Two rapes of Sikh women in Walsall and Oldbury, both in their 20s, i have been reported in recent weeks. John Ashby, 32, has been charged in connection with a religiously aggravated rape in relation to the Walsall attack. Those incidents, as well as a violent attack on two elderly Sikh taxi drivers in Wolverhampton, prompted a meeting in UK Parliament at the end of October over anti-Sikh hate crimes in the region. In the House of Lords, a Labour peer Lord Kuldip Singh Sahota raised the disturbing nature of recent attacks against Sikhs in the West Midlands region. Telford's Lord Sahota described a spate of hate crimes as 'surprising' and blamed 'a toxic political environment' for worsening community relations. Sikh leaders have raised concerns with Members of Parliament at Westminster and plan to meet policing minister Sarah Jones. The chair Sukhvinder Kaur of Sikh Women’s Aid (SWA), a domestic abuse charity in the West Midlands said women were changing their daily routines to protect themselves. 'The fear, the now complete changing of your day-to-day living, that is real. I have not seen that before'. She said, this is the first time since SWA was set up that women are saying: 'We are no longer doing the things that we enjoy because we might get harmed doing them.’ Congregations at Gurdwaras are funding rape alarms and sending messages to the local community to work together. At the Guru Nanak Parkash Gurdwara in Coventry, activist Deepa Singh from Sikh Youth UK said families should implement small changes to be safer. Meanwhile, Canada has announced plans to slash temporary resident admissions by 25–32% starting next year, while opening a new fast-track permanent residency pathway for tens of thousands of US-based H-1B visa holders and other high-skilled professionals. Canada's Budget 2025 introduces a new pathway allowing up to 33K US H-1B visa holders and other high-skilled temporary workers to transition directly to permanent residency by 2027. Concurrently, the Canada Border Services Agency has deported three foreign nationals following an investigation linking them to an ongoing extortion network targeting Panjabi-origin business owners in British Columbia (earlier coverage).
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