Canadian Christian Colleges Hit Hard by New Immigration Restrictions

2024/07/23 Leave a comment

Notable impact:

It seemed like a door had opened.

Providence University College and Theological Seminary in Manitoba started an associate’s degree program that could be marketed to international students. To president Kenton Anderson’s delight, the two-year degree attracted a significant number of applicants eager to study in Canada. Several hundred students enrolled.

For the private evangelical school, that generated significant revenue and helped further fulfill the mission of spreading the gospel around the world.

Providence made plans to grow the program—could they attract 500 international students? 600? 700?—and bought an apartment building in nearby Winnipeg to provide increased student housing.

Then, a single government decision closed that door.

Canada’s federal government announced new restrictions on undergraduate international students in January 2024. When the rules take effect this fall, the total number will be reduced by about 35 percent.

Providence was anticipating several hundred new international students. Now, when the semester starts the first week of September, the school will only greet about 20.

“It’s many millions of dollars of revenue just gone,” Anderson told CT. “And, of course, as a private tuition-funded Christian school, it’s not like we have a lot of that money lying around.”

According to the Canadian government, there are several reasons to reduce the number of international students at Canadian colleges and universities. Officials said they were concerned that lax admissions were diminishing the quality of the country’s education.

“We want to ensure that international students are successful and to tackle the issues that make students vulnerable and hurt the integrity of the International Student Program,” Julie Lafortune, a spokeswoman for the department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, told CT in an email.

The government was also concerned about the strain that the influx of internationals puts on the already stressed housing market. Many cities across Canada have seen housing costs skyrocket in recent years. Experts estimate 5.8 million new homes would have to be built by 2030 to bring prices back down to affordable levels.

“While international students are not responsible for the challenges that communities are facing in housing, health care, and other services, the growth in the number of international students is unsustainable and has added significant demand for services that all Canadians must be able to access,” Lafortune said.

The new rule sets limits on international students for each province. The provinces will then determine the allocation of that limited number of students—how many will go to one school, how many to another.

In Manitoba, the government decided to prioritize permits for international students attending public universities. Providence was allowed just a small amount.

Anderson said the combined decisions of the federal and provincial governments were enough to threaten the existence of the evangelical university. But Providence isn’t alone, he said. Many institutions of higher education are going to suffer.

“That was a very popular move politically for them to make, but it was a bit of a blunt instrument,” he said. “It just kind of like hit everybody.”

Kingswood University in New Brunswick will notice the hit.

In its 80-year history, the Methodist-affiliated school has come to rely on the flow of enrollments from abroad. Sometimes as much as 40 percent of the student body has been international. The majority have come from the United States, but many have come from further away as well, reflecting Kingswood’s Methodist ties and its missions-minded identity.

“It’s impossible for us to do what we were chosen and funded to do because of this new rule,” president Stephen Lennox told CT.

In the rural community of Sussex, where the university is located, housing is not a major problem, according to Lennox. He understands the government concerns about education quality and housing stock, but neither issue actually applies to Kingswood. So the rule doesn’t solve anything but does seriously hurt the school.

Christian Higher Education Canada sent a letter to Marc Miller, minister of immigration, refugees, and citizenship, asking him to reconsider. Lennox, who is on the board, is one of the leaders at 22 Christian schools in Canada who signed the appeal.

“Our schools provide theological education, preparing individuals to fill positions as pastors and other religious professionals,” it said. “Limiting the number of international students restricts us in our mission to help alleviate the pastoral leadership deficit in churches around the world.”

One major issue that will impact Kingswood is the change to the process of admitting US students. Americans who want to study at evangelical schools in Canada will find it’s a bit more difficult than it was before.

“They’ve always been allowed to enter by a door that’s a little easier to pass through than a typical international student. Now they all have to come through the same door,” Lennox said. “A student two hours away in Calais, Maine, has to go through the same process that someone coming from Swaziland has to go through. And to me, that just doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

Some evangelical schools in Canada have seen problems with housing. The government concern about people having places to live is relevant to their context. But they were already figuring out solutions.

“Finding housing in Moncton can be a challenge,” said Darrell Nevers, marketing and communications manager at Crandall University, a school associated with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada. “However, our student network is strong; most students can find suitable housing before arrival or soon afterwards. We also work with community partners to help students find safe and affordable housing.”

