Marriage fraud: CIC's justification for a two year delay

When the Minister of Immigration, Chris Alexander, was asked last May about delays in the Inland Spousal Sponsorship stream during a fundraising campaign of the Conservative Party, he justified the delay by talking about marriage fraud. He said investigation against marriage fraud was one of the big reasons to take more than two years to process applications of Canadians sponsoring their foreign spouses to become permanent residents.

The chief of staff of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Chris Day, has also justified the long delays with the same allegation. What both of them have failed to mention is statistics on the percentage of Inland and Outland Spousal Sponsorship cases per year resulted into marriage fraud. More deeply, how many of the cases that were refused for alleged marriage fraud were also rejected in court appeals, and how many of these applicants were posteriorly prosecuted or deported. 

Applicants don't even know the exact process CIC uses to assess the legitimacy of their marriages, or how many of the 26 months it currently takes to process an application is actually used to ensure this. None of the promotional pieces CIC has produced to alert about marriage fraud includes statistics about this problem. These numbers can't be found on the CIC website either.

This touching CIC video does not include a single piece of statistics about the incidence of marriage fraud

In a recent article by The Toronto Star (6), Minister Chris Alexander's spokeperson, Kevin Menard, said in response to testimonials published by the journal that “anecdotal accounts are not necessarily more broadly representative or, unfortunately, even factual in some cases”. Unfortunately, the previous video, produced and promoted by CIC, only shows "anecdotal accounts" and not statistics about marriage fraud in Canada.

This is what we know so far, thanks to press, CIC workers and applicants themselves:

 1. Marriage fraud is not as frequent as CIC is selling it 

According to an article by CBC (1), between 2008 and 2010, the Canada Border Services Agency received around 200 leads regarding cases of marriage fraud, and only prosecuted 39 applicants.

Image courtesy: Canada Inland Spousal Sponsorship Petitioners

This article by the Toronto Star (2) goes deeper in cases from 2010: from the 46,300 spousal sponsorship applications, 7,400 (16%) were denied. 3,000 were appealed and 1,200 won the appeal in court. That gives a total of 6,200 applications (13%) that didn't go through.

2. CIC already has measures against marriage fraud that shouldn't impact processing times

Due to the findings previously quoted, CIC ammended the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (3) starting October 25, 2012, to include a new rule: sponsored spouses who have been in a relationship of two years or less with their sponsors and have no children in common are subject to a conditional permanent residence status (4). They must cohabit in a legitimate relationship with their sponsor for two years from the moment they receive Permanent Resident status, or this could be revoked. 

Additionally, when a sponsor signs the mandatory form Application to Sponsor, Sponsorship Agreement and Undertaking (5), they agree to "provide financial support for spouse or common‑law partner’s basic requirements, and those of his or her dependent children" for three years after the sponsored spouse receives Permanent Residency. Also, if the sponsored spouse ever collected social security assistance during that period, the sponsor must refund it in full.

For those applicants trying to fool the system, penalties are not light: fines of up to $100,000, prison for up to five years and risk of deportation are just some of them. Also, an immigrant who was sponsored by their spouse can't sponsor another spouse for five years after obtaining permanent residency, which limits cases of fraud.

3. CIC does not invest 26 months investigating an application, as they claim

Immigration expert Klaudios Mustakas, who worked at Citizenship and Immigration Canada for 37 years, declared that CIC is not mandated to do further investigation on marriages other than reviewing proof of cohabitation already requested in the initial package. Further investigation into a marriage falls into the jurisdiction of the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA)

Additionally, according to CICs own eCas system, the online tool that allows (some) Canadian sponsors and foreigns spouses to monitor the progress of their online applications, their files remain untouched by CIC officers for more than a year, and are actually processed in two to three weeks.

When consulting eCas, applicants find records like this one:

This application remained untouched for 16 months

The applicants who shared this information received a decision about their application at the end of May, which means the real processing of their application, according to the information CIC provided to them, was two weeks. The rest of the 16 months was not used to research the legitimacy of their relationship, since they clearly say that they started processing their application in May 14, 2015.

We have received several screenshots like this one from other applicants, showing that their applications were not touched for nearly 16 months, then solved in two to three weeks.

4. The best solution against marriage fraud is quick processing of sponsorship applications

Imagine there is a fraudster among us. He or she managed to make a Canadian fall in love with them, or paid them to fake a marriage. With the current processing times of 26 months, this fraudster will remain in Canada, undetected, for at least 16 months, but more than two years could pass by without any authority noticing it.

If they run with enough luck, they might be among the 4 out of 5 applicants who do receive a work permit with the one-year pilot program CIC launched. They will be able to work in Canada for 16 to 26 months completely undetected, because CIC won't touch their file until then.

Image courtesy: Canada Inland Spousal Sponsorship Petitioners

If applications were processed in less than 6 months, as it happens in most developed countries, fraudsters wouldn't go undetected for so long. They would be prosecuted and/or deported in no time, and others wouldn't feel encouraged to try this path.

Image courtesy: Canada Inland Spousal Sponsorship Petitioners

While this fraudster is favored by the unprecedent delays in the Inland Spousal Sponsorship category, true couples are living a real nightmare.

For Canadians sponsoring their spouses, processing times of 26 months are an economic and emotional distress. We have already talked about this subject in a previous post, and will go deeper in our documentary.

Our research has shown that slow processing times in this category, instead of fighting marriage fraud, are working against genuine couples and in favor of fraudsters.

Is this what you want?

--

Follow our progress on Twitter and Facebook
Sign up to our newsletter

--

Sources:
1. Marriage fraud targeted by Canada Border Agency. CBC. Published: November 1, 2011. Retrieved: June 4, 2015
2. Marriage fraud: Canadian immigration officials tread thin line. The Toronto Star. Published: April 29, 2013. Retrieved: June 4, 2015
3. Backgrounder — Conditional Permanent Resident Status. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: June 4, 2015
4. Information for Sponsored Spouses or Partners. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: June 4, 2015
5. Application to Sponsor, Sponsorship Agreement and Undertaking. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Retrieved: June 4, 2015
6. Has Canada's immigration system lost its heart? The Toronto Star. Published: May 31, 2015. Retrieved: June 5, 2015