The education consultant in India did not tell Maninderjit Kaur, a student headed to Canada, exactly where the college she had enrolled in was located in relation to Toronto.
Ms. Kaur told my colleague, Norimitsu Onishi, that after an endless Uber ride – eight hours and $800 Canadian dollars later – she had ended up in Timmins, Ontario, a place she had never heard of.
But, as Nori reported, earning a degree in this remote city was perhaps a less isolating experience given that 82 percent of students at Northern College in Timmins are foreign nationals, mostly from India.
[Read Nori’s story: In Remote Canada, a College Becomes a Magnet for Indian Students]
Recruiting foreign students who pay higher tuition fees – about five times more than Canadians to earn a degree, according to the census agency – has always been attractive to the country’s institutions. It has also become increasingly important for the federal government, which aims to reach a lofty goal of attracting 1.45 million immigrants between 2023 and 2025.
By announcing this record-breaking goal in November 2022, as part of a strategy to fill the nation’s labor shortage, Canada signaled that it was going in the opposite direction from many Western governments that are restricting migration, as I reported at the time. (From this week, most foreign students in Britain will no longer be allowed to bring their families with them, a move that the country’s Home Office says fulfills its commitment to “a decisive cut to immigration”.)
In Canada, the surge in foreign students has fueled concerns about the willingness of universities and community colleges to adequately house them and efforts to ensure their jobs and finances are not exploited. Immigration Minister Marc Miller recently announced a series of measures that will come into force this month for foreign students.
For the first time since the early 2000s, the government raised the savings threshold that foreign students must have to be eligible for a study permit to about C$20,600, up from $10,000. And it will continue, at least until April, to allow international students to work more than 20 hours a week, a policy adopted previously. I go back.
Without providing details, Mr Miller’s ministry also said it was examining the ways which could ensure that colleges and universities, which are provincially regulated, only accept as many students as they can help find housing.
“Before September 2024, we stand ready to take necessary steps, including a significant visa restriction, to ensure that designated learning institutions provide adequate and sufficient support to students,” Miller said at a news conference last month. Press conference in which he announced the changes. He accused some institutions of running “the graduation equivalent of puppy mills,” depriving foreign students of a positive academic experience in the face of enormous difficulties and a lack of intervention from provincial governments.
“Enough is enough,” Miller added. “If the provinces and territories can’t do it, we’ll do it for them, and they won’t like the crudeness of the tools we use.”
The number of international students in Canada has skyrocketed over the past three years, with a 60% increase in the number of study permits processed by the Ministry of Immigration. It completed more than one million new study permit applications and extensions in 2023, a record, compared to 838,000 in 2022 and 560,000 in 2021.
Study permits are not strictly limited, but permanent residencies do adhere to annual quotas. In 2022, Canada welcomed approximately 432,000 permanent residents and of those, 95,000 were previously international students, according to a September 2023 survey postponement by four Canadian senators urging the government to address “program integrity issues.” These include a growing perception that aspiring to a Canadian degree is a safe path to citizenship.
“It’s not a path, it’s a minefield,” said Syed Hussan, executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, a migrant-led, union-like organization based in Toronto.
He characterized the changes as “small tweaks” to a system that probably needed to be overhauled.
“We constantly hear problems related to high tuition fees, difficulty obtaining permanent resident status, labor exploitation and exploitation by landlords,” Hussan said.
Placing strict limits on student permits is not the answer, said Anna Triandafyllidou, an immigration researcher and professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, but she added that the government should do a better job of regulating the flow of migrants to avoid fueling competition “ruthless” to stay in the country. Canada.
“Otherwise you create this huge bottleneck where you admit 600,000 international students, but they have to compete with everyone else for 450,000 permanent residence permits,” he said.
It’s becoming increasingly common for migrants to spend time in the country before becoming permanent residents, a process known as two-step immigration, which is seen as almost taboo in Canada, Professor Triandafyllidou told me.
Canada should recognize that it has “a two-step system and just make sure it works properly,” he said.
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Millions of acres of boreal forest in Ontario and Quebec, two of Canada’s top regions for commercial logging, have been severely depleted, according to a new study. Scientists say the findings show the country is allowing unsustainable practices that have profoundly degraded the forest.
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Florida has received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to import drugs in large quantities from Canada at lower prices, but there are significant obstacles. Health Canada says its drug supply cannot meet both countries’ demands, and pharmaceutical lobbyists are working to block importation efforts in lawsuits.
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My colleague Ian Austen, in Ottawa, shares five things he read, watched and listened to in the latest edition of “What’s in Our Queue.”
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Kathy Gannon, a Canadian journalist who has covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for 34 years at the Associated Press, explains in her guest essay why the United States should revive its presence in Afghanistan.
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Times TV critic Mike Hale suggests adding the Canadian drama “Sort Of” to your must-watch list this winter.
Vjosa Isai is a journalist and researcher for the New York Times in Toronto.
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