British no more: Why some UK citizens face Brexit dilemma (Austria does not allow dual citizenship)

2019/03/26 Leave a comment

Yet another consequence of Brexit:

The number of UK citizens acquiring the nationality of another EU country has shot up since the 2016 Brexit referendum.

For many Britons living in Germany, France or Italy, dual nationality solves questions about freedom of movement to work in the EU, pensions and healthcare.

But a handful of EU countries, including Austria, do not generally allow dual citizenship.

That makes things complicated for people like British opera singer Stephen Chaundy, who has lived in Vienna with his family for many years, but often works in theatres and opera houses in Germany.

“Freedom of movement matters to me,” he says.

“I know from colleagues and friends how difficult third-country [non-EU] nationals can have it, in terms of complications of sorting out visas and work permits… and I have already had the situation where a theatre in one European country has said they’re unwilling to hear me,” he adds.

Because of this, Stephen may not be British much longer.

Surrendering Britishness

“Depending on what happens, I am seriously considering having to give up being British and asking to become Austrian,” he says.

Britons who live and work in Austria will be able to continue to do so after Brexit. But there are no guarantees for people like Stephen who rely on freedom of movement.

Jan Hillerman, the secretary of support group UK Citizens in Austria, says feelings about giving up British nationality in order to obtain an Austrian passport are very mixed.

“Some people have done that. Other people are very hesitant,” she says.

“Some people think that this might be an easy way out of the whole Brexit dilemma – but in fact it isn’t: it’ll be costly and take a lot of time.”

Jan says there have been attempts to lobby the Austrian government on the issue of dual nationality for British people after Brexit.

“But I gather that that came to naught and the Austrians have made pretty clear that that’s not on the table,” she says.

Austria does allow dual citizenship in a few exceptional cases, such as those who survived the Holocaust.

In the event of a disorderly Brexit, the Austrian government has said it will allow dual citizenship for around 25,000 Austrians living in Britain – but not for the 11,000 Britons living in Austria.

Why Austria has a problem with dual nationality

In general, the idea of dual nationality is frowned upon here – not least because of tensions with the Turkish minority in Austria.

The far-right Freedom Party – now the junior partner in Austria’s coalition government – has been behind an investigation into whether some Turks in Austria have illegally maintained both Turkish and Austrian nationalities.

Political analyst Thomas Hofer says this colours the whole issue of dual nationality.

“There was a heated debate… saying that there are a lot of Turkish people (who are) Austrian citizens living here and voting in Turkey, especially for President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan,” he says.

Since then, dual citizenship has become “a touchy issue”.

“The government in the last couple of weeks and months did everything to be very harsh and very strict… the government said that it wanted to avoid this kind of double citizenship.”

A spokesman for the Austrian government, Peter Launsky, acknowledged that Austria had “a more restrictive approach to dual citizenship”.

But he said British citizens were welcome in Austria.

“It is very important to keep stressing that Austria does and will continue to receive British citizens with open arms, irrespective of the outcome of the Brexit process,” he said.

“Any of the British citizens in Austria are extremely well qualified and make a very active and positive contribution to the Austrian labour market.

“And we are very appreciative of that fact… everything will be done to ensure as much continuity as possible, irrespective of the question of citizenship.”

On stage Stephen Chaundy moves smoothly back and forth between the Viennese and English-speaking repertoire.

His latest role was as a Habsburg aristocrat, Count Tassilo – the lead in the classic Viennese operetta Graefin Mariza, at the Theatre Magdeburg in Germany. He is about to go to the Cologne Opera to play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

But in life it is not so simple.

“Although I’ve spent over a third of my life in Austria, I am a Londoner, an Englishman, a Brit – but I’m also European and a big, big part of me is, of course, deeply attached to Austria,” he said.

“If Austria would permit dual nationality I would have taken it in a heartbeat. They are both parts of who I am. They’re both parts of my adult life.

“They’re both parts of my identity and it feels terribly unjust and unfair to have to be asked to choose.”

Source: British no more: Why some UK citizens face Brexit dilemma

Filed under Citizenship, Dual Citizenship Tagged with ,

Conservative Universities and Intellectual Diversity

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

Some interesting reflections on academic freedom and constraints, along with the risks of further political and ideological separation:
“Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction,” began a study released in 2012. By 2014, another study reported, the ratio of liberals to conservatives among American college and university faculty was 6 to 1 nationwide, and 28 to 1 in New England. Still more recent research suggests that the overall national trend may be moving further to the left. As Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College recently learned, even just pointing out these tendencies can land you in troublewith students and peers.So if you’re a conservative scholar who cares about the American academy and wants to participate in it, what are you to do? One recent suggestion: Start your own university.

