cashiers in shopping malls. Young Indian men dominated home delivery systems and were common sights stocking shelves and cleaning supermarkets in Sydney. They were foreign students who were allowed to work limited hours per week.

After some 30 years of resisting pressure from various employer bodies to remove the 40-hour per fortnight cap on the number of hours student visa holders could work while their course was in session, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke rolled over to pressure from the hospitality, tourism and other industries in May 2021 and announced that overseas students in Australia could work unlimited hours in the hospitality and tourism industry that was facing a serious shortage of labour. 

Bowing to criticism that the move was intended to solve a labour crisis and would dent education quality, that decision was subsequently qualified by another announcement in September 2022: unrestricted work rights for student visa holders will end on 30 June next year.

In a statement on its website, the Department of Home Affairs said the reimposition of the cap was aimed at ensuring that students “focus on obtaining a quality Australian education and qualification”.

Until then, it is likely that the international students will continue to take advantage of their ability to legally work unlimited hours. 

When restrictions were lifted in May 2021, the country saw a palpable spike in student visa applications from South Asia after Australia opened its borders in November 2021. 

By April this year, Nepal had become the biggest source of foreign students to Australia, with student visa applications from that country hovering above the 4,500 mark in March and April, while those from India and China were close to about 3,000 per month. 

Before the pandemic, India and China had provided the largest foreign student market for Australia. Given the huge middle-class populations of China and India, how did Nepal overtake them to become Australia’s largest source of foreign students? 

Vocational education and training

According to Australian government statistics, there has been a large increase in vocational education and training (VET) sector offshore student applications from Nepal this year. 

Since Australia’s borders re-opened, there have been more VET sector offshore student applications from Nepalese nationals than from India, China, Pakistan and Sri Lanka put together. Chinese and Indian applicants continue to prefer a university education.

The VET sector has traditionally recruited its students from those who are already in Australia, often poached from among university students who, after a year or two of undergraduate studies, feel they need a change in career focus. 

Australian immigration authorities have traditionally subjected offshore VET applicants to a high degree of scrutiny and hence there has been a high refusal rate. The approval rate for Nepalese offshore primary VET sector student applicants has, since November 2021, averaged well over 80%. 

This worries Dr Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration. He argued in a commentary published by Independent Australia in May this year that Australia’s student visa is now essentially an “unsponsored work visa rather than one focused on study”. 

This view is shared by a Sydney-based Nepali immigration agent (who did not want to be named) who told University World News that Nepali parents are ever willing to fork out the money – even if they have to borrow it – to get a student visa to send their child for education to Australia, because they know they can recoup that money quickly. 

“Once in Australia the student could self-finance the studies by working and in the long term they can even earn the family an income by working after graduation,” he said. “If the child wants to go to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand or India for studies, parents are unlikely to fork out the money for it.”

Post-graduation work rights for degree-holders

Last month, at the conclusion of the Jobs and Skills Summit, Australia’s Minister for Education Jason Clare announced that post-graduation work rights for international students will be increased by two years from next year. 

Thus, bachelor degree graduates can stay on and work in Australia for four years and masters degree graduates for five. It is believed that nursing, engineering and IT students will be top priority areas. 

In an interview with the government-owned network SBS, a spokesperson for the home affairs minister said: “They’re the graduates that the government believes Australia needs, and they can go straight into a sector where there is a shortage of high-skilled workers”. He said that “Australia needs to better use the amazing resource of international students”.

“The overwhelming majority of ‘students’ from India and Nepal come to Australia for work rights and permanent residency, not for education,” argued Leith van Onselen, chief economist and co-founder of MacroBusiness. 

He said the government’s overseas student policy is geared towards expanding student numbers, not improving quality. “All of which proves, yet again, that ‘international education’ is really a people-importing immigration industry rather than a genuine education export industry,” Van Onselen said.

Placement consultant and South Asian community leader Ash Gholkar argued that the problem lies with frequent changes by the authorities. 

“Students are not happy because the rules and points keep changing. There’s too much uncertainty. Students should get to be assessed on the points requirements prevalent at the time they enter Australia to begin their programme,” he argued. “Else, in many cases, students take up a course on a demand list only to find, after the course is completed and they’ve had sufficient experience, that the demand list and points have changed.”

