Always a challenge how to present data and trends in a manner that will not inflame debate. Even when presented with appropriate nuance, the risk remains.
Struggled a bit with this in my recent article, Hospital stats show birth tourism rising in major cities, and judging by the reaction on Twitter, appears I got the balance right, although of course there were critiques by those on the left and right:
The graphic was splashy by the Census Bureau’s standards and it showed an unmistakable moment in America’s future: the year 2044, when white Americans were projected to fall below half the population and lose their majority status.
The presentation of the data disturbed Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director, who saw it while looking through a government report. The graphic made demographic change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing, he thought, and could provoke a political backlash.
So after the report’s release three years ago, he organized a meeting with Katherine Wallman, at the time the chief statistician for the United States.
“I said ‘I’m really worried about this,’” said Dr. Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. He added, “Statistics are powerful. They are a description of who we are as a country. If you say majority-minority, that becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”
In a nation preoccupied by race, the moment when white Americans will make up less than half the country’s population has become an object of fascination.
For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.
But many academics have grown increasingly uneasy with the public fixation. They point to recent research demonstrating the data’s power to shape perceptions. Some are questioning the assumptions the Census Bureau is making about race, and whether projecting the American population even makes sense at a time of rapid demographic change when the categories themselves seem to be shifting.
Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, spotted the risk immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she knew that group size was a marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller could feel threatened. At first she thought the topic of a declining white majority was too obvious to study.
But she did, together with a colleague, Maureen Craig, a social psychologist at New York University, and they have been talking about the results ever since. Their findings, first published in 2014, showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about the racial shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial minorities than those who were not. They were also more likely to support restrictive immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose status and face discrimination in the future.
Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University, remembered being stunned when she saw the research.
“It was like, ‘Oh wow, these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she said.
Beyond concerns about the data’s repercussions, some researchers are also questioning whether the Census Bureau’s projections provide a true picture. At issue, they say, is whom the government counts as white.
In the Census Bureau’s projections, people of mixed race or ethnicity have been counted mostly as minority, demographers say. This has had the effect of understating the size of the white population, they say, because many Americans with one white parent may identify as white or partly white. On their census forms, Americans can choose more than one race and whether they are of Hispanic origin.
Among Asians and Hispanics, more than a quarter marry outside their race, according to the Pew Research Center. For American-born Asians, the share is nearly double that. It means that mixed-race people may be a small group now — around 7 percent of the population, according to Pew — but will steadily grow. Are those children white? Are they minority? Are they both? What about the grandchildren?
“The question really for us as a society is there are all these people who look white, act white, marry white and live white, so what does white even mean anymore?” Dr. Waters said. “We are in a really interesting time, an indeterminate time, when we are not policing the boundary very strongly.”
The Census Bureau has long produced projections of the American population, but they were rarely the topic of talk shows or newspaper headlines.
“That’s what really lit the fuse,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, referring to the 2008 projection. “People went crazy.”
It was not just white nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. He said it was hard to interest them in his work on ways to make the change seem less threatening to fearful white Americans — for instance by emphasizing the good that could come from immigration.
“It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”
Dr. Myers and a colleague later found that presenting the data differently could produce a much less anxious reaction. In work published this spring, they found that the negative effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people through intermarriage.
It is unclear exactly when the idea of a majority-minority crossover first appeared, but several experts said it may have surfaced in connection with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Ms. Wallman, the chief statistician for the United States from 1992 to 2017, who helped develop the first governmentwide standard for data on race and ethnicity that came into use in the late 1970s, said she did not like having to categorize by race, but that the government had to for oversight.
“I wish we didn’t have to ask,” she said. “But to me, that’s the rock and the hard place.”
Race is difficult to count because, unlike income or employment, it is a social category that shifts with changes in culture, immigration, and ideas about genetics. So who counts as white has changed over time. In the 1910s and 1920s, the last time immigrants were such a large share of the American population, there were furious arguments over how to categorize newcomers from Europe.
But eventually, the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe came to be considered white.
That is because race is about power, not biology, said Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University.
“The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness,” said Dr. King, author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial difference. The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans, he said — the long-term legacy of slavery.
To Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, the Census Bureau’s projections seemed stuck in an outdated classification system. The bureau assigns a nonwhite label to most people who are reported as having both white and minority ancestry, he said. He likened this to the one-drop rule, a 19th-century system of racial classification in which having even one African ancestor meant you were black.
“The census data is distorting the on-the-ground realities of ethnicity and race,” Dr. Alba said. “There might never be a majority-minority society; it’s unclear.”
Asked for a response to Dr. Alba’s critique, a Census Bureau spokesman said in an email that “we constantly consult with stakeholders, and scholars, including Richard Alba and other federal agencies to improve our techniques, methodologies, and testing of population projections.”
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, argued that the Census Bureau was doing the best that it could at a time whensociety was changing quickly. He was skeptical that today’s Asians and Hispanics were analogous to the white ethnic Americans of the 20th century, and believed that a less conservative count would not do much to change the bigger picture. Besides, it is not the job of academics to protect people from demographic change, he said.
“Irrespective of the year, or the turning point, the message needs to come out about what the actual facts are,” Mr. Frey said. “We are becoming a much more racially diverse society among our young generation.”
Others say they are not sugarcoating statistics, but showing that the numbers have many interpretations, and that white-versus-everyone-else is only one. It not only reduces the American patchwork to a crude, divisive political formula, they say, but perhaps more important — with the categories in flux — it might not even be true.
The Census Bureau released new projections this year in March filled with data about the country’s future. In the coming decades, adults 65 and older will outnumber children for the first time in the country’s history. The share of mixed-race children is set to double.
