Open AccessTowards a More Just Canadian Education-migration System: International Student Mobility in Crisis
Author(s) -
Lisa Ruth Brunner
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
studies in social justice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.213
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 1911-4788
DOI - 10.26522/ssj.v16i1.2685
Subject(s) - immigration , social justice , economic justice , political science , social mobility , perspective (graphical) , sociology , covid-19 , political economy , law , medicine , disease , pathology , artificial intelligence , computer science , infectious disease (medical specialty)
Education-migration, or the multi-step recruitment and retention of international students as immigrants, is an increasingly important component of both higher education and so-called highly-skilled migration. This is particularly true in Canada, a country portrayed as a model for highly-skilled migration and supportive of international student mobility. However, education-migration remains under-analyzed from a social justice perspective. Using a mobility justice framework, this paper considers COVID-19’s impact on Canada’s education-migration system at four scales: individuals, education institutions, state immigration regimes, and planetary geoecologies. It identifies ethical tensions inherent to Canada’s education-migration from a systems-level and suggests that a multi-scalar approach to social justice can both usefully complexify discussions and introduce unsettling paradoxes. It also stresses that the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to reimagine rather than return.