Two million people are expected to leave the country in Canada's immigration reset. What if they don't?

Despite moving to Canada from India in 2018 as an international student and receiving a work permit upon graduating two years later, Dinesh* lives in Ontario today as a visitor even though that was obviously not the original plan. But with no other way to extend his stay in Canada after the expiry of his work permit in July, the 25-year-old decided to “convert” his status by applying for a visitor visa.

“I did that to stay a little bit longer with hopes of qualifying for an immigration draw,” he said. “I am doing my best to learn French and improve my immigration points so that I can somehow, someway, be saved and can stay here rather than going back.”

More than two million newcomers such as Dinesh are expected to leave Canada in the next two years as their permits expire, which is part of the federal government’s plan to reduce the overall number of temporary residents and cut the population growth of the past few years.

But economists and immigration lawyers don’t think it’s realistic to expect such a large volume of international students and temporary foreign workers to leave in such a short time. They expect many to convert their residential permits, like Dinesh did, to prolong their stay.

Being classified a visitor, though, comes with its own set of problems, as Dinesh has learned in the past six months. He can’t work on a visitor’s permit, so he has had to cut down on his spending and now lives in a shared apartment, as opposed to living on his own previously. Many others are in the same boat, raising concerns about both their welfare and whether the government’s immigration cutbacks will have any real effect.

Dinesh, a former service technician who used to fix computers and printers for a living, didn’t want to share how he was making ends meet, just that he was “somehow surviving.” But immigration consultants say it is common for people without a work permit to earn cash under the table.

“Legally not being able to work (doesn’t) mean that the bills (stop) coming,” he said. “It’s not going to stop; it’s not going to take a break from you. It’s going to chew you up, eat you up.”

Despite all the troubles, Dinesh still wants to stay in Canada and make it work. A key reason for that, aside from how hard he has worked to build a life here, is that he took out a big loan in India to sponsor his diploma. Moving back to India would mean earning in rupees, which could make it more difficult to pay off his loan.

“If I have to go back, I will gladly go back. In fact, at this point I would say the situation is better in India than here,” said Dinesh, whose visitor permit expires in mid-2025. “But I have already invested a lot here, so I am going to try all the avenues. I haven’t completely lost hope yet.”

While Dinesh is already on a visitor’s permit, Shreya*, who moved to Canada from South Asia in 2018, is planning to apply for one since her work permit expires at the end of the year.

The 35-year-old can’t pinpoint the exact reason she moved here, but she remembers that “everybody was trying to go to Canada,” and she wanted to experience the “beautiful future,” which supposedly included a decent job and a house, that her immigration agent had constantly gone on about.

But six years after quitting a reliable marketing job and taking two loans amounting to about $50,000 to study at a college in Ontario, Shreya will soon lose her work permit and, therefore, the means to live in Canada.

“I take responsibility for my decisions, but looking back, I feel like I was brainwashed by immigration agents,” she said. “I had never been to Canada and I didn’t know the environment or anybody here. I had to rely on what they said.”

I came here to have a good future. I thought I could be a person who is successful in helping others. But I feel like I'm a big zero

Shreya, a non-permanent resident in Canada, whose work permit expires soon

Shreya feels tricked because her journey as a newcomer has been a painful one, and it began with hurdles on the job front. With two years of work experience in her home country, she expected to find a job that paid more than minimum wage upon her arrival. Instead, she had to wear a costume for her first job and stand outside in the cold during her first Canadian winter.

That was the first time she realized her life wasn’t going to be as straightforward as her immigration agents had described. Still, she stuck to her goals and eventually got a better job in the food industry and graduated from college.

Her original goal was to become a permanent resident, but that was out of reach by the time she graduated in 2021 because meeting the required points in Canada’s skilled immigration system had suddenly become a lot tougher owing to certain changes.

With a huge loan to pay back in her home country and uncertainty about her future in Canada, Shreya said she fell into depression. During this period, one of her friends, who was going through a similar phase, returned to his home country and killed himself.

“I could have been next,” she said. “But, fortunately, I was surrounded by good friends who helped me, and I managed to come out of there.”

Shreya still hasn’t decided what to do after her work permit expires, but she said there’s a good chance that, like Dinesh, she may apply for a visitor visa. She still hopes for a last-minute immigration draw that can help her over the line.

“All I can do is pray,” she said. “I came here to have a good future. I thought I could be a person who is successful in helping others. But I feel like I’m a big zero.”

Unrealistic expectations

The federal government’s decision to reduce the number of temporary residents comes after a two-year period when the number of temporary residents increased manyfold compared to previous years in an effort to fill a record number of job vacancies coming out of the pandemic.

But with job vacancies declining and the unemployment rate rising during the past few quarters, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government decided to tighten its immigration policies.

As a result of these reductions, the government expects Canada’s overall population numbers to decrease in 2025 and 2026 after abnormally high increases in recent years.

Zeynab Ziaie Moayyed, a Toronto-based immigration consultant, expects many temporary residents to leave, but doesn’t expect the goal of a million of them departing each year to be realistic.

“Not all those people are going to leave and it’s not only causing chaos and confusion now; it’s going to continue to cause chaos and confusion for a number of years as the current applicants work their way through the system,” she said. “We are going to have a lot more people who are going to be out of status. We have never had that problem before.”

