Minister, advocates say they fear international students will be blamed for housing crisis

2023/09/11 Leave a comment

None of the commentary I have seen blames international students for the housing crisis but rather correctly notes that they, along with high levels of permanent and temporary residents, are significant contributors. After all, over 90 percent of Canada’s population increase is immigrant-driven.

The advocates/activists claims are self-serving, as is often the case. Equally, they fail to acknowledge time lags in increasing housing.

The only encouraging note is Minister Miller’s recognition of the “perverse incentives” by provincial governments and education institutions that have let us to this situation. But his interest in having discussions “with provinces about the systemic underfunding of higher education” is unlikely to deliver any meaningful results in the short-term:

Immigration Minister Marc Miller and student advocates across the country say they worry about immigrants and international students being singled out for blame because of the housing crisis.

“It’s one of my fears,” Miller said in a recent interview with CBC News. “I do worry about the stigmatization of particularly people of diversity that come to this country to make it better, and that includes international students.”

Miller told CBC Radio’s The House last week that Canada is on track to host around 900,000 international students this year. In 2011, that figure was just shy of 240,000.

Source: Minister, advocates say they fear international students will be blamed for housing crisis

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Blaney: Education export: an industry in dire need of a babysitter

2023/09/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary, highlighting the issues and failures. Understates the role of provincial governments in creating the problem by underfunding institutions and thus incentivizing recruitment of international students and the resulting diminishing of education objectives in favour of meeting lower-skilled service and related employment.

So while the federal government needs to take the issue seriously by considering caps and reimposing work time requirements, the provinces have a more important role in shutting down the various private colleges, sometimes under sub-contract to public institutions, that are more employment visa mills than education institutions:

Canada’s export education sector has experienced significant growth in recent years. The federal government has recently completed consultations towards the development of Canada’s third International Education Strategy, coinciding with broader consultations about the future of Canada’s immigration system. Significant changes to Canada’s International Student Program (ISP) are expected in the coming year.

Canada’s education export growth has been unmatched in recent years, but these accomplishments may also be its Achilles’ heel.

Some of its competitor countries have proceeded with more modest growth, while developing and enhancing their policy and regulatory frameworks to ensure sustainability. Canada’s current approach is highly susceptible to unwanted behaviours and future deflation if student expectations don’t match student experiences.

For a number of years, the international education sector has contributed more than CA$20 billion (US$14.6 billion) to the Canadian economy, supporting approximately 170,000 jobs. This roughly equates to the size and value of Canada’s aerospace industry.

However, while there are a plethora of federal regulations impacting the aerospace sector, only a handful impact an international student’s immigration process, and zero federal regulations govern international student recruitment.

Canada now appears ready to reconsider some of the sector-wide issues and its current highly unregulated approach. Whether the new policy initiatives will lead to a sustainable path forward, or allow the status quo to flourish, remains to be seen. However, this may be the federal government’s last chance to act before irreparable harm is perpetuated on Brand Canada.

Brand Canada: Advantages and challenges

Brand Canada has been recognised as the main value proposition by which to lay the foundation for Canada’s education export. Selling international education abroad has come with automatic advantage, based on positive perceptions of Canada, including the standards and values Canada represents.

This country brand advantage should not be considered unique to educational exports, but rather it is an advantage to many areas of Canada’s trade and investment. Mechanisms ensuring the quality of products and services are important.

In recent years, a number of occasions have been reported where Canada’s ISP has not been measuring up to the standards international students have been led to expect.

A lack of housing means that some international students haven’t been able to secure safe accommodation.

Other areas of concern include issues such as international student dependency on food banks and even much darker concerns about illicit drug use, prostitution and even suicide.

Furthermore, some education providers seem to have been poorly prepared to accommodate the sharp growth in student numbers. Provincial government authorities have not taken sufficient action despite concerns on record that some offerings are likely to be deficient in terms of facilities, academic delivery or student support.

The quality of education received has been called into question by recent government oversight audits. For instance, in 2021 in Ontario the auditor general expressed concerns about the processes used to validate whether private colleges are providing quality education. In this context, concerns related to Brand Canada deflation can no longer be considered blown out of proportion.

Band aid solution or brand reboot?

Amidst growing media reports highlighting foul play in Ontario’s international education sector, a registered lobby group, Colleges Ontario, assembled college presidents province-wide to lay out a ‘Standards of Practice’.

However, it is unclear to what extent this type of self-regulatory approach will lead to any significant improvements. For instance, the institution with the largest international student body refused to sign the statement of principles.

Some stakeholders who find the current status quo acceptable or want to see a relaxation of the rules that exist are those who are most likely to be exploiting the gaps in policy and oversight.

For instance, some overseas recruiters are purchasing institutions in Canada and consequently control the full cycle of recruitment, admissions and administration. This may enable alarming business practices, such as producing fake tuition receipts or transcripts for students who have never attended classes.

Some colleges continue to be listed by the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) despite the suspicions that many of their enrolled international students are not actively pursuing their studies. The data received under the Access to Information Act show potential non-compliance rates that are extremely high (89%-100 %).

Practices at public institutions also have concerning aspects if international students’ best interests are considered, such as brazen tuition fee increases, with the cost of tuition sometimes doubling from one intake to the next.

Some institutions also issue up to multiple times the volume of letters of acceptance than they have enrolment capacity for, then rescind them at the last minute or force large volumes of deferrals to intake periods up to two years later.

It is unclear whether, and to what extent, admission standards have been compromised, but the data received under the Freedom of Information Act demonstrate that some institutions issue letters of acceptance to 99% of all international applicants.

