For Kuldeep Bansal, empathy—or the performance of it—is good business. As an immigration consultant in Surrey, British Columbia, he is adept in the art of decoding a person’s hopes and desires. In more generous terms, he guides prospective immigrants, migrant workers, international students, and sometimes refugees through the maze of government programs needed to start a life in Canada.

That guidance, of course, doesn’t come for free, making immigration consultancy a booming practice. Since the early 2000s, after Canadian officials expanded the Temporary Foreign Worker Program—TFWP—to meet the growing demand for low-wage labour, the numbers have exploded. From 2000 to 2022, temporary foreign workers with work permits in Canada, including those under the TFWP, jumped from 111,500 to 1,098,205. What Employment and Social Development Canada once called the “last and limited resort” to fill jobs lacking qualified Canadians has become a core strategy around which many companies are built.

Bansal can be credited with some of that transition. He 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.”

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Bansal is not the first to realize that Canada’s demand for cheap labour could be met by trawling the vast pool of people around the world dreaming of a better life. Indeed, Canada as a modern nation was largely built on the backs of such people. As far back as the late nineteenth century, the government partnered with industries like mining, forestry, and railway construction to import crews who were easy to hire—and easier to discard. This spawned a network of “labour agents” with reputations only marginally less exploitative than those of slave traders. They recruited migrants on a contract basis, mostly from Europe. Government officials knew how abusive these schemes were but, under pressure from wealthy industrialists, refused to
crack down.

Nearly a century and a half later, not much has changed. The tactics are more subtle but no less cruel. Labour agents today fall under the category of Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultants, or RCICs, licensed by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, the CICC. But the goal remains much the same: feed the country’s inexhaustible appetite for cheap, temporary workers and make bank doing it.

By 2007, Overseas Immigration was leveraging the upcoming 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, which it claimed were “prompting Canada to scour other countries for skilled labour.” Not long after, its website was updated to include a staff of eight, including Bansal. By 2012, Overseas Immigration was running regular job fairs at the Flora Creek Deluxe Hotel in Dubai’s Port Saeed district. The United Arab Emirates was an ideal target: aside from being the playground of the world’s ultrarich, it is also home to many foreign workers, nearly 9 million in total, representing over 80 percent of the population. Most don’t arrive in the UAE with the intention of putting down roots and building a life. Even if they want to, they can’t: only the wealthy and members of the privileged classes—including investors, doctors, and scientists—qualify for citizenship. Low-wage labourers, who make up the bulk of the UAE’s foreign workforce, must settle for a life of permanent temporariness and uncertainty.

Bansal’s empathy trick preyed on this desperate group. Many of the posts on the Overseas Immigration Facebook page gave the impression that he cared about the UAE’s foreign workers. Flyers for Bansal’s multi-day events advertised “guaranteed job allocation” in Canada, in sectors ranging from food services to construction, as well as “settlement services” for successful recruits, including “10 days free accommodation” and help getting medical coverage, a bank account, and cellphone, among other things. Setting up shop at the Flora Creek, a five-star hotel, and then jetting over employees to help run the fairs gave the operation the veneer of seriousness it needed to convince skeptical people to part with their money.

Bansal did not reply to multiple requests for comment, but according to court documents from an ongoing class action lawsuit filed in December 2015 at the Supreme Court of British Columbia, he ensnared his victims in stages. He lured them with an initial investment of $2,000 to $3,000, then strung them along for more cash for as long as he could.

The trap was set. Thousands would tumble headlong into it.

Edlyn Tesorero first arrived in Dubai in 2007, armed with a diploma in business management and dreams of running her own restaurant. Her ultimate goal was to settle in Canada. “If you can get there,” she told me, “then you’re set. You can get citizenship and start a family. You can grow old there.”

Dubai was full of recruiting agencies. Most were scams that promised dreams but delivered only nightmares. Overseas Immigration seemed different, with a website that was slick and professional. People Tesorero knew in the food services sector had used it. Plus, the owner was an RCIC.

In 2011, Tesorero attended a job fair Overseas Immigration hosted at the Flora Creek. During the hour or so she was there, at least 200 people—a mix of labourers and service sector workers like herself—milled around the conference room. The company representative she spoke to was courteous but also evasive about her job prospects in Canada. To have her case assessed, she would need to pay an initial consulting fee of $2,000—upfront.

