international students | Multicultural Meanderings

Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Expect other provinces will join the chorus given all rely on international students to fund post-secondary education. Education organizations already also chiming in:

The Quebec government says it won’t accept a cap on the number of international students it can admit, rejecting one of the options the federal government is considering as part of a plan to tackle a national housing crisis.

Universities and colleges, meanwhile, said they were surprised and troubled, respectively, by the suggestion, which was first raised by Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser at a Liberal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown on Monday.

Quebec’s reaction indicates that attempts to limit international student admissions could create conflict with the provinces. They have jurisdiction in areas of education and their postsecondary institutions have come to rely on lucrative international tuition fees.

“Quebec does not intend to impose a cap on the number of foreign students in its jurisdiction. Although issuing study permits is the responsibility of the federal government, education is the exclusive power of Quebec. It’s up to Quebec and its educational institutions to determine the number of people they can accommodate,” said Alexandre Lahaie, a spokesperson for Quebec Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette.

Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller confirmed his government is strongly considering a cap on the number of international students Canada accepts. But Mr. Miller stressed that such a measure alone won’t fix the housing crunch.

“This will be a multipronged approach. A cap is something we’ll definitely entertain,” Mr. Miller said on Tuesday.

The number of international students in Canada soared past 800,000 in 2022, more than twice as many as when Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. Some experts have said the influx of students in need of lower-cost rental accommodation has contributed to rising rents in some cities, at a time when construction of new housing has been inadequate.

More than half of all international study permits issued in 2022 went to students at Canadian colleges, a sector that has surpassed universities as the top destination for international students.

In a statement, Colleges and Institutes Canada, which represents publicly funded colleges, said it is “troubled” by the suggestion of a cap on international enrolment.

“Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages. Furthermore, we want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted,” Colleges and Institutes Canada said in a statement.

Michael Sangster, president of the National Association of Career Colleges, which represents private colleges, said his members are willing to work with a cap, if that’s what the federal government decides, or with a trusted institution model, another proposal the federal government has floated that could see institutions with a good track record receive preference in permit processing.

“The students that are coming to our institutions, many of them are training to become tradespeople to build the homes we need. So we’re in a bit of a catch-22 right now, but we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Sangster said.

Philip Landon, interim president of Universities Canada, an umbrella group representing nearly 100 institutions, said the idea of a cap on international university students is concerning and something universities don’t believe is necessary.

“Universities seek to attract talented students to Canada and have been doing so in a responsible way with responsible growth rates,” he said.

Mr. Landon called on the federal government to make low-cost financing available to universities to allow them to build more residence spaces.

Mr. Miller said the government is already in talks with postsecondary schools about what they can do to guarantee more housing availability. He said provinces also need to be at the table, as they’ve benefited greatly from the international student program.

He said it has become “very lucrative” for some schools, adding that the economic impact of international students in Canada is more than $20-billion a year. While he said much of that is good, there is also “some abuse in the system.”

The international student program is a temporary resident immigration stream that isn’t subject to the yearly caps or targets that Ottawa sets for permanent resident immigration streams.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Tuesday that the premiers have not raised the need for a cap on foreign students with him. He added that while they talk often about the need for more housing, the premiers have also made clear they need more immigrants to fill labour shortages, including in the construction industry.

Mike Moffatt, the founding director of the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute and one of the authors of a new report on housing supply, spoke to the federal cabinet behind closed doors on Tuesday.

He said the increase in foreign students has had knock-on effects in the housing market that have helped turn a rental crisis into a home-ownership crisis.

In the area around Fanshawe College in London, Ont., for example, neighbourhoods once occupied by young families have “turned into a sea of student rentals” bought up by investors, he said.

“Domestic and international students are the biggest victims of this, not the cause of it,” he said.

“This is a systemic failure, I would say of both the federal and provincial governments and as well the higher education sector.”

Source: Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Colleges and Institutes Canada, housing, international students, Minister Miller, National Association of Career Colleges, Quebec, Universities Canada

Clark: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Indeed. As it is for an annual immigration plan that includes temporary workers and international students:

You have to agree with Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s assertion that the answer to Canada’s housing crisis isn’t new political branding. Still, it would be nice if the federal government had a plan.

The good news is there are signs that the Liberal government is putting together what could be the rudiments of a plan. But it needs an actual plan. And it needs to come to grips with the screaming urgency.

So perhaps the best exercise for the Liberal cabinet retreat taking place in Charlottetown this week would be having all ministers dip their heads in vats of ice water before and after their briefings about the housing crisis. You know, so everyone there feels the kind of shocking wake-up call that should be motivating them now.

It sounded promising when Mr. Fraser, freshly appointed as Housing Minister on July 26, outlined some of the government’s thinking about increasing the housing supply – and even said he thinks the government is thinking of capping the rapidly increasing number of international students coming to Canada. But then he said a decision on that is “premature” right now.

The problem is that Mr. Fraser is mixing up the concepts of “premature” and “overdue.”

The feds have missed a window to cap – and reduce – those numbers for this school year.

Let’s note here that Mr. Fraser is quite right when he says that we should be careful not to “somehow blame immigrants for the housing challenges that have been several decades in the works in Canada.”

That’s absolutely true. We should blame governments. They failed to plan.

Immigration itself isn’t the cause of the problem: It is good for Canada, and international students can be an especially good thing. But successive governments, federal and provincial, encouraged a boom in numbers, especially international student numbers, without planning policies to encourage housing for them.

One of the people briefing the Liberal cabinet Tuesday was economist Mike Moffatt, who has been doing the academic equivalent of waving his arms trying to get governments to pay attention to the problem. “We are in a crisis and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now,” he wrote in The Hub this week.

Mr. Moffatt’s diagnosis boils down to the fact that the population grew quickly in recent years, especially in Ontario, but the pace of home-building was a lot slower. Few places for a lot more people means house prices and now apartment rents skyrocketed.

The rapid population growth went a little under the radar because it was not just an increase in permanent immigrants. The number of temporary residents has ballooned. In 2015, there were 352,325 international students. In 2021, the number was 617,250. The following year, 2022, it was 807,260. But there weren’t a lot more student residences and apartments for rent.

Now the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates Canada needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to make housing affordable again. So it’s good the Liberals are talking about policies to encourage more home-building. Mr. Fraser unironically noted that the Liberals campaigned on some of them in the past two elections. In fact, they promised to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing back in 2015. It’s time to step it up.

It’s true successive federal governments are to blame. Municipal administrations and provincial governments are to blame for a lot of it, too. All for a lack of planning.

