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Canada to Expedite the Rejection of Bogus Refugee Claims
Canada’s immigration minister, Marc Miller, has announced that he intends to suggest reforms to the nation’s refugee system. These reforms could expedite the rejection of cases with a low likelihood of success.
“I intend to bring up additional initiatives. I intend to reform the system. “It is not working as it should,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller told a parliamentary committee on Monday.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been shifting his government’s friendly posture toward migrants. He promises to limit immigration and Canada’s population over the next two years as his party falls in polls and Canadians express waning support for new arrivals.
The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, an independent adjudicator of refugee claims, is receiving claims from “people with increasingly fewer hopes to stay in Canada and being counseled to file, I believe unjustly, asylum claims where they should not be able to do so,” Miller added.
In recent months, Canada has seen an all-time high number of refugee claims. Although the monthly total fell to roughly 17,400 in October from above 20,000 in July, the number of claims pending was the highest ever, at more than 260,000 last month.
Statistics Canada reports that more than 265,000 non-permanent residents arrived in Canada during the second quarter of 2024.
Miller has called into question the legitimacy of thousands of refugee petitions filed by international students.
The reforms would try, in part, to discourage people who planned to utilize their international studies as a gateway to permanent residency in Canada from submitting refugee claims as a last-ditch effort to stay now that new laws have closed that avenue.
According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, 46,736 people have sought asylum in Canada since March of this year. This represents a 62% increase over 2023, with a backlog of 186,000 claimants.
An increase in temporary immigration has been connected to Canada’s housing crisis. In April, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cautioned that the situation needed to be “under control,” claiming that temporary immigration had “grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”
