CILA | How the government can protect the public from bad immigration consultants

2024/11/26 Leave a comment

The immigration lawyer perspective:

…Miller can enact legal reform so that immigration consultants are only able to work under the supervision of an immigration lawyer. Lawyers are governed by strong regulatory bodies and face significant consequences such as disbarment for poor behaviour. Putting a lawyer’s license on the line will help to significantly strengthen the quality of advice immigration applicants receive as well as oversight of the conduct of immigration consultants.

We wish to be clear: not all immigration consultants are bad. There are some good ones who are honourable and competent.

Immigration lawyers have long argued that they are best able to represent visa applicants given these cases are often complex and raise legal issues involving Charter, family, employment, and criminal law. If consultants are going to continue to be given the right to provide legal services to the public, there must be stronger regulations. Consultants who are competent and ethical should be given the chance to continue to work but under a regime that ensures that the integrity of the immigration system is not brought into disrepute, and the public is adequately protected.

The Prime Minister, Ontario Premier, and federal immigration minister are correct to draw attention to this problem. Canadians remain supportive of immigration but are unsupportive of what they believe is an immigration system that has lost its way. Government leaders can help restore public confidence by limiting the ability of bad consultants to abuse victims and the immigration system.

Source: Opinion | How the government can protect the public from bad immigration consultants

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Changes are coming for international students’ postgraduation work permits in Canada. Here’s what experts say is needed

2024/05/18 Leave a comment

Comments by Kareem El-Assal, Barbara Jo Caruso and Kanwar Sierah. Always questionable that the government can manage these programs in an agile and dynamic fashion along with inadvertently creating new pressures and interest groups:

For more than a decade, international students have been able to pursue any postsecondary program and still be eligible for an open work permit upon graduation — whether or not their studies are relevant to what the Canadian economy needs.

But that’s about to change.

With a cap in place to rein in the number of international students, Immigration Minister Marc Miller has already hinted at coming changes to the rules on postgraduation work permits.

Those permits have helped make Canada a top destination for foreign students and have been blamed for the country’s runaway international enrolment growth. But experts say Ottawa needs to use them as tools for Canada’s labour market needs, and to provide a clearer path to permanent residence.

“When it comes to international students and the issuance of postgraduate work permits, it’s clear that the work is not done on that end,” Miller told a news conference after a recent meeting his provincial counterparts.

“Provinces said that they need postgraduate work permits (to) have a longer date for people that are in the health-care sector and in certain trades. And I simply said to them, ‘Bring us the data and we’ll be accommodating.’ ”

The access to an open work permit to remain in Canada after graduation has been a strong incentive for people to come study here, as the immigration system has increasingly drawn on candidates already in the country to be permanent residents. It rewards those with Canadian education credentials and work experience.

Over the years, enrolling in post-secondary education has been promoted by recruiters as a shortcut for immigration to Canada, contributing to the exponential growth of international enrolment, which has put pressure on the housing market and other resources.

Following public backlash, Miller in January introduced a two-year cap on the study permits allotted to each province to rein in the international student population, which surpassed one million last year.

The applications Canada is prioritizing

To better align the economic immigration streams with the labour market, Miller has also started prioritizing the permanent resident applications of those with a background in health care; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions; trades; transport; and agriculture and agri-food.

Experts said the postgraduation work permit system could be an effective tool to achieve Ottawa’s objectives in restoring the integrity of the international education program, improving the candidates’ quality in the permanent resident pool and aligning their studies with labour needs.   

The last major changes to the postgraduation work permit program came in April 2008, allowing recent graduates to obtain an open work permit for up to three years — depending on length of their program of study — with no restrictions on location of study or requirement of a job offer.

As a result, an increasing number of international students have gravitated to cheaper and shorter academic programs in colleges with no bearings on Canada’s labour needs, and got stranded in lower-paid jobs in warehouses, restaurants and gas stations.

A recent report by the CBC found that business-related programs accounted for 27 per cent of all study permits approved by the Immigration Department from 2018 to 2023, more than any other field. However, just six per cent of all permits went to foreign students for health sciences, medicine or biological and biomedical sciences programs, while trades and vocational training programs accounted for 1.25 per cent. 

What the experts say we could do

Immigration policy analyst Kareem El-Assal said the government could easily manipulate the durations of the postgraduation work permits to international graduates based on their enrolled programs to gear them toward studying in fields that are in demand.

By lengthening the permits for international students with backgrounds in these occupations while shortening it for those in a field with an oversupply of labour, El-Assal said it would encourage students to pursue education in the targeted disciplines and hence, increase the pool of immigration candidates with the relevant skills that Canada needs. 

“Part of it is going to be blunting the demand and part of is going to be aligning the skills of new students with what we are looking for with the (permanent) immigration system,” noted El-Assal, founder of Section 95, a website dedicated to analyzing Canada’s immigration system.

Since January, Miller has made some changes to the postgraduation work permit program by stopping to issue work authorization to international graduates of public-private college partnerships, which the minister has blamed for the international enrolment surge.

He has also extended the work permits of graduates of master’s degree programs to three years while restricting work permits to spouses of international students in a postgraduate degree program only.

Barbara Jo Caruso, co-president of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association, said that was a smart move.

“We should identify programs that match what the labour needs are,” she said. “If we need a lot of nurses or we need a lot of computer programmers, then those programs should have a pathway for postgraduation work permits.”

However, to make it work, Caruso warned that immigration officials must have clear messaging to prospective students about what academic programs are entitled to postgraduation work authorization and state the information front and centre on the person’s study permit, so they could decide if they still intend to come here.

“That’s really incumbent on the government to be transparent,” she said. “Otherwise, the whole international education program would take a bad hit.”

