Foreign Sponsored Spouses of Canadians to Face Tougher Rules

Posted on March 19, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

A proposed new federal rule aims to clamp down on immigration fraud committed by foreign spouses of Canadians. This type of fraud involves a foreigner marrying a Canadian and getting their Canadian spouse to sponsor them for Canadian permanent resident status, then getting a divorce once they have gotten their permanent residency.

The new rule would allow Immigration Canada to deport a foreign spouse if the marriage does not last two years. The proposal for a two year probationary period will be open to public input until early April. The Canadian government is planning to enact it in late summer.

The Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration has already started tightening spousal visa rules. On March 2nd it ruled that a foreign spouse who divorced her husband had to wait five years before sponsoring a new partner.

Marriage fraud has become the focus of much attention recently with a series of high profile cases involving Canadians being defrauded by their foreign spouses. The most notable of these is the one of Lainie Towell, who married Fode Mohamed Soumahm, a native of Guinea, and sponsored him for Canadian permanent resident status, only to have him walk out on her three weeks after he had arrived in Canada. Mr. Soumahm was eventually deported, three years after arriving in Canada.

Canadian Government to increase Investor Program Financial Requirements

Posted on March 16, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Last year, only 30 minutes after it began, the federal government’s investor program reached its quota of 700 applicants. Now Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney wants to increase the amount immigration applicants need to invest to become permanent residents of Canada.

As reported in the National Post, Mr. Kenney said:

“I’ve always said that I believe Canada has been underselling itself through our Immigrant Investor Program ..

They get permanent residency in the best country in the world for lending Canadian governments $800,000 for five years … so it seems to me, given there are millions of millionaires around the world who would love to come to Canada, we can do better than that and we’re looking at ways we can redesign the program to extract more bang for the buck.”

Instead of an $800,000 loan to the federal government for five years, Mr. Kenney said he would prefer that that immigrant investors be required to make a permanent investment in Canada, and to show that the investment created a certain number of jobs for a certain number of years.

That is how the federal government’s entrepreneur program, suspended last July, worked. That program is currently being revamped to attract more “high value innovators” and is expected to be re-instated soon.

Mr. Kenney also said that the federal government is considering increasing the size of the required investment, which is currently less than the $1 million required by the investor programs of Australia and the US, and the equivalent of $1.6 million required by the UK’s.

Canadian Immigration Minister to announce new Entrepreneur Program

Posted on March 14, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Canadian Citizen and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says that the Canadian government will introduce its new immigrant entrepreneur program soon, which will target “high value innovators” and not be saddled with the problems of the previous entrepreneur program.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Mr. Kenney said that the previous program, that was suspended in July of last year, was overly burdensome and ineffective.

The Globe and Mail article notes that the previous program had a backlog of 10,000 applications, with a processing rate of only 1,000-1,500 per year, meaning a best-case clearing time of eight years.

The Immigration Minister said that what will be done with the backlog has not been determined. One option the Canadian government is considering is allowing provinces to cherry pick applicants from the backlog that they believe are the most promising, so that applicant processing time is determined more by the needs of provinces for applicants’ skills and experience, rather than the criteria used in the old program of time spent in the queue.

Mr. Kenney said that New Zealand has used a similar process since 2003, when it faced a large backlog like the one Canada currently faces. A pilot program allowing provinces to mine the backlog has already started, he said.

Canadian Immigrants See Declining Health After Arriving

Posted on March 1, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

A study by Louisa Taylor under a fellowship from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research has found that Canadian immigrants are healthier than the average Canadian when they first arrive to Canada, but subsequently see a rapid decline in their health.

In an article in the Vancouver Sun, she writes:

Since the 1990s a growing body of data has suggested that most newcomers arrive in Canada healthier than the native-born population, only to have that advantage erode over time. New immigrants tend to live longer than the Canadian-born population, but within a decade of resettlement, their mortality rates creep up, as do their rates of chronic disease. In looking at almost a decade of data in its biannual National Population Health Survey, Statistics Canada also found immigrants were almost twice as likely as native-born Canadians to report feeling unwell. Recent non-European immigrants — the largest proportion of newcomers we currently admit — were the most likely to report their health declining from good or excellent to fair or poor.

This phenomenon of declining health upon immigration is known as the ‘healthy immigrant effect’.

Immigrants from the US and Europe see a smaller healthy immigrant effect, while those from India, China and the Philippines, see a much larger effect, and have significantly higher rates of chronic diseases than the general population.

Some possible causes that Taylor suggests could be behind the healthy immigrant effect are:

A high number of recent immigrants are non-Caucasians, who have ethnicity-specific diseases that Canadian medical practitioners are not accustomed to treating

Many recent immigrants come from countries where preventive care is uncommon, and therefore do not respond to calls by Canadian health agencies to make use of preventive health care

Many immigrants from non-Western countries having difficulty communicating with medical practitioners due to cultural and language barriers

Taylor writes that practitioners are beginning to better understand the unique needs of newly arrived immigrants groups and are collaborating to form better strategies to help them maintain their health.

Canadian Government to Clamp Down on "Birth Tourism"

Posted on February 27, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

A Hong Kong newspaper’s investigation into the practice of immigration consultants there coaching pregnant Chinese women on how to enter Canada without having their pregnancy detected, in order for their children to be born in Canada and receive Canadian citizenship, has prompted action by Citizenship and Immigration Canada to try to put a stop to the practice.

On Sunday, Citizenship and Immigration spokeswoman Candice Malcolm told Postmedia News, “we are aware of crooked consultants who encourage pregnant women to illegally travel to Canada to give birth and gain access to Canada’s considerable benefits”.

