Immigration
(Asian Pacific Post) – Canada is working with colleges and universities to attract even more students, despite soaring international enrolments in the country.
Representatives from educational institutions are working with government officials to develop a strategy to target growth markets for the Canada study permit, reported immigration.ca
Target countries include those growing economically with lots of young people, including Colombia and certain African nations.
New federal government figures show international students contribute $15.5 billion per year to the Canadian economy, supporting nearly 170,000 jobs in 2016.
At the end of 2018, there were 572,415 study permit holders in Canada. University enrolment alone increased by 15 percent between 2017 and 2018, according to figures from Universities Canada.
Study Permit numbers have increased 180 percent in the last decade, as successive governments have recognized the benefit to the Canadian economy of increasing international student levels.
A three-step process has been established in Canada targeting international students. First, they hold Study Permits while in full-time education; second, they become eligible for a Post Graduation Work Permit; and third, they can use all the experience gathered to qualify for permanent residence.
International students are an important source of revenue for Canada’s schools, paying significantly higher tuition fees than their Canadian counterparts.
With Canadian education much cheaper than across the border in the U.S., Canada’s best universities are often seen as a pathway to a world-class education without the dollar outlay required south of the border.
Students from India and China dominate the international student landscape, accounting for 315,610, or 55 per cent, of the total Study Permit holders in Canada.
“Increasingly, what we’re seeing among our member institutions, universities included, is a real proactive effort to diversify their student populations,” said Larissa Bezo, president and CEO of the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE). “We’re beginning to see the fruit of these investments,” she told universityaffairs.ca
At universities, it’s common for international students to make up at least 15 percent of enrolments and sometimes much more. Lakehead, with 1,400 international students, is well on the way to meeting its 2023 target of 2,000 international students, representing 20 percent of its enrolment. Nine years ago, it had just 150 international students.
The University of British Columbia has seen international enrolment climb nearly 60 percent in four years. It has 16,000 international students, representing a quarter of its enrolment.
“The sense that international students have of Canada is that it’s a place that is committed to the idea of global citizenship, and that resonates deeply with this generation,” said Murali Chandrashekaran, UBC’s vice-provost, international.
The University of Windsor opened its first international recruitment office last December, in New Delhi, to better service its top international market of India (followed by China, Nigeria and Bangladesh). The university’s special focus on students interested in a foreign master’s degree in business or STEM disciplines has more than paid off: international students make up 70 percent of the university’s graduate student enrolment, about 2,700 students, representing a six-fold increase in the last decade.
“[Canada’s] immigration policy is the primary driver,” observed Chris Busch, the university’s assistant vice-president, enrolment management. It allows international students to work during and after their studies, and provides a pathway to permanent residency, which some 60 percent of international students planned to seek, according to a 2018 CBIE survey.
The exponential growth comes as the key demographic of young adults in Canada is flat or declining in some regions. International students, by adding to enrolment rosters and contributing to revenues in an era of restrained government support, are “creating opportunities for Canadian students,” said Paul Davidson, president and CEO of Universities Canada.
For smaller communities, especially those trying to recover after the loss of key industries, international students can also provide an economic shot in the arm. Cape Breton University’s more than 2,700 international students – the number more than doubled between 2017 and 2018 – have been estimated to contribute about $60 million a year to the local Sydney, Nova Scotia, economy.
The good news story could be a double-edged sword if planners aren’t careful, though. Last summer, university administrators witnessed the risks of relying on any single country when Saudi Arabia said it was recalling its students due to a diplomatic dispute with Canada – although in the end the number of students who left was less than originally feared. “It served as a wake-up call across the country,” said James Aldridge, vice-provost, international, at Lakehead.
Then, Canada got into a spat with China – by far the top source country for international university students – over the arrest in this country of Chinese senior telecommunications executive Meng Wanzhou. Moody’s credit agency warned that if political tensions between the two countries worsened, this could pose “credit risks for Canadian universities.”
With international students paying annual tuitions of between $20,000 to $60,000-plus, a significant pullback would leave universities exposed. In its budget report for 2018-2019, the University of Toronto noted that international student fees accounted for 30 percent of revenue, more than provincial grants (25 percent).
