Brunner - final
Correspondence Address: Lisa Ruth Brunner, Department of Educational Studies, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2; Email: lisa.brunner@ubc.ca
ISSN: 1911-4788
Volume 16, Issue 1, 78-102, 2022
Towards a More Just Canadian Education-
migration System: International Student
Mobility in Crisis
LISA RUTH BRUNNER
University of British Columbia, Canada
ABSTRACT Education-migration, or the multi-step recruitment and retention of
international students as immigrants, is an increasingly important component of both
higher education and so-called highly-skilled migration. This is particularly true in
Canada, a country portrayed as a model for highly-skilled migration and supportive
of international student mobility. However, education-migration remains under-
analyzed from a social justice perspective. Using a mobility justice framework, this
paper considers COVID-19’s impact on Canada’s education-migration system at four
scales: individuals, education institutions, state immigration regimes, and planetary
geoecologies. It identifies ethical tensions inherent to Canada’s education-migration
from a systems-level and suggests that a multi-scalar approach to social justice can
both usefully complexify discussions and introduce unsettling paradoxes. It also
stresses that the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to reimagine rather than
return.
KEYWORDS internationalization; international students; higher education; mobility
justice; skilled migration; international student mobility
When announcing Canada’s 2021-2023 Immigration Levels Plan,
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Marco
Mendicino described parts of Canada as “starved for people” (CPAC, 2020,
21:53). Referring to immigrants as something for a state to consume was both
disturbing (in its dehumanization) and fitting (in its extension of Canada’s
capitalist settler-colonial project) (Chatterjee, 2019). For a country in which
immigration policy is population policy (Ley & Hiebert, 2001), the COVID-
19 pandemic’s reduction of international human mobility had major
repercussions. In just one year, Canada’s population growth swung from a
record high to a record low (StatsCan, 2020f). Economic recovery, the
government signaled, depended on immigration recovery (IRCC, 2020a).
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But to claim Canada hungered for people was not precise enough. It was
Canada’s “domestic immigration pool” that would be a focus, Mendicino
went on, highlighting international students as “a very attractive pool… to
look very closely at” (Hagan & Bolongaro, 2020, para. 12). He offered a
“simple” message for international students: “we don’t just want you to study
here, we want you to stay here” (IRCC, 2021a, para. 6).
Viewing international students as an immigrant source is just one element
of what has become a distinct education-migration, or “edugration,” filtering
system: those who (1) gain admission to, and graduate from, a Canadian
higher education (HE) institution may (2) compete in the Canadian labour
market for a limited time, during which those who gain sufficient work
experience may (3) remain in Canada permanently (Brunner, in press). In
contrast to the United Nations’ (2006) supposed triple win – where migration
simultaneously benefits migrants, countries of origin, and destination
countries – education-migration is painted as a different triple win: (1)
students gain a valuable education and desirable citizenship; (2) HE gains
revenue, labour, and diversity; and (3) Canada gains human capital, tax
revenue, population growth, and soft power. Like much in immigration and
HE today, individual and nationalist economic utility are the system’s driving
forces (McCartney, 2020).
This problematic framing ignores the system’s larger replications of
privilege and power, invisiblizing externalized losses (such as brain drain)
and problematic enablements (such as the dominance of a hierarchical global
imaginary rooted in Western supremacy which dictates the desirability of
Canadian education) (Stein & Andreotti, 2016). In any large-scale disruption,
patterns of privilege and power persist, “but the narratives that justify them
seem increasingly implausible” (Apostolidis & McBride, 2020, p. S-82).
Some see recent disruptions such as COVID-19 and the climate crisis as
opportunities to finally reimagine a more sustainable, reciprocal model of
both international education (El Masri & Sabzalieva, 2020; Stein, 2019b;
Yang, 2020) and international migration (Bender & Arrocha, 2017; Sharma,
2020).
In considering the ethics of Canada’s education-migration system at this
critical junction, this paper makes two contributions. First, it details Canadian
education-migration policies before, during, and potentially after the COVID-
19 pandemic. Second, taking a mobility justice approach, it explores their
implications at multiple scales. Constrained by the space of a single paper,
the latter offers merely a taste of deeper conversations to be had. However, in
attending to overlapping systemic vulnerabilities, it recognizes that mobility
injustices occur not only after a migrant enters a country, but are, in fact, “the
process through which unequal spatial conditions and differential subjects are
made” (Sheller, 2019, p. 26). In an effort to more fully grapple with the
system’s complexities, it includes, yet also goes beyond, injustices faced by
international students themselves.
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I begin by summarizing mobility justice and showing how its multi-scalar
faming helps situate education-migration’s ethical issues. I then describe
Canada’s education-migration system specifically and contribute to its
needed contextualization (Riaño et al., 2018) by providing a pre-COVID-19
snapshot, followed by an outline of key COVID-19 policy responses. I
outline examples of ethical issues revealed at each scale and conclude by
discussing why this approach might complexify our collective inquiry around
the ethics of education-migration in today’s uncertain times.
Mobility Justice
Mobility justice was only recently developed as a framework (e.g., Sheller,
2011, 2018, 2019) and is used in disparate ways (Cook & Butz, 2019). The
term emerged from the mobilities paradigm, which critiqued the moral and
ideological privileging of “sedentarist” perspectives – i.e., those which
uphold prevailing “understandings of ‘society’, ‘social structures’,
‘citizenship’ and ‘governance’ in which static social relations are ostensibly
produced, governed and bounded by the nation-state” (Cook & Butz, 2019, p.
10; Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). Instead, mobility was seen as
foundational to social relations, necessitating a focus on how power is
organized (at various scales) around the governance of mobility (in various
forms) – not just movement but also immobility, stillness, and stuckness
(Cresswell, 2011, 2012). Because modernity has increased and restricted
mobility in uneven ways, concepts such as the kinetic elite/underclass
(Cresswell, 2006) and the potential capacity of mobility (described as
motility) help us understand mobility capital (Kaufmann et al., 2004) as both
an outcome of, and mechanism of reproducing, systemic inequalities (Benz,
2019).
Mobility justice builds on this paradigm with a mobility-focused take on
social justice theory. Following contemporary activist movements, it seeks a
common framework to link social justice struggles (Sheller, 2019). Such
struggles range from embodied, micro-level differential (im)mobilities (e.g.,
racialized and gendered spatial relations) to macro-level patterns of global
(im)mobilities (e.g., decolonialism and climate justice). This is a tall order,
requiring a practice which itself is mobile as it jumps across scales and ways
of thinking about justice; indeed, its quest for “one common framework”
(Sheller, 2019, p. 33) risks grand theorizing. However, in compliment to
more fine-grained analyses, it offers a systems-levels approach while also
showing how justice itself “is a process of emergent relationships” based on
the “interplay of diverse (im)mobilities” (Sheller, 2018, p. 20).
A key feature of mobility justice is its intersectional, multi-scalar approach.
Scale’s full theoretical history is beyond the scope of this paper; briefly, as a
socially-constructed concept (Marston, 2000), scale does risk
oversimplification, overgeneralization, arbitrary delineation, and legitimizing
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the exclusion of actors and ideas (Glick Schiller & Çaglar, 2011; van
Lieshout et al., 2011). The conventional reliance on micro, meso, and macro
levels also has limitations. However, scales are ideally not used as “fixed
nested sociospatial units of territory or governance,” but rather dynamic and
relative “repositionings of territorially based forms of organization” operating
in the context of global power hierarchies (Glick Schiller & Çaglar, 2011, p.
72). The intention is not to separate scales (e.g., the local from the global),
but to highlight their mutual constitution (Glick Schiller & Çaglar, 2011) and
allow for examinations of uneven applications of power (Lan, 2015).
Multi-scalar analysis of international mobility grew in the past 20 years as
researchers acknowledged the limitations of macro-level, quantitative, and
methodologically-nationalistic approaches (Xiang, 2013; Glick Schiller,
2015; Williamson, 2015). A specifically intersectional multi-scalar lens of
mobility (e.g., Tungohan, 2020) highlights the simultaneous interactions of
multiple vectors of differentiation (e.g., gender, race, and class) across scales
(Mahler et al., 2015). Because exclusionary and inclusionary structures vary
from state to state, people may, for example, “be relatively privileged – and
actively seek privilege – in one country to balance the marginalisation in
another” (Purkayastha, 2010, p. 40). Intersectional multi-scalar approaches
tease out the implications of these concurrent, interlocking systems of power.
While mobility justice is just one possible approach for analyzing
education-migration, it is useful for two reasons. First, it helps rescale
questions of ethics when analyzing (im)migration policies and laws.
Mobilities-focused approaches have already helped focus on “the movement
involved in migration, rather than privileging the sending and receiving
localities and their perspectives” (King & Raghuram, 2013, p. 129).
However, (im)migration policy and law are still typically viewed “as a
relatively insulated and domestic-centered arena” (Shachar, 2006, p. 153).
States are undoubtedly key players in governing international student
mobility regimes (Brooks & Waters, 2011), but their policies and laws do not
govern only those within their borders. Positing that society as a fixed
territory bound by the nation-state no longer exists (Urry, 2000), mobility
justice pushes social justice theory “into the ‘post-societal’ present” – a
necessary move for it to “remain theoretically, empirically and politically
relevant” (Cook & Butz, 2019, p. 9).
Second, issues of highly uneven (im)mobility came to light at every scale
of the COVID-19 pandemic, from cellular virus transmission to global
vaccine distribution. The pandemic reinforced existing disparities in who is
denied or required to physically work (e.g., Dobusch & Kreissl, 2020) and
who or what is permitted to travel (Sheller, 2020b), with lockdowns and
border restrictions applied strategically and unevenly (Sheller, 2020a). It also
brought major changes through mass demobilizations (e.g., workplaces,
schools, airplanes) and new or renewed mobilizations (e.g., repatriations,
telemedicine, online learning) (Sheller, 2020a). Mobility justice’s approach is
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well-suited to draw out the significance of COVID-19’s impact on migration
systems.
In this paper I loosely adopt Sheller’s (2018) use of four scales:
individuals, education institutions, state immigration regimes, and planetary
geoecologies. I offer this organizational rubric as just one initial, partial
effort, remembering that scales are “always entangled, intersectional,
performative, and constantly being remade” (Sheller, 2018, p. 44). Different
or additional scales other than the four proposed could be useful for future
work (e.g. the land). What I seek to highlight here is (1) the need to identify
the scale at which a social justice claim is made (to interrogate its inevitable
limitations), and (2) that by viewing multiple scales together – as multi-scalar
approaches, such as mobility justice, urge us to do – their collective
contradictions become clearer. This process can both interrupt the desire for
universality and enable a layered way of holding paradoxes in view, making
“what is invisible noticeably absent” (Ahenakew, 2016, p. 333).
In the next section, I offer a review of the education-migration literature
structured by these four scales, to situate this paper, before turning to the
Canadian context specifically.