Tesorero walked away. The amount was more than she could manage. Over the next year, she followed Overseas Immigration online and messaged employees for information about various jobs. She was told they couldn’t help until she paid the fee. Finally, in October 2012, she transferred the money. A month later, she received an email telling her that Overseas Immigration would be returning to the Flora Creek in a week and that she had been scheduled for a job interview with someone from Mac’s Convenience Stores, which ran Subway franchises in Canada.

When Tesorero arrived for her interview, the conference room was packed. Foreign workers were dropping off résumés and paying fees. Others, like her, were arriving for their scheduled meetings with a Mac’s representative named Geoff Higuchi. Tesorero’s confidence grew. “I was like, who can imagine that an employer would come all this way to do interviews,” she told me. “It all looked legit.”

In some ways, it was. Overseas Immigration had indeed been contracted by Mac’s to act as its foreign worker recruiting agent for Western Canada. Higuchi was, at the time, the British Columbia operations manager as well as its senior recruitment and training manager for the region, working out of its Surrey offices.

But the relationship between Overseas and Higuchi would turn out to be suspicious. According to court documents from the class action suit, Overseas and Mac’s participated in a “scheme” that involved charging “recruitment fees” to foreign workers for jobs in Canada that, in many cases, “did not exist.” The suit also notes that the lack of a formal agreement between Mac’s and Overseas makes it impossible to know if Higuchi or Mac’s, or both, were receiving “a portion of the Recruitment Fees or another payment from the Recruitment Agents in exchange for its role in the scheme.”

Such murky relationships are all too common, Natalie Drolet, now a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, told me. When we spoke in 2023, Drolet was the executive director at the Migrant Workers Centre in Vancouver, where she saw up close how consultants and businesses operated. She recounted a 2019 incident when, during a conference, a room of immigration consultants was polled on whether employers had ever asked them to pay for recruiting foreign workers. About three quarters said yes. “It was anonymous, so everyone was honest,” she said.

According to the court documents, Bansal denied that his upfront consulting fee or later charges—totalling in the range of $8,000 to $10,000 per worker—included a recruitment fee, which is illegal in Canada; the costs were instead associated with “immigration services.” But according to Susanna Quail, one of the lawyers in the class action against Overseas Immigration, the offer of “guaranteed employment” was enough to turn the consulting fee into a recruitment fee.

Bansal, however, didn’t stop there. He allegedly also took advantage of loopholes in an administrative process called the Labour Market Opinion, or LMO, to charge multiple potential recruits for the same job—which is illegal. The LMO, now called a Labour Market Impact Assessment, or LMIA, is a key source of profit for immigration consultants like Bansal. The assessments are conducted by Employment and Social Development Canada—ESDC—when businesses claim they need to hire foreign workers to fill vacancies Canadian citizens or permanent residents don’t want. If the business obtains an LMIA, it can then recruit a foreign worker to fill the vacancy.

Bansal’s operation, according to Arjun Chaudhary, an ex-employee who now lives in the US, leveraged weaknesses in the oversight regime to obtain LMIAs, even for jobs that didn’t exist. Over the roughly nine months Chaudhary worked for Overseas Immigration, from March 2013 to November 2014, he said he was often tasked with posting and maintaining fake job listings on various online job sites, including the Government of Canada’s Job Bank.

“Businesses are required to show that they attempted to hire a Canadian worker before offering a job to a foreign worker,” he told me. “They have to show that they have advertised the job for a specified period of time—a few months usually. Immigration consultants like [Bansal] get around this by posting fake job ads. They’ll set up an email address, usually a Gmail account or something, where interested people are supposed to send their résumés. But they don’t even bother to respond to them.”

During a question period in November 2017, Jenny Kwan, an NDP member of Parliament for Vancouver East, claimed the Canadian Border Services Agency had been investigating the abuse of LMIAs at Overseas Immigration since at least 2012. The agency had also recommended that charges be laid against Bansal. “Why has the government not acted on the recommendations of the CBSA?” Kwan demanded.

In response, Patty Hajdu, then minister of employment, workforce development, and labour for the Liberal government, dodged the question, saying only that the government had taken “concrete steps” to improve the TFWP, including “strengthening” the LMIA system. But none of that was enough to stop Bansal.

