‘The students are victims’: Stop deporting Indian students caught in fake admission letter scandal, parliamentary committee urges CBSA

A parliamentary committee is calling on the Canada Border Services Agency to immediately stop deporting a group of Indian international students who have been deemed inadmissible after using fake college admission letters to enter the country.

On Wednesday, the all-party immigration committee voted unanimously to ask the border agency to waive inadmissibility of the affected students and to provide them with an alternative pathway to permanent residence on humanitarian grounds or through a “regularization” program.

“These students, I’ve met with many of them, now are just in such a terrible state. They’ve lost money and they are stuck in a terrible situation. And some of them have deportation orders. Others have pending meetings with CBSA,” said MP Jenny Kwan, the NDP immigration critic, who tabled the motions.

“So as a first step, this is absolutely essential and necessary. The students are victims of fraud and should not be penalized.”

The international students, a group estimated to be in the hundreds, claim they were duped by unscrupulous education consultants in India and were unaware that the admission letters given to them were doctored. The students only became aware of the issue, they say, when the issue was flagged by border agents after the students had finished their courses and applied for postgraduate work permits. Some cases were flagged during the students’ permanent residence application process.

The committee does not have the power to halt deportations. Its gesture Wednesday is largely a symbolic one.

The students all share similar stories: being told upon arrival in Canada that the program they’d been enrolled in was no longer available and advised to delay their studies or go to another school; some receiving their postgraduate work permits and trying to pursue permanent residence, only to find out there was a problem with their original documentation.

On Wednesday, the committee also passed Kwan’s motion to issue a news release to condemn the actions of these fraudulent “ghost consultants” and to ask Immigration Minister Sean Fraser, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and their staff to appear before the committee to provide a briefing on the situation.

Members of the committee also voted to undertake a study over two meetings into the targeted exploitation scheme faced by the Punjabi international students.

The study is set to examine:

“I’ve spoken with the students, and they were very frustrated that no actions were happening at this committee. And I think they’ll be very pleased to see that things are happening now,” said Brad Redekopp, the Conservative MP for Saskatoon West.

Liberal MP Shafqat Ali agreed.

“We need to have empathy for those students and we should not exploit the situation and play politics on this issue of those innocent students,” said the MP for Brampton centre, where many of the affected students now reside. “They have gone through and are going through a lot.”

During the meeting Wednesday, the committee also approved the amendments to Bill S-245 to amend the Citizenship Act to allow Canadians to pass citizenship birthrights to their foreign-born children if they can pass a connection test to establish the family ties to Canada.

Nicholas Keung is a Toronto-based reporter covering immigration for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @nkeung