The promise of permanence

The draw of skilled, high-paying post-graduation employment opportunities is another example of a Brand Canada promise that has now worn thin.

Offshore-based education agencies run campaigns linking the prospects of international education in Canada to the realisation of wealth and success at a young age, justifying the cost of international tuition fees to new cohorts.

However, there is limited evidence to support these claims, and research points to issues where international graduates often have to accept precarious or low-skilled employment and-or poorer economic outcomes.

Of most grave concern is also Canada’s biggest draw: the prospects of students transitioning to permanent residency. This education-immigration pathway is often marketed openly and routinely abroad, with the standard marketing spiel holding that upon completion of an academic programme and a post-graduation work phase, students will have the opportunity to stay in Canada permanently – as if it was that simple.

For instance, 2022 data obtained under the Access to information Act from IRCC suggests that only about 10% of people transition annually to permanent residency through Canada’s post-graduation work permit programme. While other options exist, these are limited in volume and-or rife with the potential for exploitation.

Is the gig up?

There are some signs that the IRCC is set to take some meaningful action. There can be no doubt that one of the greatest irritants to the federal government, caused by lack of oversight and control, has been the strained resources and resulting immigration processing backlogs caused by a dramatic increase of non-bona fide study permit volumes.

The federal government is the party that has the most to lose. Once Brand Canada is damaged, the value proposition used for education exports becomes untenable. The way the advantages of a positive Brand Canada have filled up classrooms is the same way negative impressions can sink future investment, contracts and collaboration – for generations.

The damage to Brand Canada comes with a real long-term cost that reaches well beyond the international education sector. That is exactly what should be motivating significant federal action now, if protecting the interests of international students is not seen as an equally worthy cause to do so. In the education-export industry, Brand Canada has been without a babysitter for too long.

Earl Blaney is a regulated Canadian immigration consultant who has been an outspoken critic of Canada’s international study policy. Most of his research focuses on exposing concerns associated with inadequate consumer protection standards in Canada’s edu-export industry. Dr Pii-Tuulia Nikula is a principal academic at the Eastern Institute of Technology (Te Pukenga) in New Zealand. Most of Pii-Tuulia’s research focuses on international student recruitment and sustainability questions within the international education sector.

Source: Education export: an industry in dire need of a babysitter

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Whitzman: Stopping immigration won’t fix Canada’s housing crisis, Triandafyllidou: As mortgage costs rise, it is international students’ rent keeping households afloat:

2023/09/11 Leave a comment

A number of weak commentaries trying to change the narrative on immigration and pressures on housing (along with healthcare and infrastructure). None of these address the time lags in approving new housing.

Starting with the more intelligent analysis by Carolyn Whitzman, who notes the policy failures in housing policies (but fails to recognize the failure of immigration policies) and the need for better data:

As the country’s housing crisis intensifies, there’s been a lot of finger-pointing: at foreign investors snapping up residential real estate, at municipal governments and prohibitive zoning by-laws, and now, at immigrants and international students, the latest group thrust into the spotlight for exacerbating the crunch.

Canada is, by far, the fastest-growing country in the G7. We passed the 40 million mark in June, after the population surged by over a million in 2022. Nearly all of those new Canadians were temporary and permanent immigrants. The international student population has also skyrocketed—we’re on track to welcome 900,000 international students this year, three times as many as in 2013.

Although Canada’s major political parties have been careful not to blame newcomers for housing challenges, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that “volume is volume, and it does have an impact,” in reference to the influx of immigrants. The federal government, which is not backing down from its recently increased annual target of 500,000 new permanent residents by 2025, is also considering a cap on international students as a way to ease the pressure.

But limiting immigration isn’t the solution, says Carolyn Whitzman, housing policy researcher at the University of Ottawa and expert adviser to the University of British Columbia’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project. In fact, since current estimates of housing need don’t take into account millions of Canadian residents, as well as projected newcomers, we have a woefully uninformed picture of the situation. “Immigrants are an easy target,” says Whitzman. We spoke to her about why we’re so eager to shift the focus to immigration, the dearth of data on who actually requires housing, and the urgent need for a national social housing program.

A growing chorus of people are openly blaming immigration for the housing crunch. What’s your take?
Even if Canada stopped immigration tomorrow, we still couldn’t serve the population who live here. Nearly 1.5 million Canadian households are in what’s called “core housing need,” which refers to households that are living in unaffordable, overcrowded or otherwise uninhabitable homes, where an affordable and adequate home is not available in their area. Millions of other Canadians—homeless people, students, people in congregate housing like long-term care and group homes—aren’t even factored into core housing need. How will their need for low-cost homes be helped by restricting immigration or foreign students? Where’s the evidence? Immigrants and international students are an easy target.

An easy target, sure, but won’t ever-increasing numbers of permanent residents and international students put additional strain on the housing market?
Yes. So will the formation of new households, including young adults moving away from home or couples divorcing.

Why has the focus of the housing crisis conversation shifted so abruptly to immigration?
It appears to me to be a sign of desperation. Immigrants have always been blamed for the housing crisis. Look back 100 years and people were against building boarding houses because they were scared of foreigners moving in and endangering their families. Nowadays, politicians are blaming foreign investors for housing shortages, too. I’m very impatient about people pointing fingers at immigrants for the housing crisis, because it has very little to do with immigration and a lot to do with government policy.

Which government policy?
That’s the problem—there hasn’t been a national housing policy since the early 1990s. That’s when the federal government decided it was a provincial or territorial responsibility, and in the case of Ontario, the province punted it to municipalities. There are more and more international students each year who need places to live, but colleges and universities are provincially regulated. Immigration, on the other hand, is a federal responsibility. There needs to be coordination between federal, provincial and municipal governments. And that needs to start with an accurate sense of who needs housing, where, and at what price.

