Canada clamps down on ‘flagpoling’ with immigration restrictions at some border crossings

2018/05/08 Leave a comment

When regular channels don’t work or take too much time …:

Border enforcement officials have slowly — and quietly — restricted foreign nationals from validating their permanent resident status and processing work and study permits at land ports of entry in southern Ontario and Quebec.

The move to limit the immigration services at the land border has wreaked havoc for temporary residents in Canada who try to immediately obtain or renew their status by briefly travelling to the United States and back — a long-standing practice known as “flagpoling,” symbolizing applicants making a quick U-turn at flagpoles.

Under a pilot program launched last summer, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) began to restrict “flagpoling” to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday each week at the Rainbow, Queenston-Lewiston and Peace bridges. It has since expanded to the Lacolle and St-Armand ports of entry in Quebec.

“This is unlawful because there is nothing in the law that authorizes CBSA to deny the processing of these applications for permits and landing documents,” said Barbara Jo Caruso, chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration section.

“We appreciate that CBSA has 90 different legislations they need to adjudicate on. They have drugs and guns to deal with and immigration is one more thing. But these people are Canadian taxpayers and they are being denied services.”

Although members of the bar association were notified about the changes, Caruso said there has been no public notice issued and the border agency’s website includes no cautions about the pilot.

“Given the consequences, to say this is misleading is an understatement,” she said. “We think the oversight is deliberate because to post otherwise would be to publish a process that is contrary to the regulations.”

Flagpoling has been the preferred way to obtain and validate Canadian immigration status for those who are already in Canada because it typically takes less than 30 minutes for the border processing, allowing applicants to bypass the weeks or months for the immigration department to process the same application or schedule a permanent resident landing interview inside Canada.

The border agency said it has adopted the flagpoling pilot project in order to “mitigate” the high volume and excessive wait times at the land ports of entry due to flagpole cases from Friday through Monday. Last year alone, the agency’s southern Ontario ports of entry processed 4.5 million travellers at the Rainbow, Queenston and Peace bridges, with another 1.2 million at the St-Bernard-de-Lacolle and St-Armand/Philipsburg border entries.

It said the pilot allows unsuccessful flagpolers to re-enter Canada under their current immigration status and apply online, by mail or by making an appointment with the immigration department for processing within the country.

Those who choose to return to a port of entry between Tuesday and Thursday are also warned same-day processing is not guaranteed, pending traffic volume at the border, said Diana Scott, a spokesperson for the agency.

The pilot allows the CBSA to better manage its immigration-related services during peak traffic times while ensuring critical resources are focused on national security and trade priorities.

“The CBSA regularly reviews its operations and prepares operational plans to ensure maximum operational efficiency,” Scott said in an email. “There are no plans at this time to expand the operational model beyond Southern Ontario and Quebec.”

In a letter to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, the bar association said its members were “dismayed” by the extension and expansion of the pilot program. People often flagpole on weekends to avoid taking time off work or taking their children out of school, it noted.

“The refusal to process these requests at ports of entry can have a significant detrimental impact on an applicant’s ability to work or study in Canada, as well as on their health insurance coverage,” said the association.

Dan, who asked his last name be withheld for fear of repercussion by immigration officials, said his wife received her permanent residence visa under his spousal sponsorship before Christmas and the letter stated she had the choice of going to any port of entry to “land” or make an appointment at a local immigration office.

They decided to “flagpole” on New Year’s Eve, a Sunday, so she would be able to validate her status the same day and could apply for OHIP, a social insurance number and start looking for jobs without further delays.

“The booth officer politely said they don’t process the landings or work permits until Tuesday through Thursday, and sent us inside to see what they’ll say,” recalled Dan, a Canadian citizen who works in health care in Toronto.

“Inside there were three or four uniformed officers and a group of two clients just sitting down. In other words, not busy. But instead of being served, we were refused landing and handed a pamphlet about flagpoling, a term I wasn’t familiar with.”

The border agency allowed his wife to return to Canada as a visitor, as opposed to being a permanent resident, and weeks later the couple managed to get her an appointment to land at a local immigration office in the city.

“Why has CBSA decided to take this position? They were providing a convenient and efficient service, which I want more of from the public service, not less of,” said Dan. “I speculate that CBSA is unhappy doing ‘immigration’s’ work, but if the law says they have to, then don’t they have to?”

via Canada clamps down on ‘flagpoling’ with immigration restrictions at some border crossings | The Star

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Illegal border-crossers could erode confidence in Canada’s immigration system – and in the Trudeau Liberals: @JohnIbbitson

2018/05/08 Leave a comment

Ongoing political management issue (real and perceived):

All three national political parties, and a majority of Canadians, support high levels of immigration, and the multicultural matrix through which these new arrivals integrate into the Canadian fabric. All of this could be at risk.

Last year, more than 20,000 people entered Canada from the United States by avoiding regular crossings, where they would have been turned back. If the first four months of 2018 are any indication, the number this year could reach 60,000, which would threaten to overwhelm existing settlement services in Ontario and Quebec.

These are not conventional refugees. Some are migrants who fear being deported from the United States. Some are arriving in the United States on visas, and then heading straight for Canada. This is wrong.

But the Liberal government is playing down a situation that could soon become a crisis.

Unless Ottawa can re-establish control over the border, the public could lose confidence in the government and, far worse, in the immigration system itself.

In recent days, we learned that the Canada Border Services Agency wants to construct temporary housing units for more than 500 irregular crossers.

The Conservatives call the housing “a refugee camp” and blasted the secretiveness of the operation.