But there was no mention of a year when white Americans would fall below half the population.
When asked about the change, a spokesman for the Bureau said: “It was just us getting back to sticking to data.”
While I had expected considerable media interest, given the substance and the politics of the issue, yesterday had me doing TV interviews on all major networks and a radio interview with Rob Breakenridge of Global news in Calgary.
More than one in five babies born in Metro Vancouver’s Richmond Hospital could be so-called “anchor babies” — children born to non-residents in order to gain Canadian citizenship — according to a new study.
The study, authored by the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) and published Thursday in Policy Options magazine, suggests 21.9 per cent of the children delivered in Richmond Hospital are born to non-resident mothers — more than double the percentage born in any other Canadian hospital.
The IRPP study also shows the number of such children born in Canada is far higher than previously estimated.
While a Statistics Canada report found roughly 312 babies are born in the country each year to mothers whose place of residence is officially listed as outside of Canada, IRPP’s study put that number at closer to 1,500 or 2,000 children annually. The data shows the number of births to non-resident mothers — including all provinces but Quebec, which refused to release the data — skyrocketed to 3,628 last year from just 1,354 in 2010.
The issue of birth tourism — when pregnant women fly to Canada to give birth — is divisive because children born under such circumstances are automatically granted Canadian citizenship. They therefore enjoy all the attendant rights and privileges, such as access to domestic university fees as well as subsidized education and health care, even though their parents aren’t taxpayers and the children themselves will not necessarily be raised in Canada.
Joe Peschisolido, Liberal MP for Steveston-Richmond East, believes the revelation provided by the study has some troubling implications.
“Even though I believe the (birth tourism) epicentre is in Richmond — and at the hospital in Richmond — I think you’re starting to see birth tourism as an institution,” Peschisolido told StarMetro in a Thursday phone interview.
“There are individuals that are profiting from this. And I think that’s the most heinous thing. You’re getting individuals that are abusing … the immigration and citizenship system … and are profiting off of an illegitimate — and the government has said unethical — system.”
A Thursday statement from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) confirmed the numbers in the IRPP study, though slightly more children were actually born to non-resident mothers in Richmond Hospital than the IRPP study accounted for.
While the IRPP study showed 469 non-resident births occurred in Richmond Hospital in 2017-18, VCH’s figures show 474 children were born to 469 resident mothers. The disparity, the statement explained, comes from the number of twins born in that time period.
And while the number of babies born to non-resident mothers has been increasing over the past several years — from 15.4 per cent of the total in 2014-15 to 22.1 per cent of the total in 2017-18 — the total number of babies born to all mothers decreased slightly this year, according to VCH.
The health authority also noted that non-residents are required to pay all hospital and medical-care costs for the mother and baby, including a prepayment deposit of $8,200 for a vaginal birth and $13,300 for a caesarean birth.
In March, Peschisolido sponsored a petition spearheaded by Richmond resident Kerry Starchuk calling on the federal government to condemn the “abusive and exploitative practice” of birth tourism.
Birth tourism, the petition said, fundamentally debases the value of Canadian citizenship; costs taxpayers money, since children of non-residents have access to services such as health care and subsidized education; and displaces residents from local hospital beds.
On Monday, the federal government tabled its response to Peschisolido’s petition, saying Canada does not currently collect information on whether a woman is pregnant when she enters Canada.
“A person is not inadmissible nor can they be denied a visa solely on the grounds that they are pregnant or that they may give birth in Canada,” the response reads.
And while misrepresenting the purpose of a visit to Canada to a federal officer carries “significant consequences,” the statement points out citizenship acquired through birth on Canadian soil has been policy since 1947.
Ottawa’s response, however, refers back to 2016 data from Statistics Canada, saying only about 300 of the 385,000 children born in Canada each year are born to non-resident mothers.
“This constitutes less than 0.1 per cent of the total number of births in Canada,” the response says, adding these numbers show the practice is not widespread but that the government has nevertheless commissioned research from the Canadian Institute for Health Information to look into the issue. It also committed to developing measures to address the institute’s findings.
Peschisolido said he was satisfied with the response. He said he hopes to participate in the review process once more granular data has been collected and responsible decisions can be made about the extent of birth tourism and what can be done to stop it.
But Will Tao, a Vancouver immigration lawyer, said he worries that focusing purely on statistics risks unnecessarily casting aspersions on all non-resident mothers.
“I don’t think (birth tourism) is the problem itself, so much as a symptom of the problem,” Tao told StarMetro. “I think the real problem is the unregulated nature of immigration advice.”
There are most certainly practitioners abroad who advise mothers to come to Canada to give birth as a kind of backdoor to citizenship, he said. And the federal government could do a better job providing a narrative — much in the way it has for individuals seeking refugee status — that would discourage abuses of the birthright policy, he said.
But there are countless non-residents who have children while in Canada for many other reasons. Those people, he said, should not be painted with the same brush as those who wilfully exploit the path to Canadian citizenship.
The IRPP study reflects that concern, noting its figures are not exact because they don’t express how many children were delivered by mothers with temporary status in Canada — a bracket that includes Canadian expatriates returning to give birth, corporate transferees and international students.
But researcher Andrew Griffith told The Star that a conservative estimate would suggest roughly 40 or 50 per cent of the non-resident mothers were birth tourists.
The study mined the Canadian Institute for Health Information discharge database, and according to Griffith, the IRPP’s figures — based on hospital financial data that codes services provided to non-residents under “other country resident self-pay” — more accurately reflect the number of non-resident births in Canada.
