The conflicting aims of higher education admission and immigration selection criteria

• In Event: International Student Mobility and Societal Impact: Reframing the Civic, Political, and Institutional Reach of Global Higher Education

Proposal

In mid-2023, Canada’s Immigration Minister began describing international student mobility as a ‘back-door’ entry to Canada. Given the Federal government’s (1) promotion of immigration pathways for international students since the early 2000s, and (2) reliance on international students as a source of economic immigrants, tuition revenue, and temporary labour, this was a remarkable rhetorical shift.
Canadian policy documents had long framed international students as ‘ideal immigrants’ (Brunner et al., 2025), and Canada led the world in the proportion of international students who transitioned to permanent residency (OECD, 2022). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s government expanded the number of hours international students could work – an acknowledgement of their importance to Canada’s labour market (Brunner, 2022; Sivakumar, 2023) - and, in 2022 and 2023, dramatically increased the number of study permits issued to fill post-pandemic skill shortages.

However, declining public support for immigration starting in 2023 prompted more restrictive international student policy changes in early 2024. While these were initially justified to reduce pressure on housing markets, the Minister’s escalating use of “back-door” to describe Canada’s international education system suggested a different, more dramatic discourse - one that positioned international students as a threat to Canada’s bordering regime and echoed similar patterns seen in Australia.

This paper uses Bourdieu’s conceptions of capital to dissect this discursive shift in Canada as a case study of the contradictions inherent to the higher education-migration nexus. Bringing into conversation literature on, and critiques of, ‘skill’ from migration studies and labour studies, it examines the relationship between (1) higher education institutions’ international student admission criteria, and (2) criteria of key economic immigrant programs which subsequently target international graduates. It shows how, fundamentally, the higher education-migration nexus relies on institutions’ pre-sorting of potential immigrants by mobilizing economic capital (i.e., limiting the admission of those who cannot afford tuition) under the guise of a meritocratic system (i.e., rewarding institutionalized cultural capital), which governments then rely on as part of their immigrant selection criteria (which more explicitly and primarily relies on cultural capital). In this way, the ability to succeed in the labour market is more pre-determined by class, as measured by economic capital, than merit-based discourses imply.

The paper suggests that, in Canada, public backlash against international students-as-immigrants is not just a response to uncapped enrolment, but more importantly the recruitment of the ‘wrong’ international students by non-elite higher education institutions. Lower-ranked institutions do not perform the pre-sorting roles immigration policy makers expect - especially in marketized higher education environments. The paper discusses implications for the higher education-migration nexus more generally as some countries move away from ‘mass’ international student recruitment/retention and towards increasingly more ‘elite’ recruitment (OECD, 2024) in tightening migration policy contexts.

Author

• Lisa Brunner, The University of British Columbia