VANCOUVER, Tuesday April 8, 2008- The national immigrant rights group No One Is Illegal is outraged at the recent proposed amendments to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The group will be gearing up during the next few weeks to demand the scrapping of the amendments, including making submissions today and tomorrow in Toronto at the House Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

Recently, the Harper Conservative government tried to sneak changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act through the House of Commons via C-50 (the budget implementation act). These sweeping changes will give enormous and arbitrary powers to the Minister to decide which categories of immigration applications will be processed, and which would be ignored or discarded despite meeting all the necessary criteria. It will also limit several out-of-country humanitarian and compassionate applications that Canadian sponsors can use to bring their relatives into Canada.

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