Gholkar told University World News that Australia is attractive to Indian students because of its high standard of living and its Commonwealth heritage that makes adapting and living familiar and easier. “Indian students get the benefit of a world-class education and a chance to apply for skilled migration,” he added. 

Solving a skills crisis

Dr Belle Lim, a past national president of the Council of International Students Australia, argues that international students are a ready-made solution to solving Australia’s skills crisis. There are over 470,000 international students in Australia who possess local qualifications, with the most popular fields being commerce and management, IT, engineering and health sciences. 

With young Australian-born people changing jobs regularly, “taking into account the loyalty that international graduates have towards their employers (ironically due to a smaller set of options), hiring them is less risky”, she noted in a recent column for Women’s Agenda. 

Exactly for that reason, Sri Lankan-born Australian occupational health specialist Mahinda Seneviratne is concerned that students could be exploited as cheap migrant labour. He chairs the scientific committee of the International Commission on Occupational Health, and with colleagues in the Indo-Pacific region, he is involved in research on workplace safety for migrant labour. 

“Various short-term work visa programmes and ‘students’ coming in as low-wage workers have been the backbone of many small businesses [in Australia] in recent years, particularly in hospitality and service industries,” he told University World News. 

“Their precarious situation as casual, informal workers undermines working conditions, including their health and safety at work,” warned Seneviratne.

Source: It’s on and off again for foreign students wanting to work

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Curry: New work rules may be too tempting for international students — and employers

2022/10/17 Leave a comment

Indeed. Bad policy and makes a mockery as study permits become an immigration stream for low-paid service jobs, pandering to student and business stakeholder groups:

New work rules for international students may be a boon to local employers, but a double-edged sword for the students.

To help address current labour shortages, the federal government says, as of November 15, international students will no longer be restricted to 20 hours of work a week. This will last until the end of 2023, when, presumably, it will be re-evaluated.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser is reacting to the fact that nearly one million job vacancies were reported in the second quarter of this year.

I look back at my own undergraduate days at Carleton University when I worked 20 hours a week at the residence cafeteria, 20 hours or more on the student newspaper, and sat on the residence council.

That was a lot.

As the sports editor, I travelled with the Carleton Ravens basketball team, once on a long train trip through Quebec and New Brunswick to Antigonish, N.S., for the national basketball championships. Carleton was a power even back then, probably top five in Canada. Lately, they have won 16 of the last 19 national championships.

Although I was a varsity basketball player at Bell High School in Ottawa, when I got to Carleton the players were a lot better, and a lot taller.

Did those trips and all that work affect my grades? Certainly. I could have done a lot better.

When I was more mature and working only one full-time job, my grades for my master’s degree were much higher.

Local employers tell me they can’t get enough people to work in restaurants — as chefs, cooks, and servers. If you dine out you have probably seen that restaurant staffs are not up to their full complements.

Our latest restaurant foray was at Lot 88, where we had a wonderful meal and a university student server who really knew her stuff.

She is a Canadian student at Nipissing University and we could tell from her knowledge of the menu items, confident demeanour and sense of humour that she was likely working many hours there. There are no restrictions on how much Canadian post-secondary students can work.

She told us she was working on a second degree, so she obviously could handle working and studying at the same time.

Some aren’t so fortunate and need to study a lot to keep their grades up.

Blurring the lines

It will be tempting, for both students — and employers — to hike the hours now that they can. Some in the immigration industry are fearful that it will devalue study permits, and turn them into work permits.

Both employers and students have to be careful that it doesn’t turn out that way. Employers should not pressure international students to work long hours, and international students should not be eager to work 40-hour weeks while in school.

Study permits are a vehicle to permanent residence for the majority of international students in Canada. After a post-secondary program of two years or more they can apply for a Post-Graduation Work Permit that is good for three years. They then use that work experience to apply for permanent residence a year or two later through the Canadian Experience Class Express Entry system.

Those fortunate enough to have studied in North Bay, or Timmins, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie or Thunder Bay in Northern Ontario, don’t have to wait that long to apply for permanent residence. They can do it immediately upon graduation, providing they have a year-round full-time job in the community.

