A cap on foreign student visas was necessary, Canada's immigration minister told Bloomberg, due to perverse incentives for low-quality schools amidst pressures on local housing and infrastructure.Immigration Minister Marc Miller has announced a temporary limit to the number of student visas and promises further measures. He told Bloomberg some schools are taking advantage of vulnerable youth from abroad with inferior academic programs. “People are being exploited,” Miller said."The fly-by-night business degrees that you see,” Miller said, “those really have no reason to exist. They're not really business degrees.”Starting in September, students in private schools that have formed alliances with public colleges will no longer be eligible for coveted post-grad work permits that can lead to permanent residency.“It’s not the intention of this program to have sham commerce degrees or business degrees that are sitting on top of a massage parlour that someone doesn’t even go to and then they come into the province and drive an Uber,” Miller said as he announced new visa restrictions last month.In Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario Conestoga College had more than 30,000 study permits approved, but life has not been easy for some foreign students, some of whom come from India.Student Akash Patel sleeps in the living room of a two-bedroom apartment that houses six people and takes two busses on his one-hour commute to class. Another student from India, Sai Reddy, lives in a basement apartment he can barely afford as he can't find work.“I’m in financial crisis right now,” Reddy said. “I have to cut costs and now I’m eating twice a day. I don’t have money to buy winter clothes.”About one in 40 people in Canada lives here on a foreign-study visa. Applicants have to prove they have at least $20,635 to begin their studies. International students don't get the benefit of taxpayer subsidies to tuition, so they pay five times the tuition of Canadian undergraduates.Bloomberg said "post-secondary institutions are more common than McDonald’s outlets" in Brampton, ON, thanks to foreign students. The cost of a one-bedroom apartment there rose 19% in a year, to $2,117 per month. Sandeep Singh of the Brampton Immigration Consultancy said students provide about 90% of his business.More than 80% of foreign students work more than 20 hours a week, as the Trudeau government raised a limit on the weekly hours foreign students could work. Ottawa estimates that foreign students contribute more than $22 billion to the Canadian economy each year and support 218,000 jobs.Last fall, an Environics Institute poll found that 44% of Canadians said there’s too much immigration, a 17-point jump from the previous year. But Ratna Omidvar, an Indian-born Canadian senator, said policy changes would do more good than blame.“What we need to do is not blame the students but look at the system that has resulted in this situation,” said Omidvar.“Students are both used and abused without getting the quality education you have promised them. This tarnishes our reputation. Canada needs immigrants.”Sydney, Nova Scotia has 30,000 people, but its Cape Breton University draws many students with cheap tuition. Tasha Myers, manager of a local Hallmark store, said students are "desperate" for work.“Yesterday, we had at least 12 students before noon looking for literally anything. They say, ‘Just give me three or five hours a week’ or ‘I’ll wash the toilets,’” she said.Under pressure from Quebec, the federal government also announced February 28 it will reimpose visa requirements on Mexicans visiting Canada. This will affect roughly 40% of all Mexican travellers to Canada, a government source told Radio-Canada.The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper imposed a visa requirement on Mexico in 2009, but the Trudeau government relaxed it in 2016. More than 25,000 Mexicans applied for asylum in Canada last year, making Mexico the top source of asylum claims.
