Clark: The return of Trump has Poilievre talking about a crackdown beyond the U.S. border

2024/12/04 Leave a comment

Of note:

…On Sunday, he called for a crackdown on people coming to Canada – tightening visa requirements to make it harder to visit and setting a cap on the number of asylum-seekers.

For a long time, Mr. Poilievre didn’t go there. His party wanted MPs and candidates to steer clear of anything that suggested tough talk on immigration. It’s only in the last few months that Mr. Poilievre has ramped up criticism of the Liberal government’s failure to control a surge of temporary residents.

Now, he’s talking about cracking down on “false refugees” and warning “our Canadian jobs are being taken.”

“I think it is time for a cap. And it is time to get rid of all of the abuse,” Mr. Poilievre said in his press conference on Sunday.

He added: “We need to shut off the flow of false refugee claims who are in no danger in their country of origin but are sneaking in either through our porous border or our weak visa system, and when they land here making a false claim.”

That’s the kind of lexicon Mr. Poilievre had kept from his lips for a long time, and on an issue that wasn’t in the repertoire of attacks against the government in the Commons until November….

Source: The return of Trump has Poilievre talking about a crackdown beyond the U.S. border

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Effect of the international student cap by country

2024/08/15 Leave a comment

Further to my earlier analysis of the overall effect on post-secondary study permits below, I have also done an analysis of the effect by country on study permit applications and study permit issued.

For the country analysis, the public tables do not have a breakdown by study level, so the tables below include all levels (post-secondary study permits form 80 percent).

Starting with applications (finalized applications). Despite an overall decline quarter to quarter, there is considerable variation among source countries with a number of countries showing an increase 2024 to 2023 quarter. This may reflect some processing time lags:

In contrast, study permits issued has an overall consistent pattern of decrease in study permits among all countries save Saudi Arabia. The most striking decline is India, almost 100 percent, but Nigeria declined by over 50 percent, with Philippines and Turkey close behind. The greater reduction of Indian students likely reflects some of the negative stories by or about Indian students and their frustrations and struggles, all covered in Indian as well as Canadian media.

In short, the implementation of the cap has resulted in an overall decline in the number of applications and study permits issued, and thus is achieving the policy and program goal (web interest in getting a study permit has also declined).

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Immigration minister reveals Ontario’s drop in incoming international students. It’s not as steep as expected

2024/04/08 Leave a comment

The numbers:

Ontario will see the largest drop in study permits issued in Canada — down to just 141,000 this year from 239,753 in 2023 — under the federal government’s new cap on international students, according to official data revealed on Friday.

More than two months after announcing a plan to rein in the country’s out-of-control international enrolment growth, Immigration Minister Marc Miller released a statement detailing the finalized numbers of incoming post-secondary students each province and territory is projected to receive in 2024, as well as the formula behind the allocations.

“These results will help me make decisions on allocations for 2025,” Miller said in a statement. “We will continue to work collaboratively with provinces and territories to strengthen the International Student Program and to provide international students with the supports they need to succeed in Canada.”

Across Canada, 291,914 new study permits are expected to be issued this year, representing a 28 per cent decline from 404,668 in 2023. The numbers exclude those to be granted to students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, as well as graduate programs, exempted from the cap.

The overall cut is not as deep as anticipated when Miller in January announced plans to reduce the number of new study permits issued by 35 per cent from 2023’s level, to 364,000. 

However, Ontario remains the single biggest loser and will see a whopping 41 per cent drop in new study permits issued under the cap, followed by British Columbia, which is set to receive 18 per cent fewer international students, going to 49,800 from 60,864 in 2023. 

Spike in international students mostly from Ontario schools, data reveals

Federal study permit documents obtained by CBC News reveal a handful of Ontario colleges and universities account for the greatest share of Canada’s steep growth in international students — not private colleges. And now those same institutions have the most to lose from a new cap on study permits.

Four other provinces will see a 10 per cent decline: Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Meanwhile, other provinces will now have more spots available if they wish. Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and Saskatchewan can see a growth of 10 per cent in intake while Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories will have room to grow as they all received fewer than 100 study permits last year.

“We are protecting the integrity of our province’s postsecondary education system by attracting the best and brightest international students to Ontario to study in areas that are critical to our economy,” Jill Dunlop, Ontario’s minister of colleges and universities, said in a statement.

“We have been working with postsecondary institutions to ensure international students are enrolled in the programs to support a pipeline of graduates for in-demand jobs.” 

Based on what he called a “net zero growth” formula, Miller said the national cap is based on the volume of expiring study permits this year. This means that the number of international students coming to Canada in 2024 equals the number of students whose permits expire this year. 

Miller initially suggested that the study permit allocations would be based on each province’s relative population size. Ontario would have seen its international student intake in 2024 dropped by 62 per cent under that model.

On Friday, he said other factors were considered before the numbers were finalized.

“For provinces that would receive more international students in 2024 than in 2023 based on population share, we adjusted their allocation to limit growth to 10 per cent compared to 2023,” he said. 