Now the plan is urgent, and it will have to include short-term measures like cutting back the number of international students. A government that doesn’t craft such a plan will create more poverty and damage many Canadians’ standard of living. And despite Mr. Fraser’s words, it is not at all clear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is shaking off the complacency.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he hadn’t heard talk of the idea of capping the number of international students and hasn’t spoken to premiers about it.

Mr. Trudeau, who was criticized three weeks ago for saying housing is not a primary federal responsibility, provided a nonsensical explanation for that on Monday when he said his point was that his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, had “completely walked away from housing.”

And sure, we have to expect politicians will make points about politics. But this is a bigger issue now, and it’s time to pull together a plan.

Source: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Campbell Clark, housing, housing plan, international students, Mike Moffat, Minister Fraser

Keller: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Another good column by Keller, on how the objectives of international student recruitment have been largely overtaken by economic objectives of low-paid workers:

Over the last two decades, the number of foreign students studying in Canada has increased almost sevenfold, to more than 800,000. The jump has been particularly sharp in recent years. At the end of 2022, there were nearly half a million more visa students than in 2015.

At first blush, this sounds like a success story: Canadian higher education must be so outstanding that record numbers from around the world are lining up to pay university and college tuitions several times higher than those for Canadian students.

Foreign students clearly believe that they’re paying for something that offers a positive return on their investment. But what are they paying for? And what are they getting?

Also: What are we getting?

For many international students, what they are buying is mostly not education. And what many – or most – schools are selling is not education. A big part of what is being bought and sold are public goods: the right to enter Canada, to legally work and to get on a track to citizenship.

There are, of course, excellent university and college programs attracting the best and the brightest to this country. That’s what tying higher education to immigration is supposed to be doing: boosting economic vitality by pulling in, say, the world’s best engineering or computer science students, and giving them opportunities to become Canadians after graduation.

Using foreign student recruitment to raise the education and skill level of the work force benefits all Canadians. When highly-skilled and productive foreigners graduate from a high-level program and become even more skilled and productive – and choose to become Canadians – everyone wins.

But much of the current visa-student pathway is about something else. It has become an important, though unofficial, stream of temporary foreign workers – a bottomless supply of labour to flip burgers, stack boxes and deliver late-night burritos, at minimum wage. And the number of student visas on offer is not capped.

Consider what’s happening at Ontario’s 24 public colleges. Between 2012 and 2020, their foreign enrolment grew by 342 per cent. There’s been more growth in the last three years. But a large part of that growth comes from public colleges selling their name, and their publicly-bestowed credentials, to private operators.

Students in these so-called public-private career college partnerships are often hosted at a “campus” that is a few classrooms in a strip mall or office park, usually somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area – and often hundreds of kilometres from the public college whose credentials the private partner paid to use.

Consider Lambton College in Sarnia. According to its strategic mandate agreement with the province, between 2020 and 2024 it expects domestic student enrolment to drop from 2,104 to 2,038. But international student enrolment will more than double to almost 9,000. Most visa students study at one of two campuses in Toronto, run by private operators in suburban office parks.

Why is a foreign student willing to pay $25,460 tuition for a four-semester course in hotel and resort management, from a Lambton-affiliated private business called “Queen’s College,” in a warehouse district in Mississauga?

Perhaps because the holder of an education visa can legally work while enrolled. And thanks to private Queen’s link with public Lambton, the federal government will issue another work visa upon graduation. Even a low-level Canadian educational credential plus Canadian work experience boosts one’s chances of claiming “PR” status – permanent residency, the last stop before citizenship.

That’s what many schools are selling. At $25,460, it’s a bargain.

But it brings me back to the question of why Canada is not being more selective. Using the education-to-citizenship pathway to recruit highly skilled, future Canadian citizens is a great idea. It boosts GDP-per-capita, increasing the size of the economic pie by more than the number of forks in the pie.

But much of the educational visa stream is no longer about that. And graded on the curve, Lambton is far from the bottom of the class.

The federal government lists 526 higher-education institutions in Ontario as “designated learning institutions.” Most are private and may not offer much in the way of education. Yet enrolling at any DLI includes the opportunity to come to Canada on a student visa, and the legal right to work while enrolled.

Even more than at public colleges, that’s what foreign students at private career colleges appear to be paying for: the right to enter Canada, and to work, mostly at low-skill, low-wage jobs.

However, despite the fact that governments have allowed private operators access to a bottomless helping of student visas, they’re sufficiently dubious of their education that completion of a private career college program generally does not gives students the right to a post-graduation work visa – unlike grads from public-private partnerships.

When these private college students are asked to stop working and leave Canada upon graduation from their short course, will they? Don’t bet on it. But that’s a column for another day.

Source: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

Filed under Immigration Tagged with international students, Tony Keller

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:

Good checklist by which to evaluate government seriousness… #cdnimm https://t.co/waSJBvabq8
— Andrew Griffith (@Andrew_Griffith) August 22, 2023

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

Filed under Immigration Tagged with cap, international students, Minister Fraser, Raj Sharma

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

Filed under Immigration Tagged with cap, international students, Jen Gerson

Housing crisis: Feds stick by immigration plan, rethink international student flows

2023/08/17 Leave a comment

Possible partial pivot but limited to international students, Minister Miller linking this to fraud concerns, not permanent residents and temporary workers.

Kind of an interesting contradiction in the article between “pace of population growth, facilitated by immigration, is making the housing crisis worse” and “Most experts agree that the root causes of this housing shortage are unrelated to immigration.”

The alarm bells are becoming bull horns: Canada’s housing supply isn’t keeping up with the rapid rate of population growth.

Academics, commercial banks and policy thinkers have all been warning the federal government that the pace of population growth, facilitated by immigration, is making the housing crisis worse.

“The primary cause for (the) housing affordability challenge in Canada is our inability to build more housing that is in line with the increase in population,” said Murtaza Haider, a professor of data science and real estate management at Toronto Metropolitan University.

A TD report released in late July also warned that “continuing with a high-growth immigration strategy could widen the housing shortfall by about a half-million units within just two years.”

But the Liberals are doubling down on their commitment to bring more people into the country, arguing that Canada needs high immigration to support the economy and build the homes it desperately needs.

“Looking at the (immigration) levels that we have recently approved as a cabinet (and) as a government, we can’t afford currently to reduce those numbers,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

That’s because Canada’s aging population risks straining public finances, he said, as health-care needs rise and the tax base shrinks.

A report by Statistics Canada published in April 2022 finds the country’s working population has never been older, with more than one in five people close to retirement.

