Thousands of international students miss fall semester amid uncertainty, visa delays

2024/10/24 Leave a comment

Seems to be more an issue for colleges than universities given examples cited:

…Brian-Paul Welsh, an immigration consultant at Northern Education Consultants, agreed with the school officials that there are two main factors at play – foreign students rethinking their destinations and “significant” visa delays.

Welsh said Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada had previously come under fire for not reviewing visa applications as carefully as it should have.

That has changed recently, and now every application is being reviewed “quite thoroughly to ensure that they meet the criteria before they give them a successful decision,” he said.

Another layer of bureaucracy could be adding to the time it takes, he said. Ottawa announced in January it would require provinces to issue attestation letters for international students, without which students couldn’t apply for a visa.

Still, Welsh said the larger issue may be the federal government’s policy direction.

Students may be holding back while they wait and see whether the possibility of becoming a permanent resident after their studies is still in the cards, he said.

“The potential benefits might not outweigh what they know it would actually cost,” he said.

Source: Thousands of international students miss fall semester amid uncertainty, visa delays

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Keller: It’s time to Moneyball the immigration system

2024/10/23 Leave a comment

Keller continues to offer provocative suggestions. Overly market-based IMO but worth examining given that provincial funding increases unlikely:

…Given that the number of student visas is not infinite, priority should go to programs charging the highest tuition. By happy coincidence, many of the highest-value programs, producing graduates who may become high-wage immigrants, are also the highest-tuition programs.

For example, annual tuition and fees for international students at Waterloo ranges from $50,000 to $73,000. That’s roughly four times Conestoga’s international tuition.

It means that each international student at Waterloo is paying as much as four students at the crosstown college. The government of Ontario, which long prioritized visas for colleges as an easy cash grab, needs to do some basic math. It needs to cash grab more efficiently.

Moneyballing the system means fewer student visas, but going to programs educating the most economically productive future immigrants, and programs charging the highest tuition. The two aren’t exactly the same, but there is huge overlap.

The path forward is clear.

Source: It’s time to Moneyball the immigration system

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CBIE | Canada shouldn’t be closing doors on international students

2024/10/23 Leave a comment

The interest group view, tone deaf to the impact that their previous advocacy without any consideration of broader impact on society has had, and that many of international students, particularly in public and private colleges, are far from global talent:

….This crisis has exposed what is a chronic underfunding and undervaluing of post-secondary education in Canada. To sustain the sector, provinces and territories must urgently commit to adequately funding post-secondary education ensuring access to high-quality education for Canadian students. Our post-secondary institutions shouldn’t be reliant on revenues from international student tuition for their operational survival.

Unfortunately, recent policy changes and rising anti-immigration rhetoric have obscured the fact that we need global talent to sustain and grow our economy to counter our aging population and  declining birth rate. Canada’s future prosperity and growth hinges on those who choose to study in Canada and ultimately make this country home.

International students are young, possess Canadian degrees and certifications, are fluent in one of Canada’s official languages and have established support networks here. Most already reside in our communities and many have proven domestic work experience.

They are well-positioned to provide the high-quality talent we need for our research enterprises, health, social and cultural sectors and emerging sectors including clean tech, bioengineering and machine learning; all of which will strengthen Canada’s competitiveness, productivity and economic prospects. Put simply, the recruitment of global talent is in our national interest.

Ottawa and the provinces must work together on a well-designed and synchronized global talent strategy that can address labour market shortages while meeting changing demographic realities from coast to coast to coast.

Such a strategy would ensure that short-term policy measures to address one problem don’t take place in a vacuum ignoring our longer-term recruitment, labour market and immigration objectives….

Source: CBIE | Canada shouldn’t be closing doors on international students

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ICYMI LILLEY: Trudeau has broken every aspect of our immigration system

2024/10/22 Leave a comment

Sample of some of the language being used. While the lion’s share of the blame lies with the federal government, other levels of government, business and educational institutions are also complicit:

If it wasn’t clear already, this past week showed there isn’t a single facet of the immigration system the Liberals haven’t broken.

A man on a student visa was in court on terrorism charges, a TD bank report showed temporary workers are harming the economy, and the Trudeau government started talking about moving tens of thousands of asylum seekers across the country.

“We could open a hotel in any particular province and ship people there,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said at the Liberal caucus retreat.

He was reacting to news that some premiers don’t want the federal government to ship thousands of asylum seekers their way from Ontario and Quebec. Rather than fix the problem, Miller and the rest of Trudeau’s team are trying to spread it around.

We’ve gone from a few thousand people showing up at airports and declaring asylum to a few thousand a month.

