Immigration backlog of nearly 2 million applicants has forced some to wait years for updates
New immigration plan announced Monday increases targets, despite some calls to freeze new applications
When Arian Ghobadi applied to come to Canada through Canada's federal skilled worker program in 2019, he didn't expect to wait long to get his visa — maybe six to nine months, as is usually the case.
But nearly three years after he submitted his application, Ghobadi says he's nowhere closer to coming to Canada than he was all those months ago.
"Throughout [these] 32 months of wait, I've only been updated four times or so," he told The Current's Matt Galloway from Tehran.
Ghobadi graduated from the University of Manitoba as an international student in 2013, and has been back in Tehran since, but hoping to return to Canada. He said it's been two years since he's received any update on his application status. The only contact he's had with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is for additional documentation requests and updated medical checks.
He's now in the process of hiring a lawyer for a petition for mandamus, a judicial remedy which would mandate a government agency to resolve his matter as soon as possible.
The lack of regular updates on his application status is partly to blame for his inability to find work for the last two years, he said.
"If I wanted to be honest with my future employer, I needed to tell them that, 'Look, I don't know if I'm going to stay in Iran for another year or so,'" he said.
"So if you tell it to any employer, it's a deal-breaker. They're not going to hire you."
Backlog of nearly 2 million applications
Ghobadi isn't a unique case of administrative limbo. According to data provided by the IRCC, Canada has a total backlog around 1.8 million immigration applications.
These are broken down into around 448,000 citizenship applications, 519,030 permanent residency applications and 848,598 temporary residency applications.
The backlog is due to a combination of greater influx of immigration applications, and less supply "as a direct result of the virus blocking our operations," Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship of Canada, told The Current.
"Because our borders were closed to protect the public against the spread of COVID-19 in our communities, we made a decision as a government to pivot our strategy by resettling ... more permanent residents, who were already in Canada," he said.
"At the same time, we had an enormous number of people applying to come to Canada from overseas, which compounded the challenge for the numbers of people who were coming from abroad."
While he's concerned by stories like Ghobadi's, Fraser said he's working "very hard every day" to make the immigration process an easier one to deal with.
"From my perspective, we need to be welcoming as many people to Canada that qualify for our various immigration streams as possible," he said.
A new multi-year immigration plan
To address this, Fraser pointed to a new multi-year immigration plan he announced on Monday.
According to the plan, Canada expects to welcome nearly 432,000 immigrants this year, and more than 1.3 million new immigrants over the next three years. In addition, IRCC has hired more than 500 staff, and made investments of $85 million to target five key areas that are bottlenecks in the immigration system, Fraser said.
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One of the new changes coming to IRCC will modernize and digitalize the application process, Fraser said, such as a new personal case tracker for family reunification cases.
"So today, if you are applying to come to reunite with your spouse in Canada, for example, you can actually log into your own file through a new functionality of our digital system to get a real-time update about your case," he said
Allowing people to tap into their own information will free up staff to process more applications, Fraser said. And, he added that work is being done to add similar functionalities to other immigration streams.
Immigration and labour shortage
With nearly two million immigration applicants waiting for a response, the government faced some calls prior to the announcement to deal with the backlog first before setting higher immigration targets, most notably from the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association.
But immigration and refugee lawyer Warda Shazadi Meighen said now is not the time for Canada to put a pause on immigration targets, especially given the labour shortages many provinces are going through.
"We know that 55 per cent of Canadian businesses are dealing with labour shortages. So in order to carry out projects in Canada to grow our economy, we need the right type of incoming labour," she said.
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"So we can't necessarily rely on pausing immigration inventory or reducing immigration levels because this affects our supply chain issue."
In their new plan, the government has increased immigration targets by 30,000 new permanent residents this year and 26,055 in 2023, compared to their last plan's targets.
Fraser said that by increasing the number of people that the government resettles to Canada, "we're actually going to have more of those people who are currently in the system be welcomed as permanent residents."
"If we had a smaller number of newcomers that we were willing to welcome in the levels plan I tabled yesterday, then that would be fewer spaces that we can allocate to those people who are currently waiting to come to Canada," he said.
"So the solution is to welcome more newcomers, but to match the increase in those levels with the resources necessary to process them in an effective way."
'Sometimes I regret my decision'
At this point, Ghobadi just wants to know whether or not he's being admitted to Canada, he said. And he said he's having second thoughts about continuing the application process.
"The living and all the conditions of life in Canada [are] really great, but the amount of energy and the money I put for the immigration process, I could have put it in some better way," he said.
"So I maybe could put it for applying to immigrate to another country. I don't know, just sometimes I regret my decision."
Written by Mouhamad Rachini. Produced by Samira Mohyeddin and Meli Gumus.
