A travel mug stuffed with $20 bills hides in a student bedroom. The money is evidence of an illegal transaction between employer and student, and if caught, could lead to deportation.
A Carleton University international student, who asked to remain anonymous, said after exhausting all legal options to obtain a work permit she was driven to work illegally out of desperation to pay her bills.
Last year, the student went to the International Students Services Office (ISSO) at Carleton to ask about applying for a work permit, where she was given an instruction booklet.
Three weeks after she applied online through Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and paid the $125 registration fee, she received an email that her request was denied because she didn’t give a student registration number.
“The thing they said I didn’t have, I did. I told them it was a mistake . . . but they said I had to reapply,” she said. “It was frustrating. I was desperate to get a full-time job.”
The student also said the ISSO never told her she could face possible deportation if she worked off campus without a work permit. She said it wasn’t until she heard about Victoria Ordu and Ihuoma Amadi’s case that she realized the severity of her own situation.
On June 19, Ordu and Amadi, two Nigerian students attending the University of Regina, were ordered to leave Canada by the Canadian Borders Service Agency (CBSA) for working at Wal-Mart for two weeks without work permits.
The students are in their sixth month of hiding from CBSA in an undisclosed church in Regina.
The students believed their government issued SIN numbers allowed them to work both on and off campus, according to their lawyer Kay Adebogun. As soon as they realized this wasn’t the case, they quit.
Adebogun said Wal-Mart is equally at fault for allowing them to work illegally.
“[Wal-Mart] should’ve known the rules. If the employer had done due diligence . . . that would’ve solved the problem. But the employer failed,” Adebogun said.
Although the students are now receiving support from the Government of Saskatchewan, URegina, and several MPs, the girls didn’t have money to go to court. The time frame has expired.
“These are not girls taking advantage of the Canadian system,” he said. “Did the girls commit the crime? Yes. Did they work? Yes. But should they be deported? No. We don’t think the penalty is equal to the crime.”
International Carleton student Ugo Obi is also from Nigeria and worked at Wal-Mart last summer. Obi said he had no problems getting a work permit.
“[Wal-Mart] expected I was just a normal Canadian but when I showed them my passport to process some things and they saw it wasn’t blue they were like, ‘Oh wow, it’s different,’” Obi said. “They asked me if I was an international student and to see my work permit.”
Obi said since he understood Canada’s visa system, he wasn’t concerned about deportation.
“I felt comfortable . . . because if you know what you’re doing and obeying the rules it’s fine,” he said.
The anonymous Carleton student said she’s grateful she found an employer willing to risk his own safety when her work permit didn’t work.
The student’s independent employer agreed she could work illegally—under one condition.
“He calculated how much tax would’ve been deducted from my pay cheque by the government and he took that money,” she said.
The student also followed her boss’ advice not to deposit her money in the bank, as the employer was worried the bank might get suspicious about where the money was coming from.
So, she hid it in her travel mug and used it to pay rent, buy groceries, and slowly chip away at the $50,000 she owes her government in international study fees.
The student said she hand-delivered 20 resumés to downtown businesses and applied on campus as well, but all were unsuccessful.
The irony of the situation, she said, is she received her work permit four months later, just when she quit her summer job and returned to school.
“Basically that work permit was sitting in my binder for a whole year,” she laughs.
She said she wouldn’t recommend working illegally, but there are exceptions to every rule.
“If you have a reason that you need to stay here and you need to pay for stuff, screw bureaucracy,” she said.
Wal-Mart could not be reached for comment.