The problem is that the Trudeau government relaxed the visa requirements, in some cases waiving them. That has resulted in people who would otherwise be denied entrance to Canada being given permission to fly here and claim immediate asylum.

India is currently the top source country for people claiming asylum with more than 15,000 claims in the first six months of this year, claims from Mexico are at nearly 9,000. People coming here from India and Mexico, with rare exception, are not refugees, they are economic migrants abusing a system meant to protect people from persecution.

The Liberals could fix this problem by fixing the visa system, but they’d rather talk about building hotels, busing people across the country and be arguing with premiers than looking for solutions.

When it isn’t letting the visa system rot, we have questions about how well we vet people coming into the country.

On Friday, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan was in court on terrorism charges. Khan was arrested last week after the FBI uncovered a plot, they say would have seen Khan travel to Brooklyn, New York to carry out an attack on the Jewish community there.

Khan was living in the Toronto area for a little over a year but is a Pakistani national who was admitted to Canada in June 2023 on a student visa. The arrest came just five weeks after Ahmed Eldidi was arrested on terrorism charges with a plot allegedly targeting Toronto’s Jewish community.

Eldidi had come to Canada on a visitor’s visa in 2018, claimed refugee status a few months later and was granted Canadian citizenship in May 2024 just before he was arrested.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the strength of our vetting system during a news conference in Montreal. To listen to Trudeau, there are no problems with the system.

“First of all, this is an extraordinarily serious situation, and it highlights just how effective our security services and institutions are that we were able to interdict these, these very, very potentially devastating situations,” Trudeau said.

The arrests are one thing, but why are we not catching people before they enter the country. One of the charges against Eldidi is due to what police say was his participation in an ISIS terror and torture video in 2015.

Our asylum claims are off the charts, the visa system is broken, we can’t properly vet people coming into Canada and now a report from TD Bank that says the over reliance on temporary foreign workers is hurting the economy.

All of these problems have been created by the Trudeau Liberals and their mismanagement of the system.

Source: LILLEY: Trudeau has broken every aspect of our immigration system

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ICYMI Mason: Immigrants are this country’s best friend. Don’t forget it

2024/10/22 Leave a comment

One of the counter narratives to the current critique of immigration levels (which I share). And of course the equally simplistic rationales used to justify increased levels of permanent residents, and uncontrolled growth of temporary residents, have also come home to roost:

According to a study in The Lancet, by 2050, 155 of 204 countries (75.9 per cent) measured (including Canada) will not have high enough fertility rates to sustain population size over time. This will increase to 97 per cent of these same countries by 2100. “The new fertility forecasts underscore the enormous challenges to economic growth in many middle- and high-income countries with a dwindling workforce, and the growing burden on health and social security systems of an aging population,” the report states. “These future trends in fertility rates and live births will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power, and will necessitate reorganizing societies.”…

This brings me back to Canada and our national debate around immigration. Blaming a “radical, out-of-control NDP-Liberal government,” for current immigration numbers – as Mr. Poilievre has done – is nothing more than cheap sloganeering that ignores the complexity of the problem.

Source: Mason: Immigrants are this country’s best friend. Don’t forget it





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Québec a dépensé 865 millions en cinq ans pour les étudiants français

2024/10/21 Leave a comment

Of note. Other countries also benefit from lower fees are listed in this Quebec government table:

Année après année, le contingent le plus nombreux d’étudiants étrangers arrive de France. Puisque ceux-ci paient les frais les moins élevés parmi les étudiants venus d’ailleurs, c’est Québec qui ramasse la facture : en cinq ans, 865 millions de dollars sont sortis des coffres de l’État pour eux. Les experts remettent néanmoins peu en question les ententes bilatérales qui établissent ce traitement de faveur, vu tantôt comme une politique d’immigration, tantôt comme une grâce diplomatique.

Entre 2019 et 2024, les Français ont formé autour du tiers des étudiants étrangers dans les cégeps et les universités du Québec, sauf en 2020, quand ils ont été surpassés par les Indiens. Les ententes avec la France ne datent pas d’hier : celle qui les exempte de droits de scolarité supplémentaires dans les cégeps a été signée en 1978 et n’a pas été renégociée depuis.

Les tarifs préférentiels ont été reconduits pour les étudiants universitaires en avril dernier. Les Français continuent de payer environ 9000 $ par année au premier cycle universitaire, contre un minimum de 20 000 $ pour les étudiants d’autres nationalités, et les mêmes droits de scolarité que les Québécois à la maîtrise et au doctorat.