Do we have that information?
Partially. We know that new migrants are among the groups most likely to be in core housing need. Our data from UBC’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project shows that in 2021, 16 per cent of new migrant households—those who moved to Canada since the last census in 2016—were in core housing need. That’s higher than the Canadian average of 10 per cent. Refugee claimants were the most likely households to be in core housing need, almost one in five. But the census only tracks housing need in private, non-farm and non-student households.

So we don’t have data on students?
No. The federal government has zero information on student housing needs, international or otherwise. In 1991, when the measure for core housing need was created by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and Statistics Canada, the decision was made to leave out students because it was considered a “temporary situation of voluntary poverty.” As a result, we don’t have any information on what students can afford to pay, whether they’re overcrowded or living in mouldy basement apartments. That’s unusual for a developed economy like Canada. France, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany—every country I know of with strong non-market housing programs builds student housing into it.

Why the lack of data?
I think it goes back to the ’90s, again, when the federal government backed out of housing policy. It’s been three decades of people passing the buck.

A classic tale of Canadian federalism.
I won’t disagree with you there.

And yet the federal government is looking into a possible cap on the number of permits issued to international students.
I believe we need evidence-driven policy instead. A good example is the Rapid Housing Initiation, which was first proposed as a COVID-19 relief measure in 2020. The initial target was 3,000 very affordable, rapidly constructed (or renovated) homes for the homeless. About 4,700 homes were constructed or under construction within 18 months. It was renewed in 2021 and 2022—the total number of units created is expected to be over 15,500 units. It needs to be an ongoing program.

The Liberals did introduce a national housing strategy in 2017, which promised to restore Ottawa’s involvement in building social housing. And legislation was passed in 2019 designating housing a human right.
Sure, but look at the national housing strategy. It literally has nothing to say about students. Do they not exist? Are they not part of the housing market?

You mentioned the fact that new migrants are more likely to be in core housing need. How else are they impacted by the housing crisis?
Asylum-seeking families, for instance, tend to be larger households, and there’s a critical shortage of rental housing that has three bedrooms or more. Also, new migrants traditionally moved to the inner city, where there are social services and other resources. But there’s no affordable housing there anymore, so migrants are moving to areas that aren’t near services or jobs or public transit, and most don’t have Canadian driver’s licences on arrival. All that exacerbates settlement issues, like isolation and unemployment. The federal government needs to think about an integrated policy between immigration and housing.

It sounds like you’re on the same page as Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who said that the government should “tailor its policies on immigration and housing to acknowledge the link between the two.” What would that look like?
For one thing, we’d be able to project population increases over the next 10 years. Remarkably, the 2017 national housing strategy we’ve referred to has targets that don’t include the impact of population growth through immigration.

The CMHC projected that we’ll need 5.8 million homes by 2030 to reach affordability. Do figures like that take immigration into account?
They don’t, though I do know that the author of that report is planning to publish a follow-up to revise that figure in light of current immigration projections. We can’t plan for housing if we don’t know how many people are coming in. Canada is a rich country and a smart country—we have the highest rate of individuals with higher education in the world. So if we’re a rich, smart country, and we can’t solve the housing crisis, what are we even doing?

Speaking of solving it, you’ve got a new book coming out next year, How to Home: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. Spoiler alert, but how do we fix it?
We need a calculation of supply shortage that doesn’t just tell us we need X million units, but actually gets into what kind of housing and where. We have one of the lowest rates of social housing in the world. And we’re going to have to scale up purpose-built rentals, rather than condos, again. That kind of fell off the cliff in the ’70s. Back then, during another period of high immigration, we were literally building more housing than we are today because we had a national housing social housing program and purpose-built rentals.

What is one pragmatic step the government could take?
Enable purpose-built rentals again, with some conditionality. In other words, you can’t have a 30-storey building in the middle of the Greenbelt, for instance. There needs to be some conditions around location, price point and environmental sustainability. There were measures in place in the ’60s and ’70s that led to the construction of most of our current purpose-built rental stock—meaning most apartment buildings are 40 to 60 years old, which is a whole other problem. But we need a social housing program. We haven’t had one for three decades, and we’re seeing the impact of that.

Is a federal social housing program in our future, realistically?
Absolutely. The federal government promised a new co-op housing strategy in the 2022 budget. Sources tell me it’s ready to roll. I’m not sure why it hasn’t yet, but every single major federal evaluation of the national housing strategy has asked why a non-market, social housing program isn’t part of the plan. Everyone from Scotiabank on down is saying you need to start by doubling social housing. It’s the most direct way to start building the housing that people need most.

How do we quickly build a lot of homes?
In the post-war period in Canada, housing patterns were used—the CMHC literally had Type A, Type B, Type C stamped on the front of their “victory houses.” That happened in Sweden, too, with the Million Homes Program in the 1960s and ’70s. Kitchens and bathrooms of a predetermined size were built off-site. That helped streamline construction—and led to the pre-eminence of Ikea, by the way. There are currently a whole bunch of modular housing providers who have expanded with the new rapid housing initiative, and that’s a positive thing Canada could export. There’s a big advantage to going modular and building off-site, particularly in northern climates where the construction season is shorter. It’s really problematic if construction workers can’t afford to live in the cities they’re building.

Last year, Canada’s purpose-built rental apartment vacancy rate hit 1.9 per cent, its lowest level since 2001.
The best metaphor I can think of is the credits from The Simpsons, where everyone’s running for a seat on the same sofa. We have students running toward the sofa, seniors looking to downsize running toward the sofa. People who would have been able to buy homes in a previous generation are also in the race. So if we want everybody to have a seat, we need to build more sofas and make sure that they’re the right kind.