The Ethics of Education-migration
Education-migration is an example of the talent for citizenship exchange
spurred by the global race for so-called highly-skilled, or high-wage,
migrants. In this exchange, knowledge and work are exchanged for the
acquisition of citizenship in “a stable, democratic, affluent polity” (Shachar,
2006, pp. 158-159; Geddie, 2014). In this way, international student mobility
has become a form of social mobility (Kim & Kwak, 2019; Maldonado-
Maldonado, 2014) and commodity, influencing not only individual HE
enrolment decisions but HE’s structure itself (Baas, 2019). HE institutions
and immigrant-dependent countries alike now function as recruiters (rather
than gatekeepers) (Shachar, 2006) facilitated by a global education-migration
industry (Beech, 2018). As a result, education-migration encompasses several
areas, including international student/education mobility, the
internationalization of HE, temporary foreign worker mobility, migrant
“integration,” settler-colonialism, and the global knowledge economy. This
involves a complex array of entangled ethical issues.
Imagining a just education-migration system is additionally challenging
due to its basis on two meritocratic forms of institutionalized discrimination.
Just as Baglay (2017) asked, “can immigration law, whose key function is to
screen, differentiate, select, and exclude, meaningfully incorporate social
justice values?” (p. 210), we may ask a similar question of HE (Stein, 2019a).
Selective HE institutions are by definition exclusionary, and the global
expansion of HE perpetuates, if not exacerbates, societal stratifications
(Marginson, 2016). HE may contribute to a common good, but as an
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increasingly globalized commodified good (Locatelli, 2019), its admissions
process bears some conceptual resemblance to immigrant selection (Brunner,
2017).
Despite “requir[ing] serious reflection” (Geddie, 2014, p. 245; Kim &
Kwak, 2019), considerations of education-migration’s unique, systems-level
ethical implications remain limited. Scattered across multiple disciplines,
most relevant critiques focus on only one step in the process (e.g., the study
period) and one scale (e.g., that of international students). Table 1 maps some
key critiques of education-migration (at any step) made with academic
Anglophone Global North literature.
Scale Social justice issues
Individuals
• Racism, Othering, violence, and exclusion
• Conflicting desirability discourses
• Deficit and lack of agency discourses
• Differential tuition
• Inadequate support services
• Legal temporality and limited rights
• Difficulty obtaining and maintaining (im)migration
status (both temporary and permanent)
Educational
institutions
• Academic/linguistic imperialism
• Neoliberalism
• Fragmented educational quality
• Institutions as immigration actors
State immigration
regimes
• (Settler) colonialism, in relation to (im)migration
• Meritocratic nationalism
• Brain waste/overeducation
Planetary
geoecologies
• Brain drain/abuse and inequitable flows between
Global North and Global South
• Global meritocracy and academic mobility as
reproduction of privilege
• Unsustainability
Table 1. Social justice issues related to education-migration, by scale.
The scale of individuals is the predominant scale within education-
migration research. This literature focuses on experiences of international
students (and in some cases, recent graduates working as temporary foreign
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workers, referred to as TFWs).1 Their legal status and relative voluntariness
of movement generally affords them a relatively privileged position
compared to, say, undocumented workers or asylum seekers (Walia, 2013),
although such categories occasionally overlap. Still, this scale highlights
uneven and conditional inclusion, both material and at the level of discourse.
Justice is generally positioned as being for individuals (i.e., international
students, through inclusion in more robust institutions and state supports, or
more facilitative immigration policies).
The scales of educational institutions and state immigration regimes have
commonalities; the literature positions them as both (1) sites of control and
governance, while also (2) vulnerable in their systemic external dependency
(e.g., on population/enrolment growth, capital, and labour). In the case of HE
institutions, justice is often positioned as being for the public (i.e., those who
benefit from education as public good), although the public is defined in
different ways (e.g., sometimes bound by a state, sometimes globally). In the
case of state immigration regimes, justice is sometimes positioned as being
for citizens (or permanent residents) bound within the state; in other cases
(such as those found in critiques of state role in settler-colonialism), justice is
for Indigenous peoples and nations. Proposed responses at both scales include
more robust (or more fairly distributed) supports at the level of the state or
nation.
At the scale of planetary geoecologies, the focus shifts to the experience of
all humans, and, occasionally, non/more-than-humans. Here, systematic
unsustainability is positioned as a vulnerability faced by everyone and
everything (albeit unevenly), with justice sought for all humans globally (and
sometimes non/more-than-humans). Generally, more robust or more fairly
distributed supports at a global level are offered as responses.
As Table 1 shows, there are many social justice issues to be addressed
within education-migration, some of which are contradictory or incompatible.
For the remainder of the paper, I use the Canadian education-migration crisis
point of COVID-19 as an illustration. For context, I first provide a description
of Canadian education-migration just before COVID-19 was detected in
Canada in 2020.
Education-migration in Pre-COVID-19 Canada
By imploring international students to stay, Minister Mendicino offered an
explicit public acknowledgement that Canadian international student policy
had become “synonymous with immigration policy” (Trilokekar & El Masri,
2019, p. 47). For decades, IRCC viewed the two arenas separately, refusing
the entry of would-be international students who expressed dual intent (i.e., a
1 IRCC distinguishes between its Temporary Foreign Worker Program and International Mobility
Program. In this paper I refer to workers in both categories as TFWs.
