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FILE PHOTO: People walk on the grounds of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 9, 2020. Picture taken September 9, 2020.
Ottawa caps visas for foreign students
The Trudeau government is shutting the door to hundreds of thousands of foreign students. This week, Ottawa moved to reduce the number of undergraduate international student visas for 2025 to just 360,000, a 35% cut, in an effort to tackle the housing crisis and rein in diploma mills that are profiting off the system.
The reduction is expected to pose serious enrollment problems for some institutions. The schools have already warned that the government’s visa cuts could lead to tuition increases, job losses, and even closures. But Immigration Minister Marc Miller said he had no choice: "We've got two years to actually get the ship in order. It's a bit of a mess, and it's time to rein it in."
International students fall in a jurisdictional gap in Canada between the provinces, which fund and regulate universities and colleges, and the federal government, which issues the visas. As provincial funding has failed to keep pace with post-secondary costs, universities and colleges have kept their bottom lines intact by increasing the enrollment of foreign students, mostly from India and China.
“I’m not the minister of post-secondary education underfunding,” Miller said. “I’m the minister of immigration and clearly in the last decade or so post-secondary institutions in Canada have been underfunded.”
While Miller pointed to systemic issues, the primary impetus seems to be the housing crisis, which has led to a shift in public opinion against immigration. And against Justin Trudeau. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has successfully attacked the prime minister about the housing shortage.
Unlike in the United States, where immigration is at the heart of the national political debate, a cross-partisan consensus around the value of immigration is normal in Canada. So the Liberals moving to rein in student visas lies in stark contrast to a longstanding welcoming approach to immigration.
There may be more to come. Radio-Canada, the French language branch of CBC, reported Thursday that Canada is poised to reimpose a visa requirement on Mexico after more than 25,000 people from that country sought asylum in Canada last year.The Graphic Truth: Indians hold 40% of Canadian student visas
The fallout from allegations that India was behind the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar has thrown Indo-Canadian relations into the lurch. Each side has expelled a diplomat from the other, and India’s Embassy in Canada stopped processing visas – a serious diplomatic gesture, no doubt, but the material impacts are likely to be small. Only around 80,000 Canadians visited India in 2021 out of more than 1.5 million foreign tourists.
But if Canada responds in kind, it will be a very different story. Indian students represent a staggering 40% of the 807,000 foreign student visa holders in Canada, more than every other nationality combined save China. The number of Indians studying in the Great White North skyrocketed from just 2,210 in 2000 to 171,505 in 2018 — also the year Indian students first outnumbered Chinese students. Their population has since nearly doubled, and Indian students now represent approximately 0.8% of the entire population of Canada.
Here’s the twist: Even before the row over Nijjar’s murder, Canada was seriously considering capping student visas. The country is in the midst of a severe housing shortage, and efforts to alleviate the situation are falling short. The province of Ontario needs to build around 150,000 new houses every year for the next several years to rectify the situation — and they’re managing around 40,000. Capping the number of foreign students competing for limited housing might be politically expedient, but it would be a devastating blow to the Canadian universities that depend upon international tuition rates.