The South Asian migrant, often reduced to the label of the “international student,” has become a testing ground for the expansion of precarious and gig labour and the consolidation of Canadian nationalist sentiment. Photo by Brad Rucker/Unsplash.

In downtown Toronto, whether it’s the chime of an app alert or the hum of two wheels weaving through rush-hour traffic, the faces you see delivering food, stocking shelves, and filling low-wage shifts are disproportionately South Asian migrants. What official discourse calls an “international student crisis” is not primarily a crisis of numbers, but a crisis of labour: a structurally produced, politically managed supply of cheap, precarious workers that Canada’s universities, employers, and state have come to depend on. As federal policy has turned post-secondary education into a revenue engine and work restrictions wax and wane with labour market needs, hundreds of thousands of international students have been funnelled into the gig economy, warehouses, kitchens, and service jobs that remain deeply undervalued, yet essential to the functioning of everyday life.

The frenzy over “unchecked” migration obscures this reality. Rather than a spontaneous influx of opportunistic newcomers, the recent growth in international student numbers reflects a carefully engineered labour strategy. Students are touted as economic windfalls—high tuition fees that prop up cash-strapped institutions and workers who fill staffing gaps big and small—yet their precarity is treated as incidental to policy. Poverty wages, debt-financed migration, and the threat of falling out of status are cast as the expected price of pursuing an education here, even as the state and corporations quietly rely on these same workers to power sectors that Canadian workers increasingly shun.

Yet even as international students have become hyper-visible in Canada, their categorization now unknowingly, and quite deceptively, includes those who could not continue their education for various reasons, those who have graduated, and those who have become undocumented. In 2023-2024 alone, nearly 7,000 media articles mentioned international students. Yet this heightened visibility obscures more than it reveals. Much of the furor surrounding South Asian migrants obscures how the figure of the recent South Asian migrant, often collapsed into the label of the “international student,” has become a testing ground for the expansion of precarious and gig labour, as well as for the consolidation of Canadian nationalist sentiment. While the relationship between capital and the nation is complex and contested, their overlapping interests demand a closer reading of the catch-all term “international student,” which deliberately masks questions of labour, class position, and exploitation.

The resurgence of Canadian nationalism in the past year—ostensibly a response to US tariffs—has intensified racial and class anxieties. For the first time since Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada began polling in 1996, a majority of Canadians say there are too many immigrants coming to the country. For the first time, debates about international students featured prominently in the 2025 Canadian federal election campaigns, with both Conservatives and Liberals advocating cuts to international student intake. Public discourse frequently positions recent South Asian migrants or international students as contributors to rising housing prices, job scarcity, and a perceived lack of cultural integration.

So-called “Canada first” rhetoric purports to prioritize the welfare of Canadian nationals. Addressing a press gathering in 2024, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre described the “international student crisis” by stating, “It’s not about immigration; it’s about math.” His claim that the housing crisis necessitates a crackdown on migration obscures structural issues such as corporate greed and the reality that the housing........

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