Inventing International Students: Exploring Discourses in International Student Policy Talk, 1945-75

After the Second World War, Canadian parliamentarians showed growing interest in international students coming to Canada. The students became the subject of policy talk, which was shaped by powerful discourses emerging from the larger historical context. From 1945 to 1969, international students were seen as worthy recipients of Canadian aid, an idea that was premised on the belief that they were temporary visitors to Canada who would return to their home countries with both the skills they learned in Canadian schools and with an overall goodwill towards Canada, a valuable commodity in the Cold War context. But after the Sir George Williams University affair of 1969, parliamentarians' tone changed, and international student policy talk became suffused with discourses of fear and danger. In the years after 1969, international students were imagined as both politically and economically dangerous, an attitude that emerged as a reaction to student protest, but also reflected worries among some policymakers that Canada's changing immigration system, and its move away from primarily Europeans sources for immigrants, was a threat to the stability of Canadian culture.