In National Affairs, Frederick M. Hess and Brendan Bell make the case for a new university hospitable to conservative thought:

What is needed, then, is a place where serious scholars can have the space to pursue questions and subjects that don’t fit the progressive orthodoxy at today’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. We need an incubator where promising young intellectuals could pursue their research without being forced to conform to the prevailing ideology, and where they can find the scaffolding—employment, funding, networks, and publication outlets—to enable them to achieve independent viability. What is needed is an ivory tower of our own.

Hess and Bell frame their proposal in largely constructive and unresentful ways. We might note that their express concern is not to enforce a conservative orthodoxy, but to free scholars from obeisance to a progressive one (“without being forced to conform to the prevailing ideology”). Later in the essay, they write, “Though there is no doubt that conservative thought is unwelcome in the academy, it is a mistake to imagine this is the product of a concerted, organized effort to expunge it. The issue is not one of conspiracy but a matter of rhythms, routines, and behaviors that add up to what those on the left might, in another context, term ‘implicit bias’ or ‘progressive privilege.’” The reluctance to invoke a vast left-wing conspiracy to explain the disparities is welcome, in the way that the reluctance to invoke vast conspiracies to explain anything is generally welcome.

And later still, they make an important distinction: “The aim is to create an incubator—not a sanctuary. Talented graduate students and junior faculty who might be marginalized elsewhere would have an opportunity to find accomplished senior colleagues eager and able to mentor them—allowing them to develop the kind of body of work that would give them a meaningful shot at success anywhere in academe. The goal is to spawn scholars and public thinkers equipped to thrive in other academic institutions and to contribute to the public discourse.”

What Hess and Bell are trying to do here is steer between the Scylla of being insufficiently different from existing universities and the Charybdis of imposing another set of political orthodoxies that merely mirror the existing ones. It’s not easy, and few conservative critics of the academy have managed it.

For instance, Warren Treadgold of St. Louis University recently published a book titled The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, in which he called for a university that is “traditional in character but not specifically ‘conservative’ in politics”—which sounds good. And yet, in a recent blog post, Treadgold wrote about the need for such a new university to “hire the right people,” and described those people in this way: “From what I know of the best conservative scholars, if they were hired and supported at a leading conservative university, they would be delighted to produce research combating multiculturalism, radical feminism, identity studies, the diversity doctrine, the idealization of victimhood, socialism, sustainability, and postmodernism.” It’s hard for me to see how a university composed of such people would not be “specifically ‘conservative’ in politics,” though I suppose that would depend on how you define conservative.

But what I find more concerning about Treadgold’s model university is how self-consciously polemical he wants it to be, how strongly he wants it to define itself by what it opposes. He warns, in martial language, of “moderates afraid to combat the leftist ideas that have devastated higher education,” and avers that “only a conservative research university could free conservative scholars to combat leftist ideology.” I think Hess and Bell do a much better job of emphasizing what such a new university would be for: academic freedom, the freedom to explore potentially conservative ideas without fear of reprisals from the guardians of unwritten—and perhaps, these days, actually written—orthodoxies.

But as Peter Wood points out in the post to which Treadgold is replying in his post, it’s impossible, in the current climate, to pursue that kind of freedom in a non-polemical way. One cannot, in fact, steer between Scylla and Charybdis—one of them will get you. Wood agrees that “multiculturalism, radical feminism, identity studies, the diversity doctrine, the idealization of victimhood, socialism, sustainability, and postmodernism” are “forces that cannot be excluded by a university simply deciding that we won’t give those doctrines a place in the curriculum. Those doctrines will be imposed, welcome or not, if the university doesn’t make the decision from the outset to oppose them root and branch.”

But if a university decides ab initio to exclude such ideas, then what becomes of academic freedom? Wood clearly shows the double bind: “The new university will have to compromise its commitment to the liberal arts and open inquiry from the very start. It cannot be ‘open’ to the ideas that will destroy it. But if it is not open to those ideas, it cannot be a truly liberal institution.”My own conservative credentials are dubious enough that I might not be acceptable at such an institution—or so I think, living and working as I do in Texas. (On the other hand, if I were at Sarah Lawrence … let’s just say that at Sarah Lawrence I would be, as the saying goes, seen as rather to the right of Attila the Hun.) But I think I have some experience that might suggest a way out of the bind that Peter Wood has rightly identified.

