September 27th, 2024 at 09:20 am

Canada Immigration Minister Alarming Warning on Broken Immigration System

A growing number of international students are requesting refugee status, according to Immigration Minister Mark Miller, which he called a worrying trend. Over 12,500 international students in Canada filed for refugee status last year, a roughly 600% rise from the previous year.

Data from the immigration agency shows that 12,950 persons with study permits filed asylum requests in the first eight months of 2024. It’s just another illustration of how the Visa student program has been administered with little regard for the foreseeable, unavoidable adverse effects.

Although Mr. Miller has made sluggish progress in tightening the system he inherited, during the last ten years, especially during the unrestrained period from 2021 to 2023, the system has planted a large garden of unexpected consequences. It is just now bearing fruit; a bountiful harvest is on the horizon. The majority of the issues stemmed from something basic: an inability to count.

Because most temporary residents, regardless of the fine print they signed to obtain their visas, arrived to become permanent residents, Canada’s temporary immigration streams are currently far larger than the permanent stream matters.

Because they mistakenly believe that a diploma from these universities plus experience serving coffee at Tim Hortons equates to world-beating abilities they can use back home, international students are not paying tuition at low-fidelity higher education institutions.

They arrived to stay and believed they were purchasing, but there are far fewer permanent residents—roughly 500,000 annually—than there are temporary residents—a staggering 2.8 million this past spring—many of whom are reserved for immigrants arriving directly from abroad.

The calculation is flawed. It resembles a Taylor Swift concert where the planning team made a mistake. After admitting hundreds of thousands of fans into the stadium, they realized they only had a small portion of those seats available for tonight’s performance. Now, they are relying on the silent departure of those who did not have tickets. I wish you luck with that.

Further Details

A little over half of the 2.8 million temporary residents are either former students on a Post-Graduate Work Permit or students on Visas. While many will not, some will be granted permanent residency. In the upcoming months and years, the visas of hundreds of thousands of people will expire. Many will not go home; some may obey the regulations. That shouldn’t be shocking.

Desperate people from developing nations believed that paying for Puppy Mill College with a Tim Horton job would guarantee them Canadian citizenship, or at least a good chance at it. Private companies and public universities sold our best public good citizenship in Canada, allowing and encouraging a sloppy cash grab. However, the targeted students were generally not the people our immigration system was designed to help.

The University of Waterloo, the MIT of the north, is the smartest and brightest university if there ever was one, and in 2019 it was granted visas for 243 new Visa students. Less than 1,900 foreign students attended Waterloo four years later as the number of international students in Canada skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, new student permits at Toga College, a public university established to provide accessible and useful education to residents of the Kitchen or Water region, increased dramatically from an already excessive 7,886 in 2019 to nearly 32,000 in 2023.

The goal of the student visa program should be to draw applicants who are more competent and educated than the typical Canadian, therefore increasing GDP per capita and future earnings potential. Attracting the best students with options should be the goal, but Ottawa and the Ontario government in this case opted otherwise.

If the only objective is to raise a lot of money, then Waterloo and similar colleges need to receive the majority of the currently scarce visa supply. For overseas students, the annual tuition at Toga College ranges from $155,000 to $116,000 per year. Depending on the program, Waterloo’s annual undergraduate tuition and fees for non-Canadians range from $50,000 to $773,000.

Additional Details

Two expanding patterns are probably going to emerge in the upcoming months and years. There will be a surge in the number of people from those groups attempting to make their status legal and permanent through the filing of a refugee claim, as well as an increase in the number of formerly legal temporary residents who, instead of returning home when their visas expire, will try to remain as illegal and underground permanent residents.

According to data gathered from the immigration service, individuals holding temporary residency permits have submitted 119,830 refugee claims thus far this year. The backlog of cases at the Immigration and Refugee Board increased to nearly 240,000 as of last month from just over 60,000 two years prior. The board makes decisions on roughly 6,000 cases a month, but throughout the past six months, the number of new claims it has received has tripled.

Both you and the hundreds of thousands of others here on temporary visas are capable of doing the math. Instead of concentrating on the MIT of the north, we give the puppy mills in Southwestern Ontario priority, with predictable results.

The time to wait for its internet changes is over, as we prepare for the next critical moment in our warped immigration system. Livelihoods at risk and system integrity are more at risk than they have ever been.

It remains to be seen if lawmakers will step up to the plate or keep pushing the issue farther, but one thing is for sure: unless significant adjustments are implemented, the gaps in our immigration system will only widen and have serious repercussions for everyone concerned.