It doesn’t help that the federal government has continued to promote Canada as a destination to “Study, Explore, Work and Stay” on the Immigration Department’s website and in its international student recruitment posters.

Immigration consultant Kanwar Sierah said he’s concerned that tying postgraduation work permits to specific programs would have little impact on the supply chain of skilled trades workers, as most students learn through apprenticeship, and the post-secondary sector may not have the capacity and infrastructure to to deliver.

“You might be missing a lot of occupations and you might only be targeting just 10 per cent of the trade occupations that offer formal education,” said Sierah, who is also calling for a revamp of provincial apprenticeship programs.

In March, Miller announced the goal of reducing the number of temporary residents in Canada by 20 per cent or 500,000 people by 2027 from the current 2.5 million people, which include hundreds of thousands of postgraduation work permit holders.

Source: Changes are coming for international students’ postgraduation work permits in Canada. Here’s what experts say is needed

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Applicants to Canada’s special, one-time immigration program are being forced to navigate the system alone, critics charge

2021/05/06 1 Comment

Will be an interesting and important test of IRCC’s modernization efforts. We will see whether the fears of immigration lawyers and consultants are overblown or whether IRCC can design pathways and processes that many can navigate on their own.

Not to be cynical, but simplification in any area or online tools (e.g., will and tax software) often prompt fears of lawyers, accountants and other professionals who benefit from complexity:

With Canada’s highly anticipated special immigration program set to open Thursday, experts say they’re worried about the potential for chaos.

Immigration lawyers briefed about the new program and its portal say they’ve been told applicants must create their own accounts, complete the online application and upload all required documents on their own — without professional legal help.

“There are different forms they need to fill out about family information, travel history, all the (previous) addresses, work history and study periods. They require all the forms and documentations upfront, just shy of the medical and police clearances,” said Toronto lawyer Barbara Jo Caruso.

“Everything needs to be labelled, uploaded and properly attached. If they are not done properly, they will be deemed incomplete and refused.”

The applications are being taken on a first-come, first-served basis. Even if an application is incomplete or an applicant is ineligible, once it’s logged into the portal, it’s counted toward the 90,000 cap under this new program. The system will stop accepting applications once that cap is reached.

Lawyers and consultants asked during the briefing if the portal would reopen if many applicants turned out to be ineligible, but they said immigration officials didn’t have an answer.

The one-time-only immigration pathway, announced in April, aims to grant permanent residence to 90,000 applicants comprising recent international graduates and temporary foreign workers with experience in health-care and essential occupations.

These already-in-Canada candidates have been prioritized to help the country meet its 410,000 annual immigration targets amid uncertainty given the ongoing COVID-19 border restrictions.

The new pathway has already created a buzz — and frenzy — among candidates who have found themselves scrambling to register for one of the two government-designated language tests required to prove language proficiency in their application. (Details about the application process have yet to be published.)

Authorized lawyers and consultants have previously had their own portals with the immigration department that they use to complete and submit applications on behalf of clients.

However, the new stand-alone portal for the new pathway only allows applicants to log in through their personal email and there’s no interface to link their account to their counsel.

“If your whole future depends on this whole process, you want to be fair, you want to be understanding, you want people to have experience in working in the government portal to assist you,” Caruso said.

“It’s tedious work. Government technology is not user-friendly at the best of times, let alone when you are under pressure. There’s a cap and you want to make sure you’re the first one in.”

Among the 90,000 spots of the new program, 20,000 will be dedicated for temporary foreign workers in health care; 30,000 for those in other selected essential occupations; and the remaining 40,000 for international students who graduated from a Canadian institution.

Many of the essential workers will likely have to take time off from work and spend hours to figure out the new pathway application process.

“They are the essential workers. They are the people driving trucks. They’re the people on the front line in the health-care system,” said Toronto immigration lawyer Ravi Jain.

“Many people will apply even if they don’t have their language test results. They are just going to ignore the instructions and hit the submit button. Every time you hit ‘submit,’ you take a spot.”

Last year, the federal government got rid of its first-come-first-serve system for Canadians to sponsor their parents and grandparents abroad as permanent residents after public outrage that the available spots were snapped up within minutes.

It prompted Ottawa to re-introduce a lottery system, in which interested sponsors are now required to first register to enter into the draw, then submit a full sponsorship application if they are selected after duplicate and incomplete forms are weeded out.

“The reality is there are always going to be people who are going to be harmed no matter what direction it goes. There’s a race to file. There are so many things that could go wrong. But then what are the alternatives?” said Mark Holthe, chair of the Canadian Bar Association immigration law section.

“There’s a lot of little nuances with the application that people won’t understand. I envision that we could have up to 20 per cent or even 30 per cent of spoiled applications that people are ineligible who are using up the capped spots.”

Holthe, who started an online course in April to help applicants manoeuvre the basics of the immigration portal, expects the application package for the new pathway to be comparable to the existing one for the immigration of skilled workers.

Anyone interested in applying should start compiling and scanning documentations such as copies of their passports, work permits, reference letters and employment records as these are likely what would be required in the application, he suggested.

There is still time for the immigration department to get the process “right,” says Kareem El-Assal, managing editor of immigration news site CIC News and policy director at CanadaVisa.com.

“Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada deserves credit for trying to accommodate more essential workers and graduates during this crisis,” he said. “But they need to be careful about dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s before they launch the (pathway) streams.”

Alexander Cohen, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino’s press secretary, said his office is aware of the concerns raised regarding the access to the new portal.

“We remain in close contact with several key stakeholders and are looking into this,” Cohen told the Star.

Source: Applicants to Canada’s special, one-time immigration program are being forced to navigate the system alone, critics charge

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