US seeks to reduce waivers for immigration fees

2018/10/06 Leave a comment

Consistent with other restrictive measures (Canada does not offer a waiver to lower income immigrants despite the 5 fold increase in citizenship fees in 2014-15):

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is proposing changing the eligibility for fee waivers for lower-income immigrants on the path to legal permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.Immigration advocates say the move is like building an “invisible wall.”

USCIS announced the change Friday in the Federal Register. Receiving means-tested public benefits from the states would no longer result in automatic USCIS fee waivers, the proposal states. Instead, fee waivers would only be tied to two criteria: the federal poverty threshold or particular financial hardships.

The change is necessary, USCIS said, because “eligibility for these benefits can vary from state to state, depending on the state’s income level guidelines,” meaning that “individuals who would not otherwise qualify under the poverty-guideline threshold and financial hardship criteria have been granted fee waivers.”

In 2017, USCIS approved 285,009 fee waiver applications, totaling $173 million.

The new proposal restricts waivers only to applicants who are at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty threshold or financial hardship.

“It’s a significant narrowing of those who would be eligible for the fee waiver. Our estimates indicate that this would reduce the total population of those eligible for a fee waiver by two-thirds,” said Jill Marie Bussey, advocacy director for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “It’s an extremely troubling proposal for our network.”

CLINIC’s 330 affiliates provide pro bono immigration services to thousands of low-income immigrants across the United States. Bussey said 95 percent of CLINIC’s affiliates assist with fee waiver applications.

In California, where 20 percent of the population is foreign born, the federal poverty threshold to claim state benefits is 200 percent.

For 2018, a four-person family in California is eligible for means-tested state benefits with a household income at or below $50,200. Thus, an immigrant household at that income level and receiving state means-tested benefits are currently eligible for a USCIS fee waiver.

But with the proposed change, that same four-person Californian household would only be eligible for the USCIS fee waiver if household income was at or below $37,650.

USCIS is like the U.S. Postal Service in that most of its funding comes from fees paid for its services, rather than from U.S. taxpayers.

USCIS fees for immigrants to use its services can run into the thousands. The application for a “green card”, formally known as the “application to register permanent residence,” costs $1,140. The application for naturalization to become a U.S. citizen costs $640.

The waiver proposal is an attempt to reverse a change to immigration policy under President Barack Obama. In 2011, USCIS standardized a process of using means-tested benefits as a way to prove eligibility for its fee waivers.

“When this agency waives fees, it’s hurtful to the quality of the agency and it pushes fees off from one population to another. If you can’t get fees from group A, then you have to run up the fees for groups B, C, and D. So there is a reason to be careful with waivers,” said David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank advocating for low immigration.

“The change works against and secures some fee money from the near poor while leaving the poor untouched. So this is not a program that rolls back benefits for the really poor people, it rolls back benefits for some of the working poor and the income level above that,” North said.

CLINIC’s Bussey said the proposal is like an “invisible wall,” “a back-door way of limiting family immigration and reunification.” She fears it will suppress naturalization rates

“And that hurts us all. Studies really show that low-income immigrants are able to improve their financial status through naturalization. They have access to better jobs, educational opportunities and resources,” she said. “So limiting access to naturalization through limiting this fee waiver creates a poverty loop.”

North said the fees make sense because U.S. legal status brings “admission to the labor market, for instance, where you can make as much money as you want or can.”

The proposed change is open for comment until Nov. 27. Public comments have to be taken into consideration when finalizing a federal government rule change but may not necessarily be incorporated into its outcome.

Source: US seeks to reduce waivers for immigration fees

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Over 100 Million Immigrants Have Come to America Since the Founding

2018/10/06 Leave a comment

Nice charts and analysis. While I am far from being a libertarian, Cato Institute analysts do some really good work in this area:

America is a nation of immigrants, and throughout its history, it has received nearly 100 million immigrants. I almost wrote that America “welcomed” them, but the fact is that very few of those 100 million were broadly popular with the public when they arrived. They came nonetheless. They thrived, and those immigrants—at least those who stuck it out in the face of harassment and discrimination—and their descendants built the country that we have today.

The term “immigrants” refers to foreigners who come to the United States with the intention to settle permanently. They are distinct from “nonimmigrants” who make temporary visits to the country, such as tourists, students, and guest workers. Figure 1 provides the breakdown of immigrants by the last legal status that the immigrant held. An illegal immigrant who receives legal permanent residency is listed as a legal immigrant, even though he may have entered illegally or lived illegally in the United States at some point. It includes all immigrants since the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, but does not include slaves imported involuntarily to the United States (the legal slave trade ended in 1808).

