In a significant development, Ottawa has claimed that it has cut-down the nation’s immigration backlog by as much as 40% even as the Citizenship & Immigration Minister observed that the total wait list towards the closure of 2012 was down to 616,271. During 2011 the number allegedly stood at over 1 million.
Jason Kenney, the minister, added that had the administration not adopted certain effective measures to resolve the issue, more than 2 million persons would still have been cooling their heels by 2015. Those steps include a freeze put on the visa-petitions submitted by immigrant investors & entrepreneurs, besides the migrants’ parents & grandparents.
Kenney hastily though further said that the administration intends to re-start admitting a fixed volume of petitions through the scheme of family reunification in the initial months of 2014. He apparently observed that the government will re-open the said arrangement for a restricted figure of fresh submissions on the basis of the fresh requirements during the month of January the next year.
Stress on start-ups, capitalists/industrialists
The federal administration will also commence a fresh scheme targeted at drawing start-up firms and capitalists/industrialists to the Maple Country. Further, Ottawa will endow not more than 2,750 permits per annum for each of the 5 years of the pilot arrangement.
The program comes in the place of two previous immigration programs targeted at the future business owners, even as the same were put on hold, post the administration duly took the decision that they weren’t attracting sufficient genuine business to the nation.
A remarkable chunk of the backlog reduction materialized post the incumbent administration’s 2012 budget got rid of nearly 280,000 submissions filed prior to February 2008 by the qualified manpower & their dependents. The development, however, has not gone down well with many people even as they have reportedly dragged the government to the courts.
Meanwhile, the immigration minister has dismissed the suggestions that just admitting more immigrants would cut-down the backlog. He added that doing so would still leave over 1 million persons cooling their heels by 2015. He observed that swelling the immigration targets, boosting the figure of persons admitted, would hardly have been an answer to the huge and increasing backlogs & wait times.
Kenney further said that the same actually would have kept on getting worse, minus the administration launching the action plan for swifter immigration and controls on the fresh submissions. He added that the average time required for the petitions to be duly processed has also headed south.
