International students and Canada’s fractured consensus on immigration

For decades, the Canadian public held a relatively positive view of immigration (Hiebert, 2016). In 2023, however, things changed. Amid widespread frustration with inflation and the availability of affordable housing — as well as increasing public narratives that framed immigration as negatively impacting both of those issues — a growing number of Canadians began to feel that immigration levels were too high (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada [IRCC], 2024a).

In response, the former Justin Trudeau government — facing falling approval ratings and electoral vulnerability — introduced a series of measures reducing immigration, starting with a study permit application cap. Even as Mark Carney’s new government aims to attract “the best talent in the world to build the economy,” Ottawa has retained lowered targets for immigration in an attempt to return to “sustainable levels” (Office of the Prime Minister of Canada, 2025, para. 3).

The exact cause of Canada’s fractured consensus remains unclear. Public opinion on immigration is driven by a range of factors, including media and political discourse (Paquet & Lawlor, 2022; Wilkes & Corrigall-Brown, 2011), political polarization (Mohamadian et al., 2024) and economic conditions (Banting & Soroka, 2020; Wilkes et al., 2008). But notably, decreased support for immigration coincided with a period of unusually rapid national population growth driven by immigration.

Canada’s annual population growth rates in 2022 (2.5 per cent) and 2023 (3.1 per cent) significantly surpassed the rest of the G7 and were the highest in Canada since 1957 (IRCC, 2024g). While the 2024 growth rate (1.8 per cent) decreased due to reduced immigration, it was still the third-highest year since 1972 (Statistics Canada, 2025b). Canada’s population growth slowed further in the first quarter of 2025 (0.0 per cent) (Statistics Canada, 2025a), in large part due to a decline in the number of study permit holders (Statistics Canada, 2025e).

Immigration, not births, has driven Canada’s population growth since 1999 (Statistics Canada, 2015). This has been primarily permanent, that is, those entering Canada hold permanent residency status upon arrival. The growth in 2022 and 2023 was unusual because an unprecedented proportion of immigrants entered as non-permanent residents, a term used to describe work and/or study permit holders, as well as asylum claimants and related groups.

In the fall of 2021, there were 1.37 million non-permanent residents in Canada, comprising 3.6 per cent of the overall population. Three years later, this number had more than doubled to 3.05 million, or 7.4 per cent of Canada’s population (Statistics Canada, 2025e). By April 2025, the proportion of non-permanent residents stood at 7.1 per cent (Statistics Canada, 2025e). The federal government aims to reduce this to five per cent by 2027. (See figure 1).

In recent years, non-permanent residents were increasingly associated with the international student program — not just post-secondary study permit holders, but also their spouses and those who remained as post-graduation work permit holders (Lu & Hou, 2023; Statistics Canada, 2025d). In other words, Canada’s deliberate yet poorly understood alignment of higher education and immigration played a significant role in the public opinion turmoil.

International student mobility from a global perspective

Until the 21st century, international students primarily pursued education abroad for temporary, upward social mobility opportunities — for example, to obtain prestigious degrees or language skills as a launchpad for careers in their home country or a third country. Due to historically rooted mobility patterns shaped by colonial legacies and global economic inequalities, most travelled from middle-income countries to attend highly ranked institutions in wealthy countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France (Brunner & McCartney, 2025). However, when access to education abroad expanded beyond elites to include a growing global middle class, international education became a large, market-driven, multi-billion-dollar industry.

Starting in the 2000s, international student mobility took on an additional role. Many of the top destination countries faced demographic declines and labour shortages. International students were thus seen as ideal immigrants in a global competition for “the best and the brightest.” Compared to other immigrants, they were assumed to be palatable to the public, easily integrated, highly skilled and young, with many years to contribute to their host countries’ tax bases (Robertson, 2013). They also arrived “pre-filtered” through higher education institutions’ admission assessments of their economic and cultural capital (Brunner & Li, 2022).

Not all international students sought permanent residency. However, the higher education and immigration nexus, or “edugration” (Brunner, 2021), motivated a new global cohort of students with few alternative pathways to life in high-income countries. Marketized international education systems, such as in Australia and Canada, also spurred a proliferation of lower-cost, lower-quality academic programs capitalizing on the desires of this growing cohort.

