Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat: Student Migration and Canadian Universities by The Racialization of Asian International Students Collective (Fernwood Publishing, ships preorders in May 2026).
After many years of research, the Racialization of Asian International Students Collective (RAIS) has put together a very important book about the circumstances student migrants in Canada are facing. The focus of this analysis is on the interlocking forms of discrimination and exclusion, both societal and institutional, that plague the immigration landscape and prevent migrants from becoming full citizens, thus relegating them to treatment as second-class citizens. It examines the issues regarding the treatment of immigrants recognized by the mainstream, but it also brings to the fore many underlying issues that arise from both the bureaucratic processes that police migration and the ideologies that justify these processes themselves.
Instead of addressing the issues faced by immigrants, there has been a bipartisan push in the Canadian government to scapegoat immigrants for the ills inherent to capitalism. The truth is obscured by both the Conservatives and Liberals, who would rather keep exploiting migrant labour and acquiescing to corporate landlords’ demands than recognizing the wage theft and housing crises. This book unveils that truth:
“As education or student migrants — especially racialized ones — come to Canada, they are increasingly blamed for long-standing problems and issues plaguing Canadian society, such as affordable housing and the high cost of living.”
An education system built for cash cows
Ever since the 1990s, the model for funding universities in Canada has been a neoliberal one. The provincial governments have steadily decreased funding for universities, which is a trend that can be seen in current events, as Premier Doug Ford has just cut OSAP grants from a maximum of 85% of tuition to 25%. However, this is not a phenomenon that can be reduced to one party or another — it has happened across provinces and under many different banners. At the same time, certain provinces have given their universities more freedom in deciding how much international tuition costs.
This decrease in public funding has forced the universities to seek funding elsewhere, and with the freedom to increase the cost of tuition for international students (and the increase of tuition for domestic students perceived as “politically untenable”), the only logical path being set for them by this system was to push for more international students:
“In the Canadian context, internationalization is intrinsically linked to framing international students as a source of revenue to compensate for the decline in public funding without changing the operations and growth plans of institutions, and it is generally limited to the recruitment and retention of international students”
This fact is overlooked by many who blame the current economic crises on immigrants — the system itself invited them in.
Inviting immigrants to Canada
The RAIS then outlines the history of the hypocritical turn that the Canadian government underwent regarding immigrants. With the new neoliberal model for university funding based on international students’ tuition fees, the Canadian government decided to lean into it. In 2008, the Canadian Experience Class, a permanent residency (PR) pathway for international students, was introduced. This program made graduates from Canadian universities with work experience eligible for PR applications:
“During this period, when education migration became federalized, the federal government’s role in facilitating the recruitment of international students also grew to include the establishment of various federal-provincial agreements to boost recruitment and retention and the creation of the post-graduate work permit.”
Then, during the start of the COVID pandemic and lockdown, Canada used this historically high number of student migrants as frontline workers (many of whom were Chinese students — the people who bore the brunt of the “China Virus” framing). In 2021, Marco Mendicino, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), released a statement to international students saying, “We don’t just want you to study here, we want you to stay here.”
The government recognized that a pool of talent that includes candidates from around the globe would lead to more competent labourers in the Canadian economy than a pool of talent confined to the borders of Canada. International candidates also help bolster relations with Canada’s geopolitical allies and bring money from their own countries’ economies into the Canadian economy (in 2022, international students spent $37.3 billion in Canada, 1.2 percent of Canada’s GDP that year).
But when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Marc Miller as Minister of the IRCC in 2023, the narrative switched again.
From cash cows to scapegoats
“As the country emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic[…] student migrants, some of whom had been hailed as frontline heroes during the pandemic, started to be blamed for societal ills such as increased crime rates, the housing crisis and crisis of affordability, and the strain on food banks and social services. Indeed, we are writing this at a time when the Canadian state and publics across the country have scapegoated the international students for many enduring social and public policy crises.”
