Migrant students: from cash-cow to scapegoat

There is a rising anti-immigrant movement in Canada that has also been focused on migrant students. Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller slashed the numbers of migrant workers, international students and refugees allowed to enter Canada – fuelling Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and the far-right, while the NDP has remained silent.

At the same time, we also see some incredible fightback, like the students in Brampton, with the Naujawan Support Network, who have been camping for one month now, demanding dignity and fairness.

What has led to this situation? Knowing that is crucial to knowing how we can fight back. And the answer lies in the market economics of the post-secondary education system in Canada.

Neoliberal austerity
This story begins in 1988. At that time, government funding accounted for roughly 84 percent of an average university budget. But in the 2000s, that figure dropped to just over 50 percent, a 30 percent drop.

What happened in the 1990s?

Well, Conservative premier of Ontario Mike Harris and Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney happened.

This chart shows how public funding to universities was drastically reduced between 1995 to 2000. To make up for that money, the tuition fees paid by Canadian students increased at the exact same rate. In other words, this was an attack on public education. Public funding was slashed, and the cost of education was offloaded onto students and their families.

This is not something that Mike Harris introduced, this is also the story from 1990-95 under the New Democratic government of Bob Rae. Only Harris was much more shameless in how he went about it.

There were similar developments in other provinces. As recession hit Canada in 1990, the provinces made budget cuts including to public education. The recession itself was driven by Mulroney’s austerity, who along with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the holy trinity of a neoliberal austerity.
So, at the turn of the millennium, government funding was slashed and the universities were now made to rely on increasing tuition fees, but also turning to private donations from wealthy individuals, alumni and corporations to fund their operations.

This made post-secondary education extremely expensive for working people and families. This is also how the system made domestic students dependent on student debt.

Cash cows
So what do the universities do now to fund their operations?

They targeted migrant students as “cash cows”. Suddenly, ‘internationalization’ became a buzzword. All the universities and colleges begin to draft up ‘Strategic Plans’ to recruit more and more migrant students.

From 2013 to 2023, the number of migrant students in Canada increased by 200%. And these students were charged twice, thrice, and sometimes five times the tuition fees as our domestic colleagues.

In 2018, tuition fees and rental expenses that migrant students paid into the Canadian economy made up $21.6 billion of Canada’s GDP. In 2022, this figure was $31 billion. In other words, the expenditures by international students brought more revenue into Canada’s economy than from the exports of auto parts, lumber, or aircraft.

An average migrant student funnels $30,000 a year into the Canadian economy. This is basically the money that kept many Canadian post-secondary institutions afloat.

Most of the students also come from the countries that were once colonized by the British and French Empires. So, what has happened here must really be seen as a neocolonial transfer of wealth from the old colonies back into the Empire.

Let us sit with that for a moment.

Migrant students are migrant workers
In addition to this being an education issue, this is also a labour issue. Over the last few years, with the rise in cost of living in Canada, migrant students have been forced into working all the dangerous and minimum-wage jobs. We know that the Canadian food economy is built on temporary migrant labour: from farmworkers to many of the transport workers, to fast-food retail workers, to gig economy delivery workers. We saw how the entire system was dependent on migrant labour – temporary, precarious, racialized migrant labour – during the pandemic shutdown.

So this is also not just about post-secondary education. This is also about racism in the labour market.

In 2019, the Federal Government released a report titled ‘Building on Success: International Education Strategy (2019-2024)’. It says: “Due in part to the aging of Canada’s population, immigration is required for workforce growth. International students make excellent candidates for permanent residency: they are relatively young, proficient in at least one official language, have Canadian educational qualifications, and can help address this country’s current and pending labour market needs.”

This is how the Federal Government has dangled this idea of ‘permanent residency’ as a carrot, only to use migrant students to save the post-secondary education system from going bankrupt and exploit their labour. And now Marc Miller and Justin Trudeau say permanent residency was never a promise? Having worked so hard in this country, having saved its post-secondary education system from a crisis, having kept the economy afloat during the pandemic, the students must all go back now, just so you can try to win another term in the office? It's disgusting. This is why the slogan that the students at Naujawan Support Network have raised is so powerful. Good Enough to Work, Good Enough to Stay!

This is the story of the crisis of the university system. How Brian Mulroney pushed an entire country’s education into a long-term crisis, the same union-busting, neoliberal politician who sent the military to the siege of Kahnesatake (known as the Oka Crisis). It is this same Mulroney that Poilievre has called “our greatest ever statesmen”. Our struggles were interlinked then, and are interlinked today. This is capitalism. It is inherently prone to crisis, and when it faces the crisis, it has to try and push it into the future, or find some way to put a bandaid. The bandaid was migrant student exploitation. But the crisis always returns.

Another funding crisis
And it has returned today. The Liberal government has slashed migrant student study permits, and the universities are slipping once more into a deep budget crisis.
Within one week of the Federal government announcing their recruitment freeze, Queen’s University decided that they will no longer fund Masters’ research even for domestic students. This affects all of us. We should know that this crisis is an artificial scarcity. They have millions of dollars invested in the genocide of Palestinians, and no means to run a university? They can invent new and redundant positions in the upper administration, paying them $200,000 a year, but they cannot give a Masters student funding to do their research?

The failures of the capitalist system – the recession in the 1990s and the crisis in 2008 – leads us to where we are in 2024. The same system that exploits migrant students, is also the system responsible for domestic students’ debt, it is also the system that has tried to destroy the union movement, and it is also the system that stole Indigenous land and sends the military and RCMP to attack Indigenous peoples.