A thread from Stephen Punwasi on how Canada treats its international students. tl;dr: we’re not the good guys.
Highlights:
Canada’s largest source of international students was China, with the 2nd highest concentration of millionaires. Many of the students were from these households, reinforcing that perspective in 🇨🇦.
In 2018, Canadian-China tensions rose & 🇨🇦 lost its appeal in China.
Canada, addicted to the cash, cooked up a $148m plan to replace those students with new ones—primarily in developing countries. Permits to students from India spiked fast… strangely fast. Who are these students? Get a spoon to bite, because this is where it gets f*cked.
India is a FAST growing country, forecast to have the world’s largest middle class soon. It has wealthy families, but they aren’t moving here. An Indian university study found most students looking to study in 🇨🇦 are from low-income farming regions & know little about it.
What they “know” is what the recruiter told them: It’s filled with opportunity, automatic PR, guaranteed gov jobs, etc. Sometimes, the recruiters “get them in” to prestigious schools they could never actually get into. All lies—they’ll say anything for the commission.
Recruiters tell these families their kid is brilliant & just in the wrong country. Find a way to pay their education, & all of the parents’ hard work pays off. Bet the farm, like good parents do. So they round up their savings (& sometimes relatives). They take out loans.
Heck, some literally bet the farm. Oh, some recruiters know people that specialize in high interest loans secured by your farm? Super convenient. Oh, they have a secure stream of capital, a lot of it from investors in 🇨🇦? So lucky, what are the odds‽
So they:
- spent $50k to go to a diploma mill;
- don’t speak english, because of testing fraud;
- have no money;
- often rent mattresses, taking 8/hr shifts w/other students;
- if this doesn’t work, their parents lose everything A TO funeral home sends 5 dead back per month.
Don’t worry. 🇨🇦 will help, right? In 2022, it lifted the restriction of 20 hours of on-campus work, to “help” 🇨🇦 solve its low-wage labor crisis. Those viral videos of hundreds of people waiting in line for a low-wage job interview? Those are mostly international students.
To reiterate, 🇨🇦 scoured the world for poor families. Promised opportunity if they risked everything. It turns out there was no opportunity, so now they’re stuck paying off debt while most of their income is consumed by shelter costs. It sounds familiar, but why evades me
I find the breathless sky-falling tone really pairs well with unsourced facts.
What’s Canada supposed to do again? Test more? Choose people from less-needy neighbourhoods? Control the job market directly? Remind me where the Fed missed the mark specifically. Saying “people cheated and got cheated and some died” is barely above an appeal to charity.
We’ve created the visa program. It’s our responsibility to ensure it isn’t being used to exploit people.
Universities and colleges pay agents a commission to recruit students. That’s a clear conflict of interest. We should disallow that.
Predatory colleges are opening to recruit students, and then fleecing them. We should put an end to that. Perhaps through regulation. Maybe certification. I dunno. But the problem comes up repeatedly, so we need to deal with it.
Similarly, students can’t find housing when they get here, or are being charged above-market rents by shitty landlords. Colleges should be required to provide on-campus housing for students (as recommended by the National Housing Accord).
We created the problem. We should solve it.
Ostrich. If you don’t think that government policy is directly driving the massive influx of poor and victimized foreign students, you’re either aggressively obtuse, or aggressively ignorant. Either way, lurk moar. I mean, I suppose you think this is a coincidence that this all happened directly after massive policy changes from both Provincial and Federal governments that were explicitly, openly intended to drive up enrollment in diploma mills.
Canada is being aggressively shitty to other countries, and were dressing it up as charity.
I feel like the main reason for this policy is to avoid government spending on post-secondary institutions, but I don’t have any evidence of that.
Yeah that’s why it’s happening in all countries
Yeah, he keeps saying that 🇨🇦 did this and 🇨🇦 did that, but this isn’t an autocratic country and 🇨🇦 can’t just wave a wand and end all crime/fraud. It’s a shame, the Canadian government and law enforcement should do better, but it’s not 🇨🇦’s fault.
It is entirely our fault.
The federal government created the visa program. The provincial governments administer the universities and colleges. Either could put reasonable requirements in place: agents should receive a commission for recruiting students. Either could prevent private fly-by-night colleges from admitting students on a visa.
Both levels of government are turning a blind eye to the problem. Voters are only seeing it now because we’re hearing these egregious stories.