What we mean when we talk about inclusion: Sarmishta Subramanian

2018/01/22 Leave a comment

 from Six Degrees on inclusion. Overall I found it too rambling and unfocussed, with relatively few concrete suggestions on how to improved dialogue and conversation regarding integration and inclusion issues.

While there is value in this kind of high level discourse, there is a greater need for more practical and pragmatic approaches that help different actors address some of the issues:

…There is a principle at stake, of not allowing debates about inclusion to happen in an exclusionary way. The new vogue in the West is for a modulation of the conversation by suppression, a desire for the silencing of not merely hateful opinion, but divergent perspectives of many kinds. The argument made is that certain conversations must stop for other, more productive ones to occur; and anyway, it is impossible to silence the powerful majority. A broader streak of illiberalism is in evidence here, and it’s difficult to see how a modern, inclusive society benefits from it. Does the suppression of some views not logically encompass the potential suppression of any or all views? Can a free society support the kinds of intolerance—including an intolerance of religion—that have become commonplace in modern progressive thought? Freedom of thought and speech are deliberately blind to content; making the freedom contingent on which thought or words defeats the point.

In this mode of thinking, it is not only racism or prejudice that is shut down, but also many other voices, including progressive ones—people broadly aligned with the underlying values who may not speak precisely the same coded language. This is all the more poignant given that these political or social constraints on speech have no effect at all on those fully committed to illiberalism and to the free expression of ideas of xenophobia, racial superiority, sexism, and social injustice. We continue to hear those voices, but less so others in the middle who share the fundamental values of egalitarianism, tolerance, pluralism.

There is also a pragmatic argument to be made. The support of the majority is surely vital to the long-term health of minority rights. Even successful movements that have risen up from the grassroots have found support among the majority, or from cultural or political elites. And while it may be impossible to silence the majority, it is certainly possible for a majority to feel silenced, which is a political obstacle as well as a moral and social one.

The problems of a mildly uncomfortable majority are, of course, not the concern of activists demanding the most basic forms of inclusion for black Americans, or Indigenous Canadians, or any other historically disadvantaged group. Nor should they be. Discomfort pales before real economic and social injustice, and in any case the work of activists has generally been to throw rhetorical grenades, to build pressure in the system, to remind everyone that these debates have stakes, and to shift the conversation from the edges. This is important work.

Yet it is also a fact that a position of discomfort is not one from which people will act with the greatest generosity or fairness. The frustration of activists is understandable; they don’t want to negotiate with people who refuse to “get it.” This cannot then be left entirely to the activists. Responses have to come from other places, too—from minorities who are not too exhausted to talk about it, and from reasonable members of the majority who don’t default to one of a few modes currently available in the popular discourse, which include angry reactionary; sanctimonious, slightly self-loathing recovering white person; and silent observer. They have to come from the middle, and be heard by the middle, which means they may have to come outside the polarized zones of social media.

* * *

Countries such as Canada and Australia have staked a lot in the idea of achieving inclusion by recognizing, and accommodating, difference. That mode of thinking has migrated from courts and parliament houses out into the public arena. In the public discourse, the challenge is in how citizens can achieve that recognition of particularity, and answer its demands, while still achieving a recognition of the universal—respect for all groups, and people. We could do worse than to consider the advice of the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has written about the value of applying the literary imagination in a judicial context. Adopting the posture of “concerned reader of a novel,” she writes, allows a jurist to be merciful. For the lay person too, there is much to be said for viewing the world this way, to approach our disparate fellow humans with genuine curiosity and sympathy, with a desire to understand “the entire complex history of their efforts.” Taking in the lives of others, and their whole stories, would allow everyone to be more compassionate, and like Nussbaum’s reader, to participate, and observe, to expand what we see.

In the end inclusion depends in part on perceptions—of fairness, of equity—which vary depending on the person doing the seeing. In fact, questions of perception lie at the very heart of the question. Inclusion, after all, is not merely about literal rules—legalizing gay marriage or mandating equal access to services. Those rules leave too much room for exclusion. Rather, this is more fundamentally about how we see our place in the world, about our ability to imagine and achieve a good life in every area that is meaningful to us. The capacity of all citizens to have this, in turn, allows a society to flourish.

Inclusion has been described as a “mutually beneficial state for both the community and the individual.” Much rides on that “mutually beneficial.” Discussions of inclusion and exclusion, which often bring into clear view the failures of governments. But what we owe each other is not only a question for governments to answer but also a question for individuals to untangle: what our responsibilities are as citizens, what our obligations are to those different from us, and what we owe to our communities—each of us, and all of us.

via What we mean when we talk about inclusion – Macleans.ca

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Douglas Todd: Here’s how to end migration scams by the global rich in Canada

2018/01/22 Leave a comment

Todd continues his series of articles on immigration scams involving wealthy immigrants, including the issue of taxation, particularly those who ‘park’ their family in Canada while continuing to live and work in their country of origin.

I am currently analyzing citizenship take-up by immigration category and business immigrants (entrepreneurs, investors) have the largest gap between relatively low principal applicant naturalization (mainly men) and secondary applicants (their families):

Canada could crack down in many ways on the scams performed by “ghost immigrants” who avoid paying their share of Canadian taxes while driving up housing prices in Vancouver and Toronto.

Immigration and tax specialists are pressing Ottawa to adopt numerous proposals they believe would put an end to widespread illegitimate migration schemes, such as those employed by two rich families from China, whose tactics were exposed this month in B.C. Supreme Court.

The case of Fu versus Zhu revealed how the wealthy families, who had together bought three expensive homes on the west side of Vancouver, had been engaging in illicit plots involving Canadian real estate, tax avoidance and lying about their immigration status.