The IRPP study offered several options to address the problem of birth tourism, including:
Amending immigration laws to make it an offence if a woman fails to disclose the delivery of a child as the purpose of a visit to Canada and make that child’s citizenship fraudulent due to its procurement through misrepresentation
Adopting a “qualified” birthright approach by which a child is granted citizenship only when at least one parent is either a Canadian citizen or permanent resident and the child resides in Canada for at least 10 years after birth
Tao, the immigration lawyer, said he understood why people are shocked by how far above the national average the number of children born to non-resident mothers in Richmond Hospital are.
But through his interactions with clients, he said, he has encountered many families who could technically be called “birth tourists,” were that definition applied loosely enough. He said he was concerned that forthcoming regulations could encompass non-resident families or individuals whose children were born in Canada for legitimate reasons.
Tao also suggested a policy requiring immigration officials to question the motives of pregnant women as a matter of course could be “a very slippery slope into prejudice and background checking of other types.”
Griffiths, the researcher, agreed that birth tourism at the national level, currently accounting for roughly 0.5 per cent of the total annual live births in Canada according to the IRPP, is not a huge problem but suggested it should be monitored closely.
“Using this as a starting point, if we see any further increase or a trend line, then we need to take another fresh look at it,” he said.
But Peschisolido said that in a city like Richmond, where birth tourism appears to be a far more pervasive trend, every level of government has a responsibility to investigate how it can be slowed or stopped and what, exactly, may be driving it.
Article has attracted considerable interest on Twitter and in the media.
In the Toronto Star:
The number of so-called “anchor babies” — children born to non-residents for the purpose of gaining citizenship — is at least five times higher than Canadian officials had estimated, new research suggests.
Birth tourism in Canada, where women late in pregnancy fly in to deliver their babies here, is controversial because the newborns are automatically Canadian citizens and enjoy full citizenship rights such as free education and lower university fees, even though their foreign parents aren’t taxpayers.
Statistics Canada has, since 2013, counted 1,561 babies — about 312 annually — born here to mothers, whose place of residence was listed outside Canada, based on figures from provincial birth registries.
However, a new study from the Institute for Research on Public Policy released Thursday suggests the number of “anchor babies” born here every year is likely in the 1,500 to 2,000 range.
The study mined the Canadian Institute for Health Information discharge database, and according to researcher Andrew Griffith, the figures — based on hospital financial data that codes services provided to non-residents under “other country resident self-pay” — give a clearer picture of the extent of the problem.
The data shows the number of births to non-resident mothers (including all provinces but Quebec, which refused to release the data) skyrocketed to 3,628 last year from just 1,354 in 2010, said the report by the Montreal-based think tank. It showed the Richmond Hospital in British Columbia with the highest volume of babies born to non-resident mothers.
Of the top 10 hospitals where such births were recorded, six are in the GTA.
The numbers are not perfect because they don’t break down how many of the births were to mothers with temporary status in Canada, which include Canadian expatriates returning to give birth, corporate transferees or international students who didn’t come here to specifically to have children. But Griffith says a conservative estimate is that 40 to 50 per cent of the non-resident mothers were birth tourists.
“How the (delivery) services are paid for is a more representative and realistic measure than the provincial registries,” said Griffith, a retired director general with Immigration Canada, adding part of the discrepancy can be attributed to birth tourists using their temporary Canadian address on birth registration forms and hence not being counted as non-residents.
“The concern has always been these people are exploiting the loophole in the law to obtain citizenship for their children when they are not entitled to that. There’s also the financial liability and responsibility on Canadian taxpayers for the child’s benefits.”
Currently, immigration officials cannot refuse a visitor visa application on the basis of the applicant’s intent to give birth in Canada, though they can assess if the person has enough money to visit Canada, if they will abide by the visa’s departure date and if they have a criminal record and should be barred from entry.
In 2012, the then-Conservative federal government, under Stephen Harper, had considered a crackdown on birth tourism but discarded the idea because the relatively small number of incidents — based on an estimate of 500 cases a year — did not justify the anticipated costs of enforcement.
However, with immigration and refugees expected to become a wedge issue in next year’s federal election, the Conservatives voted this summer at the party’s convention to end the birthright citizenship policy that gives citizenship to babies born in Canada even if their parents aren’t citizens or don’t have legal status in Canada. The motion is non-binding but could be part of their campaign platform next year.
Griffith said any policy decision must be based on evidence and that’s what prompted him to seek out the most reliable data on the issue of birth tourism.
“Is it a widespread problem or is it just a phenomenon at the Richmond Hospital?” asked Griffith, referring to the B.C. hospital cited by the media as the epicentre of birth tourism. “We need data for informed decisions.”
He said birth tourism, currently accounting for roughly 0.5 per cent of the total annual live births in Canada, is not a huge problem but should be monitored closely.
“Using this as a starting point, if we see any further increase or a trend line, then we need to take another fresh look at it,” he said.
The study offers three options for policy-makers to tackle the problem if birth tourism gets out of control:
Amend immigration laws to make it an offence if a female visitor fails to disclose the purpose of her visit to give birth or declare her pregnancy to officials. The child’s citizenship would then be deemed fraudulently obtained due to misrepresentation by the mother.
Follow Australia’s move by adopting a “qualified” birthright approach specifying a person born in Canada would only be a Canadian citizen if the parent is either a Canadian citizen or permanent resident and the child lives in the country for 10 years after birth.
Introduce regulations prohibiting rooming houses and consultant and support services for birth tourists, substantially increasing the financial deposits required by hospitals from non-residents and ordering the provinces to require proof of payment prior to issuing birth certificates for children of non-resident mothers.
