Canada’s Federal Investor Program for Immigrants in Limbo

Posted on June 15, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

The size of the loan applicants are required to make under the Federal Immigrant Investor Program increased from $400,000 to $800,000 in 2010, and is expected to increase again in the near future, due to huge demand for Canadian permanent residency status from wealthy individuals abroad.

The Federal Immigrant Investor Program (FIIP), which allows foreign individuals with net worths of more than $1.6 million to become Canadian permanent residents by lending a provincial government $800,000 for five years without interest, is scheduled to start accepting applications in two weeks to fill a new annual quota, but it is still not clear as to whether the federal government will suspend, modify, or allow the program to continue as it is until a new program has been designed to replace it.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had previously said that the FIIP should be changed to require applicants to make more active and long-term investments in Canada than the current five year loan requirement, or increase the sum they must lend without interest, given the huge demand for the program and room the government has to increase the investment required under it.

Last year, the program’s quota of 700 was filled in 30 minutes, with some wealthy foreigners chartering private jets to be the first to submit their applications to the Sydney NS office when it started accepting applications.

The Minister said that the size of the investment that the program would require would depend in part on whether the US government renews its investor program in September. If it doesn’t, Canada would see even greater demand for permanent residence from wealthy foreigners, and be able to increase the price by a greater margin.

The recently passed budget bill also grants the Department of Immigration and Citizenship the power to craft its own short term immigration programs, each limited to 2,750 applications per year, to meet the demands of changing economic conditions, and the department is looking to use this new power to create complementary investor programs with alternative requirements for applicants, like making an investment in a Canadian startup.

Canada Rises 3 Spots to 4th Place in Global Peace Index

Posted on June 12, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Image of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan in July 2002. Canada's ranking in the latest Global Peace Index improved due to a drawdown of the country's combat operations in Afghanistan in 2011.

The Global Peace Index (GPI), an annual ranking of national peacefulness produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace, was released today, and showed Canada rising three places, to 4th place among the 158 nations in the index.

The index evaluates a nation’s GPI score by 23 dimensions of peace, ranging from ‘perceived criminality in society’ to ‘death from external conflict’, and saw most of the world, outside of MENA (Middle East and North Africa), improve its score from last year.

Canada’s position improved due to a decrease in the number of casualties it suffered in the conflict in Afghanistan, as a result of the country withdrawing most of its troops and ending combat operations in Afghanistan in 2011.

Improvements in other countries’ GPI scores were largely due to a decrease in militarization as governments made austerity-driven defence cuts.

Refugee Law, Bill C-31, Set to Pass Today

Posted on June 11, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Bill C-31, the Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, is set to be passed by the Conservative majority in the Commons today

Bill C-31, a proposed set of laws to reform Canada’s refugee system, is expected to pass the House of Commons today.

The bill would give the Department of Citizenship and Immigration the discretion to create a list of ‘safe’ democratic countries with a reputation of respecting human rights, and the authority to reject refugee claims by individuals from those countries and deport the claimants within 45 days, rather than the typical 1,000 days that refugee claims take to process.

The new law would also deny claimants from safe countries the right to appeal the refugee board’s decision, which would prevent the situation of claimants staying in Canada for years through a lengthy process of appeals.

Bill C-31 is largely a response to a flood of Roma asylum seekers from Hungary this year that has outnumbered claimants from any other country.

In an email explaining the need for the new law, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s press secretary, Alexis Pavlich, said that “[v]irtually all asylum claims from European Union citizens in 2011 were abandoned or withdrawn by the claimant or rejected by the independent Board, with Canadian taxpayers left to foot the bill for the expensive health care and welfare benefits these bogus claimants received”.

** June 12th 2012 update **

Bill C-31, as had been expected, passed the House of Commons yesterday, with 159 voting for, and 132 voting against.

Getting Canadian Permanent Residence Could Get Easier For Temporary Foreign Workers

Posted on June 8, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney at a press conference discussing planned changes to Canada's immigration program that the government believes will make it better meet Canada's economic needs

Under current rules, a temporary foreign worker must have worked full-time for 24 of the last 36 months to qualify for permanent residence under the Canadian Experience Class (CEC) program. Under proposed changes, the required months of full time work would be reduced to 12.

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, speaking about the proposed change, said that “thousands of highly-skilled foreign nationals are working successfully in Canada on a temporary basis”, and his department wanted to expedite their transition to permanent residence as they have Canadian work experience and are proficient in English or French, and so “are set for success”.

