Visa Policy and International Student Migration: Evidence from Canada

Jerome Gonnot and Mauro Lanati
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Jerome Gonnot: ESPOL-LAB - ESPOL-LAB - ESPOL - European School of Political and Social Sciences / École Européenne de Sciences Politiques et Sociales - ICL - Institut Catholique de Lille - UCL - Université catholique de Lille
Mauro Lanati: UNIMIB - Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca = University of Milano-Bicocca

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Abstract: This paper examines how visa policy affects international student migration. Using administrative data on community colleges in Canada, we evaluate a reform that introduced a new visa stream - the Student Partners Program (SPP) - with shorter processing times and higher approval rates for student visa applicants able to demonstrate that they have the financial resources and language skills to succeed academically. Using a triple difference estimator, 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 materialized only 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 in visa approval rates and the volume of visa applications, suggesting the policy helped reduce statistical discrimination and increased the attractiveness of treated institutions. We also leverage the SPP reform to investigate potential crowding-out effects. While inflows of international students did not reduce the number of domestic students enrolled at Canadian community colleges, the reform helped foreign enrollment outpace domestic enrollment by crowding-in international students from countries that were not eligible to SPP.

Keywords: international migration; students; visa policy; Information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10-14
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04520541v2
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Published in Journal of Economic Geography, 2024, ⟨10.1093/jeg/lbae034⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04520541

DOI: 10.1093/jeg/lbae034

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