The Crash of the International Student "Market": Facing the Consequences

For decades, Canadian higher education turned to international student recruitment to make up for stagnant public funds, while the federal government turned to them as ‘ideal’ immigrants. However, the Federal government has recently enacted a sweeping array of policy changes to reduce the number of international students coming to Canada, notionally in response to public concern about competition for housing and jobs. This panel seeks to offer a more critically engaged and complexity informed response to the recent policy changes by situating them within the colonial dynamics that have long structured Canada’s approach to international students. Panelists will also consider what these policy shifts signal about the future as we face financial austerity, political polarization, and shifting migration patterns due to conflict and climate change.

Dr. Lisa Brunner is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is also a Public Policy Consultant with the Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of BC (AMSSA). She conducts critical, interdisciplinary research on international migration and education, especially in Global North settler-colonial contexts. She has over a decade of professional experience as an international student advisor and has been a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant since 2014.

Dr. María Cervantes-Macías is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD in Geography from UBC and was a 2022-2023 Fox Fellow at Yale University. María’s work focuses on the impact of education and social class in international mobility..

Dr. Karun Karki is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of British Columbia. His scholarly inquiries are grounded in the philosophical underpinnings of demographic engineering, transnationalism, and neoliberalism, informed by theoretical foundations of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, intersectionality, and anti-oppressive social justice praxis. In his social work practice, he adopts collaborative and community-based approaches that foreground the values of equity, inclusivity, and social justice, working with diasporic and minoritized communities, including immigrants, refugees, and 2SLGBTQ+ people in Canada and internationally.

Dr. Dale McCartney is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, where he teaches introduction to university courses to UFV’s non-traditional student population. Before joining UFV he worked for more than a decade as a sessional on the edges of the BC post-secondary system, including at a pathway college serving exclusively international students. His research examines the history of international student policy in Canada.