At the same time, Canada’s fertility rate hit a record low of 1.4 children per woman in 2020.

The TD report, co-authored by the commercial bank’s chief economist Beata Caranci, notes that economists are the ones who have been warning of the economic consequences of Canada’s aging population.

“A ramp-up in skilled-based immigration offered a solution. Government policies have delivered, but now the question is whether the sudden swing in population has gone too far, too fast,” the report said.

The federal government’s latest immigration levels plan, released last fall, would see Canada welcome 500,000 immigrants annually by 2025.

In contrast, the immigration target for 2015 was under 300,000.

Although the half-million figure has caught considerable attention, it’s not just higher immigration targets that are driving the surge in population.

Canada is also experiencing a boom in the number of temporary residents who are coming to the country, which includes international students and temporary foreign workers.

In 2022, Canada’s population grew by more than one million people, a number that included 607,782 non-permanent residents and 437,180 immigrants.

Miller said in the interview that the federal government is open to reconsidering international student enrolments, particularly amid fraud concerns.

Earlier this year, hundreds of people were suspected of being caught in a fraud scheme that saw immigration agents issue fake acceptance letters to get students into Canada.

“There is fraud across the system that we are going to have to clamp down on,” Miller said.

The increased scrutiny of Canada’s immigration policies and population growth comes as the country faces a housing affordability crisis caused in large part by a shortage of homes.

Most experts agree that the root causes of this housing shortage are unrelated to immigration. Red tape and anti-development sentiment at the municipal level, for example, can lead to major delays in projects.

Federal tax incentives that helped spur purpose-built rental constructions were rolled back decades ago, leading to a massive shortage in rentals that has slowly built up over time.

Given these existing challenges, experts are concerned strong population growth will add fuel to the fire.

BMO published an analysis in May that estimated that for every one per cent of population growth, housing prices rise by three per cent.

The rebound of the Canadian real estate market this year also shows how immigration is helping to maintain demand for housing, despite decades-high interest rates.

In contrast, the immigration target for 2015 was under 300,000.

Although the half-million figure has caught considerable attention, it’s not just higher immigration targets that are driving the surge in population.

Canada is also experiencing a boom in the number of temporary residents who are coming to the country, which includes international students and temporary foreign workers.

In 2022, Canada’s population grew by more than one million people, a number that included 607,782 non-permanent residents and 437,180 immigrants.

Miller said in the interview that the federal government is open to reconsidering international student enrolments, particularly amid fraud concerns.

Earlier this year, hundreds of people were suspected of being caught in a fraud scheme that saw immigration agents issue fake acceptance letters to get students into Canada.

“There is fraud across the system that we are going to have to clamp down on,” Miller said.

The increased scrutiny of Canada’s immigration policies and population growth comes as the country faces a housing affordability crisis caused in large part by a shortage of homes.

Most experts agree that the root causes of this housing shortage are unrelated to immigration. Red tape and anti-development sentiment at the municipal level, for example, can lead to major delays in projects.

Federal tax incentives that helped spur purpose-built rental constructions were rolled back decades ago, leading to a massive shortage in rentals that has slowly built up over time.

Given these existing challenges, experts are concerned strong population growth will add fuel to the fire.

BMO published an analysis in May that estimated that for every one per cent of population growth, housing prices rise by three per cent.

The rebound of the Canadian real estate market this year also shows how immigration is helping to maintain demand for housing, despite decades-high interest rates.

Source: Housing crisis: Feds stick by immigration plan, rethink international …

Filed under Immigration Tagged with housing, international students, Minister Miller, TD

Record levels of international students straining Canada’s housing supply further

2023/08/12 Leave a comment

Not much new but confirms problems. Bit rich of Universities Canada to state that “Solving the housing crisis will require collaboration among all levels of government…” while ignoring the complicity of universities in increasing demand:

Record numbers of international students coming to Canada is making the already inflated cost of housing worse, said Steve Pomeroy, a policy research consultant and senior research fellow at Carleton University’s centre for urban research.

The biggest strain on Canada’s housing market, he said, isn’t only the rising rate of permanent residents, with more than 400,000 permanent residents in 2022, and the Liberal government determined to hit 500,000 a year in the next couple of years. Those coming here seeking temporary residence, either temporary foreign workers or international students, are fuelling rental price increases.

“Temporary foreign workers and students are going to be renters, as opposed to owners,” he said.

Average rents nationally jumped more than 10 per cent last year and are expected to rise again this year, although rents in hotter markets, such as Toronto and Vancouver, are up significantly more.

Data released earlier this year by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) show 807,750 international students with valid student visas studying at Canadian post-secondary institutions as of the end of 2022. At 30-per-cent higher than the 617,315 students in 2021, it’s now at the highest level it’s ever been.

With the exception of 2020, where numbers were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s complement of international students historically saw between six to nine per cent growth annually.

Pomeroy said universities are driving the numbers as a way to generate more revenue, because they can charge international students much higher tuitions.

“In Ontario, university tuition fees are frozen, grants are frozen, but the only variable that universities have to generate new revenues is international students, so they naturally go and chase those,” he said.

More visiting students, he said, create inordinate demand at the very bottom of the rental market, where there’s already a tight market for low-income workers, fixed-income seniors and those who rely on social assistance.

Benjie Rustia, an official with an international immigration and study agency located near the Philippine capital of Manila, said his international-student clients know that coming here means fighting a tight entry-level rental market.

“They are well informed by their relatives or friends in Canada,” he told the National Post.

“Making informed decisions is the basic aspect for the process for international students, and are based on thorough research and understanding.”

Late last month, news of an international student from India found living under an east Toronto bridge brought attention to the problem, and highlighted concerns from advocates that Canada’s affordability crisis is rendering increasing numbers of foreign students homeless.

Most international students coming to Canada flock to Ontario, which in 2022 saw over 411,000 foreign students enrolled in the province’s post-secondary institutions.

British Columbia ranked second with 164,000 students last year, followed by Quebec with 93,000, Alberta with 43,000 and Manitoba with 22,000.

While India’s 319,130 international students rank as Canada’s biggest cohort, followed by China with 100,075, the Philippines is seeing big bumps in the number of their students coming here.

Canada issued 25,295 study permits to Filipino students to study here in 2022, a 76-per-cent increase from the 14,355 visas issued to students from that country in 2021.

As of June 2023, 11,400 permits were issued to students from the Philippines.

Rustia said his clients typically search for schools that offer on-campus residence living or look for schools near where they can stay with friends and relatives already in the area.

