When it comes to immigration, it is nearly guaranteed that there are always people exploiting migrants hopes. This Walrus piece explores Kuldeep Bansal’s immigration consultancy business, which allegedly lured immigrants with promises of guaranteed jobs that did not exist, as well as the systemic issues that allow such exploitation to thrive.
The ripple effects of Bansal’s actions, though, can’t be reduced to a monetary value. Overseas Immigration keeps enticing more people, through its network of enablers around the world, to fork over thousands of dollars for services that often amount to an email telling those people they do not qualify to come to Canada. Trident Immigration, which is also named in the class action suit, recently opened a new office in the same Surrey business complex where Overseas is located. Many of the employees who helped Bansal execute his Dubai operation are now registered immigration consultants themselves, running their own consultancies. Chaudhary told me Bansal is the kingpin of immigration consultants in Surrey. “So many people owe their careers to him.”
Bansal … was an early adopter of the foreign-labour-is-cheap ethos and quick to see the potential gold mine offered by the TFWP. Businesses, he realized, especially small, labour-intensive operations, like fast food restaurant franchises, family-owned farms, construction firms, and trucking companies, would be clamouring for low-cost help to pad their bottom lines. In 2006, two years after Bansal first set up Overseas Immigration, his immigration consultancy and employment company, its website claimed to offer “a holistic solution to all matters relating to immigration services.” By 2008, Overseas Immigration was promoting itself as “one of Western Canada’s largest suppliers of foreign workers to local, national and multinational businesses.”