Most immigrants with deportation letters are still in Canada, CBSA figures show

2024/02/14 Leave a comment

As Raj Sharma pointed out on X, “Overstay often receive “voluntary departure orders” which are not removal orders and many that receive the former can and have regularized status (in Canada marriage/common law, refugee claim, H&C, etc).” So numbers likely overstated and it would be helpful to have a breakdown between “voluntary” and “mandatory” departure orders:

Most people living in Canada who have been sent deportation letters in the past eight years are still in the country, according to official figures disclosed by the Canada Border Services Agency.

The figures show that 14,609 people were sent letters informing them they are facing deportation between 2016 and May last year.

But 9,317 of those were still living in Canada last year, including 2,188 people sent deportation letters in 2016 and 2017.

Conservative immigration critic Tom Kmiec, who received the figures in an answer to a parliamentary question he asked last May, said they suggest a lack of enforcement. He said they are a symptom of a “broken immigration system” and are contributing to an erosion in public confidence.

The figures show that 3,087 people – fewer than a quarter of people sent deportation letters since 2016 – have been removed from Canada….

Source: Most immigrants with deportation letters are still in Canada, CBSA figures show

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Douglas Todd: Ottawa insider warns about immigrant-investor schemes – Vancouver Sun

2024/01/20 Leave a comment

Wise warning (disclosure: I am friends of some of those quoted):

An adviser within Canada’s immigration department is warning about the dangers of entry programs that favour entrepreneurs, given the failure of earlier initiatives.

The internal cautions come at the same time the immigration department, which has been under fire from top bank economists for damaging the economy by bringing in a record 1.25 million permanent and temporary residents in a year, is expanding another program that gives preference to would-be entrepreneurs.

The internal government memo, obtained by Vancouver lawyer Richard Kurland under an access-to-information request, reveals how an adviser to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) warned that a variety of earlier immigrant-business programs suffered widespread abuse — resulting in a trivial number of new businesses being opened in Canada, and other problems.

The defunct schemes that targeted wealthy foreign nationals, which the correspondents generally refer to as “business-class programs,” opened the gates to a flood of foreign capital moving into Canadian housing, says the adviser. That raised prices, especially in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto. In addition, the internal email thread alerts decision makers to the way many entrepreneur immigrants ended up paying low amounts of income tax.

The in-house memo comes to light in the same month the Canadian Press reported the IRCC was internally warned two years ago that increasing immigration levels would harm housing affordability and services. A Nanos poll also finds support for migration has in less than a year plunged 20 percentage points, with 53 per cent now wanting fewer immigrants.

The group email shared by top immigration department officials, titled “The strange story of Vancouver,” reveals just how badly things went with the earlier schemes, specifically the longstanding immigrant-investor and entrepreneur programs, which were poorly monitored.

The email thread shows that senior officials in March of last year were working “under the radar” to expand similar business-class schemes, particularly the so-called Start-Up Visa (SUV) program, to welcome more would-be entrepreneurs into the country who have the “potential” to start a new business.

However, when the directors sought advice from Daniel Hiebert, a former UBC geography professor who is now working in the department’s strategic planning section, he said the earlier programs led to only 15 per cent of business-class immigrants actually starting a business.

“Ouch,” Hiebert says in the email, explaining how most of the business-class newcomers failed to start a new company even though their status as permanent residents was supposedly contingent on it.

The Conservatives disbanded the immigrant investor and entrepreneur programs in 2014, openly saying the people who came in through them were generally not having a long-term positive impact on the country, not bringing in significant investment capital for business, had low ability in Canada’s official languages, were tending not to stay in the country, and were paying far lower taxes than the average skilled worker.

Even many of those entrepreneurs who did begin a business through the old program dropped it after two years, said Hiebert. “They started businesses to meet requirements and then later let them go.”

Hiebert said, as far as he knows, not one of those entrepreneur-class immigrants ever had their permanent resident status revoked.

Furthermore, Hiebert explained how many of those business-class immigrants who bought expensive houses in the city tended to pay low mortgages and low income taxes.

“This is still the case,” Hiebert wrote. “The story is that many of the residents of these areas came through business-class programs with the intent to retire and live a comfortable lifestyle.”

After initially transferring their money out of their country of origin, typically somewhere in East Asia, Hiebert wrote, most purchased a house “along with a Mercedes, Audi or whatever. And then life is lived quite simply, on a small budget and with little owing in terms of income tax. The kids get to go to UBC or SFU while paying domestic fees, which is a big bonus.”

Hiebert concludes his March, 2023, memo by saying, “I think it’s time to review the economic outcomes of the Start-Up Visa program and I suspect they will show more of the same.”

At one point in the email thread, Umit Kiziltan, director general of the IRCC, said the “burning questions” that Hiebert raised required the “outmost (sic) attention” while the department evaluates whether to expand the Start-Up Visa program and others aimed at wealthy immigrants.

Also included in the thread are Maggie Pastorek, director of policy, and James McNamee, senior director in the economic immigration branch.

