No fewer than 50,000 international students, including those from Nigeria and India, failed to register at their designated schools after arriving in Canada between March and April 2023.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada disclosed this via a report released in January 2025.
The report showed that the non-enrolled students accounted for 6.9 per cent of the 717,539 international students monitored as of the period under review.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada revealed that 20,000 Indian students did not attend their designated schools in 2023, while 3,902 Nigerian students failed to register for their course of study in the North American country.
The report also disclosed that Ghana accounted for 2,712 unregistered students.
The report showed that 89.8 per cent of international students (644,349) were confirmed as enrolled, while the status of 23,514 students remained unrecorded.
Canada to reduce international student, foreign worker permits
It further revealed that some of these students are working in low-paying jobs to sustain themselves, others have fallen victim to fraudulent educational institutions, and some others use Canadian study permits as a gateway to cross the border illegally into the United States.
Canada had, in September 2024, announced plans to slash international student permits and tighten foreign worker rules in 2025 to further reduce the number of temporary residents in the country.
The move was announced after several recent rounds of restrictions aimed at taming record immigration levels that pushed Canada’s population past 41 million in 2024.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government pointed to the high immigration as straining the country’s housing sector, jobs market and social services.
“It is a privilege to come to Canada. It is not a right,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller told a news conference on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.
In 2025, Ottawa plans to issue 437,000 study permits to international students, down from 485,000 in 2024 and more than 500,000 in 2023.
It is also putting new limits on work permits for spouses of some international students and foreign workers. And it will be stepping up checks before issuing travel visas to stem a spike in fraudulent or rejected asylum claims.
Ottawa had earlier said it would reduce the number of temporary residents to five per cent of the population, down from 6.8 per cent in April 2024, according to AFP.
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