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International students’ lived experiences in Canada (ISX)

Team Members

Marshia Akbar, Anna Triandafyllidou

Co-applicants: Jill Hanley (external link) 

Funders

Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC-CRSH).

This work is part of the BMO Newcomer Workforce Integration Lab made possible by a gift from BMO.

Description

Canada’s immigration policy recognizes international students as a vital source of highly skilled workers and ideal candidates for this two-step system. The path from temporary to permanent residence and social and economic integration should be reasonably easy for international students with a Canadian education, work experience, and proficiency in at least one official language. Instead, data and information show that they experience low transition rates, underemployment, and lower median income after graduation compared to their Canadian-born counterparts and a significant gap exists between policy assumptions and actual experiences. This gap has grown during the pandemic, revealing their vulnerable and precarious migration status and employment conditions.

To better understand international students’ transition and integration challenges, we must acknowledge that most go through, not two, but three steps in the immigration process, from study permit to postgraduate work permit, and then to permanent residency. This lengthy process involves not just migration transitions but also life transitions from school to work, and often changes in family status, which has important gender and intersectional dimensions.

The number of international students tripled in the last decade, from 285,890 in 2011 to 622,000 in 2021. Despite increasing admission levels and policy emphasis on their retention, their rate of transition to permanent residency has been low. Only about one-fifth (19%) of international students who entered Canada with a study permit between 1990 and 2014 obtained permanent status within ten years of receiving their study permits. This indicates that many students live and work with temporary status for a lengthy period of time. Moreover, their migration transition is often intertwined with their school to work transition. Although their temporary migration is regulated by policy, the time dimension (both quantitative and lived/experiential time) of their temporariness is ambiguous and probably changes during their studies and post-graduate employment experience. While undergraduate, masters and PhD students follow the same regulatory process of transition from temporary to permanent status, their study length, institution type, study field, gender, employment experience and life course stages shape their experiences differently.

This study – International students’ lived experiences in Canada (ISX) – brings the three stages of international students’ transition: study permit stage, postgraduate work permit stage and permanent residency stage into one analytical framework and relates their individual experiences to the macro-level institutional contexts within which they study, work and encounter challenges. The study contributes to theorizing concepts of time, life course and transition in migration, looking at interactions between migration status, specific life phases, employment and social and institutional factors (such as migration policies, roles of educational institutions and labour market barriers).

Methodologies

We will collect primary data through an online survey and 120 interviews with three groups that represent the three stages of the temporary migration and transition process:

  1. Study permit holders (international students in universities and colleges who may work on- and/or off-campus depending on the conditions of their permit)
  2. Postgraduate work permit holders (international graduates under the International Mobility Program (IMP) who can live and work in Canada up to three years after graduation)
  3. Permanent residents (former international students and postgraduate work permit holders who obtained permanent residency).

In addition to the survey and interviews with these three groups, we will also conduct 10 expert interviews and produce 12 digital stories to visualize the experiential journey of current and former international students. Using mixed methods, the T&T project will better comprehend the conceptual and experiential views of international students’ temporariness and transition.

Project Outcomes

The data collection and data analysis for this project have been concluded. The study's findings have been disseminated at three Canadian conferences and two international conferences. Furthermore, a book proposal stemming from this study is currently in progress, and numerous publications have already been released based on the comprehensive literature review and interviews conducted as part of this project.

The publications to date include:

Policy briefs

  • Alboim, N., Cohl, K. and Akbar, M. (2024). Ontario Colleges and International Students: A Pivotal Time.  CERC Migration Policy Brief 18. https://www.icecommittee.org/reports/Supporting-International-College-Students-Final-Research-Report.pdf
  • Akbar, M. (2022). Ensuring the Success of International Students: A collaborative model between governments, post secondary institutions and the settlement sector. CERC Migration Policy Brief 08.  (PDF file) https://www.torontomu.ca/cerc-migration/Policy/CERCMigration_PolicyBrief08_AUG2022.pdf

Journal articles

Book Chapter

Research Reports

Blog articles

Akbar, M. (2023). Why Canada is Facing an Exodus of Skilled Migrants (external link) , Migration Policy Centre Blog, European University Institute, Florence, Italy.