After years of deliberately drawing in more international students to be used as cheap labour and to fill the coffers of universities, the Liberal government has implemented a drastic crackdown leaving tens of thousands of students at risk of deportation.
Attacks
The past year has seen an onslaught of restrictions month after month. In December, Liberals required international students to prove access to $20,635 rather than the $10,000 which had been required for two decades. Then, in January, they reduced the number of study permits issued by 35 per cent. In April, they restricted the amount of hours that international students are allowed to work to 20 hours a week.
These financial restrictions spell poverty and desperation for thousands of already struggling students.
And finally, on Sept. 18, they announced an additional 10 per cent reduction in study permits for next year, as well as restrictions on who can receive Post Graduate Work Permits (PGWP), which offer a path to permanent residency for international students. An estimated 70,000 to 130,000 international students holding PGWPs will see them expire in the next two years—making them vulnerable to deportation.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller has cited the need to clamp down on “diploma mills”, low-quality colleges which lure students in with the often false promise of residency or citizenship. But it’s not like the government didn’t know about this problem. In fact, they have encouraged it.
Exploitation
Canadian universities have been increasingly relying on the exploitation of international students to fund their operations, while the government has been incentivizing those students to stay and work in order to bolster the economy.
In the 1980s, provinces began to deregulate international student tuition, leaving it up to universities to set their own rates. Naturally, they chose to hike those rates, and increasingly relied on the exploitation of international students for their revenue as their funding was cut. In fact, international students’ tuition made up for 100 per cent of increased operating expenditures from 2007 to 2021. Today, international students pay four times more on average than domestic students for the same education.
At the same time, they are exploited as a pool of cheap labour. During the pandemic, the Liberals granted permanent residency to 90,000 temporary workers and Post Graduate Work Permit holders in 2021 in order to address labour shortages. They then continued to increase the number of PGWPs issued until there were 396,235 in 2023—triple the number from 2018.
The Liberals were not simply passively allowing universities drawing in foreign labour, they were actively promoting it. But now, they have done a complete 180 and as Miller puts it, “The logic for having uncapped or uncontrolled draws from abroad is no longer there.” This demonstrates clearly that all of the statements from Trudeau about how welcoming Canada is to immigrants was just empty pandering.
The Canadian ruling class only stood for a more open policy as long as they could profit from it – but now that the economy has taken a turn for the worse the Liberals have turned to scapegoating immigrants—in essence agreeing with the Conservatives. Indeed, the entire argument of the government is that international students are “putting pressure” on our housing, healthcare systems, and other infrastructure. But it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the problems with housing and the underfunding of healthcare and other social services long predates the current situation.
These attacks on international students will not make the lives of regular people any better. Any capitalist government, Conservative or Liberal, will continue to ransack public services and allow the capitalists to fleece us for all we’re worth. Deporting international students won’t change this.
Untenable status quo
In fact, the university bosses will no doubt attempt to recover the lost money from international students by hiking tuition for domestic students and cutting hundreds of jobs on campus. In effect, they would be forcing students to pay for the crackdown on immigration with their own tuition money.
However, it is not enough on its own to demand that international students be given the right to stay and to work. Under the current conditions, this would mean demanding the right for international students to pay extortionate tuition rates and work hyper-exploitative jobs to get by.
This is not a status quo we can accept. There is more than enough wealth in society to provide decent homes, good jobs and free education for all Canadians and new arrivals equally. The real culprits are not the poor immigrant who has sacrificed a great deal to come to Canada to study and work, but the rich capitalist who makes record profits while we all suffer.
We should also ask why so many youth feel the need to emigrate across the globe for a chance at a better future. It is no accident that millions look to emigrate to countries like Canada for a better job or education. The western imperialist bloc of which Canada is a part of has pillaged countries across the world, leaving little opportunity for a good life for hundreds of millions of people. This has left young people the world over with no other choice but to eke out a living in the belly of the imperialist beast.
We must not only demand equal democratic rights for those seeking a future here, but fight for the overthrow of the imperialists who stole their future—and ours—in the first place.
