Introduction to Special Issue Introduction au numéro spécial

This special issue of Comparative and International Education/Éducation comparée et internationale critically examines where international students from Asia fit within broader initiatives of internationalization, Indigenization and decolonization, and equity, diversity, and inclusion in Canada’s colleges and universities. The goal is to contextualize some of the challenges they face, to understand how they fit within institutional priorities, and to examine knowledges, strategies, structures, and spaces from critical perspectives. The seven papers in this issue, as described in the next section, were selected for their examination and exposition of the connections and disconnections between actors in the domain of international education and for provoking questions about the lack of coherence among internationalization, Indigenization, and equity priorities within institutions. In this section, we offer a justification for the focus on students from Asia, namely India and China, and argue for situating their experiences of recruitment, exclusion, and marginalization within a decolonizing and equity, diversity, and inclusion framework. International students are an increasing presence in educational institutions at all levels across the country and roughly half of over 700,000 international students come from Asia, predominantly India and China (Government of Canada, 2019). Part of the exponential rise in their numbers can be attributed to the launch of a centralized international education strategy by the federal government in 2014 that provided a national vision to the recruitment and retention of international students and one that identified target markets such as China, India, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea, among others, for primarily economic benefits (Government of Canada, 2014). The enrollment trend at the postsecondary level, which is the level of interest in this special issue, is astonishing with numbers of students from East, Southeast, and South Asia rising nearly four-fold within a decade, from just over 66,000 to over 250,000 students between 2010 and 2019 (Statistics Canada, 2022a). From India, roughly 10,000 students were enrolled in a college or university program in 2010 compared to over 117,000 in 2019. From China, the enrollment numbers show approximately 35,000 students in 2010 and over 90,000 in 2019. Although numbers alone do not justify attention on a population, they do raise questions about the role of institutions and the state in attracting flows from particular places and in their reception and integration of those, and other, students, who arrive in Canada, a place with a complex history that is undergoing social change. For its part, the federal government updated its 2014 strategy with one in 2019 titled, Building on Success: International Education Strategy 2019–2024, which lauded Canada’s progress, noting that the number of international students to Canada increased by 68% between 2014 and 2018 (Government of Canada, 2019). Now a shared vision between the departments of International Trade Diversification; Employment, Workforce Development and Labour; and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, the strategy reemphasized international education as crucial to the country’s economic prospects and called more specifically for a diversification of markets. As then-Minister of International Trade Diversification James Gordon Carr indicated, one of the three priority activities is to “diversify the countries from which international students come to Canada, as well as their fields, levels of study, and location of study within Canada” (Government of Canada, 2019, p. i). These two federal strategies have been used in recent scholarship as starting points to better grasp what a Canadian approach to international education means. However, at times, they have been posited uncritically as sole foundational moments to Canada’s recruitment of international students. Well before these strategies, provinces, colleges, and universities have framed international students as primarily economic actors, with a sustained interest in recruiting from Asian countries (see Chen, 2008; Francis, 1993). …