Figure 2 breaks down the number of new legal permanent residents admitted annually from 1783 to 2018. The bars show the absolute figures and the line the number as a share of the U.S. population. The government didn’t collect annual statistics prior to 1820, but a general consensus appears to have arrived at about 250,000 immigrants from 1783 to 1819. I estimated the annual figures for the period by assuming a modest jump after the French Revolution in 1789, a significant jump in 1793-94 following the Haitian Revolution, a significant decline during the Napoleonic Wars, and an almost  total elimination during the War of 1812. These assumptions produced period averages similar to those estimated in American Immigration by Maldwyn Allen Jones and which accord with other accounts of the period.

The average number of new legal immigrants per year from 1783 to 2017 was 370,169, and the average immigration rate was 0.4 percent of the population—that’d be the equivalent of 1.3 million people in 2018. For context, the United States is on pace to admit about 1 million new immigrants in 2018 or 0.32 percent of its population.

The estimate for the number of illegal immigrants is much more tentative for obvious reasons. About 11.3 million immigrants without legal status show up in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey in 2016. Broadly reliable estimates of the illegal population exist back to 1980. While relatively few people immigrated illegally prior to the 1980s, I estimated amounts using the available evidence. Based on estimates of the mortality and emigration rates of illegal immigrants in recent years, we can conclude that about 1.4 million immigrants died without status and 6.4 million illegal immigrants voluntarily emigrated. In addition to these, about 2.4 million were deported. It would be reasonable to increase these figures by 10 to 20 percent, but the overall picture of U.S. immigration in Figure 1 would hold.

America’s tradition of receiving people from around the world is admirable, but as Figure 2 shows, the rate of legal immigration right now is still far lower than its historic highs in the 19th and early 20th century. America can not only easily sustain a much higher rate of legal immigration than what it permits at the moment—it would benefit greatly from a much higher rate.

Source: Over 100 Million Immigrants Have Come to America Since the Founding

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UK: Shaun Bailey’s views on multiculturalism are toxic to Londoners and his response is worse

2018/10/06 Leave a comment

Sigh …

Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty, is under fire after the Guardian obtained an old Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet in which Bailey said that allowing Hindu and Muslim families time off to celebrate their religious festivals would rob Britain of its community and turn the country into a “crime-ridden cesspool”.

The policy is toxic. No, having days off to accommodate religious festivals doesn’t divide communities and in fact the reverse situation (keeping schools open but having religious absences or parents opting out of mainstream education as a result) does. Added to that, for Bailey, the politics are more toxic still.

There is no plausible path for any Conservative candidate to 50 per cent of the vote plus one – necessary under London’s supplementary vote system – that doesn’t run through London’s affluent Hindu communities in west and north-west London. How is he going to get their votes if he is on the record saying their religious holidays risk turning the country into a “cesspool”?

His campaign’s response is a revealing insight into why Sadiq Khan’s aides believe that Bailey will be an error-prone and vulnerable candidate. Here’s their response to the Guardian in full:

“As a descendant of the Windrush generation, and someone who has worked with diverse communities for over 20 years, Shaun knows full well the challenges faced by BAME communities. Shaun has made it his life’s work to help those from migrant and disadvantaged communities, and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. As someone who has received racist abuse from the Labour party, who let’s not forget branded the community worker a ‘token ghetto boy’, this is a little rich.”

There are a lot of bad political choices to unpack in a single paragraph, but let’s start with the last sentence. Put yourselves in the shoes of one of Harrow’s Hindu swing voters. You backed Sadiq Khan in 2016 but re-elected Bob Blackman, a Conservative, in 2017. You’ve heard that Bailey thinks that teaching people about Diwali in schools will rob Britain of its community and turn the country into a “cesspool”. Why do you give a flying one about Emma Dent Coad saying something racist about Shaun Bailey? Why is that relevant to your life? That’s not an apology.

But it’s not the only bad decision being made here.

Let’s imagine you are instead an older white voter in Bow. You voted for Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Zac Goldsmith. You were suspicious about Sadiq Khan and you still aren’t wholly sold on him. Why do you care about Bailey being “a descendant of the Windrush generation”? Why’s he focussing on helping migrants? What about your grandkids? Who even is this guy who hasn’t even made it to Westminster who thinks he can become your mayor?

