Mónica Colín Silva and her husband want nothing more than to keep working in Quebec.
But nearly four years after settling in the province’s capital, the couple was told they would have to leave their jobs immediately, having been rejected for a post-graduation work permit this week.
“All my colleagues, my friends are in shock,” Colín Silva said in an interview. “No one understands.”
The family’s move to Quebec City was years in the making. When Colín Silva discovered she was pregnant with her daughter, Victoria, she decided to leave Mexico in search of a better life.
“We hear a lot about Canada, about its safety and how it’s a welcoming country,” Colín Silva said.
Having studied physiotherapy, Colín Silva began a lengthy process of English and French qualifications, as well as prerequisite courses, in hopes of completing a master’s degree in ergonomics at Université Laval.
Having finally met those requirements in the fall of 2022, she moved to the city with her then 4-year-old daughter and husband, balancing her full-time studies with motherhood and work.
“It was hard because it was a master’s degree in a third language, on top of it. I speak English, I speak Spanish so to do a master’s in French was a major challenge but I succeeded,” she said.
With her master’s degree in hand last May, Colìn Silva said she finally had hope, after feeling pushed to her limit for years. While she couldn’t find employment in her field, she began working in daycare services at two schools.
But her hopes of keeping her family in the country and continuing on her career path were quickly dashed.
On Jan. 26, Colìn Silva found out her application for a post-graduation work permit was denied. Her immigration consultant informed her she and her husband, who had been working two jobs in the province, would have to stop working immediately and would soon have to return to Mexico.
In order to qualify for the permit, applicants need to pass four sections of a French exam. While Colín Silva succeeded in three of those sections, with more than the minimum score for each, she said she only managed to obtain 427 points on the written portion — the minimum score required is 428.
Since the end of 2024, the federal government requires most applicants for a post-graduation work permit to provide proof of language test results.
While Colín Silva has the option of taking the exam again, she says it costs hundreds of dollars to complete and that is money she and her family cannot spare.
Her family is currently struggling to find the means to pay their rent in Quebec City and to pay for plane tickets to return to Mexico.
“They told me it would be better to leave the country and then to come back, but that’s a lot of money. Without revenue, without work, I am really in distress,” she said.
While she understands the need for a language requirement, she wishes her family had been given more leeway to keep working in the interim and to prepare themselves to leave.
“I don’t want to speak poorly of a country that welcomed me, but I find this really inhumane,” she said. “It’s as though we are garbage.”
International students see doors closed
Immigration Lawyer Maxime Lapointe says Colín Silva is far from the only one who feels she put everything on the line for nothing.
Since 2023, Lapointe said both levels of government have put in place a series of measures making it increasingly difficult to settle in the province.
“The doors were slowly closed to [newcomers] overtime and it makes it so that there are now people here who no longer qualify,” he said.
When it comes to the recent French-language requirements for post-graduation work permits, Lapointe says this is one of the measures that hurt newcomers the most.
He says he sees a lot of clients who either submit the wrong type of exam or paperwork that goes along with it.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not respond to the CBC’s request for comment.
Jean-François Roberge, Quebec’s immigration minister, has come under fire after cutting an essential pathway to permanent residency in 2025, the Quebec Experience Program, also known by its French acronym PEQ. He’s attempting to calm the situation with a new program that will prioritize applicants working in specific fields, among other criteria.
Joeséphine Claude Haba, an international student at Université Laval and coordinator with the Association des étudiantes et des étudiants de Laval inscrits aux études supérieures, said the regulations change so often it’s hard to keep track.
The latest example of that, she says, is the Quebec government’s cancellation of the Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ), a popular fast-track to permanent residency, to start a new program that prioritizes certain types of newcomers over others.
Claude Haba for instance, had hoped to apply for permanent residency after completing her studies in marketing, but with the immigration minister’s most recent announcement, she feels she no longer has a chance.
“It’s difficult because we came on the basis of a promise. I would call it a moral contract,” Haba said. “Everyone is asking themselves what our future is here.”