Paulo Moura works a permanent, corporate job on King Street, pays tens of thousands of dollars in taxes every year, and has been calling Canada home for almost seven years—but he still can’t stay in the country permanently. In fact, his departure could be imminent.
Staying in Canada wasn’t always part of Moura’s plan. When he came to Oshawa, Ontario, in 2018, his goal was simple: spend two years at Durham College to sharpen his web design skills and return to Brazil. But he quickly realized that life in Canada was better.
Back home, early-career web designers like him can earn as little as $8,500 a year, making it difficult to cover daily expenses. He had no choice but to live with his parents to get by. In Canada, he was independent. “I earned minimum wage doing odd jobs at Home Depot, Value Village, and even a nursing home while I was studying,” he says. “But those jobs still gave me a better quality of life than working professionally back home.”
After graduating, Moura secured a post-graduation work permit, which is available to international students who complete their studies at a Canadian institution. With this PGWP, valid for up to three years, he could accrue the one year of work experience required to qualify for permanent residency. Moura entered the workforce at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so it took him two years to find a stable position. Since then, his application has never been selected for permanent residency, and after an extension on his work permit, he has less than a year left to either secure PR or return to Brazil.
Many international students are drawn to Canada by the promise of permanent residency, even though attaining PR has become hyper competitive in the past few years. Some education agents—counsellors or school representatives who recruit and advise foreign students—claim that staying permanently in Canada after graduation is straightforward. A 2022 Fifth Estate investigation in India, for example, found that when a father expressed concern that his son would have a hard time remaining in Canada, a recruiter said, “Definitely not! It’s easy for students to get permanent residency.”
It’s a sentiment I’ve heard over and over again, before and since I came to Canada as an international student. Graduate, work for one year, then get your permanent residency. I’ve etched this mantra into my mind, muttering it under my breath whenever loneliness envelops me, or when I was on my third cup of black tea, heart pounding, pulling another all-nighter to study for an exam. It’s what I tell people when they ask me what my future holds.
It’s not just unscrupulous agents. The federal government has urged students to stay after graduation. As stated in the manual used by immigration officers: “The Government of Canada actively promotes study-work-permanent residence pathways to prospective students.” In 2021, then immigration minister Marco Mendicino told international students, “We don’t just want you to study here, we want you to stay here.” Two years later, a report written by four senators concluded that the federal government is responsible for “perpetuating an inflated sense of hope” among international students about their ability to remain in the country. In short: this all feels like betrayal.
Fear and anxiety strike Moura every time he thinks about his status. His life is suspended in limbo. “I participate and assimilate. I have a good job, and I contribute. But the immigration system makes me feel like I don’t belong here,” he told me tearfully. He’s paid thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and reached out to his MP for help. “I can’t plan my life. I can’t plan what I’m going to do in a year.”
But Moura, now thirty-three years old, is not one to stop trying. “I spent my whole life savings from Brazil just to have the chance to study and stay here,” he says. “I’m not giving up that easily.”
In 2013, Matias Recharte left Peru to pursue a master’s in music at York University. Soon, his drumming career started soaring (he often plays with three-time Canadian smooth jazz guitarist of the year Jesse Cook), and he became part of Kuné, an eleven-person, Toronto-based music collective.
After graduating in 2015, he got a PGWP, then, a year later, got another study permit to pursue his PhD at the University of Toronto. He got a two-year open work permit after that. “I lived in Peru, Ecuador, and the Netherlands growing up,” he says. “The longest I’ve stayed in one place is in Canada, for ten years.”
He had trouble getting permanent residency too. Recharte spent the majority of his time in Canada as a student or a self-employed drummer. For musicians, freelancing is the predominant mode of work—and the most desirable—but immigration scores do not consider self-employed hours or hours worked during the course of one’s studies. “Nobody’s going to hire me as their employee to play the drums full time, but there’s no way for the government to recognize my industry’s uniqueness,” he says. Recharte didn’t want to go back to school and change industries just for a shot at permanent residency, so he stuck to his career.
