Why not everyone can get permanent residency in Canada
Who Canadian immigration officials deny permanent resident status to.
According to new data released Tuesday by the Migrant Rights Community, Canada has recently doubled the number of refusals of permanent residence permits on humanitarian grounds: while 35% of applicants were denied in 2019, the figure was already 70% in early 2021. Human rights activists see this situation as a serious problem that particularly harms low-wage racial migrants.
Syed Hussan: "Arbitrary officials are the potential for exploitation"
"Permanent resident status is the only mechanism that ensures equal rights for all migrants. By doubling down on rejections, Prime Minister Trudeau is doubling down on the potential to exploit the most vulnerable people in the country," Syed Hussan, secretary of the Migrant Rights Community, said in a video conference for the press on Tuesday.
"The first thing to do is to legalize all migrants already in the country, including undocumented people, and give them residence permits. Instead, we see immigration officials allowing complete arbitrariness and doing just the opposite," he said.
These are applications for immigration made on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. These grounds include discrimination in the applicant's country of origin, having worked or volunteered in Canada for a long time and having raised an aboriginal child.
Toronto-based immigration consultant MacDonald Scott called such applications for residency on humanitarian grounds "a last resort for women fleeing gender-based violence, homelessness and other undocumented families."
Immigration to Canada has fallen sharply due to the pandemic in 2020, according to Statistics Canada Statistics Canada. The December report says Canada welcomed 40,069 immigrants in the first quarter of 2020, down 61.4% from the same period in 2019. During the same time period, 66,000 people who were not permanent residents left the country.
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