Why are asylum claims skyrocketing in Canada? | About That

the number of people claiming asylum in Canada has risen steadily over the past few years but between 2022 and now it has skyrocketed and 90% of those claims are being made in just two provinces both of which are now struggling and asking the federal government for help they're bringing these people in and God God bless them but they aren't funding it the problem is urgent now there's no doubt that some of this spike is related to just how many people are living in dangerous situations around the world right now but what else explains this sudden

rise according to un data a few years ago Canada cracked the top 10 countries receiving Asylum claims but last year this country shot up to number five and in 2024 if the current trajectory continues Canada could reach the top three we have watered down the screening so significantly on our immigration program 3 million people over 7% of our population are temporary residence that is unprecedented how the government didn't anticipate this is is quite [Music] troubling if you're fleeing persecution or violence in your home country and you're looking to claim Refugee status somewhere safer you have

a couple of options one you can apply as part of a resettlement program these programs exist across North America and Europe they generally accept refugees from war torn areas and they essentially hand pick a certain number of people to resettle in their country another option for someone fleeing violence is to just physically go to another country and file an asylum claim once you're on that country's soil Canada has welcomed hundreds of thousands of people through the first stream its resettlement program which this year has been heavily focused on Ukraine but it's usually pretty insulated from

that second kind of uncontrolled migration mostly because of our geography Canada is surrounded by ocean on three sides and really far away from most other countries you don't have the same issues like with the UK and the channel and people coming in through Europe that way you don't have the issue with people coming in through Mexico and all of you know South and Central America coming into the United States you just don't have that we're just protected geographically before last year about half of Asylum claims filed in Canada came from Canada's only neighbor the us

the vast majority crossing over by foot in Quebec but the government closed that roxom road crossing in early 2023 now less than 10% of Canada's Asylum Seekers are coming over the US border and yet like we said Asylum claims have skyrocketed since then so where are these tens of thousands of new claims coming from well according to the analysts we spoke to around the same time the Canadian government signed that agreement with the US they also made it significantly easier for people to get here by air Asylum Seekers being among those people when they got

the opportunity to step on Canadian soil they said this is my chance I'm going to make an asylum seeking claim and try and stay in Canada over the long term here's what happened traditionally if you wanted to travel to Canada from one of the countries on this list there are 140 of them you couldn't just book a flight and expect to pass through customs you needed a visitor visa and to prove that you had plans to return home the reason this list exists according to the analysts we spoke to is that these countries are considered

higher risk for Asylum claims we want to make sure that um officers are uh convinced that an applicant has enough establishment in their home country and there's a clear purpose of why they're coming to Canada they're not going to overstay before 2023 if you were from one of these countries you had to show a return ticket you had to show where you were staying and you had to prove that you had the money to support yourself while you were visiting but then at the beginning of 2023 the Canadian government quietly decided to wave those screening

requirements for the rest of the year the reason they said was to help produce a massive backlog of over 2 million visitor applications in the system because they were facing such large backlogs the government came up with an internal policy of waving the Eligibility Assessment so they were less stringent about reviewing some of these applications to come here on temporary visas because they just wanted to get through the backlog and according to an internal memo that the Globe and Mail got a hold of around the time of the decision the government knew that this might

have consequences writing that not all applicants would be genuine visitors and that the department might expect an extra 8600 Asylum claims as a result in real numbers Canada saw more than 24,000 additional Asylum claims from people landing at airports in 2023 when they're not vetted if anyone who anyone who's been in the industry a while knows that you know if you do that then there are people that are more economic migrants economic migrants meaning people who are looking to come to Canada to build a better life as opposed to say fleeing a war and the

analysts we spoke to say that could be why the makeup of Canada's Asylum claims looks so different from the rest of the world why so many claimants are coming from places like Mexico or India as opposed to Ukraine or South Sudan now these visitor screening measures came back at the beginning of this year it was always meant to be a temporary change but the government made some tweaks Tred to automate some of that screening process and according to the analysts we spoke to there are concerns it's not nearly as thorough as it used to be

