Care through Control: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Canada’s Shifting International Student Policy (2018-2025)

Background: Canada’s international students (IS) policy has transformed significantly from aggressive recruitment to restriction. Driven by deliberate state efforts to leverage IS as economic assets and potential laborers, IS in Canada increased by more than eightfold from 2000 to 2023 (IRCC, 2023). Since late 2023, Canada implemented major changes to IS policy, introducing a 35% reduction in study permits, stricter post-graduation work permit eligibility, and increased financial requirements (IRCC, 2024).

Canada’s immigration governance has long been critiqued for incorporating racialized non-citizens conditionally: welcomed for economic potential, then repositioned as threatening when that utility is exhausted (Thobani, 2007). Scholars have analyzed how policy discourse individualizes structural inequities that renders non-citizen structurally subordinated (Schinkel, 2018; Goldring & Landolt, 2013), by using culture as a proxy for race to legitimize paternalistic treatment of racialized groups (Korteweg, 2017). Yet, limited research has examined how these dynamics operate within IS policy.

This study examines how Canada constructed and governed IS across policy changes (2018-2025). Specifically, we analyze how the state problematized IS mobility, what governing technologies were deployed, and what discourses were activated to constitute IS subjectivity within Canada’s nation-building project.

Methods: This study used Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) to examine how state discourse constructed “truth claims” about IS and deployed knowledge to constitute and govern such subject positions (Macias, 2015; Riley et al, 2012). Drawing on Foucault’s problematization, subject formation, and governmentality, we analyzed 80 government documents (i.e., new releases, backgrounders, statements, speeches) from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) website on IS policy between 2018-2025. Documents were purposively sampled across three temporalities: pre-, during, and post-COVID19 pandemic, which helped to trace how construction of problems, subjects, and governing rationalities shifted (Chambon, 1999) as Canada’s political and economic conditions changed.

Results: Analysis revealed that policy discourse produced the IS subject in relation to Canada’s shifting needs, while naturalizing state intervention as benevolent and necessary. However, the construction of the problems shifted across periods: from unrealized economic opportunity (pre-COVID), emergency labor shortage (during COVID), to system overburden and fraud (post-COVID). Consequently, IS moved discursively from desirable assets, morally deserving contributors, to simultaneously vulnerable victims and integrity risks. Notably, the post-COVID turn toward restriction (e.g., caps, financial thresholds, compliance screening) were rationalized as protective measures serving students’ interests. This pattern of “care through control” illustrates how policy discourse depoliticized governing decisions by folding them into language of protection and system integrity.

Implications: This study shows Canada’s IS policy, as a discursive regime, produces and repositions racialized non-citizen subjects in service of shifting state interests. The logic of “care through control” obscures the conditional and extractive terms on which IS are incorporated into, and expelled from, the Canadian society. These findings call on policymakers to confront the contradiction between Canada’s self-constructed image of benevolence and the governing rationalities that render IS expendable. Social workers and advocates are well-positioned to challenge the paternalistic framing of IS. This study further illustrates the value of FDA in social work for exposing how benevolent policy language can reproduce systems of exploitation.