Source: Stopping immigration won’t fix Canada’s housing crisis

Anna Triandafyllidou argues that the housing needs can be accommodated by basement apartments and rooms but without any supporting data on their availability or the degree to which it helps homeowners pay their mortgages.

In recent months there has been a heated debate about Canada’s housing affordability crisis and the role of international students in the mess.

Some argue that, particularly in Canada’s big three (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver), international students drive up rents because they are prepared to rent rooms in larger apartments or houses, and even share rooms with flatmates, bringing the overall possible rent of a unit to levels that are totally unaffordable for a local family.

In many smaller cities and towns, the sheer numbers of international students are also said to put pressure on housing, as there are simply not enough units for rent, regardless of the cost.

The question thus arises whether the average Canadian family is worse off because international students are creating an impossible rental market.

It is my contention that this is not the case, and I would actually argue the opposite: International students are saving both the average Canadian homeowner (and mortgage holder) and the Canadian banking system. How is that?

International students are high-paying and often exploited tenants in basement apartments and spare bedrooms across Canada’s large and smaller cities. Some are indeed contributing to competition in the market. But the housing crisis began long before the current surge in international students, and many of them, rather than competing with domestic renters, are living in arrangements that Canadians would not be seeking anyway.

Moreover, the rents that international students pay are allowing Canadian families to survive the Bank of Canada’s string of interest-rate hikes and their galloping mortgage payments. This, in turn, helps the banking system, as it grapples with the rising risk of defaults.

Recent reports show that, as the central bank tries to tame inflationwith higher borrowing costs, several Canadian banks have allowed borrowers to extend their mortgage amortizations to more than 55 years in an effort to keep the loans afloat and allow households to keep up their payments.

Anecdotal evidence suggests many families are renting not only their basements but their bedrooms to international students. In many cases, parents and children have squeezed into one or two rooms to leave the spare rooms for renters. Networking often works through friends and extended family, as many homeowners prefer to have a student from their own ethnic and/or linguistic background, to make sharing the home easier for everyone.

These rentals play a crucial and still unaccounted role in keeping households afloat now that their mortgage payments have grown sharply in less than a year.

While this is not a long-term solution for the housing affordability crisis, nor a strategy for international student migration, these insights point to a few ideas that could help in the short and medium terms.

Colleges and universities should be asked to arrange affordable accommodations for their incoming international students as part of the study permit application process. Such accommodation arrangements can include tailored schemes where, for instance, seniors are paired with students, offering full board for a reasonable price while the student helps by doing chores and grocery shopping or befriending the older person.

Young families could also be paired with international students and receive tax breaks on the rental income they make.

Provincial governments should provide strong incentives for colleges and universities to build more student residences.

International student migration needs to be reconsidered in Canada in some ways. We need to identify both bad practices (such as overexploiting international student streams as a revenue and sustainability strategy with little educational value) and bad actors (brokers and postsecondary institutions that prey on international students and their families, selling false promises for a path to migration). We also need to offer adequate services and protections to international students, including access to health care and clear pathways to job prospects.

But we must remember that international students are not the cause of Canada’s housing crisis – and that many households would be a lot worse off without them.

Anna Triandafyllidou is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Source: As mortgage costs rise, it is international students’ rent keeping households afloat

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Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

2023/09/08 1 Comment

Ignored then and no sign yet of meaningful action today:

North America’s foreign-student system is no longer a humanitarian endeavour to lift up the planet’s best and brightest, and support the developing world.

Instead, it’s become a commercial competition full of marketing rhetoric, which is creating chaos in higher education.

That’s what the West’s leading experts in international education told me 10 years ago.

They were describing how governments and post-secondary institutions were adopting an increasingly cynical attitude toward foreign students.

Philip Altbach, Hanneke Teekens and Jane Knight were ahead of their time in lamenting how international education was turning into a “cash cow” for public and private universities and colleges in the U.S. and especially Canada, where there are at least eight times more per capita than in the U.S.

While the concept of international education continues to have upsides, it’s now becoming obvious to many in Canada that the foreign-student system is creating hard times, especially for students from abroad. Even the Liberal government, long in denial, is starting to admit it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government acknowledges it has pumped up the number of foreign students in Canada to, officially, 900,000. That compares to 225,000 in 2013. And experts say Ottawa’s number is a serious undercount.

The Liberals are still not necessarily admitting the obvious: That governments and post-secondary institutions are addicted to foreign-student spending and fees, which are four times higher than those of domestic students. Ten years ago, foreign students brought $8 billion into Canada, now Ottawa estimates it’s up to $30 billion.

The main problem, however, that has suddenly drawn more attention to foreign students is the out-of-control cost of housing, particularly renting.

International students, say housing analysts, are hiking competition for places to live. The average rent for a one-bedroom in Canada has jumped to a worrying $1,800, according to Rentals.ca. Vancouver is the most extreme in the country, at a devastating average of $3,013. A one-bedroom in Toronto is $2,592.

Foreign students are an expanding factor in such expensive housing — and it’s hurting the study visa holders themselves, who, according to both social media and the mainstream media, are increasingly feeling taken advantage of.

Even Canada’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, last month used the word exploited. And he finally admitted universities and colleges are bringing in far more students than they could possibly provide housing for.

That was before Benjamin Tal, chief economist for the CIBC Capital Markets, told Liberal cabinet ministers the government is dangerously undercounting the number of temporary residents, particularly foreign students, in Canada.

