An investigation by Indian officials alleges that dozens of Canadian colleges and universities may be linked to a scheme of illegally ferrying students across the Canada-US bordershows the “amazing” extent to which loopholes in the immigration system can be exploited, some experts say.
“If the allegations are true, it reveals shocking gaps in our integrity protocols … this is deeply, deeply troubling and troubling,” Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, told CBC News Network, adding that the allegations suggest” on a large scale. human smuggling.”
India's Enforcement Directorate said in a press release on Tuesday that it had found evidence of human trafficking involving two “gangs” in Mumbai after investigating the Indian link to the Patel familywho died in January 2022 while trying to cross the border from Manitoba to Minnesota due to cold weather.
The Enforcement Directorate said its investigation found that approximately 25,000 students were referred by one entity, with more than 10,000 students referred by another entity to various colleges outside the -India every year.
Arrangements would be made for Indian nationals to be admitted to Canadian colleges and universities and apply for student visas, according to the Enforcement Directorate.
But once the Indian nationals arrived in Canada, instead of going to college, they illegally crossed the border from Canada into the United States and the tax received by schools went Bringing Canada back to the individual accounts, the Enforcement Agency said.
India alleges that dozens of Canadian colleges are working with human traffickers in India to allow people to enter the United States. The charges come from Indian law enforcement following their investigation into the death of a family at the Manitoba-US border.
The investigation also revealed that approximately 112 Canadian-based colleges entered into an agreement with one entity and more than 150 with another entity, the Enforcement Directorate said.
The allegations have not been proven in court and India has not identified the Canadian colleges accused.
RCMP has contacted India
Camille Boily-Lavoie, a spokeswoman for the RCMP, said in an email to CBC News that they have contacted India through their International Police Liaison Officers to seek additional information. about the studies.
Colleges and Institutes Canada, a national advocacy group for Canada's post-secondary education network, said it did not have details on the nature of the colleges involved in the Indian allegations.
The process for study permit applications and acceptance is completely managed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the student applicant and the post-secondary institution, said Dayna Smockum, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Colleges and Ontario Universities.
“The Ministry of Colleges and Universities has no role in this process,” Smockum said in an email to CBC News. “As our government has done again, we continue to call on the federal government to implement stronger border control measures to protect Ontario, our institutions, and all of Canada.”
In an email to CBC News, the IRCC said that from 2023, it has focused on strengthening the integrity of the international student program.
He says they have introduced a cap on enrollment rates at Designated Learning Institutions (DLIs) – schools approved by a provincial or territorial government to host international students.
The IRCC says it has also asked DLI to verify all acceptance letters, include consequences for those institutions that did not participate in student compliance exercises, and the financial requirements of the lower for candidates to increase study permit.
Immigration system lacks control, expert says
But Kelly Sundberg, a former Canada Border Services Agency officer who is a professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, said there is no control over the system and that transnational criminals “take brother”.
“This kind of fraud, in terms of gaming our immigration system, has been going on for a long time,” he said, noting that the number of people who could to be involved” is very surprising.”
The US has been using biometric technologies such as facial recognition and fingerprinting in immigration processing for over a decade and has all but eliminated identification fraud in the their program, Sundberg sad.
But Canada doesn't have the manpower or the technology to effectively screen documents or individuals, he said.
Indian law enforcement agencies allege links between several Canadian colleges and two Mumbai-based “gangs” accused of trafficking students across the Canada-US border . Criminologist Kelly Sundberg says that transnational criminals take advantage of an immigration system based on honor, but there is almost no control or enforcement.
Sundberg said it would be “really shocking” to learn that there are colleges or universities that are actively and knowingly involved in this criminal enterprise.
“But I'm not at all surprised that we're seeing people both in Canada, the United States and abroad who have coordinated to take advantage of our wide open system,” said e.
Ken Zaifman, an immigration lawyer based in Winnipeg, says that from his experience, the educational institutions should be responsible for monitoring.
“And they didn't. They were dependent on international students to fund their programs,” he said.
Colleges and educational institutions should have been aware of such a problem with international student recruitment, Zaifman said, but instead chose to continue appointing representatives outside of Canada to recruit students. hired who had no control over what they were doing.
“The numbers were so important that nobody really wanted to do anything about it,” he said.
“Some universities were a little more diligent, but not all of them. They were recruiting agents and they were attracting students, and it never occurred to me that the movement of these students might not be real. ”
fly-by-night schools
But Robert Huish, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in the department of international development studies, says he thinks many of the private colleges may be “fly-by-night” the schools involved in this scheme.
“Some of these private colleges that were helping this trade aren't really colleges. They're an abandoned office with an old copy of Microsoft Word, and that's the whole curriculum,” he said. .
“The big emphasis here is not so much on the legitimate colleges and universities across the country, but the fly-by-night things that are opening up over gas stations. ”