The “reset that’s happening” isn’t being done in the “most fair way,” Ziaie Moayyed said, since a lot of people are getting caught in the middle who are essentially “diligent applicants” who were following the immigration rules.

For some cultures, returning home after spending thousands of dollars to move to Canada can be seen as embarrassing, Stephen Green, managing partner at Green and Spiegel LLP, an immigration law firm, said.

A lot of consultants and lawyers expect many temporary residents to extend their stay here by trying to change their status from student or worker to visitor or seek asylum, Steven Meurrens, a partner at Vancouver-based law firm Larlee Rosenberg LLP, said.

“A lot of temporary residents are, from what I can tell, just hunkering down, hoping that there’s some sort of policy change again,” he said.

If the government isn’t able to meet its goal of reducing the number of temporary residents, it could also potentially lead to a decrease in the number of new international students and temporary foreign workers that it plans to admit during the next two years, Meurrens said.

He points out that the government’s immigration levels plan calls for an outflow of 1.2 million and 1.1 million non-permanent residents (NPRs) in 2025 and 2026, respectively. At the same time, it expects an inflow of about 816,000 and 660,000, respectively. This would lead to a net reduction of about 900,000 in the next two years.

“What is the plan if these people don’t leave?” Meurrens said. “How drastic will they have to cut future student and work permit programs in order to still hit their target percentage of temporary residents in Canada?”

But Immigration Minister Marc Miller has said that he expects the vast majority of NPRs to voluntarily leave.

“In some cases, increasingly many, I will concede, people decide to choose. They are in a situation of irregularity in that case,” he said during a parliamentary committee meeting last month. “Once they have exhausted their remedies, they are removed by the CBSA (Canada Border Services Agency).”

He also said there are an increasing number of international students making asylum claims with “very little hope” given their conditions.

That crashing feeling

Anya*, a 27-year-old who came to Canada from Russia as a student in 2018, doesn’t want to apply for asylum, but she might have to go that route if she doesn’t meet the immigration requirements before her work permit expires in July.

Going back to Russia is not an option for the Toronto-based woman due to the ongoing conflict with Ukraine. She fears imprisonment if she returns after living in the West for a long time. There have been cases where people returning from the United States were imprisoned, she said.

Anya, who works at an insurance company, still has half a year to decide what she wants to do to extend her stay in Canada, but she feels uncertain and stressed almost every day.

“There are days when I cry the whole day because it’s like you have this feeling of uncertainty, and it’s always in the background,” she said. “Even though you can have a good day, in the background, that feeling is always there and then eventually it comes crashing.”

The reason why Anya, Dinesh and others are looking for different ways to extend their stay in Canada is because they haven’t been able to get the required number of points — which drastically increased in recent years — to convert their temporary status into permanent residency.

There are many immigration programs, but most temporary residents and foreigners living outside Canada try to immigrate as skilled workers. These programs are managed by an online system called Express Entry, which started about a decade ago and provides prospective immigrants with points for their education levels, work experience, English and French language proficiency, age and other factors.

The higher the applicants score — out of a total of 1,200 — the higher the chance they have of becoming permanent residents, which eventually leads to citizenship. The system is designed in a way to attract young, skilled people from around the world.

For example, applicants under 30 receive the highest possible number of points in the age category. Applicants also receive points for Canadian educational degrees and work experience.

International students spend thousands of dollars on tuition and invest three to six years of their lives in Canada — while they study and earn a post-graduate work permit — with the hopes of receiving those additional points to make the cut and become permanent residents.

Temporary residents aren’t promised a permanent stay, but they are influenced by the system’s stakeholders, such as foreign brokers, or even comments made by politicians in the past decade, and often assume they are going to make the cut. But the hike in cut-off scores seems to send a message that Canada is going to be more selective in its immigration plans.

Despite living in Canada for five years (as a student and on a work permit), I am still just a visitor today

Chandra, who is in Canada on a visitor's visa after his work permit expired

One reason why the cut-off scores are so high now is that there are a lot more people annually competing for a limited number of permanent residency spots due to a record increase in the number of temporary workers and students in Canada in recent years, immigration consultants say.

A policy introduced last year that allows the government to bypass the existing immigration ranking system and set lower cut-off scores for certain groups, such as engineers, health-care workers and French speakers, has also played a role in raising the scores, analysts say. The result is that the policy leaves fewer spots for thousands of general applicants who don’t fit into those groups.

Some economists have also warned that the steep increase in cut-off scores could force many temporary residents with specialized skill sets to leave Canada, thereby hurting the country’s struggling labour productivity levels.

For example, 30-year-old Chandra* worked as a cybersecurity analyst when he had his work permit and helped his clients save hundreds of thousands of dollars. But he has been on a visitor visa ever since his work permit ended in March and hasn’t been able to get a job despite decent demand for his skill set.

Nevertheless, he keeps attending cybersecurity conferences in Toronto with the hope of landing a job at a company willing to sponsor his work permit, but he has been unlucky so far.

Chandra hopes he can find something before his visitor’s permit ends in January. If not, he will try to apply for another extension. If the extension is rejected, he is happy to return to India, he said, but he wants to ensure that he has tried all the avenues to stay since he invested a lot of money to study here in the first place.

“It’s odd,” he said. “Despite living in Canada for five years (as a student and on a work permit), I am still just a visitor today.”

* Names have been changed to protect privacy.