International student mobility has since become an important component of both temporary and permanent economic migration in a range of immigrant-dependent countries, including Australia, Canada and Germany (Hawthorne, 2012; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2022, 2024). However, many of them are now re-evaluating whether the retention of international students as immigrants achieves the intended policy objectives (Collett, 2025). Meanwhile, global education market dynamics are shifting. Several Global South countries, which had been the source of most international students, are now also established (e.g., China) or emerging (e.g., Türkiye, South Korea, Malaysia, India) international student destinations (Glass & Cruz, 2023; OECD, 2025), intensifying global competition.

The emergence of three-step edugration in Canada

Canadian edugration also developed alongside broader immigration policy changes over the past 25 years. Previously, Canadian permanent resident selection prioritized “one-step” immigration — that is, people were selected from abroad based on potential Canadian labour market success. More recently, governments have embraced “two-step” immigration — that is, permanent residents are selected from inside Canada after proven employment success in the domestic labour market.

Governments prefer two-step immigrants because this process acts as a sorting mechanism to identify immigrants who go on to have higher employment earnings (Hou & Picot, 2024) and require less government-funded integration support. The proportion of temporary work permit holders transitioning to permanent residency in Canada has increased since the mid-2000s, which contributed to improved labour market outcomes among recent immigrants (Hou, 2024).

Within this new system, international students emerged as a convenient source of two-step immigrants. After paying high tuition fees to study at Canadian post-secondary institutions for a minimum of eight months, students were encouraged to apply for an open post-graduation work permit valid for up to three years. Those who found qualifying work could then apply for permanent residency through a range of federal and provincial programs targeting two-step immigrants.

International students thus became positioned as “win-win” solutions to a range of overlapping challenges within Canada’s export economy, labour market, immigration system and higher education sector. Recruitment, selection/admission, surveilling/monitoring, retention and integration responsibilities were dispersed across policy actors as the lines blurred between student, worker and immigrant.

Despite limited co-ordination across jurisdictions and sectors, a distinct three-step immigration pathway gradually coalesced in the 2010s and was eventually promoted as “study, work, and stay” by the Canadian government (IRCC, 2024e). (See figure 2).

The pathway proved popular. In recent years, post-graduation work permit holders had among the highest transition rates to permanent residency among all work permit holders (Lu & Hou, 2024). (See figure 3).

The number of study permit holders in Canada grew eightfold from 2000 (120,000) to a peak in 2023 (1.03 million), with particularly rapid growth from 2015 to 2020, then again during the post-COVID-19 period (IRCC, 2024c). The number of post-graduation work permit holders also grew, as shown in figure 4.

Despite surface-level congruence, however, competing priorities among policy actors and jurisdictional frictions emerged alongside this rapid growth.

A brief history of recent Canadian international student policy

Like many similar countries, Canadian international student policy evolved from a Cold War-era project of aid and diplomacy to a market-driven framework central to national economic interests. (See table 1).

As this trajectory shows, the international student program became a source of policy tension and complexity. As the number of international students grew, the misalignment between higher education institutions’ uneven pursuit of tuition revenues and federal and provincial governments’ pursuit of “ideal” immigrants through three-step immigration became a key conflict.

Systemic underlying tensions

The policy domains of higher education and immigration are both highly decentralized in Canada. Higher education is primarily the responsibility of the provinces; there is no national department of education; and institutions are relatively autonomous (Jones & Noumi, 2018). Immigration is an asymmetrical shared jurisdiction between the federal government and the provinces. However, it has become increasingly “fragmented and…responsive to distinct constellations of interests” (Triadafilopoulos & Taylor, 2023, p. 720).

Because international student policy straddles these two arenas, it suffers from competing mandates, unclear accountability structures and a disconnect in expertise. (See table 2).

The key developments below contributed to the rapid growth in 2022-23, which exposed tensions among each actor’s objectives and sphere of influence.

International students as a national economic priority

Partially in response to higher education sector lobbying (Schinnerl, 2021) over the past 20 years, the federal government introduced increasingly open off-campus and post-graduation work policies, targeted immigration pathways and a national branding campaign (EduCanada) to compete globally for international students (Trilokekar & Kizilbash, 2013). Federal international education strategies by both Conservative (2014) and Liberal (2019) governments then pushed aggressive recruitment of international students, positioning them as economically beneficial to Canada. They would be a source of tuition and other expenditures, of labour and “ideal candidates for permanent residency” due to their young age, skills and language abilities (Government of Canada, 2019, p. 5). Higher education institutions invested heavily in international student recruitment in response to domestic tuition fee caps, stagnant or declining public funding and falling domestic enrolment.