That is the beauty of the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot program, which dozens of local graduates are using as their path to permanent residence, and, eventually, Canadian citizenship.

We need those students in the full-time labour force after they graduate. Let’s hope sanity prevails and they don’t use the lure of unlimited hours of work to become workers instead of students.

They came here to study, not work, and get a diploma or degree at the end of it that will help them start a satisfying career. They might have to have that conversation with their employer when pressure is exerted to work more hours.

Source: New work rules may be too tempting for international students — and employers

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He’s known as Chile’s greatest poet, but feminists say Pablo Neruda is canceled

2022/10/17 Leave a comment

Sigh… I wonder who will be cancelled 50 years from now:

There’s a steady stream of fans visiting the museum that once was the home of Pablo Neruda, widely considered Chile’s greatest poet. It’s located on massive black cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It’s also the spot where Neruda is buried.

The poet died 49 years ago, yet his reputation remains a work in progress.

Neruda has always been a polarizing figure in Chile, mainly for his left-wing politics. But now he is being called out by Chile’s growing feminist movement as a male chauvinist and sexual predator.

“He’s been canceled,” says Lieta Vivaldi, a human rights activist and member of Chile’s Feminist Lawyers Association.

The latest controversy over Neruda, who in 1971 became the second Chilean awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, sprang up in 2018 with the rise of Chile’s #MeToo movement against sexual abuse. Activists singled out some of Neruda’s verses as sexist and focused new attention on several disturbing episodes from the poet’s past.

Neruda abandoned his only child, Malva Marina, and her mother. His daughter was born with hydrocephalus — an accumulation of fluid within the brain that can lead to swelling of the head — and died at age 8.

What’s more, Neruda wrote about his rape of a cleaning woman in his hotel room in 1930, in what is now Sri Lanka.

“I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist. … The encounter was of a man with a statue,” Neruda wrote in his memoir, published in 1974, a year after his death from cancer. “She was right to despise me.”

Initially, his admission went almost unnoticed. But Chile’s feminist movement — newly energized by a series of sexual abuse scandals at the country’s universities and by the global #MeToo movement — has called attention to the episode, and disdain for Neruda is spreading.

Salvador Young, who buys online books for Chile’s National Digital Library, says that for the past several years, he was instructed by his supervisors not to purchase Neruda’s books. Otherwise, he says, “Readers would demand to know: ‘Why are you promoting a rapist?'”

Some Chilean universities and high schools are steering clear of Neruda. One high school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized by his school to speak to NPR, says many of his female students despise Neruda. He now teaches him less than he did a few years ago.

By contrast, he says, “When I was in school, we had to learn Neruda and recite his poetry. There are verses that students of my generation still recite and analyze.”

Among them, he says, is “From the Heights of Machu Picchu,” which Neruda wrote following an inspirational trip to the ancient Incan mountaintop site. The poem has been put to music by the Chilean group Los Jaivas.

Rejection of the poet by feminists is so strong that in 2018, Chile’s Congress scrapped a proposal to rename the country’s main international airport after Neruda. Meanwhile, anti-Neruda slogans were spray-painted on several walls during #MeToo marches in Santiago, Chile’s capital.

It’s easy to misread Neruda’s works, warns Kemy Oyarzun, a poet and professor of gender studies at the University of Chile. Yet even she is less enthusiastic about Neruda these days.

Kemy Oyarzun, a poet and professor of gender studies at the University of Chile, says this was a response to one of Neruda most famous verses, an ode to silence called “Poem XV.”

It begins: “I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent.”

Oyarzun says some feminists interpreted this as Neruda telling his lover in the poem to keep her mouth shut. They responded with graffiti proclaiming, “Neruda, now you shut up!”

At a #MeToo demonstration in Santiago in August, high school student Laura Brodsky, 18, said her instructors are not teaching Neruda. Referring to the rape confession in his memoir, Brodsky emphasized that she and her fellow students “have no interest in learning about him.”

All this is a startling reversal for one of the world’s most famous, prolific and bestselling poets, who has often been compared to Walt Whitman. Neruda’s masterwork, Canto General (General Song), is an epic history of Latin America, recounted by way of 231 poems.

