Immigration by ‘Dragons’ Den?’ An Assessment of International Graduate Entrepreneur Immigration Pathways in Canada

This chapter investigates recent business immigration programs in Canada aimed at international student entrepreneurs. Since 2015, six Canadian provinces have introduced pathways to permanent residency in their Provincial Nominee Programs for international graduates from local post-secondary institutions who wish to start businesses in their provinces after graduating. These International Graduate Entrepreneur (IGE) programs represent the latest wave in a long string of attempts to use immigration policy as a tool to influence where businesses are formed in Canada and around the world. To date, however, little is known about their results: Are the IGE programs meeting their objectives? To answer this question, we draw primarily on government documents and program data gathered through access to information/freedom of information requests. We find that most of the IGE streams are empty vessels which receive very few applications, resulting in even fewer successful nominations for permanent residency. This finding is surprising given the high concentration of international students in business and entrepreneurship training programs and the many examples of international student-funded startups in Canada. This chapter hypothesizes reasons for these policy failures, highlighting that the IGE streams are among the riskiest pathways to permanent residency of all the economic immigration streams open to international students after graduation. Ultimately, we argue that their poor performance underscores broader problems in Canadian immigration policy, namely, the growing emphasis on temporary to permanent pathways.