Immigration Lawyer Michael Niren on Canadian Citizenship
The story of the Canadian government potentially changing Canada’s historic tradition of birthright Canadian citizenship has caught the attention of many Canadians and is all over the media. Several media organizations have called on the expertise of our own immigration lawyer Michael Niren, who was quoted in a CBC news article today.
Staff at a Montreal-area hospitals complaining about visitors giving birth and skipping out on their bill as well as an article out of Hong Kong that stated immigration consultants are telling women to hide their pregnancies and give birth in Canada have made the problem seem much larger than it is.
Because babies born in Canada automatically become Canadian citizens, the government is considering changing this.
The problem of people hiding their pregnancies upon entering Canada – if it does exist in great numbers, which there is no evidence for – can be dealt with in other ways, including screening visitors to Canada more thoroughly, immigration lawyer Michael Niren told the CBC.
“It’s an overblown knee-jerk reaction to a problem that the government has no formal statistics on,” he said. “Which direction do we want to go as a nation? What kind of signal are we sending? The world is a global place today.”
Canada and the United States are the only developed nations that have automatic, birth-right citizenship.
President & CEO
Michael Niren
Mr. Niren is CEO of VisaPlace LLC and the President and Managing Partner of VisaPlace Legal Canada, an immigration law firm based in Toronto, and VisaPlace Legal US a law firm registered in The District of Columbia, USA. Mr. Niren is a graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Canadian Bar Association’s Citizenship and Immigration Section, American Lawyers Association, and an Associate Member of the American Bar Association.