“I’m not sure any Canadian would think that this is an acceptable response,” Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel declared, according to The Canadian Press.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale dismissed the refugee-camp label as “misleading,” because “most irregular crossers do not spend long in custody before being released.” This will not reassure people.

Previous waves of new arrivals from the United States originated in Somalia and Haiti. This year, people appear to be arriving in the United States from Nigeria, and then heading for the Canadian border. There are also fears that Hondurans at risk of being deported from the United States might also seek shelter in Canada.

Does the Conservative proposal − that the entire border be declared a point of entry under the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United Sates − have merit? This would allow officials to apprehend and deport anyone crossing the border, regardless of where they crossed. The Liberals say such a proposal is unworkable and dangerous because migrants would seek riskier crossings to avoid detention. What else could be done? Is it within the law to expedite the claims of border-crossers, reject those claims and return them to the United States, counting on the grapevine to send the message that seeking refuge in Canada is no longer an option?

That sounds cruel, but even crueller is forcing legitimate refugee claimants to languish overseas because the system has been overwhelmed by queue-jumpers.

Cruellest of all would be to close the Canadian border to immigrants and refugees entirely, because the public loses confidence in the ability of government to control the system. Nativist populists have come to power in the United States and Europe for exactly that reason. Canada is not immune to such demagogues.

The goal here is not to keep people from coming to Canada − quite the opposite. Canada’s future depends on bringing in hundreds of thousands of people each year to fill job vacancies, to innovate and invest, to make Canada stronger and wealthier and even more tolerant and diverse.

If we lose that openness, we lose our future. This is what the people crossing into Canada in hopes of gaming the system are putting at risk. Yes, it doesn’t help that the Trump administration appears uninterested in co-operating on border security. But ultimately, this is a Canadian problem and it’s up to the Canadian government to solve it.

It feels as though the Liberal plate is overflowing with difficulties, these days. Despite many months of talks, there is still no renewed North American free-trade agreement. The May 31 deadline for persuading Kinder Morgan not to walk away from the Trans Mountain pipeline project is fast approaching. The refugee-claimant situation at the border is getting worse instead of better. If Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford wins the Ontario election, Canada’s largest province may pull out of the national plan to fight global warming by taxing carbon.

More than anything else, Canadians expect their government to manage the store. If voters become convinced that the Liberals can’t handle the job, they will look for someone who can.

via Illegal border-crossers could erode confidence in Canada’s immigration system – and in the Trudeau Liberals – The Globe and Mail

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The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West – The New York Times

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

Useful history:

A video of the rapper Kanye West discussing slavery is a sad reminder of America’s historical amnesia about the brutal realities of that institution. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years,” he said in the clip, which was widely circulated on Twitter, “that sounds like a choice.”

Mr. West seemed to suggest that enslaved African-Americans were so content that they did not actively resist their bondage, and, as a result, they bear some responsibility for centuries of persecution.

He’s not alone in his thinking. In 2016, the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asserted that slaves were “well fed and had decent lodgings.” Last September, the Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore deemed the antebellum era the last great period in American history. “I think it was great at the time when families were united,” he declared. “Even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.”

Modern scholarship has debunked such whitewashing, accurately depicting slavery as an inhumane institution rooted in greed and the violent subjugation of millions of African-Americans.

Yet countless Americans have not learned these lessons. They cling, instead, to a romanticized interpretation of slavery, one indebted to a book published 100 years ago.

In the spring of 1918, the historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips published his seminal study, “American Negro Slavery,” which framed the institution as a benevolent labor agreement between indulgent masters and happy slaves. No other book, no monument, no movie — save, perhaps, for “Gone With the Wind,” itself beholden to Phillips’s work — has been more influential in shaping how many Americans have viewed slavery.

Born in 1877 into a Georgia family with planter roots, Phillips developed an abiding sympathy for the Old South. He studied history at the University of Georgia and then as a graduate student at Columbia University under the tutelage of William A. Dunning, a scholar with a pro-Southern bent.

After earning his doctorate in 1902, Phillips set out to correct the slanted picture of the Southern past that he believed prevailed at the time. “The history of the United States has been written by Boston and largely been written wrong,” he lamented. “It must be written anew before it reaches its final form of truth, and for that work, the South must do its part.”

Phillips certainly did his. During his 30-year career, he published nine books and close to 60 articles, earning a series of prestigious professorships that culminated in a “very flossy job,” as he put it, at Yale University. This 1930 appointment reflected his stature as the country’s leading historian of slavery and the South, as well as the influence of his most important book, “American Negro Slavery.”

He was a prodigious, albeit selective researcher. Phillips found evidence in plantation records and Southern travelogues that bolstered the book’s benign interpretation of slavery, while downplaying evidence that did not. In his hands, plantations became idyllic sites where white families had modeled the habits of civilized life for their childlike black charges. “The plantations,” Phillips wrote, “were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes represented.”

According to Phillips, slaveholders provided the enslaved with comfortable living quarters and plentiful rations and eschewed physical discipline. They rarely sold slaves, especially if it meant breaking up families. Slave owners’ rule “was benevolent in intent” and “beneficial in effect.”

Phillips’s use of the passive voice — “in March the corn fields were commonly planted” — further distanced the reader from slaves’ coerced labor. Enslaved African-Americans, in turn, displayed gratitude and loyalty to their masters. Phillips concluded that, while slavery may have been economically inefficient, “the relations on both sides were felt to be based on pleasurable responsibility.”

“American Negro Slavery” won widespread acclaim in the North and the South. Reviewers praised Phillips for his thorough research, charming style and lack of bias. In the words of the historian John David Smith, an expert on Phillips, the book served as “the definitive account of the peculiar institution” from World War I into the 1950s.