Crandall, which is also in New Brunswick, typically recruits between 400 and 450 international students each year to the Moncton campus—just under 50 percent of overall enrollment. The largest numbers of students come from India, Nigeria, Columbia, Ghana, and Bangladesh. The majority are enrolled in graduate programs, however, which are exempt from the new restrictions for now.

That reduces the impact but doesn’t entirely eliminate it. Crandall is welcoming only 8–12 international undergraduate students this fall but 140 additional students are enrolled in graduate programs.

“While we are certainly concerned that these changes will impact our undergraduate student enrollment, we believe that our provincial government has been incredibly fair in how they have allocated numbers to New Brunswick schools,” Nevers said.

Faced with the new restrictions, some universities have chosen to pivot.

“We feel like the Lord has definitely closed a door for this season. We hope that it opens again, either with a change of government or just because they see there is a better way. But we also feel like, ‘Hey, the Lord wants us to exist. What other options are out there for us?’” said Lennox at Kingswood.

Currently, the school has plans to offer a one-year master’s in leadership starting in January 2025. Those students will be exempt from the new restriction, and Kingswood hopes to recruit enough of them to offset the losses in undergraduate enrollment. Since it’s a one-year program instead of a four-year program, however, they will have to recruit at a faster rate.

Providence has also taken steps to expand its graduate offerings. Anderson said it was incredibly difficult for faculty and staff to get a new program in place as quickly as they needed to, but it was essential to the future of the institution.

“It was just one of those things where you do or die, so to speak,” the president said. “We’re doing a lot of things to strengthen our work and our sustainability as an institution and what we offer to the kingdom of God, to the church, to our communities.”

New graduate programs will bring about 300 international students to Providence this fall. That alleviates immediate financial concerns, but school officials have a new awareness of how easily that could change. Recruiting more international students no longer seems like a key piece of a solid plan for sustainability.

“The international work was good in that it was helping buy time, essentially,” Anderson said. “Now, we’re going to have to dig a little deeper.”

Source: Canadian Christian Colleges Hit Hard by New Immigration Restrictions

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Foreign student permits are already outpacing 2023’s record numbers

2024/07/23 Leave a comment

Analysis fails to address time lags between expressing web interest in getting a study permit and more significantly, the number of applications processed. Both are down about 25 percent, January-May, 2024 compared to same period in 2023.

While the number of study permit holders increased January to May, the numbers have started to decline in April and May by just over 12 percent:

Even as federal Liberal government is pledging to cap the number of international study permits, its own data show Canada is approving permits at a pace faster than last year, which saw a record number of approvals.

According to numbers curated online by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), Canada handed out 216,620 international study permits in the first five months of 2024.

Just 200,205 study permits were handed out during the same time period in 2023.

By the end of 2023, 682,420 study permits had been granted to foreign students.

Canada has been granting the vast majority of permits to India, with 278,335 going to students from that country in 2023, a number nearly five times more than to students from China, the second-highest country of origin, who were granted 58,230 permits in 2023.

Canada’s third-most popular source of international students in 2023 was Nigeria, with 37,575 permits handed out in 2023, followed by the Philippines with 33,830, and Nepal at 15,920…

Source: Foreign student permits are already outpacing 2023’s record numbers

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Canada to stop processing study permits for colleges, universities that fail to track international students

2024/07/11 Leave a comment

The federal government having to take on a role the provinces should be doing given in their jurisdiction :

The federal government plans to suspend processing of study permits from post-secondary students if the schools fail to keep track of international students’ enrolment. 

The proposed regulations would compel colleges and universities to report to the federal Immigration Department whether a student is attending school and complying with all study permit requirements.

The move is part of recent attempts to restore confidence in Canada’s international student program.

Under the plan unveiled in the Canada Gazette, students must also apply for a new study permit whenever they want to switch schools, and before the start date of the new study program.

In flexing its muscle to ensure compliance, the federal government is treading a fine line, as governance of the education system falls under provincial jurisdiction.

The Immigration Department is responsible for the entry of international students, establishing the conditions that study permit holders must meet while in Canada, and deciding whether a study permit should be issued.