The group email includes a discussion of a study covered in a Postmedia article from 2022, which shows how UBC business professor Thomas Davidoff and others discovered the owners of Greater Vancouver homes with a median value of $3.7 million pay income taxes of just $15,800 — which is exceedingly low for North American cities.

“Most luxury homes in Greater Vancouver appear to be purchased with wealth derived from sources other than earnings taxed in Canada,” said Davidoff’s study, which confirmed earlier research by Statistics Canada and Hiebert himself.

Several years ago, StatCan and Hiebert found the average value of a detached house bought by more than 4,400 millionaire immigrants who came to Metro Vancouver under the investor program was $3.2 million. That compared to an average of $1.5 million for a Canadian-born owner.

While working at UBC, Hiebert’s studies also found a correlation between neighbourhoods with large foreign-born populations and neighbourhoods that appear to have unusually low taxable incomes, despite their inflated housing prices, such as Richmond and Vancouver’s west side.

Based on the documents provided in response to an access-to-information request by Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, it is not clear how the internal discussion affected later decisions the Liberal government made about its Start-Up Visa program

Last year, however, Ottawa scaled up the annual intake of the Start-Up Visa program from 2022, when it offered 1,000 spots. The program’s intake rose to 3,500 last year and is set to bring in 5,000 this year and 6,000 in 2025.

Immigration department officials did not respond by deadline.

Source: Douglas Todd: Ottawa insider warns about immigrant-investor schemes

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Immigration Minister urged to crack down on international student ‘no shows’ at colleges

2024/01/19 Leave a comment

All the negligence on the part of federal and provincial governments, education institutions and others for having enabled this degree of fraud and, in many cases, exploitation.

Likely worth looking into ownership of these private colleges to assess whether any degree of political complicity or corruption involved:

The International Student Compliance Regime, implemented in 2014, is designed to help identify bogus students and help provinces identify questionable schools.

Most of the colleges on IRCC’s top ten list of schools with the highest potential non-compliance rates are privately run and in Ontario, catering heavily to students from India.

The IRCC’s Student Integrity Analysis Report, dated November, 2021, found “no shows” to make up as much as 90 per cent of students at some private colleges. “No shows” are students with letters of acceptance, who should be enrolled but either did not confirm the acceptance, never attended class or suddenly stopped attending.

The Academy of Learning College in Toronto had a 95 per cent “overall potential student non compliance rate” among students, the report said. Ninety per cent of students were recorded as “no shows.”

The 2021 Student Integrity Analysis Report, obtained by immigration lawyer Richard Kurland through an access to information request, found that Flair College of Management and Technology in Vaughan, Ont., had a “no show” of 75 per cent of students.

Both colleges did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Kurland said the IRCC has known for years which colleges have large numbers of international students not attending classes but have so far failed to act on study permits.

He said the data suggest that some schools may have a business model based on bringing students into Canada and getting their tuition, even if the student doesn’t attend.

“The integrity of our International Students Program is of the utmost importance,” she said in an e-mail.

Source: Immigration Minister urged to crack down on international student ‘no shows’ at colleges

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Invasive or not enough? Lawyers raise concerns over screening of Gaza visa applicants

2024/01/17 Leave a comment

Understandable that the government is being extremely cautious, both for domestic reasons and possibly coordination reasons with Egypt and Israel given their role in authorizing travel out of Gaza, but likely first time social media posts have been part of the formal vetting process (let me know if any other cases):
The security screening the federal government has brought in for people applying to flee the Gaza Strip is facing criticism from both lawyers who feel its questions are too invasive and others who think it should dig even deeper.
A special program that would allow up to 1,000 people in Gaza with relatives in Canada to apply for visas opened for applications last week, with the federal government seeking an extraordinary level of detail.
People are being asked to supply their social media accounts, details about scars and other marks on their bodies, information on everyone they are related to — including through marriage — and every passport they have ever hadThe questions are creating anxiety for families who worry their loved ones might have trouble answering after three months largely without internet access, electricity, or even adequate food or drinking water, said Calgary immigration lawyer Yameena Ansari. She lobbied for the program as a member of the Gaza Family Reunification Project.

“It’s almost impossible to get these answers when you’re talking about people that are running away from their homes,” she said in an interview.The questions are also extremely painful because they suggest that families desperate to flee the violence in Gaza are suspected terrorists, she said.

“This is not a list that we would ask somebody who was coming to Canada on a humanitarian basis,” Ansari said.

“To me, these are the questions I would ask somebody if I thought that they were terrorists or a combatant.”

Meanwhile, Lawyers for Secure Immigration, a group that formed at the outset of the latest Israel-Hamas war, urged the government in a letter last week to ask more pointed questions related to Hamas and terrorist activities to ensure none of the armed militant group’s supporters are allowed into Canada.

