- By Jessica Murphy
- BBC News, Toronto
Jun 14, 2023 at 7:13pm BST
Updated 3 hours ago
Image Source: AFP via Getty Images
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Canadian Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said “genuine applicants” would be allowed to stay in Canada.
Canada has granted a temporary stay to a group of Indian students who are at risk of being expelled from the country over allegedly fake college admissions letters.
Immigration Secretary Sean Fraser says “genuine students who have been victims of fraud” may remain in Canada following the investigation.
The students said they were unaware of the fakes and had been duped by an immigration agency in India.
They have held protests to draw attention to their situation.
A number of international students have come forward to Canada in recent months, saying they have received deportation orders after one of the documents – their college acceptance letter – was found to be forged.
Any pending deportations will now be halted while the federal government establishes a task force to conduct a case-by-case analysis of all students facing a deportation order, Mr Fraser said at a news conference in Ottawa on Wednesday.
“Our goal here is to provide a quick, fair and final resolution for the people affected,” he said. “We understand the toll this process is taking on your mental health and the challenges you are struggling with, and we want to offer a solution.”
The minister said he expected the process to take a few months.
“This is good news for us, but until we put everything on paper we will wait for this moment,” Chamandeep Singh, a student who came to Canada in 2019, told the BBC.
Mr Fraser said some students have already been expelled from Canada and “they will have access to the same legal remedies as those who are here”.
There are no clear figures on how many students in Canada may be affected, but the immigration minister said there are “a few dozen people who have had deportation orders issued”. He added that more cases may come to light and the number could be “possibly in the hundreds”.
At least some of the students the BBC spoke to had their papers flagged by immigration officials when they tried to apply for permanent residency in Canada, which would allow them to live and work in the country after completing their studies.
The students say they were victims of a scam themselves, duped by an immigration advice agency in Jalandhar, a city in India’s Punjab region.
Some students had been in the country for years, working towards their degrees.
Living across Canada, including British Columbia, Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta, they have found each other on social media and are organizing protests in the greater Toronto area.
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Chamandeep Singh, who came to Canada in 2019, studied web development.
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has previously confirmed to the BBC that there are “a number of misrepresentations, including those related to study permits”, but has not commented further due to an ongoing investigation.
Mr Fraser said the federal government would also work longer term to put in place a stronger system to better detect fraud in such cases.
India sends most applicants to the foreign student visa program and like all foreign students, they pay almost four to five times what Canadians pay.