International student graduates are struggling with lengthy waits for work visas—current students worry what this means for their futures

By Julian Sharma

In April of this year, Harsh* graduates from a cyber security program at an Ontario college expecting success. 

He had plenty of work experience in his home country of India and had succeeded in landing an internship during his two year program when many of his peers hadn’t. Harsh has done the work, made the connections and spent hours educating himself on his chosen field.

Following the rules, he applies for a Post Graduate Work Permit (PGWP)—a visa introduced to help international student graduates gain Canadian work experience. He begins to look for work in the meantime. 

Amidst these applications, recruiters will sometimes reach out, go through multiple interview rounds with him, only to reject him outright upon finding out he is waiting for a work permit.

Harsh has a work authorization letter to prove that he is legally allowed to work while waiting for the visa but says employers reject him anyway—which he believes is because his future in Canada is still in the balance.

One month into looking for a job, his optimistic outlook starts to decline. He becomes disheartened with the few opportunities available to him and with the treatment he’s receiving from recruiters.

“They treat you as if you don’t matter,” says Harsh.

With no luck finding work in his field, Harsh takes up ‘DoorDashing’ for extra cash. He drives up to 10 hours every day, six days a week. Enough to tire a person out and wear them down. 

On one of these nights, 10 p.m. on a weekday, around 50 to 80 km from his house, Harsh is driving around waiting for orders. He says there aren’t as many deliveries on weekdays, and Harsh knew he’d have to drive all the way back home, likely without getting a single order. He’s anxious about his future and exhausted from the job search—that’s when he crashes his car.

He isn’t hurt, but the car is totalled. Harsh spends the next month in alone, without a car to get around and no way to make extra income. He’s depressed, scared for his future and unhappy with his life. 

Harsh isn’t the only international student in Canada feeling uncertain about their future here. 

Many international student graduates are living in a state of limbo, experiencing long waits for PGWPs and many are searching for employment and finding none. Some are working but remain unsure about their future in the country as their wait for a visa drags on.

Backlog and delays within the immigration system have resulted in waits for PGWPs being an estimated 226 days, according to the government’s application processing time calculator. This is leaving students without many options, unsure of where to go to find opportunities or who to turn to for help. 

According to a journal article by Dr. Everton Ellis, a scholar and assistant professor of social justice at Mount Saint Vincent University, many employers will reject an applicant due to misunderstanding how the PGWP works. Either that, or they don’t want to risk hiring someone without knowing how long they’ll be here. 

Either way, the process is upsetting and isolating.

Ellis explains in an interview with The Eyeopener the effects this can have on students’ mental health. Graduates who live in a state of not knowing, trapped between a temporary and permanent identity as a Canadian, experience high levels of stress. 

“It really takes a toll on them,” says Ellis. 

Harsh has since moved in with friends in Toronto. He’s using the insurance money he got from his accident to get by but says that won’t be enough. In two months, the money will run out and he will have to decide between going back to India or asking his parents for money, which he says isn’t feasible. The only thing left for him to do is keep searching and continue waiting. 

Tomas Castillo is preparing to graduate from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) in the spring. 

For many university students, their final year is hopeful, marking the end of an era and the triumphant start of a new one. Students might move back home or maybe travel the world, and start a job in the field they’ve been studying for the past four years.

For Castillo and many other international students, that final year looks different.

There’s no telling what awaits him after he crosses the stage at convocation 

In early October, Castillo is in Vancouver with some of his peers in the urban and regional planning program when he gets a message on his phone. His coworkers at TMU Housing and Residence Life just shared that their manager is leaving.   

Castillo got on the phone and found out his manager wasn’t leaving on his own volition but instead he wasn’t able to secure permanent residence (PR) status and would have to leave the country. 

The government uses category-based selection for the immigration Express Entry program, which prioritizes certain in-demand fields over others—and the manager’s job did not qualify. 

Castillo took the experience as a reality check, a potential glimpse into his future post-graduation. 

Castillo’s parents were already in Canada when he first moved here from Colombia in 2022. His dad is a doctor but was unable to find work in Canada and therefore could not apply for a work visa. Unable to stay, his parents went back to Colombia and Castillo remained here with his student visa. 

Now, three years later, Castillo is in his final year at TMU, unsure of what’ll happen next. 

There’s no telling what awaits him after he crosses the stage at convocation. 

“There’s not a single day that I don’t stress about it and there’s not a week that I can go without…thinking about where this is going to end up,” says Castillo.

Whether they will be able to stay in the country isn’t the only pressure students face with anti-immigration sentiments rising across Canada, Castillo explains.

Harsh mentioned looking for jobs as someone from an Indian background can be an added burden. In Canada, Indian immigrants make up for 27 per cent of PR admissions, making it Canada’s top source country, according to the federal government. 

Anti-South Asian racism is on the rise in Canada according to a 2024 article from the CBC, particularly in regard to newcomers and international students.

Harsh says he believes Canadians use isolated negative experiences with Indian immigrants to colour their perception of the whole population. 

Castillo says he has friends who have been rejected from jobs purely based on their surname, yet when they changed their last name to something more Western-sounding, they were called in for interviews.

Even some students who receive work visas are not able to find jobs. If students are waiting for a visa, this delays their entrance to the workforce, making an already-stressful situation much more difficult to handle. 

