Indian students avoid deportation from Canada … for now

Canada has ordered a freeze on the deportation of dozens of students from India who have been found to have entered the country on the basis of fraudulent acceptance letters to Canadian higher education institutions. But the students are not yet in the clear.

Dozens of students from India who went to study in Canada and have been living in fear of deportation for some time, received some relief this week when the Canadian authorities issued a stay order on their planned removal.

The students, whose exact number is not known, faced deportation for gaining admission to higher education institutions, allegedly on the basis of forged documents. The students claim they were not involved in submitting fake documents and that immigration and educational consultants in India are responsible for their situation.

Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRCC) Sean Fraser told media outside the House of Commons chamber on Wednesday 14 June that the government was halting all pending removals of international students from India who may have entered the country on the basis of fraudulent acceptance letters.

The minister said: “We believe that there are significant aspects of fraud that certain bad actors have been using to take advantage of students. And, to the extent that people are complicit in fraudulent schemes, of course, they will bear the consequence of Canadian law on their behaviour.

“If the facts of an individual case are clear that an international student came to Canada with a genuine intent to study, and without knowledge of the use of fraudulent documentation, I have provided instructions for officers to issue a temporary resident permit to that individual,” said Fraser.

“This will ensure that these well-intentioned students and graduates can remain in Canada, and ensure that they are not subject to the five-year ban from re-entering Canada that normally follows in cases of misrepresentation.”

Fraser said the government’s focus was on “identifying those who are responsible for the fraudulent activity and not on penalising those who may have been affected by fraud”.

Police investigation

While Fraser did not say how many students and former students are involved, it appears that most of the students are from India’s northern state of Punjab.

A number of the students affected have informed police in India of the fraud.

Gurudev Singh, a farmer from Ferozepur in Punjab, said his son Amritpal Singh went to Canada in 2018 for undergraduate studies in London, Ontario for two years. He has since started working in Canada, but was now in danger of being sent back to India.

“We did not know this could happen. We have invested all our money and now there is talk of sending our son back from there,” he told University World News.

“We cannot tell what condition our son is in. He must be in great despair.”

On 28 March, police in the Punjab city of Jalandhar said Rahul Bhargava, an employee of a firm known as Education and Migration Services had been arrested. Police were still searching for his partners: Brijesh Mishra, whom they said had absconded; and another man called Gurnam Singh. The men face multiple charges under India's criminal, penal and administrative codes.

Most of the students who went through the agency dealt mainly with Mishra. “We have got a case registered against Brijesh Mishra,” said Gurudev Singh.

Chaman Singh, based in the Punjab city of Amritsar, Punjab, is among the students who faced deportation. “While applying for an engineering course in Canada, I took help from an educational agent. I did not know that he would be giving me fake certificates,” Singh told University World News.

He arrived in Canada in 2018. “We came here to build our future but now we don't know whether we are going to stay or be deported,” said Chaman Singh.

Permanent residence applications

The issue became public in March when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s investigative show, The Fifth Estate reported that dozens of students from India had been informed by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), that the institutional acceptance letters they had used to apply for their international student visas were fraudulent.

Upon their arrival in Canada, students were told the college that they believed to have sent them letters of acceptance was full, and immigration agents in India directed them to other institutions.

Things went wrong when those students applied for permanent residence in Canada. Officials discovered they had studied in colleges other than the ones for which they had gained admission, and had gone on to work in Canada.

Deportation orders were then issued to the individuals for fraudulently staying in Canada.

The majority of the cases hark back to the period between 2016 and 2019 and involve students who have completed their studies.

Media reports initially suggested that 700 students in Canada faced deportation. According to Member of Parliament Jenny Kwan, the immigration critic for the opposition New Democratic Party headed by Jagmeet Singh, the number of Indian international students is at least 340.

However, Toronto-based Gurjit Singh, who supports students in Canada and was instrumental in organising a protest in Toronto by Student Morcha (a student movement) from 28 May to 14 June which involved 18 of the students, said the total number is 87. Of these, 57 were issued with removal notices while eight have already been deported from Canada.

After receiving a removal notice, students have the option to take their case to the federal court, he said. “We came to know about it through IRCC documents. We don’t even know who those eight [people] were [that were] deported from Canada,” Gurjit Singh told University World News.

A temporary solution

Gurjit Singh was not entirely positive about the government’s stay order. “We have to see what criteria they apply and what kind of relief these students get after investigation by the government,” he said.

Student groups and their supporters demonstrated outside the CBSA offices in Toronto and in Brampton, 30 miles (48 kilometres) northwest of Toronto. Brampton is a city of 600,000 people, 180,000 of whom hail from India; approximately 20% of the total population are Sikhs, the main religious group in the Punjab, and for almost 20%, Punjabi is their first language.

The protests in Brampton were attended by the city’s mayor, Patrick Brown and Kwan, who, in addition to raising the issue in Canada’s House of Commons, had planned to present individual cases to the minister.

Kwan said this week that students who have been “defrauded by crooked consultants should not be punished with deportation and inadmissibility based on misrepresentation”.

Before the stay order was issued, some students were due to be deported on 13 June. Students said despite the first stay orders, their protests would continue until they had secured permanent cancellation of the deportation orders and a right to permanent residency. “It is just a temporary solution, not a victory for us,” said one of the affected students, Prakash Singh.

India’s Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar earlier told the Canadian authorities the fault did not lie with the students but the agents. The Indian ministry has appealed to Canada to deal with the students' cases sympathetically.

Task force

On 14 June Fraser announced he was establishing a task force of senior IRCC and CBSA officials to undertake a case-by-case analysis of the students in question.

“The task force will consider particular factors,” the minister said, “including whether a person has completed their studies, including the level of knowledge of any fraudulent scheme that may have underpinned their application.

“Those who are found not to have knowledge and are genuine applicants to the student programme will be given permission to stay in Canada for a few years so they can either complete their studies or potentially remain in Canada and work over the next few years.”

In an answer to a question about the students who have already been deported or have left voluntarily, the minister said: “To the extent someone who has already left can demonstrate that they too are victimised by the fraud, they will have access to the same remedies as those who are already here.”

Largest group of international students

Around 226,450 Indian students went to Canada in 2022 for studies, making up the largest group of international students in the country.

The states of Punjab and Haryana have been under scrutiny in recent months after some Australian institutions suspended recruitment from these states following a rise in visa refusals. Most of the students facing deportation in Canada come from Punjab.

The Punjab state government has appealed to parents of prospective students to check the details of the colleges and the record of the admission and travel agents before sending their children for studies abroad.

Punjab NRI (non-resident Indians) Affairs Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal urged India’s Home Minister Amit Shah to cooperate with the Punjab government to punish travel agents who are found to have duped students.