Chaudhary, who left Overseas Immigration after seeing the company’s devastating impact on people in the UAE, told me nothing has changed since. Bansal was never charged, and fake job postings are still rampant today. To demonstrate, during one of our WhatsApp conversations, he proceeded to the Job Bank site and, within minutes, pulled up four job listings he claimed looked suspicious. One, for a supervisor at a small perfume retailer in a Surrey shopping mall, paid nearly $30 an hour—above the provincial median for that position—and listed only a high school diploma, with no experience necessary, as a requirement. At the time of our call, the job posting had been up on the Job Bank site for nearly four months.

“How is that even possible?” Chaudhary said. “You’re offering $30 an hour to a high school graduate with no retail experience and you haven’t found someone?”

A spokesperson for ESDC said in an email that the Government of Canada takes extensive measures to prevent fraudulent activity in the TFWP, including monitoring the Job Bank website to ensure compliance with rules and regulations. “Job Bank uses various measures including risk indicators and verification processes to ensure the legitimacy of job postings,” the spokesperson said, but declined to specify what those indicators are.

A Toronto Star investigation published last August found that employees at ESDC were instructed in January 2022 to spend less time vetting LMIA applications. ESDC officials told the Star the directives were intended to balance the huge demand for workers in the post-pandemic labour market with the time it was taking to approve LMIAs. Critics say the program has expanded rapidly, outstripping ESDC’s ability to monitor compliance. And the lack of oversight encouraged even more bad behaviour on the part of employers and immigration consultants.

The scale of the program has been a windfall for immigration consultants and business owners. Partly because of the lack of resources, ESDC has shifted the burden of reporting abuses onto workers themselves. But the low-wage stream of the TFWP ties work permits to a specific employer. Complaining about their bosses to the government means workers risk their own livelihoods.

According to Drolet, “there are too many disincentives” for these workers to speak up. “If they lose their job, they’re out of work,” she said. “They’re here to support their families back home. They won’t be able to send money home. Their families will suffer. So even if they’re earning less than minimum wage, they’re not going to give that up, because, you know, the alternative is too bleak.”

All this underscores how the combination of Canada’s appetite for cheap, temporary labour and a finely tuned permanent immigration system targeting skilled labour creates the ideal environment for bad actors to thrive. Temporary status is a carrot to draw in people who don’t qualify for immigration through the points system. Immigration consultants like Bansal tell their targets they can start with temporary status and then transition to permanent status later. But opportunities to successfully transition are limited. Consultants, of course, often fail to make that clear. Their promotional materials create the impression that transitioning to permanent status just takes a few more thousand dollars in consultancy fees.

The Liberal government’s late-October decision to reduce the number of permanent immigrants to Canada over the next two years could create opportunities for even more exploitative practices, Surrey-based civil litigator Eoin Logan told me. “The recent changes increase competition for a smaller number of permanent immigration places,” he said. “This makes the immigration market more competitive and tougher for people who want to immigrate to Canada. Bad actors have increased incentive to take advantage, and maybe even increase their profits. Whereas before an LMIA would have been sold for $35,000, their going rate now might be $50,000.”

In the absence of a functioning regulatory body, Logan added, the increase in competition over fewer immigration spots creates “a perfect storm” for more abuse.

At first, it seemed that Tesorero would be one of the lucky ones. In April 2013, she received an email from Overseas Immigration with an employment contract, signed by Higuchi, for a supervisory position at a Subway in Calgary, along with a copy of an LMIA approving her job. She was ecstatic.

When she asked about the next steps, she was told she needed to immediately apply for a visa at the Canadian embassy in Abu Dhabi, before the LMIA expired. Nearly six months later, she was granted a visa, at which point an Overseas employee told her to pay another $5,500 to Trident Immigration, Bansal’s sister’s consulting firm. She was also told to purchase her flight ticket for Canada—a cost that, under the terms of the TFWP, is supposed to be covered by employers. Tesorero was promised a partial reimbursement of her costs. She was also told she would be housed for at least two weeks in Calgary while she looked for a place to rent.

None of that happened. When she landed, Tesorero was put into a double room, with two other temporary foreign workers, in a Best Western hotel near Bansal’s office in Surrey. After a few days, Bansal confirmed her job at the Subway, and she was put on a bus to Calgary. After arriving, she was told by the manager that the store had received no instructions about a new hire.