The CP article quoting Minister Hussen’s reactions to the findings along with other commentary:
With new research showing that more babies are born in Canada to foreign residents than Statistics Canada realized, the federal government is studying the issue of “birth tourism” in the hope of better understanding how many women travel to Canada to have babies who are born Canadian citizens.
Using numbers from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), which captures billing information directly from hospitals, researcher Andrew Griffith found over 3,200 babies were born here to women who weren’t Canadian residents in 2016 – compared with the 313 babies recorded by Statistics Canada.
The finding suggests not only that the numbers are higher than previously reported, but that it’s a growing trend, Griffith says.
“(The data) shows the steady growth in the number of babies born in hospitals to women who are residents of other countries, by absolute numbers and percentage, for all provinces except Quebec,” Griffith wrote in an article in Policy Options, published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy. “These births total just over one per cent of all live births in English Canada.”
A petition tabled recently in the House of Commons by Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido calls on Canada to take stronger measures to end birth tourism, saying it abuses Canada’s social-welfare system.
Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen responded by saying his department has commissioned research to get a better picture of the scope of the issue in Canada.
“While these statistics indicate that this is not a widespread practice, the government of Canada recognizes the need to better understand the extent of this practice as well as its impacts,” Hussen said in his response, tabled in Parliament.
The department has commissioned CIHI to perform this research.
The issue of so-called birth tourism has been polarizing in Canada, with the Liberals defending the current law that gives automatic citizenship to anyone born on Canadian soil except for children of foreign diplomats.
Conservative party members passed a policy resolution during their biennial convention this summer calling on the government to end birthright citizenship “unless one of the parents of the child born in Canada is a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada.”
Leader Andrew Scheer said at the time one of the goals would be to end the practice of women coming to Canada simply to give birth to a child that will automatically have Canadian citizenship.
Other countries have ended or modified their birthright-citizenship laws, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, India, the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Portugal. Recently, U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to end birthright citizenship in the United States, although critics have argued such a change could violate that country’s constitution.
Canada did explore changing Canada’s existing birthright policy under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. This work ultimately found any change to the law would have significant impacts, according to a senior government official who spoke to The Canadian Press on background.
Many Canadians – 40 per cent or more – don’t have passports and use birth certificates to prove their citizenship. A change in birthright-citizenship rules would mean they’d need new forms of identification to prove their citizenship and get government services.
A 2013 estimate pegged the cost of changing the rules at $20 million to $30 million, plus $7 million in extra costs for the federal government every year, the senior official said. He further noted this did not include costs to the provinces and territories, which would be even higher because they’re responsible for more personal documents than the federal government is.
The Conservatives did not change the policy. Nor will the Liberals, said Mathieu Genest, a spokesman for Hussen.
“The birth-on-soil principle has been enshrined in our legislation since Canadian citizenship first came into existence in 1947. A change to this principle was planned by the Harper Conservatives, but abandoned after listening to the advice of experts,” Genest said. But the Immigration Department still wants a better understanding of what’s going on.
Griffith said he was inspired to delve into the question of how prevalent birth tourism is in Canada after he noted the number of non-resident births reported for Richmond Hospital in B.C. were disproportionate to the rest of the country, as calculated by Statistics Canada.
The data he collected from CIHI captured the number of mothers who paid out-of-pocket for their hospital bills, which was at least five times higher. He acknowledged this would include Canadian expatriates and foreign students whose hospital expenses were not covered by Canadian medicare.
Ontario immigration lawyer Gordon Scott Campbell said he’s had several clients in recent years who have given birth while in Canada while in the middle of legitimate refugee or immigration processes.
For example, he said some women with visitor status live with their spouses while applying for spousal sponsorship, and some refugees arrive pregnant or become pregnant while waiting for their claims to be processed.
“It would seem extremely punitive, even misogynistic, arguably, to say that no woman should be able to become pregnant or be pregnant if you’re not a permanent resident or a citizen of Canada,” Campbell said.
“Are we talking about three people a year, four people a year, flying into Canada (to give birth)?” he asked. “I’m not sure we even have any proof of that. There might be anecdotal proof out there in media articles, but if we’re talking two or three people a year, it’s hardly a national crisis justifying legislation.”
Vancouver Coastal Health, the authority that oversees the Richmond Hospital, said Thursday that taxpayers don’t pay for non-resident births. The agency provided its own statistics, which differed slightly from Griffith’s findings but which were also out of keeping with the numbers of non-resident births in Canada reported by Statistics Canada.
Statistics Canada says it generates its data from demographic information provided by vital-statistics registries in the provinces and territories. Parents complete these registry forms and are responsible for filing them with local registrars, the agency said. Griffith believes Statistics Canada might record lower numbers of non-resident births because parents put local addresses on these forms that aren’t their real permanent addresses.
As part of his response to Parliament, Hussen said Canada does not collect information on whether a woman is pregnant when entering Canada, nor can a woman legally be denied entry solely because she is pregnant or might give birth in Canada.
Brian Lilley in the Toronto Sun who also wrote an earlier piece on surrogacy and birth tourism:
When it comes to hot tourism spots in Canada, few would put suburbs like Richmond, British Columbia or Scarborough, Ontario up there with the CN Tower or the Rockies.
But to a certain kind of tourist, these suburbs, and specifically their hospitals, are all the rage.
Written by Andrew Griffith, the former director general of Immigration Canada, the paper reveals significantly more women than thought are coming to Canada to deliver their babies and leave with a Canadian passport for their child.
“The level of birth tourism nationally is at least five times greater than the 300 births captured by Statistics Canada in 2016,” Griffith writes.
Instead of the Statistics Canada number, Griffith estimates that there were 3,628 babies born to foreign parents in 2017, and that doesn’t include numbers from Quebec.
