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The Racialization of Asian International Students (RAIS) Collective is a team of racialized and non-racialized postsecondary educators, researchers and students, including student migrants from Asia, all located in Canada. Dedicated to understanding the connections between the experiences of student migrants and other Canadian realities, including settler colonialism, racism, sexism, classism and ableism, the RAIS Collective and its individual members are committed to advocating for better support for student migrants through activism.

For issue #167 of The Internationalist, we feature an excerpt from Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat. Here, they explain how Canadian international student recruitment has transformed from a strategic economic fix for underfunded universities into a contentious national policy, marked by rapid growth, soaring fees, and a recent political shift that blames migrant students for societal crises.

The number of international students and their contributions to the Canadian economy have increased significantly in the last twenty years. From 2010 to 2023, the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE) recorded a 119 percent increase in the number of international students in Canada, with close to 495,000 international students in Canada in 2017 at all levels of study (CBIE 2018). Since then, these trends have continued, reaching more than one million international students at all levels of study in 2023 (CBIE 2023a; 2024). Across the Canadian postsecondary sector, there were 620,000 international students both in 2019 and 2021 (Crossman et al. 2022). From 2000 to 2009, the number of international students enrolled in universities increased 5 to 8 percent per year, with a 17 percent jump recorded in 2019 (Kim et al. 2024, 3). From 2022 to 2023, the number increased by 29 percent (CBIE 2023a; 2024). Most of these students were from countries in Asia, which was in line with the recruitment strategies promoted and facilitated by Canadian universities and governments. In 2019 alone, 60 percent were either South Asian or East Asian, at 33 percent and 27 percent, respectively.

It is well documented that such increases in the recruitment of international students by Canadian universities have been motivated, especially since the 1990s, by a gradual loss of public funding, increased privatization and marketization of the sector, and competition between postsecondary institutions (Montsion and Caneo 2024). Conceived colloquially as cash cows, international students from countries that are considered to have a high demand for high-quality education came to be identified by Canadian universities as a spatial fix to continue their operations and to expand without addressing these core problems, such as chronic provincial underfunding of higher education (Shahrokni et al. 2022). In concrete terms, this spatial fix meant raising tuition fees for international students to cover operational deficits and systemic constraints, such as the political untenability to raise tuition rates for domestic students. This marketization of the Canadian postsecondary sector — the apex of which we witnessed during the research for this project — was initiated in the 1970s with the introduction of a differential fee structure for international students (see Chapters 2 and 3 for more details). For instance, the University of Toronto introduced differential fees for international students in 1977, setting the stage for Canadian universities, with government support, to “mine international students for cash” (Chua 2022). In the 1990s, the Ontario government officially acknowledged this instrumentalization of international students, both by excluding them from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan in 1994 and by allowing each university to fix the international tuition fee rates in 1996. 

At the federal level, the 1990s were the years when Team Canada missions, Canada Education Centres, and the branding of Canadian education overseas were introduced (Kim et al. 2024). From the early 2000s onward, Canada began actively participating in the so-called global race for skills or war for talent. Also, the federal government launched a more skills-based immigration policy, and various commissioned reports articulated the need for skills to grow Canada’s knowledge-based economy (Chatterjee 2025). In 2008, the Canadian government launched the Canadian Experience Class as a two-tier pathway for permanent residency for international students, a harbinger of institutionalizing a Canadian edugration framework through which migration for education purposes serves as a pathway to temporary labour migration and eventually, permanent status (Brunner 2021; discussed in Chapter 2). 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 federalprovincial agreements to boost recruitment and retention and the creation of the post-graduate work permit. 

In the decade that followed, such arrangements and permits became significant policy avenues through which a steady stream of student migrants entered Canada. Tellingly, in 2016, the president of Universities Canada referred to Canadian universities as “the Pier 21 of the 21st century” (quoted in Brunner 2022). Specifically, the Government of Canada has developed two national strategies — one by a Conservative government and the other by a Liberal government — since 2014 to support higher education institutions’ recruitment and retention of international students, and it is supposedly working on a third strategy. These strategies are meant to provide a national vision for higher education institutions’ ongoing internationalization efforts. As stated in the first national strategy (2014–19), “the Government of Canada will work with the provinces and territories, Canadian educational institutions, and other stakeholders to double the size of our international student base […] by 2022 [… which] will create new sources of jobs, economic growth and prosperity in every region of the country” (Government of Canada 2014, 11). The strategy emphasized the immediate benefits to local economies across the country and the potential for long-term growth through the training of highly skilled labour.

This vision was adjusted in 2019 to ensure the long-term sustainability of these internationalization practices. In Building on Success, the Government of Canada specifies: “Attracting students from a wider diversity of countries, as well as to a greater variety of regions and schools, Consolidating Canada 5 would foster sustainable growth of Canada’s international education sector and distribute the benefits more equitably across the country” (Government of Canada 2019, 4). This directive, which emphasized how the recruitment of international students would translate into a success story for the Canadian labour market and its need for highly skilled migrants, also responded to the over-reliance on international students from a small number of countries. For instance, while China, India, and South Korea have been long-standing source markets, since 2014, there has also been an increasing focus on Bangladesh and Vietnam (Kim et al. 2024, 4). Moreover, the strategy spoke to concerns about how internationalization is practiced by Canadian institutions, as well as the perceived impacts of large numbers of international students on local communities across Canada and these students’ living conditions, including challenges related to affordable housing and the cost of living. 