Tesorero was now alone, in a foreign country, with nowhere to live and no job. Bansal and Higuchi stopped responding to her emails and calls. A Subway staff member was kind enough to connect her to a foreign worker from the Philippines who let Tesorero sleep on her couch until she was able to find an apartment. Within a couple of months, her savings ran out and she was forced to borrow money from family and friends. Another friend suggested she find a job as a nanny, but her work permit tied her to the job she had been promised at Subway. If she took on any other job, she would be breaking Canadian law; she could face deportation. Besides, she hadn’t come to Canada to work as a nanny. She’d come chasing her dream of one day opening her own restaurant.

Watching that dream collapse was devastating. Her mental health deteriorated. “My entire life came crashing down,” Tesorero told me. “That’s when I decided I had to leave. If nothing else, at least I had to save myself.”

The breadth of Bansal’s operation in Dubai was breathtaking. At its height, he was raking in up to $5 million a year, according to a 2019 Globe and Mail investigation. Chaudhary, his former employee, forwarded me pictures from a 2014 Christmas party Bansal threw at his private box at Rogers Arena, home of the Vancouver Canucks. Bansal would regularly entertain business clients there, Chaudhary said. In 2015, Bansal purchased his first golf course and posted a picture of his Lamborghini and Bentley on Facebook, despite Overseas Immigration having been investigated by Service Alberta. In January 2022, while his licence was still under suspension, he purchased a commercial property in Surrey for $55 million. That year, he also purchased a second golf course.

As Bansal amassed his fortune, his victims struggled to recover from their losses. In at least one case, lack of funds forced a victim to leave Dubai and return to his native Ethiopia. I was told stories about others being forced to divert money they had been sending back to their families to pay off debts they incurred paying Bansal’s fees.

But as expansive as it was, Bansal’s operation was still only one head of Canada’s immigration consultant Hydra. A 2023 policy memo from the C. D. Howe Institute, a Toronto think tank, calculated that there were 11,324 RCICs across the country. And the group was being kept busy. In 2022, the authors pointed out, applications for temporary and permanent status in Canada surged to roughly 5.1 million, almost double the number in 2021.

The demand incentivizes bad behaviour. So much so that attempts for reform have mostly failed. In 2019, Parliament passed the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants Act, which scrapped the Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council, or ICCRC, a self-governing regulatory body, and replaced it with the CICC, giving it expanded powers that would, at least in theory, provide investigative tools to punish transgressors.

The college was launched in November 2021, to mixed reviews. Quail, as well as other immigration lawyers I spoke to, complain about a certain investigatory and disciplinary dysfunction at the CICC. There simply hasn’t been the will to punish wrongdoing.

Bansal’s Dubai operation was investigated by multiple agencies, including the ICCRC, the CBSA, and the Consumer Investigations Unit of Service Alberta. In 2016, he was found to have violated multiple sections of Alberta’s Fair Trading Act, including charging recruitment fees, making false and misleading statements, and threatening and harassing clients. He received a $40,000 administrative penalty and had his Alberta employment agency business licence cancelled. A year later, he pled guilty in an Alberta court to securing employment for an individual without entering into a proper agreement and to operating under a false name. He was ordered to pay $6,3461.21 in restitution. In late 2018, he pled guilty in a British Columbia provincial court to employing a foreign national in an unauthorized capacity. He was fined $10,000.

The ICCRC’s Discipline Committee began investigating Bansal’s conduct in 2015, holding multiple hearings pitting ICCRC lawyers against Bansal’s. The proceedings dragged on for years, in part because of the complexity of the case—involving witness testimonies across two continents—and in part because of Bansal’s penchant for filing successive motions to dismiss that delayed the proceedings. It wasn’t until October 2022 that the ICCRC’s successor, the CICC, reached a decision. It dismissed nearly all the allegations against Bansal, even the ones he had already been found guilty of by Alberta’s director of fair trading, a decision that was upheld on appeal.

In a turn that stunned observers, the CICC determined that Bansal had committed just a handful of violations—including the seemingly basic oversight of failing to provide retainer agreements to his clients. They suspended his licence for fifteen months, minus the twelve months of interim suspension the ICCRC had already placed him on. He was forced to repay the funds he had taken from the five complainants who had brought the disciplinary action against him, totalling $10,453, and fined another $55,000 in penalties. He was also mandated to complete four hours of coursework on topics like ethical practices and professional standards.

Within a day of the suspension being lifted on January 12, 2023, Bansal was back at work. His first act was to make two posts on the company’s Facebook page: the first in Hindi, announcing new rules for truck drivers seeking work visas, and the second calling on people, including employers looking to hire foreign workers, to get in touch. “Candidates or Employers who wish to apply LMIA, work permit, PNP, express entry, family class, spousal applications and any other immigration related applications please contact us,” it said. “Very low fee.”