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desire to remain in Canada permanently after their studies). But over the past
20 years, Canada gradually developed its own dual intent, coming to view
post-secondary international students as a source of not only temporary
workers (IRCC, 2018), but also of highly desirable immigrants (Brunner,
2017; Tremblay, 2005; Trilokekar & El Masri, 2019; Williams et al., 2015).2
By 2019, education-migration played a major role in both temporary and
permanent migration flows.
Contemporary Canadian immigration has long been viewed by the
government as an essential tool for population and economic growth. Despite
a record-low fertility rate (StatsCan, 2020a), Canada’s 2018/2019 population
growth rate was the highest in roughly 30 years, driven primarily by
relatively high levels of immigration (StatsCan, 2019) which placed Canada’s
net migration rate among the highest globally (UN DESA, 2019).
Immigration was expected to account for 100% of workforce net growth in
the near future (GAC, 2019).
In the eyes of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD, 2019), Canada’s economic immigration system was
“widely seen as a role model for successful migration management” (p. 13) in
its ability to solve a so-called problem faced by immigrant-dependent
countries: how to select the most desirable immigrants who will efficiently
integrate into their labour markets. Canada succeeded in two ways. First, the
2015 introduction of Express Entry promoted a more flexible, demand-driven
approach, shifting from a backlogged first come, first served mandate to a
nimbler, just-in-time selection process. By ranking applicants and then
extending rolling invitations to those meeting an adjustable cut-off number,
the government could, theoretically, fine-tune its selection criteria and
respond to immediate labour market demands.
Second, Canada followed global immigration trends (Akbari &
MacDonald, 2014; Boucher & Cerna, 2014) by relying on a two-step
approach in which permanent residents (PRs) were selected not from abroad
but from among TFWs already in Canada. Through the introduction of
Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs) in 1998 and the federal Canadian
Experience Class (CEC) in 2008, Canada benefitted from more reliable
evidence of labour market success based on actual participation in Canada
(Hou et al., 2020; Sweetman & Warman, 2010). This was a supposed antidote
to the known “brain waste” or “overeducation” among those immigrants
(selected from abroad) unable to leverage their human capital in Canada
(Crossman et al., 2020; Hou et al., 2020; Lo et al., 2019).
These changes had a notable impact. The number of new two-step
economic immigrants with Canadian work experience rose dramatically
(from eight percent in 2000 to 46% in 2018) as did the number of TFWs in
2 That said, some study permit applications are still refused for dual intent (e.g. Pisarevic v.
Canada [Citizenship and Immigration], 2019), especially those from the Global South (Tao &
Arib, 2020).
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Canada (roughly 60,000 in 2000 to 429,300 in 2018) (Crossman et al., 2020).
Instead of selecting immigrants and supporting their integration, Canada
increasingly selected workers, affording the labour market more direct
influence over who proceeded to the second step. Some TFWs such as
seasonal agricultural workers were permanently temporary, while others,
generally higher-skilled, were temporarily temporary – that is, on a PR
pathway (Rajkumar et al., 2012). Regardless, a period of provisional
admittance and conditional inclusion had become a prominent feature of
Canadian immigration.
Concurrently, another temporary resident selection process with direct
impact on the pool of TFWs expanded dramatically: the recruitment of
international students (OECD, 2019). By 2019, Canada ranked among the
highest in the world both in its proportion and total number of international
students (IIE, 2019; UNESCO UIS, 2022). Canadian public postsecondary
enrolment’s modest 2018/19 rise (1.8%) was driven entirely by international
students, whose enrolment increased while domestic enrolment fell; the
proportion of international students rose from 6.4% to 16.2% in a decade
(StatsCan, 2020b).
International students have been considered economically important since
the 1980s (McCartney, 2020). Since then, the Canadian economy grew
dependent on their tens of billions of dollars in annual expenditures, which,
by 2019, had a greater impact “than exports of auto parts, lumber or aircraft”
(GAC, 2019, p. 2). In Canada, public HE is funded through a combination of
low to medium public expenditures and relatively high tuition fees in
comparison to other OECD countries, and it responded to budget shortfalls
and enforced domestic tuition caps with hikes in largely unregulated
international student fees (Pechar & Andres, 2011; Williams et al., 2015). By
2019, international undergraduate tuition was roughly five times the average
domestic university tuition rate, with approximately 40% of all tuition fees in
Canada paid by international students (StatsCan, 2020e).
International students are a heterogeneous category (King & Raghuram,
2013; O'Connor, 2018), and not all are recruited for, or pay, tuition. In
general, however, international student policies are uniquely located “at the
confluence of migration policies and policies affecting the services industry,
but where the services are sold to the migrant rather than provided by them”
(Riaño et al., 2018, p. 291). Due in part to constant public reminders of their
economic importance (e.g., IRCC, 2021a) and a neoliberal climate
positioning HE as a commodity, they are often read as unproblematic,
transient consumers (contributing to the economy) as opposed to TFWs
(competing in the economy). Although international students are indeed
framed by racialized tropes in which they are sometimes positioned as
competitors (Stein & Andreotti, 2016), they remain relatively acceptable to
the public in comparison to other migrant categories (O'Connor, 2018).
In reality, their work authorization – whether during or after studies – has
also been permitted, and used as a recruitment tool, since the 1980s (IRCC,
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2018). The typical international student transition entails three steps as part of
a unique three-step immigration process (Brunner, in press): (1) as a study
permit holder, which allows part-time work, (2) as a post-graduation work
permit (PGWP) holder, and (3) if certain criteria are met (e.g., one year of
skilled Canadian work experience), as a PR (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Canadian three-step education-migration process.