Recharte could have had a better shot if he’d graduated a few years earlier, before the government updated the immigration process. “A few years ago, international graduates with a year of skilled work experience in Canada would no doubt qualify for PR,” says Matthew McDonald, who runs a consulting firm that helps newcomers navigate the immigration system. Before 2015, immigration officers reviewed all applications and granted PR to everyone who met the requirements. As the volume of applications ballooned, however, the queue to get PR became very long and backlogs became substantial. McDonald says he personally knows a family from Macedonia who waited six years during that time.
Canada needed something more efficient, so it created Express Entry, a web-based platform that operates on a merit system and assigns points to each PR hopeful. The immigration system ranks applicants based on factors like age, education, language proficiency, and work experience. Being twenty years old, for example, is worth 110 points, while being thirty-five years old is worth 77. Those with the highest scores out of a maximum of 1,200 are invited to become permanent residents.
Express Entry was a hit. It reduced PR application processing times to six months. It also made the immigration system more responsive to Canada’s labour market needs, as its points system prioritizes candidates most likely to contribute to the economy.
The lowest-ranking candidate who obtains a PR invitation ends up setting a round’s “cut-off” score. McDonald says, in the early days of Express Entry, that limit hovered around the mid-400s. According to government data, it more or less remained that way until August 2021, when there was a cut-off score of 403. More than two years ago, Moura would’ve easily made it through; his score is around 450. Today, the cut off is 539.
This trend boils down to two key factors. First, the demand for PR spots among international students is vastly outpacing availability. From 2015 to 2023, the federal government nearly tripled the number of student visas, soaring from 350,000 to over 900,000. And 60 percent of these students aim to stay in Canada, according to a survey by the Canadian Bureau for International Education. By the end of 2023, almost 400,000 individuals were on PGWPs—nearly triple the 2018 figure.
Recently, the Liberals made competition even tighter for international graduates. In June 2023, they began prioritizing French speakers and workers in high-demand fields like health care, trades, and agriculture—shifting away from those with Canadian education and work experience. “It’s extremely challenging for an international graduate to get PR right now,” says McDonald. “Without a master’s degree, fluency in French, permanent job offer, or a labour market impact assessment, which is a document that certifies there’s no Canadian available to do a certain job, staying permanently may not be realistic for students anymore.”
In their study on the federal international student program, senators Sabi Marwah, Ratna Omidvar, Hassan Yussuff, and Yuen Pau Woo warned that the number of permanent residency spots isn’t keeping up with the surge in international students. They urged Ottawa to create a more reliable pathway for students to secure PR. Similarly, in 2022, the Conference Board of Canada called on the government to create a dedicated program for international students to “ensure faster and more predictable immigration journeys.”
Last January, immigration minister Marc Miller announced that the Liberals will reduce the number of study permit approvals by 35 percent—from almost 580,000 in 2023 to 364,000—in the next two years. He says the cap is intended to bring down the number of temporary residents in Canada, ease the country’s housing supply, and crack down on bad actors, such as private colleges that prioritize profit over education, churning out diplomas while being woefully underfunded and failing to support students.
Ten months later, the Liberals announced a dramatic cut in PR spots, signalling a shift in their immigration policy. Ottawa is reducing the number from 485,000 in 2024 to 395,000 in 2025. The numbers will drop further after that: 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027. Altogether, Canada expects more than a million foreign workers and students to leave the country in the coming years due to these policy changes.
International graduates have increasingly turned to other ways of attaining PR, such as the provincial nominee program. Launched in 1998, the program allows provinces and territories to nominate immigrants with the skills and education they need. For example, Alberta has streams for hospitality workers and farm entrepreneurs, while New Brunswick wants French speakers. Ontario has a dedicated stream for international graduates.
Like Express Entry, most provincial nomination programs use a points-based system. They have also become more competitive. Three years ago, when cut-off scores were introduced to Ontario’s international graduate stream, the lowest score was 62. In March, the latest round, the lowest score among 1,306 successful applicants was 72. Applying to Ontario’s nomination program is Moura’s last option for staying in the country permanently.
