Ranvir Singh was waiting for his bus on his first day of college last year in Waterloo when a car honked nearby.
The driver shouted at him to “go back home.”
This was not the welcome he anticipated when he applied for his Canadian study visa. It left him heartbroken and demotivated.
“But this was just the first of many race-based discrimination incidents I have been facing being an international student and a person of colour,” he said.
Ranvir, a third-semester student at Conestoga College, isn’t the only one facing these troubling incidents. Other students have echoed his concerns about discrimination.
Navjeet Kaur was at a grocery store when she faced a similar incident.
“It’s getting more and more difficult for international students to survive in this country because of the growing hatred towards us,” she said.
“I am not living for free in this country. I am paying three times the fee any Canadian student is paying.”
In 2022, international students in Canada spent around $37.3 billion on tuition, accommodation, and discretionary items, or 1.2 per cent of Canada’s GDP.
A report released by Waterloo Regional Police says between 2020 and 2023, officers recorded 387 race-based hate crimes, with nearly half of the incidents occurring in 2023.
Over the past four years, most race-based hate crimes in the region targeted Black people.
But there has been a recent surge in incidents directed at South Asians. In 2023, South Asians accounted for about one in six of the 190 race-based hate crimes reported to the police, up from about one in 10 in 2022.
The majority of these incidents are non-violent and often involve uttering threats and acts of mischief, such as graffiti.
Harassment and racism targeting international students, particularly South Asians, have also been on the rise across social media platforms.
“I have witnessed a steep increase in racism on social media,” Conestoga student Lovejeet Singh said.
Singh said he uses an online app called OmeTV, where he goes live and likes to interact with people around the country, but these live talks have been getting more and more hateful.
“I preferred coming to Canada thinking it’s a diverse country and people from all walks of life will be welcomed here with open arms but I regret my decision,” he said.
“Though there are very strict policies around this, I don’t think they’re working out.”
Students like Ayushi, who uses a single name, feel misled about their expectations of life in Canada.
“Canada promotes itself as the best country in the world, but the reality hits once we arrive,” she said.
“As international students, we already face countless challenges and to be blamed for issues like housing is completely unfair.”
Earlier this year, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said the international education system had “gotten out of control” and that there was a “challenge to integrity” from current levels.
He added that in some areas of Canada, the volume of international students was contributing to problems in the housing sector.
He has asked the provinces to “clean up the mess in their own kitchens.”
In 2025, new international student study permits will be reduced by 10 per cent from the 2024 target of 485,000, meaning 437,000 permits will be issued next year, with that same target continuing into 2026.
The federal government also signaled changes could be coming this fall to permanent resident levels.
“The international student cap is here to stay,” Miller said last week.
Meanwhile, a study led by a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment has debunked popular myths about international students.
“There has been an ongoing debate on international students in the public discourse, accusing them of flooding university towns and taking up all the affordable housing. The recent policy change putting a cap on the number of new study permit holders for the next two years was introduced as a solution to the ongoing housing affordability crisis, which also targeted international students as the culprit of the problem in the first place,” the report read.
“The needs of international student families haven’t really been discussed,” said Dr. Alkim Karaagac, researcher in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management and principal investigator of the new study.
“There is an invisibility and silence, which is a perfect recipe for vulnerability and exploitation.”
Mike Morrice, Green MP for Kitchener Centre, believes there is a lot of work to do in the community when it comes to racism.
“More needs to be done to both address the exploitation of international students, as well as the real impact of the rise in international students in our community,” he said.
“The blame falls with the provincial government for cutting investments in the post-secondary (institutions) and with the federal government on issuing study permits.”
The increase in international students at Conestoga College from just over 700 in 2014 to almost 31,000 in 2023 had an impact on housing in the community, Morrice said.
“But the blame shouldn’t be with an individual student who may have been lied to about the cost of living in our community,” he said.
Last October, Morrice tabled a private member’s motion in Parliament focused on improving conditions for international students.
It contained 10 recommendations, four of which were implemented, including increasing the proof of financial resources international students must show before arriving in Canada and capping their off-campus work hours at 20 per week during the school year. The government will also produce annual cost-of-living updates to assess study permits, and create a dedicated infrastructure funding stream and use incentives to supplement investments in building housing for all students.
Morrice worked closely with former international students while drafting the motion to ensure it addressed their concerns.
One of the students was Ashwin Annamalai, who is now a Canadian citizen but came to Canada in 2018 as an international student.
“I never faced the hardships the international students are facing nowadays. This is not the Canada I came to,” he said.
“A lot of my friends who are international students are going through a lot of hardships, including a spike in racism on the streets and online hatred. We have these conversations every week.”
Annamalai said he had not faced racism in Canada until 2023. Things changed in 2024, when he started facing random aggression, racism on the streets and strangers gesturing toward him with their middle finger.
“I wasn’t even in their space. I don’t know what I did to make them mad,” he said.
“This is not the Canadian dream.”
