Immigration.ca - Canada Immigration News - July 2008
The Department of Citizenship and Immigration will have its hands full now that the Conservative government has passed new legislation changing the way that applications for permanent residency are accepted and processed. The backlog of an estimated 900,000 applicants is to be sorted and classified according to which professionals are most needed to ease the labour shortage.
However, some critics see the new legislation as a distraction for a Department whose resources could be instead used to reconstruct Canada's faulty and erratic refugee-stream of immigration. They argue that the refugee system in Canada is "an incoherent muddle of exceptions, special pleading, unverifiable claims, activism, confusion and foolishness."
A recent government report revealed that the Department has actually "lost track" of over 40,000 people who received deportation orders. Often times, people whose refugee claims have been denied take refuge in churches or temples and authorities quickly give up the case.
In other instances, such as the U.S. military deserters who have come to Canada to avoid Iraq deployment, applicants whose claims have been denied are allowed to remain in the country while awaiting appeal.
While most of Canada, a nation that is renowned internationally for its compassion, displays little outrage when such cases of deportation avoidance are made public, critics still argue that these instances are hurting Canada as a whole. They assert that advocates for these illegal migrants have not thoroughly considered the long-term consequences of placing individual concerns over even-handed application of the law and what that does to the nation's immigration system.
Source: The Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=9d076a3c-284a-4a00-9ced-e4edeb02ac5d
