Asylum seekers in Canada | Two thirds enter the country on a tourist visa

A new channel is fueling the strong growth of asylum seekers in Canada. After crossing Roxham Road and the requests at the airport after getting off the plane, it is now asylum requests made once on Canadian soil, by people holding visitor visas, which are increasing sharply.

The monthly number of people entering the country on a tourist visa and then seeking asylum quintupled between April 2023 and April 2024, from 1,815 to 10,170, according to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) obtained by The Press.

This route now represents 66% of asylum requests in the country.

“Two thirds of requests are made by people who come as tourists! It’s fascinating ! », Says Michael Barutciski, lawyer and professor at York University in Toronto. “However, in April, we had already been raising this problem for months: the granting of visas in a somewhat too lax manner by the federal government. That means it continues. »

Mr. Barutciski recalls that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke of tightening visas for people who come to Quebec on March 15, as part of a tête-à-tête with François Legault on immigration.

Already, in January, the Federal Minister of Immigration, Marc Miller, recognized that a “turn of the screws” was necessary to slow down the increase in the number of asylum applications.

This objective was achieved in the case of Mexican nationals.

The number of asylum seekers entering Canada with an electronic travel authorization (eTA) – a document required for foreigners exempt from visa requirements – fell drastically, from 2,145 in April 2023 to 785 in April of this year. This seems to indicate that the reimposition of a visa on visitors from Mexico, who only needed an eTA before February 29, has slowed down this gateway.

Set foot in the country

But if Canada has managed to close one door, others have opened, as shown by the increase in asylum seekers among visitor visa holders. This increase suggests that the mechanisms for controlling the allocation of tourist visas established by the Canadian government are insufficient or poorly adapted, since the system is poor at identifying visitor visa applicants who are not really tourists, and therefore to slow down asylum requests.

These IRCC data sheds light on the means used by asylum seekers to set foot in the country. The Press made the request after noting the presence of a significant number of Indian asylum seekers who came to Quebec as visitors. Several of them confided that they had to pay colossal sums in India to obtain this tourist visa.

The figures allow us to detect another trend, that of foreign students who apply for asylum after obtaining a study permit.

Their increase, without being as spectacular as that of tourist visa holders, is nevertheless significant. For example, their number doubled between April 2023 and last April, going from 635 to 1,365.

Over the whole of 2023, 11,154 foreign students requested asylum, including 2,595 in Quebec.

Measures were announced in January by Minister Marc Miller to contain the explosion in the number of foreign students coming to the country, including the establishment of a ceiling of 360,000 study permits in 2024, which represents a decrease of 35% compared to 2023. The threshold for 2025 will be reassessed at the end of the year.

These constraints could help reduce the number of asylum seekers holding a study permit whose primary objective in coming to Canada is not to continue their education.