Richard Kurland, a Vancouver-based immigration lawyer and member of the newly formed group, called the background questions “grossly insufficient” because they don’t probe for possible connections with Hamas and the events of Oct. 7.Kurland said he understands it’s important for Palestinian Canadians to get their family to Canada safely, but said it’s not something that can be done “blindly.”

Once a bad actor gets into Canada, it is a very long and difficult process to remove them, he said.

This past weekend marked the 100th day of the war, which broke out on Oct. 7 when Hamas launched a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 240 others as hostages.

The military response from Israel was almost immediate as it lay siege to the territory, restricting access to clean water, food, internet and electricity, and subjecting the strip to a near-constant barrage of bombs in its pursuit of Hamas.

The humanitarian catastrophe has displaced most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people. The Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, though it does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said Palestinians are not considered a greater threat to Canada’s security than people from elsewhere in the world, but the “enhanced biographic information” is part of a standard practice in cases where IRCC is not able to do initial screening on the ground.

The background questions are similar to the ones asked of Afghans who were still in Afghanistan when they applied to come to Canada after the fall of Kabul in 2021, the department said.

“As we did with Afghanistan, we will collect enhanced biographic information and conduct security screening while the applicant is still in Gaza. Provided no inadmissibility concerns are flagged, people who are able to leave Gaza will have their biometrics collected in a third country,” the Immigration Department said in a statement.

Shortly after the Gaza family reunification program was first announced, Liberal Mental Health Minister Ya’ara Saks said members of the Israeli community in Canada had expressed concerns about the program.The conflict in Gaza has coincided with a massive rise in antisemitism across Canada, and police have reported an increase in hate crimes directed at the Jewish community.

“This is a limited program, the security concerns are well understood and the security requirements are strict and follow reviews from Israeli authorities,” Saks assured her constituents in an Instagram post on Dec. 22, the day after the immigration program was first announced.“I understand the concerns I’ve heard from community members. Security is always the number one priority and we will be vigilant.”

Saks declined to elaborate on her comments when contacted by The Canadian Press last week.

The background questions are only the first of a multi-step screening process.

If no concerns are flagged, basic personal details like name, date of birth, sex, and passport information of the applicant will be passed on to Israeli and Egyptian governments, which will do their own vetting and determine whether or not the individual can leave Gaza. After that, applicants will still have to undergo fingerprinting and other biometrics before they can board a plane to Canada.

The Immigration Department has promised to be flexible if applicants don’t have access to all the background information that has been asked of them, but Jewish Toronto immigration lawyer Debbie Rachlis said that flexibility is not enshrined in the policy.“That’s not written down anywhere and to me it’s not worth anything,” said Rachlis, who is also a member of the Gaza Family Reunification Project.

The penalties for putting incomplete or inaccurate information in the application can be significant, she said, including getting banned from Canada for up to five years.

Rachlis said she wouldn’t be able to answer some of the questions about herself, especially without written records. She said there is no real recourse for people who get refused because they can’t remember details, like all of their past work supervisors’ names.

The government is still accepting applications, and hasn’t given any estimate of when visas could be issued. The department said the application process could take longer than it otherwise would if IRCC has to wait for additional information to complete background checks.

Source: Invasive or not enough? Lawyers raise concerns over screening of Gaza visa applicants

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Douglas Todd: Foreign-student dreams being crushed in greedy Canada

2023/10/13 Leave a comment

More on exploitative education industry practices for international students, with complicity among governments, education institutions (particularly private), consultants and others.

Not convinced, however, that “taxpayers would be willing to spend more on higher education to support domestic students and protect foreign students from being taken advantage of:”

The record number of international students in Canada is an “asset that is very lucrative,” according to Immigration Minister Marc Miller.

And he’s not kidding. With Canada’s official foreign student numbers at 800,000, and CIBC bank economist Benjamin Tal informing the Liberal cabinet the actual figure is more like 1.3 million, it’s often boasted people on study visas bring about $30 billion a year into the country.

Much of that lucre in Canada, put together by wealthy and middle-income families around the world, goes toward more than 1,600 Canadian public and private learning institutions. The rest is funnelled into the wider economy, including the pockets of big-city landlords.

But a prominent Vancouver businessman and educational philanthropist, Barj Dhahan, who works in higher education in both India and Canada, uses the word greedy to describe the organizations and individuals raking in windfall profits from international students.

The co-founder of the Canada India Education Society, which collaborates with the University of B.C. and Punjabi organizations to educate thousands of students and nurses in India, said he hears stories each week from families of foreign students about how Canada is exploiting and even abusing them.

“They come here because they’ve been sold a dream. And their dreams are dashed,” Dhahan said.

Many international student are upset, or even in despair, when they discover Canadian rents are extreme, their schooling is often shoddy, especially in small private schools, tuition fees are four to eight times that of domestic students, decent jobs are hard to get and their chances of becoming Canadian citizens are low.

Last week, it was learned through access to information that, in 2021, Ottawa’s Immigration Department conducted a survey of 3,700 international students, which found an overwhelming 87 per cent plan to apply for permanent residence in Canada. That’s a spike from 70 per cent in 2020.