“The impact of this practice can no longer be described as insignificant given its effect on the integrity of citizenship and public perceptions that birth tourism is a fraudulent shortcut to obtaining citizenship,” Griffith writes.
These figures don’t include landed immigrants or refugees, this is simply people who are simply visiting Canada when they give birth.
While some would be people visiting on a work or student visa, Griffith says that even with a conservative estimate of 40% to 50% the number is too high.
His search for better data on birth tourism was sparked by reports earlier this year showing more than 20% of births at the Richmond Hospital just outside Vancouver were due to birth tourism.
Of 2,145 births at this hospital in 2017-18, 469 were non-resident births.
The second highest hospital tracked by Griffith for the paper is Scarborough and Rouge Hospital — Birchmount site in Toronto’s East End and St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal.
Both of those sites saw more than 9% of all births involve non-residents.
One thing all the hospitals on the list have in common is easy access to a major airport and direct flights in and out of Canada.
A petition sponsored by Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido, who represents the Richmond area, calls on the government to study the problem of birth tourism and take steps to end it.
So far the petition has garnered almost 11,000 signatures.
The previous Harper government considered taking action to stopping birth tourism but with StatsCan saying there were only a few hundred cases a year, the cost to enforce any new measures was deemed too high.
The numbers tracked by Griffith show the number of births to non-resident mothers has just about tripled between 2010 and 2017.
None of this includes the numbers I revealed in this paper a week ago showing 44% of surrogacy births in British Columbia in 2016 and 2017 were for foreign based parents using a Canadian surrogate.
Each of those children, regardless of the status of the parents, gets full Canadian citizenship and all the benefits that entails. Even if the mother only flew into Canada and checked into the hospital for the express purpose of giving birth.
Isn’t that making a mockery of our system?
Doesn’t that debase Canadian citizenship?
There are lawyers, consultants and “global mobility solutions” experts offering services on having a baby in Canada in order to get a Canadian passport for the baby.
The Conservative Party passed a resolution at their convention this past summer to end the practice of birth tourism.
That move was instantly attacked by Trudeau’s top aide Gerald Butts as, “a deeply wrong and disturbing idea.”
You’ll recall that Trudeau famously campaigned to give back Canadian citizenship to convicted terrorists who had dual citizenship and who had taken up arms against Canada.
His mantra was that a Canadian, is a Canadian, is a Canadian.
It’s a handy catch phrase and useful when the real purpose is to try and sound compassionate and scare immigrants.
The truth is that under Trudeau Canada has still stripped many people of citizenship. From former Nazis to people that lied on their applications to come here.
The simple fact of the matter is that Canadians get to decide who gets citizenship, and we do that all the time.
Changing the law to end birth tourism, a growing and disturbing trend, would hardly be controversial for most Canadians.
Let’s hope someone in the political world has the courage to take up this issue.
An article in The Breaker on the formal government response to the petition by MP Peschisolido (written before my article came out):
The federal Liberal government says it will undertake further research into birth tourism.
That, according to Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen’s Nov. 19 response to an electronic petition initiated by Richmond activist Kerry Starchuk and sponsored by Steveston-Richmond East Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido.
Starchuk’s petition, which was supported by 10,882 people, was brought to the House of Commons on Oct. 5 by Peschisolido. It called upon the government to state it opposes birth tourism, commit public resources to determine the full extent of the practice and implement concrete measures to reduce and eliminate the practice. Under federal law, MP-endorsed electronic petitions that gain 500 or more supporters within four months are tabled in the House of Commons.
Citizenship acquired through birth on soil has been in place since the first Canadian Citizenship Act of 1947, though it does not apply to children of anyone representing or working for a foreign government. Richmond Hospital averages one foreign birth a day and there have been cases where local mothers have been transferred to other hospitals to make way for foreign mothers. Petitioner Starchuk is also concerned with the potential future health and education costs to taxpayers.
The 354-word response said the government does not collect information on whether a woman is pregnant when entering the country, and a person cannot be deemed inadmissible or denied a visa if they are pregnant or if they may give birth in the country. But foreign nationals are required to state the purpose of their visit.
“Applicants must always be honest about the purpose of their visit. Providing false information or documents when dealing with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada or Canada Border Services Agency is considered misrepresentation and has significant consequences,” said the official response.
The response quoted from 2016 Statistics Canada data that said only 300 children were born to foreign women among the 385,000 babies born in the country that year. But that data has been discredited in media reports which found public agencies do not harmonize their research and there are loopholes that prevent accurate data collection.
The Richmond News reported in June that many non-resident women who give birth at Richmond Hospital list their address as a birth house or birth hostel where they are temporarily staying. Richmond Hospital saw a jump in self-pay births from non-resident mothers from 299 in 2015-2016 to 379 a year later. Most were from China.
RICHMOND HOSPITAL (MACKIN)
“Should the birth house operator list the address of their home business at the hospital’s registration desk, the ministry would not count the baby as a non-resident,” the newspaper reported. “Only when the true address of the mother is registered, does the birth become a non-resident in the eyes of Vital Statistics B.C.”
The response said the federal government “recognizes the need to better understand the extent of this practice as well as its impacts. IRCC has commissioned research from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which also show the number of children born to non-residents who were required to pay hospital expenses to be less than 1% of total births in Canada, and will undertake further research in this regard.”
Starchuk said the response lacks details about the government’s next steps.
“There’s no deadline, they’ve left it open-ended,” Starchuk told theBreaker. “How long are they going to take to do it?”
She was also perplexed why such a multifaceted issue attracted a response from only the immigration minister, but not the ministers of public safety (Ralph Goodale) or border security (Bill Blair).
