Ravi Jain is an Ontario-based immigration lawyer at Jain Immigration Law. He has served as the national chair of the Canadian Bar Association Immigration Section and as a president of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association.
I used to brag at international conferences about how well Canada integrates immigrants, and how no mainstream Canadian political party is opposed to immigration. But an anti-immigrant sentiment is now on the rise – and I believe this is because federal and provincial governments across party lines have failed in terms of “program integrity,” to borrow government buzzwords.
Last October, The Globe reported that normal eligibility requirements, such as showing sufficient funds or demonstrating they would leave after their visit, were waived for up to 449,000 approved visitor visas, despite an internal department warning that this could lead to “eroding public confidence in managed immigration” and that additional refugee claims would result. The policy took effect in February, 2023, and lasted until the end of that year – but it would have been a secret, if Radio-Canada hadn’t reported on it last July. Predictably, refugee claims have shot up. La Presse reported last week that the monthly number of visitor-visa holders arriving and making refugee claims more than quintupled year-over-year in April, from 1,815 to 10,170.
The Liberals also removed a visa requirement for Mexicans shortly after coming to power in 2015, when refugee claims from Mexico were at about 100 a year. Such claims had increased steadily to 24,000 a year by the time the government finally acted in February, reimposing the visa but exempting those with a valid U.S. visa or those who’d had a previous Canadian visitor visa within the past 10 years.
Altogether, according to the UNHCR, Canada received 146,800 new refugee claims in 2023, up from 94,000 the previous year, making Canada the fifth-largest recipient of such claims last year.
The dramatic surge in temporary residents to 2.8 million, from about 1 million in 2021, is another failure. The majority of this category is comprised of international students and their spouses, as well as postgraduate work-permit holders.
The federal government should have imposed international-student visa caps years earlier, and could have outright banned student visas for private-public college partnerships long ago. Of course, provincial governments – Ontario, in particular – share much of the blame for becoming dependent on international-student tuition fees and for their lax approach to substandard private colleges.
The recent announcement that caregivers will be able to receive permanent residence upon arrival, rather than being required to first work for an employer under a work permit, is another head-scratcher. English and French requirements have been lowered, and instead of a postsecondary education, only a high-school degree is needed. But will employer families assist with this process when the person being sponsored can simply arrive as a permanent resident with the right to then choose to work in a different field entirely? And while the program is intended to prevent caregivers from working for abusive employers, it ignores the existing program for “open” work permits for foreign workers in cases of abuse.
Perhaps the greatest failure in terms of program integrity relates to representatives. In 2019, during the review period for the second attempt at regulating non-lawyer immigration consultant representatives, the Liberal government decided to allow for a third attempt. With a federal election looming at the time, this may have been because of a perception that immigration consultants could influence outcomes in Ontario’s politically crucial 905 region. There are about 12,000 immigration consultants compared with about 2,000 immigration lawyers, so it’s no exaggeration to say that they have a major impact on our system; some falsely promise a guaranteed pathway to permanent residency for international students. There have been countless stories in the media about such consultants selling jobs and assisting with fake refugee claims. Their cost to our system is enormous, in terms of unmerited application filings, as well as frivolous and expensive tribunal and court appeals.
Sadly, while temporary residents are being blamed for hospital wait times and a lack of affordable housing, they are often victimized first by immigration consultants in their own communities and then by government policies, such as the one currently being considered to limit coveted postgraduate work permits by linking them to areas in which there are labour shortages.
Then again, maybe the immigration consultants will be proven right if the government chooses to solve the crisis with the ultimate program-integrity capitulation: a blanket amnesty. Consider this CBC headline from last month: “One way to decrease temporary residents is to make them permanent, minister suggests.”
If our immigration system is losing integrity – along with public confidence – then governments have themselves to blame.