Marco Mendicino becomes the new Canadian immigration minister

Marco Mendicino has been named the next Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship by Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. Mendicino descends from Italian immigrants to Canada, and he is the representative of the riding of Eglinton-Lawrence in Toronto. Aged 46, his academic background is embedded in law, and he has been working for almost a decade as a federal prosecutor. During his career, he played a crucial role in sending the members of the “Toronto 18” terror group to jail.

It is safe to say that the choice has been made with much deliberation, but it is yet to see whether Mendicino is able to manage the immigrant situation in Canada. He will now have the responsibility of making a case for the immigration-related policies that were promised by the Liberal Party of Canada led by Trudeau during the last federal election. Since the Liberals secured a minority government, they will have to depend on opposition votes in order to implement their promises of raising immigration levels and creating a Municipal Nominee Program. The party had also promised to reduce citizenship fees and turn the Atlantic Immigration Pilot into a permanent program.

While the Liberals were in a majority government for four years, they managed to raise the immigration levels to 330,800 annually in 2019 from 260,000. These targets should ideally be boosted by another 20,000, and the total will reach 350,000 by 2021. This means that the country might see more than a million newcomers over the next three years. The Liberals also focused on the plight of the refugees during their term. They managed to raise refugee class intake to 15 percent, reducing the intake of the economic class to about 58 percent in the process. The family class immigration levels did not see much change.