Canada beckons international students with a path to citizenship

ST JOHN’S (Newfoundland) — At the College of the North Atlantic here, a young Chinese woman stood discussing her future with two fellow students, a Bangladeshi man and a Korean woman, amid a flow of mostly pale Newfoundlanders in down coats and hoodies heading for class.

“The environment here is really good, so I think for my health I will stay,” said Ms Fei Jie, from China’s eastern Shandong province. The others said they, too, were planning to remain in the country after graduation, eventually becoming Canadian citizens.

Their path is no accident. They are three of hundreds of thousands of international students in Canada as part of a government strategy to reshape Canadian demographics by funneling well-educated, skilled workers through the university system. It is an answer to Canada’s aging population and slowing birthrate, and an effort to shore up the nation’s tax base.

In Nov, the federal government changed its electronic immigration-selection system, called Express Entry, to make it easier for international students to become citizens. And a bill pending in the Senate would restore a rule that counts half of students’ time spent studying in Canada toward the period of residency required for citizenship.

The country needs talented immigrants to backfill a thinly spread, aging population. According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the country’s immigration department, immigrants already make up 75 per cent of the annual net growth in the country’s workforce and are expected to account for 100 per cent within 10 years.

The strategy, which builds on a decade-long trend and was formally laid out in 2014, seems to be working. In the 2015-16 school year, Canada’s international student population grew 8 per cent to more than 350,000 — equal to roughly 1 per cent of the country’s population. The number of international students in the United States is less than one-third of 1 per cent of the population.

Canada expects to have nearly half a million international students studying in the country within 10 years. And more than half its students from abroad hope to stay in the country and become Canadian citizens, according to a survey by the Canadian Bureau for International Education.

“All of the building blocks are in place, just in terms of the reputation of our education system for quality, the reputation of the country as tolerant and safe, and the affordability of education in Canada and the opportunities that Canada gives to international students to be welcomed on a more permanent basis,” said Ms Karen McBride, the president of the Canadian Bureau for International Education, an association of educational institutions.

Internationalising Canadian education promises a deep and lasting effect on the country, binding it to other nations and cultures through the family ties and the broader perspectives of international students who become citizens. Some of those students may even rise to positions of national power. Canada’s new immigration minister, for example, arrived in the country as a Somali refugee and earned a law degree at the University of Ottawa.

But the strategy may also lead to tensions similar to those seen in the United States and Europe as the makeup of Canadian society evolves and less educated segments of the mostly white workforce feel pushed aside.

Since the early 1970s, when Canada embraced multi-culturalism, the per centage of what it calls “visible minorities” has ballooned to about 20 per cent of the population.

Statistics Canada, the country’s census bureau, predicts that the number will reach nearly 30 per cent by 2030. Non-whites will make up a majority of the population in Toronto and Vancouver.

So far, Canadians have shown a remarkable equanimity toward the influx, one of the highest per-capita immigration rates in the developed world. While polls show a gradual uptick in concern about the flow of new arrivals, mostly tied to unskilled Syrian refugees, the country on the whole remains welcoming to outsiders.

But non-Canadians are already crowding out local students at some of the country’s best-known schools. International students at McGill University in Montreal make up a quarter of enrollments. In British Columbia, where students from abroad make up 18 per cent of the enrollment, people in the province are beginning to grumble that locals are being passed over in favor of non-Canadians who pay higher fees.

The University of British Columbia created a controversy with its plans to spend 127 million Canadian dollars (S$138 million) to build a school, Vantage College, for international students — mostly Chinese — who need to improve their English before matriculating at the university.

Similar tensions have plagued schools in the United States that increasingly rely on tuition from international students to balance their budgets.

International students typically pay more than domestic students, and many, particularly from China, come from affluent families eager to establish a toehold in North America. The money these students bring helps subsidise education for domestic students but can also distort local economies.

About half Canada’s inbound students come from China, and the government wants even more. Former Immigration Minister John McCallum, recently named ambassador to China, met with Chinese officials in Aug, hoping to double or even triple the number of Canadian visa application centers in mainland China from the four the country has now, not including Hong Kong.

Mr Amit Chakma, the president of the University of Western Ontario who led a 2012 government advisory panel that developed the core of the government strategy, said there was plenty of capacity among smaller, high-quality institutions in Canada that are struggling to fill their classrooms as applications from high school graduates fall.

It is not just major cities that are attracting students from abroad. High schools, colleges and universities across the country are seeing an influx of international students. The fastest growth in the past year has been on tiny Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province. Yukon College’s website, meanwhile, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

Even the broad middle of the country is getting its share. The Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology in Regina, for example, has expanded its International English Language Testing System program to meet the demand, which has doubled, by non-Canadians who need to pass the English proficiency exam for immigration requirements.

Mr Jack Wu, who arrived from China, manages the design of circuit protection systems for hydroelectric transmission lines. He studied at the College of the North Atlantic in St. John’s before earning an electrical engineering degree in 2005 from Ontario’s Lakehead University. He and his wife immigrated through a provincial program for people who have studied in Newfoundland and Labrador. The process from student to citizen took them about 2 1/2 years.

“Our daughters were born here,” Mr Wu said proudly, sitting in a Tim Hortons, the quintessentially Canadian fast food chain. “They are Newfoundlanders.” THE NEW YORK TIMES