The book set the tone for the treatment of slavery in classrooms and textbooks across the country. “There was much to be said for slavery as a transition status between barbarism and civilization,” maintained a 1930 best seller, echoing Phillips almost verbatim. “The majority of slaves were … apparently happy.”

From the beginning, however, Phillips had his critics, who insisted on telling a more truthful, unvarnished history of slavery. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a scathing review of “American Negro Slavery,” observing, “It is a defense of American slavery, a defense of an institution which was at best a mistake and at worst a crime.” Drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, sources Phillips rejected, the historian Frederic Bancroft published a 1931 book that exploded Phillips’s misrepresentations of the domestic slave trade.

Phillips’s critics grew more vocal in the 1950s and 1960s, as a new generation of scholars challenged his benign reading of slavery and the racism that stained almost every page of “American Negro Slavery.”

Yet while Phillips’s most egregious claims fell out of favor, the legacy of “American Negro Slavery” has proved tenacious.

According to a new Southern Poverty Law Center report on how slavery is taught in public schools, current pedagogy continues to focus on slavery from the perspective of whites, not the enslaved, while failing to connect the institution to the white supremacist beliefs that supported it. Textbooks often ignore slaveholders’ desire to make money and too easily slip into grammatical constructions — Africans “were brought” to America — that absolve enslavers of their actions.

Last year, a Charlotte, N.C., teacher asked her middle-school students to list “four reasons why Africans made good slaves.” An eighth-grade teacher in San Antonio recently sent students home with a work sheet titled “The Life of Slaves: A Balanced View.” It prompted students to list the “positive” aspects of slavery along with the “negative.”

We must confront mischaracterizations of the nature of slavery, whether nurtured in the classroom or broadcast on Twitter. After all, historical accuracy on this topic is not just about getting the past right; it is also about understanding the challenges of the present.

The persistence of racial inequality in America — from police brutality and school segregation to mass incarceration and wealth disparities — reflects, to some degree, the persistence of the Phillipsian take on slavery. If the institution were little more than a finishing school for African-Americans, then why acknowledge or address its pernicious legacies today?

via Opinion | The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West – The New York Times

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You can’t drink an apology

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

A somewhat cynical column by Scott Gilmore on apologies. While I agree that an apology by itself may not address (or redress) historic injustices, their symbolic value should not be discounted:

Canadian parliamentarians are so chronically petty and partisan they typically cannot agree on the colour of the sky. Yet, all but 10 were able to agree on one seemingly important issue yesterday. They voted in favor of an apology for the now infamous residential school system.

Our political leaders have already made two previous apologies for the residential schools. A decade ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood in the House of Commons to express our collective regret and then nine years later his successor Justin Trudeau repeated the apology, this time while in Newfoundland. For this third time they’ve opted to kick it upstairs to a higher authority, the Pope.

Our MPs were unified in believing that since we’ve already done our bit and apologized, and given that the corrosive legacy of the residential schools continues to persist, obviously it’s now someone else’s turn to sort this thing out. Amen.

It has been theorized that there are 12 different types of Canadian “sorries,” including the “sympathetic,” the “ostentatious,” and even the “libidinous.” There is, in fact, a thirteenth type: the “political.”

Abroad, we have the reputation for being chronic apologizers. Compared to our politicians, though, the average Canadian looks callously unrepentant. An incomplete list of their official apologies includes Acadians for being deported in the 1700s, Japanese-Canadians for interment during World War Two, Chinese-Canadians for imposing a head tax, Sikh-Canadians for turning away migrants, and gay and lesbian Canadians for discrimination.

All these official “sorries” have two things in common, which explains why our politicians are so eagerly remorseful. First, the official apology is the least expensive thing they can do. In many of these cases the legacy of the original sin is so vast and pervasive there would not be enough money in the federal treasury to fully repair the damages done to the victims or their descendants. By comparison, apologies are cheap and in full supply. Here, have another.

Second, these statements of regret are for sins committed almost entirely by white, male, straight Canadians. We, as a group, have done very well over the last few centuries. And while our position of power and wealth is no longer unassailable, we’re still on top and would like to stay there. When public values shift, and we are forced to acknowledge that our previous behavior was utterly criminal, we really don’t want to do anything too dramatic.

In light of this, and the low cost, it is obvious why our political leaders like to apologize so often. But it’s well past time we recognized these rituals for what they are: distractions. The politicians making the apology (or telling the Pope he should), are probably genuinely remorseful for the sins of the past. But sincerity will not right past wrongs. Even worse, it just reduces the pressure to prevent future ones.

Consider the fact that just hours after the House voted on the Pope’s apology, the Prime Minister was across the river in Gatineau speaking at the Assembly of First Nations. There he pledged (again) to fix the water problems plaguing Canadian reserves for decades. There are currently 76 Indigenous communities without clean drinking water. Since coming to office, the Liberal government has managed to remove 61 communities off that list, but another 32 were added.

If the people of Rosedale or Westmount woke up this morning to discover they had to boil their tap water, the problem would be fixed by the end of the day.

Given this indisputable truth, standing in front of a room of Indigenous leaders to promise yet again that we are eventually going to fix this should be so unbearably humiliating that it would render Trudeau speechless from shame. Instead, he walked up to the podium with a smile. He had just voted for another apology (via the Pope). That’s something. It’s a step in the right direction. Sure, you can’t drink an apology, but it’s progress. Right?

Source: You can’t drink an apology

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ICYMI: After a massive refugee influx, Germany is confronting an imported anti-Semitism

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

Good balanced overview:

Bullied students. Crude rap lyrics. An ugly confrontation on an upmarket city street.

