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