The Canadian government pledged to crack down on student visa abuse after Indian officials complained about a “well-planned conspiracy” that used Canadian student visas to smuggle Indian nationals into the United States.
According to India’s Directorate of Enforcement, an umbrella agency that coordinates interdepartmental investigations of money laundering, a sophisticated criminal operation in India has been systematically abusing student visas to smuggle Indians into Canada. The criminals allegedly targeted a hundred Canadian colleges and universities.
Once the Indian nationals involved in the operation reached Canada, the network quickly smuggled them across the border into the United States. According to the Directorate of Enforcement, none of the Indians the operation smuggled into the U.S. ever actually attended a Canadian school with their fraudulently obtained student visas.
Clients of the smuggling operation reportedly paid up to $100,000 each to be slipped across the border into the U.S.
The most infamous example of the smugglers’ activities involved a 39-year-old man named Jagdish Baldevbhai Patel, who paid for himself, his wife, and their two young children to be transported to Canada and then smuggled across the border from Manitoba to Minnesota in January 2022.
The crucial step in this plan involved the Patel family walking across a desolate stretch of the Canadian border, on a night when the wind chill in that area hit 36 degrees below zero. Canadian officials found the Patels frozen to death in the wilderness. Jagdish Patel died clutching the body of his three-year-old son wrapped in a blanket.
The terrible death of the family sparked outrage in both India and Canada. Indian officials revealed that a thriving pipeline for illegal migration to the United States by way of Canada has developed, with smugglers openly advertising their services in some Indian villages. Entire neighborhoods in those villages have been depopulated, as the residents sell off their homes and farmland to pay exorbitant fees to smuggling rings.
Diplomatic relations between Canada and India have deteriorated sharply in recent years, particularly after Canada accused the Indian government of assassinating Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023. Given that tense atmosphere, Indian officials were not shy about accusing Canada of facilitating industrial-scale human smuggling by leaving its student visa program open to abuse.
The Directorate of Enforcement said two smuggling “entities” are referring thousands of Indian nationals to Canadian foreign student programs every year.
Canadian officials responded to these allegations by insisting their international student program is “well-managed,” as Colleges and Institutes Canada president Pari Johnston put it, but they also promised to crack down on the abuses that are occurring. Some provincial officials blamed the Canadian federal government for not doing enough to police visa applications.
“As our government has repeatedly done, we continue to call on the federal government to enact more stringent border control measures to protect Ontario, our institutions, and all of Canada,” a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities told CBC News on Saturday.
Former Canada Border Services Agency officer Kelly Sundberg told CBC that immigration fraud has been happening at “staggering” levels for “quite some time.”
Sundberg, now a professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, said Canada lacks the manpower and technology deployed by the United States to spot identity fraud.
“I’m not surprised at all that we see people both in Canada, the United States and overseas that have coordinated to take advantage of our wide-open system,” he said.
Other experts told CBC that Canadian colleges are not aggressive enough at weeding out fraud, especially small “fly-by-night” schools that largely exist as paperwork fictions.
“Some of these private colleges that were facilitating this trade really aren’t colleges. They’re an abandoned office that have an outdated copy of Microsoft Word, and that’s the whole curriculum,” said Dalhousie University associate professor Robert Huish.
Canada is also under pressure from the United States to address its immigration and border-security issues. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods if both of those countries do not tighten their borders, cutting off the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States.