The response also said the government is “committed to protecting the public from fraud and unethical consulting practices and protecting the integrity of Canada’s immigration and citizenship programs,” so it is undertaking a comprehensive review aimed at cracking down on unscrupulous consultants and those who exploit programs through misrepresentation.”
In 2016, Starchuk also petitioned the federal government to end birth tourism, but the December 2016 reply from then-Immigration Minister John McCallum dismissed the issue. McCallum was later appointed Canada’s ambassador to China.
Lastly, an op-ed by Jamie Liew of University of Ottawa law faculty written before my analysis, quoting my comments dismissing the issue as insignificant given the previous numbers (my position has evolved :):
There’s been a lot of talk about getting rid of birthright citizenship in Canada and the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he’ll issue an executive order to do so, and the Conservative Party of Canada passed a motion that, should they form the next federal government, birthright citizenship will be no more.
In the U.S., the president will have to contend with the fact that he can’t just unilaterally eliminate a right granted in the 14th Amendment of their constitution.
In Canada, birthright citizenship can be eliminated simply by amending or repealing parts of the Citizenship Act.
In both countries, the preoccupation with ending birthright citizenship is tied to the argument that migrants are engaging in “birth tourism” and challenging the integrity of citizenship. But the facts say otherwise.
As Andrew Griffith, former director general at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, points out, fewer than 0.1 per cent of total births in Canada in the past 10 years (except 2012) involved births of children to foreign mothers. Griffiths concludes, “An impartial observer would conclude that there is currently no business case for changing Canada’s birth policy.”
Aside from the business case, what’s not talked about is how the elimination of birthright citizenship would affect not just migrants, but all of us. Undoubtedly, such a policy would increase the number of stateless persons in Canada.
Every person born in Canada to non-citizen parents would have to apply for citizenship. More tax dollars would be needed to process the applications. Clerks would suddenly have the power to make substantive and legal determinations about the status of every person who applies for citizenship. Like any administrative system, mistakes would be made. Bad or wrong decisions would be challenged in the courts at great expense to both the state and people affected. People would struggle with the fact that they are stateless in the interim.
Being stateless has serious implications.
Stateless persons have difficulty accessing education, employment, health care, social services and freedom of movement. Simple things such as getting a bank account, cellphone account or registering birth, marriage or death are complicated, if not impossible. Stateless persons would be subject to arrest, detention and potential removal to places they may never have been to.
The elimination of birthright citizenship would have the greatest effect on the most vulnerable: the indigent, the less educated, those with mental illness, children in precarious family situations or wards of the state. These are the people who may not have the appropriate paperwork or proof that they do qualify for citizenship or they won’t have support for obtaining citizenship.
This one policy would create an expensive social problem for the state.
The elimination of birthright citizenship is, then, not an act to preserve or protect the integrity of citizenship. The policy is a dividing tool that fuels discrimination against those of different races and socioeconomic classes. It’s a tool to delegitimize persons who have a genuine and effective link to Canada. It would create barriers to important rights that come with citizenship, including the right to vote.
We only need to look at how stripping citizenship and the denial of citizenship in other places of the world have encouraged discrimination, persecution and violence against stateless persons. For example, the oppression of and the genocide against Rohingya people was precipitated by denial of their citizenship in Myanmar, a country they called home for generations.
Canadians should be cautious when considering the idea to get rid of birthright citizenship. It wouldn’t stop migrants from coming. Instead of making it harder to get citizenship, we should trust our well-oiled immigration system to deal with the entry of persons within our country.
Such a policy would not build confidence in the integrity of Canadian citizenship. Instead, citizenship would be more precarious than ever before.
Canadians should also be mindful that Canada has signed onto the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which obligate Canada not to create situations of statelessness.
My father was born stateless because the state he was born into didn’t confer birthright citizenship. It affected his opportunity for education, employment and his mental health.
Being a child of a previously stateless person, I’m proof enough that welcoming stateless persons to Canada with the conferral of citizenship is the best way to build a nation.
Whether or not one likes Michelle Obama, her clarification of going high provides a useful guideline in how to engage and converse with others:
By now, Michelle Obama‘s famous phrase — “When they go low, we go high” — has become something of a slogan for exercising restraint in the face of frustration. First uttered by the former First Lady in 2016, it quickly caught on.
In an interview with The New York Times while promoting her popular new memoir Becoming, Obama took the time to unpack the meaning behind her words, expanding on what “going high” really means when you’re faced with a challenge.
“‘Going high’ doesn’t mean you don’t feel the hurt, or you’re not entitled to an emotion,” she explained. “It means that your response has to reflect the solution. It shouldn’t come from a place of anger or vengefulness. Barack and I had to figure that out. Anger may feel good in the moment, but it’s not going to move the ball forward.”
She continued: “For me, when you are a public figure in power, everything you do models what you want the country to do … Responding to a dog whistle with a dog whistle is the exact opposite of what you’d teach your child to do.”
When faced with a specific scenario, Obama tactfully maintained her diplomacy. “I wouldn’t even respond,” she said.
“I say: Let’s just do the work … I’d have to understand why you feel that way. I’d have to be your friend and get into your pain and hurt, your fears. And that takes time. That’s the work that needs to happen around kitchen tables and in our communities. When I say ‘go high,’ I’m not trying to win the argument. I’m trying to figure out how to understand you and how I can help you understand me.”
During her press tour and arena appearances to promote Becoming, Obama has shed light on everything from her feelings about Donald Trump to her marriage with Barack — still “going high” in her candid moments.