The shift in attitude toward student migrants came with a cap on the amount of postsecondary students allowed visas in 2024. Study permits were reduced by 35 percent, and then by a further 10 percent the following year, paired with “stricter financial eligibility requirements[…] restricted open work permit eligibility for spouses[…], and a decrease in the number of hours they are allowed to work off campus.” These changes drastically reduced the amount of international students that Canadian institutions recruited. They did not result in more domestic students enrolling in university. Thanks to the overreliance on international tuition to fund universities and colleges, these changes have put these institutions at risk:
“As we write, the impacts of these policies are being felt across the postsecondary sector, and they are helping to shed light on the contributions international students make to Canada as well as the extent of Canada’s reliance on these contributions.”
During this period of increased anti-immigration policy, racism towards student migrants has increased. However, the RAIS is insistent on mentioning that regardless of this shift in attitude, we must not look at the previous system of students as cash cows with nostalgia. “[…] we maintain that the about-face in higher education migration policies is consistent with developments in Canadian society and the use of immigration and higher education as a nation-building tool.”
The RAIS also insists that this shift towards scapegoating must be contextualized as one step in a long line of Canadian realities. Racism and settler-colonialism existed in Canada long before this shift happened, and as such it only reinforces pre-existing forms of oppression.
Humanizing migrants
The research conducted for this book includes many interviews with students in which they reported their experiences in a descriptive manner. The decision to include some of these testimonies in the book goes a long way to remind us that immigrants are not just numbers on a Statistics Canada report or an abstract mass for media pundits to pontificate about, but real people who have suffered real discrimination.
These migrants told stories of discrimination and exclusion from government and university programs afforded to domestic students, but they also told stories about inclusion into other racialized communities and their successes finding support systems in groups that were able to sympathize with them. Many student migrants found themselves in a landscape where the domestic students they tried to form communities with would exclude them, some out of chauvinism, and others out of already having enough friends through a lifetime of socializing in Canada.
These stories also illuminated the different types of discrimination that people could be subject to: blame for the COVID pandemic, mockery of their language skills, exclusion from job prospects, and tired racist nicknames. Some people were mocked for supposedly being rich, while they were working full-time jobs alongside studying in order to pay for their education and housing. Others were met with death threats on the street for being on the wrong side of town. Many of these students reacted with ambivalence to their experiences with racism, only realizing they have been victims of discrimination after casually describing their experiences out loud and having someone else point it out. Another section of the students simply accepted that they would be subject to racial discrimination and viewed it as part of the deal. They never saw it as a systemic issue, only as isolated incidents.
But some other stories told of finding community, like one specific Asian student migrant, who decided to attend a Mi’kmaw gathering and found themselves welcome there. After spending more time with the Mi’kmaq students, they even found a romantic partner and began studying the language and creating resources to make learning it more accessible for other Chinese people.
The path forward
In the book, the Racialization of Asian International Students Collective proposes a program with pathways for Canada to address this issue. It includes abstract propositions, which they recognize would take a long time and face many more systemic challenges, as well as concrete proposals that can be implemented by a government that takes this issue seriously.
Firstly, they recognize that the issues of discrimination against and exploitation of student migrants can never be resolved while racism and exclusion are still alive and well in Canada. This invites the question as to whether this issue can be resolved under capitalism, a system that resorts to chauvinism, imperialism, and austerity when it faces economic crises and stagnation.
However, they set out a concrete step forward in addressing these issues by proposing a system where “scholarships, bursaries, and employment opportunities are not limited to students born in Canada or who currently hold permanent residency status.” The exclusion of student migrants from these programs is especially unjust when one takes into consideration the fact that they pay between four and five times more tuition than domestic students.
This last point is another issue to address: the neoliberal model for university funding necessarily leads to the exploitation of student migrants through exorbitant tuition costs. The responsibility of funding education must be taken seriously by provincial governments.
Universities also need to take the inclusion of student migrants into Canadian society more seriously, not just giving them a broad but incomplete list of resources for them to inspect and be overwhelmed by, but by also crafting programs that make student migrants’ new society actively include them.
The Canadian government also needs to make student migrants eligible for settlement services, like all other newcomers to Canada, and their scapegoating must be challenged and rebutted.
Other chapters analyze the exclusion of student migrants from EDI initiatives, the difference between universities’ rhetoric and practice regarding student migrants’ inclusion in Canadian society, and the mythology built around Canada’s racial diversity, which challenges its reality as a white supremacist nation.
Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat by The Racialization of Asian International Students Collective comes out via Fernwood Publishing in May.
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