Guest column | Why Punjab’s youth must look beyond ‘Canada dream’

Germany, Ireland, the UAE, Australia, and New Zealand are not fallback options. For many aspirants, they are the smarter first choice

There is a March Monday morning in Mohali I keep returning to. A twenty-three-year-old woman, an engineering graduate with an IELTS band of 7.5, sat across the table from her father and asked a question neither of us could answer easily: “Papa, if Canada has shut doors, where do I go?”

For nearly two decades, “going abroad” in Punjab meant one thing: Canada. (Bloomberg)

That question, multiplied across thousands of Punjab households last year to today, is the real story. Not the fortunes of any consultancy, but the fact that an entire generation’s roadmap to the world has been redrawn, and most families do not yet know the new route.

For nearly two decades, “going abroad” in Punjab meant one thing: Canada. The post-graduate work permit (PGWP), the low-friction path to permanent residency, the cousin already settled in Brampton — it was a formula so well-worn that few families asked whether better options existed.

That formula has broken. Indian student departures peaked at 9.08 lakh in 2023, fell to 7.7 lakh in 2024, and dropped further to 6.26 lakh in 2025, a 31% decline in two years, as per Bureau of Immigration data placed before the Rajya Sabha by the Union education ministry in February 2026.

Punjab absorbed this shock more than almost anywhere else in India. According to Bureau of Immigration data cited in Parliament by the MEA (2021), Chandigarh recorded the highest per-capita student migration in the country — with 10,150 departures per lakh residents between January 2016 and February 2021. Punjab followed at 869 per lakh, ahead of Delhi (851), Andhra Pradesh (524), and Kerala (331). At its peak, Punjab supplied a disproportionate share of the 4.27 lakh Indian students enrolled in Canadian institutions.

So, when Canadian student visa applications from India fell from roughly 20,900 in August 2023 to just over 4,500 in August 2025 — an almost 80% contraction, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC)

data reported by Reuters — it was Punjab students who felt it first and hardest. Canada’s rejection rate for Indian applicants hit 74% by August last year, the highest among all major source countries.

The causes were political and structural, in equal measure. The India–Canada diplomatic rupture following pro-Khalistan activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s murder in September 2023 strained a relationship an entire generation’s ambitions had been built around. Ottawa then layered on hard caps on study permits, steeper proof-of-funds requirements, narrower post-study work options, and a harder route to permanent residency. The UK and Australia tightened, almost in parallel, closing off the other two destinations that, alongside Canada, had defined where a Punjabi student’s ambition was expected to point.

Options galore

What deserves far more attention than it has received is this: the world did not close. It moved. Germany’s ‘opportunity card’ now allows qualified professionals relocate without a job offer and search for work for 12 months, with EU ‘blue card permanent residency’ achievable in 21 to 27 months, at universities charging a fraction of Canadian tuition. Ireland offers English-medium degrees, a genuine post-study work visa, and a graduate job market anchored by the European headquarters of Google, Meta, and Apple.

The UAE offers tax-free income, a five-year green visa obtainable without employer sponsorship, and proximity — four hours from Amritsar — no Western destination can match. Australia’s ‘skills in demand visa’ now processes specialist-occupation applications in a median of seven working days. New Zealand’s ‘green list’ grants direct residence to healthcare workers, engineers, and IT professionals from the day they arrive.

None of this is a consolation prize for Canada’s closure. For many students, it is a genuinely better proposition — cheaper, faster, and in some cases offering permanent residency on a timeline Canada never matched even in its best years.

What this demands of Punjab’s families is a mindset shift as significant as the policy shift itself. The old approach — pick a country because a relative lives there, apply, and hope —no longer serves anyone well. The study-work-PR pathway built around Canada’s PGWP is not returning in its old form, and families still chasing it are chasing a route that has narrowed dramatically.

Importance of point system

The students who do well over the next decade will be the ones who choose a destination on its actual merits: the country’s points system, its real employer demand in their field, its actual cost of living against realistic starting salaries — not inherited assumptions from a cousin’s WhatsApp forward. This is, in the end, an encouraging story rather than a discouraging one. Punjab’s appetite to see its children study, work, and build lives abroad has not diminished by a single household. What has changed is the map. Germany, Ireland, the UAE, Australia, and New Zealand are not fallback options. For many aspirants, they are the smarter first choice. The families who understand that shift early, and choose their destination with the same rigour they once reserved for choosing a university, will find the next decade opens more doors than the last one closed.

aliec.punjab@gmail.com

(The writer is president of Mohali-based Association of Licensed Immigration and Education Consultants. Views expressed are personal)