In another country – one less attuned to the horrors wrought by anti-Semitism – evidence that the scourge is once again growing might have been ignored.

But this is Germany, a nation that nearly annihilated an entire continent’s Jewish population. And after a series of high-profile incidents, the country isn’t waiting to sound the alarm on a pattern of rising hatred toward Jews.

In recent days, demonstrators have filled the streets, a first-ever national coordinator to combat anti-Semitism has taken up his post, and officials from Chancellor Angela Merkel on down have spoken out.

Germany is also doing something difficult for a country that sees itself as the open and tolerant antidote to the prejudice-driven murder machine it once was: acknowledging that the problem’s resurgence has been fueled not only by the far right, whose views have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream, but also in significant part by Muslims, including refugees.

“The nature of anti-Semitism in Germany is definitely changing,” said Sergey Lagodinsky, a member of the assembly of the Jewish community in Berlin. “We’re having a lot more violent, everyday confrontations that come through incidents with immigrants.”

That’s not an easy admission in Germany, where Merkel led the push three years ago to open the country to more than a million asylum seekers – many of them Muslims fleeing conflict. At the time, the move was widely seen, at least in part, as a grand gesture of atonement for the worst crimes of German history.

Since then, Merkel has rallied the nation around the slogan “We can do it,” brushing away suggestions that Germany will suffer for its generosity.

But she’s also been forced to concede the link between the new arrivals and creeping anti-Semitism. This month, she told an Israeli broadcaster that Germany was confronting “a new phenomenon” as refugees “bring another form of anti-Semitism into the country.”

That’s something critics have warned of for years, given that many of those who arrived in Germany came from nations where anti-Semitism is widespread, including Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But officials, analysts and Jewish and Muslim leaders all say Germany has been slow to recognize the risks.

“The cultural dimension that is linked with the influx was always underestimated,” said Felix Klein, who started work this month as the federal government’s point person for combating anti-Semitism. “Now we have to deal with it.”

The first step, Klein said, is to understand the scale. But the data is surprisingly limited, and what is available has been called into question.

Police statistics, for instance, show that about 90 percent of the anti-Semitic cases nationwide are believed to have been carried out by followers of the far right – traditionally the bastion of prejudice toward Jews in Germany.

But government officials and Jewish leaders doubt that figure, citing a default designation of “far right” when the perpetrator isn’t known. The government also has no reliable means of tracking anti-Semitism that falls below the level of the criminal – something Klein said he’s determined to change.

A survey of victims of anti-Semitism commissioned last year by the German Parliament concluded that Muslims were most often identified as the perpetrators. A separate study found comparatively high levels of anti-Semitic thinking among refugees with a Middle Eastern or North African background.

The number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in Germany has remained fairly steady over the past decade, at around 1,500 every year, although researchers think the actual numbers are much higher, said Uffa Jensen, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. One recent survey found that 70 percent of Jews said they would not report an anti-Semitic incident because they feared the consequences.

Even if the overall numbers are relatively stable, the behavior behind the data has changed, said Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.

“The incidents are more aggressive, more pronounced, and directly affect Jewish people with insults or attacks,” Schuster said.

German schoolchildren have reported the word “Jew” being thrown around as a taunt on the playground. Some have said they have been threatened with death.

“There are incidents that go so far that kids have to leave their schools because it’s no longer possible to stay. I can’t remember that happening in the past,” Schuster said.

Beyond the bullying, two high-profile instances of anti-Semitism have spawned outrage in recent weeks.

A German rap duo won the top honor at the country’s most prestigious music awards this month for an album that included lyrics boasting of bodies “more defined than those of Auschwitz inmates” and threatening to “make another Holocaust.” Amid a backlash, the awards program was terminated.

Meanwhile, cellphone video footage emerged of an assailant shouting anti-Semitic slurs and whipping a belt against a man wearing a kippa, or Jewish prayer cap. Police arrested a 19-year-old Syrian refugee in connection with the assault, which took place in the trendy Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg.

“When I watched the video, I looked into his eyes. I don’t understand how a young man can be so filled with hate,” said Sigmount Königsberg, anti-Semitism commissioner for the Jewish community of Berlin.

Königsberg deals with hundreds of incidents each year and said a substantial majority of the cases involve an alleged Muslim perpetrator.

Far-right assailants are less common, he said. But that makes sense, if only for geographic reasons: Germany’s Muslim and Jewish communities are both concentrated in big cities, such as Berlin. Far-right supporters are more likely to live in the countryside.

The German far right has been emboldened lately, winning seats in Parliament last fall – the first time that’s happened since the 1950s. Authorities say elements of the far right have grown more vocal in their anti-Semitism. But they have been even louder in denouncing Muslims, capitalizing on resentment toward Merkel’s decision to let in the refugees.

Ironically, far-right politicians have used concerns about anti-Semitism to make their case against the refugees – a logic that many Jewish leaders reject.

“The world doesn’t revolve around Jews. If people are dying in Syria, you can’t let them die because you may face more anti-Semitism in a couple years,” said Lagodinsky, the member of the Berlin Jewish assembly.

Rather than bar refugees, Lagodinsky said, the solution starts with being more honest in talking about the problem – something he said mainstream German society is often afraid to do for fear of targeting a Muslim minority population that already feels under siege.

Aiman Mazyek, for one, welcomes the conversation. The president of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany emphasized that it’s only a small minority of Muslims who are taking part in anti-Semitic acts. But he said there is no doubt that some newcomers – and some who have been here far longer – have failed to integrate into a society that has put “Never Again” at its core.