International education became a prized industry with “a greater impact on Canada’s economy than exports of auto parts, lumber or aircraft” (Government of Canada, 2019, p. v). In 2022, for example, international students contributed $30.9 billion to Canada’s gross domestic product (Roslyn Kunin and Associates, 2023). By 2024-25, the average undergraduate tuition fee in Canada was $35,480 for international students, compared to $6,510 for domestic students (Statistics Canada, 2025c).

Canada’s global rank as a post-secondary destination country rose from eighth in 2000, when it attracted two per cent of the global share of international students, to second in 2024, when it attracted 12 per cent (Institute of International Education, 2024). One Universities Canada president described Canadian universities “as the Pier 21 of the 21st century” (Chiose, 2016).

Changing student demographics and motivations

International students are highly heterogeneous and difficult to generalize, arriving with a wide range of backgrounds, identities and motivations. They study at all educational levels. In 2024, for example, 22 per cent were at the secondary school level and lower (IRCC, 2024b). Most, however, study at universities and colleges.

From 2001 to 2017, China was the top source country for Canada. However, as China’s economy grew and living standards there rose, fewer Chinese students chose Canada. Meanwhile, expanded work and permanent residency opportunities in Canada increasingly attracted students from other countries with lower GDP per capita. Students from these countries — particularly India, Nigeria, the Philippines and Vietnam — have higher average transition rates to permanent residency (Choi et al., 2021). In 2018, India surpassed China as the top source country for international students. (See figures 5 and 6).

Canada now has one of the highest shares among OECD members of students from lower- and middle-income countries despite relatively few policies promoting equitable access to higher education for these students, such as lower tuition fees and scholarship programs (OECD, 2025).

Concentrated recruitment

The distribution of international students has been highly uneven. Not only do the majority of study permit holders live in Ontario and British Columbia, but they are further concentrated in large metropolitan areas such as the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Vancouver, as well as Montreal (Stick et al., 2024). (See figure 7).

As a result, both the economic benefits and the associated pressures on infrastructure produced pronounced disparities.

Expanding private and short-term programs with varying quality

Canadian doctoral programs have long depended disproportionately on international students, who perform specialized teaching and research duties (Coustere et al., 2024). In 2022-23, for example, 46 per cent of new doctoral degree enrolment was international (Statistics Canada, 2025c). However, the share of international students who study at this level remains small in absolute numbers relative to the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Germany (Institute of International Education, 2024).

Instead, in recent years, international students proliferated in other programs. In 2022-23, 41 per cent of new master’s degree enrolment and 36 per cent of new diploma enrolments were international students, in contrast with only 15 per cent of new undergraduate degree enrolments (Statistics Canada, 2025c). Much of this growth was spurred by the development of programs specifically designed to align with minimum post-graduation work permit requirements to attract students focused on acquiring permanent residency. Particularly at the diploma level, this was accompanied by targeted recruitment at lower-ranked, less-selective public institutions (Marom, 2022).

Such schools were not traditionally international student destinations, but the potential to work and immigrate after graduation increased their value in the eyes of certain students. Meanwhile, technology-enabled agent aggregator platforms driven by commission enabled schools to recruit at scale.

New private institutions designed to turn a quick profit also proliferated while offering varying degrees of quality. Public institutions, particularly those in Ontario outside the GTA, licensed their curriculum to private colleges within the GTA to deliver programs to international students under the brand and credentials of the public institution. This workaround allowed public institutions in smaller city centres (e.g., in Northern Ontario) to run programs in the GTA with minimal involvement or oversight, while still benefiting from the international student tuition windfall.

As study permit applications climbed, IRCC struggled to keep up with the sheer volume (IRCC, 2023) while provincial quality assurance was inconsistent. This presented greater opportunities for fraud among recruiters and institutions.

Overall, these changes transformed the Canadian higher education sector, particularly in Ontario, where provincial funding per post-secondary student is disproportionately lower than elsewhere in Canada (Usher & Balfour, 2024). Though not all institutions pursued international recruitment with equal intensity, the overall system expanded well beyond the limits of domestic demand, creating a privately funded infrastructure sustained entirely by international student enrolment. At colleges, for example, the proportion of international enrolment steadily increased from 27 per cent in 2013-14 to 44 per cent in 2022-23 (Statistics Canada, 2025c). (See figure 8).

