Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, we speak with Laurie Wilkinson about the experiences of international students in Canada and the new book, Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat.
Speaker: International students have long been seen as a source of extra income by Canadian universities, who charge them much higher tuition fees for the same education as domestic students.
Speaker: In the past, they've been seen as global talent for Canada. More recently, international students have been blamed for social issues from housing shortages to spreading disease.
Speaker: In their new book, Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat, the Racialization of Asian International Students Collective studied the experiences of over 145 international students from China, India, and South Korea at five flagship universities.
Speaker: Laurie Wilkinson is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba. She's Canada Research Chair in Migration Futures, and she's also a member of the collective. Laurie Wilkinson joins me today from Ontario. Hello, Laurie.
Speaker: Thanks for having me on the show, Jane. Oh, it's great to talk with you. now this study project began in 2018. What motivated you to embark on this research?
Speaker: Well, a group of professors across Canada have always been concerned about what the experiences are regarding international students and largely in the field.
Speaker: This group of people hasn't been researched very much. And we saw individually some really unfortunate events, students struggling in school, students having difficulty with racism and understanding the culture of school,
Speaker: And so we got to talking and decided to apply for SSHRC research grant, and we were lucky enough to get one. Now, the pandemic broke out in Canada in 2020 when you were a year or two into the project. What changed in terms of your focus and I guess also in the lives of the people that you were studying?
Speaker: Well, everything changed. So we were just starting the interviews with the students at that time. We'd finished the administrator interviews and And, you know, the world changed for everyone. And we quickly learned that the pandemic had unequal experience on different groups of people. And international students were one of them. You know, at the beginning time, right, everything just shut down. People lost their jobs, their sources of income. And for some international students, that greatly affected them.
Speaker: Universities use the term international students as if every student's the same, but of course, that's not the case. Can you talk about some of the particular challenges that Asian students from different countries face?
Speaker: Well, at the start of the pandemic, with all of the travel restrictions, they were essentially trapped here in Canada, both because Canada's travel restrictions were tough, but also because the countries of origin, they shut down as well. And so they lost their ability to return home safely.
Speaker: You know, if there was an emergency or someone got sick, they were just not able to go home. And then from a financial perspective, many international students have part time jobs. Many of those jobs exist on university campuses and the university campuses were closed.
Speaker: They lost their source of income. And unlike other Canadians at the start, they weren't eligible for those pandemic relief checks. Eventually they were, but there was all of that financial uncertainty, like how am I going to pay rent when i have no money coming in and i can't go home? ah Like, what do I do? And we were looking at the possibility that many international students would be kicked out of their accommodation. simply because they just didn't have a way to pay.
Speaker: So it it became evident to us early on that that was going to be an issue. But even before we shut down, which was on March in Manitoba, it was March the 13th, but I think that was about the same everywhere else.
Speaker: It also became clear before the shutdowns occurred that the Chinese students in particular were already facing an uptick in racism in their daily lives, you know, getting on the bus and people not wanting to be near them because they thought,
Speaker: just because they were Chinese, that they would be carriers of this virus, even though most of them wouldn't have been home at all and anywhere near the epicenter of the disease outbreak. But that was clearly evident before we shut down, about a month before we shut down.
Speaker: Moving past the pandemic, I think you've also found that some international students are considered to be more responsible for the housing crisis than others. I think you mentioned Indian students are being particularly targeted.
Speaker: Yes, there was a you know, there's a widespread belief. And I mean, it makes it makes a certain amount of common sense, right? You have more people coming, they need places to stay. So therefore, you know, if we shut down or cut off or reduce the number of people coming, that will lighten up the the load.
Speaker: um As an aside, my research team in Winnipeg um outside of this study took a look at that phenomenon. And what we found actually is there was only three cities in Canada in which the arrival of international students caused death.
Speaker: the rental availability to go down or the housing prices to go up. In every other jurisdiction across Canada, the arrival of international students either had no effect on price of housing or availability of rental base or Interestingly, in some places, the arrival of international students meant the prices of housing and the rental availability. Rental availability went up and prices went down.
Speaker: But on the surface, right, it seems like, you know, if you have more people coming, then prices will go up and availability will go down. What is actually happening is that international students are not competitors for the kinds of housing that Canadians need and want.
Speaker: international students are more likely to live on campus in university housing, which is only available to university students. And if they're living off campus, they tend to maximize the number of people per square foot, you know, in their rental apartment or basement suite and are usually living in accommodation that other Canadians don't want.
Speaker: And then you look at the different geographies, So the housing crunch in places like Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal, very, very different than the housing needs in, say, a place like Winnipeg or Saskatoon or even Fredericton, where, yes, there's international students. Yes, we have a housing shortage.
Speaker: But again, they're not direct competitors because they're taking a different kind of housing that is not in short supply. Now, I want to go back to the title of your book, which is called Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat. How much of a cash cow are international students? i mean, how much more do they pay?
Speaker: Depending on the post-secondary institution, it can be anywhere from double, usually at the trade colleges, to quadruple the tuition that Canadians pay. And the argument there is, well, Canadian taxpayers pay They support universities you know, in in a subsidized way, but the international students, their families don't contribute to the tax base.
