Thousands of university and college acceptance letters used by foreign students applying to study in Canada this year may be fake, an official with Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada said at a Commons Citizen and Immigration committee meeting.
Bronwyn May, director-general of the International Students Branch, told the committee on Nov. 7 that more than 10,000 letters could not be verified by the IRCC and are “potentially fraudulent.”
The committee is reviewing a new system of verifying post-secondary acceptance letters introduced last year, and early signs are that the new process is working, said May.
The IRCC reviewed about 500,000 university and college applications and their attached Canadian school acceptance letters, she said. While 93 percent of acceptance letters were verified, more than 10,000 are still being analyzed and are “potentially fraudulent,” said May.
Of the unverified acceptance letters, 2 percent could not be confirmed with the school, 1 percent had been cancelled by the school, and in 2.7 percent of cases there was no response from the school.
“The enhanced letter of acceptance system has been in place now for about 10 months, and so we’re in the process of analyzing the data associated with the 10,000 plus letters of acceptance,” she told MPs at the committee.
She said the IRCC is “paying very close attention” to the matter and needs to investigate possible sources of the letters.
There have been reports over more than a year of foreign students receiving falsified school acceptance letters, sometimes unwittingly, from fraudulent immigration consultants.
The enhanced letter of acceptance verification system was introduced last December to better protect students from fraud, May said. Ottawa also said it was reducing the number of foreign students permitted to come to Canada to study over the next two years. The announcement came after more than 807,000 study permits were issued in 2022, up 190,000 from 2021. The new target for foreign student permits will be reduced to 437,000 for 2025 and 2026, down from the 485,000 permits handed out in 2024, according to Immigration Canada.
Numbers
released in September show that the number of new study permit applications processed dropped by 54 percent compared with 2023.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller has previously raised concerns over the number of international students seeking asylum in the country after entering on student visas. Since the pandemic, about 355,000 international students have been given permanent residency status in Canada, according to numbers
released earlier this year by the IRCC.
Jennifer Cowan and Matthew Horwood contributed to this report.