They’re attempting to find their way in a society that is not making it easy for them, with no real guidelines on how to handle it.

Ellis points out that even if the government is actively working to process and distribute work permits in order for the international students to begin work, it doesn’t appear to be enough.

“A lot of the individuals tend to fall through those cracks,” says Ellis. 

International students and graduates alike are more vulnerable to housing insecurity, according to Statistics Canada and are more likely to be exploited for low-paid labour, according to Ellis’ journal article. 

Castillo says these are often the jobs Canadians don’t want to do. “Retail, cleaning, all of these jobs run on international student labour,” he says. 

“Everything in this land is built by immigrants,” he adds.

Ellis explains that immigrants and international students are oftentimes used in Canada to fix structural challenges.

According to a 2024 BBC article, the Liberal government’s immigration policies aimed to fill gaps in the labour market and boost economic growth.

A 2024 article in the Journal of International Students, describes how Canada has continuously brought in highly-skilled students from across the world to improve their population and labour market. Now, it seems like those highly-skilled students are ready to work, yet aren’t able to.

Rebeka Maceda Salazar’s reality check came sooner than most. 

She was in Mexico, the summer before her first year at TMU, when her brother came back with the news that his PGWP had been rejected. Four years at Sheridan College, paying international student tuition and no visa to show for it. 

Her parents started wondering if they’d made the right decision sending her brother to school in Canada. They’d sent him here so he could find opportunities outside of their home country. Now, it looked to them like this might not be possible anymore. 

Eventually, her brother made the decision to go back to school in Canada for a one-year program so he could live and work here and reapply for the PGWP once he completed his program. This was in Maceda Salazar’s second year.

She doesn’t know why exactly her brother was rejected but she worries she might be next

She remembers the anxiety and stress that overwhelmed her when she realized the path to building a life in Canada wouldn’t be as straightforward as it seemed. She’d grown up knowing she’d eventually move here for school but the reality of what that would entail never kicked in until that moment. 

“Just realizing that it would be difficult,” says Maceda Salazar. “It would be more difficult than it already is.”

She’s in her fourth year of business technology management at TMU now. Since then, she has been burdened by the thought of waiting for a visa post-graduation or looking for a job. She doesn’t know why exactly her brother was rejected but she worries she might be next. 

Soon after her brother came back to Canada he began looking for an apartment for the two of them to live together. 

Maceda Salazar says the process was complicated. One landlord expected them to pay half a year’s rent upfront.

“They want to take advantage of us because they know we need that apartment,” she says. 

Situations like this are common across the country as international students are more vulnerable to housing insecurity, according to a 2024 report from Statistics Canada. Castillo says many get desperate and end up in unstable housing conditions.

Some may believe that because the cost of international student tuition is high, these students must be wealthy—however, this is a misconception, says Maceda Salazar.

She says the ones who aren’t wealthy, the ones whose families are saving up and taking out loans and working hard to pay for their kids to study in another country, suffer from the same issues Canadians do.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” says Maceda Salazar. “I’m not taking advantage of anything.”

If anything, she says international students like her might have more to risk. The main issue concerning international students at the moment, she says, are jobs and the lack of them. If she doesn’t find a job, she will have to return to Mexico or go back to school. Her options are limited and she sees no way around them.

Then, if she does get a job, she has to worry about meeting the requirements of a work permit. 

She’s anxious about the Comprehensive Ranking System—a points-based system that determines one’s eligibility for a work permit based on factors like education, language-proficiency and work experience. 

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has shifting policies that might affect her future as well. The amount of funds international students must prove they have has increased to $22,895 and the federal government plans to cut student visas by more than half in the next three years, which will have an effect on post-secondary institutions’ funding.

Maceda Salazar feels as if she’s on a timer, one that’s running out the closer she gets to graduating and applying for a PGWP, beginning the long wait for her application to be processed. It’s an uncertain future looming ahead of her, one that’s already begun plaguing her mind. 

Harsh has built a routine for his post-graduate life—even if it’s not what he originally planned for.

Every morning he wakes up at around 7 a.m., and  listens to a podcast about cyber security. He wants to stay updated in his field, even if he doesn’t end up with a job in Canada, he would need these skills to find a job in his field elsewhere. For the past six months, Harsh has been spending 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., a typical work day, applying to jobs, reaching out to people on LinkedIn and tailoring his resume.

He keeps busy because he has no other option and has to keep trying. 

“It feels very upsetting and pathetic,” admits Harsh. 

In a month, he sends out an average of 200 tailored applications.

Ellis believes that Canada’s reliance on international students should make it easier for them to find employment, yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. He says there needs to be a tailored solution in order to make the process easier for them. Ellis thinks labour and immigration policies should coordinate with each
other to streamline the process for international students. 

While Harsh has attempted to remain hopeful, it’s getting harder and harder as the months go by. 

He says he left a good life in India, filled with jobs, parties and friends, to come to Canada in search of better opportunities, an inclusive environment and a great life. 

He hasn’t found it yet, and it’s unclear if he will. Maceda Salazar isn’t the only one on a timer. If Harsh’s PGWP isn’t accepted soon, and his funds run out, he’ll have to pack his bags and move back home. 

*This source has requested to remain anonymous. The Eye has verified this source.