While the government, and Statistics Canada, state there are more than one million non-permanent residents in Canada, Tal’s calculations show there are at least one million more missing from the count. “Housing demand is stronger than what official numbers are telling you and that’s why we’re approaching a zero vacancy rate.”

The government’s calculations, Tal said, have ignored that many foreign workers and students don’t leave the country when their visas expire. They stay on in hopes of applying to become immigrants. Census methods for surveying foreign students, he added, are misleading.

Giacomo Ladas of Rentals.ca says, “International students do add pressure to the rental market,” even while he emphasized it’s not their fault.

“There’s such a supply and demand issue in the rental market right now and they add to this imbalance. The study permits for international students have increased by 75 per cent in the last five years. So, that’s a huge influx of people coming in and nowhere to put them.”

Delegates at a recent Union of B.C. Municipalities’ housing summit heard how rapidly foreign students and other non-permanent residents are adding to demand for housing.

The number of non-permanent residents and newcomers to Metro Vancouver has in five years almost doubled, delegates were told. Foreign students and other recent arrivals own eight per cent of all homes in Metro Vancouver, and account for 25 per cent of renters.

Canada’s housing minister received a lot of media attention in August when he responded to a reporter’s direct question by saying he wouldn’t rule out a cap on international students.

But since then both he and Immigration Minister Marc Miller have backtracked, and Trudeau has warned not to “blame” foreign students.

Miller admitted Canada’s “very lucrative” foreign student system “comes with some perverse effects, some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen to be a backdoor entry into Canada.”

Whatever the Liberal cabinet is starting to admit in the past month, however, the public would be naive to expect any real reforms.

In addition to anxiety over the housing crisis, many economists also worry international students are being taken advantage of by employers to keep wages down. An earlier StatCan study showed up to one out of three foreign students aren’t attending school.

While some representatives of universities and college, especially private ones, are trying to shut down debate by accusing critics of blaming study visa holders for high housing costs and low wages, the reality is those raising concerns can be seen as standing up for people on study visas.

Many people are aware of a high suicide rate among international students, including alarms raised by funeral homes. The largest cohort of foreign students, by far, now comes from India, and it is often South Asian voices in Canada who are pointing to their victimization, including employer abuse and sexual harassment by landlords.

And Vancouver immigration lawyers such as Richard Kurland and George Lee add the federal government’s decision to allow unlimited international students is setting up many for future immigration disappointment.

Canada is building far too big a pool of people who will be highly qualified for permanent resident status, they say. Not everyone can win the immigration points-system competition, which has an annual cutoff.

The trouble is a lot of vested interests are eager for the foreign-student gravy train to keep chugging along, regardless of the unintended suffering it causes — including for students desperate for a place to live.

Source: Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

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Ontario colleges are fuelling unprecedented growth in international students

2023/09/04 Leave a comment

Good analysis by there Globe with focus on Ontario and the impact of the Ford government policies in bringing us to this mess:

… There are currently two federal government reviews of the international student program under way, one by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and one by Global Affairs. But attempts to curtail the program will have to reckon with its impact on the schools, because international funding has become crucial to Canadian higher education.

Many of the Ontario colleges that have a large proportion of international students have expanded via branch campuses in the Greater Toronto Area or partnerships with private educational providers. The partner schools teach curricula from the colleges and the students receive Ontario college degrees and postgraduate work rights. Both Conservative and Liberal provincial governments have made attempts to limit the size of these lucrative public-private operations. The latest policy imposes a per-college cap of 7,500 students.

Cambrian College, which has a partnership with a private college in the GTA, said its home campus enrolment still has a domestic majority. It said it takes a measured approach because it doesn’t want to bring in more international students than the college or the Sudbury community can accommodate.

The schools have been encouraged on the international path by both provincial and federal governments. The federal government, which aims to attract half a million immigrants a year by 2025, is hoping to build a talent pipeline already equipped with Canadian educational credentials. The provincial governments benefit by placing a growing share of the postsecondary funding burden on prospective immigrants.

According to a report from Ontario Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk, Queen’s Parkprovided by far the lowest level of government support to colleges of any province in 2018-19. The funding gap that colleges face has been exacerbated by the Doug Ford government’s decision to cut domestic tuition fees by 10 per cent in 2019 and freeze them at that level.

McMaster University economist Arthur Sweetman, an expert on immigration and public policy, said the growth in international students is an example of what happens when policy makers misunderstand the incentives they create.

The federal government has placed no limits on student visas, he said, and the provinces are happy not to increase their grants to postsecondary institutions. The result is that some schools have pushed the envelope.

“I think it’s a regulatory failure,” Prof. Sweetman said. “If you tell people to go make money and here are the rules, people are going to make money and go right up to the edge of the rules.”

Conestoga said in a statement that the well-being of its students is a priority and that it works with them to find affordable housing options. This year, it signed onto a sector-wide set of standards on how best to support international students.

Revenue generated through increased enrolment has helped the college boost hiring, invest in new facilities as well as in new programs and student services, the statement added, including supports for students seeking employment. It has expanded its Kitchener campus, opened one in downtown Guelph and will open two new locations in Milton next year.

David Agnew, president of Seneca, said international students are now the majority at his Toronto college, and that they enrich the learning environment and college experience for everyone on campus. Domestic students aren’t displaced by the international students, as schools are required to offer places in high-demand programs to Ontario applicants first and Canadians second. The school is, however, able to offer more programs for domestic students thanks to the funding that international students provide.

“We haven’t had a grant increase in more than a decade and now we have frozen tuition. We [wouldn’t] have enough money to operate anything close to the high-quality educational institution that Ontarians should expect,” Mr. Agnew said.