Designed to “(1) attract international students to Canada; (2) increase
[their] participation in the Canadian labour market; and (3) provide [them]
with a pathway to [PR]” (CIC, 2015, p. 5), the government considers the
PGWP “generous” (CIC, 2015, p. 6; IRCC, 2018), as it is among the longest
and least restricted of its type in the world (OECD, 2019). The PGWP is thus
a selling point over competitor countries, leading Canada to be described as
among the most welcoming so-called host countries for international students
(e.g., Gopal, 2016; Lo et al., 2019). While not directly responsible, there is a
correlation between the 2008 expansion of Canada’s PGWP program and
increasing international student numbers (CIC, 2015).
In combination, international students’ economic importance, relatively
benign political position, existing work pathways, and the fact that most are
“young, have Canadian educational qualifications and in-demand labour
skills, and are proficient in one of [Canada’s] official languages” led them to
be seen as “ideal” immigrant candidates (GAC, 2019, introduction), despite
ongoing questions regarding their actual labour market outcomes (CIC, 2015;
Hou & Lu, 2017; IRCC, 2019). Largely self-funded, international students
were also cost-effective immigrants for the government; their human capital
was pre-vetted by academic application systems, and their subsequently
limited integration needs (Trilokekar & El Masri, 2019, p. 45; Hawthorne,
2012; OECD, 2019) were largely provided by education institutions. With
immigration positioned (whether implicitly or explicitly) as a possibility,
student and immigrant recruitment merged.
1: Student
• Study permit issued
for duration of in-
Canada portion of
academic program
• Authorized to work
part-time off-campus
and full-time on-
campus
• Time studying in
Canada counts
towards PGWP length
calculation
• Work does not count
towards PR
2: Temporary foreign
worker (TFW)
• Post-graduation work
permit issued for 8
months to 3 years,
depending on program
length and time in
Canada
• Authorized to work in
any job, anywhere in
Canada
• 'Skilled' work counts
towards PR
3: Permanent resident
(PR)
• Must meet certain
(e.g. residency)
conditions unless
Canadian citizenship
is aquired
• Can count portion of
time as an
international student
towards citizenship
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However, Canada struggled to meet international student retention goals.
Among those who arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s, roughly a quarter
transitioned within 10 years (Lu & Hou, 2015), and more recent numbers
have been lower than anticipated (Tao & Arib, 2020). Not all international
students aspire to immigrate, but informal polling shows widespread
intentions to immigrate (Canadian Bureau for International Education, 2018;
Esses et al., 2018), leaving significant capacity for systemic growth from a
government perspective. It is here, having described a system viewed as
integral to the future of Canada, that I shift to COVID-19.
Key Education-migration Related COVID-19 Policy Responses
On March 12, 2020, IRCC tabled its 2020-2022 Immigration Levels Plan;
four days later, Canada’s unprecedented COVID-19 related travel restrictions
reduced foreign entry to Canada to a trickle as education institutions
scrambled to transition to virtual learning. These changes led to three key
impacts on Canadian education-migration: (1) a (partially) lost cohort of
international students physically present in Canada, (2) the subsequent
loosening of PGWP eligibility requirements, and (3) indications of a heavier
future reliance on international students as immigrants.
Lost Cohort: Once instruction was fully virtual, many enrolled international
students left Canada. IRCC quickly included study permit holders on their list
of foreign nationals permitted to enter Canada – if their travel was essential.
Determining the essential threshold was left to individual officers upon
students’ arrival; for example, if courses were entirely online, travel generally
did not qualify. Many remained abroad.
The travel restrictions had a bigger impact on incoming students. The
Forum of Ministers Responsible for Immigration “reaffirmed the importance
of newcomers, particularly international students, in keeping the economy
and Canada’s communities moving forward” in July 2020 (IRCC, 2020b,
para. 4). Yet it was not until October 2020, after the start of the academic
term, that IRCC amended its travel restrictions to allow new incoming
international students to enter Canada. Even then, service interruptions and
application difficulties continued to present obstacles (Cyr & Landry, 2020;
Hiebert, 2020). Combined with a reluctance to pay high tuition fees for online
education, some students deferred. Roughly half of those expected arrived by
the fall of 2020 (Hiebert, 2020).
Loosened PGWP Eligibility: The PGWP is a high-stakes document for
students wishing to immigrate; it can be held only once in a lifetime and is
often the culmination of significant financial and educational investment. To
be eligible, students must continuously maintain full-time student status in
Canada, of which distance learning may compose up to 50%. The permit
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length is determined by the length of the program. In essence, the factors in
determining PGWP eligibility are the length of time spent physically in
Canada while maintaining continuous, full-time, and in-person studies.
COVID-19 disrupted all this: many students were physically outside
Canada, studying virtually, unable to maintain a full-time course load, and/or
facing study interruptions. Normally, this would render many ineligible for
the PGWP, impacting not only international students’ long-term plans but
also institutional recruitment and national immigration targets. In response,
Canada tweaked its PGWP policies multiple times: (1) students already in
Canada remained eligible for the PGWP even if they failed to meet the
continuous, full-time, or in-person requirements due to COVID-19, and (2)
students outside Canada remained eligible even if they failed to meet the in-
person or physical presence in Canada requirements (Cyr & Landry, 2020).
Later, in January 2021, IRCC recognized that high unemployment prevented
many PGWP-holders from meeting PR eligibility and announced that PGWP-
holders could apply for an additional 18-month open work permit.