Or perhaps you’re a graduate in, say, Richmond. You backed Boris Johnson but you now have complicated feelings about him thanks to the referendum. You voted Liberal Democrat in Westminster and gave Sadiq Khan your second preference in London as you disliked Zac Goldsmith’s campaign. You think Khan is a decent guy but you aren’t sure what he’s actually done. You aren’t entirely sure what Diwali is about but you like living in a city where different things go on.

I just named three groups without which a Conservative candidate cannot win the London mayoralty and Bailey is appealing to none of them. And among liberal graduates and affluent Hindus he has probably suffered a wound that Khan will seek to widen and deepen over the next two years.

Source: Shaun Bailey’s views on multiculturalism are toxic to Londoners and his response is worse

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Sajid Javid is right – the British citizenship test is a bad pub quiz. So what is he going to do about it?

2018/10/05 Leave a comment

Good comments on the UK citizenship test and the “values” question that apply more broadly than the UK:

Speaking at his party’s conference this week, the home secretary Sajid Javid criticised his own government’s British citizenship test, describing it as like “a pub quiz” that is not fit for its intended purpose.

Javid is not the first to realise this. In 2013, I published what is still the only comprehensive report into the citizenship test, in which I criticised it in those terms – and this was discussed in parliament. So it is pleasing to see my campaign for changing the test has the home secretary on board.

It’s about time. The test is a key part of the immigration system for permanent settlement. Over 2 million tests have been sat since it launched in 2005. Immigrants sit a multiple choice exam with 24 randomly selected questions and must get 18 or more correct to pass the exam. It costs £50 for each attempt – and one person was known to take it 64 times.

The test’s intended purpose is to help confirm that an immigrant has successfully integrated into British society. This might be thought best achieved by checking for any criminal record or tax arrears over an extended residency period (which are also part of the process), but the test is supposed to add something extra beyond this. And here it categorically fails.

If you pour over the roughly 3,000 facts covered by the test questions, including about 280 historical dates spread over 180 pages, it is difficult to see what practical use the citizenship test has. Its handbook does not say how to contact emergency services, register with a GP or report a crime. There is no mention of 999 or of how many MPs sit in the House of Commons. But you must know how many elected representatives sit in the Welsh Assembly, Scottish Parliament and Stormont in Northern Ireland. The handbook requires memorising the height of the London Eye and the age of Big Ben. And while you must know about starting a free school, there is no mention of the national curriculum.

Unsurprisingly, the test is regularly seen as the test for British citizenship that few British citizens can pass, with many migrants seeing it as an opportunity by the Home Office to extract increasingly more expensive fees through a test of random trivia meant to make more fail.

Instead of ensuring new and old citizens were coming together, my research found the test was actually moving them apart – and doing more harm than goodat confirming integration.

In June this year, a House of Lords select committee on citizenship and civic participation agreed with me, endorsing seven of my recommendations, including the need for a new test and an advisory group engaging with the public to close the gap between public expectations and what any such test should cover. While Javid’s remarks acknowledge the citizenship test’s problems that the Lords select committee and I raised, it is unclear what he proposes to do about it. He says the test is not enough, but then promises to bring in “a British values test” as something new.

My concern arises from one difference that I have with the home secretary: I have sat the citizenship test and know it firsthand. If Javid examines the test, he will see that it already does ask immigrants about “the liberal, democratic values that bind our society together”. So if he wants the UK citizenship test to do this, the good news is it already includes it.

It would be a mistake to rush towards launching a new values test or revising the current one without engaging with the public. There are concerns about immigration and how well it is managed that have remained strong for several years. An edict based on guesswork won’t build confidence, especially for those most anxious about immigration levels. One problem shouldn’t lead to something worse.

Now is the time to foster healing for a country divided many different ways beyond the Remain and Leave split. An advisory group, preferably led by a naturalised British citizen who understands the process firsthand, could play an important role in bringing citizens together to discuss what British values we have, what they mean to people and how they can help rebuild a post-Brexit immigration system. Such work could be done over a few months, serving as a useful means for fostering confidence while dispelling immigration myths that might remove some of the toxicity from the debate and move the conversation on.

But it would take courage to make such a new start – and we can only hope such a plan is in mind.

Source: Sajid Javid is right – the British citizenship test is a bad pub quiz. So what is he going to do about it?

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FM Klimkin proposes to discuss dual citizenship in Ukraine

2018/10/05 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see how this debate progresses:

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin says there is a need for a debate on dual citizenship in Ukraine.

“We all understand that tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine have passports of neighboring countries. And this is not only ethnic Hungarians. I think we should hold a discussion about the state’s attitude to this large group of our compatriots,” he wrote in an article for European Pravda.

