Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller speaks during a news conference, in Ottawa on Sept. 18.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
In an interview aired Sunday on Global TV, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that a “growing number” of foreign students are filing for refugee status, a situation he described as “alarming.”
Last year, more than 12,500 foreign students in Canada made refugee claims, an increase of nearly 600 per cent compared with 2018.
According to data provided by the Immigration department, the first eight months of 2024 have seen 12,915 asylum claims from people on a study permit.
It’s one more example of how the visa-student program has been run with insufficient consideration given to predictable, even inevitable, side effects.
Mr. Miller has moved, albeit slowly, to tighten up the system he inherited. But that system spent the past decade, particularly during the free-for-all from 2021 to 2023, planting a vast garden of unintended consequences. It is just starting to fruit. A bumper harvest is coming.
Most of the problems derive from something simple: a failure to count. Canada’s temporary immigration streams are now much larger than the permanent stream. That matters because most temporary residents – no matter the fine print they agreed to in order to get their visas – want to become permanent residents. That’s why they came.
Foreign students are not paying tuition to low-fidelity institutions of higher education under the mistaken impression that a certificate from these schools, plus pouring coffee at Tim Hortons, equals world-beating skills they can take back home. They came in the hope of staying, and thought that’s what they were buying.
But the number of permanent residence places – roughly 500,000 a year, and with many of those spots reserved for immigrants directly from overseas – is considerably smaller than the number of temporary residents, which was a whopping 2.8 million this past spring. The math doesn’t work.
It’s like a Taylor Swift concert where the organizers got everything backward. First, they let hundreds of thousands of people into the stadium. Then, they remembered they had only a fraction of that number of seats available for tonight’s show. And now they hope those without a ticket will quietly leave.
Good luck with that.
About half of the 2.8 million temporary residents are either visa students or former students with a postgraduate work permit. Some will get permanent residency but many will not. Hundreds of thousands will see their visas run out in the coming months and years. Some may follow the rules and go home. Many will not.
That should come as no surprise. Desperate people from poor countries thought tuition at Puppy Mill College, paired with that job at Tim Hortons, meant Canadian citizenship, or at least a good shot at it.
Canada allowed and encouraged a sloppy cash grab, with private businesses and public colleges selling our highest public good: citizenship. But the targeted students were mostly not the people our immigration system was supposed to be chasing after, namely the best and brightest.
The University of Waterloo, the “MIT of the North,” a best-and-brightest institution if there ever was one, got permits for 2,043 new visa students in 2019. Four years later, as the number of foreign students in Canada exploded, Waterloo’s numbers actually fell, to fewer than 1,900.
Meanwhile, at nearby Conestoga College, a public institution created to offer accessible and practical education to the citizens of the Kitchener-Waterloo region, new student permits exploded from an already excessive 7,886 in 2019 to nearly 32,000 in 2023.
The student visa system should be about attracting people who are, or will become, more educated and skilled than the average Canadian, earning higher future incomes and boosting GDP per capita. It should be about attracting top students who have options. But that’s not what Ottawa, and in this case the government of Ontario, chose.
Even if the goal is simply raising a lot of money, then Waterloo and universities like it should be getting most of the now-limited pool of visas. Conestoga College’s annual tuition is $15,000 to $16,000 a year for international students. Waterloo annual undergraduate tuition and fees for non-Canadians? Depending on the program, between $50,000 and $73,000.
The coming months and years are likely to bring two growing trends.
There will be increasing numbers of formerly legal temporary residents who, rather than going home when their visas expire, will try to remain as illegal and underground permanent residents. And there will be a spike in the number of people from those groups who attempt to make their status legal and permanent via a refugee claim.
The figures I obtained from the Immigration department show 119,835 refugee claims made so far this year by people on temporary residence permits.
As of last month, the Immigration and Refugee Board reported a backlog of more than 240,000 cases – up from just over 60,000 two years ago. The board decides about 6,000 cases per month, and over the last six months, it has received new cases at three times that rate.
You can do the math, and so can hundreds of thousands of people here on temporary visas.
We should have been focusing on the MITs of the North. Instead, we prioritized the Puppy Mills of Southwestern Ontario. With predictable consequences.