Canada Promises Crackdown on Student Visa Abuse After India Human Smuggling Charges

The Canadian government pledged to crack down on student visa abuse after Indian officials complained about a “well-planned conspiracy” that used Canadian student visas to smuggle Indian nationals into the United States.

According to India’s Directorate of Enforcement, an umbrella agency that coordinates interdepartmental investigations of money laundering, a sophisticated criminal operation in India has been systematically abusing student visas to smuggle Indians into Canada. The criminals allegedly targeted a hundred Canadian colleges and universities.

Once the Indian nationals involved in the operation reached Canada, the network quickly smuggled them across the border into the United States. According to the Directorate of Enforcement, none of the Indians the operation smuggled into the U.S. ever actually attended a Canadian school with their fraudulently obtained student visas.

Clients of the smuggling operation reportedly paid up to $100,000 each to be slipped across the border into the U.S.

The most infamous example of the smugglers’ activities involved a 39-year-old man named Jagdish Baldevbhai Patel, who paid for himself, his wife, and their two young children to be transported to Canada and then smuggled across the border from Manitoba to Minnesota in January 2022.

The crucial step in this plan involved the Patel family walking across a desolate stretch of the Canadian border, on a night when the wind chill in that area hit 36 degrees below zero. Canadian officials found the Patels frozen to death in the wilderness. {sni[}

The terrible death of the family sparked outrage in both India and Canada. Indian officials revealed that a thriving pipeline for illegal migration to the United States by way of Canada has developed, with smugglers openly advertising their services in some Indian villages. Entire neighborhoods in those villages have been depopulated, as the residents sell off their homes and farmland to pay exorbitant fees to smuggling rings.

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The Directorate of Enforcement said two smuggling “entities” are referring thousands of Indian nationals to Canadian foreign student programs every year.

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