Seneca recently crossed the international majority threshold among full-time students, but the ratio drops to 39 per cent when continuing education students are included. Mr. Agnew admits that the concentration of international students at some Ontario colleges could be perceived as a concern by some people. But he says it’s wrong to lay the blame for housing shortages at the feet of international students.

He said housing affordability is an issue that cuts across society. Seneca has about 1,350 residence spaces and more than 28,000 students. The college would like to work with governments and the private sector to build more, Mr. Agnew said.

“Let’s not demonize international students,” Mr. Agnew said. “Let’s work on solutions to the affordable housing issue rather than trying to blame people.”

In a presentation to Hamilton City Council this year, Steve Pomeroy, an industry professor at McMaster’s Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative, said the biggest added pressure in the housing market is the rapid increase in non-permanent residents, a large chunk of whom are international students or former students. He places the inflection point at 2016, when international enrolments began to jump.

“When these folks come into the housing system they’re trying to find relatively affordable housing and they’re also displacing other folks who are trying to find relatively affordable rental housing,” Prof. Pomeroy said. The competition heats up and international students, who are nearly all renters, often outbid low-income Canadians in the bottom quartile of the rental market.

With as many as 900,000 students expected in the country this year, Prof. Pomeroy said in an interview it’s reasonable to assume they’re adding demand equal to somewhere between 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the national rental housing market of 4.5 million homes.

Economist Mike Moffatt was surprised when he first noticed the close links between the real estate crunch and higher education in London, Ont., where he teaches at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey Business School. The share of the impact on rent prices attributable to international students hasn’t been quantified, Prof. Moffatt said, but rent increases are happening at the start of term and appear to be rising faster in locations near campus.

London, Kitchener, Windsor – mid-sized Ontario cities that have both university and college campuses and high numbers of international students – have seen record rent increases and the lowest vacancy rates in 20 years, according to a January report from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

The international students do not deserve any blame, Prof. Moffatt said.

“Enrolment growth is not being fed into housing policy and it’s causing all kinds of local tensions,” he said…

Source: Ontario colleges are fuelling unprecedented growth in international students

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ICYMI: Star editorial – An influx of international students is straining the system. But don’t blame the students.

2023/09/02 Leave a comment

Good editorial, making the necessary linkages between the various responsibilities behind the “lucrative” incentive that has brought us to where we are today. And whether it is caps or “systematically manag[ing] international student intake, the net result will have to be fewer but higher quality international students:

It must once have seemed like a simple matter. Invite international students to attend Canadian universities and colleges and in the process gain a lucrative source of revenue to help fund those systems.

Now, however, it has become something of a Gordian knot. With about 900,000 international students expected to enter Canada this year, landing in the middle of a persistent housing crisis, tackling one element of this issue exacerbates a problem elsewhere.

The students often feel gouged, lack adequate supports, are subject to exploitation and can end up in dire or unsafe circumstances.

The issue demonstrates how inter-connected this challenge is, affecting not just education and housing, but also employment and immigration policy. There are many vested interests and not all of them put a priority on the students.

The post-secondary system has become economically dependent on these students because of the higher tuition they pay. In Ontario they accounted for 30 per cent of college enrolment in 2021 but 68 per cent of tuition.

So, too, have employers, many of them in the service sector who rely on student labour. Earlier this year the federal government temporarily eliminated the 20-hour-a-week limit on work by international students.

Meanwhile, many students are attracted to Canada by the prospect of gaining permanent residence through acquiring a Canadian education and work permit — a fast track exploited by some.

In all, it is a knotty problem not easily untangled. Cutting it will involve some pain and no small jurisdictional wrangling.

At the federal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown last week, Housing Minister Sean Fraser floated the notion of a cap on foreign students. But what at first blush might seem the easiest solution would merely bring its own set of problems, not least of which would be rationing international students among schools and effectively creating financial boons for some and crises for others.

Some schools have already objected to the idea of a cap, saying that building more student housing is a better way to ease demands for rental accommodation.

Part of the solution must involve schools doing a better job to ensure the well-being of the students whose tuition money they happily accept. As Fraser said, if schools are going to recruit record numbers of international students, they are going to have to do a better job of housing them.

The immigration department has said the federal government will need to have discussions with the provinces, which have jurisdiction over education, about the pressure on cash-strapped post-secondary institutions to use international students as cash cows.

As well, Fraser said, attention must be paid by provinces to separating legitimate educational institutions from the exploitative private schools that have sprung up to cash in on international students. The partnerships between public and private colleges to to educate international students and then provide access to a postgraduate work permit is overdue for closer scrutiny.

But there will be no quick fix. The problem is sufficiently complex to require a set of solutions.

They suggested a process to more systematically manage international student intake and to reset expectations of applicants about their ability to come to Canada and what a student visa promises.

Governments and schools must take responsibility for recruiters they contract who have marketed the international student program as an easy pathway to immigration.

“It is an ecosystem in Canada that is very lucrative and it’s come with some perverse effects: some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen as a backdoor entry into Canada, but also pressure in a number of areas – one of those is housing,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller told CBC’s The House.

But it is a problem largely of our own making, born of that word “lucrative.” It is a discredit to Canada, to the provinces responsible for education, to employers, to post-secondary institutions themselves that happily take their money, that students aren’t better supported.

Source: An influx of international students is straining the system. But don’t blame the students.

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@charlesadler: Affordable housing — or else

2023/09/01 Leave a comment

Another voice jointing the chorus:

“I think we need to do some serious thinking here.” — Housing Minister Sean Fraser discussing the idea of putting a cap on the number of foreign students in Canada, Aug. 21 in Charlottetown, P.E.I.

