Federal report warns ‘marriages of convenience’ a threat to immigration system

More anecdotal than hard evidence, but anecdotes generally signal issues:

More than a third of the applications to bring new spouses to Canada from India may involve bogus marriages, according to internal government documents made public on Tuesday.

“Marriages of convenience” in India “have become a threat to the integrity of Canada’s immigration program,” states the 2013 report from the Canada Border Services Agency’s enforcement and intelligence operations directorate.

Applications involving Indian nationals engaged in phoney marriages “are constantly evolving and creatively testing the bounds of the Canadian immigration system.”

The report, which cited statistics up to 2012, said it is “presumed” that there is a link between organized crime and the arrangement of phoney marriages.

The broader problem of marriage fraud primarily involves applicants from 10 to 15 countries. The report identifies China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Guyana and Haiti as the “high risk” countries involving Canadian permanent residents sponsoring bogus spouses under the immigration system’s family-class section, according to Border Services.

But the report said the problem appears to be “most prevalent” in India and it makes an unsubstantiated assertion that “it has been estimated that as much as 36 per cent of the spousal caseload” involving that country “may be fraudulent.”

The report offers suggestions to Border Services and Citizenship and Immigration Canada officials to detect fraud, but that advice was not released under provisions of the Access to Information Act protecting sensitive information.

Nationally, the document shows that the refusal rate on spousal applications from all countries had been around 14 per cent from 2008 to 2011, but jumped to 17 per cent in 2012 when there were a little over 4,500 applications.

…The report, obtained by Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, properly points out a legitimate concern about marriage fraud, according to Manpreet Grewal, director of multicultural and immigrant integration services at Abbotsford Community Services.

But she said that trend is likely to drop over the long-term due to growing government vigilance, combined with the government’s increased preference for economic immigrants rather than the family-class applicants who can sponsor relatives.

There is also less interest among second-generation Indo-Canadians to be involved in arranged marriages involving Indian nationals, she said.

Border Services, she said, is making a “far-fetched” link between marriage fraud trends and the decline in the relative number of marriage-age Indian women due to sex-selection abortion practices.

“I have never seen the two things connected. It seems to be a bit of a stretch,” she said.

Federal report warns ‘marriages of convenience’ a threat to immigration system.