An assistant manager at a James Bay diner who was facing a January deadline to leave the country says he’s hopefully on his way to getting a work visa after a local MP’s constituency office stepped in to help.
Rajesh Kumar lost his right to work at the Beacon Drive In when his two-year temporary foreign worker visa expired on Oct. 9, five months after he started the process to extend it.
At that point, he had 90 days — until Jan. 10 — to apply for renewal or lose his temporary resident status and be forced to leave the country.
The only trouble is that employers have to submit a labour-market-impact assessment if they want to hire under the temporary foreign worker program. But for weeks, Service sa国际传媒 had been telling Kumar’s employer that it was still processing assessments from March, two months before Kumar’s was submitted.
Last Thursday, Service sa国际传媒 denied an urgent processing request from his employer for Kumar’s assessment.
But Kumar received notice on the weekend that the assessment had been approved and he would be able to apply for his work permit.
Beacon Drive In general manager Janet Reynolds credits the sudden green-lighting of three visas that her restaurant had applied for to efforts by Cowichan-Malahat-Langford MP Alistair McGregor’s constituency office.
“The NDP office had said she might have something in the works for us, and sure enough — it came through,” Reynolds said.
Kumar said he believes public pressure played a role in getting his market-impact-assessment form approved, paving the way for him to submit his work visa application.
Kumar, who has a master’s degree in hospitality and has worked in the restaurant field for about a decade, said he was visiting the Khalsa Diwan Society gurdwara on Cecelia Street when he heard the assessment had been approved.
That night, he celebrated the news over a home-cooked meal with his mother and sister, who were visiting from India.
Reynolds said it’s stressful for everyone when people run into work-visa troubles.
Full-time workers who pay taxes and put money into the community should be able to receive permanent residency, she said. “These people have paid big money to get here. They’re putting money into the community,” she said.
University of Victoria sociology assistant professor Anelyse Weiler said while then-Immigration Minister Sean Fraser was tasked with coming up with more pathways toward permanent residency in 2021, the government has waffled on actually making it happen.
“My suspicion is perhaps that is partly because public opinion has really shifted,” she said.
An estimated 1.2 million temporary residents in sa国际传媒 will see their residency permits expire in 2025, she said.
One of her fellow researchers on migrant workers, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, recently estimated that it would cost the federal government more than $1 billion per 500,000 people to deport those who overstay their visa, Weiler said.
“The federal government has failed to create a plan for a large number of people who are going to be in a very vulnerable position,” she said.
For example, an undocumented woman might be afraid to call the police when faced with domestic abuse, she said.
When workers have permanent-residency rights, it’s less likely they will be exploited in the workplace or in other ways, Weiler said.
