Migration is broken. Let’s fix it. Warren Whitlock interviews Murtaza Khan, the Founder of Migranet in this episode of Distributed Conversations. We believe everyone has the born right to choose which part of the world to call home with full freedom, safety, and dignity. Instead, every year millions of migrants and refugees surrender their shot at a better life due to red tape, unfair fees, and fraudulent practices. This is where Migranet comes in. Learn how Migranet is using blockchain and AI to solve the world’s immigration problems.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Using Blockchain And AI To Solve The World’s Immigration Problems – Migranet.io with Murtaza Khan
Distributed Conversations Interview with Murtaza Khan, Founder of Migranet.
We’re talking about immigration. That’s a big issue you’ve heard a lot about but it’s more than the walls, refugee fights and things like that. All of that is important. We want to focus on something that’s making a difference, using blockchain, AI and fixing things for people that are going to be stuck doing the migration or the people that are moving. I’ve got my new friend and we’re working together on part of this project. He is Murtaza Khan from Migranet. Welcome to the show and I’m glad to have you.
Thank you, Warren. It’s a pleasure being here.
Your name is not John Smith. You’re in Canada and I’m in the US. You must know something about immigration. How did this all come about? How did you get into fixing immigration?
I come from a family of immigrants myself. My parents immigrated from the Middle East many years ago. Being an immigrant made it easy to look for this industry where I’ve seen myself immigrate. I’ve seen my family immigrate. I’ve seen other friends and family immigrate. I’ve seen all the pain and suffering that happens and how hard it is to get people integrated and everything. It was an easy decision for me to pick that up as a profession. I’m a Canadian Immigration Consultant for many years. I’ve been practicing professionally on almost every category there is from refugees to students’ permits.
This whole thing happened because, throughout the years, I’ve noticed fraud and corruption in this industry. On TV, it’s a whole different type of migration they’re talking about. Immigration has a lot of fraud and corruption happening in the background. That happens by having unregistered immigration practitioners charging $50,000 to $100,000. There are fraudulent employers that misuse international workforce systems. There are delays that are caused by unprofessional immigration practitioners. My whole thing was that there are applications in Canadian immigration and US immigration and most of the countries that have good immigration systems. Those applications are point-based. Your age, language ability, educational background, work experience, all equate to a certain number.
We have the technology for these nowadays. I looked into it and I got our advisor, data scientist, blockchain developers, legal immigration, everyone on a table in a room. We realized that we have the technology to simplify immigration and using technology to clarify. Machine learning is the part that will be doing the calculations. AI will be the one suggesting where a person should go or immigrate based on their qualifications and also based on the host country’s requirement for that category or their industry for example. Blockchain is used for the security of the documents. There’s no reason why we should be charging $5,000 to $6,000 for that. This should be a $500 fee. That’s what we’re achieving here. We’re reducing the cost by 90%, making it simpler and more cost-effective.
The disruption you’re working on is to help the people like if I live in Country A and I want to live in Country B, and there are no wars or conflicts or government restrictions or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the system is, there is a right way to do it or the best practices of how to move to Guatemala. I will use Guatemala because it’s in the news that people are leaving but anywhere Chile. I’ve been to a bunch of countries and had a visa. I’m a US citizen with a passport. I can go most places without a lot of paperwork. Even if I have to do a little bit in our TSA, I feel like there are these government rules that we’re constantly not knowing what the right thing to do is.
We already have AI for regular travels. They’re competing for places, selling tickets and different ways to plan a trip. We have a whole lot of things in there for regular travel from one place. When you want to move, you need to know for sure that you get there. The one that came to mind is the idea of foreign workers where somebody gets a visa and goes on work someplace and he is tied into having to be there. They owe somebody when they get there. That’s got to be a huge thing, which borders on human trafficking. Anything we do to fix the nice easy legal stuff then gets into all the other stuff because there is no reason that the same technology is going to be handling people where there are huge crowds in a refugee camp.