Speaker: So therefore they don't deserve the lower rate in tuition. So that's why we came up with the idea of cash cow is that in many places, the universities gladly take this extra tuition money. And yes, many universities have international student help centers, but the help that the students need isn't necessarily provided by these organizations, nor is it provided at the rate at which they pay tuition. In other words, their tuition, they're not getting their tuition dollars, the help that they need.
Speaker: um Instead, it goes to the rest of the university to fund its operations because our provinces haven't increased the investments that they're making to the institutions. And so they got to find the money somewhere Rather than taking it from Canadians, they gladly take it from international students.
Speaker: You say that university discussions of international students tend to celebrate their diversity, but they ignore race. Can you say more about that?
Speaker: Yeah, every university has a concern about racism on campus. But i feel like they kind of fumble around what they should do with regards to racism on campus. and so Ultimately, they do the easy things, right? They celebrate all of this diversity. They have days celebrating multiculturalism, but they don't handle the problems that arise. So very rarely is racism in the classroom or on campus adequately addressed. And I mean, this is not just an international student phenomenon. This is this is a student phenomenon because usually if you're being racist towards somebody, you don't really care if they're an international student or not.
Speaker: And we got to talking as professors about our institution's response and we found it to be inadequate. What do you think should be in place for students on campus?
Speaker: Well, you know, it's easy for the university to count people, right? We count how many people that come, how much money they give us, where they come from, what languages they speak, but we don't do a good job of integrating the students. So take housing again.
Speaker: If you look at how many universities operate If the student is not living on campus housing, which is in short supply, they live off campus and many of the universities have little resources to help vet the housing needs for these international students. So at my home institution, it is not uncommon to hear about international students who are renting a basement suite, possibly from somebody that they know from their home country,
Speaker: And being told, you know, you can't make any noise after 8 p.m. m or you can't cook things that smell because I don't want my house to smell or you're not allowed to use the laundry room. And in extreme cases, I've had students reporting 15 people living in a three bedroom house.
Speaker: Like that's massive overcrowding. There's no mechanism at the universities, many universities to prevent them from moving into these situations or helping them get out of these situations once they're in.
Speaker: Most international students, I would argue, and probably many Canadian students, they don't realize they have rental rights. And when their rights are impeded upon, they don't realize that there's each province has an ombudsman office that you can report these problems to.
Speaker: So it's those things which are more difficult, more time consuming and cost the university more, but they're very slim on their offerings to international students.
Speaker: Let's look at the cuts that the government, federal government, decided to make in 2024 in international study permits. What's been the impact of those cuts?
Speaker: So the reasoning for the government to reduce the number of temporary people, including international students, is to try to loosen up on the housing crisis.
Speaker: The problem is is that the housing crisis, according to housing researchers, it's actually 50 plus years long. Like it didn't take overnight for us to get there.
Speaker: When the government cut international students, the agreement was to cut by a third. But what happened is they also took away many of the pathways to permanency after graduation And international students, they're rational.
Speaker: They want to, you know, they want to have a chance to stay permanently. And so many of them decided I'm not coming to Canada because they don't want me there. And the permits dropped, I think, by 40%.
Speaker: But the other issue is, is that the permitting didn't drop equally across the cities and the provinces. And so where there is a housing shortage, like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal,
Speaker: Those are still the primary cities that international students want to be in They want to attend these universities and they want to go to these cities because it's the city that they know. and I don't want to slag Winnipeg.
Speaker: But people don't know where Winnipeg is. They've never heard of it. It'd be like, you know, if we had to move to a place like Afghanistan, I'd be picking Kandahar or Kabul because I know that in those cities, there's probably a chance that I can find some English translation.
Speaker: But I wouldn't know any other city in Afghanistan. And so why would we expect international students to know any of our smaller cities? And so the cuts didn't happen across the universities or the cities equally. And so places like Winnipeg and Halifax and Saskatoon saw massive cuts. And yet these are the cities that international students saw can find housing. And these universities do have room for these international students. and And so it's these universities where the financial hit, but also the cultural hit was the greatest.
Speaker: In the book, you use a term transactional integration. What do you mean by that? So transactional integration refers to the fact that, well, you know, I'm going to help you integrate, but you're going to help me. Like there's got to be a two-way street in terms of integration. But we found that on the host society end or the university end of the integration equation, universities are just not doing what they need to do in order to help our students successfully settle their
Speaker: during their time in the program. And you also mentioned that Canadians aren't really getting to know international students. I guess we see them as a kind of a stereotype.
Speaker: oh absolutely. Absolutely. You have to go out of your way to meet somebody new. And it's a human phenomenon. And it it happens to everybody. i remember when I moved to Winnipeg and i am Canadian, and it was hard for me to make friends because I was a stranger.
Speaker: If you add on I look different or I have an accent or I'm not, you know, I'm new to the culture, so I don't understand everything. It makes it very difficult for international students to blend in and fit in and feel like they're Canadian. And especially if they're from a group of people that are experiencing a lot of racism, that can make the whole atmosphere very unwelcoming. It's really great to talk with you today, Laurie. Thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker: Thanks for having me, Jane. Laurie Wilkinson is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Manitoba. She's Canada Research Chair in Migration Futures, and she's a member of the Racialization of Asian International Students Collective.
Speaker: Their book, Not Your Cash Cow, Not Your Scapegoat, is published this month. The online launch for the book is May 11th, and you can find a link to join them at fernwoodpublishing.ca slash events.
Speaker: You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
