700 international students face deportation in enrolment scam as Brampton Councillor calls for education reform

One Brampton City Councillor is calling for education reform and for the province to do more to protect international students following an enrollment scam that’s led to hundreds of deportation orders.

Protestors have been gathering in Mississauga and Brampton to speak out about the deportation of some 700 international students who fell victim to an enrollment scam. The demonstrations were sparked by the Government of Canada’s decision to deport the students, who were granted student visas based on fake acceptance letters to Canadian schools by a now-shuttered consulting company in India.

And while some are casting blame on the students, Brampton Coun. Navjit Kaur has visited with protestors and says the real culprits are the schools who allow unlicensed agents and “ghost consultants” to make applications for students.

“We need to protect the core values of our country and ensure that international students are treated with dignity and respect, rather than being treated as mere commodities,” Kaur said in a statement to Insauga.com

Part of the problem is the use of what Kaur called “ghost consultants” – unlicensed and unregulated third parties who file applications on behalf of students with no accountability.

Kaur is calling on the province to have schools terminate their agreements with ghost consultants and aggregators to safeguard students against scams like this in the future.

The fraud was only revealed when students applied for permanent residency and the admission offers were found to be fake. The enrolment company reportedly gave students fake offers of acceptance without their knowledge, and would then get the students enrolled in other institutions once they arrived in Canada.

Sean Fraser, Federal Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, said in May that the fraudulent acceptance letters are under investigation and said the focus “is on identifying culprits, not penalizing victims.”

Fraser said the fraud victims will have an opportunity to demonstrate their situation and present evidence to support their case.

Data from the Canadian Bureau for International Education says there were 807,750 international students in Canada at the end of 2022 at all levels of study with India as the top source country, making up some 40 per cent of international enrolment.