Good evening, Madam Chair and honourable members of the parliamentary committee.
I rise before you today with profound gratitude to express my sincere appreciation to each and every one of you for giving us this opportunity to address the critical issue of exploitation faced by international students. I want to thank all the MPs, ministers, members of this committee and the honourable immigration minister for halting the further deportations until the final investigation is completed.
I am here to represent those students who participated in the protest. We are affected students who have fallen victim to unscrupulous agents who have provided us fake offer letters and ruined our lives. We are victims of fraud. We are already victims back home, and we are revictimized again here in Canada.
I want to make one recommendation to the task force on how to determine whether a student is genuine or not—by checking their capability and intention. If the student is already capable of obtaining the original offer letter, then why do we need a fake one? Moreover, their intentions are clear. That's why they went to the school. They completed their studies.
In addition, once the student has got clearance from the task force, then we have a gentle request to the minister to use his powers to revoke the inadmissibility and five-year ban under section 25.2 of IRPA.
Studies have shown that 50% of the affected international students have suicidal thoughts. There are four or five dead bodies going back home to India every month due to mental stress. Students are visiting counsellors for their mental stability. Our families back home are on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, because we pay five times more fees than a domestic student. Now we have paid around $15,000 to $20,000 to lawyers as legal fees.
Now immigration consultants are threatening our families, too, because we are openly exposing them in the media and spreading awareness about these ghost consultants. The mother of one of the students who was protesting with us was sick. She was waiting for him, and he lost his mother. Now he has to live with this regret for his whole life. His only crime was that he was defrauded by a ghost immigration consultant. That's why revoking the inadmissibility is so important, so that we can travel back home in emergency situations.
We are broken mentally and financially, and we are losing confidence in ourselves because all of us are suffering this unbearable pain from the last two to three years. We are expecting that real justice should be delivered to us.
Apart from that, Canadian colleges are now in a race to recruit many international students. That's why they are dealing with these ghost consultants who act as sales representatives to these colleges. These ghost consultants, who are dealing with several colleges in Canada, sell fake dreams to students. Colleges in Canada intentionally create a barrier between the students and the colleges, so that students have no choice. They have to go to immigration consultants.
According to a CBC documentary on The Fifth Estate, colleges in Canada issued 10 times more acceptance letters than their physical occupancy limit, and when these students came to Canada, these colleges deferred these students to the next semester. A recent example of a similar incident was when a student protested in front of Alpha College in Toronto. Here I want to make one recommendation: that colleges in Canada be required to deal only with authorized agents who are regulated by the Canadian immigration authorities.
We care about the integrity of the Canadian system, and we believe the culprits should face consequences. We believe that no system is perfect in this world. However, the exploitation of international students has happened because the ghost consultants got to know about some deficiencies in our system.
Now we have to work as a team—the government, the immigration department and the international students—to rectify our system. As a representative of affected international students, I want to mention that we are already working on an awareness campaign. We are going to spread awareness among students who want to come to Canada on study permits from all over the world, because we don't want any other student to have to suffer the same pain that we went through.