In a country where poetry had long been composed by and for the well-to-do, Neruda was known as the poet of the people, often writing about the working class and Indigenous groups, as well as Chile’s natural wonders.

In addition, Neruda won praise around the world for his humanitarian work in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, following his diplomatic service as consul, he helped bring more than 2,000 Spaniards — who were fleeing Gen. Francisco Franco’s newly installed military regime — to Chile.

“Many working people and progressive activists — not just in Chile, not just in Latin America, but all over the world — adopted him as their hero, proclaimed him as their own,” wrote Mark Eisner, author of Neruda: The biography of a poet.

Still, Neruda has fallen from grace before.

In 1947, Chile’s government outlawed the Communist Party — of which Neruda was a member — and accused him of treason. To avoid arrest, he went underground; then, in 1949, he escaped by horseback across the snow-capped Andes Mountains to Argentina.

Neruda eventually returned. But in 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power and his right-wing military regime burned Neruda’s books while promoting poet Gabriela Mistral, another Nobel Prize winner, who was viewed at the time as apolitical.

As during those past anti-Neruda crusades, many writers and academics say the current campaign has gone too far.

Fernando Saez, executive director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation that oversees the late poet’s estate, points out that many writers, painters and musicians have had stormy personal lives, and says reproachable behavior should not negate their artistic contributions.

Doing so, he says “is tremendously dangerous.”

Author Isabel Allende has also defended Neruda’s literary legacy. “Like many young feminists in Chile I am disgusted by some aspects of Neruda’s life and personality,” she told the Guardian in 2018. “Unfortunately, Neruda was a flawed person, as we all are in one way or another, and Canto General is still a masterpiece.”

Neruda “is a very, very important poet and you cannot just cancel him because of his personal life,” Vivaldi says. “In that case, we would be judging everyone.”

It’s also easy to misread Neruda, says Oyarzun. Take “Poem XV,” the one some interpret as a plea for his lover to shut up.

“That’s not what he meant,” Oyarzun says. “He meant to learn from women. He says: ‘I love it when you’re in silence because silence is my favorite dimension and I learn from your silence.'”

Yet even Oyarzun is less enthusiastic about Neruda these days. She says so much fuss over Neruda for so long has ended up overshadowing the work of female poets in Chile, where many of them remain largely unknown.

“I myself have chosen to teach young women’s poetry that was denied for so many decades,” she says. “So if you tell me — ‘Will you teach a course only on Neruda?” — I will not do that.”

At the Neruda museum on Isla Negra, many fans brush off criticism about the poet. Among them is Santiago storekeeper Jorge Díaz, who says many Chilean men of Neruda’s generation behaved the same way.

“Neruda had a dark side,” he says. “But everyone has a dark side.”

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Native Americans recall torture, hatred at boarding schools

2022/10/17 Leave a comment

As in Canada:

After her mother died when Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier was just four years old, she was put into a Native American boarding school in South Dakota and told her native Lakota language was “devil’s speak.”

She recalls being locked in a basement at St. Francis Indian Mission School for weeks as punishment for breaking the school’s strict rules. Her long braids were shorn in a deliberate effort to stamp out her cultural identify. And when she broke her leg in an accident, Whirlwind Soldier said she received shoddy care leaving her with pain and a limp that still hobbles her decades later.

“I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred,” Whirlwind Soldier testified during a Saturday event on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation led by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, as the agency confronts the bitter legacy of a boarding school system that operated in the U.S. for more than a century.

Now 78 and still living on the reservation, Whirlwind Soldier said she was airing her horrific experiences in hopes of finally getting past them.

“The only thing they didn’t do was put us in (an oven) and gas us,” she said, comparing the treatment of Native Americans in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.

“But I let it go,” she later added. “I’m going to make it.”

Saturday’s event was the third in Haaland’s yearlong “Road to Healing” initiative for victims of abuse at government-backed boarding schools, after previous stops in Oklahoma and Michigan.

Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the U.S. enacted laws and policies to establish and support the schools. The stated goal was to “civilize” Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, but that was often carried out through abusive practices. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal funding and were willing partners.