Disturbing although the case seems to hinge on federal vs state authority. Will see if leads to an appeal (hopefully it will, but not sure how the current more conservative Supreme Court would rule):
In a historic ruling that strikes a chilling blow to women’s rights, a federal judge in Michigan declared unconstitutional the U.S. law against female genital mutilations (FGM), and dropped charges against two doctors for carrying out the procedure on underage girls.
U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman said Tuesday that Congress lacks the authority to outlaw the procedure, and insisted only states can make such a decision, the Detroit Free Press reports.
“As despicable as [FGM] may be,” Friedman said, Congress “overstepped its bounds” by banning the practice.
The trial was the first federal case to involve FGM, which is common religious practice in some cultures, but is internationally recognized as a human rights violation. The defendants, including three mothers, are all members of the Indian Muslim Dawoodi Bohra community.
Friedman dismissed the main charges against Jumana Nagarwala, a doctor who prosecutors said may have performed the procedure on up to 100 girls. Another doctor who allowed Nagarwala to use his clinic, that doctor’s wife and five others also saw their charges dropped. The doctors continue to face lengthy prison terms on conspiracy charges.
According to the court records, two of the mothers tricked their 7-year-olds into thinking they were going to Detroit for a girls’ trip. Instead, they had their genitals cut.
FGM typically involves cutting or even wholly removing the clitoris. The World Health Organization calls it “a violation of the human rights of girls and women” that “has no health benefits.”
In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution to ban the practice, which affects an estimated 200 million women and girls worldwide. It has also been outlawed in more than 30 countries, including the U.S., which passed a law in 1996 criminalizing FGM with a 5-year prison term.
Twenty-seven states separately passed similar measures, including Michigan in 2017. But the defendants in this case are not retroactively subject to the new law.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in Detroit said the government would review the ruling before deciding whether to appeal.
Michigan State Senator Margaret O’Brien, who backed the state ban on FGM, said she was “appalled” by Tuesday’s ruling.
Yasmeen Hassan, executive global director for gender rights group Equality Now, warned the ruling sends the message to women and girls that “you are not important.”
Wells Fargo, the financial services provider, has found that multicultural consumers have remained more supportive of its brand than the general market following a testing period for the company.
Nydia Sahagún, Well’s Fargo’s svp/segment marketing, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2018 Masters of Marketing Week.
And she reported that consumer perceptions among the multicultural audience proved to be robust even as Wells Fargo has dealt with various issues and controversies.
These include opening bank accounts without customers’ knowledge, illegally repossessing the cars of service members, wrongly fining thousands of mortgage holders, and charging some clients for auto insurance they did not need.
“What I would tell you is that, in the wake of this brand crisis, we’ve actually seen far less impact with multicultural consumers than we have with the general population,” said Sahagún. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Wells Fargo draws on multicultural strength in brand recovery.)
And the company believes this resilience can be tracked back to its long-term efforts to build bonds with multicultural consumers. “What we attribute that to is really our commitment to diversity,” she added.
Its marketing initiatives range from making native-language ads in Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish right through to championing the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities.
Beyond communications, Wells Fargo has developed several practical initiatives, too, as shown by its financial support for the American Indian/Alaska Native Communities, and pledging funds to boost Hispanic home ownership.
“Our view of [engaging] diverse and multicultural consumers is that it’s not a nice to have; it’s actually a business imperative,” Sahagún said.
“And it’s been built into the fabric of who we are for a long time. So, we have many segments that we have dedicated resources [against] that we support, we cultivate, and grow. And not all of them are cultural segments.
“But they’re important – and strategically important – to the organisation.”
It’s rare for pollsters to be able to use the word “unprecedented” to describe survey results unless they’re releasing their first poll – or giving in to the temptation to use hyperbole to get attention. But a recent Environics Institute survey has indeed revealed some unprecedented results. We’ve been fielding our Focus Canada tracking survey since November 1976, and one of the trends we’ve kept an eye on for much of that time has been Canadian attitudes toward America and its president. We first measured these attitudes after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
When our measurements began, a substantial majority of Canadians – more than 7 in 10 – admired our southern neighbour. This feeling reached its apex in 1983, when 83 percent of Canadians expressed admiration for America. Nearly 6 in 10 (58 percent) admired President Reagan.
Notably, admiration for the country at large cut across party lines. In the 1983 Focus Canada survey, Conservatives felt the most positive (87 percent), but solid majorities of Liberals (82 percent) and New Democrats (71 percent) also admired the US. America in 1983 gave the world “Billie Jean” and TheReturn of the Jedi. It also declared a national holiday to recognize the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
Today, just 37 percent of Canadians admire the United States (figure 1). Not coincidentally, only 13 percent of us approve of President Donald Trump (figure 2). These are lows we’ve never seen before. (Unfortunately, we don’t have polling going back to the War of 1812; the proportions admiring the US and its leaders might have been lower then.)
Historian Jack Granatstein has often argued that anti-Americanism is bred in the bone of people north of the 49th parallel. If so, the intensity of that sentiment has waxed and waned. It certainly softened in the period starting with the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and running through that of John F. Kennedy. Canadians admired FDR’s leadership during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Feelings of loyalty and solidarity remained strong through the Cold War.
For many of us baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1966), John F. Kennedy represented a far more dashing figure than the dour John Diefenbaker, our prime minister in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kennedy and his brother Bobby seemed to embody the vitality and idealism of America while Diefenbaker was the lumbering avatar of our relatively drab dominion.
In this exceptional period, America was much more than the leader of the free world. It offered many of the things average Canadians aspired to (partly because they’d been told to aspire to them by American advertisers): a house in the suburbs, a new car every few years, modern appliances, a martini after a hard day’s work. When Americans moved on to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, Canadians wanted those things, too. America’s status as the materialistic and hedonistic capital of the world is durable; millions of would-be migrants around the globe still long for a piece of the rags-to-riches, log-cabin-to-the-White-House American Dream.
