this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas (www.theglobeandmail.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/canada
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Granting an ever-growing number of student visas to people we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best and fraudulent at worst.

We need to dramatically cut the number of student visas, especially for private colleges, some of which are offering a quality of education that is less than desirable. We then need to tie student visas to housing availability – that is, a university shouldn’t be allowed to take on more international students than it can house in that community, for the duration of that person’s time studying in Canada.

Why is Canada trying to attract so many international students? Because it's easier than properly funding post secondary institutions:

international students are cash cows. Tuition fees for domestic students are regulated by provincial governments. Not so for their international counterparts, which makes bringing in foreign learners incredibly lucrative for perpetually cash-strapped schools and universities. (The real growth is increasingly not just from universities, but also from private colleges.)

The housing crisis has a bunch of causes, from Airbnb, to shitty taxation policies, to NIMBYs, to regressive zoning. Tying student visas to available, reasonably priced housing would be a simple first step to reducing prices.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Desperate calls by schools to urge local homeowners to rent out their rooms; students paying $650 a month to live three-to-a room in college towns boasting monthly rents upward of $2,000; a viral TikTok video purports to show an international student living under a bridge in Scarborough, Ont.

But in the short term, there is at least one glaringly obvious – if surely controversial – way to help ease the challenge of finding affordable rental accommodation: We need to stop issuing so many international student visas.

But anybody who thinks that our desire to bring in as many fruitful international students as possible isn’t contributing to the housing crunch hasn’t looked at the figures lately.

International students, who actually dwarf the population of temporary foreign workers at the moment, comprise about 17 percent of university enrolment in this country.

Further, the majority of those students are opting for schools where housing is exceptionally expensive and difficult to find – namely, in big cities in Ontario and British Columbia.

If that edict seems extreme, I would remind everybody that reducing international student visas to a more manageable baseline would actually be among the easier levers to pull to relieve pressure in our housing market.

The original article contains 791 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] corsicanguppy 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

We need to stop issuing so many international student visas.

Yes. The others. Get rid of the others. Then it's all better.

Wait. My university is now poor because it's a user-pay mess and it relied on international students paying 4x as much as domestic students from across the country that it's now broke. Somehow this is the others' fault but I'm not sure how.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The suggestion is to tie visas to housing available in the institutions' community. It would ensure that there's enough housing for international students. It would give schools a reason to build and manage student housing.

Many post-secondary institutions are accepting students who will have nowhere to live. That's shitty for the students, it's shitty for the communities that don't have enough housing.

International students are still welcome.

And as stated in other comments, we should fund our schools directly, rather than relying on international students.