Changes to immigration rules are a boon to international student recruitment
Fastest growing economic immigrant class is Canadian Experience Class, which favours foreign graduates of Canadian universities for permanent residency.
by Rosanna Tamburri
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| Number of international students in Canada. Source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada. |
International students have become an increasingly integral part of Canada's immigration strategy as a result of ongoing changes to federal regulations aimed at recruiting more highly skilled newcomers to the country.
The federal government has made incremental revisions to immigration rules in recent years designed to tap into this desirable pool of potential immigrants, said Harald Bauder, academic director of Ryerson University's Centre for Immigration and Settlement. It's been "a creeping transition" away from a system that assesses would-be economic migrants on a points system towards a two-step process that admits international students and foreign skilled workers on a temporary basis before allowing them to transition to permanent residency status.
"It's not a reform that's been passed by Parliament," Dr. Bauder said. "It's an incremental approach. And if you put all the different puzzle pieces together, then you end up with a different [immigration] system."