America has given us a lot since “Billie Jean.” Its cultural and technology leaders continue to shape our worlds. We snap up Apple products, binge on Netflix and use “Uber” as a verb for getting from A to B. But even with our admiration for things American and our dependence on America’s power and its huge market for our exports, Canadians’ attitudes toward the country indicate that they are troubled by the face their neighbours are now showing to the world.
The US president with his bullyish style and America-first policies is one factor. The nightmarish mixing of guns and bigotry (Charleston, Orlando, Pittsburgh) is another. (Canada has had its own recent hate-fuelled mass murders with the Quebec City mosque shooting and the Toronto van attack.) Some Canadians would still like to see their country be more, not less, like the United States. Some might even argue that gun violence, inequality vastly greater than our own and other obvious negatives are simply the price of a society that is on the whole richer, freer and more dynamic. But a majority of Canadians seem to feel that America’s advertisements for itself are not what they used to be.
Valid question that should be asked of any similar efforts by non-profit organizations in favour of any political party. The Conservatives are particularly strong among Chinese Canadians:
Federal Elections Commissioner Yves Cote has been formally asked to investigate the relationship between the Conservative Party and 10 Chinese-Canadian conservative non-profit organizations for possible breaches of election laws.
The Liberal and NDP parties both sent letters to Mr. Cote’s office on Monday, saying an official probe is required to determine if there is collusion between the Conservatives and wealthy Toronto developer Ted Jiancheng Zhou and the non-profit groups he set up to help the party win support within the Chinese-Canadian community.
Mr. Zhou, a former Liberal donor who has condominium projects in Canada and China, set up Chinese-Canadian conservative groups in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as well as a national organization called the Federation of Chinese Canadian Conservatives (FCCC). The stated purpose of the FCCC is to assist the “Conservative Party to develop new members; disseminating ideas and policies of the Conservative Party; assisting the Conservative Party to educate and train candidates, party members and to develop volunteers.”
In his letter, NDP MP Nathan Cullen asked Mr. Cote to initiate a “formal investigation” to determine if Mr. Zhou and the Conservatives are co-ordinating their political activities “to circumvent contribution limits” in “potential contravention of election laws.”
Liberal MP Marco Mendicino wrote to Mr. Cote that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the Conservative Party of Canada and the FCCC are co-ordinating efforts to use the latter organization as a parallel political entity – akin to a Political Action Committee – which could violate the Canada Elections Act.”
The Elections Act says it is illegal for any outside or non-profit groups to be used as vehicles to evade the spending and contribution limits imposed on political parties. Canadian political financing rules restrict donations to parties or candidates to $1,575 a year and consider provisions of services or goods without charge to be non-monetary contributions subject to the same limits.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s office denied on Monday that Mr. Zhou’s organizations are involved in fundraising or helping his party to elect MPs in next year’s general election.
“The FCCC is playing no role for the Conservative Party of Canada or the Conservative Fund, no caucus members are involved in the FCCC,” communications director Brock Harrison said in an e-mail. “As far as Mr. Zhou is concerned, he does not have a role either in fundraising or organizing on the party’s behalf … He has organized the FCCC as an independent group of Chinese Canadians who want to promote conservative values in their community.”
Mr. Zhou has also denied any wrongdoing and insists he is not acting as an arm of the Conservative Party. He asserts he set up that network to promote small-c conservative causes within the Chinese-Canadian community.
The businessman made a maximum donation of $1,500 in June, 2016, to the Liberal Party and $400 in May, 2017, before switching his allegiance to the Conservatives. He said his organizations do not violate federal election laws and “we have no intention to fund raise for any candidate or the Conservative Party.”
But Canada’s former long-serving chief electoral officer told The Globe and Mail that an Elections Commission investigation is warranted into whether there was an attempt to skirt the contribution limits under the Canada Elections Act.
“It raises the questions about collusion and these are matters that should be looked at frankly in order to satisfy Canadians that the financial provisions of our status – which makes Canada a leader in this field – are being respected,” said Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who served as chief electoral officer from 1990-2007.
For example, Mr. Kingsley said, it would be collusion if non-profit or third-party organizations provided a list of volunteers to a political party or provided any other form of non-monetary benefit.
An official for the Commissioner of Canada Elections, which conducts investigations into electoral matters, says the agency can’t discuss a probe or confirm whether a particular incident is being investigated. However, Mr. Kingsley said a formal request from either MPs or the public usually triggers an investigation by the commissioner’s office.
The Liberals and the NDP also want Mr. Cote to investigate a Nov. 9 rally and dinner in Richmond Hill, Ont., that featured Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and at least 10 other MPs and senators for the inauguration of Mr. Zhou’s FCCC. Tickets were priced at $70, or $100 for VIPs, an amount that would have collected between $45,500 and $65,000, depending on the mix of ticket sales. Food and rental space cost $35,750.
A video of the rally showed former Conservative MP Chungsen Leung, who is on the FCCC advisory board, urging the crowd to “volunteer or to donate to the Conservative Party,” and Ontario PC MPP Aris Babikian said: “Without your support, manpower and financial [help] we would not be able to do it. So let’s work together to bring Andrew Scheer as the next Prime Minister of Canada.”
Mr. Zhou said there was no money left over from the event. “We raised barely enough to pay for the event itself. All the money raised are used for the event expenses,” he said in an e-mail. Expenses incurred could still qualify as a non-monetary political contribution, according to Elections Canada.
Multicultural Meanderings 