The View | Trump’s war on universities not a threat to student housing market

For a textbook case of how not to boost exports of higher education, look no further than the deplorable decision by US President Donald Trump’s administration on May 22 to bar Harvard University from enrolling international students. The ban would force Harvard’s 6,800 foreign students to enrol elsewhere or lose their legal status to study in the US.

While a US district judge temporarily blocked Trump’s order, the ban sends a chilling message. The Department of Homeland Security said it was “committed to restoring common sense to our student visa system”, yet for Trump and his supporters, “common sense” means draconian anti-immigration policies and waging war on the US liberal establishment, especially the country’s elite universities.

Chinese students, who accounted for about 20 per cent of Harvard’s overseas student intake last year, are at the sharp end of Trump’s assault on America’s Ivy League universities. The White House accused Harvard of “coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus”. In March, a group of Republicans introduced legislation to stop the issuance of student visas to Chinese students.

However, the United States does not have a monopoly on anti-immigration policies. Some other governments in the Anglosphere have made international students a scapegoat for their failures to tackle the causes of dysfunctional housing markets.

Last year, Canada imposed a lower cap on the number of foreign students receiving visas. With the intake of international students tripling between 2013 and 2023 to more than a million amid increasing evidence of bogus diplomas being awarded by small private colleges, the government took advantage of mounting hostility to immigration to turn higher education policy into a de facto appendage of housing policy.

Instead of focusing on the underlying problems in Canada’s housing market – an acute shortage of homes and political resistance to taxing Canadian homeowners with multiple properties more aggressively – the government has targeted foreign homebuyers and international students. Last year, a ban on foreign ownership of Canadian housing, which was set to expire this year, was extended to 2027.