Let’s begin with a fact of life that most Canadians are unaware of — about 800,000 foreign students are now living in Canada.

The minister for housing revealed the number. The key reason is university economics.

Tuition for foreign students is substantially higher than it is for Canadian citizens. And universities are always looking for money.

There is no easier place to find it than young people around the world seeking a university education in Canada.

Most of these students are not living in university campus housing. There isn’t nearly enough of that housing stock available. So they compete for mostly rental housing with millions of Canadian citizens.

Eight hundred thousand is the kind of number that is forcing the housing minister and his government to do some “serious thinking” about limiting the number of foreign students Canada admits every year. There is no doubt the government is also revisiting its immigration targets.

The government plans to bring in an estimated 500,000 immigrants every year. But if we continue to have a dearth of housing in this country, we have to take seriously the idea of bringing in fewer people.

It’s axiomatic that politics cannot change the math.

But the math can and does change politics.

The most credible information on housing statistics comes from the federal Crown corporation known as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). CMHC figures say the country will need to build nearly six million new housing units in Canada in the next seven years to accommodate our population growth. One out of three will be rentals.

There is a multitude of reasons we may not hit those targets.

Ironically, one of those reasons might be any decision to slow down immigration. Canada’s construction trades rely heavily on immigrant workers.

The sad truth is many countries do a good job of encouraging their citizens to take up various trades. Canada is not one of them. But if we continue to have more newcomers than places where we can house them, we will continue to have a housing crisis in this country.

In some cities, rents are becoming outrageously expensive. As is always the case in conversations about the price of shelter in Winnipeg, we have it good relative to places like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, the three cities that have been largely responsible for electing the last three Liberal governments. But relatively good is not the same as actually good.

While the housing picture is murky, especially in Canada’s largest population centres, the politics could not be clearer.

Justin Trudeau’s government will be evicted by the voters two years from now unless steps are taken to reduce the growth in the price of homes and rent.

There is no point in pretending that housing is a one-size-fits-all issue.

We need different kinds of new housing for different people. For low-income people, we must build new government or co-op housing at affordable prices. The same goes for seniors who rely exclusively on their pension income to be involved in the housing market. The government has the means to create its own market for people without means, whether they are old or young.

The same goes for student housing. It’s no mystery where the students are. They’re on campus. And so apartment units have to be built close to campuses and rented out at rates that are lower than the free market in buildings that aren’t competing for the free market.

They’re owned by government agencies created for the needs of students, working-class families and low-income seniors.

Can the government do this in Canada? Of course they can. There is nothing I am suggesting that governments calling themselves liberal democracies or social democracies aren’t doing in many parts of the world.

After the Second World War, it made sense for the federal government to build housing across Canada for veterans returning home to young families. We’re in a cost of living war right now.

And for the government of the day, on this day and this year and next year and the year after that, it’s a political war for hearts and minds that it cannot afford to lose. The next election hinges on it.

More importantly, a less stressful quality of life for millions of Canadians, requires it.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

Source: Affordable housing — or else

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Beaudry: Au-delà des chiffres sur le français et les étudiants étrangers

2023/08/31 Leave a comment

Useful reminder that Quebec francisation policies are harder for PhD students:

Les étudiants étrangers font la manchette : on leur attribue divers maux de notre société, du déclin du français à la crise du logement. Mais plutôt qu’alimenter la guerre de chiffres que se livre différentes factions en matière d’immigration, ce texte relatera plutôt une belle histoire de volonté et de résilience.

En matière de francisation, la réalité des études supérieures contraste avec celle des études de premier cycle. À l’instar de plusieurs universités en Europe et ailleurs, la pression pour donner les cours et faire la recherche en anglais est très forte.

Bien que ce ne soit pas la mission de nos universités de franciser les étudiants allophones, rendre plus flexibles nos programmes d’études supérieures pour leur permettre de suivre de vrais cours de francisation est nécessaire, puisqu’avantageux pour tous. Mais cela prend du temps et de l’argent. Faire son doctorat et suivre des cours de francisation en même temps relève du parcours du combattant.

À Polytechnique, comme dans beaucoup d’autres institutions, le doctorat à temps partiel n’existe pas : il faut franchir à vive allure toutes les étapes dans les temps impartis. Si nous voulons contribuer à l’intégration des personnes étudiantes que nous accueillons et formons, nous devons repenser ces premières années des programmes d’études supérieures.

Ce temps supplémentaire exerce aussi une pression énorme sur les fonds de recherche des universitaires qui appuient ces personnes pendant une plus longue période d’études.

À Polytechnique, j’enseigne en français. Un de mes étudiants de doctorat dont le français se résumait à « bonjour » s’inquiétait de ne pas pouvoir suivre les cours et bien comprendre la matière. Pour les cours du trimestre d’hiver 2022, nous nous sommes donc tournés vers la technologie pour pallier son manque de compréhension du français. Il a installé une application sur son téléphone cellulaire qui traduit de façon simultanée la langue parlée. Une des oreillettes était placée sur mon bureau (elle servait alors de micro) et il avait l’autre dans l’oreille (où étaient diffusées mes paroles traduites en anglais). Le texte traduit en anglais défilait aussi sur son téléphone, avec un petit délai différent de celui de la voix en anglais. Ce n’était pas parfait, mais il estime que 60 % de la traduction était compréhensible et correcte. En plus de cet équipement mal synchronisé, il a traduit en anglais tous les documents et présentations de ses cours du trimestre.