As such, this was a period of aggressive and well-orchestrated strategies of recruiting international students to the Canadian postsecondary sector. Presumably, this was to help Canada rise within the ranks of the global race for skills (Human Resources Development Canada 2002) and to secure accessible labour for Canada’s local economies, all while fortifying the country’s cash-starved higher education institutions. In 2021, as Canada was emerging from the first year of the covid-19 pandemic and recruiting historically high numbers of students, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), Marco Mendicino, had a “simple message” for international students: “we don’t just want you to study here, we want you to stay here” (IRCC 2021). As the IRCC (2021) press release explained, the retention of international students for long-term settlement in Canada was an asset to Canadian society:

"The government has made significant efforts to encourage international students to settle permanently in Canada. They bring strong employment and language skills, bolstered by their Canadian education and work experience, so they are typically well positioned to apply for permanent resident status. More than 58,000 graduates successfully applied to immigrate permanently in 2019, and their decisions to stay in Canada will help to address our stark demographic challenges."

This perspective from the federal government, however, changed rapidly in 2023 and 2024 during the tenure of the IRCC’s minister, Marc Miller. This is when the official discourse shifted toward blaming international students for societal problems. Lisa Brunner and Roopa Desai Trilokekar (2024) indicate that, “for decades the federal government has used international students as solutions to multiple policy problems — especially labour market and economic immigrant shortages — until international students suddenly became, in their eyes, the problem” (emphasis in original). This shift in the government’s message and society’s growing reluctance to welcome greater numbers of education migrants are both indicative of a long-standing conceptual tension in the design of these internationalization strategies, as student migrants came to be conceived as both desirable migrants for Canadian society and not worthy of attention for social integration and upward social mobility (Beck 2024, 22). This tension is especially evident when the public discourses both at the federal and provincial levels are contrasted with the praxis of Canadian institutions. For example, while Canadian universities, with the support of the Canadian government and its EduCanada website, enthusiastically opened their doors to international students by branding and marketing an inclusive and equitable Canada and Canadian higher education (Liang and Stack 2022; Shahrokni et al. 2022), they treated these students differently from domestic students. Among various systemic inequities that we discuss in subsequent chapters, international students paid much higher tuition fees than domestic students, with the payment gap between the two widening from $12,293 in 2007 to $31,452 in 2022 (Kim et al. 2024, 7). This tension, as further discussed in Chapter 7, is the result of internationalization strategies designed to support the growth and prosperity of Canadian universities despite their critical funding problems, including the gradual reduction of public funding.

Between 2007 and 2014, tuition fees increased for both domestic and international students by about 40 percent. However, starting in 2014, not coincidentally the year Canada’s International Education Strategy was first released, the picture starts to look quite different: from 2014 to 2022, tuition fees rose 64 percent for international students, compared to 19 percent for domestic students (Kim et al. 2024, 8). In Ontario, between 2018 and 2025, the average international undergraduate student tuition rose, “from around $35,000 to just under $50,000. They now pay five times more than domestic students” (Chaudhary 2025). Such figures vary by institution. Where international student tuition fees for most arts and science programs were about $35,000 in 2023–24 at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University, they reached $60,000 per year at the University of Toronto, in stark contrast to $11,000 for domestic students (Chatterjee 2023). With provincial governments not increasing their support for university students, some commentators have started to frame universities as publicly assisted rather than public institutions. 

The economic benefits of international students are experienced by both Canadian universities and by the Canadian society as a whole. In 2012, international students spent $8.4 billion in the Canadian economy, which increased to $21.1 billion in 2018, with the sector’s impact on the Canadian economy rivalling that of the auto, lumber, and aircraft sectors (Government of Canada 2014, 2019; Kim et al. 2024, 7). In 2022, international students, as well as any visiting friends and family members, spent $37.3 billion in Canada, or 1.2 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This spending supported an estimated 361,230 jobs, with international students paying, directly or indirectly, $7.4 billion in tax revenue. It also accounts for 23.1 percent of Canada’s service exports. 

Such benefits can be measured in nonmonetary or ideological terms as well. As the country emerged from the covid-19 pandemic — an event that changed family composition (e.g., divorces and deaths), reshaped governance priorities, and exposed and deepened existing social vulnerabilities — 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 (Esses et al. 2021; Su 2025). 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 era of the federalization of education migration in Canada, which was characterized by the support and involvement of the federal government in the recruitment of international students as an economic advantage to the country (Kim et al. 2024), thus, analytically, has to be replaced by a post-2024 era. The new period solidifies and institutionalizes many long-standing implicit negative reactions toward student migrants. Once presented as global talents, they become more publicly accused of various societal ills and in need of stricter controls.

This shift prompted the federal government to impose a cap on the number of international students in the postsecondary sector. This cap included a 35 percent reduction in study permits for 2024 (364,000 new permits issued) with a further 10 percent decrease in 2025, stricter financial eligibility requirements for study permits, restricted open work permit eligibility for spouses (now limited to students in master’s, doctoral, or select professional programs), and a decrease in the number of hours they are allowed to work off campus (Government of Canada 2024, 2025a). According to Colleges and Institutes Canada, these measures resulted in $2 billion in revenue being at risk for Canadian institutions and seismic changes in education migration patterns, as student enrollment declined by 54 percent (Michael McDonald quoted in Hassan 2024). Federal legislation builds on or is reinforced by various provincial measures to restrict access for international students, including restricting their access to healthcare coverage in Manitoba, doubling their tuition fees and French language requirements in Québec, and requiring Canadian institutions to provide housing guarantees, thereby curtailing the number of enrollment offers (CBC News 2025; Government of Ontario 2024; Olson 2024). 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.

Excerpted with permission from Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat by the Racialization of Asian International Students Collective. Forthcoming in May 2026 by Fernwood Publishing. 

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