News reports on Wednesday described long wait-lists for on-campus housing at Calgary universities, with 740 students waiting for housing at the University of Calgary, and the city’s Mount Royal University establishing a waiting list for their 950 dorm rooms for the first time in the school’s history.

Solving this problem, Pomeroy said, could be done by striking partnerships between schools, governments and developers.

“If the government was smart, it would say ‘OK, we’re causing the problem by giving out these visas to international students, how can we solve this problem,’” he said.

“Let’s work with the universities, let’s work with the private developers for some incentives and stimulus.”

He suggested using existing programs, such as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s rental construction financing initiative — which provides low-cost loans to encourage rental apartment projects — to encourage student-centred rental construction to keep the pressure of local residential rental markets.

“You can wait until folks get displaced and they’re in the homeless shelter and we intervene and provide supportive housing and wraparound services to help them get out of shelters at significantly high cost, or we could build 1,000 units of student housing with no cost to government,” Pomeroy said.

A statement to the National Post from Universities Canada, a post-secondary institution lobby group, agreed the federal government should be doing more to address the issue.

“Solving the housing crisis will require collaboration among all levels of government, and universities remain willing partners in these efforts,” wrote interim president Philip Landon.

“Universities Canada urges the federal government to meet its commitments, as set out in the National Housing Strategy, to reduce homelessness, construct new homes and provide Canadians with access to affordable housing that meets their needs.”

Canada’s universities, he wrote, are doing more to approve and build more on-campus housing, as well as provide resources to help students access off-campus living space, as well as developing “innovative housing models” to relieve local rental market pressures.

Emails to Immigration Minister Marc Miller went unacknowledged.

Tom Kmiec, the Conservative party’s immigration and citizenship critic, said that the current government’s housing and immigration policies are leaving newcomers on the streets.

“More homes were being built in 1972 when Canada’s population was half of what it is today,” he said in a statement.

“The Liberal government has failed to deliver on their housing promises and failed to come anywhere close to building the number of houses we need, leaving Canada short millions of homes and Canadians struggling to afford a place to live.”

Source: Record levels of international students straining Canada’s housing supply further

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with housing, international students, MP Kmiec, Steve Pomeroy, Universities Canada

54% of African student visa applications denied by the US

2023/07/31 Leave a comment

Comparable differences to Canada and likely most OECD countries. Advocacy and interest based report:

African students who apply to study at universities and colleges in the United States experience the highest visa refusal rates of all international students applying to study in the US with more than half of all applicants rejected in 2022.

The refusal rate of 54% of student visas in 2022 is up from 44% in 2015, according to a report titled The Interview of a Lifetime: An analysis of visa denials and international student flows to the US, from the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, and Shorelight, two US advocacy groups that promote policies in support of immigrant students.

While the refusal rate for African students applying for visas is higher than for students belonging to other geographical categories of visa applicants, it is roughly in line with an across-the-board rise in refusal rates, which suggests that the United States is becoming a less welcoming place to foreign students.

By 2030, just seven years from now, young Africans are expected to constitute 42% of the world’s youth population, and by 2050 are expected to number 1.1 billion.

The trends outlined in The Interview of a Lifetime suggest that the United States is poised to lose out in the competition for students – just at the time that the American colleges and universities will be in the grips of what demographers call the ‘demographic cliff’, the drop each year of some 500,000 students from the cohort born following the 2008 financial crisis – note the report’s authors, Dr Rajika Bhandari and Jill Welch, both senior advisers to the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, and Shorelight’s leading managers, Shelley Landry, a senior director of government affairs, and Hilary O’Haire, the executive director of analytics.

Rejection rate on the rise

According to the report, since 2018, the total number of students from Africa enrolled in American colleges and universities has grown from 47,251 to 49,308. Over that same period, however, the rejection rate has grown six percentage points, from 48% to 54%. As a result some 92,051 potentially qualified African students were denied a visa. The authors of The Interview of a Lifetime describe them as 92,051 ‘Missed Opportunity Students’.

In technical terms, these prospective African students failed to qualify for the F-1 Visa. The F-1 Visa category allows foreign students to enter and study full-time in institutions that are certified by the US government and is mandatory for immigrant international students.

Negative public narrative towards immigrants

The report contains evidence that American immigration officials are becoming more apt to refuse student visas overall. Between 2021 and 2022, for example, the refusal rate for South Americans rose from 20% to 30%, while the rise in numbers of Australians and Pacific islanders being denied study visas rose even more starkly: from 8% to about 25%. Rejection rates from Europe and North America (which includes Mexico) have also risen but by only a few percentage points.

Although the report has not identified the specific African countries of origin whose students were heavily affected by the visa denials, the researchers found that since 2018 refusal rates have consistently been higher for Western and Central Africa than for Eastern and Southern Africa.

In 2021, for example, the refusal rate for Western and Central Africa was 57% and 64%, respectively, while for Eastern and Southern Africa the rates were 43% and 10%. Last year, the rates for Western and Central Africa were 71% and 61%; for Eastern and Southern Africa the rates were 48% and 16%, respectively.

“But when Southern Africa is removed from the equation, the visa denial rate jumps to 57%, suggesting that most of the denials were concentrated in other parts of Africa,” noted the report.

At least in terms of approving foreign student visas from Africa, as University World News reported last June, the situation in Canada is much the same. Refugees and Citizenship Canada rejected 59% of the visa applications from English-speaking Africans and 74% from French-speaking Africans seeking to study in Canada’s colleges and universities.

But the question remains as to the reasons behind African students being denied opportunities to study in the US universities compared to their peers from the rest of the world. The report, however, suggested that it might be a reflection of emerging US national policies that are fuelled by a negative public narrative toward immigrants.

While President Joe Biden’s administration is significantly more open to immigration than was that of former US president Donald J Trump, the tenor of the American debate over immigration has not moved much from when Trump described Haiti, El Salvador and African states as “shithole countries”.

Yesterday, for example, the Republican controlled House of Representatives passed the Visa Overstay Enforcement Act of 2023 which imposes new penalties, including fines and/or prison terms of six months on individuals who overstay their visas.

Last June, 31 Republican lawmakers in Washington backed a group of workers in the high-tech industry who are suing the Federal government over changes the administration made to the F-1 visa program that would allow foreign students to remain in the country and work for up to three years after they graduate.

The problem with interviews

Emmanuel Smadja, the chief executive officer and co-founder of MPOWER Financing, a Washington DC-based company that provides educational loans to international students, says the visa denial problem may be systemic.

