Canada to start Express Entry draws from July; sops for foreign students

Ottawa: Canada is all set to resume its Express Entry draws in early July to fill hundreds of thousands of vacant positions in all sectors across the country. The draw will be open for candidates that fall under the categories - Canadian experience class (CEC), federal skilled worker (FSW) and federal skilled trades (FST). Applications will be processed within six month service standard.
This comes as good news for aspiring Indians and also international students already in Canada whose plans of obtaining permanent residency had been derailed. For the past several years, Indians have led the charts both in terms of the number of invites issued to become permanent residents and those admitted as permanent residents. In 2020, Indians bagged 50,841 invites to apply for permanent residence in Canada under the ‘Express Entry’ route, making it to be 47% of the total invites (just over 100,000).
Travel curbs throughout most of 2020 and 2021 delayed the processing of overseas applications, which led to an increase in the size of the processing inventory. To manage this inventory, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) temporarily paused invitations. This has helped reduce the backlog from 110,000 cases to just 48,000 in March, 2022.
Immigration minister Sean Fraser also announced a new temporary policy that will give recent international graduates with expiring temporary status an opportunity to stay in Canada longer so that they can continue to gain work experience and have a better chance at qualifying for permanent residency. Starting in summer 2022, former international students who are in Canada and have a post-graduation work permit expiring between January and December 2022 will qualify for an additional open work permit of up to 18 months.