“The problem is that there is large-scale immigration of relatively wealthy people to Canada who are not contributing significantly, if at all, to the Canadian tax base,” said David Lesperance, a specialist in Canadian tax and immigration law.

“They have bid up the housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto. They are also receiving the benefits of Canadian permanent resident status, including excellent schooling, free medical care, security and (eventually, as citizens) an excellent visa-free passport.”

Noted Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland shares much of the unease of Lesperance – including frustration that Canadian authorities are not enforcing the country’s rules when would-be immigrants fail to declare their worldwide income, pretend to spend time in Canada and obscure the real owners of their properties.

The two specialists have appeared before politicians in Ottawa to offer their ideas on fighting such scams. They agree problems have been created by Canada welcoming so many investor families, in which the breadwinners often become “ghosts immigrants” with little connection to Canada other than engaging in property speculation.

A recent investigation by the South China Morning Post, for instance, found that more than 40 per cent of the breadwinners for recent millionaire migrant households in Canada appear to have left Canada, although some left family members behind. It’s a widespread phenomenon, said the newspaper, among rich Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants.

Lesperance and Kurland maintain their proposals would be especially helpful in dealing with the increasing number of trans-national “astronaut” migrants who use Canadian real-estate primarily as a place to park their capital and sometimes their offspring.

The specialists would especially target the rapidly growing number of would-be Canadians who are renouncing their permanent resident status, which some are using as a way to avoid paying taxes in Canada while still visiting often on 10-year visas.

“Unfortunately, the perception of too many (wealthy) immigrants is that cheats are not sought after or detected” by Canadian tax or border officials, said Lesperance. To eliminate the problem of ‘ghost immigrants,’ the Canadian Revenue Agency must change this perception.”

Both experts emphasize how important it is for the CRA to do far more tax audits of investors, domestic and offshore, who buy up numerous properties. Authorities should particularly focus, they say, on the dubious techniques accountants have cooked up for avoiding paying taxes on their capital gains.

In the complex world of immigration law, perhaps the most radical idea for reform comes from Lesperance, who says it would reduce foreign speculation in Canadian real estate and curtail the tax evasion illustrated by clothing manufacturing mogul Quoqing Fu in the B.C. Supreme Court case.

The judge mocked Fu’s testimony after learning he had told the CRA his worldwide income, which is subject to taxes in Canada, was just $97.11.

Instead of authorities trying in vain to determine whether would-be immigrants are physically present in Canada, Lesperance recommends rating them mostly on whether they pay significant income taxes in Canada — regardless of which country in which they spend most of their time.

There is not much wrong with rich people travelling the world to work, invest and run businesses, argues Lesperance, who is based in Europe. Many would be satisfied, he says, to hold two passports while still paying their share of taxes on their global incomes to Canada, in return for “a stable and safe place for their global operations” and their children.

Canada is losing out on these entrepreneurial newcomers, he says, because its immigration policy focuses on migrants having a sustained “physical presence” in the country. The major resistance to this idea, Lesperance said, comes from those who believe newcomers “must rub elbows at Tim Horton’s to become Canadianized.”

The trouble with Canada’s current residency-based approach to immigration, said Lesperance, is that it often doesn’t work and “we get people like the Fu family abusing the tax system, but we scare away the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.”

Even though Kurland strongly believes Canada needs to stop exploitation of the country by high-net-worth tax-avoiding newcomers who speculate in real estate, the Vancouver immigration lawyer continues to believe there is value in immigrants integrating into the country by “rubbing shoulders” with Canadians.

Kurland, author of the Lexbase newsletter, also worries that, unless wealthy would-be immigrants who are not often present in the country simply write Canada a big cheque in exchange for citizenship, too many would have their accountants find ways to hide their riches in a trust fund.

Alternatively, one of Kurland’s more innovative recommendations is for the federal government “to very visibly invite Chinese tax collectors to Vancouver,” a move which would dramatically remind cheaters to submit to the rigours of Canada’s tax and security treaties with China, which is launching its own crackdown.

Kurland also believes that, in this new era “in which global computer systems can carefully track individuals’ travel,” it is fast becoming easier and less costly for Canadian authorities to catch people who are not following the country’s immigration and tax rules.

Ultimately, however, like Lesperance, Kurland believes the following is the most important thing that will lead to a clampdown on migration scams in Canada involving false tax claims and real-estate speculation:

“It’s a pure question of political will.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Here’s how to end migration scams by the global rich in Canada

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It’s hard out there for an immigrant; lemon lawyers make it harder | TheHill

2018/01/22 Leave a comment

Welcome any comments from Canadian immigration lawyers on the extent this is a comparable issue in Canada:

It’s hard out there for an immigrant. President Trump routinely demagogues the nation’s undocumented population.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions now leads an enforcement campaign centered around making life so unpleasant for undocumented immigrants that they decide to leave the country instead of facing the abuse.

In these times, immigrants need to be able to find help they can trust. Sadly, they also need to watch out when they call up a lawyer.

Our self-regulating legal profession does many things well, but we often struggle to police our own ranks. We each learned this lesson while representing immigrants on a pro bono basis while in private practice.

Like many lawyers, we gave our immigrant clients the same level of dedication and diligence as our paying work. Sadly, when we walked into immigration court, we often saw seemingly unprepared and unimpressive lawyering.

As law professors, we have seen similar problems with some immigration lawyers. We stay in touch with our driven, idealistic graduates. Some of them land at immigration firms. One individual worried about how to extricate himself from an unethical firm.

The managing partner would file baseless asylum claims and then task his young associate with defending them in immigration court. It forced a hard choice on a young lawyer: his ethics or his income.

Most immigration lawyers zealously represent their clients and help them achieve better outcomes than they would without representation. Research convincingly shows that representation usually improves an immigrant’s chances in our Byzantine immigration system.

One study found that represented immigrants are five times more likely to apply for relief and five times more likely to get it. But there simply are not enough good immigration lawyers to go around. So, some immigrants get lemons: lawyers who can actually make their chances worse.

While the research on immigration lawyers shows how much most of them help their clients, it also confirms the real problems within the immigration law bar that we’ve seen with our own eyes.

Researchers studying asylum cases found that the bottom 10 percent of immigration lawyers actually reduced the chance of relief so much that the applicant would have been better off without a lawyer.

Notably, the study controlled for the wildly unpredictable outcomes in asylum cases — some judges grant 95 percent of applications, and others deny 95 percent — a different problem that also must be addressed.

Immigrants face a dilemma: How do they avoid the lemons? They have no way of knowing whether they have hired one of the many good lawyers, or one of the lousy few. One group of researchers explained that “immigrants are simply in a terrible position to evaluate the claims made by lawyers and are often naïve about what lawyers can and cannot do for them.”

George Akerlof won a Nobel prize for showing how “asymmetric information” causes market failures. When sellers know more than buyers, buyers don’t know who to trust, and everyone suffers. Just like a few dishonest used car dealers make everyone mistrust used cars, a few bad immigration lawyers make people mistrust all of them.

Although measuring lawyer quality is difficult task, the immigration law bar has a serious quality control problem. One survey of judges by Richard Posner and Albert Yoon found that of all practice areas surveyed, “immigration was the area in which the quality of representation was lowest.”

Another survey of New York immigration court judges found that about half of the lawyers they saw provided either inadequate or grossly inadequate representation, and the worst lawyers actually make their clients worse off.

There are two ways to address this problem. Lawyers can and should police their own ranks by reporting unfit lawyers. But no one likes a tattletale. When one of us published concerns about this problem in the Wall Street Journal, the American Immigration Lawyers Association called it “fake news.”

Just like the “blue wall of silence” encourages good police officers to defend bad ones, good lawyers are reluctant to criticize bad ones.

We think reducing information asymmetry might also help. Immigrants deserve to know how often lawyers succeed. Immigration courts collect information about every case filed by every immigration lawyer. A public database providing that information to immigrants would help them find good lawyers and avoid bad ones. This would give immigrants a tool to distinguish between the reprobates and the righteous.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect solution. Statistics cannot tell the entire story. We trust immigrants to use the information intelligently. A lawyer winning only 20 percent of cases before a judge who denies 95 percent of all claims deserves a medal.

A lawyer winning 60 percent of petitions when most win 90 percent should be avoided. Great lawyers taking tough cases may show middling statistics. Despite this, immigrants should have information that might help them steer away from lousy lemon lawyers.

Whether we pursue this solution to the lemon problem or another, we must do more to deal with the bad apples in our midst. Far too often, professional self-regulatory organizations behave like cartels.

Although we see the problem as most pronounced in the immigration law bar, similar problems exist with criminal defense and other practice areas. We should make more information available to let immigrants themselves improve quality by making informed decisions about who to hire.

via It’s hard out there for an immigrant; lemon lawyers make it harder | TheHill

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Jonathan Kay: Why a murderer may have a better future than a #MeToo accused

2018/01/20 Leave a comment

Valid comments, applicable in many spheres, of the need for nuance and greater understanding:

An all-or-nothing process that can mete out exactly one kind of punishment — a lifetime of disgrace, or nothing at all — provides us with a thrilling kind of moral theatre, in which pure villains such as Harvey Weinstein get their due. But in cases where the facts are less damning, this black-and-white, permanent-ink approach doesn’t reflect the way most ordinary men and women judge — and eventually forgive — one another.

Things could be starting to change, however. In response to allegations that actor Aziz Ansari pressured a date to have an unpleasant sexual encounter, Bari Weiss of The New York Times wrote this week: “I am a proud feminist, (but if) you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you … Aziz Ansari sounds like he was aggressive and selfish and obnoxious that night … And isn’t it enraging that women are socialized to be docile and accommodating and to put men’s desires before their own? Yes. Yes. Yes. But the solution to these problems does not begin with women torching men for failing to understand their ‘nonverbal cues.’ It is for women to be more verbal.”

One advantage of this approach — of looking for shades of grey, and not casting every moment of sexual friction in the language of moral absolutism — is that it may ultimately induce men to take more responsibility for their actions, not less: When any admission of “selfish and obnoxious” behaviour is seen as tantamount to a rape confession, if punishment is seen as an all-or-nothing affair, there is little motivation for a man to publicly come to terms with his behaviour.

Megan Ganz, a sitcom writer who was mistreated last year by an older boss after she rebuffed his come-ons, took a novel approach on social media. Writing on Twitter two weeks ago, she used open-ended language to coax an admission from her former boss — Dan Harmon — that he’d treated her “like garbage,” and that “I was an awful boss and a selfish baby.”

I have no special insight into Harmon’s thinking. But the tone of their Twitter exchange, and a subsequent podcast by Harmon, suggests that he was responding to Ganz’s decision not to threaten her former tormentor with repercussions, or seek to rally antagonists with hash-tags.

“I think of Dan as a work in progress,” Ganz told The New York Times. “That’s how I think of myself, too. It’s dangerous to think of yourself as a hero and someone else as a villain. It gets in the way of empathy. We should be tearing down walls, not putting them up. Women are not different creatures from men. They don’t need to be extra careful around us. They just need to treat us with the same basic respect and dignity that they show to other men.”

Not all women can be expected to adopt this sort of generous attitude. When men are violent, or engage in full-blown criminal assault, no one should encourage them to turn the other cheek. Sometimes, scorched earth is the only way to go.

But for Ganz, the project of reforming male attitudes comes leavened with a sense of understanding and mercy — the same spirit that, I hope, will inform readers of my friend’s forthcoming book about prison life. As morally urgent as the #MeToo project may feel, it’s important to remember that most of us aren’t pure martyrs or pure monsters, but something in between.

Source: Jonathan Kay: Why a murderer may have a better future than a #MeToo accused

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Why Asking About Citizenship Could Make the Census Less Accurate – The New York Times

2018/01/20 Leave a comment

Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at U.C.L.A. on the US Census citizenship question along with a study that shows how distrust plays out in different states, reflecting the particular political climate:

It’s a question that used to be on the national census every decade:whether you were a citizen of the United States.

But the Justice Department’s request to return it to the 2020 census for all respondents has unsettled demographic experts as well as advocates of voting rights and immigrants, who say it could lead Hispanic people to avoid being counted. Are they overreacting to a simple question?

We can’t say at this point what the electoral consequences would be, but it’s likely to lead to undercounting. The Census Bureau itself estimates that the 2010 census failed to find 1.5 percent of the Hispanic population. Research conducted that year suggests that Hispanic trust in the census may have been undermined. And from the start of his candidacy up through his reported vulgar remarks last week about Haiti and African countries, President Trump has been fanning anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide.

The Justice Department says it wants to add the question to aid its defense of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (which prevents the dilution of minority populations so their power cannot be weakened).

Supporters of adding the question say it shouldn’t be a problem because the citizenship question has since 2000 been asked on a smaller, recurring census-sponsored survey, the American Community Survey, and because the anonymity protections are strong. But the trouble is that today, everything even remotely political has become a battle over what it means to be an American.

Responding to both the census and the A.C.S. is the law of the land — you must do it or you could be fined. The data collected determines how a lot of money is allocated, as well as the allocation of House seats (and therefore Electoral College votes).

The more people who fail to respond, the more concern there is that we are missing some groups of people more than others, and that the failure to return the form among these group members is not random.

The government dedicates tremendous resources to reminding people to return their census form and even sends people to the doors of households from which no form has been filed. Mostly, it gets results. But if the reason for not filling it out is distrust of government, additional efforts at compliance by government might fall flat.

For the 2010 census, the Spanish-language television network Telemundo sought to improve census participation by writing a story line into one of its most popular telenovelas, “Más Sabe el Diablo.” In it, the character Perla meets a Latino census worker at her father’s empanada stand and is encouraged to apply for a job with the census. The plot shows Perla being trained and learning about why the census asks the questions it does and how it safeguards confidentiality. The idea was that a popular character on a TV show could do more to assuage the fears of a community than the government could.

Matthew Trujillo, currently at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Elizabeth Paluck, a Princeton University psychologist and recent MacArthur Award winner, studied the network’s efforts. Mr. Trujillo and Ms. Paluckasked 121 Spanish-speaking Latino adults across three states to watch either a four-minute clip from “Más Sabe” that showed Perla talking about the importance of completing the census or one that included Perla talking only about family. One of the states was Arizona, which had just passed a law requiring police officers, in the course of an unrelated investigation, to investigate a “reasonable suspicion” that a person was in the country illegally.

Subjects in the experiment completed a survey before and after watching one of the clips. (Which one they watched was determined at random.) Upon leaving the lab, they were able to take a flier about the census and choose either a generic “Latino Pride” or census-specific “Be Counted” sticker.

The results of the test showed that people who saw the census story line were more likely to have positive attitudes toward the government generally — unless they lived in Arizona.Latino residents there, under threat from the newly passed law, were not moved by Perla’s story line.

The study also revealed that, on average, seeing Perla’s experience with the census made people, including those in Arizona, more aware of it. They were also more curious: 86 percent took a flier about the census as they left, compared with 69 percent of people who saw the other clip. Finally, the census clip prompted more people to take and wear the “Be Counted” sticker as they left — if they lived in Texas or New Jersey. In Arizona, people in both groups avoided the “Latino Pride” sticker.

The results suggest that if Latinos in the United States feel generally threatened by the Trump administration, it may be hard to persuade them to overcome their negative views of government and return the 2020 census.

California officials are so worried about Latino nonparticipation — and the potential loss of a seat in Congress and billions of federal dollars — that they are discussing aggressive multilingual advertising campaigns.

In the 2010 Telemundo study, it mattered a bit how much people liked Perla as a character. This is both good news and bad news for the Census Bureau as it faces 2020. With TV content booming, there is no shortage of popular characters who could be seen talking about the census.

On the other hand, today’s networks may be reluctant to participate the way Telemundo did in 2010. Given the current climate, even they may be unsure of the government’s intentions, particularly as it relates to those who are undocumented or whose national origin may not be in keeping with the president’s view of being American.

via Why Asking About Citizenship Could Make the Census Less Accurate – The New York Times

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The Left’s Immigration Radicalism | commentary

2018/01/20 Leave a comment

While I disagree with some of Rothman’s assertions, I agree with his conclusion regarding the need to end the” insufferable generalities about immigrants bandied about by opinions makers on both the left and the right.” Canada also has its share of “insufferable generalities:”

Observers on the right must have been confused by the controversy that erupted following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent appearance on Fox News. What he advocated sounds at first glance like common sense.

“When we admit people to our country, we should be like Canada,” Sessions said. “What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills, and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” Based on these comments, you could be forgiven for thinking a plague of unskilled illegal immigrants had descended upon the United States. Rest easy; a combination of increased border enforcement and a tightening labor market—trends that predate the Trump administration—resulted in a decline in the low-skilled illegal immigrant population.

The statistics are beside the point. The attorney general is packaging unsavory preconceptions about immigrants in a marketable pitch to centrists based on meritocratic assumptions. The fact is that Jeff Sessions is not qualified to determine who will or will not be a “successful” immigrant to the United States.

Sessions’s vision of a meritocratic immigration regime assumes that success is beyond the reach of under-educated immigrants—a judgment based only on his own preconceptions. That’s not just immodest but antithetical to conservatism, a philosophy which, at root, recognizes that the billions of daily interactions and events that we call the economy routinely frustrate those bold enough to issue predictions about its trajectory. Sessions’s vision of a meritocratic immigration system really isn’t that meritocratic at all; not if it is based on his presumptions about who should and who should not have the chance to prove their worth.

There is truth in the notion that under-educated, low-skilled immigrants are no benefit to some Americans, but not because they are unlikely to be successful. Precisely the opposite; they are more likely to be successful, shutting low-skilled Americans out of the market. Those on the left who revel in the condition of the native-born Americans displaced by this phenomenon shouldn’t laugh too loudly. Whether they recognize it or not, they are the mirror image of the right’s hardliners. What’s more, they are helping fuel the polarization that led to the ascension of an administration that ran explicitly on a restrictive approach to immigration.

Outgoing Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, a man with ambitions for higher office, exemplifies the blinkered radicalism of the left when it comes to immigration. This week, Gutierrez announced his opposition to the Trump administration’s desire to end “chain migration,” the practice by which American green card holders and U.S. citizens transfer their family members into the United States. Gutierrez insisted that American residency should be transferable to an immigrant’s siblings, parents, spouses, and children, regardless of whether or not they’ve demonstrated the capacity or interest to assimilate into American society. That’s not meritocracy; it’s charity.

Of course, there are those on the intellectual left for whom meritocracy is an illusion indulged only by those who don’t know the extent to which their successes are not their own. That’s the view of Linfield College English Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, author of The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant, who claimed the “logic of meritocracy that is built on this racist assumption that everyone has had the same access and opportunities.” It’s the view of columnist Jo Littler, who insists that “meritocracy is a myth.” Western democracies like the U.S. and the U.K. are closed systems in which wealth and opportunities are reserved for those with connections to people with an abundance of wealth and opportunity. Meritocracy “is a smokescreen for inequality.”

What these successful opinion-makers have marketed as wisdom is really just blinding resentment. In the United States, in particular, there are no rigid class strata, and there most certainly isn’t any closed loop that guarantees the wealthy that status in perpetuity. “Citing tax scholar Robert Carroll’s examination of IRS records,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson observed, “Professor [Mark] Rank notes that the turnover among the super-rich (the top 400 taxpayers in any given year) is 98 percent over a decade—that is, just 2 percent of that elusive group remain there for ten years in a row. Among those earning more than $1 million a year, most earned that much for only one year of the nine-year period studied, and only 6 percent earned that much for the entire period.” Among those who found their way onto Forbes Magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans in 2016, a record 42 of them were immigrants from 21 different countries. Together, they have a combined net worth of over $250 billion.

Among liberals, however, this kind of old-school class envy is practically passé. What’s really in vogue isn’t resentment toward American capitalism but American culture. For many on the post-Marxist left, race and identity have supplanted wealth and power as the traits by which structural haves and have-nots can be identified and pitted against one another. For nearly two decades, liberal ideologues have debated whether assimilation into American society was possible or even desirable. Not only does assimilation represent the tacit acceptance of and submission to American racism, but it is the surrender of cultural heritage and traits that are superior to America’s heterogeneous soup of appropriated customs. “Assimilation, instead of bringing upward mobility, brings downward mobility,” Aviva Chomsky wrote in 2007. “It’s not lack of assimilation that keeps them marginalized—it’s assimilation itself.”

As the decades have shown, and as the literate left would likely concede, assimilation continued apace, and it has not yielded a racial hierarchy. A 2015 study conducted by Harvard sociologist Mary Waters for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that immigrants, particularly second-generation immigrants, are integrating into society faster than migrants of earlier generations. This is not without its setbacks; the strain on U.S. English language programs in schools and the evidence suggesting low-skilled migrants “appear to be filling low-skilled jobs that native-born Americans are not available or willing to take” increase social tensions. But assimilation is occurring, and all parties are richer for it.

America in the 1990s and 2000s experienced an immigration boom and, as historian Arthur Schlesinger said, “Mass migrations produce mass antagonisms.” Even though the undocumented and legal permanent-resident populations have leveled off since the collapse of the economy in 2008, America’s politics haven’t caught up with the trends. As the light and heat around immigration fade, so, too, should the insufferable generalities about immigrants bandied about by opinions makers on both the left and the right. At least, that would be ideal.

via The Left’s Immigration Radicalism | commentary

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The moment pro-migrant politicians feared: Afghan boy kills ex-girlfriend, a German

2018/01/20 Leave a comment

Good in-depth article. Same pattern of reactions occurs elsewhere, and how it influences the overall political debates over immigration:

It happened between neatly stacked rows of shampoo and organic baby food: A teenage boy walked up to his ex-girlfriend in the local drugstore, pulled out a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade and stabbed her in the heart.

The death in Kandel, in southwestern Germany, on Dec. 27 has traumatized this sleepy town of barely 10,000 inhabitants, not just because both the suspect and the victim were just 15 years old and went to the local school, but also because the boy is an Afghan migrant and the girl was German.

From the moment Germany opened its doors to more than one million migrants two years ago, prominent episodes like the Berlin Christmas market attack and the New Year’s molestation and rapes in Cologne have stoked German insecurities.

But the case of the two teenagers, Abdul D. and Mia V., has struck a special nerve because the killing happened in such a quiet and provincial setting and the two people involved were so young. It became national news, was debated over dinner tables, on talk shows and on social media sites, and reinforced fears that Germany is becoming ever less safe.

Yet perceptions are one thing, and statistics are another. Reported crimes have edged up over the past two years, but overall, violent crimes have been trending downward for a decade in Germany, which remains one of the safest countries in Europe.

Nevertheless, each crime involving a migrant or asylum-seeker has become a fresh occasion for national hand-wringing.

Something has shifted in Germany. Not so long ago, the logistical challenge and cost of integrating new migrants still dominated the public debate. These days, the growing unease with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policy has reached a new and febrile stage.

“I am scared,” said Jana Weigel, a 24-year-old dental assistant, as she lit a candle outside the DM drugstore where the killing took place.

Calls have multiplied for mandatory medical exams to determine the age of migrants claiming to be minors and for swifter deportations of those who — like the suspect — have been denied asylum.

A preliminary coalition agreement between Merkel’s conservatives and the more liberal Social Democrats announced Friday includes a cap of 220,000 refugees per year and strictly limits the number of family members allowed to join a refugee in Germany.

Even in proudly tolerant and left-voting Kandel, the mood on the street has hardened. Many here took the killing personally. Before Mia broke up with Abdul, he had been welcomed into her family, Weigel pointed out, much like the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been welcomed to Germany.

“It makes you think,” she said, “how many others will betray our hospitality.”

Weigel’s sense of insecurity was reinforced by a widely publicized study showing that the number of reported crimes in the state of Lower Saxony had risen by more than 10 percent over the past two years and that the increase could be attributed overwhelmingly to cases involving refugees.

Half of that increase is due to the fact that crimes involving migrants are twice as likely to be reported, the authors of the study said. Many of the people accused of crimes are young men under 30, a demographic that is most likely to commit crimes, even among Germans.

Less publicized was the other major finding of the report: Overall, violent crime, including murder and rape, remains well below its 2007 peak. The number of young offenders has decreased by half since then.

“The paradox is that Germany is still a very safe country, much safer than even a few years ago,” said Christian Pfeiffer, a criminologist and a co-author of the report, which was commissioned by the government and released last week. “But the perception is the opposite: People feel less safe. And when something like this murder happens, it confirms that feeling.”

Ask the Germans paying their respects at the ad hoc memorial for the girl who was killed — a sea of candles and messages and photos of her with friends — and they will reel off a list of crimes committed by migrants: A German woman who was raped by a Sudanese migrant in the nearby town of Speyer a few days earlier. Another woman who was raped and strangled by an Afghan in Freiburg just over a year ago.

Weigel, who has a 2-year-old daughter, no longer leaves the house after dark. Last month, a terrorist attack was narrowly foiled at an ice rink in nearby Karlsruhe, a 30-minute drive away.

“It feels like we’ve lost control,” Weigel said. “The state has lost control.”

Kandel is an orderly town of tastefully restored medieval houses and shops that close for lunch. It is also home to 125 refugees, most of them from Syria or Afghanistan.

Until Mia was killed, “there was never a problem,” said Günther Tielebörger, Kandel’s mayor. He represents the Social Democrats, long the strongest party in the town. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, received less than 10 percent of the vote in the last election.

Kandel has a long tradition of tolerance. Three centuries ago, it welcomed Huguenot refugees from France. Where other villages in the region built a wall inside their churches to keep Catholics and Protestants apart, Kandel ripped down its wall and shared the church. One of the best restaurants in town serving regional specialties like “pig’s stomach” is run by a Turk.

But this tolerance is now being tested.

Maja Mathias, 53, works in a local French bakery and has Turkish neighbors and a Croatian brother-in-law. “I have no problem with foreigners,” she said, standing behind a counter featuring freshly baked baguettes and pretzels. “But there is always the fear: What else is coming?”

Beyond fear, the killing has stirred other resentments.

“German retirees who have worked hard for 45 years get less than the refugees,” said Knoll Pede, 64, a town maintenance worker. He is no fan of President Donald Trump, he said, “but I wouldn’t mind our politicians to do a bit of ‘Germany First.’”

Such talk worries Tielebörger, the mayor. The benefits migrants receive are far less generous than Germans may believe, he said, and many of the migrants are barred from work until their asylum applications have been processed. But the optics matter.

“Germans feel neglected,” Tielebörger said.

“We need to wake up,” he said. Otherwise, he added, the left will lose votes to the right.

One of Tielebörger’s former colleagues in local government is Heiko Wildberg, a former member of the liberal pro-immigration Greens party. Wildberg is now a lawmaker for the nationalist AfD in Berlin. For him, Mia’s killing was a “turning point.”

“This is not Berlin or Cologne; we are in small-town Germany,” he said. “This murder shows that the reality of the migrant crisis has arrived in the German province.”

The AfD was quick off the mark, organizing a silent march through Kandel two days after the killing. The more extremist National Party of Germany followed suit.

Meanwhile, the local benefits office in Kandel had to barricade its doors because its employees had received so many threats. “Accomplices,” anonymous messages called them.

Some here accuse the authorities of not having done enough to protect Mia. Abdul had stalked her online and in person and beaten up one of her classmates in a fit of jealousy.

On Dec. 15, her parents had reported him to the police. Twelve days later, as she was shopping with friends, he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife he had bought in a supermarket next door. She later died of her wounds.

After her father told the German tabloid Bild that her ex-boyfriend “was definitely not 15,” demands for medical exams to verify the claims of refugees who say they are minors have been revived.

The ethics commission of the body representing Germany’s doctors has said that such tests — which include X-rays of hand, collar and jaw bones as well as genital exams — violate “bodily integrity” and can be inaccurate by as much as two years.

They have nonetheless become a rallying cry at the highest level of politics.

“In all cases, where no official and real document is presented, we need to determine the age in another way, if needed through medical examinations,” said the conservative interior minister, Thomas de Maizière.

When Abdul arrived in Germany in April 2016, he said he was 14, and apparently none of the officials registering him raised serious doubts about his age. As part of the court case against him, a series of medical exams will now seek to confirm his age.

Austria, Sweden and the German state of Saarland are among the places conducting such exams regularly.

There is an incentive for migrants to be listed as under 18. Government benefits, access to German lessons and job opportunities are better for minors. In Saarland, more than a third of the migrants who were tested appeared to be over 18.

Most of the unaccompanied-minor migrants are integrating well, said Anne Spiegel, the integration minister for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which includes Kandel. “They are attending school, learning German and signing up for apprenticeships,” she said.

Still, officials like Tielebörger, the mayor, say that every transgression by a migrant gets disproportionate attention, leading to the opposite impression.

There was another shocking homicide in Kandel in recent weeks, he pointed out. A man killed his wife and two children. That one did not make the national news.

“If the boy had been German,” Tielebörger said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Source: The moment pro-migrant politicians feared: Afghan boy kills ex-girlfriend, a German

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

StatsCan Study: The exit and survival patterns of immigrant entrepreneurs

2018/01/20 Leave a comment

Yet another interesting study by StatsCan:

In most developed countries, self-employment is more prevalent among immigrants than among native-born individuals. However, much less is known about the survival and longevity of immigrant-owned firms. A small body of international research suggests that immigrant-owned businesses have shorter durations of survival than businesses owned by the native born. There has been little evidence on whether or not this is the case in Canada. Information on business survival is relevant to business development policies and the measurement of the economic impacts of immigration.

A new Statistics Canada study examines the duration of business ownership among immigrant and Canadian-born individuals. The study finds that, on average, there was little difference in the duration of ownership between immigrant and Canadian-born owners of private incorporated companies.

The study uses data from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamic Database, including individual and corporate tax returns and immigrant landing files, and focuses on ownership of private incorporated companies that started between 2003 and 2009. Ownership was tracked for up to seven years after start-up. The analysis builds on previous research studies that examined the prevalence of business ownership among immigrant entrepreneurs and the industries in which they were found.

The new Statistics Canada study finds that the rate of business failure is highest in the initial years after start-up. Specifically, among all immigrant owners, 11.5% terminated ownership after one year in business, with this share declining to 3.9% after seven years in business. Overall, about 80% of all immigrant business owners were still in operation after two years and 56% were still in operation after seven. Exit rates from business ownership and the duration of ownership were about the same among Canadian-born owners of private incorporated firms.

Recent immigrants (that is, those in Canada for less than 10 years) had higher exit rates from ownership and shorter durations of ownership than did the Canadian-born or longer-term immigrants (that is, those in Canada for 10 or more years). While 51% of recent immigrant business owners were still in operation after seven years, this was the case for 57% of long-term immigrant business owners and 58% of Canadian-born business owners.

Among recent immigrants, business class immigrants had the highest exit rates and shortest duration of ownership. Among longer-term immigrants, exit rates and the duration of ownership varied little across immigrant admission categories.

A number of other factors were found to be associated with longer duration of business ownership among immigrant owners, including being 30 to 49 years of age; owning a business in the health sector; and being from Europe, Southeast Asia, India, or select English-speaking countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. Education was found to have only a small effect on exit rates and duration once the effects of other variables were taken into account.

Immigrant owners of private incorporated businesses in the health sector (for example, laboratories, nursing companies, doctors’ offices and chiropractic practices) had particularly long durations of ownership and exit rates that were only one-third of those observed among immigrant business owners in other sectors. Owners in real estate and leasing, food and accommodation, professional services and wholesale trade generally had the shortest duration of ownership.

via The Daily — Study: The exit and survival patterns of immigrant entrepreneurs

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A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews: Stephens – The New York Times

2018/01/19 1 Comment

Good column and reminder:

Until his dying day, my dad’s Uncle Bern was a communist sympathizer. I remember him as an affable old man with a gracious wife who made a modest living selling antique lace. He probably wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Yet he found much to admire in the most murderous ideology of the 20th century, responsible for tens of millions of deaths from the killing fields of Cambodia to the gulags of Murmansk.

If you’re Jewish in America, chances are there’s at least one Uncle Bern somewhere in your family tree. As the scholar Ruth Wisse noted last year in Tablet magazine, Jewish intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s was largely defined by one’s stance toward one thing: The Party. Historians reckon that Jews accounted for nearly half the Communist Party’s total membership in those years, while many other Jews were close fellow travelers.

Most of these people, like my great-uncle, were deeply misguided idealists who otherwise led quiet and decent lives. A tiny handful of others — including atomic spies Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Harry Gold and Morton Sobell — betrayed America’s most important military secrets to Stalinist Russia and did incalculable damage to the country and the world.

Here’s a thought experiment: Would the United States have been better off if it had banned Jewish immigration sometime in the late 19th century, so that the immigrant parents of Rosenberg and Sobell had never set foot here? The question is worth asking, because so many of the same arguments made against African, Latin-American and Muslim immigrants today might have easily been applied to Jews just over a century ago.

Consider some of the parallels.

Crime? In 1908, the New York City police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, caused a public uproar (for which he later apologized) when he claimed that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The truth was closer to the opposite: Jewish crime rates, at about 16 percent, were considerably lower than their roughly 25 percent share of New York’s overall population. The same goes today, when, contrary to much Trumpian propaganda, incarceration rates for immigrants are nearly half what they are for native-born Americans.