The Overseas Immigration website also came back online after going into “maintenance mode” sometime in 2021. It now advertises LGBTQ Immigration.” Chaudhary told me Bansal has no interest in LGBTQ rights. “He probably just sees it as a way to make money,” he said. “He’s very good at figuring out the people he can target.”

In another post this past October, the Facebook page urged temporary residents in Canada to act quickly to respond to recent changes to temporary work permits and student visas. The post said international students could still change their status to a “work permit based LMIA” and urged them to “be quick” about it before the rules changed again. “We provide all kinds of Canadian Immigration services,” the post concluded, “with very nominal fee.”

There was nothing illegal in the posts, of course. The very reason why immigration consultants are licensed in Canada is so they can provide such advice at a fee. The problem is that the industry, by its very nature, is prone to exploitation. Some migrant rights experts argue there is no way to regulate it; the best thing is to ban it altogether. Others have argued that banning it will only send the industry underground and lead to even more suffering.

Much of what Bansal did in Dubai wasn’t, at least technically, illegal either. The CICC ruling exonerating him argued that investigators were not able to prove Bansal was charging recruitment fees and not, as he claimed, fees for immigration services. The difference, though, can be semantic, and for prospective immigrants, whose English-language skills may be limited, telling the difference can be difficult. They can be easily tricked into believing they are paying fees for guaranteed jobs.

The class action suit, however, alleges that Bansal explicitly offered “guaranteed job allocation.” The Alberta ruling found as much and included its finding in its decision to revoke his company’s recruitment licence. The CICC’s decision, based on the opposite conclusion—that Bansal was not charging recruitment fees—is, for Quail, dumbfounding. “I think this is a damning example of a failure by the regulator,” she said. “We’re focused on getting money back for workers; the regulator needs to do its job of protecting the public from people like Bansal.”

At this point, Quail added, the best they can hope for is to settle the suit with Mac’s Convenience, now renamed Circle K, which would then become liable for the alleged recruitment fees Bansal charged on their behalf and for compensating workers who, like Tesorero, arrived in Canada to find no job or to find a lower-paying job compared to what they were promised.

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.”

Getting the industry under control won’t be easy. A succession of Canadian governments has tried—and failed. From my conversation with Drolet, I came away thinking it might be one of those corrupt sectors, like the drug trade, that may be impossible to eliminate entirely. The best way to manage it, though, might be to stop issuing so-called employer-specific work permits that make workers reliant on a single employer for their status in Canada. An open permit that would allow foreign workers to change jobs could drastically reduce the power immigration consultants and employers wield. It wouldn’t prevent people like Bansal from operating overseas, where they can say almost anything they want to draw in their targets, charge whatever they want, deliver nothing, and ultimately continue to operate back in Canada. But it would shift the power balance in favour of workers and away from employers.

Bansal will likely not suffer any meaningful consequences for the many lives he has destroyed. But people might be growing savvier to his empathy trick. According to one source, during Bansal’s last known visit to Dubai as a foreign worker recruiter in June 2016, he was confronted by several victims in that same conference room where he had amassed his fortune. Among that group was Anteneh Gessesse, a twenty-five-year-old labourer from Ethiopia who attended an Overseas job fair several years earlier. Gessesse, who had been in Dubai for about ten years, had handed over 22,500 dirhams—or roughly $8,808 in today’s terms—for what Overseas advertised as “guaranteed job allocation” in Canada. He never heard from them again.

During the 2016 encounter, Gessesse demanded his money back. Bansal gave him 10,500 dirhams but refused to pay the rest. The confrontation turned heated. Hotel security intervened, allegedly whisking Bansal out of the conference room. Gessesse then called the police, who arrived at the hotel shortly. “The reception told me he is not around,” Gessesse said. “They totally protected him, the reception and the hotel security.”

When I told Tesorero about the incident, she was ambivalent. Now forty-three, she was trying to put the “traumatic experience” in Calgary behind her. “It’s not my fault, but it affected the entire course of my life,” she said. She had dreamed of marriage, building a family, and becoming a successful restaurateur. All of those dreams were stolen by Kuldeep Bansal.

Adnan R. Khan

Adnan R. Khan is a freelance writer and photographer.

Nicole Rifkin

Nicole Rifkin is an award-winning Canadian American illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, among other publications.