Canada tackles ‘chronic’ visa issues for conference attendees

The Canadian government is taking new steps to help international visitors attend academic conferences in the country, after being warned of potential reputational damage from visa-related obstacles confronting participants from developing nations.

The visa problems that academics face, seen as chronic in Canada, have gained new attention, with the International Studies Association (ISA), a major global social sciences grouping, saying that it was having extensive problems assembling its 6,000-delegate annual conference next month in Montreal.

The ISA described similar troubles with its Toronto conferences in 2014 and 2019, and other academic groups have also reported having issues. The stand-off this year appeared especially problematic, with the ISA’s leadership noting that most people having trouble getting permission to visit Montreal – about 10 per cent of its invitees – were from less-developed nations in the Global South.

“It is evidence that they are not as open and welcoming as they might be,” said the ISA’s executive director, Mark Boyer, a professor of geography at the University of Connecticut.

Yet as the complaints gained public attention, Professor Boyer told Times Higher Education, the federal agency that handles visa issues – Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) – quickly offered the ISA help.

“They reached out directly to us,” he said of the IRCC, “and asked us to identify specific people who were getting rejected, and that they would do their best to try to expedite their visa process and get them visas in time.”

The solution, Professor Boyer said, appeared at least in part to involve policies and options that already existed but apparently were not well known, including an event-specific IRCC code that groups can provide to their attendees to help them affirm the purpose of their visit in visa applications. The IRCC also offers conference organisers the option to have an agency staff member dedicated to helping their group secure the necessary visa approvals, he said.

“The Canadian government has been much more cooperative and helpful” since the initial set of visa problems surrounding the Montreal conference, Professor Boyer said. “Whether it’s too late, we just don’t know.”

Canada is one of the most welcoming nations in the world in terms of global higher education, second only to Australia in the share of students coming from outside its borders. Yet the federal government has repeatedly struggled to get students and others in academia the necessary visas, both in the aftermath of the pandemic-related lockdowns and well before that, sometimes with questions about its commitment to diversity.

In one example last year, the Canadian government was faulted for imposing English-language test requirements on students from Nigeria, where English is the main language of instruction. The government, however, has also been confronting a problem in which a small number of post-secondary institutions in Canada have extremely high shares of their international students – often from India – who secure visas but then don’t come to their classes or apply for asylum.

IRCC officials told THE that they've been trying to give special assistance to legitimate conference organisers, and said they had no immediate explanation for why the ISA and other academic and scientific groups – including the American Political Science Association and the International AIDS Conference – have reported trouble obtaining the necessary help with visas in the past year or so.

"IRCC deals with thousands of applications from people from around the world every day," said an agency spokeswoman, Isabelle Dubois. "We are committed to the fair and non-discriminatory application of immigration procedures – we take this responsibility seriously."

In the case of academic conferences, Professor Boyer acknowledged that the heightened scrutiny of attendees from less-developed nations may not be entirely unwarranted. For events it has arranged in both Canada and the US, he said, the ISA has seen instances of unaffiliated people from India and other countries trying to secure conference invitations in ways that appear designed to circumvent government visa processes.

“I think it’s a combination of both” bias and legitimate concern, he said, describing the Canadian government’s handling of visa applicants from less-developed nations. “We do know for a fact that there are games being played.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com