A provincial nomination is also what drove Arminder Saini to move from Barrie, Ontario, to Moncton, New Brunswick, three years after graduating from the automotive business program at Georgian College. A lawyer told Saini that New Brunswick’s smaller population—and therefore greater demand for skilled workers—might increase Saini’s chance at nabbing the province’s nomination.
Saini had taken the IELTS—the International English Language Testing System test—eleven times to get more points for English proficiency—buying tutorial services and spending up to $3,500 in exam fees. The highest his Express Entry score ever reached was 463. Saini couldn’t sleep at night in the three months before he moved to Moncton. He’d already been in Canada for six years, but with no permanent status to show for it. He was desperate.
The move was extremely difficult for Saini. He knew just one person in New Brunswick, and he landed employment only after sending out 150 résumés and one month of searching. The job he got is not ideal either. He currently works as a manager at a fast food restaurant, earning $15.50 per hour, which is $4 per hour less than what his job in Barrie paid him. If the store is not busy, Saini has to go home. So there are weeks when he doesn’t work full-time hours. Saini has forced himself not to care too much; it’s his final shot at PR after all. His work permit expires in 2026.
The process is about to get even more challenging. In October, the Liberals announced they’ll be cutting permanent residencies granted through the provincial nominee program by half this year, to 55,000. The targets are expected to stay the same until 2027. Still, Saini could make it. Recharte just did. Last year, he applied under the PhD stream of Ontario’s provincial nomination program. Even though Recharte had to shell out an additional $1,500, it worked: last year, he got the nomination and secured his PR.
The clock is ticking for me too. I came to Canada in 2019 as an eighteen-year-old international student at the University of Toronto. I had applied to schools in the UK and Australia, but the option to work and stay after graduation was what reeled me to the Great White North. My home, the Philippines, is one of the most dangerous and worst-paying places to practise journalism, so I decided to build my reporting skills here. The articles I’d read and school representatives I’d talked to made PR sound so easy.
In 2023, I graduated from U of T with a perfect CGPA and numerous awards, then joined Maclean’s as an editor—it’s a full-time, permanent position. In October, I amassed one year of skilled work experience, which means I could throw my hat in the ring for PR. If I apply today—armed with my twenty-three years of age, four-year bachelor’s degree, and English fluency, among other factors—I would get only 474 points. It’s nowhere near current cut-off scores.
I booked a Zoom meeting with an immigration adviser for help. She told me I could get a master’s degree or move to PEI or New Brunswick to increase my chances. I smiled throughout that meeting, trying to stop my lower lip from trembling. I said I couldn’t shell out another several thousand dollars, and that Toronto is now home to me. Reality washed over me like a tidal wave: even after all my achievements, assimilation into Canadian society, and more than $200,000 in tuition fees, I might have only two years left in the country—two years left with my best friend who got married in May, where I cried and stood by her side as a bridesmaid; two years left in my dream media job; and two years left with a boy I’ve fallen in love with. I sobbed as soon as I closed my laptop.
Like many international students, I’ve spent my most important formative years in Canada. This is the place where I opened my first bank account, made great career strides, and learned to live independently. I’ve built my adult life here. To leave would mean to restart all over again in a country where I haven’t lived in half a decade, or a different province where I don’t know anyone.
People tell me to hold out hope. Anything can happen in the next two years, they say, as Canada’s immigration landscape continues to shift rapidly. While Ottawa slashes PR spots, it’s dedicating 40 percent of slots to temporary residents already here, such as myself. “These people are a young labour pool. They are skilled. They’re here,” Miller recently told reporters. “They’ve begun the process of integration, and it doesn’t place the additional demands on the housing, health care, and social services that we see with someone that comes directly from another country.”
Maybe cut-off scores will improve and I’ll be able to stay. Maybe Ottawa will create a dedicated PR pathway for international graduates. Maybe Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will suddenly approve almost all PR applications again. (In 2021, as a pandemic response, IRCC issued more than 27,000 PR approvals in one round, and the cut-off dropped to 75.) Whatever happens, I have two years to figure something out. And like Moura, I will not give up easily. I will see this to the end.
