Why recently the illegal immigration in Canada has increased so badly?

It is a well-known fact that Canada and Australia are the most welcoming countries in the Western World when it comes to accepting needy immigrants in the form of a genuine workforce or helpless refugees. But Canada, in particular, has had its own history of generously allowing many helpless immigrants into its borders over the last decade and a half. It has a separate Law enacted exclusively to govern the immigration screening process and entry allowance.

There are numerous checkpoints in the form of small rehabilitation centers placed at various areas near the Canadian border exclusively to facilitate the immigration process. But even after so many legal and infrastructural measures, unfortunately, there has been a huge menace of illegal immigration in Canada over the past few years. About approximately 35,000 to 1,20,000 has been a rough estimate of the total number of illegal immigrants to have entered Canada over the past decade.

Why do they Immigrate illegally into Canada?

There are many answers to this question of “why” and they all are related to the demographical aspects of particular countries facing illegal immigration. For instance, India has the majority illegal immigration in the world coming from adjoining countries, especially Bangladesh. Exactly similar to this case is the problem of illegal immigration in Canada.

How illegal immigration in Canada affects the economy?

Over the last decade, there have been several political crisis, anti-social activities, inhuman warfares, etc. problems observed by the millennial generation across the globe. These problems have affected certain areas the most such as the Middle Eastern countries like Syria, Iraq, Israel, etc.; European countries, United States and some major Asian countries like India, Afghanistan, etc. All these problems have led to tremendous loss of human lives, property, global peace, humanity, etc. and has therefore led to the mass migration of people from major affected areas. For instance, the rise of terrorist groups and the anti-government activities in the countries like Iraq and  Syria have resulted in mass population fleeing from those countries. Once people flee from such affected countries, they search for a country which might be economically, socially and infrastructure wise secure. And most importantly they prefer easy immigration process. The only two countries perfectly satisfying all these factors are Canada and USA. And more people preferred USA over Canada due to a more developed image.

But with the election of the current US President Donald Trump, there was an introduction of stringent legal policies banning immigrants from many Islamic countries and this left all the helpless immigrants into a fix. As a result, all these immigrants started to flee to USA and went to the closest and safest option, Canada. This was the main reason behind large-scale illegal immigration in Canada over the recent past, although lately, Canada has been deporting many of such illegal immigrants.

How Do they illegally immigrate into Canada?

The most common ways adopted by refugees to enter the countries have been identified as the illegal Border crossing, Overstaying Visa, and Fake Marriage with domestic citizen.

Illegal immigration in Canada is mainly characterized by the refugees overstaying their visa validity period. This basically means that many people first enter Canada legally with a work visa or tourist visa or education visa, but then after the maturity of its valid period, they continue to stay in Canada in complete disguise. Most of the illegal immigrants are caught overstaying their visa period in Canada.

The second most probable way to illegally immigrate into Canada has been crossing the border illegally. These refugees are mostly only from USA which has been facing President Trump’s immigration ban. Post this immigration ban, as many as 14,000 refugees staying in the USA had reportedly fled to Canada and immigrated illegally. Lastly, people also marry Canadian citizens in a fake manner just to acquire a Canadian citizenship and thereby immigrate into Canada illegally. However, the number of illegal immigrants doing this is quite small.

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Raima Sen

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