The Canadian government has sought to transform the country’s immigration program in recent years to make it more focused on admitting immigrants that contribute to the Canadian economy, as data has emerged suggesting the country has not been doing a job in this regard, with a growing gap between the average incomes and unemployment rates of newly arrived immigrants and native-born Canadians and longer-term immigrants.

Canadian work experience and job offers from Canadian employers are seen as key indicators of an applicant’s prospects for economic integration in Canada, and the government has been looking to expand those programs, like the temporary foreign worker stream of the Canadian Experience Class program, that assess applicants according to these criteria.

‘Super Visa’ a Big Hit, Over 3500 Granted Since Dec.

Posted on June 7, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

A grandfather plays with his granddaughter. The Super Visa lets parents and grandparents of Canadian permanent residents and citizens visit Canada for up to 10 years without being required to apply for visa renewals and extensions. (Burpelson AFB)

The new Super Visa, a special visa for the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens and permanent residents, has been granted to over 3,500 applicants since its introduction in December of last year, according to the Canadian Immigration Ministry.

The Ministry said that 83 percent of applications have thus far been approved, with an average processing time of less than eight weeks.

The Parent and Grandparent Super Visa was introduced as a replacement for the parent and grandparent category of the family sponsorship for permanent residence program, which was temporarily suspended in November 2011 in order to stem the build-up in the backlog of sponsorship applications in the parent and grandparent category.

The new visa allows holders to visit Canada for up to 10 years, and stay for up to two years on each visit without being required to get an extension after six months as required by holders of regular visitor visas.

Gov. Agencies Now Permitted to Share Information on Immigration Rep Misconduct

Posted on June 6, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Statue of Justicia in Ottawa Canada. New legal provisions in Bill C-35 allow government agencies to share information on professional misconduct by immigration representatives with governing bodies that license and regulate them.

Rules in place since April 10th give Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) the legal authority to share information on professional misconduct by immigration representatives with governing bodies.

CIC regularly receives complaints and tips from the public about unethical or illegal conduct by immigration representatives, but until the April 10th operation bulletin that implemented the information-sharing provisions of Bill C-35, has not had the authority to share that information with governing bodies like the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council (ICCRC), which licenses and regulates immigration consultants.

Examples of the type of conduct that government agencies can now share allegations or evidence of are:

Failing to provide services promised to a client in an agreement
Making guarantees that the representative not capable of ensuring
Misrepresenting Canada’s immigration processes and requirements
Counselling clients to provide false information

To reduce the possibility of being defrauded, CIC recommends that people who are looking to pay for immigration representation ensure that their representative is licensed in their provincial or federal jurisdiction. A list of all immigration consultants licensed by the ICCRC to provide paid immigration consultation in Canada is available on their website.

Study: Learning Canadian Culture/Customs, Not Just Language, Essential for Immigrants’ Success

Posted on June 4, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

New immigrants taking a computer class as part of the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program (City of Peterborough)

A study released on Thursday finds that the success of Canada’s immigrants rests not just on their English and French language skills, but also their knowledge of Canadian culture.

The study authors, Tracey Derwing and Erin Waugh, advise that the language training programs for immigrants that the federal government funds, like the Language Instruction for Newcomers (LINC) program, be refocused to place a greater emphasis on helping new Canadians acquire pragmatic skills and Canadian cultural knowledge.

The study, Language Skills and the Social Integration of Canada’s Adult Immigrants, was done for the Institute for Research on Public Policy and based its conclusions on several research findings on the language proficiency levels of immigrants, including a seven-year longitudinal study that followed two groups of immigrants, one Slavic language speakers, and the other Mandarin speakers, to observe their progress over the period.

The data from the longitudinal study shows that Mandarin speakers acquired lower levels of both official Canadian language skills and national cultural knowledge than Slavic language speakers. It found that among the Mandarin speakers, many did not know their Canadian born neighbours after seven years, and were less likely to be aware of local events than their Slavic-language speaking counterparts. This isolation from the Canadian population further limited the opportunity for Mandarin speakers to develop their language skills.

The authors believe the differences in the experiences of the two groups are due to Mandarin being more distinct from English than Slavic languages, which are in the same language family as English, and more cultural overlap existing between Slavic-language speakers and native-born Canadians, for example in a shared interest in hockey, than between Mandarin speakers and average Canadians.

The authors recommend that immigrant-focused government and other organizations expand outreaches to help immigrants network in Canada, in order to help them develop the “soft skills” needed to integrate in the economy, and to work to raise awareness among native-born Canadians about the challenges immigrants face and strategies for interacting with them.