Vancouver immigration lawyer and researcher Richard Kurland, who obtained the internal government survey, said there is no way that many aspiring foreign students will be able to obtain coveted citizenship, since there is intense competition for spots.

Given that many families around the planet have literally “bet the farm” to finance their children’s education abroad in hopes they will get immigrant status, Kurland, a frequent adviser to Parliament, believes Canada has a moral obligation to warn of the likelihood of crushed expectations.

The reputation of Canada, and its educational system, is being damaged both here and abroad, says Dhahan, who is also founder of the $45,000 Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature and a major contributor to international programs at UBC, Carleton University in Ottawa, and other institutions.

In addition to questioning the cost and quality of education at Canada’s often-tiny private colleges and language schools, most of which rely almost entirely on foreign nationals, Dhahan is appalled tuition fees for foreign students have soared at many of the country’s large public universities.

Dhahan points, for instance, to how UBC now frequently charges a foreign student seven times more than a domestic student. For instance, one year in UBC’s undergrad arts program costs an international student about $45,000, while the rate is $5,800 for a domestic student. The price tag on other programs can be much higher.

Tuition fees for international students are also exorbitant, he said, at most public and private colleges, where students from India are by far the biggest cohort of international students. Chinese students make up the largest group of international students at universities.

Given that many Canadian universities and colleges don’t want to rely so heavily on foreign students to survive, Dhahan believes taxpayers would be willing to spend more on higher education to support domestic students and protect foreign students from being taken advantage of.

Dhahan said it’s disturbing that a lot of foreign students whose parents are not rich are being encouraged by immigration consultants here and abroad to sign up for six-month programs at some of Canada’s more than 900 private schools, mainly so they can gain a work permit.

“Canadian governments have no policing resources to monitor how many actually study, or how many stay in Canada beyond the six-month program,” Dhahan said. “There is no determination as to who leaves and who stays.”

Since the vast majority of foreign students want to eventually become Canadian citizens, Dhahan and Kurland say they are vulnerable to victimization by seedy employers.

Some desperate students, according to Dhahan and recent reports, are paying employers kickbacks worth tens of thousands of dollars to fill out a government form called a labour market impact assessment, which allows them to work longer in Canada so they can apply for permanent resident status.

Listening to troubled families and students over the years, Dhahan has also heard many variations on news media reports about landlords taking advantage of foreign students.

“I would say the reputations of our world-class public colleges and universities are being tarnished right now.” Good quality public institutions are being lumped together with dubious private ones, Dhahan said. And both, he said, are often demanding “rapacious” and “unjust” tuition fees.

In a reference to the West’s past history of colonialism, which often led to the exploitation of the people of developing nations, Dhahan said: “It’s colonization all over again. Just in a different way.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Foreign-student dreams being crushed in greedy Canada

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Amid record immigration, some experts fear newcomers are ‘falling out of love with Canada’

2023/09/28 Leave a comment

Bit rambling and largely ignores the impact of the larger number of temporary residents coming to Canada as today’s StatsCan report shows over 2 million non-permanent residents.

Some interesting insights by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, Business Council of Canada, Anil Verma, Richard Kurland, and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce:

A historic 431,645 new permanent residents were added to Canada’s population in 2022, but decreasing affordability and a sluggish economy have many immigrants reconsidering a future in Canada.

Immigration advocates and business leaders say it will have troubling consequences for the country. 

Just over a year ago, a survey conducted by Leger on behalf of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship suggested that three out of 10immigrants in Canada aged 35 and under are considering leaving the country within the next two years. The reasons cited were the astronomical cost of living and unrecognized credentials. 

“We think that because we’re not an officially xenophobic country, and because we are more open to newcomers than most other developed countries in the world, that this is therefore just paradise and everyone will come and stay,” says ICC CEO Daniel Bernhard. 

The ICC is a national charity that assists newcomers with the immigration process and integrating into Canadian society. Bernhard says the ICC’s research team could find no official studies about Canada’s immigrant retention rate and are now in the process of conducting one themselves. 

“We do know…that the number of permanent residents who are becoming citizens has nosedived, so these are indications that newcomers are falling out of love with Canada,” says Bernhard. 

In February, the ICC reported that the 2021 census found just 45.7 percent of permanent residents had gone on to become citizens in that previous 10-year period, a sharp decline from 75 percent in 2001.

Canada fell from 9th place in 2016 to 15th in the Global Talent Competitiveness Index and scored poorly on immigration retention. 

“Two-thirds of our members directly recruit newcomers through the immigration system and then the rest of them hire newcomers once they’re already relocated in Canada,” says Trevor Neiman, the director of policy and legal counsel at the Business Council of Canada. 

Neiman, and others in the business community, say this poses a major problem for the country’s economy. 

“Having a sufficient supply of labour underpins our entire economic model,” says Daniel Safayeni, the vice president of policy at the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. “So for businesses, to be able to find and retain the talent that they need is critical, and immigration is part of that equation.”