Klimkin believes it is possible to find a solution that will not harm people with dual citizenship, but, on the contrary, free them from the need to conceal it.

“The discussion is not about worsening their situation or branding them as traitors, but rather reasonably resolving the legal limbo, and not only that,” the minister said.

He stresses the problem of dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship should be considered separately in the context of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

“I personally consider it fundamentally unacceptable. As a matter of fact, the decision on single citizenship in Ukraine was once made, first of all, as a fuse against Russia’s possible influence on the newly declared independent Ukraine. Today, when Moscow is waging armed aggression against us, such motivation is leveled: if Ukraine wants to consider the possibility of limited application of dual citizenship, this should not concern Russia in principle,” Klimkin said.

Source: Klimkin proposes to discuss dual citizenship in Ukraine

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Americans top the list of ‘inadmissible’ migrants to Canada

2018/10/05 Leave a comment

A smaller proportion of the total number of visitors to Canada, about 50 percent compared to the two-thirds of all visitors who are American:

Almost 267,500 migrants were deemed to be inadmissible to Canada between 2007 to 2016, most of them due to criminal convictions, according to Canadian border officials.

The 267,449 foreign nationals included convicted criminals, human rights violators and terrorists identified by Canada Border Services Agency, which is tasked with getting them out of the country afterwards.

These individuals had come to Canada as permanent residents, visa students, foreign workers, visitors or refugees. While for some, their previous records went undetected before arrival, others were found to be inadmissible for offences committed while in Canada and ordered to leave.

Border services data obtained under access to information legislation shows that the number of people deemed inadmissible each year has been on a gradual decline from a peak of 9,131 in 2008 to 6,365 in 2016.

Over the decade, Americans topped the list of those deemed inadmissible, with a total of 63,590 being told they had to leave. They were followed by Mexicans (22,104), Hungarians (13,082), Haitians (11,748) and Colombians (10,090).

Immigration experts said it’s not known if the annual decline in the number of inadmissible individuals was a direct result of effective pre-arrival screening procedures, which successfully stop undesirable migrants from coming here in the first place.

However, Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens said the number of people deemed inadmissible from some countries appeared to fall dramatically after visa requirements were imposed for visitors from those countries.

The number of inadmissible Mexicans, for instance, dropped significantly from 6,739 in 2009 to just 1,041 in 2010. Other requirements such as pre-boarding electronic authorizations and biometric screening also help detect criminals before they get on a plane to come here, said Meurrens.

“We do have a robust screening system. People are checked against terror lists and criminals are caught before they get here,” said Meurrens. “And the majority of the hundreds of millions of people who come to Canada are not involved in crimes.”

In 2016 alone, Canada admitted 296,346 permanent residents, including 58,435 refugees and protected persons. More than half a million people came as temporary residents, including 266,000 international students and 287,117 foreign workers, in addition to more than a million visitors such as tourists here to visit family and friends.

Toronto refugee lawyer Raoul Boulakia said foreign nationals deemed inadmissible for criminality must apply for special permission to re-enter Canada and those who are banned as a security threat must get what’s known as ministerial relief to remain here — a process that takes a minimum of five years.

“The stats do not tell you the whole story. Without the facts, you don’t know how serious or frivolous their crimes are,” he said. “The big issue is this overbreadth of wording and interpretation of the inadmissibility grounds.”

The definition of membership to terrorist groups is broad and border officials have a lot of discretionary power to designate someone inadmissible with that label, said Boulakia, pointing to the case of Sugunanayake Joseph, a grandmother who came to Canada from Sri Lanka after her husband, a Tamil activist, was assassinated in 2005.

Officials associated her husband’s political coalition with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and alleged she was inadmissible because she had supported her late husband in his career and accompanied him to political events, which they said amounted to her complicity in crimes against humanity with the Tigers.

Joseph was ordered deported, but found to be in danger of torture or death in a pre-removal risk assessment if sent back to Sri Lanka. Her case is still in the system. She cannot be given refugee status or permanent residence unless the public safety minister grants her ministerial relief.

“There’s a wide gap in how people are being treated (by border services). Some are prosecuted zealously and others are not,” said Boulakia. “There is a lot of arbitrariness.”

Source: Americans top the list of ‘inadmissible’ migrants to Canada

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Trump Administration Asks SCOTUS To Block Top Officials From Explaining Census Citizenship Question

2018/10/05 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see how the SCOTUS rules:

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to step in and block two top officials from having to speak under oath in a lawsuit challenging the administration’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census.