“If people come here and want to integrate, they need to understand the DNA of the country. And part of that DNA is the legacy of the Holocaust,” he said.

Mazyek said it will take effort to educate people who may have grown up in countries where anti-Semitic rhetoric is rampant and others who may have been raised in Germany but who nonetheless feel drawn into “the unresolved conflicts of the Middle East.”

But he said there is also reason for optimism.

“Many of them came from countries where there was dictatorship, where they weren’t free. There’s the potential there for much more empathy when they visit a concentration camp,” he said.

Josh Spinner, an American-born, Berlin-based rabbi, said Germany also needs to keep its problems with anti-Semitism in perspective.

“There’s nowhere in Europe where there isn’t a sense of unease” among Jews, said Spinner, who is also chief executive of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, an education-focused philanthropic group.

German unease was reflected vividly this past week in a Berlin protest that drew about 2,000 people, who came wearing prayer caps. They listened as speakers warned of a rising threat and insisted that the country would not tolerate a return to its anti-Semitic past.

But Spinner said Germany still has it better than most places on the continent – in part because its past has taught it to be vigilant and aggressive in responding to signs of hatred.

Spinner said that he has walked Berlin’s streets wearing a kippa for years without any serious problems and that he will continue to do so. Warnings that Germany would become inhospitable for Jews after taking in so many refugees have, for the most part, not come to pass.

“Relative to the perceived threat, not much has happened,” Spinner said. “And that’s a relief.”

Source: After a massive refugee influx, Germany is confronting an imported anti-Semitism

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Exclusive: Major Neo-Nazi figure recruiting in Montreal

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

Long read on a Canadian connection:

One of North America’s most influential neo-Nazis lives in Montreal and is organizing a white supremacist network on the island.

“Zeiger” is the pseudonym for the second-most prolific writer on the Daily Stormer, an extreme right-wing news website that attracts upwards of 80,000 unique visitors a month.

The site traffics in conspiracy theories, refers to African-Americans as “nogs,” to gay men as “f***ots” and devotes coverage to what it calls the “Race War” and the “Jewish Problem.” Along with the Daily Stormer’s other authors, Zeiger has helped spread this ideology to a new generation of young white men across North America.

Since emerging as a key figure in the movement four years ago, Zeiger’s identity has been a closely guarded secret. But an investigation by the Montreal Gazette has linked Zeiger to a local IT consultant in his early 30s.

Gabriel Sohier Chaput lives in an apartment in Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie. That same apartment was listed by Zeiger as his home and as a rendezvous point for a local neo-Nazi group, according to documents obtained by the Montreal Gazette.

The group also met at downtown bars, apartments and a hotel between August 2016 and January 2018. At various points, members self-identified as alt-right, alt-reich, Nazis, fascists and white supremacists.

They acted on the instructions of a man referring to himself as Zeiger from the Daily Stormer. Zeiger co-ordinated the time and place of most meetings.

“Zeiger is probably second to only Andrew Anglin, the Daily Stormer’s founder and chief propagandist,” said Keegan Hankis, the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s senior analyst. “[Zeiger] has been very influential in the strategies behind it.”

The SPLC monitors the online presence of hate groups throughout North America.

Zeiger used his infamy as a recruiting tool, sharing a manifesto he authored as well as hyperlinks to his Daily Stormer articles and podcast appearances with the local group.

They first met at an Irish pub on Prince Arthur St. in August 2016. Shortly afterward, he introduced them to another Montreal-based fascist group.

Over a one-and-a-half-year period, a core of between 10 and 15 members gathered in bars and apartments around the city. Only men were allowed to attend their official meetings, but they opened up some events to women and “normies” — a term they use to describe people outside the movement.

The information that links Zeiger to Sohier Chaput comes from anti-fascist activists who monitor neo-Nazi and other far-right groups online.

The anti-fascists cross-referenced Zeiger’s profiles on white supremacist websites like Iron March, the Right Stuff and the Daily Stormer with information Zeiger provided to a closed Montreal-based chat room.

A home address Zeiger shared with the chat group matches the corporate listing for GSC Gestion, a consulting firm whose owner and sole employee is Sohier Chaput.

Ironically, two key pieces of information linking both men came from Zeiger himself, who, during a March 11 appearance on a white supremacist podcast, revealed that he attended high school in Outremont. Although Zeiger did not name the school, it narrowed the activists’ search down.

They also believed his real first name was Gabriel after digging into Zeiger’s profile on the neo-Nazi website Iron March. The profile was connected to a Skype account registered under the name “gabriel_zeiger.”

The anti-fascists then found and combed through a small library of yearbooks from Outremont high schools. They were searching for someone whose first name, age and appearance matched Zeiger’s.

They found a 2002 yearbook from Paul-Gérin-Lajoie-d’Outremont, which Sohier Chaput attended in Grade 10. They saw a resemblance between the 2002 photo of Sohier Chaput and Zeiger’s online profiles.

Compared to Zeiger’s enormous digital footprint, there are only traces of Sohier Chaput online.

He was an IT manager at a UPS store before branching out as an independent contractor in 2016, according to his profile on a job networking site.

A Google search for his name yields a Soundcloud account and an entry noting his second-place finish in the 2012 St. Lawrence Toastmasters public-speaking competition.

He does not appear to have public profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media.

Instead, the anti-fascists claim, he exists under a Nazi alter ego: Zeiger.

Neither Sohier Chaput nor Zeiger responded to the Montreal Gazette’s request for comment.

