Canada has a message for international students: You can’t all stay

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Canada is reassessing the number of long-term visas it grants to international students, underscoring the government’s desire to slow immigration and population growth.

Federal and provincial officials are discussing how to meet labour market demand and international students, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in a telephone interview. While Canada has for years used universities and colleges to attract educated, working-age immigrants, student visas should not imply a guarantee of future residency or citizenship, he said.

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“It should never be a promise. People should come here to get an education and maybe go home and take those skills back to their country,” he said. “That hasn’t always been the case in recent times.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing increasing pressure from rising living costs, intense competition for scarce housing and rising unemployment. Earlier this year, Canada imposed a new cap on the number of international student visas it issues. It expects to issue fewer than 300,000 new student permits this year, down from about 437,000 last year.

Authorities are now carefully considering which students in this group should stay on after completing their studies.

Canada needs to do a better job of ensuring that jobs offered to international students match the studies they are undertaking, Miller said. There is now discussion about the need to take into account labour needs and “how we can adapt post-graduate work permits to a diminishing labour shortage” in the provinces.

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“The logic behind uncapped or uncontrolled draws from abroad no longer exists.”

The number of people in Canada holding these visas has grown rapidly: there were 132,000 new PGWP holders in the country in 2022, a 78% increase from four years earlier, according to government data.

Changes to immigration policy will need to be a discussion between governments and businesses, Miller said. The Trudeau administration is also looking closely at how a separate program that allows businesses to apply to bring in temporary foreign workers has been “used and abused,” Miller said, and has pledged to reduce the proportion of temporary residents to five per cent of the population, down from nearly seven per cent.

Foreign workers in Prince Edward Island have been protesting in recent weeks — with some going on hunger strike — after the provincial government cut the number of permanent residency nominations in sales and service sectors.

“Canada is now seen as less welcoming than it used to be” to students, Miller said. But the news, he added, is that a student visa “is increasingly seen less as a cheap way to get permanent residency or entry into Canada, and more as a quality proposition – that’s where we want to see it go back to, to its original purpose.”

However, after attending a roundtable with local media in Surrey, B.C., which has a large South Asian immigrant population, Miller said he was also concerned about signs of racism in Canada.

“We have built a very important consensus around immigration in Canada, but it is being eroded.”

With assistance from Randy Thanthong-Knight.

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