Most closed their doors long ago and none still exist to strip students of their identities. But some, including St. Francis, still function as schools — albeit with drastically different missions that celebrate the cultural backgrounds of their Native students.

Former St. Francis student Ruby Left Hand Bull Sanchez traveled hundreds of miles from Denver to attend Saturday’s meeting. She cried as she recalled almost being killed as a child when a nun stuffed lye soap down her throat in response to Sanchez praying in her native language.

“I want the world to know,” she said.

Accompanying Haaland was Wizipan Garriott, a Rosebud Sioux member and principal deputy assistant secretary for Indian affairs. Garriott described how boarding schools were part of a long history of injustices against his people that began with the widespread extermination of their main food source — bison, also known as buffalo.

“First they took our buffalo. Then our land was taken, then our children, and then our traditional form of religion, spiritual practices,” he said. “It’s important to remember that we Lakota and other Indigenous people are still here. We can go through anything.”

The first volume of an investigative report released by the Interior Department in May identified more than boarding 400 schools that the federal government supported beginning in the late 19th century and continuing well into the 1960s. It also found at least 500 children died at some of the schools, though that number is expected to increase dramatically as research continues.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says it’s tallied about 100 more schools not on the government list that were run by groups such as churches.

“They all had the same missions, the same goals: ‘Kill the Indian, save the man,’” said Lacey Kinnart, who works for the Minnesota-based coalition. For Native American children, Kinnart said the intention was “to assimilate them and steal everything Indian out of them except their blood, make them despise who they are, their culture, and forget their language.”

South Dakota had 31 of the schools including two on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation — St. Francis and the Rosebud Agency Boarding and Day School.

The Rosebud Agency school, in Mission, operated through at least 1951 on a site now home to Sinte Gleska University, where Saturday’s meeting happened.

All that remains of the boarding school is a gutted-out building that used to house the dining hall, according to tribal members. When the building caught fire about five years ago, former student Patti Romero, 73, said she and others were on hand to cheer its destruction.

“No more worms in the chili,” said Romero, who attended the school from ages 6 to 15 and said the food was sometimes infested.

A second report is pending in the investigation into the schools launched by Haaland, herself a Laguna Pueblo from New Mexico and the first Native American cabinet secretary. It will cover burial sites, the schools’ impact on Indigenous communities and also try to account for federal funds spent on the troubled program.

Congress is considering a bill to create a boarding school “truth and healing commission,” similar to one established in Canada in 2008. It would have a broader scope than the Interior Department’s investigation into federally run boarding schools and subpoena power, if passed.

Source: Native Americans recall torture, hatred at boarding schools

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International students enticed to Canada on dubious promises of jobs and immigration

2022/10/14 Leave a comment

Yet another policy and program fail. Federal and provincial governments need to regulate better to reduce this exploitation by recruiters and private colleges:

Dilpreet Kaur’s parents were worried it would be difficult for her to find a job in her home state of Punjab, India, where her father toils long, lonely hours as a rice and wheat farmer. She, too, felt there was no future for her there.

So last year, her dad sold two trucks for $28,000 and mortgaged the family’s land to raise money for her to come to Canada, rent a room in a shared apartment in Toronto’s east end and pay $16,000 in international tuition fees for the first year of a two-year college program.

Kaur, 19, told CBC’s The Fifth Estate that she consulted with a college recruiter, one of a legion of freelance agents operating in an unbridled market in India who earn commissions by signing up students to attend Canadian colleges — sometimes by painting a distorted picture of the education on offer and the ease of life in Canada. The recruiter directed her to Alpha College, a school she’d never heard of before.

“I don’t know why she just suggested this college,” Kaur said in an interview. Nevertheless, she enrolled in a computer systems technician course at Alpha.

“Before coming here, it was kind of, in my mind, ‘Canada is so beautiful. I’m going to come here, just earn well, live a life, have fun at the weekends,’ like we saw in the movies,” she said.

“When I came here it was different, it was completely different.”

Increasing numbers of Ontario’s international college students come, like Kaur, from India, where it’s not uncommon for rural families such as hers to literally bet the farm to raise enough money to pay for a daughter or son’s education, hoping they’ll eventually land a decent job and be able to remit money back home to repay the debt.

