Canada needs to do a 'stronger job' of curbing misuse of visitor's visas, Miller says

The federal government needs to do more to prevent misuse of visitors visas by people coming to Canada, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said.

«We've taken a number of measures throughout the summer, particularly to deal with the flow of people coming into the country,» Miller told CBC News last week.

«And it's no surprise to anyone that … we need to do a stronger job in making sure that people that are coming here, for example on visitor's visas, do so for those purposes and not for the purposes of… claiming asylum or finding their way into the U.S.»

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reports it encountered 21,929 migrants between border posts on the American side of the Canada-U.S. border between October 2023 and August 2024 – 17,810 of them in the Swanton Sector, which runs along Quebec's border with New York and Vermont.

While that number is nowhere near as high as those associated with the United States' southern border, it's more than twice as many as the 8,686 encountered between border posts on the American side during the same time period in the previous year.

The year before that, CBP encountered only 2,238 migrants between border posts at the northern border.

Of the 21,929 stopped by U.S. Border Patrol officers, 12,992 — nearly 60 per cent of the total — came from India.

Miller said that visa applicants from India could face more scrutiny in future.

«We do see a number of people that are claiming asylum from India, from other countries, who are not getting a positive determination from the Immigration (and) Refugee Board, which is an indication to us that we have to take an increased look at how we accord visas in the first place,» he said.

Miller didn't offer details of any new measures adopted by his department