That has made “diversification” the mot du jour among Canadian international education administrators. Universities Canada said it would like to see Canada give serious backing to a fresh, sector-led, five-year international education strategy that identifies a group of source countries with the best promise for student recruitment based on factors such as existing partnerships, trade agreements and where Canada has a realistic opportunity to compete.
To that end, there’s much applause for the federal government’s 2019 budget earmarking $148 million over the next five years for a new international education strategy, part of which is intended to promote Canada to “top-tier foreign students,” so that they choose it as their “education destination of choice.”
While Canada has “done a good job,” of competing – it garnered fourth place for market share in 2017, ahead of Australia and France, but behind the U.S., U.K., and China, according to CBIE – Mr. Davidson noted that federal government spending to promote the Canadian education brand has been about $5 million a year, compared to $7.5 million by New Zealand and $12 million by Australia. It’s time to take Canada’s pitch “to the next level,” he said. “It’s about seizing this moment, when Canada is seen as open, inclusive and dynamic.”
Canada is celebrating a milestone – the 40th anniversary of Canada’s private refugee sponsorship regime that has resettled 327,000 refugees. But alongside this record of welcome, some refugees are facing a closed door.
Canadians most recently helped resettle thousands of Syrian refugees. Indeed, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has welcomed refugees at our airports and the government promoted Syrian resettlement with the hashtag #refugeeswelcome.
This celebration is in stark contrast to the federal government’s omnibus budget bill tabled recently. Embedded in the 392-page document are troubling changes to our inland refugee determination system. Significantly, a new ground of ineligibility for protection is added to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act – claimants who have made a claim for refugee protection in another country will be ineligible to make a claim in Canada.
That means many refugee claimants will be denied access to Canada without having an opportunity to tell their story and without having their claim heard by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board. Some people may never be heard.
Canada has an obligation under the Refugee Convention and the Convention against Torture to not only treat all refugee claimants equally but to hear them out.
The Supreme Court of Canada held in the 1985 Singh decision that every refugee claimant has the right to be heard in an oral hearing. We celebrated this decision on its April 4 anniversary, now marked as Refugee Rights Day in Canada.
Less than a week later, the government introduced a budget bill that tries to strip away that right.
The government says we should be comforted by the fact that claimants will have access to a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA), which examines whether someone would be returned to a situation of torture or other risks. But this isn’t the same as a full hearing at the Immigration and Refugee Board. PRRA applications are paper-based and an immigration officer conducts an interview only if the officer deems it necessary.
And not all claimants will be told about the PRRA. Some people approaching our official ports of entry only get a PRRA when they ask for it. And even if they do know about it and get one, the acceptance rate is extremely low; 97 per cent of all PRRA applications in 2018 were rejected.
All Canadians would agree that we need to manage the border and the influx of migrants crossing it. But we shouldn’t do that by slamming the door shut, violating people’s Charter and international rights, hoping that this will deter people.
People are going to come to our borders no matter what the law says. Managing the border in an efficient and humanitarian way means allowing people to come to official ports of entry to be processed. We have a well-oiled system. Why turn our backs on it now?
Our refugee determination system through the Immigration and Refugee Board is considered the gold standard all over the world. Let’s use it.
The government wants to turn back people who enter from ‘safe’ countries like the United States. But the U.S. refugee determination system is very different from Canada’s.
Former U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions issued a decision foreclosing people from making refugee claims based on domestic violence or gender-related persecution, for example. This denies protection to many people who would obtain protection in Canada.
Children were separated from parents and put into detention in the U.S. People are being prosecuted for entering the U.S. outside of official ports of entry and are being detained while they wait for their refugee claims to be assessed. Why do we want to delegate our refugee determinations to a country that isn’t respecting basic human rights of refugee claimants?
We can’t allow the Canadian government to use joyful images of ‘deserving’ refugees arriving at airports and 40th-anniversary celebrations to imply that only resettled refugees are legitimate.
Doing good deeds through the resettlement program should not provide us with moral comfort in slackening our commitment to refugees coming across our borders. We should not focus on the route by which refugees come to us or how they ask us for protection. A refugee is a refugee.
(Jamie Liew is a refugee lawyer and an associate law professor at the University of Ottawa. Shauna Labman is an assistant law professor at the University of Manitoba.)