Sohier Chaput’s brother hung up the phone twice when called by the Montreal Gazette. His father did not respond to email and telephone requests to pass along contact information to Sohier Chaput.

The Montreal Gazette also sent a letter to Sohier Chaput’s apartment by courier and rang his doorbell twice to no avail. His landlord agreed to pass along a message but as of Wednesday, he has not replied.

On white nationalist forums, Zeiger and other Montreal users brag about beating anti-fascist protesters and pasting Nazi stickers on the métro and co-ordinate their attendance at far-right rallies.

They also refer to a 2016 meeting with a representative from Students for Western Civilization, which led a campaign in 2015 for the creation of white student unions on Toronto university campuses.

One of the Montreal group members claims to have hosted a lecture by Ricardo Duschene, a University of New Brunswick professor who believes mass immigration is causing the ethnocide of European Canadians, in the summer of 2017.

Duschene denies any association with the group.

“I spoke at a meeting in Montreal last summer but it was for another group that does not identify as ‘alt right,’ ” he wrote in an email to the Montreal Gazette. “I don’t identify myself as ‘alt right’, and less so would I ever speak at a meeting organized by Daily Stormer.

“I am aware that someone by the name ‘Charles Zeiger’ posted one of my talks, but this was done without my knowledge, and I have no idea who he is.”

Zeiger’s reach extends beyond the North American movement. When the British government disbanded the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action, the group’s final communiqué
personally thanked Zeiger and Andrew Anglin for their work in spreading propaganda.

Anglin and Zeiger have repeatedly claimed their goal is to use internet culture as a way of making extremist ideas more palatable to a mainstream audience.

“(Young men) can go onto these forums and … they’ll be immersed in fascist culture, Nazi jokes, meme culture and (it) gradually breaks down their inhibitions toward the most despicable forms of violence,” says Alexander Reid Ross, a lecturer at Portland State University. “Forum culture in general has helped to draw people into this fever swamp of fascist ideas.”

Reid Ross is the author of Against the Fascist Creep, a sweeping history of post-Second World War fascist ideology.

Before founding the Montreal group, Zeiger claimed responsibility for the resurgence of Siege, a 1980s manifesto that calls for individual acts of terrorism as a means to create a white ethno-state. Posting on the forum the Right Stuff, Zeiger wrote that he digitized the book to help it reach a wider audience.

Siege’s resurgence within white supremacist circles is mostly “self-marginalizing,” Reid Ross said, adding that the book is “a thing 14-year-old boys read when they’re angry at their moms.”

“However, for those few people who do pick it up … it is definitely extremely dangerous. It points to a movement of leaderless resistance that’s been growing since Charlottesville.”

Zeiger attended the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last summer with a small group of Quebecers. At the end of the march, a right-wing extremist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

The rally in Charlottesville marked a turning point for the neo-Nazi movement in the United States. Before Heyer’s death, white supremacist ideology had been creeping its way into mainstream politics.

But the violence from that day triggered a backlash that forced the movement back underground, according to Reid Ross.

“It showed that you can’t get a (large) group of Nazis together in one place without there being some kind of murder, attempted murder, assault or things like that.”

After Charlottesville, the Daily Stormer published an article titled “Heather Heyer: A Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident Was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut.” They were subsequently removed from web hosting by GoDaddy, Google and a series of international domains.

The site was hosted on the dark web for a brief period, but has re-emerged on the open internet through Eranet International Limited, a web hosting service based in China.

Hankis says there’s a link between the ideology espoused on sites like the Daily Stormer and acts of mass violence in the United States.

After murdering nine people at a predominantly African-American church in South Carolina, Dylann Roof released a manifesto outlining his racist views. Verbatim sections of the manifesto appeared in the Daily Stormer’s message boards in the months leading up to the 2015 massacre.

James Harris Jackson, who was charged with murdering a black man in New York City with a sword last year, told reporters he was an avid reader of the Daily Stormer.

Andrew Anglin and Zeiger did not respond to the Montreal Gazette’s email request for comment.

However a disclaimer on the website says it opposes violence and seeks “revolution through the education of the masses.” Further, it adds, “anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned.”

One expert cautions that while Quebec’s extremist movement is still relatively small, it is attracting a growing number of angry, disillusioned young men.

Maxime Fiset is a reformed neo-Nazi who now does outreach work for the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence. He estimates that active support for “alt-right” groups in Quebec numbers in the hundreds or thousands.

While the rise of far-right groups like La Meute and Storm Alliance have made waves in local media, Fiset says Zeiger’s movement targets a much different demographic.

“La Meute is an older crowd, between 40 and 65 years old,” he said. “With the alt-right, it’s more like between 15 and 35. They’re not as structured and organized but they’re becoming more and more visible.”

Fiset’s job is to try to understand how young men are indoctrinated with hateful ideology in hopes that they can be rehabilitated.

He said that the process of radicalization often begins with a feeling of injustice and sense of isolation. This leads to the person questioning why they are unhappy, and then either coming to terms with their situation, or seeking retribution for their distress.

“The person usually begins a path of questioning, which is legitimate, because injustices are corrected by some of those who challenge them at first,” Fiset said. “But it may become something much more dark when the person eventually arrives to more violent answers. That could be as common as hate speech or as dire as terrorism.”

For Zeiger, the “path of questioning” began early. In a white supremacist podcast, he describes his process of radicalization.

“I think I was about 14 when I was reading about the Holocaust and realized that it was a hoax,” he said. Later, he was exposed to a blog post that was “anti-semitic from a liberal perspective,” in that it described Jewish people as racist.

“This resonated with me, because my sister she had dated a Jew for a while, but his family forbade him from marrying her.”

