Ottawa immigration cuts imply temporary foreign residents have little chance to stay in Canada legally

Temporary residents will face tougher odds of becoming permanent residents after the federal government cut immigration rates for the next three years, raising the ire of foreign students and workers who have spent considerable time and money in pursuit of building their lives in Canada.

 

Many chose Canada as a destination because it offers pathways to permanent residency for those with a Canadian education and work experience. But as the temporary resident population has soared in recent years, the competition for PR status has become stiffer – and now there are fewer spots available.

 

Last week, Ottawa announced cuts to the number of projected permanent residents it plans to admit in 2025 to 395,000 from 500,000. The cuts will continue into 2026 and 2027, with 380,000 and 365,000 permanent resident spots available, respectively.

 

There are more than three million temporary residents currently in Canada or 7.3 per cent of the total population – more than half of that number are international students on study permits and those who are already in the labour force holding postgraduate work permits.

Not only are fewer PR spots available, but the federal government is trying to reduce the share of temporary residents to 5 per cent of the country’s population over two years. This implies a net reduction of roughly 900,000 temporary residents. Ottawa said last week that more than 40 per cent of total PR admissions next year will come from the pool of temporary residents. Still, this suggests that hundreds of thousands of people will be unlucky and told to leave when their visas expire.

 

In September, the government announced that it will no longer renew postgraduate work permits for current holders of the permit, while acknowledging that over 200,000 of those permits are set to expire by the end of 2025.

 

The decision by the Liberals to lower immigration rates – a backtracking of the party’s decade-long economic plan of immigrant-fuelled growth – comes barely a year before a federal election and amid a housing affordability crisis that many Canadians have linked to soaring population growth.

 

On a human level, the consequences of sudden policy shifts can be devastating. The government’s reduced PR targets will leave hundreds of thousands of former international students with no chance of remaining in Canada legally.

 

Navjot Salaria, a 37-year-old former international student working at a large bank in Toronto, told The Globe that Ottawa’s PR cuts will almost certainly result in her having to leave the country. Ms. Salaria, an IT professional from India, had come to Canada in 2021 to pursue a one-year diploma in digital marketing at York University, and easily obtained a job at a bank that she said valued her dual qualifications in IT and marketing. She, like many other former international students, applied for permanent residency through the Canadian Experience Class (CEC) stream of the Express Entry immigration system – a score-based process that determines eligibility for PR.

 

Even before it cut immigration levels, the federal government had made a series of changes to its PR selection criteria in the Express Entry system, prioritizing French speakers and people with job experience in health care, skilled trades and STEM fields. The unintended consequence of those changes was that it made it harder for those hoping to migrate through the CEC stream to meet the cut-off score to be granted permanent residency.

 

Maria Alfaro, a lawyer by training who came to Canada from El Salvador in 2019 to study human-resources management at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ont., said that she hoped the federal government would have considered introducing a separate pathway to PR for foreign students who have worked in Canada a certain number of years. Ms. Alfaro worked as an administrative assistant at a law firm in Toronto but lost her job in August after her postgraduate work permit expired. She is now on a visitor visa with no option but to leave Canada if she does not obtain permanent residency within the next three months.

 

Both Ms. Alfaro and Ms. Navjot have scores of more than 440 in the CEC stream, which used to be a competitive score in the category, but the most recent cut-off score to obtain permanent residency was 539, a historic high. The scores required fluctuate, but they have averaged at over 500 in recent rounds of approvals.

Employers do have the ability to sponsor employees whose postgraduate work permits are close to expiration. There are work permits that are exempt from the Labour Market Impact Assessment process (a document that an employer may need to get to hire a temporary foreign worker) that an employer could apply for to keep an employee in the country. But the bar is high, and employers tend to go this route only when the employee is a high-skilled professional who is hard to replace.

 

Syed Hussan is executive director of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, a labour advocacy organization that has been critical of Ottawa’s sudden reversal in immigration strategy. He said that the government’s projected figure of 1.2 million temporary residents leaving Canada in 2025 is more than double the number of temporary residents expected to leave Canada in 2024.

 

“Canada has a revolving door immigration policy, so every year you do get hundreds of thousands of people arriving, and hundreds of thousands of people leaving. But I think many more people than usual are going to face the prospect of being uprooted from the community they have built in Canada or living here undocumented, which is incredibly difficult,” he said.

 

The government estimates that there are between 20,000 and 500,000 undocumented workers in Canada – Mr. Hussan’s organization says it is closer to the latter figure.

 

But he added that international students with Canadian work experience are not likely to stay in Canada undocumented because they can find jobs in other countries. “The people who will end up staying without status are those who have come in as low-wage workers and have no other choice but to remain.”

 

 

 

 

This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail