As education-migration ("edugration") blurs the line between international student and immigrant recruitment in some jurisdictions, higher education admission is becoming linked to settler nation-building projects. Using critical discourse analysis, this article examines the Canadian higher education sector's response to COVID-19 through pre-budget submissions to the House of Commons of Canada Standing Committee on Finance for the 2021 federal budget. Findings demonstrate how institutions instrumentalized international students to position themselves as valuable actors in Canada's immigration regime and justify their requests for public financial support. In this way, nation-building through immigration -- both globally, as an imperial power, and domestically, as a colonial power -- is now a new societal role of higher education which is becoming hegemonic within institutions. This is significant because, as higher education's purposes align with those of economic immigration, the sector not only fails to interrupt, but itself reproduces, systemic patterns of border imperialism and settler-colonialism. The article urges higher education institutions to: (1) more deeply consider how a reliance on international student enrolment is impacting its societal roles; while also (2) avoid exceptionalizing the present by recognizing that higher education has long functioned in the service of the state as a colonial and imperialist power.