In a petition filed Wednesday, the Justice Department asked the high court to prevent Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and John Gore, the acting head of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, from having to sit for depositions in the case. A coalition of activist groups, cities and nearly 20 states, led by New York, say the Trump administration was predisposed to adding the citizenship question, and say it violated federal law by not following the proper procedure for doing so.

Getting information from Ross and Gore is crucial to the lawsuit because Ross, who oversees the Census, has said he added the question at the request of the Justice Department. DOJ said it needed the question, which has not been asked on the decennial survey since 1950, to get better citizenship data so it can better enforce the Voting Rights Act. But documents disclosed as part of the litigation show that Ross wanted to add the citizenship question even before the Justice Department requested it, and that it was Ross who initially approached DOJ officials about making the request.

Critics say adding the citizenship question will depress the response rate among immigrants who fear sharing their immigration status with the Trump administration. Data collected by the Census is strongly protected by federal privacy laws and must be kept confidential.

A lower court in New York has ordered depositions of Ross and Gore, saying they possess unique and relevant information that can’t be obtained from other sources. In its Wednesday filing, the government said the lower court’s ruling was incorrect, and that the case should be evaluated based on an “administrative record” of documents compiled by the government detailing why it made its decision.

“The court thought Secretary Ross’s testimony uniquely vital because he was personally involved in the decision to reinstate a citizenship question and the decision is of great importance to the public,” U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in the brief. “The Secretary’s personal involvement in a significant policy decision is not exceptional, and the importance of the Secretary’s decision in this case does not distinguish it from many other decisions of national importance that Cabinet Secretaries make.”

The information that the government has disclosed in the lawsuit so far has raised significant questions about the decision to add the citizenship query. The documents show Ross and top aides discussing the addition of the citizenship question, and a memo in which the bureau’s top scientist advised against adding it.

Justice Department lawyers have been fighting to block the plaintiffs in the case from gathering information beyond the documents that government officials voluntarily compiled about the decision. However, they have been largely unsuccessful. On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman, the trial judge overseeing the case, said the government’s most recent request was “particularly frivolous — if not outrageous.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit is also considering whether to block Ross from having to sit for a deposition, but said last week that Gore could be deposed. A trial in the case is scheduled to begin at the start of November.

“The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to block discovery in our suit ― and courts have repeatedly rejected their attempts. You have to wonder what they’re trying to hide,” said Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood (D). “We’ll get to the bottom of how the decision to demand citizenship status was made, as we continue our case to ensure a full and fair Census.”

Source: Trump Administration Asks SCOTUS To Block Top Officials From Explaining Census Citizenship Question

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Coyne and Yakabuski contrasting views on the CAQ and the notwithstanding clause in relation to religious symbols

2018/10/05 Leave a comment

Two very different takes, starting with Andrew Coyne:

Be careful what you wish for. Quebec’s election may have signalled a turning away from separatism — the mad, doomed project to wrench apart the country on linguistic and ethnic lines that consumed so much of the province’s energy and wealth over the last 50-odd years. But it has been accompanied by a turning toward other forms of zealotry and intolerance.

The Liberal Party and Parti Québécois may have gone down to their worst defeats in their respective histories, dispatched by voters tired of the ancient existential stalemate and the entrenched/corrupt elites that thrived upon it. But into the vacuum have surged parties peddling other fantasies.

Quebec Solidaire campaigned on a platform that might have been stolen from a student union at one of the less prestigious universities, and probably was. It was rewarded with a doubling of its share of the popular vote and a tripling of its seats in the assembly.

And the “conservative” Coalition Avenir Quebec surged to power on a mix of unfunded tax cuts, warmed-over 1970s-style dirigisme and enriched daycare subsidies. Oh, and beating up on immigrants.

The party will protest at that description, but it is not for nothing that they were feted with victory congratulations from Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader. The party vows not only to slash immigration to Quebec — this at a time of growing labour shortages, in a province where population aging is a particular concern — but to expel those who fail a test of “values” and French language proficiency after three years.

How it would do so, or where they would be deported to, or under whose constitutional authority are among the many questions raised by this odious proposal, to say nothing of the obvious Charter issues. Party leader Francois Legault struggled to explain it during the campaign. But when a voter in Rimouski asked him whether he would fight for “us” against “these immigrants who are erasing us,” Legault was quick enough to reply: “Bien oui!”

If deporting thousands of immigrants was too much for the other parties, on the other great question of the day, whether members of religiously observant minorities should be allowed to work in the public sector, the parties were more in accord than otherwise.

