Keller: How to fix a broken foreign student visa system? Send it back to school 

Yet more commentary from Keller, this time on international students. Valid criticisms but hard to see how any government, federal or provincial, would have the political courage to implement even if they should take significant steps in that direction, starting with caps and gradually eliminating the “visa mills” of the private colleges and the public institutions that work with them:

Marc Miller, the new federal immigration minister, gets it. Whether he plans to fix it; whether the Prime Minister’s Office is interested in fixing it; and whether the provinces will help all remain to be seen.

The “it” is Canada’s student visa program. Its defects and side effects have been getting a lot of attention, mostly in relation to housing prices. The fact that more than 800,000 visa students were in Canada last year, compared to fewer than 200,000 a decade and a half ago, is one of many contributors to a growing mismatch between housing demand and supply. It’s not discriminatory to point this out. It’s just math.

But in an interview last Saturday with CBC Radio’s The House, Mr. Miller said there are issues at stake that are bigger than housing. He’s right.

He described the international student recruitment system as an “ecosystem” that is “very lucrative” but has brought “some perverse effects: some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen as a backdoor entry into Canada.”

He said that the larger issue is “the integrity of the system.”

Bingo. Canadians want an immigration system that benefits and enriches Canada. It’s become obvious that part of the student visa program, maybe even most of it, is no longer hitting the target or even aiming at it.

As I said in my last column, the Trudeau government broke the immigration system by enabling a massive shadow immigration stream of temporary foreign workers, many now coming through student visas. And Ottawa had help: from private industry lobbying for an all-you-can-eat buffet of minimum-wage labour; from educational institutions with dollar signs in their eyes; and from provincial governments that saw an opportunity to put their higher education budgets on a diet, with foreign student tuition making up the difference.

The leader on that last account has been Ontario. Between 2000 and 2022, its number of foreign students rose from 46,000 to 412,000. The rise under the Doug Ford government has been especially vertiginous, and particularly pronounced in the college sector. In 2016, fewer than 35,000 new student visas were issued to attend Ontario colleges. Last year, the number was more than 143,000.

A lot of those students are at suburban strip-mall academies or office park “campuses.” Some are run by private entrepreneurs. Others are the product of entrepreneurial arrangements between public colleges and private operators, with the former providing the credentials and latter just about everything else.

What is being sold in many cases is not world-class education, but the right to come to Canada, to work while enrolled, to continue working after graduation and to move up the line for citizenship.

And at around $15,000 a year for an Ontario college credential, that’s selling Canadian citizenship at fire sale prices.

The road to citizenship via higher education – genuine education, of a genuinely higher level – is a path our immigration system should always be eager to promote.

When a foreign graduate in, for example, engineering, is given a student visa to do a master’s degree at, say, the University of Alberta, and after their studies they choose to remain in Canada, this country wins.

Our student visa system is supposed to be a pipeline of people who are more educated and skilled than the average Canadian, making them likely to be more economically productive than the average Canadian.

The student visa system is not supposed to be a route to come here to flip burgers, stock shelves or deliver Instacart.

Canada should be maximizing the number of high-skill, high-wage immigrants, and minimizing the number of low-skill, low-wage immigrants. A sensibly run student visa system would be entirely about the former. Instead, a big chunk of it is now about the latter.

How to fix that?

The first thing Ottawa should do is cap the number of student visas. Mr. Miller said this year’s tally will be around 900,000. He should cap future intake well below that.

Next, create a system to prioritize who gets the limited supply of visas. Some in higher education have suggested that can’t be done, but every university and college has a system to do something similar, year after year. It’s called the admissions department. If there are only 500 places in the medical school, the school has to figure out who are the best 500 to admit.

A spokesman for Mr. Miller told me that the department is having “exploratory discussions” about creating a “trusted institutions” framework, which would look more favourably on educational institutions meeting a “higher standard” in areas such as “international student supports and outcomes.”

To govern is to choose. The highest quality and highest value programs should get the visas.

Some provinces will scream, notably Ontario. It underfunds public colleges relative to other provinces, by leaning heavily on foreign student tuition. But at Ontario colleges, foreign students are paying surprisingly low tuition fees. The price is generally far below university tuition. It can rise.

Ottawa should also end the right to work in Canada while in school. Or at least restrict it to high-wage work. Make it so that a Canadian education is the reason a foreign student is coming to Canada, not the pretext.

Source: How to fix a broken foreign student visa system? Send it back to school