Increased Focus on International Students as PRs: Overall, Canada saw a
dramatic decline in not just international students but all non-citizen/PR 2020
entries (StatsCan, 2020d), and the travel restrictions’ impact on Canada’s
population growth was “profound” (StatsCan, 2020c). The federal
government subsequently announced relatively high immigration targets for
the next three years to make up for 2020’s shortfall (IRCC, 2020a). Yet with
travel restrictions still in place and applicants outside of Canada facing
processing delays, two-step immigration became the primary source of PRs
(StatsCan, 2020d). IRCC’s PGWP quasi-extension indicated its hopes of
retaining as many international students as possible. Similarly, a historic
Express Entry draw in February 2021 inviting 27,332 Canadian Experience
Class (CEC) applicants to apply (close to six times the previous largest draw)
at a Comprehensive Ranking System cut-off score of just 75 (less than half
the previous record cut-off score) (IRCC, 2021) indicated the government’s
willingness to accept virtually any applicant meeting the minimum CEC
requirements. Many were former international students. Finally, in May
2021, the government opened 40,000 PR spots specifically for recent
English-speaking graduates from Canadian institutions; the quota was filled
just a day later (IRCC, 2021c).
Globally, Canada’s COVID-19 response was considered relatively supportive
for international students (e.g., Bilecen, 2020), and industry analysists
predicted Canada would be “the big winner” in future international student
enrolments (Ross, 2020, para. 13). Yet these policy decisions also point to
important questions of “who and what can move (or stay put), when, where,
how, under what conditions, and with what meanings” – that is, questions of
mobility justice (Sheller, 2018, p. 11). In what follows, I return to the four
previously mentioned scales (individuals, education institutions, state
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immigration regimes, and planetary geoecologies) to highlight four new
issues that arose due to COVID-19. Once again, I stress that these scales are
non-exhaustive, and this paper only gestures towards the full complexities; I
outline them here as an articulation of what future research may more deeply
explore.
Individuals: Those who are Absent or Unseeable
There is no doubt that individual international students and recent graduates
were heavily impacted by COVID-19. Initial global research and media
accounts pointed to the exacerbation of existing vulnerabilities, including
deteriorated mental health, threats of (or actualized) status loss, fears of
academic interruption, lack of adequate accommodation and food, job loss
and financial concerns, loneliness, and concerns about family wellbeing
(Bilecen, 2020; Coulton, 2020; Firang, 2020), while Chinese and other Asian
students experienced particular social exclusion and racism (Newbold, 2020;
Zhai & Du, 2020).
Canada’s policies largely underscored the country’s paradoxical reliance
on, yet conditional inclusion of, temporary residents in Canada. Allowing
international students deemed essential to temporarily work more than 20
hours per week (IRCC, 2020c, para. 1) signaled not only their importance to
the labour market but also the expectation that they not rely on public
support. There is some evidence that employed study permit holders were
concentrated in the service sector; while this disproportionally exposed them
to COVID-19, international students were also more likely than temporary
foreign workers and permanent residents to lose a job due to COVID-19
(WES, 2020). Although technically eligible for the Emergency Response
Benefit, its minimum earnings requirement rendered it elusive for many
international students, and they were ineligible for the Canada Emergency
Student Benefit and Canada Student Service Grant. PGWP holders faced
additional COVID-induced challenges as TFWs, such as job loss and worker
exploitation (Crossman et al., 2020).
A mobility justice approach, however, also reminds us of those who are
absent from, or unseeable in, the education-migration literature. Mobility
capital (Kaufmann et al, 2004) is an unevenly distributed resource. If we
consider international students as kinetically elite in that they
disproportionally benefit from education-migration – even as they experience
injustice – then mobility justice also asks us to consider the kinetic underclass
or motility poor. Attending to this scale means noting the absence of would-
be international students who were immobile due to increased study permit
refusals (Tao & Arib, 2020) or decimated family savings; future would-be
international students who face the likelihood of increased class stratification
within HE as a response to expected periods of austerity (Bilecen, 2020); and
other potential migrants who are rendered less desirable through the
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reinforcement of international students’ desirability (Trilokekar & El Masri,
2017). We may also consider precarious low-wage Canadian workers whose
skill development is neglected in favour of a reliance on TFWs (Crossman et
al., 2020). This reliance may implicate PGWP-holders, whose median
employment earnings are less than half those among recent Canadian
graduates; they have been identified by the government as a “large low-wage
workforce,” (CIC, 2015, p. 9) unprepared for “long-term success” (IRCC,
2019, p. 5). Finally, we might reflect on the implications of Canada’s ongoing
settler-colonialism for individual Indigenous people.
Education Institutions: Tightening of HE and Immigration
COVID-19’s impacts on Canadian HE were highly uneven. The for-profit
short-term language program sector took an immediate hit due to halted
enrolment. While public universities and colleges, who receive just under a
third of their revenue from tuition fees (StatsCan, 2020e), were able to retain
some international enrolment, economic impacts varied based on institution
type and region. Overall, Canadian HE’s vulnerability in terms of its reliance
on international student inflows had never been clearer (El Masri &
Sabzalieva, 2020; Esses et al., 2021).
From a mobility perspective, this points to an even further tightening of HE
and immigration in three key ways. First, the importance of the PGWP as a
recruitment tool became undeniable (e.g., Keung, 2020). Both HE and
politicians lobbied the government to ensure virtual learning would not
impact PGWP eligibility; one Member of Parliament said PGWP flexibility
would “continue to make northern institutions a viable option for
international students,” implying that without the PGWP, international
students would not consider such institutions (The Daily Press, 2020). When
one such institution declared insolvency in 2021 after a string of complex
financial and governing challenges, a prominent HE consultant blamed the
university for not recruiting more international students (Buse, 2021).