From there, Zeiger fell deeper into the online rabbit hole of anti-Semitic propaganda, binge-consuming hundreds of hours of white nationalist radio shows and YouTube videos.

“I saw a video … and I wasn’t that right-wing at that point so I thought ‘Oh my God, this is so extreme, this is racist.’ But I thought it was interesting,” he said, on a December 2016 podcast. “So after that I listened to (hours of these) radio shows, one after the other.

“It took like a few weeks but I listened to all like 300 of them. After that I was like, ‘Gas the k****, race war now.’ ”

Fiset says he doesn’t believe that radicalized youth are irredeemable. He is living proof that a person can be drawn away from the extremist fringe.

But he worries that, left unchecked, the spaces that Zeiger inhabits can move beyond internet hate speech and into real-world violence.

“We need to address this because they’re living in very dark corners of the web, without any boundaries, without any limits, without any structure or counter narrative,” Fiset said. “These guys are just alone, evolving together, in what becomes more and more violent ideologies, and it’s not getting any better. We’re just starting to realize that we have a ticking time bomb on our hands.”

via Exclusive: Major Neo-Nazi figure recruiting in Montreal | Montreal Gazette

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ICYMI: Australia: Chair of Section 44 inquiry says dual-citizenship rules should change

2018/05/05 Leave a comment

Given the risks of holding a referendum on this issue, unlikely that this requirement will be changed or narrowed:

The Liberal chair of a cross-party committee on electoral reform has revealed her personal view that Section 44 of the Constitution, which forbids dual citizens being elected to parliament, should be changed in a referendum.

Liberal senator Linda Reynolds chairs the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, which launched an inquiry into Section 44 last year under instructions from the prime minister.

The 10-member committee’s final report was expected last month and is now overdue.

But Senator Reynolds has now revealed her own views in comments to Fairfax Media.

“While I will not pre-empt the findings of the committee, it is my personal belief that the cleanest way to resolve this problem is to remove sections of 44,” she said.

“Section 44 has unintentionally created two classes of Australian citizenship.

“The only way to do that would be through a referendum. Ultimately the issue of dual citizenship for MPs must be one for Australians to decide, not a parliamentary committee.”

Section 44 of the Constitution contains a number of smaller sections that disqualify certain people from being elected, including those who are bankrupt or who hold an “office of profit under the Crown”.

But the best-known is Section 44(i), the dual-citizenship rule, which sensationally ended the political careers of eight senators in the last 12 months.

It also triggered by-elections that threatened the Turnbull Government’s one-seat majority in the House of Representatives, after the High Court ruled former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce and Liberal MP John Alexander were invalidly elected. Both men won their seats back.

Senator Reynolds, herself a veteran, reportedly told Fairfax Media it was inconsistent that dual citizens could serve in the Army but not sit in the parliament.

“Not only is this out of step with other areas of contemporary Australian life, it’s also out of step with most western democracies which allow dual citizens to serve in Parliament, including the UK, US and Canada.”

In August last year, a Guardian Essential poll found only 41 percent of Australians supported allowing dual citizens to sit, compared with 40 percent saying “no” and 18 percent saying they did not know.

Other Coalition MPs like Craig Laundy have publically suggested a referendum.

But prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has previously said a referendum would likely fail.

“I think it’s questionable whether Australians would welcome dual citizens sitting in their Parliament,” Mr Turnbull said last year.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten said the dual-citizenship rule should not have been included in the Constitution “in the first place”, speaking with reporters in Sydney.

But he said it was a more urgent priority to hold a referendum on replacing the British monarch as Australia’s head of state or on Indigenous recognition in the Constitution.

via Chair of Section 44 inquiry says dual-citizenship rules should change

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The 14 Most Common Arguments against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong | @CatoInstitute

2018/05/04 Leave a comment

Good long read and counter-arguments from a quasi-Libertarian perspective by Alex Nowrasteh (have only clipped the headings but most points are buttressed by reasonably solid evidence):

Arguments against immigration come across my desk every day but I rarely encounter a unique one.  In 2016, I wrote a blog responding to the most common arguments with links to different research.  Since then, academics and policy analysts have produced new research that should be included.  These are the main arguments against immigration, my quick responses to them, and links to some of the most relevant evidence:

1. “Immigrants will take American jobs, lower our wages, and especially hurt the poor.”

2. “Immigrants abuse the welfare state.”

3. “Immigrants increase the budget deficit and government debt.”

4. “Immigrants increase economic inequality.”

5. “Today’s immigrants don’t assimilate like immigrants from previous waves did.”

6. “Immigrants are a major source of crime.”

7. “Immigrants pose a unique risk today because of terrorism.”

8. “It’s easy to immigrate to America and we’re the most open country in the world.”

9. “Amnesty or a failure to enforce our immigration laws will destroy the Rule of Law in the United States.”

10. “National sovereignty.”

11. “Immigrants won’t vote for the Republican Party—look at what happened to California.”

12. “Immigrants bring with them their bad cultures, ideas, or other factors that will undermine and destroy our economic and political institutions.  The resultant weakening in economic growth means that immigrants will destroy more wealth than they will create over the long run.”

13. “The brain drain of smart immigrants to the United State impoverished other countries.”

14. “Immigrants will increase crowding, harm the environment, and [insert misanthropic statement here].”

via The 14 Most Common Arguments against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong | Cato @ Liberty

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UK: Sajid Javid has a unique opportunity to change the toxic debate over immigration. But he might not be allowed to

2018/05/04 1 Comment

Interesting analysis of Gresham’s law as applied to immigration debates in the UK and the challenges (and opportunity) facing the new Home Secretary:

Amber Rudd’s departure has not eased the pressure on the government over the Windrush scandal. The questions keep on coming. This afternoon Labour is urging the Commons to ask ministers to publish all the government documents relating to the affair since 2010, which could shed new light on Theresa May’s involvement as home secretary.

