Game the system

I’ve been working on the front lines of Canadian immigration for 12+ years. Thousands of cases. Thousands of people. And in all that time, I’ve probably met a few dozen real, true refugees. People fleeing serious persecution. People with no internal flight alternative. People who couldn’t rely on their own governments for protection. People who had no choice but to escape.

The rest are bogus. People gaming the system. People coached by consultants, lawyers, ghost agents. People using the refugee claim process to buy time. People using it to get work permits. That’s how the system is built now.

There’s a whole process to move through. The RPD, the Refugee Appeal Division, judicial reviews, humanitarian applications, pre-removal risk assessments. Up and down. Back and forth. One refusal leads to another lifeline. One loss becomes the trigger for another delay. Eventually something lands. Or people just sit and wait.

The system has been softened over the past 10 years. Liberal policy has taken a protection mechanism meant for the truly vulnerable and turned it into a bloated process that people profit from. Lawyers, consultants, NGOs. Everyone has a role in keeping it going.

And when it doesn’t work, folks just go underground. CBSA is backlogged. They can’t get travel documents. They can’t locate people. This isn’t the U.S. We don’t round people up and stick them on military aircraft. The Canadian system is slow, bureaucratic, and completely reliant on the cooperation of foreign governments. And that cooperation is sporadic.

So we end up with tens of thousands of failed refugee claimants awaiting removal. Now repackaged by the Liberal government as “unauthorized workers” or “undocumented migrants.” We’ve taken something that was supposed to be exceptional - protection for the truly at-risk - and turned it into a mainstream pathway. Gaming the system, failing the process, and staying anyway has become completely normal.

There’s an election coming. And there’s a real opportunity to ask what kind of immigration system we want in this country. One that works for the people it was actually built to protect, or one that keeps rewarding those who’ve learned how to cheat it.
7:52 PM · Mar 28, 2025
https://x.com/MatthewIwama/status/1905800244681724225