A lawyer working with former international students from India facing potential deportation from Canada, has argued that the phenomenon of agents in their home country providing fraudulent documentation should be considered organised crime and they should be extradited.
Some of the former international students facing potential deportation from Canada at their indefinite protest site in the Greater Toronto Area. (Inder Singh)
Toronto-based barrister and solicitor Sumit Sen is representing Karamjit Kaur, who is from the Jalandhar area, before Canadian authorities. He has also consulted with several other students who are mired in the ongoing cases over their original study permits being based on forged documents that has led to many of them facing hearings over their status and at least two receiving removal orders from the Canadian Border Services Agency or CBSA.
Sen argued that if Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Sean Fraser “wants to clean up the system and protect its integrity, it’s not enough to regulate consultants in Canada.”
“What needs to be done is that Canadian colleges have to stop working with overseas agents who are neither licensed nor accountable in Canada,” he added.
These students, all from Punjab, arrived in Canada between 2017 and 2019, and in rare instances, in 2020. They started receiving notices from the CBSA in 2021, 2022 and this year, for a hearing as the agency concluded the letter of offer of admission to a Canadian higher education institution, which formed the basis of their study permits, was “fake.”
The majority of the affected students were represented by the agent Brijesh Mishra of the Jalandhar-based counselling firm EMSA Education and Migration Services Australia.
“What these agents have done by providing fake fraudulent letters of acceptance amounts to organized crime,” Sen said. He said he has demanded that these agents be brought to Canada under extradition treaty with India, so they can face justice, and, more importantly, for the impacted ex-students, the facts of their cases can be established.
Fraser tweeted last month that the Government’s “focus is on identifying culprits, not penalizing victims.”
He had also said, “We’re actively investigating recent reports of fraudulent acceptance letters.”
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anirudh Bhattacharya is a Toronto-based commentator on North American issues, and an author. He has also worked as a journalist in New Delhi and New York spanning print, television and digital media. He tweets as @anirudhb. …view detail