While the Liberals’ Bill 62 would have banned, in the name of “religious neutrality,” covering one’s face, not only for providers but recipients of public services — those wishing to attend school, say, or ride the bus — the other parties would in some ways have gone further.

The CAQ, for example, proposes to ban anyone in a position of authority — police officers, judges, even teachers — from wearing any “conspicuous” religious symbol at work. The party has been admirably clear about what this means: those whose faith requires them to wear such symbols will not only be precluded from being hired for these jobs, but dismissed from such positions as they currently hold.

So to go with mass expulsions of ethnic minorities, add mass firings of religious minorities: the platform, not of some creepy fringe party, but of the newly elected government of Quebec. If Canadians outside Quebec think they can look the other way at this latest manifestation of the province’s famous distinctness, as they did earlier measures banning the display of English in public, they should think again. For it is about to explode in all of our faces.

Bill 62 was already tied up in the courts, the ban on face coverings suspended while its constitutionality is under review. The CAQ’s more sweeping religious bar, should it be passed into law, will quite certainly meet the same fate. But while the Liberals had never indicated they would do anything but accept the courts’ findings, the CAQ leader has again been clear: it will invoke the notwithstanding clause to override any Charter objections.

Perhaps, in the event, we will be treated to the same circus as surrounded Ontario’s recent flirtation with suspending constitutional rights: squadrons of law professors explaining again that this latest demonstration of the clause’s malevolent potential should not be held against it; elderly veterans of the constitutional wars re-emerging to protest that this was not what they intended, either; people who’ve never liked the Charter pointing out, as if it were either new or relevant, that the Charter override is in fact part of the Charter; and so on.

But in one crucial respect this time cannot fail to be different. The federal government could afford to take a pass on the Ontario fight: the override threat came in response to a particularly wonky court decision, soon set aside by an appeals court, after which it was withdrawn; it was far from clear how far the law in question, redrawing municipal election boundaries, offended against rights, as opposed to common sense; and the use of the clause was opposed by every opposition party — and, polls showed, wildly unpopular.

None of these are likely to apply in the present case. The threat to rights is obvious, and serious; it involves no arcane dispute between different levels of government, but blatant discrimination against vulnerable minorities; and yet it is likely to have the support of at least three of the four parties — and perhaps a majority of the Quebec public.

Can the federal government stay out of this? The immediate response from the prime minister was not encouraging. Invoking the notwithstanding clause, he said, is “not something that should be done lightly.” To suppress “the fundamental rights of Canadians” is “something one should be very careful about.” Stop, or I’ll shout ‘stop’ again.

No, sorry, that will not do. The question he will have to confront, the question confronting us all, is this: do we want to live in a country in which people can be fired from their jobs because of their religious beliefs? In which important positions in the public service are off limits to members of religious minorities? How can we possibly?

Source: Andrew Coyne: Quebec situation is too serious for Trudeau to stay out of notwithstanding debate

In contrast, Konrad Yakabuski is downplays the initial language and says wait to see the actual legislation:

The international headlines referencing Monday’s Quebec election left little to the imagination.

In France, where Quebec politics get more attention than anywhere outside Canada, Le Monde spoke of a “crushing victory by the right.” At the more downmarket Le Parisien, the verdict was even more sensational: Quebec Elects a Nationalist and Anti-immigration Government.

The beleaguered Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s truly anti-immigration Rassemblement national, could hardly believe her luck. She tweeted that Quebeckers had “voted for less immigration,” demonstrating “lucidity and firmness in the face of the migration challenge.”

That is hardly the message premier-designate François Legault hoped his victory would send to the four corners of the globe. But Mr. Legault is learning the hard way that what he says now carries repercussions far beyond the tiny bubble of Quebec politics and can influence his province’s reputation not just in the rest of Canada, but around the world.

For a seasoned politician, Mr. Legault was shockingly undisciplined on the campaign trail. His daily press conferences could go on ad infinitum and Mr. Legault would venture answers to reporters’ questions that a more scripted politician would not touch with a 10-foot pole. It got him into plenty of trouble and, were it not for Quebeckers’ overwhelming desire to punish the Liberals and Parti Québécois alike, it might have cost him the election.

So, it is mind-boggling why Mr. Legault chose to waste his first postvictory news conference on Tuesday by answering a double-hypothetical question about what he would do if courts strike down a law that his government is in no hurry to pass. He should have known that nothing productive could come of his outburst, which left exactly the opposite impression that he intended to make.

While the official program of the Coalition Avenir Québec that Mr. Legault leads favours prohibiting persons in a position of authority from wearing conspicuous religious symbols, passing legislation giving effect to this policy is not high on Mr. Legault’s agenda.