International students as a key source of labour

Growth in the number and proportion of international students who worked in Canada, both during (Crossman et al., 2021) and after (Crossman et al., 2022) their studies, also transformed the Canadian labour market (Champagne et al., 2025). This growth was partially impacted by changing international student demographics, as those with less foreign economic capital increasingly relied on their Canadian employment to afford their tuition. The trend was also driven by post-secondary institutions and business groups, which resisted federal attempts to impose tighter limits on international student work. By 2021, study-related work permit holders (including students, their spouses and post-graduation workers) comprised 60 per cent of all temporary immigrant workers in Canada, up from 24 per cent in 2011 (Statistics Canada, 2024). Most held open work permits with few restrictions, creating an uncapped population of temporary foreign workers selected by higher education institutions (Schinnerl & Ellermann, 2023).

In recent years, international students disproportionately worked in low-wage sectors, such as the accommodation and food services industries (Zhong et al., 2024). After graduation, many had worse employment outcomes than their domestic counterparts (Etmanski, 2025; Scott et al., 2015). Like most newcomers, they reported discrimination and racism in the labour market (El Masri & Khan, 2022; Ellis, 2023; Nguyen & Sharma, 2024). International students were also concentrated in certain fields of study (e.g., STEM and business and administration), which did not necessarily align with Canada’s labour market needs (Richardson & Hussain, 2022; Statistics Canada, 2025c). Among former international students who studied in these fields below the bachelor’s level, alignment between field of study and occupation was low (Choi & Xu, 2025).

Broadly speaking, international students who successfully obtain permanent residency still tend to have stronger labour market outcomes compared with immigrants who do not study in Canada. However, not all recent international students are well positioned to qualify for existing permanent resident pathways.

COVID-19 pandemic impacts

The pandemic had additional impacts. In 2020, Canada experienced a sharp drop in new immigrants due to COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions, which had a “profound” negative impact on Canada’s population growth (Statistics Canada, 2020, para. 5). To compensate, the federal government set ambitious immigration targets focusing on the retention of temporary residents already in Canada — and was among the first countries to exempt international students from travel restrictions as part of this strategy (Brunner, 2022). Acknowledging that the pandemic’s labour market distortions prevented many international graduates from qualifying for permanent residence, in 2021, IRCC also introduced a series of 18-month open work permit extensions for international graduates, expanding the pool of post-graduation workers. Marco Mendicino, then-IRCC minister, made it clear (IRCC, 2021): “Our message to international students and graduates is simple: we don’t just want you to study here, we want you to stay here.”

A historic number of international students soon arrived to do just that. Additionally, for 18 months between 2022 and 2024, international students were permitted to work unlimited hours off-campus, rather than the typical 20-hour-per-week limit — reflecting Canada’s reliance on their labour.

In sum, the Canadian labour market banked on international student and graduate labour as a post-pandemic recovery strategy (Champagne et al., 2025) — until those students became a political liability.

Post-pandemic U-turn

In 2023, IRCC began a year-long, piecemeal overhaul of its international student policies to address “unsustainable growth and integrity issues” (IRCC, 2023, slide 3), noting that the program was “tilting away from [its] education focus to fulfil economic incentives of institutions and for students to work more than study.” The department indicated its intention to focus on the “quality of students, education and client services over quantity” (slide 7). In February 2024 — just three years after IRCC implored international students to come to Canada to stay — a subsequent IRCC minister, Marc Miller, claimed that Canada’s international student program (Raj, 2024): “has been used as a back-door entry into Canada, which it was never designed to do.”

Program changes throughout 2024 significantly impacted Canada’s reputation as a destination of choice. The government instituted a study permit application cap, more restrictive post-graduation work permit and spouse work permit eligibility requirements (especially for programs below the bachelor level, which were restricted to fields of study linked to “occupations in long-term shortage”) and drastically limited permanent residency options for international students. Overall, international education has been deprioritized, despite being one of Canada’s few high-impact export industries not reliant on the United States. The last official federal International Education Strategy ended in early 2024 and a renewed strategy has yet to be released.

Broken promises?

These changes deeply impacted Canada’s higher education system due to declines in new students from previously top-sending countries (MacDonald, 2024). While colleges, institutions in more rural and remote areas, and institutions in Ontario were most impacted, institutions at all levels continue to struggle to meet even their reduced quotas.

Given stagnant or declining domestic enrolment and per-student public funding, it is unclear how many higher education institutions are sustainable long-term unless governments significantly increase funding, or private philanthropy steps in, or domestic higher education enrolment rates grow (Usher & Balfour, 2024). Otherwise, a reduction in program offerings or consolidation of the higher education system may be required to align with lower demand.