“For provinces that would receive fewer international students in 2024 than in 2023, we adjusted their allocation to lessen the negative impact in the first year and support broader regional immigration goals.”

Factoring in that 60 per cent of study permit applications are approved, the Immigration Department will process a total of 552,095 applications to reach the 291,914 target. Given study permit approval rates vary across provinces, Miller said he also topped up allocations for those with below-average approval rates.

As a result, Ontario’s public post-secondary institutions can take in as many as 235,000 applications in 2024, given that the province has decided to give almost all its allocated spots to the 24 colleges and 23 universities that are funded by taxpayers.

Miller warned that there are still other factors that may influence the actual number of international students arriving this year that are beyond the department’s control. For instance, provinces and territories with room to grow may not end up using all spots, while approval rates may fluctuate.

Critics say the government’s adjustments were welcomed as finalized numbers help provide much-needed clarity for international students considering studying in Canada.

“The government has acknowledged that approval rates have historically been inconsistent across provinces and has buffered those numbers accordingly through one-time allocation top-ups to provinces like Saskatchewan,” said Meti Basiri, CEO of ApplyBoard, a Kitchener-based online marketplace for learning institutions and international students.

“It has raised the allocations for provinces that would otherwise have seen the most significant restrictions. The impact on Ontario in particular will still be significant, but the adjusted allocations will ease the transition.” 

Source: Immigration minister reveals Ontario’s drop in incoming international students. It’s not as steep as expected

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Yakabuski: Capping foreign student visas isn’t as simple as it sounds

2023/08/25 Leave a comment

Good reminder that making choices harder that talking about “considering” limits. And, as always, interest groups, whether provincial governments, education institutions and associations, have louder voices that people affected by housing availability:

Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s suggestion that Ottawa may consider limitingthe “explosive growth” in foreign student visas, which many experts say has contributed to Canada’s housing affordability crisis, is giving indigestion to college and university administrators.

…

Source: Capping foreign student visas isn’t as simple as it sounds

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Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Looking at vs doing something about….

Raj Sharma developed what I view as a neat little test as to whether the government is serious or not:

The federal government should reassess its policy on international students and consider a cap on a program that has seen “explosive growth,” putting pressure on rental markets and driving up costs, Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser said.

The number of international students in Canada has more than doubled since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, government data show. At the end of 2022, it sat at 807,260.

“The reality is we’ve got temporary immigration programs that were never designed to see such explosive growth in such a short period of time,” Mr. Fraser said Monday in Charlottetown. He noted that unlike the permanent resident immigration programs where the government sets targets each year, the study permit program is a temporary resident program that is driven by demand and doesn’t have a set cap.

He said the growth of the program for international students is happening in concentrated regions of Canada and is putting an “unprecedented level of demand” on the job market but even “more pronounced” demand on the housing market.

Asked if the government should cap the number of international students allowed in Canada each year, he said it’s an option Ottawa should consider.

Mr. Fraser did not provide any timeline for when Ottawa might lower the number of study permits issued. Asked if a change would be made this fall, he said Immigration Minister Marc Miller would have more to say at a later date.

Mr. Fraser spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a three-day cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island.

The affordability crisis pushing many Canadians to the brink, in particular owing to rising housing costs, is at the top of the agenda for the meetings. The government wants to come up with new ways to make the first-time homebuyers’ market more accessible and also address rental costs that are increasingly unsustainable for lower- and middle-income households.

Postsecondary schools in Canada have relied more and more on international students for their revenue streams because their tuition fees are much higher than the fees paid by domestic students.

Mr. Fraser said the federal government needs to work with colleges and universities to ensure those institutions also take responsibility for housing the record numbers of international students they’re accepting.

He also said the government needs to more closely scrutinize private colleges, some of which he suggested were illegitimate and taking advantage of the international student permit system.

Some of those schools “exist purely to profit off the backs of vulnerable international students,” Mr. Fraser said. He added that there are some “plaza colleges” that have up to six times more students enrolled than physical space for them in their buildings.

“Not all private colleges should be treated with the same brush,” he said. “There are good private institutions out there and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work.”

As part of the federal cabinet’s focus on the housing crisis, it will hear from two of the authors of a report released last week. That report says the spike in rental housing costs is in part attributed to the growth in young adults living in Canada, which is in part linked to the rise in international students

The authors call on the government to establish an industrial strategy for housing, saying that in order to restore affordability by 2030, the country needs to build 5.8 million more housing units, of which approximately two million should be rentals.

In Ottawa, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre blamed the government for the sky-high housing costs, noting the rapid rise has happened under Mr. Trudeau’s watch.

“Now he wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants; he wants to divide people to distract from his failings,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters on Parliament Hill.

Mr. Poilievre would not say whether he would lower immigration levels, and instead said that Ottawa needs to crack down on slow-moving municipal bureaucracies that make it harder to start construction projects.

In Charlottetown, the Housing Minister stressed the need to be “really, really careful” not to blame immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis. And Mr. Fraser dismissed Mr. Poilievre’s criticism entirely, saying the Conservatives are now promising what the Liberals have already campaigned on in past elections.