Racial desirability? Just as Donald Trump wants more Norwegian immigrants and none from “s-hole countries,” the early 20th-century eugenicist, conservationist and immigration restrictionist Madison Grant was obsessed with protecting the “Nordic” races against those he termed “social discards” — including “the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew.”

Assimilation? This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked, in an interview with Fox News, “What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” That seems to be the general way of thinking in this administration.

Now compare that to a 1907 article in McClure’s magazine, titled “The Great Jewish Invasion,” which observed of Russian Jews, “no people have had a more inadequate preparation, educational and economic, for American citizenship.” Henry Adams, the great American patrician, wrote of “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish.” In 1914, Edward Alsworth Ross, the famous progressive sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, called Jews “moral cripples” whose “tribal spirit intensified by social isolation prompts them to rush to the rescue of the caught rascal of their own race.”

Subversion? During the campaign, Donald Trump said at a New Hampshire rally that Syrian refugees “could make the Trojan horse look like peanuts.” His campaign then infamously called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Similar charges have long been leveled at Jews. Henry Ford accused Jews of causing the First World War. A generation later, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh charged Jews with trying to inveigle the United States into war. Lindbergh was the leading champion in his day of “America First.” Still later, Jewish “neocons” somehow became the shadowy instigators of America’s wars in the Middle East.

O.K., you get the idea. And it’s worth acknowledging there are often kernels of anecdotal or statistical truth for nearly every ethnic stereotype. Jews were indeed overrepresented in radical political circles. Jewish gangsters — a.k.a. the “Kosher Nostra” — were nearly as notorious as their Irish and Italian peers in the early 20th century. There were Jewish students who rallied against the draft during the First World War, just as many more would rally against it over Vietnam.

Yet imagine if the United States had followed the advice of the immigration restrictionists in the late 19th century and banned Jewish immigrants, at least from Central Europe and Russia, on what they perceived to be some genetic inferiority. What, in terms of enterprise, genius, imagination, and philanthropy would have been lost to America as a country? And what, in terms of human tragedy, would have ultimately weighed on our conscience?

Today, American Jews are widely considered the model minority, so thoroughly assimilated that organizational Jewish energies are now largely devoted to protecting our religious and cultural distinctiveness. Someone might ask Jeff Sessions and other eternal bigots what makes an El Salvadoran, Iranian or Haitian any different.

via A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews – The New York Times

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Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

Interesting study comparing attitudes in New Mexico and Arizona:

Immigration policy in the US has grown increasingly contentious, seemingly pitting different communities and ideologies against each other. But a new study suggests that a large majority of Americans appreciate a welcoming policy toward immigrants. Only a specific minority—white conservatives—generally feels otherwise. And the effect isn’t limited to policy, as it influenced whether citizens felt welcome in the place that they lived.

The research, performed by a collaboration of US-based researchers, focused on New Mexico and Arizona. These states have similar demographics but radically different policies toward immigrants. Arizona has state policies that encourage police to check the immigration status of people they encounter; controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio ended up in trouble with the court system in part due to how aggressively he pursued this program. New Mexico, by contrast, will provide state IDs and tuition benefits to immigrants regardless of their documentation status.

The researchers reasoned that these states would provide a reasonable test as to how immigration policies align with the feelings of the public. So they surveyed nearly 2,000 residents of the two states, including immigrants, naturalized US citizens, and people born in the US, focusing on the states’ Caucasian and Hispanic populations.

The work used a phone-based survey that suggested that the state’s representatives were considering new immigration-focused legislation. Participants were randomly given a description of one of two types of legislation, either pro- or anti-immigrant (examples included English-only laws and bilingual state documents). Those surveyed were asked how they felt about the proposed legislation but were also asked questions about how they felt about the state—whether they felt at home there and whether they intended to move elsewhere. The intent was to get at whether immigration-focused policies in a state made people feel more or less at home.

Perhaps the clearest and most striking result is that the state where the participant resided didn’t have a significant effect on the main findings. That’s quite striking, given that state policy should in theory represent the desires of its citizens.

Beyond that, people responded to the proposals as you’d expect. Foreign-born Hispanics, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, viewed the immigrant-hostile legislation negatively and felt positively about the immigrant-friendly proposal. Hispanics born in the US were similar, but ideology seemed to creep in as an influence: conservatives were more likely to view the hostile legislation favorably. Liberal whites also strongly favored the pro-immigration proposal, while moderates were nearly evenly split. White conservatives, however, were the only group that on average favored an anti-immigration measure.

A nearly identical pattern emerged when the researchers analyzed how the proposals influenced people’s sense of being welcomed into the community. Foreign-born Hispanics uniformly felt more welcome when primed with immigrant-friendly proposals, as did liberal and moderate native-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic liberals. Conservative native-born Hispanics and moderate whites had a mixed response, while conservative Caucasians were the only group that clearly felt less welcome in their community when told that the legislature was considering a pro-immigration policy.

It’s not much of a surprise to see confirmation that policies that are hostile to a group make members of that group feel less welcome in their communities. In this case, the non-immigrant Hispanics surveyed shared a geographic origin and likely some culture with the people targeted, so it’s not much of a surprise that they felt less welcome as well. It would be useful to perform a similar experiment in New York City or Northern California, where there are more diverse groups of immigrants, to see if these feelings crossed cultural boundaries.

But there was at least one case in this study where the feelings clearly did cross cultural boundaries: liberal Caucasians felt more at home in their communities if they felt the communities welcomed immigrants.

White conservatives, however, were unique in this study in that they were the only group who felt that an immigrant-friendly community was hostile to them. While that might not be a problem in the more homogeneous areas of the country, this group is a shrinking minority—which may both explain the response and suggest that it will become an increasing issue going forward. Finding a way to moderate this sense of hostility may thus be essential to keeping US society functional in the face of demographic change.

Source: Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

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