Canada to accept fewer relatives of immigrants News National Post
Canada to accept fewer relatives of immigrants
Oct 20, 2011 – 11:01 PM ET
By Thandi Fletcher
OTTAWA — The Conservative government aims to cut down a heavy immigration backlog by capping the number of parents and grandparents of immigrants who can come to Canada, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said Thursday.
“Canada is the most generous country in the world with respect to immigration . . . but there have to be practical limits to our generosity,” Kenney said after speaking at an often-heated citizenship and immigration committee meeting.
The current backlog, or total number of immigration applications still waiting to be processed, is now more than a million names long, according to immigration officials.
Kenney’s comments came after NDP immigration critic Don Davies suggested in an Oct. 14 letter to Kenney that Ottawa set a target of issuing 289,000 to 336,000 total permanent residency visas for 2012.
Canada receives about 400,000 applications for permanent residency every year. Since coming into power, the Conservative government has granted permanent residency to an average of 254,000 a year.
Last year, about 38,000 of those applications were from parents and grandparents of permanent residents, said Kenney.
Davies recommended increasing the number parent and grandparent admissions to Canada.
Higher immigration levels are needed to satisfy a growing labour shortage and create a sustainable economy, wrote Davies in the letter.
While he agreed there is a need to increase participation in the workforce, Kenney said immigration is not the solution.
Only about 20 per cent of immigrants to Canada are primary economic immigrants, he said, while the remaining applicants are their spouses and sponsored family members.
“To those who think we can solve that problem through immigration alone are profoundly mistaken,” Kenney told the committee.
Kenney said the Conservative government isn’t opposed to family reunification, but said there must be limits.
“We have to calibrate those limits based on our country’s economic needs, our fiscal capacity,” he said. “There is no doubt that the people who are coming who are senior citizens, they have much, much lower labour market participation and much higher level of utilization of the public health system.”
Limiting the number of family sponsored applications would also help speed up processing times, Kenney said.
“I don’t want people waiting seven, eight or 10 years for their parents or grandparents to come,” he said. “That’s cruel. That’s unfair.”
He suggested looking at other countries’ immigration policies for ideas on how to limit applications. One method might be a minimum family income criteria.
“It’s not about reducing immigration,” said Kenney. “It’s about managing the intake of applications so that it is aligned with our very high immigration levels.”
Davies argued limiting applications isn’t the only solution. The federal government should hire more staff to process the applications faster, he said.
“If you have a seven to 10 to 13 year waiting list in processing applications, unless I’m missing something, you need to put some more bodies in there to process those applications,” said Davies.
OTTAWA — The Conservative government aims to cut down a heavy immigration backlog by capping the number of parents and grandparents of immigrants who can come to Canada, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said Thursday.
“Canada is the most generous country in the world with respect to immigration . . . but there have to be practical limits to our generosity,” Kenney said after speaking at an often-heated citizenship and immigration committee meeting.
The current backlog, or total number of immigration applications still waiting to be processed, is now more than a million names long, according to immigration officials.
Kenney’s comments came after NDP immigration critic Don Davies suggested in an Oct. 14 letter to Kenney that Ottawa set a target of issuing 289,000 to 336,000 total permanent residency visas for 2012.
Canada receives about 400,000 applications for permanent residency every year. Since coming into power, the Conservative government has granted permanent residency to an average of 254,000 a year.
Last year, about 38,000 of those applications were from parents and grandparents of permanent residents, said Kenney.
Davies recommended increasing the number parent and grandparent admissions to Canada.
Higher immigration levels are needed to satisfy a growing labour shortage and create a sustainable economy, wrote Davies in the letter.
While he agreed there is a need to increase participation in the workforce, Kenney said immigration is not the solution.
Only about 20 per cent of immigrants to Canada are primary economic immigrants, he said, while the remaining applicants are their spouses and sponsored family members.
“To those who think we can solve that problem through immigration alone are profoundly mistaken,” Kenney told the committee.
Kenney said the Conservative government isn’t opposed to family reunification, but said there must be limits.
“We have to calibrate those limits based on our country’s economic needs, our fiscal capacity,” he said. “There is no doubt that the people who are coming who are senior citizens, they have much, much lower labour market participation and much higher level of utilization of the public health system.”
Limiting the number of family sponsored applications would also help speed up processing times, Kenney said.
“I don’t want people waiting seven, eight or 10 years for their parents or grandparents to come,” he said. “That’s cruel. That’s unfair.”
He suggested looking at other countries’ immigration policies for ideas on how to limit applications. One method might be a minimum family income criteria.
“It’s not about reducing immigration,” said Kenney. “It’s about managing the intake of applications so that it is aligned with our very high immigration levels.”
Davies argued limiting applications isn’t the only solution. The federal government should hire more staff to process the applications faster, he said.
“If you have a seven to 10 to 13 year waiting list in processing applications, unless I’m missing something, you need to put some more bodies in there to process those applications,” said Davies.
No comments:
Post a Comment