4 ms·

Wonderful $25/HR opportunity -or- Canada LMIA abuse and immigration fraud

19 points by llm_nerd 3y ago

gnabgib 3y ago
Article title: "software developer - Abbotsford, BC - Job posting - Job Bank"
llm_nerd 3y ago
This really is targeted at the Canadian HN readers per the Canadian job market and the extraordinary abuse that is happening right in the open. New grads in Canada are having an incredibly rough time finding jobs. Canada is absolutely flooded with new arrivals (this isn't some sort of racist "some people look different!" appeal because of a few migrants, but instead is a factual observation that Canada has seen ridiculous levels of migration, hitting 3.2% population growth YoY. Population trap type numbers). If you list a job in Canada, as I frequently do, you will get thousands to tens of thousands of applicants. Canada is awash in jobless software developers, particularly in generalized roles, and finding good candidates requires a lot of winnowing through garbage, but they are there. So it's interesting that this "employer" -- whose only address in Canada seems to be the lawyers that did the provincial corporation filing -- claims that there is so little talent in Canada that they have submitted an LMIA submission to the government. An LMIA is a claim that there are no talents for a given need so they need to bring in someone that the employer selected to Canada. I guess there are no suitable developers in Canada with their hilarious mix of needs with the acclaimed 7 - 12 months of experience from their 1-2 year education program. It's almost like it's written to be exclusionary. This program is absolutely rife with fraud. The fact that there are zero credible checks -- note that to apply to this job you email them directly, so the government does not see the number or quality of applicants -- means that the program has widespread reports of employers using it to bring friends or family into the country, or third parties in return for a kickback of some sort. There are rampant reports of individuals paying tens of thousands to be "selected" for a LMIA position. This is happening throughout Canada. And it is disgusting.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >This program is absolutely rife with fraud. Keep exposing it, just like you did here. I have faith that our government will react, eventually. This stuff is crazy.
  - morkalork 3y ago
    I doubt it.
- RobertDeNiro 3y ago
  We just hit 7.5% of our population being Temporary Foreign Workers. The government claims they want to bring that back down to 5%, but even that seems too high.
  - winter_blue 3y ago
    Who decides what % is high? In the UAE and Qatar close to 90% of the population are foreign workers on visas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im... There was a recent vote in the Parliament of Canada on the topic of immigration rates (and in particular about the Century Initiative goal of raising Canada's population to 100 million): https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/votes/44/1/322?view=party https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/votes/44/1/322?view=par... -- 170 members of the Canadian Parliament supported high immigration, and 138 were opposed to it. It of course fell along partisan lines -- with 100% of members of the Liberal, NDP, and Green parties supporting high immigration, and 100% of the Conservative and BQ parties opposing high immigration. Rate of immigration is a subjective matter, and any attempt to misrepresent it as being objective is dishonest; since it entirely depends on political opinion. A white nationalist likely sees multi-cultural immigration as terrible (unless those immigrants are all white), whereas many liberal/progressive people have a fairly welcoming attitude towards immigrants (something which is reflected in Canadian federal immigration policy).
    - llm_nerd 3y ago
raverbashing 3y ago
It seems the job post was recently removed
- pixl97 3y ago
  Shining light upon both roaches and fraud will cause them to scurry away back into the darkness.
alephnerd 3y ago
CAD$50-100k is market rate in Abbotsford for a fresh QA Tester (7 months to less than 1 year according to LMIA), which is what this role is. I'm surprised that they even decided to try to hire in Canada instead of outsourcing. Abbotsford is Canada's Fresno, for people who are out of loop. Edit: I think this is a US-to-Canada transfer for an employee of theirs in the US who's F1-to-H1B or H1B-to-EB1/2 conversion failed.
- morkalork 3y ago
  Because the person they're "hiring" is paying them for the position so they can immigrate. It's not a real job.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    And do tell me how you know? I lived in the Lower Mainland and VI as a South Asian kid - I know the ins and outs of "fake jobs" for visas. This ain't one of them. Instead, it's one of those mobile QA consultancies [0] If you wanted a fake job for Canadian visa scheme, the common path is one of the various Jatt trucking companies with biradari/familial networks between India and Canada. [0] - https://subcodevs.com/mobile-app-maintenance/ https://subcodevs.com/mobile-app-maintenance/
- ayewo 3y ago
  > Abbotsford is Canada's Fresno, for people who are out of loop. Fresno is what? For people outside of the North American loop?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    It's a relatively large and conservative farming town in Central California home to a large Protestant Fundamentalist community, a large Latino farm worker and small business community, and a similarly large Punjabi farmworker and small business community. The only difference between Fresno and Abbotsford is Abbotsford gets snow on occasion.
    - 3y ago
golergka 3y ago
C++, Ruby on Rails, Database management. Prepare reports, manuals and other documentation. Surely, 7-12 months of experience is more than enough.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
crowcroft 3y ago
As someone looking to enter Canada on an express entry visa an currently on an youth mobility/working holiday visa I find the situation in Canada quite extreme. I'm a skilled worker working on a temporary visa, working for Canadian company in people management role. If I want to get enough points to get a permanent visa the best options are. 1. Go back to university and study give money to Canadian universities. 2. Leave my current job where I'm doing proper work, and try get one of these job bank ones. I fell like the system is pushing me to either give money to universities, or give my time (at a low price) to these borderline fraudulent jobs with LMIA attached. I don't believe this is the outcome the system was designed for, but it's what it's been gamed to achieve. I could understand if Canada wanted to simply reduce immigration, but that's also not the outcome being achieved.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  There is no real point to immigrate to Canada for the long term. For example, when I was a kid, my parents and I got Canadian PR via express entry as a backup option in case we wouldn't get a Greencard in the US. For most South and East Asians, the true value of Canadian Citizenship is the fact that it gives you TN privileges, which essentially give you the ability to stay in the US indefinetly. CoL in Canada is easily 2-3x that of the US with salaries that are easily half those you'd get in the lower 48.
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    > CoL in Canada is easily 2-3x that of the US I'd love to see the data on that
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      My experience growing up in BC, and something most other BCians can back me up. I think the CoL aside from housing is much more manageable outside of BC. I remember as a kid it was very common for families on VI and the Lower Mainland to pool money for one family to cross the border and do all their Costco and Safeway shopping in Bellingham and then drive back. A good example is milk - it costs around US$4 including tax in the US, but around US$5 in Canada. Same for bread (though I was in Canada during the 2000s when there was a massive price fixing scheme by bread makers in the country) let alone restaurants and eating out (your average South Asian restaurant in Abbotsford or Surrey would sell a meal like Chole Bhature for around US$20 when the exact same restaurants and ownership in Fremont and Fresno would make the same meal and fixing for around US$10-22) All this doesn't sound too bad on a SV salary, but non-tech salaries in BC are around CAD$40-70k so your household income after tax is best case CAD$60-90k [0] There's a reason my family left Canada for the US. [0] - https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/TableMatchingCriteria?GeographyType=Province&GeographyId=59&CategoryLevel1=Population%2C%20Households%20and%20Housing%20Stock&CategoryLevel2=Household%20Income&ColumnField=HouseholdIncomeRange&RowField=MetropolitanMajorArea&SearchTags%5B0%5D.Key=Households&SearchTags%5B0%5D.Value=Number&SearchTags%5B1%5D.Key=Statistics&SearchTags%5B1%5D.Value=AverageAndMedian#next-year https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Tab...