Drawn by Canada’s reputation and the potential to gain permanent residency, tens of thousands of foreign students enrol every year in Canadian post-secondary schools. The vast majority head to universities and public colleges.

But a subset, about 25,000 students as of last year, had been enticed to enrol at private career colleges in Ontario that partner with public colleges — colleges that have grown dependent on the international students’ much higher tuition fees, typically four to five times what a domestic student pays. Critics told The Fifth Estate those colleges are packing pupils into classrooms — real or virtual — with little regard to government rules, student wellbeing or anything beyond the bottom line.

Since the pandemic began, Alpha, a private career college in partnership with public St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ont., has more than doubled its enrolment, to 4,900 students, whereas its two-storey building at Kennedy Road and Passmore Avenue in Toronto has a capacity of just 420, according to the Toronto fire department.

“They just want us to give money, again and again. And get rich, filling their pockets, and don’t really care about us at all,” Kaur said of her experience.

A report from Ontario’s auditor general last December found that the province’s smaller public colleges, particularly the ones in smaller or northern communities where domestic enrolments have been declining, “have become highly dependent financially on international students but increasingly face challenges in attracting these students to their home campuses.”

As a result, 11 of them have entered into partnerships with private career colleges in the Toronto area, allowing students to live in or around Toronto but take courses toward a diploma from a public college located in Timmins or North Bay, for example.

The auditor general’s report found that the tuition revenue from these partnerships single-handedly meant the difference between running a deficit or a surplus for five of the six public colleges that had them in place as of 2019-20, and is also lucrative for the private career colleges, with net profit margins ranging from 18 to 53 per cent.

“With reduced funding from government, international students have become bread and butter sustaining these institutions,” said Earl Blaney, an advocate for international students and a registered Canadian immigration consultant based in London, Ont.

“Their appetite is insatiable. They’re doing everything they can to find more ways to bring in more students… whether it is increasing class sizes, whether it is irresponsibly bringing in students that they don’t have enough support to offer. I mean it doesn’t matter. What matters is numbers.”

Recruiters make questionable claims

Education recruiters represent the first step in the chain from farmer’s field to classroom. It’s a cutthroat industry in India, where thousands of independent agents compete to earn around $2,000 for each student they recruit for a Canadian college with which they have an agreement.

Alpha College, for example, got 100 per cent of its international students in its most recent academic year through recruiters, according to documents obtained by The Fifth Estate.

Ontario’s public colleges paid more than $114 million in commissions to recruiters in 2020-21, according to last year’s auditor general report; the total paid by the private career colleges isn’t tracked.

The Fifth Estate‘s investigation went undercover in Punjab state, using hidden cameras, to see what recruiters are telling potential students. A father and his 19-year-old son interested in a Canadian education agreed to wear a hidden camera while meeting with several recruiters in Jalandhar, the state’s third-biggest city.

In one of their meetings, the recruiter outlined that tuition would cost around $17,000 for the first year.

“Will he be able to find a job for the second year?” the father asked.

The recruiter replied that “it is very easy for students to pay their second-year tuition fees.”

In fact, as The Fifth Estate found, many international college students struggle to earn enough money in Canada to pay their living expenses, much less tuition for their second year.

Last Friday, the federal government temporarily lifted the cap of 20 hours of off-campus work a week that international students had previously been limited to during school semesters. At minimum wage in Ontario, the limit meant international students couldn’t expect to earn much more than about $22,000 a year — not enough to cover $16,000 or $17,000 in tuition and have funds left over for rent, food, utilities and other essentials. And that’s while also studying full-time.

During the meeting involving the father and his 19-year-old son, the father asked about a well-established public college in Toronto. But the recruiter directed him instead to a little-known private career college.

“There is a college called Cambrian at Hanson,” he said, referring to private Hanson College, which is tucked away in a strip mall in Brampton, Ont. Hanson has had a partnership since 2005 with Cambrian, a public college based in Sudbury, Ont., 350 kilometres to the north.

