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New immigration rules aim to weed out marriage fraud
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Ashpreet Badwal's immigration-sponsorship saga reaches all the way to the top.
The 35-year-old resident of Brampton, Ont., met her future husband, Indian national Manjit Shahi, on an online forum four years ago. After corresponding with him for a year, she flew to India in November 2007 and married him.
Thousands of dollars — spent on immigration applications and appeals — and more than two years later, Badwal was able to sponsor her husband to come to Canada. Shahi was granted a permanent residence visa June 26, 2010, but on the very day in early July that he arrived at Toronto airport, he called Badwal to say he wasn't going to meet her, she says. She hasn't seen him since.
Marriage fraud for the purposes of immigration has been an issue for years in Canada, with hundreds of reported cases of newly wed foreigners ditching their sponsoring spouse once the permanent residency card arrives.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney knows of Badwal's story, he told CBC recently. Changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations expected to take force next month will give officials more power to weed out such con artists, he said.
Even "far more frequent" than the headline-grabbing tales of bamboozled brides and gulled grooms, Kenney said, are so-called marriages of convenience. These are marriages in which both spouses collude to fake true love so that one can bring the other to Canada, frequently in exchange for cash.
The Canadian immigration office in Hong Kong, with jurisdiction over much of southern China, rejects 50 per cent of spousal-sponsorship applications, the minister said, "because they've detected a wave of fraudulent marriages that are often facilitated by unscrupulous marriage consultants overseas."
Immigration staff received about 49,500 spousal-sponsorship applications from various parts of the world last year. While the government doesn't know exactly how many of those were deemed bad-faith marriages, Citizenship and Immigration Canada says "many" of the 10,000 applications that were rejected were turned down because there was evidence of a marriage of convenience.
The new immigration rules will allow officials to reject a spousal-sponsorship application if they determine the relationship either is not genuine or is primarily aimed at getting permanent residency for the foreign spouse. Currently, both criteria have to be fulfilled for an automatic rejection.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/
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