In the meantime, many international students feel betrayed by the lack of permanent residency options that were once promised to them and face backlash fuelled by political and media discourse. Public opinion polling shows international students are now viewed as the least desirable category of immigrants (Environics Institute, 2024; IRCC, 2024a; Nocos, 2025). Although they experience housing discrimination and exploitation by landlords (Pottie-Sherman et al., 2024) and are more likely to live in unsuitable housing than Canadian-born students (Stick et al., 2024), they have been framed as illegitimate actors partly responsible for Canada’s long-standing housing affordability crisis (Brunner, 2024; Harden-Wolfson et al., 2025).

International students have also been positioned as a source of illegitimate asylum claims, prompting proposed restrictions on their eligibility to seek protection. While the vast majority of international students do not pursue asylum, some successfully make credible claims under Canada’s refugee system. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of current and former students who invested their youth, labour and savings with the hope of permanent residency now face far more restricted, if not impossible, pathways to remain in the country. When long-term prospects diminish so sharply, a minority may resort to other means to remain. This also increases the potential for a growing number of former international students with irregularized status.

The future of Canada’s international student-immigration nexus

Canada’s story is not unique. Many countries are grappling with mounting tensions arising from immigration politics, increasing global demand for international education, economic pressures to integrate international students into domestic education systems, and the effects on local communities. Australia and the United Kingdom also experienced surges in post-pandemic international enrolment and shifts in student demographics, which similarly prompted more restrictive policies and the scapegoating of international students to deflect attention from structural issues in the housing market (Collett, 2025). The notion that all international students are “ideal immigrants” and immune to nativist sentiment has been punctured (Sabzalieva et al., 2022).

That said, edugration remains a global strategy to address labour shortages. Economic growth in key sending countries continues to improve the financial resources of their middle classes and fuels international migration desires (OECD, 2025). In response, most receiving countries have adopted more selective approaches than Canada, such as specifically targeting graduate-level and STEM students in an ongoing search for the “perfect” form of labour migration (OECD, 2024). In addition to post-graduation work and immigration options, some countries experiment with scholarships, lower tuition levels and partnerships and agreements to entice desirable students. Emerging models of cross-border online education seek to offer education without physical relocation — yet still allow the possibility of post-graduation work immigration (Brunner, 2024; Collett, 2025).

In Canada, the current Immigration Levels Plan still allocates more than 300,000 spots for new international students per year and the “best and the brightest” are still encouraged to stay. Yet our edugration remains unco-ordinated and its objectives remain unclear despite a competitive global market. There has never been a comprehensive, cross-sectoral, intergovernmental national edugration strategy which emphasizes sustainability rather than perpetual growth. Given Canada’s continued engagement in the recruitment and retention of international students, it urgently needs one. But to avoid making the same mistakes again, three core complexities need to be addressed.

Who should pay for Canada’s public higher education system, and what is the correct proportion of international students within it?

In edugration, the unchecked marketization of international education within an otherwise public higher education system fuels a core systemic distortion (Brunner et al., 2025). This produces a profound reliance on international student tuition, effectively amounting to a large-scale wealth transfer from the Global South to subsidize more wealthy countries’ domestic higher education systems (Wong & Sohi, 2025). While other public funding models show this reliance is not inevitable, it has become structurally entrenched in Canada.

If permanent residency becomes fully decoupled from international education, many prospective students, particularly those considering non-elite institutions, will look elsewhere unless significant program innovation occurs. The current system’s appeal relies heavily on post-study work and immigration opportunities.

Reduced demand is not necessarily bad. In fact, Canada must urgently rebuild public support for both international education and higher education more broadly. A smaller, more sustainable cohort of international students may be necessary to do so. However, without a plan to finance schools, Canada risks undermining the accessibility and quality of its public post-secondary system. The institutions most affected will likely be those serving lower-income and historically marginalized domestic students.

Determining the correct number of international students must start with a reassessment of both the funding and purpose of Canada’s higher education system.

What settlement services should international students be eligible for, who should deliver them and who should fund them?

The vast majority of international students are ineligible for federally funded settlement support. By design, international students are expected to remain self-sufficient. In reality, however, there is a limited global supply of such students who are also willing to pay high Canadian tuition rates.

