This isn't true. There are about 1 million international students in Canada and they aren't cherry picked. Basically anyone who gets into any of the strip mall colleges in Ontario gets in, and many of them are basically just diploma mills "selling" Canadian immigration status to anyone willing to pay. There is nominally a requirement to be self sufficient financially but it just requires showing you have 20k CAD in a bank account somewhere. Many people fake this by borrowing 20k to show the sufficient balance and then pay it back, and even if they aren't faking it, having 20k isn't enough to support yourself in Vancouver or Toronto for a year.

Being an international student isn't "immigration status" -- it's temporary by definition. There's a potential path to PR from there, but by no means guaranteed. I'd have to go look up the conversion rate, but my understanding is the majority of international students are returning home after, or at least that used to be the case.

Yes, many return by choice, but until the last few months, it was basically guaranteed that if you get into university or a college here and graduate, you'll definitely get a work visa, and you'll definitely be able to get a PR, and then citizenship.

> but my understanding is the majority of international students are returning home

Your understanding is outdated

Many (most?) of those community college international students don't have a path to permanent residency. If they didn't already have a Bachelor's degree before coming, I don't think they will ever have enough points to stay permanently.

This is totally wrong. The majority of immigrants that people have a problem with are poor immigrants from rural areas of India. They spend their life savings to get a college degree which used to guarantee a work visa and path to residence.

Curious how others on this thread experience this. It’s different from anti immigration sentiment in EU & USA then?

I actually think the comment you're replying to is somewhat mistaken. It's true that the majority of Canadian immigrants do have to compete on education, job prospects, language skills, etc.; but there's a sizable chunk who are admitted for humanitarian or family reunification reasons and are not held to that standard. There are also a lot of people on temporary work and student visas. I think these groups are the source of a lot of the animosity.

Here's an official government source which says that ~40% of immigrants in 2023 are not in the "middle-income range or above", i.e. they are low-income. [1] The same source says that 75k out of the 450k admitted were refugees.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...

I have a BIL who immigrated to Canada and most of my family immigrated to the US.

In the US most immigration sentiment is around illegal immigrants and fear of crime. In Canada, up until COVID there was basically no ill sentiment towards immigrants because no illegal immigrants and not really much immigrant crime.

COVID flipped the job markets and economy, so people turned their eyes to skilled immigrants. Most Americans are frankly not that skilled as workers, have lower educational attainment than Canadians, it's a more rural, spread out population, etc. Plus the illegal immigration is still a bigger gripe, so they never turned as much on skilled immigrants during the downfall. Canada turned sharply and many who moved there and followed all the rules feel the anger of the population towards them is way higher than they expected (or feel they deserve).

A lot of people claim the immigrants don't want to integrate, but it's largely untrue. These are usually some of the most Westernized out of their peer groups from India already, to even consider immigrating to Canada / US. They also tend to be wealthier to afford the tuition to do so. That makes people happy when the economy is good, but it sucks when jobs are scarce.

"People from the future. They took our jobs." -- South Park