Yet, on Tuesday, the premier-designate was already musing about invoking the notwithstanding clause to override a non-existent court decision that nullifies the currently non-existent legislation, whose shape and form remains a matter of pure conjecture.

This is not to say some form of legislation regulating religious symbols in the public sphere won’t eventually show up on the order paper of a CAQ government. The issue of religious accommodation has dogged successive Quebec governments for more than a decade, as rising Muslim immigration has forced the province to grapple with questions of religious diversity.

Francophone Quebeckers’ idea of state secularism may not correspond with the dictionary definition of the concept, given their desire to grandfather the blatantly Catholic symbols of their past, right up to the crucifix that hangs in the National Assembly. But that doesn’t mean the new CAQ government will be able to indefinitely ignore demands to regulate other religious symbols.

There is a large consensus among Quebec’s political class that the best way to settle the debate once and for all is to follow the recommendations of the 2008 Bouchard-Taylor commission on religious accommodation. The commission, led by sociologist Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor, concluded that “agents of the state” (such as judges, Crown prosecutors and police officers) should be prohibited from wearing religious symbols.

In 2017, Prof. Taylor dropped his support for the proposal, saying that it had been misunderstood. Indeed, the Bouchard-Taylor report explicitly excluded teachers, civil servants and health-care professionals from the list of public employees it said should be prohibited from wearing religious symbols. But that detail seemed to have been lost on many politicians.

The official CAQ policy would include teachers among those banned from wearing the Muslim hijab or Jewish kippa. But whether a CAQ government would legislate to include teachers in the mix remains highly speculative. What’s more, any legislation regulating when and where police officers or judges could or could not wear religious symbols would likely be limited in scope.

On Wednesday, the CAQ MNA who served as the party’s justice critic in opposition moved to clean up the damage Mr. Legault created on Tuesday. Simon Jolin-Barrette insisted that the new government intends to ensure that any future legislation on religious accommodation would stand up in the courts. He added that invoking the notwithstanding clause, while an option, would never be the CAQ’s first course of action.

The CAQ has brought in Carl Vallée, who served as a press secretary to former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, to help the new government find its communications footing. It likely signals tighter messaging and less freelancing by Mr. Legault in the future.

After all, those headlines outside Quebec can be killers.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Interactive research map reveals multi-billion-dollar US immigration industry

2018/10/04 Leave a comment

Quite a contrast with Canada where the “immigration industry” is characterized by service provider organizations, immigration lawyers and academics in contrast to business interests in the USA:

An interactive website which investigates the rising investment in detention, enforcement, and deportation of immigrant families in the U.S has been released by a group of researchers and academics this week.

The virtual resource charts financial contracts that the U.S government has with companies to supply goods and services required for detention, surveillance, and deportation of immigrants. This includes everything from IT supplies and services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices, toiletries for detainees and even ammunition and taser accessories.

The website was co-built by Associate Professor Rachel Hendery from Western Sydney University’s Digital Humanities Research Group. Associate Professor Hendery contributed to the programming, design and analysis work for the platform.

The interactive data exploration reveals that ICE government values have increased 987 percent since 2014— and they have almost doubled in the past year.

Associate Professor Hendery said the research found the U.S government and businesses are heavily profiting from the detainment of .

“Businesses like Deloitte have various ICE contracts which collectively amount to $250 Million— and they aren’t the biggest,” Associate Professor Hendery said.

“Amazon, LinkedIn and Dell are just some of the household names of organisations that are a part of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‘industry’.

“I don’t think people are aware of the scale of this immigration prison industry, nor that it really is an industry, with all kinds of financial and other incentives for the status quo to continue, or as our data suggests, scale up even further,” she said.

The map is divided into ‘visualisations’ which provide different data on the financial industry of the immigration system. The visualisations include:

  • Monetary amounts of ICE contracts in each congressional district
  • ICE contracts from 2014-2018 showing the exponential growth of economic activity within the immigration system.
  • An exposé of some of the most egregious participants in the ICE economy.
  • An in-depth look at the expenditure categories for ICE contracts.
  • Re-displacements from the US since 2012 by port of removal.
  • A map of allies, double vetted for trustworthiness.

Professor Hendery said that maps and other interactive data visualisations that were used in the project help extract narratives from complex figures in a way that looking at numbers does not.

“Most people reading or hearing about immigration in the U.S are operating without all the information. It’s hard to understand how large the ICE machinery is, or what the scale of their financial web is like.”