Although Ottawa only grants study permits to “designated learning institutions,” it’s the provinces that designate if a college or university is authorized to admit international students.

As a result, federal officials have had a tough time monitoring what goes on after a student enters Canada. They don’t know if a student is enrolled in the school named in their study permits or if they are actually studying until they need to extend a permit or apply for postgraduation work permits….

Source: Canada to stop processing study permits for colleges, universities that fail to track international students

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Douglas Todd: Canada should warn guest worker, student applicants they’re taking a big gamble

2024/06/26 Leave a comment

Good comments by Kurland, Skuterud and Lee:

….Their plight is the direct fault of Ottawa, say migration specialists.

“Over the past four years the number of people with temporary status in Canada has skyrocketed” because of an executive decision from the office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, says Richard Kurland, a Vancouver immigration lawyer.

“So there is now a chicken in the python problem,” he said.

“People with study permits, and then post-graduate work permits, who can’t qualify for permanent resident status face taking an airplane ride home in shame and poverty. Or they’ll find a way to stay.”

Kurland expects to see “increasing trends of marriages of convenience, refugee claims and applications for humanitarian and compassionate relief.”

A sign of what’s to come might have already arisen at Seneca College in Toronto, where asylum claims from international students increased from 300 in 2022 to almost 700 in 2023. At Kitchener’s Conestoga College, claims jumped from 106 to 450 during that same period.

University of Waterloo economics professor Mikal Skuterud, a specialist in labour, said “lots of non-permanent residents in Canada are seeing their permits expire and the government is worried that large numbers have no intention of leaving the country.”

The Liberal government created the predicament a few years ago, said Skuterud, when it signalled to the world, particularly those with low skills, the easiest way to become a citizen of Canada is to show up as a temporary resident.

“For migrants, Canada’s immigrant selection system now looks like a lottery, in which a work or study permit is the ticket. That’s a big problem. And it wasn’t like this before 2021.”

The Liberal government made the mistake of dismantling the country’s skills-based immigration system because of a “post-pandemic obsession with labour shortages, which is economic nonsense fuelled by corporate Canada,” Skuterud said.

George Lee, an immigration lawyer in Burnaby, said the “federal government created this problem: They’ve brought in too many people. The government wanted to address labour shortages. But now they say,  ‘It’s too much!’ In effect the government is blaming itself.”

Last week, StatCan reported 2.8 million temporary residents in Canada, comprising a record 6.8 per cent of the population. That’s up from 3.5 per cent two years ago.

More than one million are foreign students, most with work permits. Others are classified as “temporary foreign workers” or “international mobility” workers. Another 360,000 are asylum claimants.

In light of Immigration Minister Marc Miller promising this spring to reduce the number of study visas, partly in response to the pressure on housing prices and social services, Kurland said Canada should warn would-be migrants they’re taking a big gamble.

“They now face a loss of their significant investment in time and money. The problem is that the majority of people are unaware that every (newcomer) takes the risk that Canada’s immigration regulations may be changed at any time,” said Kurland, who publishes the newsletter, Lexbase, which previously reported on how Canada’s border services are better tracking when people actually exit the country.

Canada’s problem with an influx of temporary residents is different from what’s facing the U.S. and Europe. Those regions have experienced waves of millions of undocumented migrants. But, for the most part, Canada has explicitly welcomed the record flow of newcomers, most of whom are unskilled.

Skuterud questions the immigration minister’s May announcement that he would like to reduce the number of temporary residents in Canada simply by turning them into permanent residents, particularly through the provinces’ so-called nominee programs.

“The irony of all this is that the government is providing more ad hoc openings to permanent residency to relieve the bulging non-permanent population.” It’s thereby “inadvertently” encouraging more people to start in Canada on a temporary basis with the dream of staying forever, he said.

The surge of temporary residents has not only exacerbated Canada’s housing crisis, Skuterud said rapid population growth, almost entirely from international migration, correlates with Canadian wages staying stagnant.

Lee, who came to Canada on a study visa from China in 1992, supports Canada’s efforts to bring high numbers of international students to the country, saying they’re primed to become engaged citizens since they have learned the culture, to speak English or French, and have developed Canadian-based job skills.