However, others are skeptical of the alarm bells being rung over these potential departures. 

“We have processed more cases than ever, at a fraction of the cost,” says Richard Kurland, a lawyer and policy analyst at Kurland-Tobe, a law firm specializing in immigration. “We have undergone an upgrade. It is a work in process, not perfect by any means, but what can you say when you get more people we need in huge numbers at the lowest per case cost ever?” 

Canada’s brand is threatened

While noting Canada has a very strong immigration brand that has helped it retain the best and brightest over the years, Neiman says that brand is under threat due to Canada falling behind on immigration backlogs, affordable housing, and credentialing. 

Neiman points out that in the Global Talent Competitiveness Index, Canada fell from 9th place in 2016 to 15th, and scored poorly on immigration retention. 

Bernhard says Canada needs a sufficient working-age population to support the social services promised by the government but that many of the countries that Canada traditionally relies upon for a supply of immigrants are outperforming it in key areas. 

“We do need a fresh infusion of working-age people…there are a lot of other countries that have figured out how to deliver health care at a high quality for less money, they figured out how to build transit at a decent quality for less money, they figured out how to build housing at a decent quality for less money,” says Bernhard. 

Neiman says countries like India and China have worked to curb skilled emigration, resulting in many of their citizens choosing to return home after a period of working or being educated in Canada. 

In 2022, the Times of India reported that many Indian nationals working abroad were returning home due to pandemic-born uncertainties and competitive job offers. Furthermore, Neiman says countries like Australia, who have historically been less open to immigration, have changed their policies to make them more attractive. 

Last August, the Australian government raised its permanent annual immigration quota to 195,000, up from 160,000 in the previous year. Worth noting is that the GCTI ranked Australia in 9th place in 2022, Canada’s former position. 

“Businesses and governments need to be laser-focused on ensuring that Canada is the top choice for newcomers who have so many options, and who are so sophisticated, and can choose wherever in the world they want to be,” says Neiman.

Credentials aren’t recognized 

Bernhard notes that highly regulated professions such as engineering, nursing, law, and medicine have strong entry barriers in Canada. 

“Immigrants to Canada in the economic class tend to be about twice as likely as the average Canadian to hold a university degree,” says Bernhard. “They’re far better educated and tend to actually be considerably younger, so they have more working years ahead of them.” 

Credentials in fields like dentistry and medicine from countries like India and Iran, both sources of large numbers of immigrants, are often not recognized by those industries’ professional colleges in Canada. 

“A lot of people don’t find appropriate employment right away,” says Bernhard. “And eventually that gap shrinks, but the impact on earnings and things like that lasts forever.” 

In the past, these barriers have resulted in legal battles to ensure foreign accreditation is properly recognized, such as in B.C. to ensure that Indian-trained veterinarians could be allowed to practice without undue scrutiny. 

Calls to soften the barriers for people trained abroad in the medical profession have grown in recent years as Canada’s health-care system is increasingly strained by a lack of new doctors and nurses. Bernhard says other barriers exist for other professions as well. 

“What a lot of people do not realize is that there are other softer barriers for people like marketing professionals, HR people, all these non-regulated jobs, where peoples’ experiences are also not being fairly recognized in the workplace,” says Bernhard. “It’s a big problem for Canada, which reports shortages in these areas despite the presence of many people who are qualified and working below their capability.”

Not a new issue

Anil Verma, the professor emeritus of industrial relations and HR management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, does not believe the trend of immigrants cooling to Canada is new at all. 

“Just to give you my personal perspective on this, I emigrated to Canada in 1974, and so now over the last 50 years, I’ve seen the ebb and flow of immigrants coming and going,” says Verma. “It accelerates in the years that the Canadian economy is not doing well. It is much less of a problem during growth years, so there is an economic cycle to this.” 

Safayeni says Ontario’s economy is expected to slow down eventually as a result of higher interest rates, so it’s understandable that businesses are feeling more pessimistic.

“But when you look at the top two concerns underpinning that concern, it’s labour shortages and inflation,” says Safayeni.

Verma believes modern immigration to Canada must be addressed as a long-term issue, and that the country is being affected by a globalizing economy. 

“I think that what has happened, and that is relatively newer, is that there is a global market now in high-tech talent,” says Verma. “If you are a cutting-edge medical researcher, or similarly positioned in your profession or occupation, there are people all over the world hunting for you, or enticing you to move.” 

“Our members are disproportionately using immigration programs to attract highly skilled and highly specialized talent,” says Neiman. “So things like cyber security professionals, engineers, mathematicians.” 

Neiman says the labour shortage situation has changed drastically in the past few years regarding the need to fill gaps in the labour market. 

Record numbers of Canadian workers retired during the pandemic, and from August 2021 to August 2022, yearly retirements rose by over 30 percent. 

Neiman says that while they use the immigration system to address labour shortages, there is a wider interest in highly skilled immigrants with specialized areas of expertise.

