Canada rethinks long-term visa for international students

Canada is evaluating the number of long-term visas it awards to international students, highlighting the government’s intention to restrict immigration and population growth.

In a phone interview, Immigration Minister Marc Miller stated that federal and provincial officials are considering how to link job market demand with international students. Although Canada has long used universities and colleges to attract educated, working-age immigrants, study visas should not be interpreted as a guarantee of future residency or citizenship, he added.

“That should never be the promise. People should be coming here to educate themselves and perhaps go home and bring those skills back to their country,” he said. “That hasn’t always been the recent case.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been under increasing pressure to address growing living costs, intense competition for scarce homes, and rising unemployment rates. Canada put a new cap on the amount of international student visas it distributes earlier this year; it expects to grant fewer than 300,000 new student permits this year, down from around 437,000 the previous year.

Officials are now deciding which of those pupils should stay when they finish their education.

Miller believes Canada should do a better job of ensuring that international students’ careers are consistent with their studies. There is a discussion over reflecting labor demands and “how we match post-graduate work permits to an increasingly contracting labour shortage” in provinces.

“The logic for having uncapped or uncontrolled draws from abroad is no longer there.”

According to official data, the number of persons in Canada with those visas has increased rapidly: 132,000 new PGWP holders arrived in 2022, up 78% from four years earlier.

Changes to immigration policy will necessitate consultation between governments and businesses, Miller said. Trudeau’s administration is also looking into how a different program that permits businesses to apply for temporary foreign workers has been “used and abused,” Miller said, and he has pledged to reduce the proportion of temporary residents to 5% of the population, down from nearly 7%.

Foreign workers in Prince Edward Island have protested in recent weeks, with some going on hunger strike, after the provincial government reduced the amount of permanent residency nominations for sales and services.

“Canada is now being seen as less welcoming as it has been before” for students, Miller said. But the benefit, he said, is that a study visa “is less and less being seen as a cheap way to obtain permanent residency or entry into Canada, and more of a qualitative proposition — which is where we want to see it go back to its original intent.”

However, after visiting a roundtable with local journalists in Surrey, British Columbia, which has a high population of South Asian immigrants, Miller expressed alarm about indicators of racism in Canada.

“We’ve built a very important consensus around immigration in Canada, but that’s being chipped away at.”