if an application is determined to be based on the algorithms that IC developed a lowrisk application then it's going to be approved 99% of the time without an officer really going in and looking at those documents and just look at the number of people who claimed Asylum at airports in the first eight months of this year they haven't leveled off in fact 2024 is on track to exceed last year's numbers but people arriving by air is just one part of this equation Asylum claims are also increasingly coming from people who are already [Music] here in

the past 6 months or so Canada has seen a significant uptick of Asylum claims coming from one unexpected Group International students and I say unexpected because in order to become an international student in Canada you need to prove that you're financially pretty well off and yet in just the first half of 2024 there were almost 13,000 Asylum claims from this group that's almost triple what we saw in all of 2022 and it's something that the immigration Minister told global news that he sees as an alarming new trend it's frankly quite alarming uh given the volumes

of people that come to this country in theory with the proper financial capacity to live and to pay their tuition fees which are four times what Canadians pay U but it's becoming an alarming Trend according to the analyst we spoke to part of the issue here is that most of these students may not have come with the intention to study and leave that they intended to stay all along in fact for many years the government's own slogan for the international student program was study explore work stay but the second half of that slogan has gotten

harder and harder to achieve people say well they weren't guaranteed PR status no of course they weren't guaranteed but there was clearly they were sold an expectation we're sold an expectation that if you come here and study here we want you as new immigrants and now when you change the rules of the game and and move the goal posts I think you know it's it's not fair this trory of study explore work stay was relatively realistic just a few years ago you come to Canada to study for a few years get some Canadian work experience

through a temporary work permit use that to polish off your resume and then apply for permanent residency and chances were good that you'd be approved but today there are too many applicants and not enough spots there's been a huge increase in the number of international students the numbers are quite staggering frankly I mean they've nearly quadrupled in the last nine years we know there are over a million people here in Canada on a study permit last year that's over a million people on study permits with only about 485,000 permanent resident spots as early as 2022

we were as an immigration bar talking about the numbers are not matching up the total number of uh economic class immigrants that Canada want want to take each year was not corresponding to the number of students that were being taken in each year and not only were the numbers already working against these students hoping for permanent residency a few months ago the government made it harder for many of them to get work permits after they finished studying which was an attempt they say to deal with skyrocketing youth unemployment Mark and I and our government want

those jobs to go to Canadians college graduates as a general rule will no longer be eligible for the postgraduate work permits that's a huge change we're talking about tens of thousands of fewer students eligible for a work certificate that could be their golden ticket to permanent residency so if many of these students are no longer eligible to get a work permit or an extension of their permit and their chance of getting permanent residency is Slim the only other option if they want to stay here legally is to file an asylum claim the reality is what's

happening now as we speak is that every day now thousands of people's visas are expiring and they're becoming what are called Visa over stairs undocumented there's some pressure at least on some applicants that just buying themselves more time or trying to make a lasage effort and some applicants are turning to Refugee claims to be able to try and do that according to international law Canada is required to process any Asylum claim made by anyone on Canadian soil regardless of how they got here they don't have to accept that claim mind you but they have to

grant that person a hearing in front of a judge but with such a massive backlog it's taking years to get to that stage unfortunately I'm seeing clients of mine who are desperate to stay they continue to get poor advice by non- lawyers who just say oh make a refugee claim you know and when you make a refuge claim you get a work permit and you get interm federal health and there's a concern that what we're seeing now is just the start of a trend it's estimated that up to 175,000 foreign students will see their visas

expire in the next year and many temporary foreign workers are in a similar boat people can criticize them and say flippant things like when your Visa expires why don't you just go home no not that simple people have made uprooted their lives have made big Investments to come to Canada families have invested in children to come and build this new life not that simple you can't just turn around when the rules change last month the federal immigration Minister told CBC news that it needs to do a quote stronger job of ensuring that people applying for

visitor visas are in fact seeking to visit and not to file an asylum claim they are also trying to figure out an interim plan to relief pressure on Ontario and Quebec and to figure out a way to support all of these Asylum Seekers while they wait for their verdict they hope to present some kind of announcement in the coming weeks