Editorial

On January 22, the federal government of Canada announced a cap on student permits granted over the next 2 years. The cap will see permits approved for about 360,000 undergraduate students for 2024, a reduction of 35% from the previous year (Wherry, 2024). As a reference point, over a million international students (at all levels of study) were enrolled in Canadian educational institutions in 2023, an increase of 29% over the previous year (CBIE, n.d.). The cuts are meant to target “bad actors,” the private institutions who recruit increasing numbers of international students, and exploit them by charging excessive fees, providing poor quality education with few or no support services. In the worst reported cases, agents have defrauded students by promising falsified admission to private or public institutions. The minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship of Canada, Marc Miller, described them as “the diploma equivalent of puppy mills” continuing, “[i]t’s a bit of a mess and it’s time to reign it in” (Wherry, 2024). We agree that unethical recruitment practices and the exploitation of vulnerable international students must be called out and stopped. There’s more to this issue, however, that warrant attention. The issue of exploitation of international students, whether by recruiting agents or by private schools/institutions, is hardly new. Scholars and the media have been reporting on this for a few years, highlighting the hardships, racism, and financial difficulties experienced by international students. Provincial and federal governments, however, did not see this as an issue of concern, let alone act on what was building up into a crisis situation for students. Why the outrage and concern now? What is different? As we noted in an editorial a few months ago (McCartney et al., 2023), public anger has been building over the past year against international students and new immigrants who are being blamed for the housing crisis in Canada. As history has shown us, newcomers to Canada have often been scapegoated for prevailing social problems, and the media have played a role in creating the moral panics regarding international students. Once considered “the competition” in displacing local students and taking up seats in universities and colleges (Stein & Andreotti, 2016), they are now “the competition” taking up scarce rental housing. While the housing crisis is real for everyone, international students are hardly the cause, and, in fact, are themselves often forced to live far from school and in overcrowded shared spaces. It is clear that the pushback against increasing numbers of international students coming to communities that don’t have the capacity to accommodate them, and the hysteria surrounding the rental housing market is the main reason for the timing of this new federal announcement. The cap on international student permits and assurances from some Canadian provinces about addressing licensing and regulatory measures for private schools will be a good start, but this is just one aspect of a complex problem. Canadian colleges and universities are also complicit in the unbridled growth of the international student market over the years. As scholars in international higher education have pointed to over the past two decades, public funding for higher education has been decreasing over the past couple of decades, adding pressure on institutions to become more entrepreneurial. They have now become overly dependent on revenue from international students, leaving themselves open to financial vulnerability at times of threat. The pandemic and its aftermath were one such threat, leading to low enrollments across Canada and subsequent budget cuts in many institutions this year. Budget cuts most commonly affect services to underserved groups, programs and courses that, for example, maintain commitments to equity, …