At a separate press conference, Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Cornwall, PEI, that immigration is a key part of the solution for Canada’s housing shortage because the construction industry needs more skilled labour.

“There’s much more we need to do on housing and we’re continuing to step up,” he said. “But we’re going to continue to be the open, welcoming, prosperous and growing country we’ve always been, because that has been something that has led to great opportunities and prosperity for all Canadians.”

Source: Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

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Gerson: Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas

2023/08/19 Leave a comment

Gerson nails it. But goes beyond international students given housing and other pressures by increasing numbers temporary foreign workers and permanent residents:

Desperate calls by schools to urge local homeowners to rent out their rooms; students paying $650 a month to live three-to-a room in college towns boasting monthly rents upward of $2,000; a viral TikTok video purports to show an international student living under a bridge in Scarborough, Ont.

Housing is a complicated issue. It will take co-ordination, cash, and time to fix. But in the short term, there is at least one glaringly obvious – if surely controversial – way to help ease the challenge of finding affordable rental accommodation: We need to stop issuing so many international student visas.

Of course, this is not going to solve the housing problem in and of itself. But anybody who thinks that our desire to bring in as many fruitful international students as possible isn’t contributing to the housing crunch hasn’t looked at the figures lately.

Canada was home to more than 800,000 international students as of the end of last year. That number, which began growing under the Conservatives, has continued to increase at an extraordinary pace since the Liberals took office; it has roughly doubled since 2015.

International students, who actually dwarf the population of temporary foreign workers at the moment, comprise about 17 percent of university enrolment in this country. Further, the majority of those students are opting for schools where housing is exceptionally expensive and difficult to find – namely, in big cities in Ontario and British Columbia.

Why this is happening is fairly obvious. Firstly, the federal government is trying to use study as a method of attracting top international talent. Between 2010 and 2016, 47 per cent of international students who graduated from a Canadian postsecondary institution stayed in Canada.

Secondly, international students are cash cows. Tuition fees for domestic students are regulated by provincial governments. Not so for their international counterparts, which makes bringing in foreign learners incredibly lucrative for perpetually cash-strapped schools and universities. (The real growth is increasingly not just from universities, but also from private colleges.)

And these visas don’t come with anything else – that is, the schools don’t need to provide housing for the students they bring in. Student housing is annoying and expensive and a pain to manage, and most schools know that, which is why they are not particularly keen to do it. That’s why Canada’s stock of purpose-built student housing lags dramatically behind our counterparts in the United States and Europe.

This isn’t an isolated problem, either. These kids need to live somewhere, and their desperation ripples through the broader housing market, driving up demand for affordable rentals and even single-family housing.

I spoke recently with Mike Moffatt at the Richard Ivey School of Business, and he provided me with some research on the subject – including links to his own recently published report offering advice to governments on how to address the housing crisis.

Ontario alone needs to build 1.5 million housing units by 2031 to keep up with expected growth led by immigration and, yes, by international students. (The province is behind on its commitment to do so.)

And while there will be no quick fix, no silver bullet – at least one answer is painfully obvious, no?

Granting an ever-growing number of student visas to people we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best and fraudulent at worst.

We need to dramatically cut the number of student visas, especially for private colleges, some of which are offering a quality of education that is less than desirable. We then need to tie student visas to housing availability – that is, a university shouldn’t be allowed to take on more international students than it can house in that community, for the duration of that person’s time studying in Canada. And we need to ensure schools don’t respond to this edict by pushing out less profitable domestic students, which only displaces the problem from one class of student to another.

That means we need to incentivize building more affordable rental housing. There will be a role for federal and provincial governments in this effort, perhaps in co-ordination with the private sector, to address this critical need as quickly as possible.

But I don’t see any way to address this problem unless we temporarily curtail the number of international students. The federal government needs to become far more restrictive about that particular avenue for immigration, and quickly.

If that edict seems extreme, I would remind everybody that reducing international student visas to a more manageable baseline would actually be among the easier levers to pull to relieve pressure in our housing market. Everything else from here on in is going to get much more difficult.

Jen Gerson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.

Source: Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas

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Cap on international students’ working hours should be lifted permanently: advocates

2022/10/13 Leave a comment

Of course they would. And of course they shouldn’t given the impact on eduction outcomes, the ostensible reason for granting the study permit. Ripe for abuse as we are already seeing:

Advocates who want the federal government to lift the cap on working hours for international students say a new pilot project that allows them to work more should be made permanent.

Last week Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced the government would temporarily remove the 20-hour cap on the number of hours international students can work off-campus to address labour shortages.

The cap will be lifted from Nov. 15 until the end of next year.

The International Sikh Students Association has been calling for this change for years to improve the quality of life of students, and founder Jaspreet Singh says he was surprised to hear the change would not be permanent.

Singh says the cap doesn’t make sense, and puts stress on students who face increasingly high costs while they are in Canada.

At a press conference Friday, Fraser said the next year or so will help the government determine whether it could continue the approach over the long term.

Source: Cap on international students’ working hours should be lifted permanently: advocates

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