Just a few years ago, getting admitted to a college in Canada would create a smooth pathway to a work permit and then permanent residency. Thousands of Indian students, mostly form Punjab, would get admitted to such colleges, called degree mills, to obtain a diploma in a trade and then get a work permit which in due course would lead to permanent residency and then to citizenship.

That smooth path to the Canadian dream has been disrupted as Canada struggles with unemployment and a sluggish economy. Thousands of students and temporary foreign workers, who too came as students, have taken to streets to put pressure on the Canadian government. But as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority government, propped up by the NDP, grew unpopular, partly for allowing unchecked immigration, it has decided to cap the number of temporary foreign workers which would mean deportation for thousands of students as well as those who had found work after completing their courses.

International students and foreign workers hit the road

Even though work permits and residencies are a matter of privilege and not a right, international students and foreign workers, a lot of them from Punjab, have taken to the streets, hoping to get support from Indian-origin Canadians who form a sizable voter group.

A protest in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island (PEI) has been brewing for several months as temporary foreign workers and students camp outside the state legislature.

In February, the PEI government announced it would cut the number of people from other countries that it nominates for permanent residency in Canada through the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), CBC reported. The number of nominees will fall by 25 per cent in 2024, partly as a result of pressure on PEI’s health-care system and housing market. The province’s new population strategy specified that of the spots that remained, people who work in specific occupations including health care and construction would be given priority. That means hundreds of immigrants in other industries, such as retail sales and service, may not have their work permits extended when they run out in the next few months.

The protests by international students and temporary foreign workers have spread to several provinces.

The Canadian authorities insist that a study permit isn’t necessarily a pathway to PR. “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,” Canada’s Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller had said in an interview.

Protest culture has caught on with international students in Canada. Another kind of protests by Indian students have also made news. In several colleges, the students who flunked in exams have protested, claiming that the grading system was not fair. In one case, such students were granted another chance after they protested. Protestors insist that colleges flunk them to get extra fees which they charge for re-examinations.

After Trudeau said on Monday that the country would reduce the number of low-wage, foreign workers so that Canadian businesses invested in their own workers and youth, protests have flared up. The decision came after a UN special rapporteur warned that Canada’s reliance on temporary foreign workers is “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery”. The temporary foreign workers are often underpaid and exploited by employers in various ways.

Glut of foreign workers

Easy path to work permit, residency and citizenship has lured hordes of foreign youth from global south to Canada in search of a first-world lifestyle. But as their growing number has created jobs crisis not only for locals but also for temporary foreign workers. A few months ago a video went viral showing a long queue of temporary foreign workers at a Tim Horton for a few low-wage jobs.

The use of Canada’s temporary foreign worker low-wage stream has exploded in use over the past few years, Better Dwelling, Canada’s largest independent housing news outlet, has reported. These positions climbed 7% to 83,654 workers in 2023. Growing at twice the rate of the general population is already fast, that’s actually a slowdown. Last year’s annual volume was a whopping 291% higher than 2018, just five years ago. In the first quarter of this year, Canada has already seen 28,730 such positions, or 34% of last year’s total volume. Over the first three months of 2024, there have already been more low-wage roles created than Canada saw in all of 2018.

Temporary residents and recent immigrants are driving up Canada’s unemployment rate, as record numbers of newcomers welcomed to the country to fill labor shortages are now struggling to find work, Bloomberg has reported. The unemployment rate for temporary residents – including foreign workers, international students and asylum seekers – was 11% in June, according to Bloomberg calculations. Using comparable data, the unemployment rate for all workers was just 6.2% in the same month. Immigrants who’ve landed in the last five years are also having a hard time finding a job, with their unemployment rate reaching 12.6% in June.

“The biggest single weighted contribution to the rise in the unemployment rate has been from the temporary residence category,” Derek Holt, an economist at Scotiabank, said on BNN Bloomberg Television last month. While the US has seen a widely-covered surge in authorized and irregular migration, the scale of the increase actually pales in comparison to Canada’s growth rate. For every 1,000 residents, the northern nation brought in 32 people last year, compared with fewer than 10 in the US.