As a result, to sustain current international student targets, many international students recruited to Canada do need support — not just to immigrate, but also to thrive during their studies (Akbar, 2022; Dauwer, 2018; El Masri & Khan, 2022). Because schools lack a clear mandate or adequate resources for settlement services, there is disagreement over who, beyond the students themselves, is responsible for international students’ outcomes, let alone what those outcomes should be.

When international students are treated exclusively as a source of revenue, support services are often viewed as costs to be minimized, leading to inconsistent and inadequate provision (Calder et al., 2016; Shokirova et al., 2022). Then, when international students’ core needs go unmet and they turn to the community for help — for example, accessing food banks — they no longer fit the image of the “ideal immigrant” and risk being positioned as competition. This is often when political and policy tensions arise. A collaborative service delivery model is thus an important component of addressing both poor international student outcomes and public opinion (Akbar, 2022).

What are the human costs of an unpredictable sorting system based on deceptive marketing?

By design, two- and three-step immigration pathways are sorting mechanisms which require would-be migrants to endure years of uncertainty about their ability to remain in Canada permanently. This has been described as conditional, trial or probationary immigration (Ellermann & Gorokhovskaia, 2019; Stein & Andreotti, 2016). Edugration requires international students to undergo particularly prolonged precarity due to an extended time as a temporary resident — first as a student, then as a post-graduation worker — before securing permanent residency, if they are able to do so. During this time, international students are vulnerable to exploitation yet have limited recourse or political representation (Brunner et al., 2024).

International students also cannot make informed decisions about their participation in this system because permanent residency pathways are opaque, confusing and inconsistent. As well, recruiters have a financial incentive to overpromise — with few consequences —the likelihood of permanent residency. When institutional and policy gaps leave students vulnerable, they become visible to the public in negative ways, fuelling anti-immigrant sentiment.

Policy recommendations

To adapt playwright Max Frisch’s well-known critique of European guest worker programs, governments seek student-workers but get people instead. Canada’s current approach to international education reflects a strong short-term economic logic, but this model comes with consequences. A more sustainable and strategic framework for edugration is needed that balances economic goals with social and ethical responsibilities to the students it recruits. Without a co-ordinated and forward-looking approach, and without careful attention to the tone of public discourse, Canada risks undermining the public trust and social licence essential to maintaining international education as part of its broader immigration and labour market strategy.

The following recommendations focus on three core areas: rebuilding public trust in immigration, stabilizing the higher education system and reducing potentially exploitative conditions. Together, they chart a path toward a more sustainable framework.

Canada’s international education system sits at a crossroads. Recent reforms signal a recognition of deep structural challenges, but more holistic and collaborative action is needed. Canada now faces a choice: whether to continue managing international student policy through fragmented, short-term fixes, or to invest in a coherent, principled framework that not only meets immigration objectives but also restores public trust and international respect, prioritizes international student well-being, and strengthens Canadian higher education for the long term.

 

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Notes

¹ A substantial number of foreign nationals also study at the K-12 level.

² Note that this population is often undercounted because not all minor children in Canada require a study permit. Both public and private K-12 schools recruit fee-paying international students to generate revenue. However, because the number of non-permanent resident adults in Canada increased, a growing number of their children attend K-12 public schools and are exempt from tuition fees due to their parents’ status.

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About this paper

This Policy Brief was published as part of the Canada’s Changing Immigration Landscape series from the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation. The manuscript was copy-edited by Jim Sheppard, proofread by Zofia Laubitz, editorial co-ordination was by Étienne Tremblay, production was by Chantal Létourneau and art direction was by Anne Tremblay.

Canada’s Changing Immigration Landscape is a partnership between the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation at the IRPP, the Institute for Research on Migration and Society at Concordia University (IRMS) and the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia (CMS). All publications are under the direction of Charles Breton, Executive Director of the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation, Mireille Paquet, Director of IRMS and Irene Bloemraad, Co-director of CMS.

Dr. Lisa Ruth Brunner is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner specializing in immigration, citizenship and education in Global North settler-colonial contexts. She has 15 years of professional experience in international education, including a decade as an international student adviser. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia Centre for Migration Studies and a Public Policy Consultant with the Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of British Columbia (AMSSA).

A French translation of this text is available under the title La politique canadienne relative aux étudiants internationaux à la croisée des chemins.

To cite this document:

Brunner, L. R. (2025). Canadian international student policy at a crossroads. Policy Brief No. 1, October 2025. Institute for Research on Public Policy.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Dan Hiebert, Dale McCartney and Sandra Schinnerl for helpful feedback and discussion.