Stewart Sharma Harsanyi Immigration Law Firm Blog

Marriage appeal - Sponsorship Refusal - Appeals before the Immigration Appeal Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board

I'll be attending at the Immigration Appeal Division of the Immigration Refugee Board on August 24, 2016 to handle an appeal against a refused spousal sponsorship application. In this case, my client is a Canadian citizen born in Punjab, India. He is a Sikh, and this is his third marriage. He had a short-lived first marriage while he was in a third country; he married again and on the basis of this second marriage was sponsored to Canada. Some months after he arrived, the marriage broke down with his sponsor and acrimonious divorce proceedings ensued. The breakdown of that relationship soon after his arrival to Canada raised the specter that he had committed marriage fraud to enter this country. His ex-wife called the police the day she left the matrimonial home; after investigation no charges were laid against my client; she then made allegations that he committed marriage fraud to the immigration authorities of this country that resulted in delay in the finalization of his citizenship application. Despite the passage of many years since the breakdown of their relationship, she then wrote a poison pen letter to the overseas visa office with respect to his current relationship and sponsorship alleging... Read more →

The Minister's Roundtable on Immigration: Will We Welcome More or Less Immigrants to Canada in 2017?

I was honored to have been invited to join the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and other officials and stakeholders in a round table discussion held here in Calgary on the future of immigration in Canada. This new government is seeking to understand how to grow Canada using the immigration system. The findings from this discourse will help this government plan for the future of immigration in Canada including the number of newcomers Canada welcomes each year. For quite some time immigration has been treated as a sacred cow in Canada. Arguments against the numbers of new Canadians or immigrants welcomed each year sometimes are characterized as being inherently racist. I don't know how we got to the number that we seek or achieve or try to achieve each year, which is approximately 300,000 immigrants. This is on top of the hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers and international students and visitors that enter this country each year. I believe it was our past liberal prime minister who suggested this, somewhat pegged to the arbitrary number of 1% of Canada's population. The discussion guide for the round table discussion can be found on the CIC website. It is... Read more →

Assessing Misrepresentation and Loss of Status in Canada

I have written about misrepresentation on numerous occasions. The consequences of misrepresentation are serious and can lead to loss of status in Canada. Misrepresentation is broadly defined in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. There are numerous cases regarding misrepresentation in the jurisprudence. It seems that individuals lie, omit relevant information, obfuscate or prevaricate for any number of reasons. There are individuals who lie in order to obtain status in this country. There are individuals who lie because they relied on dubious advice from unqualified individuals - usually their relatives or friends - even when the lie is not required to obtain status in this country. So, there are individuals that lie to obtain an advantage and there are individuals that lie for no discernible reason whatsoever. I handled a case for a permanent resident of Canada earlier this year that was somewhat unusual. His wife was the principle applicant for an economic class application; both he and his wife were skilled individuals with proficiency in the English language and perhaps either would have qualified to come here. After applying but before landing, the principle applicant, my client's then wife, became pregnant. The couple had a child; my client assumed... Read more →

Blog Posting - Designing an Overseas Refugee Selection System that Works

Ninety percent of the world's refugees are living in developing countries where their living conditions are usually poor, their integration into local societies and economies difficult, and their legal status is transient. Just ten percent of the world's refugees live in the developed world. The casual observer might sneer and remark that the reason for this is that the developing countries are most commonly those with repressive regimes or those who are engaged in war with one another, however the reality is that the developed countries usually have played some role in causing world problems which result in refugee outflows. To give, two recent examples, few could argue that the disastrous Iraq War did not result in widespread insecurity in the country; warfare; and dire humanitarian conditions. This was a war of choice engaged in by the most developed country in the world which has led to massive refugee outflows. The NATO led bombing campaign which displaced Qaddafi is another example of armed intervention (whether you deem it humanitarian or otherwise) which has led to refugee outflows from that country and also the complete breakdown of state authority in Libya allowing for the rise of smugglers and criminal gangs unsafely... Read more →