First-hand accounts from African students suggest that they face challenges securing visa interviews and according to the report, some are having to jump through hoops just to travel to other countries at considerable expense. Outside South Africa, most US visa interviews for students in Sub-Saharan Africa are mainly held in Accra, Lagos and Nairobi.

In their analysis, the authors of the report faulted some of the grounds that are used by the US consular officials to deny African student visas.

The report cited lapses such as students being ill-prepared for the visa interview or failure to demonstrate a strong connection with the US. A few tense minutes of a visa interview should not be used to determine their academic future, as too often African students encounter challenges securing visa interview slots.

Doubts about funding

Drawing insights from MPOWER, Bhandari’s team noted that many African students, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, were denied visas even when they are qualified and have funding.

The report highlights the issue of 3,000 students from Sub-Saharan Africa that were accepted for graduate studies at a top US university last year but only 60% were granted visas despite being admitted and having secured the necessary funding.

Further, there are indicators that African students were denied visas for not demonstrating that they had sufficient funds to support their studies in the US. Concerns had also been raised about fraud but the Presidents’ Alliance, a coalition of 450 US university leaders, had been quoted pointing out that in most cases, African students are the victims, but not the perpetrators of the fraud.

In an interview with The PIE News, Farook Lalji of Kenya-based Koala Education Consultants said that “applying for a university abroad means paying visa fees, a deposit to the university, paying for a medical and other related costs” and that the “fear of being denied a visa after all that is a factor in people falling for fake schemes that come with an alleged guarantee of getting a visa”.

He advised students to make sure they were dealing with licensed agents. “If you must deal with a briefcase or suspicious agent, then do not pay until the job is done, just like it happens with other things in life. In this case do not pay until you have obtained all the information about the university and have obtained all necessary documents,” he warned prospective students.

On the issue of visa denial for lack of adequate funds, Bhandari and associates noted that discussion forums of groups that serve African international students are rife with worries about students who have met every admissions and financial requirement and are seemingly well-prepared for the high-stakes visa interviews but are nonetheless denied visas.

Presidents and vice-chancellors concerned

American university presidents and vice-chancellors are concerned by the high rates of visa denials and share perceptions that it is harder for students in certain countries to acquire a visa than in other countries.

“Some higher education officials reported that students from some African nations, for example, are more likely to receive a student visa when applying in a non-African country, such as Australia, to study in the US,” stated the report.

Is a shift in policy possible?

Unfortunately, whereas visa data and enrolment datasets point to current demands for a US education by students from African countries, the report says there are no indicators as to whether the US visa policy will shift in favour of such students in the near future.

Aware of Africa’s emerging demographic trends, some countries such as France and China, are aggressively recruiting African students, while the interest shown by US university presidents and vice-chancellors are being frustrated by visa denials.

In that context, Bhandari and associates raised the issue as to whether the US is missing out on top academic talent from Africa.

Quoting Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for University Education at the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think tank that conducts research analysis on education and public policy issues, the study team noted that the growth in the world’s labour market will in the years ahead be in Africa.

“As other parts of the world begin to age, Africa will grow its population and today’s children will be the talent tomorrow’s global companies will be recruiting,” stated the report.

In its vision of more recruitment of African students into US universities and colleges, the Presidents’ Alliance and Shorelight are urging the US authorities to issue new guidelines that would reduce visa denials for African students.

For instance, they are recommending that competency in English should not be a reason for refusing a visa to a foreign student who wants to attend for instance a low-level institution, or a community college in the US.

“Consular officers should leave questions of academic choice and qualifications to be decided between the student and the institution, instead focusing on evaluating whether the student meets entry requirements,” stated the report.

The argument is that denial of a visa should not occur based on English-language competency, as it is the purview of the universities and colleges to evaluate language proficiency and to provide English-language training programmes if necessary.

The report criticised visa denials based on the inability to provide proof of multiple years of funding, given that in the US many students and their families pay for their education as they go on with their studies.

“Proof of funding for the entire duration of the academic programme is not reasonable and should not be a requirement for a visa,” stated the report.

Consular officers should ‘stop speculating’

Further, the report recommends that post-graduation work interests should also not be grounds for visa denial. The issue is that, despite the updated US foreign affairs manual that makes it clear that consular officers should stop speculating about international students’ intentions in the future but instead evaluate their intent at the moment of the interview, many African students continue to be denied a visa because of that outdated clause.

The report says clear guidelines should be issued on how to evaluate international student visa applications for forcibly displaced students from their countries’ of origin, not only in the case of the African students, or their counterparts from the Global South, but throughout the world.

Amid efforts to get rid of perceptions of discrimination, the Presidents’ Alliance and Shorelight are urging the US government to provide transparent and clear information to students about visa denials.

“The issue is that when prospective students are denied visas, they are often left to guess what aspects of their application may have led to the denial,” stated the report.

The two bodies have also urged the US Congress to modernise immigration law and, more specifically, to expand the criteria on how to reduce visa denials, taking into account that the US domestic demographic trends and workforce shifts point to the need for an inclusive approach to attract diverse global talent.

But despite such robust appeals, it is not clear as to whether the negative public narrative toward immigrants is about to change in favour of students from Africa.

Source: 54% of African student visa applications denied by the US

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Africa, international students, Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, Shorelight, The Interview of a Lifetime: An analysis of visa denials and international student flows to the US, USA

Is racism behind denial of visas to African students?

2023/07/10 Leave a comment

Largely reflects the interests of education institutions and their financial pressures as much as concerns over differential treatment (given that immigration is inherently “discriminatory,” the question is more are their legitimate reasons and evidence to justify that discrimination):

In the five years between 2018 and 30 April 2023, officials at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada reportedly rejected 59% of the visa applications from English-speaking Africans and 74% from French-speaking Africans seeking to study in Canada’s colleges and universities.

In 2022, the disapproval rates were 66% for applicants from French-speaking African countries and 62% for applicants from English-speaking African countries.

Besides the higher rejection rate for francophone African students, the stats show a massively higher rejection rate for African students compared to students from Western countries. Refusal rates for Great Britain, Australia and the United States were 13%, 13% and 11%, respectively, while for France the refusal rate was 6.7%.

‘A certain rate of racism exists’

Referring to hearings held in 2022 by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (SCCI) during which Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) admitted there was a problem, Etienne Carbonneau, director of research and support for internationalisation at Université du Québec in Québec City, said: “Let’s put it bluntly, we think there is a certain rate of racism that exists [in IRCC].

“By this I mean negative prejudices against, particularly, French-speaking African populations. When you look at IRCC’s responses, basically, the immigration officers who process the permit application files seem to be saying that they don’t believe the students.”