The problem, Lee said, is that when Ottawa tried to address a perceived labour shortage, it went too far and embraced too many newcomers at once. “We need a more balanced approach.”

Kurland suggests Ottawa adopt a “consumer protection” model to more honestly process people who want to move to Canada.

Canada’s immigration department, he said, should ask people who apply online for temporary residency: “If you are planning to possibly immigrate to Canada, do you acknowledge that your plan may fail if Canada immigration law and regulations were to change?”

Skuterud offers a different way forward. He says Ottawa has recently been over-promoting a “two-step immigration” scheme that pushes aspiring immigrants to first enter the country on a temporary basis.

He would like the government to return to emphasizing the more traditional economic-class pathway to permanent resident status, which relied on a transparent, above-board ranking system to select candidates.

Source: Douglas Todd: Canada should warn guest worker, student applicants they’re taking a big gamble

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Globe editorial: The right question to ask about international students and housing

2024/06/24 Leave a comment

Great summary:

…Ultimately, Ottawa must act to fix the incentive structure that has contributed to the lack of affordable housing. As we’ve argued before, students should be limited to on-campus work. Ottawa should not guarantee permanent residency for international students, although they should be able to apply. Decisive action, which to date has been lacking, will eliminate the incentives that have distorted Canada’s international student system.

That action starts with asking the right question: how can Ottawa fix the mess it has made?

Source: The right question to ask about international students and housing

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Krikorian: Donald Trump, Immigration Expansionist

2024/06/24 Leave a comment

From the US right wing largely anti-immigration crowd. Comments on how this approach would “would turn every university (and community college!) into a citizenship-selling machine.” Sounds somewhat familiar to some of our education institutions and provincial ministries?

In a podcast this week with several tech investors, Donald Trump said he wants to give green cards to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. institution. (The full interview is here; the immigration comments start at about 43:40.)

It’s true that his staff has subsequently tried to walk some of this back, but his comments shouldn’t surprise anyone.

While Trump’s explicit endorsement of this specific “staple a green card to every diploma” scheme is new, he’s always made clear, even during his first campaign, that he favored increased immigration. I’ve written in these pages about Trump’s support for expanded immigration here and here. And here. And here.

That said, this week’s comments by Trump really were more preposterous than usual. While he cited “people who are No. 1 in their class in top colleges,” he specifically added that foreign students getting a two-year degree from “junior colleges” should also automatically get green cards. Even lobbyists for higher ed and the tech industry aren’t this brazen. They exploit the appeal of keeping the “best and brightest” among foreign students as a means of protecting broader cheap-labor schemes, but I’ve never heard one seriously argue for giving green cards to graduates of community colleges.

If a foreign student completes a PhD in a hard science from one of the top research universities in the country, I will personally deliver a green card to their home. But someone who got an associate’s degree in communications? It’s laughable.

Trump promised the tech guys that the current situation would “end on Day One,” which is more nonsense, since any staple-a-green-card ploy would require legislation. But since this gimmick has been floating around for years, it’s worth thinking through what it would mean.

It would turn every university (and community college!) into a citizenship-selling machine. There are no numerical limits on the admission of foreign students — who number about 1 million now — and foreign students are already a major profit center for schools large and small.

But if any degree from any school would guarantee a green card (and thus U.S. citizenship, access to welfare, and the ability to bring your relatives), applications would soar at every kind of school, and new schools would pop up like mushrooms. Any residual connection that taxpayer-subsidized U.S. institutions of higher education (which is all of them, public or private) still have to the interests of the United States would be washed away by the gusher of easy foreign money. Good luck getting your kid into Hofstra, let alone Harvard.

Not to mention that elite higher education has become a hive of anti-American villainy — why reward them with a firehose of foreign cash?

In Australia the connection between foreign-student visas and permanent residence is closer to what Trump proposes, though still not automatic. The result is that foreign students account for more than 40 percent of all college enrollment and total close to 3 percent of the entire nation’s population. It’s gotten so bad there — remember, even without the automatic provision of a green card that Trump wants — that even the center-left Labour government is cracking down on foreign-student admissions.

