Experts say India’s human trafficking allegations against Canadian colleges reveal an ‘exploitative’ immigration system.

An investigation by Indian officials alleges that dozens of Canadian colleges and universities may be linked to the scheme Illegally transporting students across the Canada-US borderThis report reveals the “astonishing” extent to which loopholes in the immigration system can be exploited, some experts say.

“If these allegations are true, they expose horrific gaps in our integrity protocols…and this is deeply concerning and problematic,” Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, told CBC News, adding that the allegations indicate “the scope of… wide range of allegations. Human smuggling.”

The Indian Enforcement Directorate said in a press release on Tuesday that it had uncovered evidence of human trafficking involving “two entities” in Mumbai after investigating the Indian connection with… Patel familywho froze to death in January 2022 while trying to cross the border from Manitoba into Minnesota during extremely cold weather conditions.

The Enforcement Directorate said its investigations found that around 25,000 students were referred by one entity, with over 10,000 students referred by another entity to various colleges outside India every year.

Necessary arrangements will be made for Indian citizens to be admitted into Canadian colleges and universities and to apply for student visas, according to the Enforcement Directorate.

But once the Indian nationals arrived in Canada, instead of enrolling in college, they illegally crossed the border from Canada into the US and the fees received by Canadian schools were credited back to the individuals’ account, the Enforcement Directorate said.

The Enforcement Directorate said the investigation also revealed that about 112 colleges based in Canada entered into an agreement with one entity and more than 150 colleges with another entity.

These allegations have not been proven in court and India has not identified the Canadian colleges allegedly involved.

The RCMP has reached out to India

Camille Boilly-Lavoie, a spokeswoman for the RCMP, said in an email to CBC News that she has reached out to India through international police liaison officers to obtain additional information about the investigations.

Colleges and Institutes Canada, a national advocacy organization for Canada’s post-secondary education network, said it had no details about the nature of the colleges said to be involved in the Indian allegations.

The study permit application and admission process is entirely managed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the applicant and the post-secondary institution, said Dayna Smokum, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities.

“The Ministry of Colleges and Universities has no role in this process,” Smocum said in an email to CBC News. “As our government has done time and time again, we continue to call on the federal government to enact tougher border control measures to protect Ontario, our institutions and all of Canada.”

In an email to CBC News, IRCC said it has focused since 2023 on strengthening the integrity of the international student program.

It says it has capped enrollment levels at designated learning institutions (DLIs) – schools approved by the provincial or territorial government to host international students.

IRCC says it has also asked DLIs to verify all admission letters, introduced consequences for those institutions that fail to participate in student compliance exercises, and increased the minimum financial requirements for study permit applicants.

The expert says the immigration system lacks oversight

But Kelly Sandberg, a former Canada Border Services Agency officer and professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, said the system is not subject to any oversight and is being “exploited” by transnational criminals.

“This type of fraud and manipulation of our immigration system has been going on for some time,” he added, noting that the scale of those potentially involved is “astonishing.”

The United States has been using biometric technologies like facial recognition and fingerprinting to process immigrants for more than a decade, and has eliminated identification fraud in its program, which Sandberg saddens.

But he said Canada doesn’t have the staff or technology to effectively screen documents or individuals.

Sandberg said he would be “very surprised” to discover that there are colleges or universities actively and knowingly participating in this alleged criminal enterprise.

“But I’m not at all surprised to see people in both Canada, the United States and beyond coordinating to take advantage of our broadly open system,” he said.

Ken Zaifman, a Winnipeg-based immigration lawyer, says in his experience, oversight should fall to educational institutions.

“But that didn’t happen. They were addicted to international students to fund their programmes,” he added.

Colleges and educational institutions should have been aware that there was such a problem when recruiting international students, but instead chose to continue hiring agents outside Canada to recruit students without any control over what they do, Zaifman said.

“The numbers were so large no one wanted to do anything about it,” he said.

“Some universities were a little more diligent, but not all of them. They were hiring agents and they were attracting students, and it never occurred to them that maybe the movement of these students wasn’t real.”

Fly-by-night schools.

But Robert Huish, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in the Department of International Development Studies, says he believes many of the schools involved in this alleged scheme may be mostly private colleges.

“Some of these private colleges that were facilitating this trade are not actually colleges. It’s an abandoned office that has an old version of Microsoft Word, and that’s the whole curriculum,” he said.

“The big focus here is not on legitimate colleges and universities across the country, but on these express things that are opening up above gas stations.”