“The particular skill set that’s in demand, that kind of a higher skill type of more specialized talent, has also grown as well,” says Neiman. “So I think there’s big structural forces here that are at play.”

Affordability matters

Internal migration may provide an example of how an issue like unaffordability is driving young, educated workers out of Toronto, Canada’s economic centre for the last 50 years, to more affordable cities like Calgary. One of the main reasons cited for Toronto’s unaffordability is the lack of housing supply in the Greater Toronto Area. 

Affordability has traditionally not been an area covered by the Chamber, but Safayeni says it has struck a task force to study the issue. In April, Alberta residents paid $873 less in monthly rent for an apartment, and $387,780 less when buying a house in March. 

Verma says affordability remains a huge problem, and that young people are drawn to urban centres like Vancouver and Toronto, but it becomes a problem when their salaries cannot cover the costs of living. 

Bernhard says the affordability crisis affects everybody, immigrant or non-immigrant. 

“Immigrants are a special class of people, but they also live in society with everybody else, and they’re subjected to the same pressures as everybody else,” says Bernhard. 

Verma, however, says people whose families have settled in Canada would be reluctant to uproot themselves and move away. He says the survey showing three out of 10 permanent residents are considering leaving Canada displays only their opinion, not what will actually happen. 

“I don’t see that this is a big problem. The main reason why people come to Canada is because of better economic opportunities,” says Verma. “Canada is a great place to live…wages are relatively high as compared to the world. They are not as high as in the U.S. but that has been true for the last 50 years.” 

Richard Kurland, the lawyer at Kurland-Tobe, however, says anybody who leaves Canada will be replaced by others.

“You have a bus where 25 percent of the passengers want out, and four times that number of people who want in,” says Kurland. “Anyone who wants to leave, God bless. There are a ton of replacements, with higher human capital scores, due to the nature of Canada’s new selection system.” 

Bernhard says Canada can learn from new immigrants to its benefit. 

“It isn’t just about standing still and replacing old people and hoping for the best. It’s about an optimistic vision for the future,” he said.

“Canada has always been built on that vision for hundreds of years, this is how we succeeded and I think that we need to keep that tradition alive.” 

Geoff Russ is a full-time writer for The Hub. He is based in British Columbia. @GeoffRuss3

Source: Amid record immigration, some experts fear newcomers are ‘falling out of love with Canada’

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Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

2023/09/08 1 Comment

Ignored then and no sign yet of meaningful action today:

North America’s foreign-student system is no longer a humanitarian endeavour to lift up the planet’s best and brightest, and support the developing world.

Instead, it’s become a commercial competition full of marketing rhetoric, which is creating chaos in higher education.

That’s what the West’s leading experts in international education told me 10 years ago.

They were describing how governments and post-secondary institutions were adopting an increasingly cynical attitude toward foreign students.

Philip Altbach, Hanneke Teekens and Jane Knight were ahead of their time in lamenting how international education was turning into a “cash cow” for public and private universities and colleges in the U.S. and especially Canada, where there are at least eight times more per capita than in the U.S.

While the concept of international education continues to have upsides, it’s now becoming obvious to many in Canada that the foreign-student system is creating hard times, especially for students from abroad. Even the Liberal government, long in denial, is starting to admit it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government acknowledges it has pumped up the number of foreign students in Canada to, officially, 900,000. That compares to 225,000 in 2013. And experts say Ottawa’s number is a serious undercount.

The Liberals are still not necessarily admitting the obvious: That governments and post-secondary institutions are addicted to foreign-student spending and fees, which are four times higher than those of domestic students. Ten years ago, foreign students brought $8 billion into Canada, now Ottawa estimates it’s up to $30 billion.

The main problem, however, that has suddenly drawn more attention to foreign students is the out-of-control cost of housing, particularly renting.

International students, say housing analysts, are hiking competition for places to live. The average rent for a one-bedroom in Canada has jumped to a worrying $1,800, according to Rentals.ca. Vancouver is the most extreme in the country, at a devastating average of $3,013. A one-bedroom in Toronto is $2,592.

Foreign students are an expanding factor in such expensive housing — and it’s hurting the study visa holders themselves, who, according to both social media and the mainstream media, are increasingly feeling taken advantage of.

Even Canada’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, last month used the word exploited. And he finally admitted universities and colleges are bringing in far more students than they could possibly provide housing for.

That was before Benjamin Tal, chief economist for the CIBC Capital Markets, told Liberal cabinet ministers the government is dangerously undercounting the number of temporary residents, particularly foreign students, in Canada.

While the government, and Statistics Canada, state there are more than one million non-permanent residents in Canada, Tal’s calculations show there are at least one million more missing from the count. “Housing demand is stronger than what official numbers are telling you and that’s why we’re approaching a zero vacancy rate.”

The government’s calculations, Tal said, have ignored that many foreign workers and students don’t leave the country when their visas expire. They stay on in hopes of applying to become immigrants. Census methods for surveying foreign students, he added, are misleading.