Both Carbonneau and Daye Diallo, senior economist at the Montreal-based Institut du Québec, underscored that while the high refusal rate of English-speaking Africans can also be attributed to racism at the IRCC, the impact on English universities such as McGill University in Montreal, or those in Ontario or elsewhere in the country, is not as severe.

“In Ontario, it [the rejection rate] is more than 50%. Serious too, but it is higher in Quebec. And because Quebec speaks French, the recruitment pools are more limited. In Ontario there are many students who come from Asia and English-speaking countries,” says Diallo, co-author, with Emna Braham, the institute’s executive director, of the study, “Portrait de l’immigration temporaire: attraction et rétention des étudiants étrangers au Québec”.

“We cannot go to India or China because Indians and Chinese are looking for training in English,” Carbonneau explained. “If I were at McGill University or University of British Columbia, and I saw that it was getting difficult on the Indian side [ie, recruiting from India], I would look to other markets. I don’t have that opportunity [recruiting for a French university].

“The potential for growth is really in French-speaking Africa, but this potential is cut off by the practices of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Presently, some 50% of French speakers worldwide live in African countries; by 2050, the continent will account for 50% of the world’s population growth.”

SCCI report evidence

The report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (SCCI), published in May 2022, titled Differential Treatment in Recruitment and Acceptance Rates of Foreign Students in Quebec and in the Rest of Canada, found evidence of racism both in the internal workings of the department and among IRCC’s visa officers vis-à-vis African applicants for study visas.

This evidence was contained in a report of a survey of IRCC conducted by the polling firm Pollara Strategic Insights following the international protests against the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis (Minnesota) police department in March of 2020, which sparked the Black Lives Matter protests.

Racialised respondents to the IRCC survey told Pollara that they “considered racism to be a problem in the department”, which, in its response to the report, IRCC acknowledged.

Pollara was told that some immigration officials referred to certain African countries as “the dirty 30”. Nigerians, the investigators were told, were considered “particularly untrustworthy”.

According to the SCCI, IRCC “acknowledged that due to the nature of its mandate to promote a strong and diverse Canada, it must hold itself to the highest possible standards so that the programmes, policies and client services are free from any racial bias”.

IRCC policy

IRCC reiterated this policy in an email that said, in part: “The Government of Canada is committed to the fair and non-discriminatory application of immigration procedures. We continually evaluate data and make concerted efforts to address the results and the differential strategies in order to improve our approaches so that we can overcome these issues.”

The email further explained: “The strategic review of the immigration policies and programmes will enable us to identify and address the issues relating to rejections and the International Student Program will be informed by this exercise.”

Among the steps IRCC has taken is the creation of a task force dedicated to the “elimination of racism in all its forms at IRCC”. This requires IRCC staff, including middle and senior managers, “to take mandatory unconscious bias training which is tracked”, and evaluate “potential bias entry points in policy and programme delivery [ie, deciding on visa applications]”.

As of May 2022, IRCC had “nearly two dozen projects under development to reduce and eliminate racial barriers – with a large focus on … African clients, due to the fact that this region historically faces longer processing times and lower approval rates”.

Nigerian students deemed ‘particularly untrustworthy’

While some IRCC staff considered Nigerians to be ‘particularly untrustworthy’, critics, including the University of Calgary’s Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Law Gideon Christian, who is also president of African Scholars Initiative, told the House of Commons committee that the 2019 pilot project, Nigerian Student Express (NSE), discriminated against Nigerians.

Pointing to documents he had obtained via an Access to Information and Privacy request, Christian showed that irrespective of whether the NSE improved processing times for Nigerian students by giving them the option to use a secure financial verification system, it discriminated against these students.

The NSE required Nigerians to provide different and more onerous financial data than did students from other countries that were part of the Student Direct Stream (SDS), Christian said.

Unlike students in the other 15 countries included in the SDS, such as China, Vietnam, Senegal, Brazil and Colombia, Nigerians seeking to study in Canada had to produce a bank statement showing that they had the equivalent of CA$30,000 (US$22,600) in their account for at least six months in the last year.

While testifying before the committee, Sean Fraser, minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship of Canada, defended the CA$30,000 figure, saying that it was fair because it did not include living expenses.

“The issue is that we don’t necessarily have financial partners on the ground in Nigeria, so having proof of funds of CA$30,000 is more equitable when you look across the requirements in other countries, where you have not only [the requirement to show] CA$10,000, but also the proof of funds to cover the cost of an international student tuition.”

In his testimony, Christian dismissed Fraser’s claim, noting that a “Nigerian is required to show proof of funds that are three times more than those of other SDS countries, and yet, when this applicant overcomes this high burden of proof, most of the study visa applications from Nigeria are still refused”.

Christian also told the SCCI that since all colleges and universities exempted Nigerians from English-language proficiency tests, “the language proficiency requirement imposed by the visa offices … exudes stereotypes and racism”.

SCCI Recommendation 4

The SCCI’s Recommendation 4 called for IRCC to reconsider the financial reporting requirements imposed on Nigerians and for IRCC to “remove the English-language proficiency required for Nigerian students”.

As with Canada’s English universities, French universities in Quebec recruit international students for a number of reasons. Carbonneau began by noting the importance of universities internationalising their student bodies.

“The career of a researcher who is from Quebec will involve collaborations with people who have been trained abroad and who have worked abroad. The integration of international students into our university programmes means that our Quebec students will have contact with people from other countries. They will be made aware of international issues and the issues of intercultural work and the taking into account of intercultural issues.

“We understand how the presence of international students, particularly at the graduate level, makes it possible to develop links between researchers and students that will be maintained over time.”

Recruiting in French-speaking Africa

International students contribute CA$22 billion (US$16.6 billion) to the Canadian economy and support more than 218,000 jobs, the SCCI heard. The portion of these funds spent in Quebec is part of the third reason Quebec’s universities recruit in French-speaking Africa. The other part is that the 217,660 French African students in the province’s colleges and universities help keep these institutions economically viable.*

The tuition for Quebec residents at the province’s French universities is approximately CA$6,000; international undergraduates payCA$30,000 more. Each international student also contributes some CA$15,000 to the province’s economy in living costs.

Since Quebec universities receive grants on a per student basis from the provincial government, for universities international students mean larger government grants.

According to Carbonneau: “We need students for the vitality of several of our university programmes. Quebec universities are funded per student, so when we have students, we have funding.”

Ontario’s universities, too, it should be noted, are hungry for international student fees. For the 2021-22 academic year, for example, the 22,728 international students at the University of Toronto, for example, paid on average CA$59,320 in tuition and fees, or a total of over CA$1.3 billion.

