Immigration minister has a message for international students: you can't all stay

financialpost.com:

Canada is reviewing how many long-term visas it grants to foreign students, underscoring the government’s desire to slow immigration and population growth.

Federal and provincial officials have been discussing how to match labour market demand with international students, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in a phone interview. Although Canada has for years used universities and colleges to bring in educated, working-age immigrants, study visas shouldn’t imply a guarantee of future residency or citizenship, he said.

“That should never be the promise. People should be coming here to educate themselves and perhaps go home and bring those skills back to their country,” he said. “That hasn’t always been the recent case.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has faced mounting pressure over the rising cost of living, intense competition for scarce housing and higher unemployment. Earlier this year, Canada imposed a new cap on the number of international student visas it issues — it’s projecting fewer than 300,000 new student permits this year, down from about 437,000 last year.

Now officials are scrutinizing who among that pool of students should stay once they’re done with their studies.

Canada needs to do a better job making sure jobs for international students are commensurate with the studies they’ve undertaken, Miller said. There’s a conversation about reflecting labour needs and “how we match post-graduate work permits to an increasingly contracting shortage of labour” in provinces.

“The logic for having uncapped or uncontrolled draws from abroad is no longer there.”

The number of people in Canada with those visas has grown rapidly: there were 132,000 new PGWP holders in the country in 2022, up 78 per cent from four years