Le ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur indique au Devoir que la « subvention nette » aux étudiants français se chiffrait à 187 millions en 2023-2024, et à entre 146 et 186 millions pour les années précédentes : ce qui donne un total de 865 millions depuis 2019. Mais l’on ne sait pas quel montant reviendrait dans les coffres sans les ententes bilatérales, car personne à Québec n’est en mesure de chiffrer précisément combien cette faveur coûte réellement au gouvernement….

Source: Québec a dépensé 865 millions en cinq ans pour les étudiants français

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Immigration is key to ensuring the vitality of French in Canada 

2024/10/21 Leave a comment

A reminder that immigration has more than economic objectives although legitimate debate regarding impact on skill levels and expected economic outcomes and impact on productivity:

Francophone immigrants, many of whom are “young, gifted and Black,” are les forces de l’avenir that will ensure the future of French outside Quebec – a future that reverberates with the splendour of French with intonations of Franglais, Lingala, Wolof, Arabic and all other tongues of our shared reality.

Francophone immigrants are not just rebuilding our declining demographics; they are reweaving the tapestry of our Francophonie. What is “top talent,” after all, if not the people who rebuild a culture?

Source: Immigration is key to ensuring the vitality of French in Canada 

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Clear majority of Canadians say there is too much immigration, new poll suggests

2024/10/19 Leave a comment

Clear continuing signs of an inflection point in attitudes, reflecting overly high levels of permanent residents and out of control temporary (students, foreign workers) along with impact on housing availability and affordability.

Recent reversals will take time to work through the system meaning that public opinion unlikely to revert to pre-2022 levels. Clear policy failure on the part of the federal government, along with provincial governments and advocates/lobbyists for high levels.

Reversion to 1990 attitudes or worse as per the summary charts below:

…..Keith Neuman, a senior associate with the Environics Institute, says his organization has consistently found a consensus that immigration was either positive for Canada or not a problem.

But he said Canadians have been growing more concerned about the volume of immigrants. “There are worries and concerns about immigration that we simply didn’t see two years ago to the same extent,” he said in an interview.

However, he said Canadians are not rejecting immigration entirely. “People still value the diversity. They still recognize the economic benefits. They understand that jobs need to be filled. Those things are still part of the general sentiment of the population for most people.

“But there are increasing concerns with how the system is being managed and the number of people coming.”

Among the findings of the researchers is a 10-point increase, to 21 per cent, in those who believe there is too much immigration because it is being poorly managed by government….

Source: Clear majority of Canadians say there is too much immigration, new poll suggests,

Clear majority of Canadians now say there’s too much immigration,



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MPI: Immigrants and Crime in the United States

2024/10/19 Leave a comment

A reminder given the falsehoods in the USA election:

Immigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population, notwithstanding the assertion by critics that immigration is linked to higher rates of criminal activity. This reality of reduced criminality, which holds across immigrant groups including unauthorized immigrants, has been demonstrated through research as well as findings for the one state in the United States—Texas—that tracks criminal arrests and convictions by immigration status.

A growing volume of research demonstrates that not only do immigrants commit fewer crimes, but they also do not raise crime rates in the U.S. communities where they settle. In fact, some studies indicate that immigration can lower criminal activity, especially violent crime, in places with inclusive policies and social environments where immigrant populations are well established….

Source: MPI: Immigrants and Crime in the United States

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Opinion | Justin Trudeau’s immigration minister cracked down on Canada’s international student ‘racket’. Here’s what he wishes he’d done differently

2024/10/19 Leave a comment

Well worth reading. Some excepts of interest:

Terms of debate: “The issue is having the proper intellectual debate and not turning it into value statements about the race, colour, or creed of the people coming in, but also without painting people as racist when they express views you disagree with.”

International students: “The program had become a bit of a racket, and I probably should have acted sooner. My biggest mistake was to trust people for too long — to trust provinces and the institutions they regulate. Auditors general have said time and time again that Ontario and B.C. had to get a grip on things. Those are the two provinces where international-student placements had become a runaway train. And they were all promising something — permanent residency or Canadian citizenship — that was not guaranteed.”

Temporary Foreign Workers: “Largely hospitality. Go into a Tim Hortons, and you will see a lot of temporary foreign workers. When you take a step back, the questions you need to pose are, ‘How are we filling needs? Are we artificially depressing wages? How is an influx of temporary foreign workers contributing to that trend, particularly when you have a labour force already here?’ There will need to be further adjustments to the program, including in the availability of asylum seekers who have work permits. But we also don’t want to harm markets that are important to regional economies, like fish processing or food processing.”

Source: Opinion | Justin Trudeau’s immigration minister cracked down on Canada’s international student ‘racket’. Here’s what he wishes he’d done differently






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