Giacomo Ladas of Rentals.ca says, “International students do add pressure to the rental market,” even while he emphasized it’s not their fault.

“There’s such a supply and demand issue in the rental market right now and they add to this imbalance. The study permits for international students have increased by 75 per cent in the last five years. So, that’s a huge influx of people coming in and nowhere to put them.”

Delegates at a recent Union of B.C. Municipalities’ housing summit heard how rapidly foreign students and other non-permanent residents are adding to demand for housing.

The number of non-permanent residents and newcomers to Metro Vancouver has in five years almost doubled, delegates were told. Foreign students and other recent arrivals own eight per cent of all homes in Metro Vancouver, and account for 25 per cent of renters.

Canada’s housing minister received a lot of media attention in August when he responded to a reporter’s direct question by saying he wouldn’t rule out a cap on international students.

But since then both he and Immigration Minister Marc Miller have backtracked, and Trudeau has warned not to “blame” foreign students.

Miller admitted Canada’s “very lucrative” foreign student system “comes with some perverse effects, some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen to be a backdoor entry into Canada.”

Whatever the Liberal cabinet is starting to admit in the past month, however, the public would be naive to expect any real reforms.

In addition to anxiety over the housing crisis, many economists also worry international students are being taken advantage of by employers to keep wages down. An earlier StatCan study showed up to one out of three foreign students aren’t attending school.

While some representatives of universities and college, especially private ones, are trying to shut down debate by accusing critics of blaming study visa holders for high housing costs and low wages, the reality is those raising concerns can be seen as standing up for people on study visas.

Many people are aware of a high suicide rate among international students, including alarms raised by funeral homes. The largest cohort of foreign students, by far, now comes from India, and it is often South Asian voices in Canada who are pointing to their victimization, including employer abuse and sexual harassment by landlords.

And Vancouver immigration lawyers such as Richard Kurland and George Lee add the federal government’s decision to allow unlimited international students is setting up many for future immigration disappointment.

Canada is building far too big a pool of people who will be highly qualified for permanent resident status, they say. Not everyone can win the immigration points-system competition, which has an annual cutoff.

The trouble is a lot of vested interests are eager for the foreign-student gravy train to keep chugging along, regardless of the unintended suffering it causes — including for students desperate for a place to live.

Source: Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

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Douglas Todd: Chinese interest in emigrating to Canada jumps 28 times

2022/12/15 Leave a comment

Kurland has it right that there is a big difference in interest, based upon web stats, and acting on those interests in terms of applications, as the US interest after Trump’s election demonstrated. 
IRCC web stats “immigrate to Canada” show a comparable increase in Chinese interest in Canada, but only about 21 percent (January-November 2019 compared to 2021). However, applications from China were essentially flat from 2019,  January-October for the same period in 2021 (2022 numbers have a time lag due to data entry delays). Admissions have also remained flat for the same period.
And of course, the share of China as a source of immigrants has fallen over past years for a variety of factors:
I have been following IRCC web stats for four years now and am not finding any significant correlation with applications and admissions:
China’s most popular internet search engine experienced a 28-times surge in residents looking up the terms “conditions to immigrate to Canada” during the populous country’s severe COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
According to an internal Canadian immigration department report obtained under access to information requests by a Vancouver immigration lawyer, the search engine Baidu saw soaring interest in “immigration to Canada” and “immigration” before it suspended use of the terms in April.

Source: Douglas Todd: Chinese interest in emigrating to Canada jumps 28 times

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Why Desperate People Are Suing Immigration Canada

2022/11/25 Leave a comment

Good article and discussion, with good comments by Kareem El-Assal and Richard Kurland, particularly liked Aurland’s contrasting IRCC lack of status updates and application tracking with CRA’s client service:

From January to the end of February, Alejandro Ginares woke up daily at 6 a.m. in order to grab a spot in the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada phone queue.

He went about the business of his day — preparing breakfast, doing dishes and feeding his cat — until eventually, sometimes after eight hours of being on hold, he’d reach the front of the queue and receive a pre-recorded message: “all our agents are busy, try again later.” He’d hang up. If it was early he’d try again. If it was after 3 p.m., when the offices out east close, he’d make dinner, go to bed and start all over again the next day.

While news articles have been filled with stories of long lineups of Canadians stymied while renewing passports, less has been reported on how the pandemic and its knock-on effects have impacted would-be Canadians, whose immigration applications have been left in a backlog that has only increased since the beginning of the pandemic.

In Ginares’s case, he was desperately trying to track down the status of a permanent residency application he’d submitted 15 months before.

Occasionally he’d reach a human being, only to be told that his application was “not in the system.” He was baffled. He had paid the processing fee and had a Canada Post delivery confirmation in hand, certifying that the application had arrived at IRCC. He knew they’d received it. So why wasn’t he in the system?

Ginares eventually reached an agent who promised to help him. A few days later he got a response confirming for certain that his application had not entered the system.