For the most part, immigration processing is in the hands of immigration lawyers and consultants. They’re manually processed. I could say that we’re about 100 years behind in this world. There are many things like you mentioned, getting an airfare is meetable. It’s like going to a ticket sales center or a flight center, for example, or something like that and buying a ticket there. I understand if you need to do that. Ideally, a lot of things are automated. Immigration needs to be automated for where automation is available. I like to clarify that we need lawyers and consultants. There are cases that automation cannot handle like refugees applications, appeals, child sponsorship, spouse and family applications, rejections for any matter.
'Migration is broken. Let’s fix it.' Migranet.io Share on X
You need professionals to handle those things and those fees, they are what they are. You can’t change them because people have worked and gone through vast years of educations to achieve that designation. When we talked about a simple calculator, calculating some of those points, there’s no reason to be charging $5,000 or $3,000, anything more than $1,000 even. We’re going to do it within $500 as an automated system. There’s phase two to this, which is we also want to help refugees. How do we want to help refugees? We can’t automate that application but we definitely can help them with their skills assessment. What we’ve noticed in our countries and I say our countries meaning the refugee-hosting countries. In those countries, UNHCR and the UN of the world are doing a great job saving their lives. You cannot deny that. Thank them for that.
What I’m trying to say is that what happens is they come here or they come to Canada or the US or these countries and we don’t know them. We don’t know what kind of skills do they have? Where we could actually put them where they could thrive based on their profession. A carpenter for example. A carpenter in the US cannot even practice carpentry in Canada because there are rules and regulations or regulated occupation. Let’s say we talk about a refugee who’s a carpenter in their country. They do not need to be working in the carpentry industry right away, but they can be in the construction industry. We’re planning on working with UNHCR and NGOs within the refugee camps to upload their skills on blockchain. It’s like their resume. We find out a little bit more about them. We upload it on blockchain.
They would have a private key where they can let the host country know, therefore, post-selection in the host country. They can be integrated better. Hence, the whole doctors driving cabs or Uber will be eliminated by doing this. We will know a lot more about them. We’re also helping the refugee side with their skills assessment and integration. On this side, where automated immigration is available, we’re also automating it with those three technologies because you can’t do it with one. We’re not a blockchain project. We’re not an AI project. We’re not a machine learning. We’re a combination of all three.
You’re definitely attacking the thing that automation works best on in eliminating things. I know when I’m handed a form and have to find a pen and fill it out, I’m like, “What’s wrong here. It shouldn’t be this way. I should have this on my phone. I should be able to push a button and order a cab.” My dream for travel is I want to go someplace. I want to push a button to where I want to go, come back and confirm to know the price is okay. When I get to the other place, I’ve got clothes in the hotel room. All the time, the Uber drivers are there to pick me up. I don’t need to be a jet setter with my private jet to get through all this. I’m well enough known as a traveler. I should not have to stand in line at TSA and baggage claim. I’m nobody as far as travel is concerned. I don’t have to prove who I am to Uber. Why not sign it to everything? 30 to 40 years ago, we were working on automating forms being filled in.
I went to a new dentist, six pages of paperwork and they have a wall full of files for all their customer. They were cleaning my teeth. The only thing that was automated is I pick the Groupon. When I got through, they said, “We’ve already collected your Groupon. We didn’t even wait for you to show us the barcode. We’ve already done that.” I’m going, “That’s wonderful. Now I have to sit here and do all this paperwork so you can clean my teeth.” That part of it took as long as seeing the dentist. We were trying to fix all these things and this is a place definitely because we got people that lost their paperwork and are running away from a place or something like that, especially in a refugee crisis. Even if I’m only deciding that I’ve got a job in Dubai and I’m going to move there and it’s all taken care of, it’s still a big hassle for me to do that. I arrive in Dubai not knowing whether or not my stuff is going to be there, whether or not the place I rented is going to work. All those kinds of things and you’re leading into that technology. You are a startup. Do you have an MVP or an early release that you’ve got running?
We have a prototype. We have 1,300 use cases that were used for this prototype. We have our machine learning algorithm based on the Canadian immigration category called Federal Skilled Worker. We’ve proudly reached 30% accuracy according to our data scientist. That’s there to show that we have a simple model of what to expect. The other great news is we’ve started to work on our blockchain. The section that we’re going to be handling the blockchain part for Migranet as an entire project, we’ll have that ready.
