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Since the formation of our collective in 2022, Science for the People “Canada” has been built by scientific knowledge workers from many different regions of the world. We are deeply affected by the new wave of attacks on migrant workers and international students, including a total freeze on two major permanent residency streams in Québec. We support the call by the Immigrant Workers Centre-Centre des travailleurs et travailleuses immigrants (IWC-CTI) for international students and workers to get organized and fight back.
In addition to endorsing the key demands of the IWC-CTI on the December 18th day of action, we recognize the following:
1. International students from the Global South are increasingly “migrant workers” first and “students” second, with university tuition merely serving as the extortionary price of admission for selling one’s labour in the Global North. In many cases, these labour and migration dynamics are the consequence of a global system of imperialism which, in Canada, serves first and foremost the capitalist class.
2. International students, who comprise 34.6% of temporary immigrants to Canada, serve to prop up Canada’s underfunded education sector. As a result of massive reductions to the proportion of public funding for post-secondary institutions (47% of university operating costs in 2018 compared to 80% in 1990), universities are increasingly dependent on corporate donors and exorbitant tuition fees shouldered by international students, many of whom are seeking a pathway to permanent residency. While tuition for domestic students has remained nearly constant, international student fees have increased by 97.7% from 2006/7 to 2023/24, after adjustment for inflation. International students provide more funding for Ontario post-secondary education than the government does.
3. International students are a growing source of invisible and informal on-campus labour, particularly in labour-intensive STEM fields. International students comprise 50% of doctoral students in the faculty of sciences at UQAM, and 46% of faculty of science graduate students at McGill.
4. A system of stipend-based labour compensation falsely classifies many STEM post-graduate workers as “students” or “trainees” rather than “workers” – despite the fact that, in practice, these “trainees” serve as full-time employees and are responsible for the vast majority of scientific labour within Canadian universities and research institutions.
5. In addition to preventing scientist-workers from unionizing or even understanding themselves as “workers,” the deliberate sleight of hand that classifies students and post-graduates as “trainees” makes the migration status of international students dependent on their continued “good standing” with a particular institution. This helps to guarantee the steady supply of cheap and precarious student-workers with little to no legal recourse against exploitative and unsafe working conditions.
6. International students are also a significant and growing source of precarized labour off of campus. For international STEM doctorates lucky enough to receive a research stipend at all, Québec’s FRQNT stipends are currently a meagre $25,000/year, with many annual stipends set even lower. A growing proportion of international students working full-time in the laboratory or in the field are therefore forced to take second jobs in order to make rent, with 56.7% of international graduate students and 36.3% of international bachelors students reporting a T4 income in 2018*.
7. As of November 15, 2024, international students in Canada are officially permitted to work a maximum of 24 hours a week off-campus on a student visa. However, these limits are often inadequate to the cost of living, incentivizing under-the-table employment, unofficial overtime, and informal job contracts.
8. In addition to exploitative working conditions, international students are vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse. For example, 41.6% of international students from Francophone universities in Québec have experienced at least one incident of sexual violence on campus. The academic sector is characterized by high rates of sexual harassment, which are particularly egregious within STEM.
9. International students are often hesitant to seek support against harassment, attend protests, or join a union or political organization because they fear that conflict with university administrators or law enforcement could impact their immigration status. Exploitative working conditions are exacerbated by language barriers and manufactured uncertainty surrounding one’s political rights and legal protections as an immigrant.**
10. While STEM degree-holders continue to enjoy significant privileges compared to other workers, post-graduate education is rapidly expanding while the post-graduate job market is shrinking, reflecting significant changes to the nature and purpose of the graduate degree over the last 30 years. While a postgraduate STEM degree was once a signifier of class privilege, or a mechanism of so-called “upward mobility” as a ticket to a professional-managerial job, a growing proportion of post-graduate students in Canada are now better understood as precarized, temporary workers, who are expected to perform an ever-growing number of years of informal labour as “trainees” in order to gain access to the formal job market at all. Graduating with an average debt of $41,100 CAD, this new “academic precariat” faces increasingly slim odds of obtaining a job related to their years of specialized “training,” and/or of remaining in the country in the case of international post-graduates.
As scientists and friends of science, these facts compel us to stand in solidarity with all international students and workers, temporary foreign workers, and refugees on December 18th to demand status for all, and working and living conditions that are stable, secure, and dignified. As we suffer the consequences of a nation-wide housing crisis, stipends and salaries that are deeply inadequate to meet the rising costs of living, and a general deterioration of social and economic conditions, we reject the federal and provincial governments’ attempts to scapegoat migrant workers and international students for these problems. We know very well that these economic hardships do not result from immigration, but rather from the systematic underfunding, deliberate neglect, and privatization of public services – carried out by the same political class now attempting to blame immigrants for their own failures. Further, as anticapitalists and anti-imperialists, we recognize that the solution to these injustices, on both the local and global scale, requires organizing for systemic political change by building collective power where we are — in our laboratories, in our workplaces, in our unions, and on the picket line.
Further reading:
Senate Report on International Student Conditions
The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada 2024
Footnotes:
* A T4 income is any remuneration paid by an employer to an employee during a calendar year, which excludes scholarships and bursaries. The percentage of international postsecondary students receiving T4 slips has been increasing from 17.6% in 2000 to 46.6% in 2018.
** For more information see the following reports:
The Shadowy Business of International Education
Women International Students: The Invisible Workforce Project Report