It was then that he realized that IRCC had most likely lost his application.

“It’s awful to be waiting,” he says. “We don’t know if we’re waiting for a purpose or if we’re waiting for nothing.”

Resubmitting his application was risky. It would mean starting all over again. And it would cost another $1,000. He didn’t know what to do.

A geological engineer in Uruguay, Ginares had left his home and family to join his husband, Wendall Seldura, in Canada. The two had met in a cocktail and music bar in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2017. They’d fallen in love immediately and quickly decided that Canada was the country where they’d spend their future.

Ginares knew that permanent residency processing times can often reach 15 months. But he didn’t think it would take 15 months for the system to even receive his application, or approve a work permit.

Back home, Ginares worked, studied and volunteered. Now he feels like he’s stuck in limbo. “I fight every morning when I wake up to find motivation,” he says.

According to data released by IRCC Oct. 31, 2.2 million people are waiting for approval for temporary residence, permanent residence and Canadian citizenship applications. Like Ginares, 1.2 million have waited beyond the standard time expected for their application.

In permanent residency specifically, there are 603,700 applicants. Only 279,700 of these are being processed within standard times; 54 per cent, or 324,000 applications, are not being processed within the times projected by the agency.

B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix recently hit headlines when he called on Ottawa to halt the deportation of Claudia Zamorano, a hospital worker whose family is facing deportation because their applications have not yet been processed.

Nathaniel Preston, Ginares’s immigration consultant, says that he is seeing long wait times for all his clients. His colleagues report the same. “You exist but you don’t. You’re technically not supposed to be here. But maybe you could be here, if they approve the visa, or they restore your status,” he says.

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New data shows big boost in hiring at Canada’s immigration department. ‘What were they doing?’

2022/11/15 Leave a comment

My sense, given under attention to processing efficiencies, automation and AI, is that IRCC had little alternative but to hire more staff. Whether or not there IT modernization initiative, a longer term project, and other initiatives such as more online applications and tracking, will allow IRCC to wean itself from the “just throw bodies” remains to be seen.

And of course, the government is unwilling to revise its targets downwards to align with its capacity:

Only eight months into 2022, Canada already received almost as many permanent and temporary resident applications it did in 2019 before the pandemic.

After a two-year slump, the engine of the country’s immigration system is running above its capacity in 2019 by 45 per cent and the number of permanent and temporary residence applicants processed through the system is bound to exceed the 3.2 million recorded in the pre-COVID year.

According to never-before-published data, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada currently has 8,104 front-line operations staff, up from 5,583 in March 2019 — with the bulk of the extra work force added since the beginning of 2022. That is despite the number of staff on leave having crept up from 559 in March 2019 to 733 in October.

Those employees who continued to telework have also come down from almost 100 per cent at the beginning of the pandemic to 71.8 per cent last month.

“More people can do more files,” immigration lawyer and policy analyst Richard Kurland told the Star. “Combined with the artificial intelligence decision making system, it should result in greater volumes of decisions.

“You’re having the A.I. do the heavy lifting. You have more humans to take care of files that need that human touch now on track, and they’re on the right path.”

But there are also numbers that immigration officials would rather see in check:

  • Web forms, a main mechanism for applicants to communicate with the department, rose from 1.61 million in 2020 to 2.26 million in 2021 and 2.42 million as of September this year;
  • Access-to-information requests, another key tool for inquiries, spiked from 98,042 pre-pandemic to 204,549 in 2021, before declining to 122,016 to date this year;
  • The number of lawsuits against the immigration department for a court order to compel officials to process a file rocketed from 112 cases in 2019 to 963 in 2022.

Not all critics are convinced the immigration system is back on track.

“Why do we have 45 per cent more people processing applications yet still have these backlogs?” said Vancouver immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens. “I’m curious as to why it feels like processing times just keep getting worse in numerous programs and certain visa offices. I don’t understand.

“Is it glitches with new tech? Are there IT issues at certain visa posts? Are there tech issues with working from home? It’s hard just to know what’s going on from the data because the ‘why’ is missing and the department won’t say.”

Ravi Jain of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association says the ramped-up staffing levels at the department did not jive with the “massive slowdown” in people’s experience with the immigration system. He would like to see a royal commission report into the immigration delays and backlogs.

“What were they doing? I don’t think they were doing much,” said Jain. “They can’t get away with this. It just feels criminal to me because it’s affecting people in so many different ways.”

As of Aug. 31, Canada received more than 2.9 million new permanent and temporary resident applications through the major immigration programs. With four months remaining in 2022, those numbers are certain to push the total above the 3.2 million files in 2019.

Over the time period, immigration officials processed 2.25 million immigration applications — 207,590 permanent and 2.04 million temporary residents, compared to the total of 3,225,130 (235,257 permanent and 2.99 million temporary residents) recorded in 2019.

Source: New data shows big boost in hiring at Canada’s immigration department. ‘What were they doing?’

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