The silver lining might be that we can start a conversation about our whole system of admitting foreign students. What’s the rationale for it? Why take any foreign students at all? Why is there no numerical limit? Why no percentage cap for any individual school? Shouldn’t the American people have a say in who moves here, rather than just university-admissions officers? Why is the hiring of foreign graduates (masquerading as students) subsidized through the Optional Practical Training program? And why is ICE so lackadaisical (even under Trump) in its oversight of foreign students, through the sleepy Student and Exchange Visitor Program?

Ceterum censeo academiam delendam esse. (The academy must be destroyed)

Source: Donald Trump, Immigration Expansionist

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Trump proposes green cards for foreign grads of US colleges, departing from anti-immigrant rhetoric

2024/06/22 Leave a comment

Always hard to judge his thoughts as to the degree of seriousness in following through if elected. More likely that his harder line immigration views will prevail given the nature of organizations and possible senior appointments but essentially a version of PGWP:

Former President Donald Trump said in an interview posted Thursday he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges, a sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoriche typically uses on the campaign trail.

Trump was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the “best and brightest” in a podcast taped Wednesday with venture capitalists and tech investors called the “All-In.”

“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too, anybody graduates from a college. You go there for two years or four years,” he said, vowing to address this concern on day one.

Immigration has been Trump’s signature issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House. His suggestion that he would offer green cards — documents that confer a pathway to U.S. citizenship — to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates would represent a sweeping expansion of America’s immigration system that sharply diverges from his most common messages on foreigners.

Source: Trump proposes green cards for foreign grads of US colleges, departing from anti-immigrant rhetoric

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With dipping study permit approval rates for international students, Canada may not meet its reduced target

2024/06/21 Leave a comment

Classic case of how planned and needed changes/corrections can either under or over shoot planned targets:

Canada’s processing of new study permits has fallen by half since rules were changed to rein in the number of international students, and the decline is so steep that it may not even meet its reduced 2024 target, according to the latest immigration data.

The free fall is the result of a considerable drop in Indian students’ applications and the rising overall refusal rate for study permits, says an analysis of the first-quarter data from the Immigration Department.

“The Canadian international education landscape has evolved considerably over the past six months,” said the insight report released on Wednesday by ApplyBoard, an online marketplace for learning institutions and international students.

“The data is starting to illustrate the effects of these updated policies.”

Since January, Ottawa made a number of changes to slow the intake of international students, with the aim of reducing the new study permits issued by 28 per cent to 291,914 from last year’s 404,668. To reach that target, immigration officials will have to process a total of 552,095 applications, based on a projected 40 per cent refusal rate….

Source: With dipping study permit approval rates for international students, Canada may not meet its reduced target

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Changes are coming for international students’ postgraduation work permits in Canada. Here’s what experts say is needed

2024/05/18 Leave a comment

Comments by Kareem El-Assal, Barbara Jo Caruso and Kanwar Sierah. Always questionable that the government can manage these programs in an agile and dynamic fashion along with inadvertently creating new pressures and interest groups:

For more than a decade, international students have been able to pursue any postsecondary program and still be eligible for an open work permit upon graduation — whether or not their studies are relevant to what the Canadian economy needs.

But that’s about to change.

With a cap in place to rein in the number of international students, Immigration Minister Marc Miller has already hinted at coming changes to the rules on postgraduation work permits.

Those permits have helped make Canada a top destination for foreign students and have been blamed for the country’s runaway international enrolment growth. But experts say Ottawa needs to use them as tools for Canada’s labour market needs, and to provide a clearer path to permanent residence.

“When it comes to international students and the issuance of postgraduate work permits, it’s clear that the work is not done on that end,” Miller told a news conference after a recent meeting his provincial counterparts.

“Provinces said that they need postgraduate work permits (to) have a longer date for people that are in the health-care sector and in certain trades. And I simply said to them, ‘Bring us the data and we’ll be accommodating.’ ”

The access to an open work permit to remain in Canada after graduation has been a strong incentive for people to come study here, as the immigration system has increasingly drawn on candidates already in the country to be permanent residents. It rewards those with Canadian education credentials and work experience.

Over the years, enrolling in post-secondary education has been promoted by recruiters as a shortcut for immigration to Canada, contributing to the exponential growth of international enrolment, which has put pressure on the housing market and other resources.

