The Ghost World of Immigration Consulting

Image by: Dina Goldstein

Li-Yan, whom Fedelia contacted through a Richmond-based immigration consulting firm, first advises in accented English that she needs a job offer in order to secure a work permit. But she’s having trouble finding a position in the slumping economy, she says.


“If you really, really just want to stay in Canada,” he then says hesitantly, “you can get married with someone with permanent residence status or citizenship.”


“But I don’t have a boyfriend.”


Li-Yan explains the options: Fedelia can go to a marriage agency where she’ll be connected with a man who is looking for a wife. But she shouldn’t expect a knight in shining armour. “Local people who try to get a marriage from a marriage agency, I don’t think they are really good-looking guys. Maybe they are pretty old age. Maybe got divorced several times. Maybe have some bad habits.” 


Or Fedelia can open her wallet. “You give some money for a fake marriage – $40,000, $50,000, $30,000, it depends,” he says. “After this guy sponsors you and you are in Canada, then you guys can get divorced.”


What’s the risk of getting caught? “You won’t get caught. You won’t get caught,” Li-Yan confidently assures her. “If you are willing to give up that kind of money, I can probably find someone for you. There is no guarantee for [permanent residency], but I’ll say it’s 99 per cent.”


Li-Yan didn’t yet know that Fedelia (a pseudonym) is not actually a foreign student desperate to stay in Canada but a researcher who, for this article, recently called 25 Lower Mainland-based immigration consultants randomly selected from the Yellow Pages. Sixteen of the consultants she spoke to told her to make an appointment or offered sound guidance, but five gave advice inconsistent with current immigration laws, one advised obtaining a student visa on dubious grounds and two suggested the fake-marriage route. Welcome to the shady world of immigration consulting.


Google “immigrate to Canada” and you’ll find hundreds of businesses offering to secure work and student visas, help bring family members to Canada, obtain refugee status and assist in other immigration-related services. Although potential immigrants aren’t required to hire a lawyer or consultant to move here, consultants and recruiters based both in Canada and abroad do brisk business navigating Canada’s complicated immigration system.


Where there’s money, there’s potential for abuse and fraud, and in the immigration trade it appears to be rampant. While many immigration consultants are ethical, some charge tens of thousands of dollars for a two-year work permit or promise jobs they can’t deliver. The more unscrupulous advise cooking up stories to strengthen what would have been a perfectly legitimate application, falsify documents and records, arrange fake marriages, obtain phony student visas and even craft fake refugee claims. Stories of consultants preying on immigrants prompted the federal government to spend $1.2 million to establish an arms-length self-regulatory body called the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants (CSIC) in 2004, yet five years later misconduct is still widespread. 


“There hasn’t been any serious crackdown in all these years of talking about immigrants getting ripped off,” says Olivia Chow, immigration critic for the federal NDP. “Without legislation and enforcement, this talk is meaningless.”


Almost 250,000 people became permanent residents of Canada in 2008, with 44,000 of those immigrants settling in B.C. Refugees accounted for 3.5 per cent of that number; 28 per cent were family-class immigrants (whose applications were sponsored by a spouse or parent with permanent residence or citizenship); and the vast majority, 65 per cent, were economic class. That last category includes business immigrants such as investors, entrepreneurs and self-employed people, as well as live-in caregivers and skilled workers. Approximately 80 per cent of economic-class applicants seek out help from consultants and recruiters. 


The cost of such assistance ranges from $800 for a straightforward skilled-worker application, to $5,000 for a spousal sponsorship, to as much as $40,000 for a business immigration case. Vancouver-based immigration lawyer and policy analyst Richard Kurland estimates that Canada’s 750 immigration lawyers and 1,600 registered consultants process between $80 million and $100 million worth of skilled-worker applications and $100 million in business immigration cases each year. 


As for the number of unregistered consultants in Canada, called “ghosts” by insiders, that number is thought to be even greater, with estimates ranging from 4,400 (according to a 2007 Toronto Star investigation) to Kurland’s guess of 7,000. With 18 per cent of immigrants coming to B.C. last year, that means as many as 1,200 of these ghosts could be operating in the province. Don Davies, deputy immigration critic for the federal NDP, says he receives two or three complaints about immigration consultants every month through his Vancouver Kingsway constituency office, and almost all of them are about the questionable practices of ghost consultants.


The means for abuse are everywhere. Surrey-based immigration lawyer Massood Joomratty, who calls his city “the ghost-consultant-infested zone,” says he routinely comes across misleading advertisements in ethnic media for consultants who guarantee residency in impossible time frames. (One consultant group advertised aggressively on a popular Indian radio station in Surrey and then disappeared with its clients’ fees, according to Joomratty.) A 2006 report by the Canada Border Services Agency also notes abuse in the student visa system, describing “bogus students” who say they are coming to Canada to study but never show up for class. “Corrupt consultants” often help students scam the system, according to the report. Finally, there’s the refugee route. With the current backlog in applications, it can take up to two years before a refugee claimant gets a hearing, two years during which the claimant can legally work and qualify for welfare. In 2006 only 28 per cent of claimants were approved. The Toronto Star revealed that some consultants will advise immigrants who don’t have the expertise or language skills to file a refugee claim themselves, regardless of whether they have grounds. “Saying the word ‘refugee’ buys you 18 to 24 months,” says Kurland. “So it’s a magnet to attract abuse. This is a horrific loophole.”


Joomratty says approximately 90 per cent of the appeals he sees are for people who have been denied permanent-resident status because of bad advice. And that bad advice, which clogs up the system with applicants who don’t stand a chance, impedes upstanding immigrants from coming to Canada. Joomratty describes how one of his clients, an investor immigrant who owns a large chain of small businesses in the U.S., has been waiting to be processed for five years. “This guy is worth millions, and he wants to sell everything and come to B.C. This should take two weeks.”


Joomratty adds that potential immigrants who spend years waiting to be processed or have been denied because of bad advice often give up or are never permitted to enter Canada: “Many times these people will be robbed of their chance of coming to Canada. Their dream is shattered and the opportunity for Canada to have a good immigrant is gone.”


Rosalie Suniega is one of those well-intentioned immigrants Canada may miss out on. The self-assured ­Filipina and her husband dreamt of one day building their life together in Canada. So they took out loans and borrowed from friends and family to pay North Vancouver-based Global Nannies & Caregivers Agency $2,900 – the equivalent, for her, of half a year’s salary – to find her a job as a nanny and process her work permit so she could immigrate as a live-in caregiver. The 28-year-old had hoped to earn enough money to help her husband and her seven-year-old son join her.


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