Written by Asma Atique (CERC Migration and Integration, Toronto Metropolitan University)
Recent mainstream discourse on international students in Canada is replete with racist, xenophobic narratives, vilifying international student-workers as “que-jumpers” and scapegoats for longstanding issues such as the housing and affordability “crises.” Once touted as the “ideal immigrants” as part of the federal government’s strategy to attract and retain “highly skilled” migrants, international students have become Canada’s “new” disposable cheap labour. These temporary migrants face significant challenges which warrant a robust diagnosis of structural causes through frameworks such as racial capitalism (which, in short, highlights the interconnectedness between capitalist and racist processes). This blog post shares one such compelling analysis by Vincent Wong and Arman Sohi, who argue “that [the] current policy facilitates a significant neocolonial wealth transfer from Global South families” through three interrelated processes: expropriation, exploitation and expulsion.
Wong and Sohi start their article by introducing racial capitalism and its two key features: profit-making and race-making. At the risk of oversimplifying, they explain how these processes of differentiation are interrelated as “capitalist relations require the ‘ongoing confiscation of the unpaid or underpaid labour of subordinated groups.’” Indeed, as numerous studies have repeatedly shown, international student-workers in Canada face significant challenges, including underemployment and being disproportionately represented in sectors associated with poor working conditions, creating what some have called “probationary precarity.”
Expropriation – Education Head Taxes
After presenting the evolution of international student mobility policy in Canada towards increased commodification, Wong and Sohi argue that the Liberal administration under former Prime Minister Trudeau turned migrant students into cash cows and scapegoats through wealth expropriation through discriminatory tuition fees. These tuition costs are often five (in some cases, 10) times more than those for domestic students. Drawing on post-colonial scholars, they argue that these fees allow Canada to exploit old power asymmetries. Moreover, they compare international student-workers’ financial costs to the 1886 Chinese head tax in Canada – a blatantly racist legal mechanism intended to deter Chinese immigrants after they were no longer needed to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. This was later replaced by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 (the Exclusion Act), which banned the entry of nearly all Chinese immigrants for 24 years.
Drawing on racial capitalism, Wong and Sohi argue that “discriminatory tuition fees effectively function as ‘education head taxes.’” Wong and Sohi do the math and find that Canadian postsecondary institutions have expropriated approximately $7.3 billion in 2020 alone, which is “five times the entire inflation-adjusted amount collected under the Chinese head tax throughout its four decades of operation.” The total amount expropriated is even higher, considering the biggest population increase was after 2020. As another government report finds, the government expropriated $37.3 billion from international student-workers in 2022 alone. In other words, the amount expropriated from tuition fees in the more recent years during the “international student gold rush” far, far supersedes what was collected through the entirety of the Chinese head tax.
Exploitation and Expulsion
Furthermore, as illustrated by the recent flurry of changes to the international student program, including a cap on study permits and limitations on the post-graduate work permit, options for working-class international student-workers to transition to permanent residency are shrinking. As such, “pathways” such as the Post-graduate Work Permit and Canadian Experience Class that are part of Canada’s two-step immigration model can be better described as “gauntlets.” Since working-class students often incur significant debts to pay high tuition and living costs with little access to supports given their status, prolonging migrants’ temporary status while keeping the promise of permanent residency contributes to a system of labour exploitation, precarious work, and structural indebtedness (with some earning as little as $6.25/hour).
Threats of losing status and deportation – in other words, expulsion – allow for, as Wong and Sohi argue, “disciplining of labour and nationalist segregation of labour and education markets.” Through these processes, race-making and neocolonial relations establish differential treatment, which ultimately undermines solidarity efforts. While tensions between the federal and provincial governments are real, the “passing the buck” narrative sidesteps the core concern: “is it fair or just to discriminate against international students.” Therefore, campaigns like “status for all” which call to eliminate the two-step immigration model and the Canadian Federation of Students’ fight to end discriminatory international tuition costs are increasingly important. Wong and Sohi conclude that research alone will not lead to migrant justice. They end with a much-needed, provocative call for academics to understand our complicity in these systems and learn from grassroots migrant justice movements that continue to defy the many odds against them.
Suggested reading:
Wong V and Sohi A (2025) Racial Capitalism, Neocolonial Wealth Transfer, and Canadian International Student Policy. Epub ahead of print 2025.
Gerrard J, Sriprakash A and Rudolph S (2022) Education and racial capitalism. Race Ethnicity and Education 25(3). Routledge: 425–442.
Author bio:
Asma Atique’s research is broadly on labour migration, environmental law and policy. She is currently a Research Fellow at CERC Migration and Integration (Toronto Metropolitan University). She earned a PhD in Law from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University and an LLM in Environmental Law from Newcastle Law School.
Social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asmaatique/