Worlds Apart: the Pandemic’s Detrimental Impact on International Students at Queen’s
Emma Bouillard, Investigative Journalist
March 18, 2021
For the past year, much of the Canadian pandemic response has been concentrated on controlling international movements. At Queen’s, a side effect of COVID-19 and these associated measures is that international students have become increasingly vulnerable within the student population. They struggle with a unique set of issues: they are separated from their family and friends by closed borders, have limited access to financial aid and social services, suffer from social isolation and exclusion… and they are actively voicing their frustration.
Even when they are fully enrolled at Queen’s, crossing the border proves to be extremely tricky for new international students. Last year, Esther was living in the Netherlands with her family. She describes how when she started her Master’s degree at Queen’s in September, she tried to move to Canada so she could be in a safe learning environment, follow her synchronous online classes, have access to on-campus services, and get paid to work as a TA. However, because of border restrictions, her flight was cancelled four times and her study permit was only delivered two months after the start of her program. She finally arrived in Kingston at the end of the term, losing a lot of time, money, and energy in the process.
For the students that have been at Queen’s for years, the travel ban also came with consequences. Andres has been living in Canada for 6 years and is finishing his Ph.D. at Queen’s. Before Christmas, he decided to take advantage of certain measures allowing for family reunifications, and he contacted the Canadian government to check if his parents (who are US citizens) could come to stay with him for a while. When the response was positive, his parents took a flight to Canada. However, his parents were stopped by a customs officer during a layover, who, ignoring the nuances of the Canadian border restrictions, disregarding the documentation (including an official email from the Canadian government), sent them on their way back. Andres is very angry at Canadian and US border services for how they treated him and his family, and he suspects their biases were based on his status as a Mexican international student in Canada.
Since the start of the pandemic, international students have on many occasions been targeted by racist attacks and accused of spreading the virus. That is especially true for Asian students. Jessie, a Chinese student in her last year of undergrad at Queen’s, recalls how when she was travelling at the very beginning of last year, a stranger yelled and coughed at her on the street. Tianai, another Chinese international student, says that she feels pressure to isolate herself, and not see anyone but her boyfriend, in part because of a racist incident at Queen’s at the beginning of last year. When she goes outside, she feels like she might be judged: “I always wonder, are they looking at me differently?”.
Dealing with the pandemic in isolation has been extremely hard on the mental health of international students especially. Sofia is always very worried about her family back in Spain, where the cases of covid-19 have consistently been amongst the highest in the world. Her father is an elderly doctor working on the front line with covid patients. She saw members of her family get hospitalized and close friends pass away due to the virus. While she says she is glad that she, at least, is safe in Kingston, she often feels helpless, so far from her family.
The uncertainty of students’ situations often increases this sentiment of helplessness. Flavio is in a long-distance relationship and has not seen his girlfriend, who lives in the Netherlands, for over a year. He has made many attempts to reunite with her, but because he is not a Canadian citizen, he learned he cannot leave, nor can she come here to stay with him. He says that because he also cannot see his family in Brazil, and he has been fairly isolated as a result of social-distancing measures, he has found himself quite anxious at times. He is infinitely thankful for the support he has received from his girlfriend, his family and his friends, but he is disappointed in the lack of institutional and government assistance available to him here.
Flavio accuses Queen’s of not being sensitive to the precarious situation international students are in. He applied last year to Queen’s emergency bursary for $1000, but only got half of the stated amount. Many international students who like him needed it, also applied, and did not get a cent. The pandemic was also used as an excuse to rush Flavio to finish his Master’s, which led him to be denied part of his last semester of funding. He says that “they do not care, and they take advantage of us, because they know we have nowhere else to go”.
Many other international students have had to endure financial difficulties and got close to no compensation since the start of the pandemic. Ana was finishing her Ph.D. at Queen’s in international law and was about to start an internship in Geneva in the summer of 2020, a requirement so she could graduate. Her paid internship was cancelled and replaced by an unpaid remote program delayed several months. Ana, therefore, had to extend her Ph.D. for a year and pay tuition at the rates for international students (which are at least $12,000/year), with no funding, no scholarships, no salary, and no unemployment benefits – using then all her personal savings.
Those stories are representative of the kinds of challenges international students have had to endure in the past year. Queen’s University, and Canada as a whole, need international students to bring in revenue and talent to post-secondary education. But they are tired of their hard work and sacrifice going to waste because of inadequate Covid-19 relief efforts and restrictions that never take them into account, which is adding to the burden of living through a pandemic that turned their world upside down.