Recruiting university students from French Africa is also part of the government of Canada’s commitment to ensuring that approximately 72,000 of the nation’s immigrant target of 500,000 are French speaking. This policy was put in place to ensure that the percentage of French-speaking Canadians did not fall below the present 22.8%of the nation’s population of 40 million.

Although Fraser told the SCCI that “international students are excellent candidates for permanent residency” and that Canada has “increased our target efforts overseas to promote and attract francophone students and immigrants to Canada”, the committee heard of a number of roadblocks that prevented French African students from studying in Canada.

At the hearings, Alain Dupuis, executive director of the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada (Canadian Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities), stated that irrespective of the government’s immigration goals, “we are closing the doors to them”.

Investment certificate roadblock

Denise Amyot, president and CEO of Colleges and Institutes Canada, told the SCCI that one of the main roadblocks is a requirement created, not by IRCC policy, but by its visa officers: the guaranteed investment certificate to demonstrate financial sufficiency and SDS.

While this certificate may have streamlined the application process, it ignored the fact, Amyot told the SCCI, that the banking systems “in certain countries are not as well developed, and students rely more heavily on family networks in ways that may seem atypical from a Canadian cultural lens”.

Referring to the cases for which he knew IRCC’s reason for denying the application for a study visa, Diallo told University World News: “The reason in these situations is that the student does not have enough real estate; he does not have a house in his country of origin.” He then asked, pointedly: “How can an 18 year old own buildings?”

The guaranteed investment certificate is more than a proof of financial resources, Diallo further explained. It serves as a proxy for the applicant’s attachment to his or her home country: ie, as proof that he or she plans to return to their home country.

Similarly, applicants have been denied study visas because they have not shown that they have enough family in their home countries, or that they have not established a travel history that shows that they have left and returned to their home country.

This is a requirement that one brief to the SCCI mocked by asking” “How many kids of the age 15-20 years old from other countries have travelled out of their shores at such a young age? What counts as sufficient travel history? This remains unclear,” says Carbonneau.

For his part, Diallo says: “There are reasons like that that are given. But they are ‘reasons’ which, in our opinion, are not necessary. [For] these reasons, the official can say that he believes the student will not return home. But these are not facts. There are no statistics that say that African students are more likely to stay here illegally when their visas expire.”

Residency roadblocks

Notwithstanding Fraser’s statement that “international students are excellent candidates for permanent residency”, the very document applicants for study visas must fill out puts them in a ‘catch-22 situation’ with regard to what’s called ‘dual intent’, says Shamira Madhany, managing director and deputy executive director at World Education Services, told the parliamentarians studying the issue.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act allows for international students to apply for permanent residency upon completion of their studies if “the officer is satisfied that they will leave Canada by the end of their period authorised for their stay” and wait outside Canada for their permanent residency to be granted.

However, in practice, one witness told SCCI: “If a student has the misfortune to check that box, their chances of getting a visa are nil … The authorities believe that they really do not intend to study in Canada, and they want to stay in Canada.”

According to Carbonneau, this situation is absurd.

“A student who comes to study with us with the intention of immigrating, which is deemed desirable by our government in Quebec [the lone province to issue its own study document accepting the prospective student], is using his studies, a bachelor degree or a masters degree or a doctorate, to integrate into Quebec or Canadian society – and then immigrate.

“For us it is desirable. But for the Government of Canada, I think the second most frequent response is that the application is refused because the Canadian government is not convinced that the student will return to his country after graduation.

“It’s really absurd because on the one hand Canada really needs qualified immigrants. We also need qualified French-speaking immigrants. But, on the other hand, we tell them once they graduate our expectation as a Canadian government is that you return home.”

Reform required

In his appearance before the committee, Fraser admitted the system needed reform but pushed back against critics by saying that Canada “need to prevent a lot of students coming with the purpose of staying permanently by claiming asylum, for example, when we have different streams for people who are coming for purposes other than studying”.

While Recommendation 15 does not expressly refer to the minister’s statement, by implication it rebuked him by calling on IRCC to clarify the dual intent provision of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, “so that the intention of settling in Canada does not jeopardise an individual’s chances of getting a study permit”.

Organisations and individuals involved in recruiting in Africa are concerned that Canada’s high rate of refusal of study visa applicants is hurting the country’s reputation in Africa. Amyot told the SCCI that he had heard of students who waited months for decisions only to find out that their study permits had been rejected “often for unclear and unfounded reasons”.

“We live in a world where the competition to attract the best brains is very important. Canada cannot afford to have these difficulties. Canada must work to reduce refusal rates from French-speaking African countries that have students who want to come to Canada,” said Diallo.

“We have a poor image internationally because Canada does not grant visas and the reasons why Canada does not grant visas are not the right reasons.”

Source: Is racism behind denial of visas to African students?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Africa, international students, Nigeria, Quebec

She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Housing example of lack of planning for impact of immigration:

Parul Yadav saw Canada as a pathway to her future.

The 23-year-old, who arrived in Toronto alone but bright-eyed in late 2021, had pored over post-secondary programs around the world from her home in Delhi, India, carefully selecting a public relations course at Humber College for its hands-on learning opportunities. Toronto, she was told, was a multicultural city — one where newcomers like her would be welcomed.

What she didn’t expect was a housing crisis, one that would become an ever-present stressor as she began her studies.

She struggled, during those first days in a Mississauga hotel, to even book an apartment viewing without local references who could vouch for her. Even studio apartments were too expensive. Feeling desperate as the first day of classes approached, she signed on for several months of renting a den without a door in a shared apartment.

Today, she has a single room in a basement where two other students rent rooms on the same floor, while their landlord lives upstairs. She counts herself lucky, given how many other international students she’s met who’ve fared worse in Toronto’s housing market.

“I know so may international students who are living in miserable, miserable conditions,” Yadav said, describing groups of two or even three students who she’s known to split single rented bedrooms.

It’s a problem she believes the country needs to reckon with — especially as it aims to boost immigration rates. If Canada and its post-secondary schools are attracting promising young learners, especially to campuses in major cities such as Toronto that are facing rental crunches, how can officials ensure the kind of housing opportunities students need to thrive?

The question of whether Toronto has adequate housing for its international students is, of course, a microcosm of an even broader question: Are we prepared to house all the new immigrants that officials see as vital for Canada’s future? A report from Desjardins Securities recently suggested the answer is no — noting that homebuilding will have to increase by at least 50 per cent nationally through 2024, or a difference of about 100,000 more units starting construction in each of the two years, to keep pace with the expected rate of population growth.