Following public backlash, Miller in January introduced a two-year cap on the study permits allotted to each province to rein in the international student population, which surpassed one million last year.

The applications Canada is prioritizing

To better align the economic immigration streams with the labour market, Miller has also started prioritizing the permanent resident applications of those with a background in health care; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions; trades; transport; and agriculture and agri-food.

Experts said the postgraduation work permit system could be an effective tool to achieve Ottawa’s objectives in restoring the integrity of the international education program, improving the candidates’ quality in the permanent resident pool and aligning their studies with labour needs.   

The last major changes to the postgraduation work permit program came in April 2008, allowing recent graduates to obtain an open work permit for up to three years — depending on length of their program of study — with no restrictions on location of study or requirement of a job offer.

As a result, an increasing number of international students have gravitated to cheaper and shorter academic programs in colleges with no bearings on Canada’s labour needs, and got stranded in lower-paid jobs in warehouses, restaurants and gas stations.

A recent report by the CBC found that business-related programs accounted for 27 per cent of all study permits approved by the Immigration Department from 2018 to 2023, more than any other field. However, just six per cent of all permits went to foreign students for health sciences, medicine or biological and biomedical sciences programs, while trades and vocational training programs accounted for 1.25 per cent. 

What the experts say we could do

Immigration policy analyst Kareem El-Assal said the government could easily manipulate the durations of the postgraduation work permits to international graduates based on their enrolled programs to gear them toward studying in fields that are in demand.

By lengthening the permits for international students with backgrounds in these occupations while shortening it for those in a field with an oversupply of labour, El-Assal said it would encourage students to pursue education in the targeted disciplines and hence, increase the pool of immigration candidates with the relevant skills that Canada needs. 

“Part of it is going to be blunting the demand and part of is going to be aligning the skills of new students with what we are looking for with the (permanent) immigration system,” noted El-Assal, founder of Section 95, a website dedicated to analyzing Canada’s immigration system.

Since January, Miller has made some changes to the postgraduation work permit program by stopping to issue work authorization to international graduates of public-private college partnerships, which the minister has blamed for the international enrolment surge.

He has also extended the work permits of graduates of master’s degree programs to three years while restricting work permits to spouses of international students in a postgraduate degree program only.

Barbara Jo Caruso, co-president of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association, said that was a smart move.

“We should identify programs that match what the labour needs are,” she said. “If we need a lot of nurses or we need a lot of computer programmers, then those programs should have a pathway for postgraduation work permits.”

However, to make it work, Caruso warned that immigration officials must have clear messaging to prospective students about what academic programs are entitled to postgraduation work authorization and state the information front and centre on the person’s study permit, so they could decide if they still intend to come here.

“That’s really incumbent on the government to be transparent,” she said. “Otherwise, the whole international education program would take a bad hit.”

It doesn’t help that the federal government has continued to promote Canada as a destination to “Study, Explore, Work and Stay” on the Immigration Department’s website and in its international student recruitment posters.

Immigration consultant Kanwar Sierah said he’s concerned that tying postgraduation work permits to specific programs would have little impact on the supply chain of skilled trades workers, as most students learn through apprenticeship, and the post-secondary sector may not have the capacity and infrastructure to to deliver.

“You might be missing a lot of occupations and you might only be targeting just 10 per cent of the trade occupations that offer formal education,” said Sierah, who is also calling for a revamp of provincial apprenticeship programs.

In March, Miller announced the goal of reducing the number of temporary residents in Canada by 20 per cent or 500,000 people by 2027 from the current 2.5 million people, which include hundreds of thousands of postgraduation work permit holders.

Source: Changes are coming for international students’ postgraduation work permits in Canada. Here’s what experts say is needed

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Immigrant workers say future in limbo as government ranking system scores soar

2024/05/16 Leave a comment

Consequences of a failed immigration system that encouraged such hopes and education institutions that catered to international students seeking pathways to permanent residency through often lower skilled business programs. Another disconnect.

And in general, a rise in the express entry cut-off is a sign that the program is working to select more qualified immigrants under the “general” category:

Kanika Maheshwari moved to Brampton from India in 2020 to study business management. Her dream, she says, was to open a jewelry business one day.

