Senior Immigration Officer Cites Fraud and Incompetence in Refugee System–Part 1
By David Richardson, Retired Senior Immigration Examining Officer
I began my work for Canada’s Department of Immigration as a Senior Immigration Examining Officer (SIEO) at the Fort Erie Point of Entry (POE) at the Peace Bridge.
After some initial problems, I was elected to act as their Union Rep. About eight months later, I was elected to be the Immigration Rep in Southern Ontario for the Canadian Employment and Immigration Union, Ontario Council, where I then became the president of that council.
Management sent me to get the training I needed for the job : two weeks in Vancouver for SIEO training, and 3 weeks in Regina at the RCMP Depot for Use of Force Training. I felt satisfied that I was able to do the job. However, that job was not exactly what I thought it would be.
Fort Erie, Ontario is opposite Buffalo, New York. The Peace Bridge joins the two cities. In the 1990’s, Fort Erie processed 4000 to 5000 refugee claims a year. The process was convoluted and resulted in a major industry being developed on both sides of the border to handle it. Churches, refugee holding facilities, immigration consultants, lawyers, NGO’s, and translators were all part of the process. The Immigration Officer was responsible for the identification and documentation of the claimants. The resulting forms and documents and schedules provided to the claimant included healthcare and welfare and transportation to Toronto where their refugee claim would be finalized.
The process at the border could take three to four hours as many claimants came as families. There were two Officers working with translators working two claims a shift, days and evenings. The process as a whole, from claim to determination of status could take up to three years or more. And if an individual was found not to be eligible for refugee status, they would be sent back to Buffalo, where after three months, they could start all over again !! This sounds hard to believe, but it was a fact.
The Port of Entry Process
The refugee claimant would arrive from Buffalo, New York via specialized Taxi service paid by Canada. Information about name, the country of origin and language preference would be recorded so that a translator could be booked and an appointment made for the client to formally make their claim. They would then be returned to Buffalo, to await their appointment.
This was the process in 1995—-before an agreement was made with the U.S. which resulted in non-American claimants being ineligible to make claims in Canada if they were in the U.S.
When the claimant arrived for their appointment, they were photographed and fingerprinted and brought to an interview room where the translator was present and the interview would commence. We had a form made up to get the required information to begin the claim. Readers may be shocked to read the following :
The information from all applicants was almost always exactly the same, no matter where the applicants came from. Obviously, they had received coaching in how to lie at the holding center in Buffalo. From the very beginning, fraud and lies like the following prevailed :
(1) Almost all claimants said they had flown into New York City in the company of an agent, who for a fee of $10,000 to $15,000 a person, would bring them through US Immigration. The Agent would then take their passports and return to the country of origin. On arrival in New York, the vast majority (95%) of applicants / claimants had no documents to prove that they were really from the country they claimed to be from.
(2) They would take a bus to Buffalo to the Church that housed and prepared them to make their claim. (Obviously they had duped the Churches into accepting their lies / stories.)
(3) All claimed they were being persecuted for clan membership or religious affiliation or abuse of some nature. We soon learned that we couldn’t believe a word they said. (As a side note, photographs and fingerprints were not the norm for a long period of time, but were introduced because it was found that claimants would make a claim in Fort Erie with one group of children, return to the US and return with a whole new family and make another claim in Niagara Falls. This enabled them to collect much more in welfare payments when they got to Canada.)
(4) Another interesting thing was that the interpreters would tell us that the claimant was lying to us, but we could do nothing about it as it was the refugee board’s job to determine veracity of claims.
(5) We would fill out the forms with the names that they gave us, print out the claim form, give them forms to get medicals, and eligibility for welfare and childcare. Then up the road they went.
(6) The fraud we saw was extremely shameless very early in many cases. For example, Pakistanis, who had succeeded in getting refugee status in the US, were coming to Canada to make a refugee claim here in order to get extra welfare cash from Canada. They found it harder to commit this fraud in the US because the US requires fingerprints on ID cards and the US has card readers that scan information. We tried to get one of these readers at the Fort Erie Port of Entry, but our Immigration Department refused.
(7) The really disturbing thing is that these claimants are not the pathetic cases you see on TV. These people can afford to pay a great deal of money to get here, and were most likely the upper middle class in their country. In other words, they were economic migrants and it disturbed the translators to no end that these people were getting away with so much fraud from the very start.
________________________
www.ImmigrationWatchCanada.org