Sajid Javid, Rudd’s successor, must answer claims that senior officials were paid bonuses for hitting targets for deporting illegal immigrants and that foreign students were wrongly deported over language tests. There are also suggestions May blocked moves to lift a cap on visas for foreign doctors that the NHS needed.

Javid must design a new system for EU migration post-Brexit which does not repeat the Windrush mistakes. That’s before he turns his attention to the rise in violent crime, the terrorist threat and other nasties lurking in the woodwork that we don’t know about.

Javid made an encouraging start by ditching May’s rhetoric about a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, which indirectly caused the Windrush scandal. But his move has worried right-wing Conservative MPs, who fear he is going soft on “illegals”. In fact, Javid has not changed the policy, merely its label. Some Tories, including May, are convinced the public are on their side on “illegals” and therefore bring the conversation back to this topic at every opportunity.

Of course, people are against illegal activity. The UK does have a problem regarding illegal immigration. But talking about that to the exclusion of everything else risks repeating the mistakes of both Tory and Labour politicians for the past 20 years. They have assumed the worst on public opinion and pandered to it. Labour talked tough to prevent the Tories exploiting immigration. The Tories ramped up the rhetoric to combat Ukip’s threat. The party which trumpets providing the first BAME home secretary ran a disgraceful campaign to stop Sadiq Khan becoming London Mayor, only to find the capital’s voters much more tolerant.

I recall being told by a Tony Blair aide that a forthcoming Queen’s speech would include an immigration bill. But the Home Office knew nothing about it – an example of the “do something” culture. Blair got his bill.

The Tories set their arbitrary target to reduce annual net migration below 100,000, which depends as much on the number of people leaving as coming in. Immigration figures were published every three months, showing the target was never going to be hit, which fuelled public scepticism about politicians. So did Labour’s woeful underestimation of the number who would come to Britain after Eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004.

The ever-tougher rhetoric created a vicious circle, as politicians shouted louder to cover their failure to meet public expectations, which they created but could never deliver on. It was rare to talk up the benefits of immigration. As Sir Oliver Letwin, David Cameron’s policy chief, admitted on Monday: “All of us over the past 20, 30 years in British politics have underplayed the advantages to our country of migration, so the argument has become unbalanced.”

If this story sounds familiar, it’s because the same happened on Europe. After 30 years of criticising the EU, promising to slay the dragon of an imaginary superstate and never talking about the benefits of membership, it was hardly surprising the public voted to leave.

On immigration, public opinion is more nuanced than many politicians believe. Some 120 group discussions in 60 places held by the British Future think tank found that most people are “balancers” who recognise the benefits of migration but worry about the impact locally.

In an open letter to Javid, Sunder Katwala, the think tank’s director, said its “national conversation” had found much scope for consensus. He added: “A balanced policy can square this circle: ensuring that Britain controls the large-scale movement of lower-skilled workers that fuelled the Brexit vote while remaining open to the skills and energy that generations of new arrivals have contributed to our economy and society.”

British Future found that two thirds of people would support an annual cap on low-skilled workers; it enjoys majority support among Labour and Tory supporters and Remainers and Leavers. Nick Boles, a former Tory minister, has also proposed replacing the current target with an annual cap reflecting the economy’s needs. Javid might be sympathetic, but feels hemmed in by last year’s Tory manifesto “objective” to reduce net migration to “the tens of thousands”.

A similar conclusion was reached by the Commons Home Affairs Committee, which said in January: “Treating different kinds of migration differently would reflect most people’s views of immigration, and allow for much greater consensus to be built into the debate, as well as for greater transparency over immigration policy in general.”

Javid has a lot of speed reading to do. But he should read the British Future and select committee reports on the scope for consensus. He has a unique opportunity to break the vicious circle, and end our polarising and toxic debate on immigration. The question is: will May let him?

Source: Sajid Javid has a unique opportunity to change the toxic debate over immigration. But he might not be allowed to

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‘Canada the Good’ myth exposed: Migrant workers resist debt-bondage

2018/05/04 Leave a comment

This film premiered (I think) at the 2015 Mexico Metropolis conference. Worth watching for a different take:

Here in Canada, some like to think of the country as “tolerant of diversity,” a champion of human rights and a land of opportunity for those willing to work hard and play by the rules, which are presumed equal and fair. This is the myth of Canada the Good, one that still prevails despite repeated truths to the contrary.

The reality of Canada’s unfair labour system enters the world stage with the international broadcast of Migrant Dreams on Al Jazeera’s Witness which will, throughout the month of May, stream the documentary for free.

Canada maintains its pristine international reputation partly by silencing the people who live the lie. Migrant Dreams asks questions about what Canadian values really look like — by highlighting the voices of those who have long been ignored, marginalized or erased.

At the centre of the documentary are migrant workers in farms across Canada. The film opens a conversation about the relationship between labour, gender, sexuality, race, class and settlement — otherwise known as immigration to Canada.

I use the word settlement to draw our attention to the colonial history and ongoing colonial reality of the Canadian state. This is Indigenous land, much of it remains unceded and stolen. Immigration has become the coded word for settlement — a tactic to erase settler tracks in colonial structures.

via ‘Canada the Good’ myth exposed: Migrant workers resist debt-bondage

Filed under Immigration, TFWP Tagged with ,

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