Editorial Éditorial

As we approach another academic year, it feels like international education is facing new challenges. In Canada the conversation about international students has been drawn into the longstanding housing crisis, and it threatens to become a deeply bitter challenge to nation-wide attempts to increase international student numbers. Educational policy analysts such as Alex Usher have been suggesting that international student recruitment is contributing to housing costs for quite a while (for example: https://higheredstrategy.com/the-reckoning), but recently this idea has gained more mainstream attention. An August story in Canada’s most conservative national newspaper, The National Post, was titled “Record levels of international students straining Canada’s housing supply further” (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/record-international-students-straining-housing-supply). Though the article itself is slightly more moderate, recognizing that the housing crisis predates the arrival of international students, there is no acknowledgement that the students themselves are also victims of the crisis. This is despite the fact that only two weeks earlier the same newspaper had published the distressing story of an international student who had been rendered houseless and was sleeping under a bridge in Toronto (https://nationalpost.com/news/toronto-international-student-sleeping-under-bridge-helped-by-strangers). There is no question that there is a housing crisis in Canada, as there is in many countries around the world. As Alex Usher points out, institutions have been recruiting international students with little concern about where they would live, and as this may indeed be causing a “reckoning” for international education in Canada. Certainly there is evidence on social media that there is a growing anger towards international students around housing. Angry Reddit threads blaming temporary residents of Canada for skyrocketing rents are easy to find, and every announcement of international student numbers on X/twitter gets replies about housing. An August Canadian Press story suggests that the Federal government is considering limiting international students, partly to manage pushback against its immigration policies (https://biv.com/article/2023/08/housing-crisis-feds-stick-immigration-plan-rethink-international-student-flows). International students are (as they have often been in the past) being treated as a political football, with little regard for their wellbeing or value as members of Canada’s academic communities. The deep irony here is that international student mobility and the housing crisis are linked, but not in the way popular discourse in Canada suggests. Blaming international students for housing costs is blaming the symptom for the disease. The underlying system that has created the housing crisis is the very system that drives the constant demand for more international students. The connection between the end of public housing in the 1980s and the profit orientation of new housing in Canada today exactly parallels the stagnation of public funding to post-secondary education and the increasing reliance on international students paying differential fees. In this connected interwoven crisis international students are not the cause or even the catalyst for housing prices but are instead themselves also victims of the problems created by a capitalist housing market and a capitalist education system. Distressingly, there are few voices speaking up for international students as the opprobrium builds. Colleges and universities seem to have little public response. Popular media discussions of international students and the threat they pose to the Canadian housing market never feature college or university representatives explaining the academic benefits of hosting students from around the world. It has long been argued by commentators from all perspectives that Canadian institutions were primarily motivated by the financial, rather than academic, benefits of international student mobility. As a result, now that the time has come to defend international students on their intrinsic value as learners, scholars, and members of our community, and to try to protect them from scapegoating, institutions appear to have little defence …