Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for inviting me to appear today.
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for inviting me to speak about this study.
My name is Dr. Yvonne Su. I am an associate professor at York University. I'm currently a visiting scientist at Harvard. I study asylum, migration and global governance, including how public narratives shape immigration policy.
I would like to make three points today. First, Canada's asylum system should be assessed with careful attention to legal standards and actual outcomes. Second, recent data on international students and asylum need to be interpreted within context. Third, current policy debates should be informed by Canada's longer history of exclusion.
The first point is that Canada's asylum system is neither automatic nor unrestricted. The right to apply for asylum is protected in Canadian and international law. However, claimants must still prove a well-founded fear of persecution, and many claims are indeed rejected. When the public and our policy-makers are only presented with numbers about applications, not decisions, their perceptions of the robustness of our system are rightly skewed.
For example, my analysis of IRB data on India—the main source country for asylum seekers—found that between 2021 and 2024, claims were more often rejected than accepted. The rejections are really important to highlight because they take the air out of the rhetoric that international students are applying for asylum as a secure back door to stay longer in Canada.
The second point is that the increase in claims by international students should be situated carefully. International students filed just over 20,000 asylum claims in 2024. When we look at the number alone, it looks large, but it amounts to only 2% of the almost one billion international students in Canada. That means more than 98% of international students in Canada did not apply for asylum. That is a small minority, not a massive abuse of the asylum—