One option being considered by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is to end automatic birthright citizenship, known as Jus Soli, so that being born on Canadian soil alone does not grant citizenship.

Canada and the United States are the only developed nations with Jus Soli and there have been many calls in both to abolish the legal right.

Canadian Government to Provide Microloans to Immigrants in Saskatchewan

Posted on February 24, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

In an effort to help newly arrived immigrants update their education credentials to Canadian standards, the Canadian government, in partnership with the provincial government of Saskatchewan, will be offering microloans to new immigrants who live in Saskatchewan for education and training programs, through the ‘Immigrant Access Fund’.

Saskatchewan will be the first province to launch a government lending initiative supported by the Canadian government’s foreign credential recognition loans pilot.

The goal of the federal program is to help immigrants overcome obstacles they face in getting the Canadian credentials that would allow them to qualify for jobs in their field of study. It is hoped the program will help immigrants better integrate into the Canadian economy.

A microloan is a small loan that does not require the recipient to have credit history or collateral.

Can. Immigration Minister Proposes New Bill to Toughen Canadian Refugee Admittance

Posted on February 23, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has proposed a new bill “Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act”, that would toughen rules for asylum seekers coming to Canada.

The new bill would reduce the time taken to assess a standard refugee application from 1000 to 45 days. This would reduce the incidence of immigration authorities being unsuccessful in deporting asylum seekers applying under false pretences, due to the long duration of their time in Canada.

As the National Post writes, the longer the application process for an asylum seeker to Canada is, the less likelihood there is they will be deported:

Reducing the time it takes federal officials to examine claims for asylum is critical. The longer an applicant gets to remain in Canada before a decision is made, the less likely bogus applicants are to be expelled. People who stay here three or more years waiting for their cases to be adjudicated put down roots. They establish homes, have children, develop friendships and forge connections in the community. Then, if their applications are rejected, they plead that it is unfair to expel such a well-established new Canadian.

The new bill would also make biometric readings for foreigners getting Canadian visas mandatory, and introduce more powers to deal with human smuggling.

Hundreds of Canadian Immigration Consultants will meet in Mississauga

Posted on February 14, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Six hundred immigration consultants are registered to gather at the First General Meeting (FGM) for members of the Canada Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council (ICCRC) in Mississauga on Friday. This will be the largest gathering of Canadian immigration consultants in history.

The ICCRC is Canada’s immigration consulting regulatory body, and replaced the previous self-regulatory body of the immigration industry, the CSIC, last year.

The regulatory body has new investigative powers granted to it by Bill C-35, an Act to Amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which came into law on June 30, 2011. This legislation gives the federal government new abilities to crack down on unlicensed immigration consultants and otherwise illegal immigration consulting activities.

The ICCRC, unlike the old regulatory body, is also directly answerable to the Immigration Minister of Canada, Jason Kenney.

The keynote address for Friday’s FGM will be given by Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Deputy Minister, Neil Yeates.

Jonathan Kay of National Post says Immigrants turning Canada into Nation of ‘Tiger Moms’

Posted on February 13, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

An editorial by Jonathan Kay in the National Post, published on Friday, argues that immigrants are turning Canada into a nation of ‘Tiger Moms’, a term that refers to demanding Chinese mothers who push her children to excel academically, due to the competition that immigrant students from Asian countries are giving to native born Canadian students:

But the issue is more fundamental than that: Competition from Asian students is coming to shape the parenting practices and scholastic expectations of millions of native-born Canadian parents.

It used to be that upwardly mobile native-born parents could count on getting any reasonably bright child into a good private school and university. Now, those children are in competition with Asian immigrants who spend their weekends drilling math and spelling-bee lists.

Kay describes how the phenomenon of status-focused immigrant students and their parents had affected his own wife and the parenting of their children:

For native-born Canadian parents, that’s a scary thing. Last year, my wife read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, and laughed at the author’s insanely Type-A mothering techniques. But when she put the book down, the first words out of her mouth were “Should we put our kids in piano lessons?”

And so we did. We also sent our youngest child to after-school reading lessons, even though I’m not sure she needed them. The competition from highly motivated immigrants is making stressed out Tiger Mothers of us all.

The article explains how this recent trend has a historical precedent in the increase in Jewish immigration and academic excellence in the early 20th century, as the Jewish proportion of the student bodies of prestigious American universities shot up, reaching 28% in Harvard and 40% in Columbia by 1925, alarming the WASP establishment which instituted quotas in reaction.

Quotas in this day and age wouldn’t be politically palatable, and in any case wouldn’t be ethical, writes Kay, as they would be racist and deny the children of immigrants, who were promised a better life in Canada, the opportunities available to other Canadians.

We can expect to see continued change in Canadian culture and in particular educational institutions, as the population of immigrants, a high percentage of whom are highly educated and expect their children to follow in their footsteps, increases by millions over the next few decades.

Canadian-Gov Backed Website to Help Immigrants Find Jobs in Toronto Launched

Posted on February 10, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) has launched a new online network, www.networksforimmigrants.ca, to help Canadian immigrants find jobs.

The website will make pre-existing networks of professional Canadian immigrants easily accessible to employers in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) through a search feature and a directory.

The website is part of an initiative, called PINs (Professional Immigrant Networks), that started in 2009, to help immigrants, whose unemployment rate of 8.4% is above that of native born Canadians of 5.4%, connect to employers.

The initiative has received $100,000 in funding from Citizenship and Immigration Canada and from Scotiabank through a sponsorship agreement.

TRIEC hopes to expand its website to other regions of Canada to make it a national job network for immigrants.