It was 2018 when The Racialisation of Asian International Students (RAIS) Collective came together for a research project setting out to compare the treatment of international students from Asia at five Canadian universities.
But the pandemic hit before the fieldwork could begin and RAIS meetings became places for racialised and non-racialised researchers, educators, and international students to meet and reflect on the anti-Asian racism and xenophobia they felt rising in Canadian society.
“There was always a book in mind… but what changed was the pandemic. I found students generally felt more compelled to talk about racism and discrimination,” said co-author Lori Wilkinson, University of Manitoba professor and Canada research chair in Migration Futures.
“From very early on I was getting many reports from Chinese students about increased racism on campus. And as we inched closer towards the [Covid] lockdown it became more and more predominant.”
Eight years later, the 15-member RAIS Collective published Not your cash cow, Not your scapegoat – the first book to empirically study the daily lives of international students in Canada.
Drawing on more than 120 student interviews, the book exposes the racism inherent in Canada’s student immigration policy of the 2010s and the vulnerabilities arising from international students’ immigration status.
“We had project leads in five different cities and major universities across the country going all the way from Vancouver to Halifax, doing a qualitative study of Indian, South Korean and Chinese international students,” explained Ajay Parasram, associate professor at Dalhousie University and RAIS Collective member.
He said one of the biggest challenges in writing the book was that many students initially resisted calling their experiences “racism”, even as they described clearly racist incidents, sometimes only adopting that language by the end of the interview.
Since its release this summer, the book has been well received by sector experts for spotlighting the systemic issues around “edugration” in Canada, revealing among other things, the disconnect between inflated international student fees and the lack of specialised support they receive.
Are these students not citizens of our university, even if they’re not citizens of the province or citizens of the country?
Ajay Parasram, Dalhousie University
It tracks the changing narratives around international students, once welcomed in Canada and lauded as a source of global talent, only to be blamed for social issues including housing shortages and the spread of Covid-19.
In the process of researching and writing the book, the RAIS Collective was responding to outside forces, as changing social views and the politicisation of immigration increasingly shaped international students’ experiences.
The authors shared their frustration about the discourse used under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government blaming international students for the housing crisis and exaggerating the idea that all students were trying to stay in Canada.
“If you look back, the number of immigrants coming to Canada increased faster under Conservative governments than Liberal governments,” said Wilkinson.
“Both parties think very similarly about immigrants, it’s just that the Liberal Party uses more flowery, obscuring language whereas the Conservatives tend to be blunter.
“But after the Pandemic, when it became clear the Liberal party was going to struggle in the election, they picked up the Conservative playbook, and it was easy to blame immigrants because they can’t vote.”
Parasram said the title reflected the writers’ anger over the treatment of international students by all levels of government.
“We didn’t set out to write a book about scapegoats, but when federal and provincial policy started colluding against them, that was one of the reasons we chose to go with our publishers.”
“We felt that Fernwood was a progressive political publisher that would make space for the vision of this book as it came out, written as a collective, inclusive of international students and dispensing with some of the academic niceties that some presses would expect.”
As for the title: “There’s no ambiguity about what the book is about … As the flagship capstone for our work, we all reached the point where we wanted to say it how it is and be absolutely clear about what is happening here to some of the most vulnerable people in this country,” Parasram said.
He and Wilkinson emphasised the wide variety of student and institutional experiences across Canada, something the researchers sought to represent by being spread across the country – in smaller centres such as Winnipeg and Halifax as well as the dominant cities of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.
Contrarily, the federal government’s blanket policies have long been criticised for ignoring regional differences, as Wilkinson said the government’s caps had caused unintended harms to remote provinces that tend to have space to absorb international students and which “were largely playing by the rules”.
And their message to the sector? Wilkinson and Parasram hope the book will urge university administrators to treat students as full members of the academic community rather than revenue sources.
“For far too long they’ve taken international students for granted,” said Wilkinson.
“Many Canadians have bought into this idea that it’s okay to charge triple the tuition because their parents aren’t here paying taxes… And there’s also this idea that they can afford to be here.”
But she stressed this isn’t the case, citing instances of international students living in cars when finances change or costs spike, with little safety net to rely on when governments or families stop paying.
Wilkinson highlighted that 75% of all scholarships are reserved for those with Canadian citizenship or permanent residency, as Parasram urged universities to defend academic missions that treat international and domestic students equally.
“Are these students not citizens of our university, even if they’re not citizens of the province or citizens of the country?”
“Our hands are not tied… we have active power to push back,” said Parasram: “You can talk to other universities, you can articulate different points of view you can clarify how your academic missions work, and you can put your foot down on the fact that a student is a student is a student.”