19 points by llm_nerd 3y ago

Article title: "software developer - Abbotsford, BC - Job posting - Job Bank"

This really is targeted at the Canadian HN readers per the Canadian job market and the extraordinary abuse that is happening right in the open. New grads in Canada are having an incredibly rough time finding jobs. Canada is absolutely flooded with new arrivals (this isn't some sort of racist "some people look different!" appeal because of a few migrants, but instead is a factual observation that Canada has seen ridiculous levels of migration, hitting 3.2% population growth YoY. Population trap type numbers). If you list a job in Canada, as I frequently do, you will get thousands to tens of thousands of applicants. Canada is awash in jobless software developers, particularly in generalized roles, and finding good candidates requires a lot of winnowing through garbage, but they are there. So it's interesting that this "employer" -- whose only address in Canada seems to be the lawyers that did the provincial corporation filing -- claims that there is so little talent in Canada that they have submitted an LMIA submission to the government. An LMIA is a claim that there are no talents for a given need so they need to bring in someone that the employer selected to Canada. I guess there are no suitable developers in Canada with their hilarious mix of needs with the acclaimed 7 - 12 months of experience from their 1-2 year education program. It's almost like it's written to be exclusionary. This program is absolutely rife with fraud. The fact that there are zero credible checks -- note that to apply to this job you email them directly, so the government does not see the number or quality of applicants -- means that the program has widespread reports of employers using it to bring friends or family into the country, or third parties in return for a kickback of some sort. There are rampant reports of individuals paying tens of thousands to be "selected" for a LMIA position. This is happening throughout Canada. And it is disgusting.

itsoktocry 3y ago
>This program is absolutely rife with fraud. Keep exposing it, just like you did here. I have faith that our government will react, eventually. This stuff is crazy.
- morkalork 3y ago
  I doubt it.
RobertDeNiro 3y ago
We just hit 7.5% of our population being Temporary Foreign Workers. The government claims they want to bring that back down to 5%, but even that seems too high.
- winter_blue 3y ago
  Who decides what % is high? In the UAE and Qatar close to 90% of the population are foreign workers on visas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_im... There was a recent vote in the Parliament of Canada on the topic of immigration rates (and in particular about the Century Initiative goal of raising Canada's population to 100 million): https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/votes/44/1/322?view=party https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/votes/44/1/322?view=par... -- 170 members of the Canadian Parliament supported high immigration, and 138 were opposed to it. It of course fell along partisan lines -- with 100% of members of the Liberal, NDP, and Green parties supporting high immigration, and 100% of the Conservative and BQ parties opposing high immigration. Rate of immigration is a subjective matter, and any attempt to misrepresent it as being objective is dishonest; since it entirely depends on political opinion. A white nationalist likely sees multi-cultural immigration as terrible (unless those immigrants are all white), whereas many liberal/progressive people have a fairly welcoming attitude towards immigrants (something which is reflected in Canadian federal immigration policy).
  - llm_nerd 3y ago

raverbashing 3y ago

It seems the job post was recently removed

pixl97 3y ago
Shining light upon both roaches and fraud will cause them to scurry away back into the darkness.

