From the New York Times news section:

In Remote Canada, a College Becomes a Magnet for Indian Students

The country’s public colleges and universities increasingly rely on international students,

By Norimitsu Onishi Photographs by Nasuna Stuart-Ulin
Reporting from Timmins, Ontario

Dec. 23, 2023, 5:03 a.m. ET

On a college campus in northern Canada, eight hours by car from Toronto, most of the students who fill the classrooms are from a country half a world away: India. …

Timmins, Ontario is closer to the Hudson Bay than it is to Toronto.

“We feel like we are in India,” said Mehardeep Singh, 20, a general arts and science major, who led a prayer. “In every class, there are only three or four local people. The rest are from India.”

Northern College traditionally drew its students from the province of Ontario’s vast, sparsely populated hinterland, a region dominated by miners and loggers. Today, a whopping 82 percent of the public college’s students come from abroad—nearly all from India.

How a Canadian college—in a remote town most Canadians have never visited, where winters can feel subarctic—became a magnet for young Indians is the story of the many forces buffeting the country.

Public colleges and universities, hit hard by budget cuts, have grown dependent on the higher tuitions international students must pay. For students from abroad, the institutions can be a conduit to permanent Canadian residence, and for Canada, the students help reduce labor shortages and increase the country’s flagging productivity.

After all, the Indian students must be Ramanujans, one and all.

… At Northern College, there were 40 international students in 2014—now it has 6,140.

… Arbaz Khan, 25, said he was not only the first member of his family, but the first Muslim in his village in Gujarat to study in Canada. Because his family owned farmland and his father was a politician, he was able to secure a bank loan of about 30,000 Canadian dollars, or about $22,500, for part of his tuition and other costs to study at Northern. …

Annual tuition varies by major, but for foreign students, it is generally around 16,000 Canadian dollars, about four and a half times what Canadian students pay.

So, Canadian colleges get to privatize the handing out of lifelong permanent resident visas, which ought to be the possession of the Canadian citizenry as a whole, for an increment of about $13,000 per year for a few years.

The people making the decisions about who get to be the next generation of Canadian residents are utterly obscure public college bureaucrats trying to fend off budget cuts.

Isn’t that kind of nuts?

… Maninderjit Kaur said she would probably not have gone to Timmins if the education consultant in India—who arranged her enrollment at Northern—had told her the school’s exact location.

She recalled landing at the airport in Toronto in 2018, and then hopping into an Uber, believing that Northern College was nearby. The eight-hour ride cost 800 Canadian dollars.

“I was sitting in the car, and Timmins never came,” Ms. Kaur, 25, said, recalling the drive through endless forests with no cellphone service. “I’m scared they’re taking me somewhere else.”

Now, Ms. Kaur works in marketing at the college and owns a gas station in town with her fiancé, Karanveer Singh, 28, who also came from India to study at Northern.

But despite many foreign students’ initial reluctance to study at a place as remote as Northern, Dr. Penner, the college’s president, believed she held an ace: Graduates of Northern and other public colleges may apply for a post-graduation work permit that could lead to permanent residence and citizenship.

“We can say, if you come here, we can pretty well guarantee that you could stay here and live and make a home for yourselves,” Dr. Penner said.

Who appointed this college president to profit off the Great Replacement?

A snapshot of some of Northern’s Indian students offers a window into how they could change Timmins.

Assuming they stay in Timmins instead of crowding into Greater Toronto.

Harmandeep Kaur, 22, is studying to become a police officer. She had left India, she said, “to live my life as I want to.”

She saw herself settling down in Timmins with her own family. She is fine with an “arranged or love marriage” as long as her husband accepts a police officer’s irregular hours. …

Early childhood education is a popular major among international students

See, Ramanujans all of them.

because of the high demand for related jobs in the region, said Erin Holmes, who oversees the program at Northern. Dozens of international students are immediately hired after graduating, allowing them to apply for permanent residence, Ms. Holmes said.

Canada used to try to skim the cream off its list of immigration applicants, but now Early Education Majors get rushed through to permanent residence. Remember, people, these aren’t babysitters, they are people who have earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Early Education.

“We’re just desperate,” said Ms. Holmes, as six students—one Canadian and five Indians—took care of a group of toddlers who had come to visit a Northern classroom.

Ms. Holmes had once worried about the survivability of her program, but its enrollment is now at capacity.

Across Canada, the influx of foreign students has been so great that it is blamed for worsening housing shortages. …

At Northern, the college revoked the admissions of several hundred international students this year after realizing that the city of Timmins lacked housing, Dr. Penner said.

Jobs to help pay for college have also been a challenge. International students are allowed to work up to 20 hours a week off campus while studying.

But in Timmins, a city of 42,000 people, too many foreign students compete for a limited number of positions at the Canadian and American chains where they typically find jobs, many Indian students said. Many have had to dip into their savings or ask their parents for money, they said.

“I have seen many students who have been here four to five months, or even eight months, but they haven’t gotten jobs yet,” said Mandeep Kaur, 23, a student who dropped by the Sikh temple for prayers. “They get depressed.”

Still, if students ultimately get permanent residence, she said, “then I think it’s worth it.”

When they tell you about South Asians getting into Canada for life by attending Canadian colleges, they want you to assume they are talking about Artificial Intelligence Engineering majors at McGill. But, instead, they are largely talking about Early Education majors at Moose Droppings U.

And you know that a few decades from now, the Narrative in Toronto media circles will be all about how the Canadian white man cruelly made their parents suffer in the arctic cold of Timmins instead of letting them move to Toronto immediately. And then that the American white man cruelly didn’t let their ancestors move to the D.C. suburbs immediately, and instead forced them to waste time in frigid Toronto.