International students pay sky-high fees. Whose job is it to house them?

The clamour for a cap on international student intake is growing, but whose job is it to house the students who are already in Canada?

Around 800,000 international students currently call Canada home, with thousands more expected to come with every new academic year.

As students head back to school this fall, the focus is increasing on whose responsibility it is to house them, and what the growing numbers mean for Canada’s housing crisis.

Pressure is growing on the Liberal government to address the housing crisis, and several federal ministers have hinted that the number of international students could be capped in the future to ease housing demand.

“This is a tale as old as time, that immigrants are responsible for social crises; that immigrants and migrants are responsible for the housing shortage, which is simply not true,” said Sarom Rho, an organizer for Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC).

Rho said Canada has already seen that a cap on international students wouldn’t work, because it has already seen “something similar to a cap” during the COVID-19 crisis.

“In 2020 and 2021, we saw that very few migrants, including current and former international students, were coming to this country because the borders were closed. Yet housing prices continue to increase. In fact, they spiked drastically.”

Instead, Rho said the emphasis should be on adequately housing students — both domestic and international — as universities and colleges continue to rely on the latter for hundreds of millions of dollars each in tuition fees each year, and bank on that growth for their financial futures.

“Colleges and universities and post-secondary institutions must do more to ensure that both international students and domestic students can access affordable housing, have protections at school, which include caps on the rate of fee increases and in-school supports. And a lot of this is denied to international students,” Rho said.