My name is Ericka Skirpan, and I am being deported because I took Drama. I have been living and studying in Canada for the last five years. I have paid all international tuition fees, and been quite loyal to this university. I have made friends, established professional contacts, and essentially built a life in my adopted home.
Now, as I am ready to begin the professional life my education prepared me for, I am told I will be sent back to the United States upon graduation.
For all international students, it is extremely difficult securing permission to work in Canada after receiving a degree. The government of Canada happily takes a student’s money during her university career, but afterwards wants nothing to do her; this is something I have experienced up close and personal.
Although current immigration laws have supposedly been expanded to encourage more students to stay in Canada after graduation, it is still nigh impossible for most graduates to qualify for a work permit. The current Citizenship and Immigration law (as available on the International Student Centre website) states that graduates must seek employment that is “consistent with the recently completed field of study.”
One might assume that “consistent with the… field of study” can be interpreted fairly openly. A Bachelor of Arts is vast in its ability to support various fields of employment.
However, despite this logical assumption, it seems that anti-international sentiments aimed at students like myself are institutionalized in conditions like this one to an alarming degree. In fact, the policy requires that the job be entirely synonymous with the field one has studied.
For me this means my Drama degree, even though it is an Honours Bachelor of Arts, only qualifies me to work as an actor. Finding work as an actor is not only an arduous and poverty-inducing challenge in itself, but this stipulation also-more disturbingly-denies the array of other qualities my education has cultivated as being useful to my work life.
What about all the skills I have learned in my five years that are not limited to stage performance? Was it only the art of the monologue for which my thousands of dollars have been doled out?
In this case, a political science degree only qualifies a person to work in government, (a position for which an international student would not even be considered). A pre-med degree presents no options but to immediately pursue graduate school if the student desires to stay in Canada. And yet, no explicit caveat has been made to international students, and the elusiveness of the post-graduate work permit remains hush-hush until it is too late.
Joe Volpe’s expansion of opportunities for off-campus work permits in April suggests the doors are opening for international student workers. Still, the strictness in the law controlling graduate work permits leaves international students with very few options indeed. I find it sad and deceitful that neither the government nor the academy warn international students of this policy before we put over $10,000 a year in tuition into their country.