When contacted by The Fifth Estate, a Hanson College spokesperson wouldn’t confirm whether the school had a relationship with that particular recruiter, but did say the college works with “recruitment agents across various regions globally, including Indian agencies,” and that the students they sign up account for about 30 to 35 per cent of the school’s enrolment.

The auditor general noted that because recruiters’ commissions are a percentage of the tuition fees paid by the students they sign up, “recruitment agencies are incentivized to enrol as many students as they can in the programs that charge the highest tuition fees.”

Dubious claims about visas

At another recruitment agency, the father expressed concern that after his son graduated, it might be hard to get permanent residency in Canada.

“Definitely not,” the recruiter said. “It’s easy for students to get permanent residency.”

In reality, a Statistics Canada study last year found only about 30 per cent of people who come to Canada on a student visa had obtained permanent residency within a decade.

Even after the father and son left the agents’ offices, they were approached on the street by recruiters for another agency offering to charge less for their services and to provide a more personal relationship.

The Ontario auditor general’s report found similar examples of dubious claims made by college recruiters, including agencies that promised “100 per cent visa success” and others that advertised “guaranteed scores” on English aptitude tests.

In recent years, a new type of recruitment has cropped up. A number of “edu-tech” companies in Canada, Australia and Singapore have created online platforms to connect the millions of potential students in other countries with the thousands of recruiters and educational institutions in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Ireland.

But critics like Blaney, the international student advocate and immigration consultant, said these so-called aggregator companies only put more distance between colleges and the recruiters who are signing up students for them. “Ten thousand-plus sub-agents on the ground … have absolutely no direct connection with the college. The college has no ability to screen them, they have no ability to review their work or conduct with the student, promises made, advertising, you name it,” Blaney said.

Colleges exceed provincial enrolment limits

Blaney said the volume of foreign students coming to Canada really picked up starting 10 years ago, after the federal government declared the country needed more skilled immigrants. A federal advisory panel also recommended doubling the number of international students to more than 450,000 in total by 2022. Canada sailed far past that target and had 621,000 people on student visas as of Dec. 31, 2012, according to federal data.

The crush of students coming from abroad opened up more opportunities for the province’s public colleges to enter into partnerships with private career colleges; nine such deals have been signed since the 2012 report.

All those international tuition fees now provide more money to Ontario’s colleges — $1.7 billion in 2020-21, according to the province’s auditor general — than the provincial government’s total funding of $1.6 billion, which is the lowest amount of per capita government funding of any province in Canada.

Ontario’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities officially caps the number of international students that a public college can have at one of its private career college partners. The quota is a maximum of two times the number of international students enrolled at the public college’s home campus.

But the provincial auditor general found a number of colleges have exceeded those limits in recent years with seemingly no consequences. North Bay-based Canadore College’s private partner had 8.8 times the number of international students as the college itself; at Northern College in Timmins, Ont., the ratio was 8.6. Alpha College is at about 4.5-to-1 compared with St. Lawrence College’s home-campus enrolment, or more than twice the allowed ratio

“The focus has been numbers-driven,” Blaney said. “That’s all, literally, that anyone cares about … how many international students can we pack in, and how much money can we get.”

A Ministry of Colleges and Universities spokesperson told The Fifth Estate that colleges “are separate legal entities and are responsible for both academic and administrative matters — including enrolment and capacity.”

Neither Alpha College nor its public partner, St. Lawrence College, would agree to an interview.

In an email this week, St. Lawrence spokesperson Julie Einarson said the school and Alpha College have “established and followed quality assurance protocols to ensure students who come to Ontario to study have a good experience and ultimately stay here to live and work.”

“Colleges and our partners provide a wide range of support services to international students but we know there is a lot more to do,” the email continued. “We are working collaboratively with other colleges, governments, and community leaders — and most importantly, our students — to find new solutions.”

Low-wage jobs after graduation

Federal Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said it troubles him greatly that “certain private career colleges, I’m convinced, have come to exist just to make a buck on the back of the international student program.”

In an interview with The Fifth Estate last week, he said, “We have concerns that it might be about financial impropriety, rather than providing a quality education to students who are coming here trying to better themselves.”

Fraser said if certain recruiters or colleges are taking advantage of students, then he needs to make it clear to the appropriate provincial government that they don’t need his permission to oust the college from the study permit program.