alephnerd 3y ago

CAD$50-100k is market rate in Abbotsford for a fresh QA Tester (7 months to less than 1 year according to LMIA), which is what this role is. I'm surprised that they even decided to try to hire in Canada instead of outsourcing. Abbotsford is Canada's Fresno, for people who are out of loop. Edit: I think this is a US-to-Canada transfer for an employee of theirs in the US who's F1-to-H1B or H1B-to-EB1/2 conversion failed.

morkalork 3y ago
Because the person they're "hiring" is paying them for the position so they can immigrate. It's not a real job.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  And do tell me how you know? I lived in the Lower Mainland and VI as a South Asian kid - I know the ins and outs of "fake jobs" for visas. This ain't one of them. Instead, it's one of those mobile QA consultancies [0] If you wanted a fake job for Canadian visa scheme, the common path is one of the various Jatt trucking companies with biradari/familial networks between India and Canada. [0] - https://subcodevs.com/mobile-app-maintenance/ https://subcodevs.com/mobile-app-maintenance/
ayewo 3y ago
> Abbotsford is Canada's Fresno, for people who are out of loop. Fresno is what? For people outside of the North American loop?
- alephnerd 3y ago
  It's a relatively large and conservative farming town in Central California home to a large Protestant Fundamentalist community, a large Latino farm worker and small business community, and a similarly large Punjabi farmworker and small business community. The only difference between Fresno and Abbotsford is Abbotsford gets snow on occasion.
  - 3y ago

golergka 3y ago

C++, Ruby on Rails, Database management. Prepare reports, manuals and other documentation. Surely, 7-12 months of experience is more than enough.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

crowcroft 3y ago

As someone looking to enter Canada on an express entry visa an currently on an youth mobility/working holiday visa I find the situation in Canada quite extreme. I'm a skilled worker working on a temporary visa, working for Canadian company in people management role. If I want to get enough points to get a permanent visa the best options are. 1. Go back to university and study give money to Canadian universities. 2. Leave my current job where I'm doing proper work, and try get one of these job bank ones. I fell like the system is pushing me to either give money to universities, or give my time (at a low price) to these borderline fraudulent jobs with LMIA attached. I don't believe this is the outcome the system was designed for, but it's what it's been gamed to achieve. I could understand if Canada wanted to simply reduce immigration, but that's also not the outcome being achieved.

alephnerd 3y ago
There is no real point to immigrate to Canada for the long term. For example, when I was a kid, my parents and I got Canadian PR via express entry as a backup option in case we wouldn't get a Greencard in the US. For most South and East Asians, the true value of Canadian Citizenship is the fact that it gives you TN privileges, which essentially give you the ability to stay in the US indefinetly. CoL in Canada is easily 2-3x that of the US with salaries that are easily half those you'd get in the lower 48.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  > CoL in Canada is easily 2-3x that of the US I'd love to see the data on that
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    My experience growing up in BC, and something most other BCians can back me up. I think the CoL aside from housing is much more manageable outside of BC. I remember as a kid it was very common for families on VI and the Lower Mainland to pool money for one family to cross the border and do all their Costco and Safeway shopping in Bellingham and then drive back. A good example is milk - it costs around US$4 including tax in the US, but around US$5 in Canada. Same for bread (though I was in Canada during the 2000s when there was a massive price fixing scheme by bread makers in the country) let alone restaurants and eating out (your average South Asian restaurant in Abbotsford or Surrey would sell a meal like Chole Bhature for around US$20 when the exact same restaurants and ownership in Fremont and Fresno would make the same meal and fixing for around US$10-22) All this doesn't sound too bad on a SV salary, but non-tech salaries in BC are around CAD$40-70k so your household income after tax is best case CAD$60-90k [0] There's a reason my family left Canada for the US. [0] - https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/TableMatchingCriteria?GeographyType=Province&GeographyId=59&CategoryLevel1=Population%2C%20Households%20and%20Housing%20Stock&CategoryLevel2=Household%20Income&ColumnField=HouseholdIncomeRange&RowField=MetropolitanMajorArea&SearchTags%5B0%5D.Key=Households&SearchTags%5B0%5D.Value=Number&SearchTags%5B1%5D.Key=Statistics&SearchTags%5B1%5D.Value=AverageAndMedian#next-year https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Tab...