Visa Policy and International Student Migration: Evidence from Canada

Résumé 0

This paper examines how visa policy affects international student migration. Usingadministrative data on community colleges in Canada, we evaluate a reform that introduceda new visa stream - the Student Partners Program (SPP) - with shorter processing timesand higher approval rates for student visa applicants able to demonstrate that they havethe financial resources and language skills to succeed academically. Using a triple differenceestimator, we find that SPP increased student migration from treated countries by 33%relative to what would have occurred without the reform, and that this effect materializedonly among students from origin countries suffering from low approval rates. Moreover,we show that higher enrollment was driven in roughly equal proportions by an increase invisa approval rates and the volume of visa applications, suggesting the policy helped reducestatistical discrimination and increased the attractiveness of treated institutions. We alsoleverage the SPP reform to investigate potential crowding-out effects. While inflows ofinternational students did not reduce the number of domestic students enrolled at Canadiancommunity colleges, the reform helped foreign enrollment outpace domestic enrollment bycrowding-in international students from countries that were not eligible to SPP.