Second, institutions positioned themselves as critical to immigration. HE
formally requested from Parliament looser travel restrictions on international
students and increased financial support to make up for their losses. Of
significance was their justification for these requests: Universities Canada
(2020) highlighted the role of international graduates in “revitalizing
regions… struggling with outmigration and population decline” (p. 4),
Colleges and Institutes Canada (2020) highlighted their importance in
“meet[ing] immigration targets” (p. 3), and Languages Canada (n.d.) noted its
role as “an essential part of the equation for meeting Canada’s labour force
and immigration goals” (para. 2). In this way, HE’s role as a source of
immigrants became justification for its funding.
Third, as admission letters paved an even clearer path towards PR,
COVID-19 intensified the role of institutions as immigrant selection actors.
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We know the impacts of an employer-driven two-step Canadian immigration
process: it becomes driven by corporate interests (Chatterjee, 2019), and top
source countries skew Anglophone (Hiebert, 2019), reflecting not only
employer concerns around language, but more significantly, racism and
discrimination against foreign experience (e.g., Bhuyan et al., 2017; Lo et al.,
2019; Oreopoulos, 2011). This is not to say that immigration systems
preceding the current two-step model were not also racist. However, as public
education institutions emerge as more significant immigrant selection actors,
their short-term interests will increasingly shape the long-term make-up of
Canada. HE itself is undergoing marketization and fiscal pressure due to the
pandemic’s economic recession. We have yet to fully see the impacts of a
three-step immigration process driven increasingly by a neoliberal education
system.
This tightening of HE and immigration raises larger questions around
jurisdictional power. In Canada, responsibility for HE falls on the provinces,
while immigration is controlled by a shared federal-provincial jurisdiction.
However, the federal government is becoming more involved in HE by way
of international education (e.g., its 2014 and 2019 national strategies), and
provinces and territories are intensifying their regional immigrant recruitment
activities (e.g., the relatively recent growth of Provincial Nominee Programs,
many targeting international graduates). In the meantime, Canada’s HE’s
funding model shifts more acutely from “publicly-financed” to “publicly-
aided” (Usher, 2020). Although this paper lacks space to sufficiently discuss
the changing landscape, a growing area of scholarship is recognizing its
complexities (Tamtik et al., 2020).
State Immigration Regime: Virtual Versus Physical Tensions
The government has long walked a difficult line with the PGWP: as
mentioned, it is both a potential source of competition for low-wage work
and a powerful recruitment tool for HE. This has led to internal scrutiny of
the PGWP and the international student program more generally to ensure
international students are not using study permits “to gain full access to the
Canadian labour market” (Regulations Amending the IRPR 2012, para. 12)
and academic programs are not “visa mills” (para. 10). Both are discourses of
control, attempting to ensure migrants use education-migration only as the
government intends (Merrick, 2013). Notably, these pre-COVID-19 fears
focused on virtual learning as an area of potential fraud (Tao & Arib, 2020),
something COVID-19 quickly changed.
While online education was increasing in Canadian HE before COVID-19
(Johnson, 2019), COVID-19 accelerated the sector’s interest. Ontario
invested $50 million in virtual learning (Government of Ontario, 2020), while
some called for its use towards more ethical “international partnership models
that enable Canadian HE to be delivered away from the traditional campus
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base” to reduce the reliance “on recruiting international students to Canada”
(El Masri & Sabzalieva, 2020, p. 326).
However, study permits and their associated entitlements were predicated
on students physically entering Canada for in-person study. COVID-19’s
sudden push towards online education bifurcated mobility. For those
international students stuck outside Canada, some entitlements were barred;
those scheduled as teaching or research assistants, for example, were unable
to get Social Insurance Numbers (and thus Canadian work). Yet tuition
(despite drastic currency fluctuations), learning (despite major time zone
differences), and motility (thanks to conditional study permit approvals and
promises that distance learning would count towards a PGWP) continued to
flow, although Canadian educational credentials earned virtually during the
pandemic do not appear to count towards points in Express Entry’s
Comprehensive Ranking System. Still, for the first time, international
students could accumulate mobility capital before entering Canada – that is,
without physical international mobility.
A lack of physical presence in Canada was a loss to some (e.g., Canadian
communities who relied on international students as renters and consumers).
Yet it was a gain to others (e.g., students who preferred to remain outside
Canada yet still accumulate the capital afforded by international education
and migration). Some students avoided social injustices associated with
Canadian presence, such as racism or limited rights as a temporary resident.
While border restrictions were surely felt as a mobility limitation for many,
the allowances also meant a freedom to return or remain, speaking to
supplementation of “the question of who can travel… by the question of who
can stay at home” (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 7).
IRCC will soon have data on COVID-19-era PGWP-holders. If the long-
term integration data is favourable for Canadian immigration objectives, the
PGWP may shift to accommodate certain virtual programs, opening up new
marketing opportunities for institutions. If not, virtual HE programs, which
are likely to increase regardless, may find the strength of Canadian education
tested if they are not connected to PGWP eligibility, especially at non-elite
institutions.
Planetary Geoecologies: Denials of the Past, Present, and Future
As governments responded to COVID-19, two dominant yet contradictory
narratives were revealed: “‘we are all in it together’ and ‘close the borders’”
(Sharma, 2020, p. S-19). Social distancing was enforced on a global scale
through travel restrictions (Sharma, 2020), with states like Canada trying to
mitigate risk and externalize harms to “sacrifice zones” outside their borders
(Sheller, 2020a), even while global financial systems and virtual technologies
enabled the northward flow of economic benefits.