À l’été 2022, je lui ai demandé pourquoi il n’était jamais disponible avant 14 h. J’ai déjà eu des étudiants lève-tard et des oiseaux de nuit, mais si tard, je trouvais cela curieux. Il m’a avoué candidement et un peu honteux que depuis novembre 2021, il était inscrit à temps plein aux cours de francisation pour les personnes immigrantes et qu’il devait être en classe de 8 h à 13 h, et ce, tous les jours de la semaine.

Me voyant bouche bée, il m’a expliqué que, pour comprendre la réalité des personnes immigrantes au Québec, de façon à bien cerner cette dimension de son sujet de recherche, il devait se mettre dans leurs souliers. Il faut dire que sa thèse porte sur le rôle de l’immigration qualifiée et des étudiants étrangers sur la collaboration internationale en science, technologie et innovation.

Depuis le début de ma carrière de professeure, certains de mes étudiants ont bien suivi quelques cours de français ici et là au cours de leurs études — avec des résultats très mitigés, pour être honnête. Mais personne ne s’était encore prêté à cet exercice intense en plus de ses études doctorales.

Nous avons dû planifier l’examen doctoral et la présentation de sa proposition de thèse, qu’il a réussi avec brio, entre deux modules de cours de francisation. Avec la permission de son école de francisation, il faisait une pause pour reprendre lors du prochain module (dont la durée est d’environ huit semaines). Au moment où j’écris ces lignes, il ne lui reste que deux modules de cours de francisation à terminer, mais toute mon équipe de recherche l’encourage, converse avec lui en français et est fière de ses progrès.

S’astreindre chaque jour à cinq heures de cours de français, en plus des devoirs à faire le soir, des présentations orales à préparer, sans compter les cours de la scolarité doctorale, les travaux et les articles à lire en préparation de la proposition de thèse, représente une tâche titanesque.

Serez-vous surpris d’apprendre que cet étudiant a non seulement réussi avec succès son examen doctoral et présenté sa proposition de thèse, mais qu’il a aussi remporté l’une des prestigieuses bourses Vanier que le Canada offre à des étudiants exceptionnels et déterminés ? Félicitations, Amirali !

Plutôt qu’être un handicap pour les universités francophones, ce début un peu plus lent des études doctorales devrait être considéré comme un avantage qui rend nos diplômés plus attrayants dans un milieu très compétitif. Autant nos étudiants et futurs diplômés, leur famille, leur société d’accueil et les universités francophones en bénéficient.

Donnons-nous les moyens de remplir cette mission sociétale correctement.

Source: Au-delà des chiffres sur le français et les étudiants étrangers

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

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

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

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Chinese students frustrated by lengthy security checks as school year nears

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

Some Chinese international students say their study permits have been tied up in security screenings, leaving them in the lurch for months after being admitted to Canadian universities.

Yunze Lu, a master’s student in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Ottawa, has already completed a year of coursework online and successfully applied to the school’s co-op program.

“I have a very simple and clear background. It’s OK to be checked, but I don’t think it needs to be checked for so long,” he said.

“It makes me feel they are doing nothing but just don’t care about my application, just throw it away.”

Lu said he didn’t even know his application was under security review by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) until he filed an access to information request to the CBSA to find out more about his file.

Through social media, he has now connected with other frustrated study permit applicants, some of whom spoke to CBC News.

‘This is unfair to all of us’

Xinli Guo has also been waiting months for the study permit that will allow him to take up an offer from the U of O’s master’s program in systems engineering.

“This is unfair to all of us,” he said.

Through proactively tracking his file, Guo helped resolve an issue with a financial document and learned that he’d been placed under security review in May.

“I don’t think I deserve a security check because I don’t have anything related with Canadians’ national security. I’m just a normal student going to study engineering courses in Canada,” he said.

Given the delay, Guo is worried he’ll lose his admission offer and could miss the opportunity to apply to study in other countries.

In a statement, the University of Ottawa said it’s aware of students from “many countries” facing visa issues and is working to develop contingencies.

The university says it continues to advocate for a fair, efficient and transparent immigration system that allows students to plan their future with confidence.

In a statement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said China is one of the top sources for international students and the department is receiving a record number of applications.

Since January 2021, there have been nearly 181,000 study permit applications from China. Of those, 1,832 have not been processed.

“All study permit applications from around the world are assessed equally and against the same criteria, regardless of the country of origin,” IRCC said.

“Security screening is one, but not the only, factor that can result in higher processing times.”

The department said processing times vary on a case-by-case basis depending on complexity, responses for additional information and the ease of verifying the application’s content.

According to the department’s website, a study permit should take about seven weeks.

Delays ‘problematic,’ immigration lawyer says

Will Tao, an immigration lawyer at Vancouver’s Heron Law Offices, said the worsening geopolitical situation between China and Canada may be combining with the increasing use of algorithms to contribute to a rise in certain files being caught in review delays.

“Grad students working in the computer science/tech space, and especially folks with government experience or with parents that are in the government, those are the ones that are being flagged in our experience,” he said.

“It’s very, very problematic how this has become almost a predictive analytics exercise.”

Tao said applicants from Iran, another country with fraught geopolitical relations, have faced similar screening delays. He said while he understands there is a national security need for screening, and international diplomacy complicates the issue, students are being left uncertain about their futures due to the lack of transparency.

“They could be pursuing other stuff or going to other countries,” Tao said.

More Chinese visa applicants are resorting to using mandamus applications in court to compel a government decision, he said. The applications are used to compel IRCC to issue decisions in a timely fashion after considerable delays.

Chinese applicants account for 12 per cent of mandamus applications, second only to India and just ahead of Iran, according to Tao’s analysis of IRCC data.

Source: Chinese students frustrated by lengthy security checks as school year nears

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