Since graduating, she has been working with a logistics company as a sales executive. The 29-year-old has built a life in Canada with her husband, who works as a trader — both are saving to open her jewelry store.

But Maheshwari says her dream is now at risk because her Canadian work permit expires in August, and she hasn’t heard back about her permanent residency (PR) application since she applied last year, due to Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) draws which have been consistently way higher than her score.

One immigration consultant says that is because a record number of people are applying for a PR with higher scores, having collected more points through lengthy and costly application processes that come with no guarantee of success.

Canada accepted a record high of 430,000 PR applications in 2022.

“It feels like I’m going straight and there will be a well where I will fall down,” Maheshwari says.

CRS is a ranking system used by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to score immigrants applying for a permanent residency, using factors like age, level of education, English proficiency and work experience. Every two weeks, IRCC draws a CRS rank and applicants with that score or higher are invited to submit documents to receive a PR card.

All the draws since January this year for the general category have averaged over 540, according to IRCC’s website.

“That’s terribly high. It’s impossible to meet, and it’s really rare,” says Manan Gupta, a Brampton immigration consultant.

Most people with a post-graduate work permit (PGWP) — lasting a maximum of three years — don’t meet the current threshold, Gupta says.

That high score comes at a time when Immigration Minister Marc Miller says permits expiring after 2023 will not be extended, as the ministry decided to end the temporary extension program introduced during the pandemic in 2020 to retain students as workers. Miller made the announcement in December.

Gupta says he’s worried that will lead to hundreds of thousands of workers exiting the country.

“If these temporary foreign workers suddenly exit the labour market, we don’t have people to fill in the same job,” he says.

Canada had 286,000 PGWP holders in 2022 — a similar number of those work permits have been issued annually since 2019 — with over half of them intending to work in Ontario, according to IRCC data.

Few categories prioritized

There have been a slew of changes to immigration policy since Miller’s appointment in July last year. One of them was to maintain the target number of new permanent residents in the country at nearly 500,000 until 2026.

However, there are six priority categories to fill labour shortages: workers in STEM, agriculture, health care, transportation, trade and French speakers.

But Canada’s recruitment of international students was not aligned with its labour shortages, as it welcomed nearly 800,000 students in business programs, compared with 113,000 students in health care and 36,000 students in trades between 2018 and 2023, according to a CBC News analysis of federal data.

“For someone who has given five to six years of their prime youth to Canada, now they are being told you have to go back home and start fresh. Canada is closing doors on them,” Gupta says.

“You don’t know what future lies there. It is choosing between a rock and a hard place.”

‘Band-Aid approach’ needs to stop: consultant

Maheshwari, who lost her mother two years ago, says she provides financial support for her family back home. Her husband is on a spousal permit, which means if she leaves, he also has to return to India.

“Because of the anxiety I can’t sleep the whole night. It’s a huge lot of hell,” she says.

With only three months before her visa expires, learning French or switching professions is not an option, she says.

The couple is working overtime to make ends meet and pay some $30,000 for a lawyer who can advise them through their next possible options.

Gupta says he’s seeing an increasing number of people spending tens of thousands of dollars to bump their score, by hiring immigration consultants or lawyers, to become eligible for different PR streams like Provincial Nomination Program or by completing a Labour Market Impact Assessment.

New data obtained by CBC News show that Canada’s recruitment of international students failed to match the job market. Colleges and universities brought in far more foreign students to business programs than in-demand fields like healthcare or the trades. CBC’s senior reporter at Queen’s Park Mike Crawley has the story.

“If I have to go back; what I have done in four years — made my career, spent a lot of money — will just be a waste, all lost. Not just for me, but for an entire family whom I’m supporting,” Maheshwari says.

While she supports IRCC’s adjustments to immigration programs, she says the country is doing little to retain working immigrants.

Gupta says if the government wants to have skilled workers, it needs to focus on shutting down programs which continue to attract students but do not fill the acute labour shortages.

“The trust is kind of up in the air right now, because every other week there is a new policy being announced. Every other week there is a Band-Aid approach by the government. That approach needs to come to a full stop,” he says.

Source: Immigrant workers say future in limbo as government ranking system scores soar

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