Just weeks ago, the country’s population hit 40 million people for the first time. In Toronto, the provincial Ministry of Finance has forecast the population will surpass 3.3 million people by 2031 and 3.6 million by 2041. International migration is the primary driver of net population gains, city hall housing secretariat director Valesa Faria wrote in a statement to the Star — though city reports have also noted Toronto’s rapidly aging population as a key demographic shift in the years to come.

The federal government hopes to bring in 465,000 permanent residents this year, Faria said, rising to 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025. International student study permits were also on the rise, she said, adding that the 550,150 permits issued last year represented a 75 per cent jump from five years earlier. These newcomers will bring skills and abilities that Toronto needs to sustain its “economic and social vibrancy,” she wrote. But it’s a reality that demands more housing.

“Toronto looks forward to supporting federal targets, however, it is imperative that these go hand-in-hand with new investments in affordable housing so that newcomers can find safe, secure and affordable homes to live successfully,” she wrote.

While being accepted for study in Canada does not guarantee a pathway to permanent residency, it is a common trajectory taken. The prospect of life in this country is a key lure of Canada’s international education strategy — which has uplifted the economy, created a steady immigration pipeline and offered a boost to the country’s colleges and universities amid declining public funding and domestic enrolment.

While schools have eyed increased enrolment in recent years, Faria sees student housing creation as failing to keep pace. Now, institutions such as Toronto Metropolitan University are putting new residence plans on ice, she said, directing blame on rising construction costs.

Student residences did not qualify for affordable housing funds, Faria added, and were therefore offered at market rent rates — which could be prohibitive for cash-strapped students. (Yadav, too, noted the cost of purpose-built residences often ruled them out as an option for her.)

The challenges of home affordability aren’t limited to international students, as students of all origins, in Toronto and beyond, often scramble to find affordable homes — like so many individuals and families with limited incomes. But city hall staff have noted newcomers at its colleges and universities are often making do with the lousiest living conditions, attributed in a recent city housing plan to “significantly” higher tuition and limits on their ability to work.

For Yadav, the doorless den she leased in late 2021 — after days of fruitlessly scouring Kijiji and messaging landlords — made her feel like she was walking on eggshells, with virtually zero privacy between her and her roommate. She tried to be out of the apartment as much as possible, and it wore on her mental health. “I remember I was always so stressed and always so low on energy that my friends would say, ‘Hey, is anything wrong with you?’” she recalled.

“It really does affect the relationships around you, the way you work, the way you study.”

After five months, she decided to test her luck again, with a budget that topped out at $1,500 per month, though she was hoping to keep closer to $1,000. But in Toronto, even studio units were going for higher rates. In the end, she found her single room in the basement of a house, which came with a $700 price tag and two other tenants sharing the floor. Yadav is grateful to have it — she said her landlord upstairs was kind, and really tried to offer students who’d newly arrived in Canada a “homey family environment.”

Many others she knew weren’t so fortunate.

Faria, the housing secretariat director, said international students, especially, can often be in the dark about their rights as a tenant — citing the findings of an ongoing working group tasked with probing student housing problems. “This presents a safety concern, as international students may be more vulnerable to predatory landlords and poor living conditions.”

One particular housing arrangement that has worried Toronto colleges and universities is the unregulated rooming house sector — an area where major changes are looming.

In December, council voted — after many years of debate — to legalize and license rooming houses citywide as of March 2024. This kind of rental, where tenants lease single bedrooms with shared kitchens and washrooms, often come with lower price tags than any other private market option and have long existed across the city. But they were illegal in Scarborough, East York and North York, and could be unlicensed in the old Metro Toronto and Etobicoke.

The idea of legalization, as staff proposed it, was to ensure rooming houses were safer and more regulated. In reports, staff pointed to devastating outcomes in the unlicensed market, with roughly 10 per cent of Toronto’s residential fire deaths from 2010 to 2020 in rooming houses — a grim count that would include the death of 18-year-old Helen Guo, an international student who’d just finished her first year of business management at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. Of the 18 rooming houses where fires caused death or serious injury, 16 were unlicensed. And along with seniors on fixed incomes and low-income households, immigrants and students were seen as the most likely rooming house tenants.

“Students, post-secondary institutions and community members all expressed safety concerns for students living in overcrowded and unsafe living conditions,” the staff report recommending cross-city legalization and licensing read, while also noting that some areas of Toronto located near college and university campuses had seen a particular concentration of student-aimed rooming houses “due to the lack of alternative affordable rental housing options.”

Faria, in her statement, noted that city staff have been asked to develop a post-secondary-specific housing strategy alongside academic institutions. The vision had to go beyond residences, she suggested, noting the city hoped to convince schools to plan new affordable housing for students, staff and faculty on land they own. “It is critical that the post-secondary institutions themselves commit to building new housing as part of their long-term strategic plans in order to attract top students and faculty, and to maintain a global advantage,” she wrote.

Looking back to when she first arrived, Yadav said she wished there was more transparency from schools in their recruitment materials for international students, making sure they knew not only what kind of rental market they would face, but potential traps and pitfalls to look out for when searching for a place to stay. She’d seen people fall for rental scams, having sent money from overseas for a house or room that didn’t exist.

That same openness about the housing reality could apply to officials in Canada’s immigration process, she suggested. “Just be more open and clearer about the crisis that’s going on.”

Yadav is now nearing the end of her two-year program at Humber — a time in which she immersed herself in a student union and found a part-time job with a PR agency that excites her about her future. She hopes to make the jump to a full-time role, and carve out a life for herself in the city. “I’m hoping my salary will be increased enough to sustain myself renting a studio. I’m not even thinking about a one-bedroom right now,” she told the Star one recent afternoon.

She’s seen too many of her fellow international students pack up and leave, not simply because they struggled to find their footing right away, but because — like so many other individuals and families citywide — they felt their long-term housing hopes were simply unattainable in Toronto.

“I know so many people that are moving out of Toronto or Ontario after living here for five, six years because they cannot afford a house. They’re going to Calgary, they’re going to places like Saskatchewan,” Yadav said. “So many people are moving out — even out of Canada and going back home to their countries. Everything comes down to the housing conditions.”

It’s the kind of conclusion she hopes officials take heed of as immigration continues to flow.

“They’re just inviting people in — and they don’t have the right resources to support them.”

Source: She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

Filed under Immigration Tagged with housing, international students

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She came to Canada for an education. Desperate for a place to live, she had to rent a room with no door

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