The research makes up the second volume of the Torn Apart/ Separados project which provides a deep and radically new look at the culpability behind the humanitarian crisis in the United States. The project is made up of an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers around the world who combine technical skills and classical research practices to help mobilise humanity.

Source: Interactive research map reveals multi-billion-dollar US immigration industry

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Sajid Javid backs plans for stricter citizenship rules after Brexit

2018/10/04 Leave a comment

Values tests play more heavily to the base and public rather than being effective as applicants can simply provide the desired response without believing in it.

Fact-based tests are more objective and do not encourage dishonesty:

The government has announced stricter immigration and citizenship rules to come into place after Brexit, with Sajid Javid later telling the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katharine Viner that he was unworried by the suggestion such rules would have prevented his own father entering the UK.

The home secretary used his speech to the Conservative party conference to say people seeking British citizenship would face tougher English-language requirements, part of an immigration overhaul that will include the end of free movement from the EU.

In a broad speech set to intensify speculation about his leadership ambitions, Javid unveiled plans for a beefed-up “British values test” to replace the Life in the UK test for those looking to settle in the country.

Overnight, he and Theresa May had announced proposals for a single immigration system that treats people from EU countries the same as those from non-EU countries. Highly skilled workers who want to live and work in Britain would be given priority, while low-skilled immigration would be curbed.

Speaking later in an interview on the conference fringe with Viner, the home secretary said he was not concerned by the thought that under such a regime his father, who arrived from Pakistan in 1961 with £1 and no skills, would be barred from entry.

When his father came, Javid said, the entry system was very different as the governments of the time “wanted, needed, a route for low-skilled migration”.

Asked if it made him sad this would no longer be the case, he said: “No, it doesn’t make me feel sad. Actually, with today’s policy it makes me very optimistic about our future. Because what I have also set out is that we will remain the global-outlook nation that welcomes people from across the world, no matter where they’re from.”

In his speech, Javid announced plans aimed at improving integration and described the current Life in the UK test as a “pub quiz”.

“It’s about integration, not segregation,” he said. “And I’m determined to break down barriers to integration wherever I find them. Take, for example, the most basic barrier of all: language.”

Javid said 700,000 people living in the UK could not speak English.

“As home secretary, I will apply these principles to those who arrive in our country. So not only will there be a new values test but we will also strengthen the English-language requirements for all new citizens.”

Highly skilled migrants coming to the UK on a work visa will not face tougher language requirements than those already in place, the Guardian understands.

Javid said earlier he would consider scrapping the cap on the number of highly skilled migrants as part of the post-Brexit plan. The limit is currently 20,000.

Applicants will need to meet a minimum salary threshold – for highly skilled migrants this currently stands at £30,000 – but Javid has hinted that this will be reviewed.

In his speech in the main hall, the home secretary said: “Thanks to the [Brexit] referendum we now have a unique opportunity to reshape our immigration system for the future.

“A skills-based, single system that is opened up to talent from across the world. A system that doesn’t discriminate between any one region or country. A system based on merit. That judges people not by where they are from, but on what they can do.

“What people want – and they will get – is control of our own system. With a lower, and sustainable level of net migration. And, above all, that has to mean one thing: an end to freedom of movement.”

The government has said it intends to publish a white paper this autumn and a bill the following year, meaning it is highly unlikely MPs will get to vote on the legislation before the UK leaves the EU in March.

In the interview with Viner, Javid, who has previously spoken about how his mother did not learn to speak English until more than decade after she arrived in the UK, talked about his anger at the unfair targeting of people from the Windrush generation by immigration enforcement.

“The first thing that went through my mind is that it could have been my parents,” he said. “Imagine if this was my mum or my uncle, someone who had lived in Britain their whole life, contributed so much, being detained or, worse, removed from the country.”

But Javid vehemently rejected that the post-2010 Conservative government had been primarily responsible for the Windrush crisis with the so-called hostile environment policy, saying a lot of it had begun under Labour.

“If people portray this as a problem that happened under a Tory government, it’s incorrect. It’s either bad reporting or a deliberate attempt to twist the fact,” he said.

Javid, who again spoke about a range of subjects well beyond his official brief, was similarly blunt about Labour’s interventionist economic policies, saying: “The trouble is, Jeremy Corbyn really believes what he says. And he’s completely deluded.”

Elsewhere in his speech, he announced a package of new measures to tackle forced marriage, including proposals to refuse spousal entry to the UK where there is evidence a marriage is forced.

Source: Sajid Javid backs plans for stricter citizenship rules after Brexit

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

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