“It’s not what the program was designed for. It’s designed to provide an education to students and to benefit Canadian communities, not to allow sham operations to open up to financially abuse innocent students who have in their mind what Canada could be, only to be let down.”

Source: International students enticed to Canada on dubious promises of jobs and immigration

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Passport Processing: Appears to have turned the corner

2022/10/14 Leave a comment

Latest stats showing the September was the first month that passports issued was greater than applications received. However, no stats on the degree to which service standards on processing time were met:

Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/passport/statistics.html

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Cyprus to revoke 10 more passports issued under discredited citizenship scheme

2022/10/14 Leave a comment

Of note:

Cyprus on Wednesday said it would strip citizenship from 10 individuals, among thousands who benefited from a cash-for-passports scheme which collapsed under accusations of corruption in 2020.

Cyprus gave passports to more than 7,000 people under a citizenship scheme which in its final form gave citizenship to individuals investing a minimum 2 million euros. It was popular with Russian and Asian investors.

Wednesday’s cabinet decision involved three investors and seven dependants, government spokesperson Niovi Parisinou said in a written statement, without identifying the people or their nationalities.

The process to revoke citizenship had started against 60 investors and 159 family members in total since last October, she said.

Six individuals have already had their passports revoked, Parisinou added.

Once championed by the government, the passport scheme was abandoned in 2020 after a barrage of news reports suggesting that fraudsters and fugitives from justice had benefited along with bona fide investors. The European Union also frequently raised misgivings about the programme.

Two official investigations have said the scheme ran without adequate oversight, with one report suggesting some investment transactions could have been fictitious.

Source: Cyprus to revoke 10 more passports issued under discredited citizenship scheme

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Hyder: Canada’s immigration advantage – A survey of major employers

2022/10/14 Leave a comment

Of note:

Canada’s success in attracting newcomers from every corner of the globe is one of our country’s greatest competitive advantages. In addition to enriching the social and cultural fabric of our communities, immigrants bring valuable knowledge, skills and experience that contribute to economic growth.

This report sheds light on immigration’s importance to employers and the overall economy. It is based on a survey of 80 member companies of the Business Council of Canada in the first quarter of 2022. Collectively, these 80 companies employ nearly 1,650,000 Canadians in more than 20 industries, generating revenues of approximately $1.2 trillion in 2020. 

Close to two-thirds of the companies said they actively recruit workers through the immigration system. The rest hire immigrants who have already relocated to Canada. Among employers that use the immigration system, two-thirds expect to increase their usage over the next three years.

Employers look to the immigration system to help meet a variety of business needs, from enabling enterprise growth to increasing the diversity of their workforces. Above all, immigration helps them fill positions that would otherwise stay vacant. Of the employers that make direct use of the immigration system, four out of five say they do so to address labour shortages. 

Employers rely most on programs designed to attract highly skilled workers, such as the Global Talent Stream and the Federal Skilled Worker Program. Employers report that newcomers make important contributions to their businesses, adding that the immigrants they hire tend to possess strong technical as well as human skills.

Nevertheless, some immigrants face challenges adapting to their new environment. Employers recognize these challenges and say they are committed helping newcomers succeed. This includes investing in community settlement organizations, providing language and cultural training, and helping foreign-trained staff obtain recognition of their credentials.

Half of the employers that took part in the survey are in favour of raising Canada’s annual admission targets, in particular for economic-class immigrants. At the same time, employers note that higher levels of immigration should be accompanied by greater investments in the domestic workforce, as well as in childcare, housing, and public transportation.

Despite their overall support for the immigration system, survey respondents say there is room to make it more responsive to Canada’s economic needs. Frustrated by application processing delays, complex rules, and the cost of navigating the system, fewer than a quarter say the immigration system currently serves their business needs well.

These challenges are made more pressing by the accelerating race for international talent. Canadian employers overwhelmingly agree that global competition for skilled workers is likely to intensify as other countries step up their efforts to attract the best and brightest.

Source: https://thebusinesscouncil.ca/app/uploads/2022/06/Canadas-immigration-advantage-final.pdf

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