We have the technology to simplify immigration and using technology to clarify it. Share on X
Whatever you have available is talked about and can be seen on the website. Why don’t you tell us about how to get to that?
It’s Migranet.io. We have all the information there. The link to our prototype is there as well as the publications that we’ve been on around the world. Another thing that I would like to mention is that we started making partnerships with immigration law firms around the world. We have our blockchain development coming in. We’re also going to go for the listing in two major exchanges. Great things are coming along.
Investors can find out what they need to know starting off by going to the website. I have some of the tokens and I’m not a token or security salesperson in any way. I’m not telling you to invest in this. I like it myself and I recommend you to pay attention to this company regardless of whether you’re an investor or not. If you know anybody needing help with migration, be sure to check this out because while you’re not in every country and can’t do everything right away, that’s the goal. When do you think you will be able to help any immigrant anywhere?
Starting on July 15th, we will be able to help immigrants process the traditional methods while we’re building our technology. We’re adding a 25% discounted rate for all the immigration practitioners. That’s for Canada, EU, Portugal, Brazil and Costa Rica. We will start the immigration immediately as of July 15th using our traditional methods with partnerships that we have. As for the technology, we are aiming for 20, 21 to have ten to twenty countries covered. We’re hoping that by September or November, we should have our first working prototype for one category for ten countries, which will be the investors class. All that news is to come because we have already started developing.
Imagine immigrating becomes as simple as grabbing an Uber can be nice. What you’re doing is good work and helps the world. Regardless of whether somebody wants migration or not, it’s happening. It’s in the lives of millions of people. It’s going to continue whether or not it’s due to some global warming or political conflict or people wanting to move around because we can move around. That’s a force that’s not going to stop. When I hear of somebody staying in the same place throughout their life, which is great if that’s your choice. If you want to live in one rural location or whatever, that’s fine. When people have the means and it’s like the one I heard about somebody who was 30 miles outside of a metro area in the United States. They’d never taken the half-hour ride into the big city. They are middle-aged and I’m going like, “That’s almost a sin to me.”
You need to travel. If you decide you hate the city and you don’t want to live there, that’s fine. Spend an afternoon and find out how the other half lives. The same goes for any kind of travel. We all have the means now. The abundance of the future, I believe that we will have technology and whatnot. I know I could take my phone and work anywhere, except for when I want to come here and have a nice microphone for a podcast. I’m pretty much mobile and I have done many podcasts on my phone. We can do whatever we want to do. Why shouldn’t we be encouraging everybody else to do that? Politically, I’m much more for migration than about anybody. At the same time, I’m aware of all the little conflicts that are going on. I’m glad to say we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the bulk of it, which is people wanting to go where they want to go legally. I appreciate your time and I will be checking back with you. Until next time, thanks a lot.
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About Murtaza Khan
Khan is a migration specialist with 16 years experience in the industry. He is an immigration consultant in Canada accredited with Immigration Consultants of Canada Regulatory Council (ICCRC). Khan specializes in Canadian immigration that includes: Refugee, Investors, Entrepreneur, Temporary Foreign Worker program and Employment Specific Training. Over the years, Khan has held Canadian immigration and recruitment offices here in Canada along with U.A.E, New Zealand, Taiwan, Pakistan and the Philippines processing Canadian immigration cases and facilitating Canadian employers with job-specific trained staff that were later integrated though federal immigration system or provincial nominee programs that resulted in permanent residency which paved the way to citizenship.
He also established Continental Career Training Ltd., which is a multi-disciplined, online education training company that has existed for more than 10.5 years. A combined experience in the Foreign Worker Recruitment, Training, and Immigration Consultations both domestically and International with knowledge and expertise in graduating students through a “Canadian experience class” focused on immigrating graduates into most needed sectors in Canada. From 2011 to 2014 Khan, presented in seminars internationally to introduce Canadian Immigration categories and Service Canada programs in U.A.E, Pakistan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, USA, Mexico, U.K, Italy, France, Cayman Islands, and Jamaica. The vision is to create a global community of immigrants, travelers, and processing systems in a standardized token ecosystem under the most innovative migration platform.
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