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The idea that physical movement should stop in response to COVID-19
threats – only now, after state sovereignty has been established – is itself “a
postcolonial fantasy of domination” (Sharma, 2020, p. S-26). At this scale,
we see denials of the past, present and future on a global level. There is a
failure to recognize, for example, that “there is no mobility without the
history of colonialism” (Kaplan, 2015, pp. 124-125); in other words, the
movement of people across the globe today is intimately (though not
exclusively) shaped by the colonial past and present in both direct and
indirect ways. Many education-migration patterns are fueled by colonial
histories and disparities, such as the predominant (but shifting) Global South
to Global North movements, or the fact that the lower an international
student’s home country GDP, the more likely they will transition to PR status
(Lu & Hou, 2015; Prokopenko & Hou, 2018).
There is also a failure to recognize that Canadian education-migration is
bound up in an ongoing settler-colonial system in which “dreaming, even in
inclusive and multicultural tones, of developing an ideal settled state
implicitly supports the elimination of Indigenous peoples from this place"
(Chatterjee, 2019, p. 24). Viewing international students as ideal immigrants
who benefit Canada over others may ultimately be environmentally,
economically, and emotionally unsustainable (Tallbear, 2019). Similarly,
dreaming that this is the last pandemic, or that the state or HE will survive
indefinitely, or that climate change is a distant event, may be a denial of the
future when seen from this scale. Canada’s education-migration system is not
only embedded in such denials but actively reproduces them to the extent that
the ethics of its very continuation comes into question.
The planetary geoecologies scale is where the interlocking structural forces
behind education-migration (e.g., neoliberal capitalism, colonialism,
meritocracy, imperialism) are most visible. It highlights frequently
overlooked impacts, such as the way mobility contributes to environmental
privilege and the effects of the climate crisis through both literal and
figurative borders (Park & Pellow, 2019). But it is also at this scale where
one most keenly – and perhaps painfully, overwhelmingly, or fearfully – feels
the magnitude and pervasiveness of the system’s ethical complexities. It
dares us to face more difficult questions. Here, we do not ask how education-
migration fails students, or how HE’s role has changed, or if a state’s
selection criteria deliver on its promises – but whether such a system can be
just to begin with.
Addressing the Desire to Return to “Normal”
As this paper seeks to illustrate, a mobility justice lens can help tease out
paradoxes of not just international student mobility in times of crisis, but
even theories of justice. Partial views of the system’s injustices (e.g.,
focusing on implications only for international students) may foreclose
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impacts on others bound up in the same system. In this way we might see that
modernity’s shine is possible only through the denial of its shadow (Mignolo,
2000); that is, the aspects of modernity “which we often cherish as sacred
grounds for our interpretations of social justice, paradoxically create the
conditions of injustice we are trying to address” (Andreotti, 2012, p. 19).
Even when strategically necessary, it is important to recognize the inherent
trade-offs of limited social justice analyses to avoid, if possible, reproducing
different harms in the process (Stein, 2019b).
Here I have shown, in a limited way, how articulating justice at varying
scales may complexify existing conversations. Mobility justice helps us begin
to conceptualize the problems, but like all frames it is limited. Articulation is
of course not a solution, and highlighting relationships between (differently)
vulnerable groups can exacerbate divisions in its own way. Sheller (2018)
outlines normative “principles of mobility justice” (pp. 173-174) seeking
“more collective, non-individualistic and commons-based understandings of
mobility” (Sheller, 2019, p. 29). From this perspective, we might try to
reimagine international student mobility beyond individualistic social
mobility; if we continue to deny our collective entanglement (Stein et al.,
2020), we are always limited by costs and benefits based on separability. Yet
within our current meritocratic systems bound by the state, moving beyond an
individualistic lens is a challenging task.
One response is to ask what we learn from reframing our attention
“towards the practices, regulations, infrastructures, moorings, systems,
discourses or regimes that allow for differential movements and forms of
mobile and immobile existences among all kinds of people” (Raithelhuber et
al., 2018, p. 12; emphasis added), a process which, in the case of
(im)migration, requires questioning the state as a distributor of entitlements.
While Sheller’s (2018) set of principles include “fairness and equity in
determining the freedom of movement across borders” (p. 174), she stops
short of questioning borders altogether. Moving forward, education-migration
may benefit from engagements with the ethics of states and borders more
generally (Carens, 2013; Shachar, 2009; Walia, 2013).
Another response is “resisting the temptation for certainty, totality, and
instrumentalization in Western reasoning by keeping our claims contingent,
contextual, tentative, and incomplete” (Ahenakew, 2016, p. 333) – that is, not
deferring a solution, but rather humbly letting go of the fantasy that there can
be an easy solution and interrogating the (colonial) desire for purity and
innocence in many social justice claims. Looking at justice from a multi-
scalar vantage point reminds us that all solutions are partial and bring
problems of their own. We in HE especially (Stein, 2019c) need to reckon
with the depth of our own complicity in education-migration injustices. An
attentive awareness and visibilization of such paradoxes may help us stay
with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) while moving the conversation in different
directions.
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96
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Bill Reimer, Sharon Stein, and Vanessa Andreotti for generative
feedback on earlier versions of this paper; Margaret Walton-Roberts and two
anonymous reviewers for insightful suggestions; David Butz for astute
editing support; and the guest editors for bringing this special issue together.
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