The immigration firm will help Amazon staff turn temporary status into permanent residency
Amazon has launched a new immigration legal referral program in Canada, offering employees with immigration status challenges access to legal services. As part of the initiative, the company has partnered with Toronto-based immigration law boutique Green and Spiegel LLP.
The initiative is designed to provide Amazon’s full-time and part-time corporate staff and frontline workers access to flat-fee legal services for various immigration matters, including permanent residency, citizenship applications, and family and spousal sponsorship.
“Most of the things will relate to people who are here in temporary status – how to get them a permanent status, and what is the most efficient way to get that done,” says Evan Green, one of the two managing partners at Green and Spiegel.
He adds that the partnership's goal is affordability, reliability, and clarity in legal guidance.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and the idea is, by offering the service, Amazon employees can get reasonably priced legal services that best serve their needs.”
Green acknowledges the potential for increased workload, but he says it’s too early to tell whether the firm's staffing will need to expand as a result. For now, he is focused on the initiative's national reach.
“Our office is perhaps the largest boutique immigration firm in the country. All we do is immigration. So we cover from coast to coast. In addition, we have offices in the United States, and I have a bar both in Canada and in the United States, and have been working both sides of the border for many years.”
Amazon employs approximately 46,000 people in Canada, working at the company’s tech hubs in Vancouver and Toronto, AWS in Calgary and Montreal, and around 70 operations sites nationwide.
Green says the partnership comes as immigration status is becoming more challenging to navigate – especially for those looking to transition from temporary to permanent residency. He says Canada's immigration system has recently undergone significant changes, leading to tighter restrictions and fewer opportunities for advancement.
“It is getting more difficult to understand if there is a path forward because, for a lot of people now, there may not be one. There are far greater restrictions on visas than there have been in previous years.”
He adds that while Canada’s express entry system was once a more straightforward route to permanent status, recent changes to the ranking system have shifted the landscape.
“There has been only one general draw, where only 500 people have been chosen in the last number of months,” he says.
When the point system was revised, the most significant advantage went to younger individuals – those with Canadian-based work experience and graduates of Canadian institutions.
He says this creates a growing barrier for more experienced professionals, particularly executives, and it has to be addressed.
“We talk a lot about productivity these days, and when you compare Canada to the United States in many ways, Canada is more restrictive right now than the US in certain categories. What we want is a successful, productive country. And as we all know, immigration is a big piece of that… If there is no permanent pathway, people are going to look elsewhere.”