That way out will require some conceptual adjustments, and a willingness to learn from institutions that have had to deal with similar issues. I am thinking of religiously based colleges and universities; I know something about them because I have worked for them all my adult life (after being educated in public institutions). The adjustments begin with reconsidering what we mean, in an academic context, when we talk about “freedom” and “openness.”

Often over the years, I have found myself quoting a passage from an essay by Stanley Fish titled “Vicki Frost Objects.” Fish, taking up his occasional role as legal scholar, was reflecting on a fundamentalist Christian who protested that her local public school was “indoctrinating” her children in secular thought. In the process of explaining why the usual way people think about this kind of conflict is wrong, Fish made a telling point:

What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed.

What Fish helps us to see is that academic freedom is a concept relative to a given faculty member’s structures of belief. As someone who believes that Jesus is Lord, I feel very free when I’m teaching at schools that let me say that, even in class. If I were a socialist atheist, I might be rather uncomfortable. If I were a socialist atheist, Sarah Lawrence might be a better fit.

With respect to the issues under discussion here, the real difference between an explicitly Christian school such as the ones I’ve taught at, or a Jewish institution such as Yeshiva University, and a school such as Sarah Lawrence is this: The religious schools are explicit about their commitments; Sarah Lawrence isn’t. No Sarah Lawrence job announcement is likely to contain the sentence “Conservative Christians”—or Jews, or Muslims, or even atheists, probably—“need not apply.” But then, it doesn’t have to, does it? Especially after l’affaire Abrams.

The general conclusion to be drawn here is simple and straightforward: Academic freedom is always constrained in multiple ways. It is constrained by law; by a given discipline’s sense of its own professional standards and practices; by a given university’s sense of institutional mission. (This is one of the main reasons Jonathan Haidt’s straightforward contrast between two types of universities, Truth U and Social Justice U, doesn’t really match the conditions on the academic ground.)Fish’s point doesn’t render academic freedom illusory or insignificant—indeed, in my experience it has been vital, because at several points in my career, I have written essays that angered influential donors to the institutions where I worked, and if I had not had the protection of tenure, I might have lost my job. Or, more likely, if I had not had the protection of tenure then, fearful of reprisal, I wouldn’t have published those essays in the first place—even though I believed very strongly in what I wrote.

Nevertheless, academic freedom remains constrained. If you make social justice (as it is typically defined) a key component of your institutional mission, then you will deny employment to people who think social justice (as it is typically defined) is a load of hooey. And if, at the level of institutional mission, you think that social justice (as it is typically defined) is, if not necessarily a load of hooey, then at best a highly debatable concept, then you will deny employment to people who insist that they know what social justice is, that you can find it on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter feed, and that its core principles are not up for discussion.

There is, therefore, no need for people who want to found a conservative university to insist that their principles do not put them at odds with a commitment to academic freedom. Their principles, like those of every university, will require a partial and mission-limited commitment to academic freedom; they will differ from the Sarah Lawrences of the world not in that they have limits, but in their openness and honesty about those limits.

To be sure, those commitments create problems. What happens if someone hired to teach free-market economics at a conservative university reads Thomas Piketty and becomes a socialist? Presumably the same thing that happens to a professor at a Christian college who loses his faith in Jesus, or a professor of social justice who finds her eyes opened to new and different truths by a close reading of Atlas Shrugged. It’s a problem. But it’s a problem for all universities, not just conservative or Christian ones.

So the academic-freedom issue is something of a red herring. The larger issue that proponents of a conservative university must face is that of intellectual diversity. Were a few conservative universities to pop up, we might indeed see a net increase of intellectual diversity in American higher education taken as a whole, taken as a single entity. But we would surely get even less intellectual diversity than we currently have within any given institution. This would not be an altogether unappealing future for people, like me, whose stated positions on religious and cultural matters make them unemployable in perhaps 98 percent of American colleges and universities. But would it be good for the country as a whole?

It is easy to foresee, after this institutional fissiparousness, a future in which children attend ideologically monolithic high schools, pass from there to ideologically monolithic colleges, and afterward go on either to ideologically monolithic graduate programs or to ideologically monolithic workplaces. All of which would bring Americans several steps closer to a fundamental and permanent political separation. People would go through their lives never seriously confronting alternatives to their most cherished beliefs—and, yes, that happens all too often already, but that surely is no reason to press still harder on the accelerator that would take us to that particular future. One can see the appeal of a supposedly (though surely only temporarily) more peaceable future, but that would be a very sad way to see the American experiment come to an end.

Source: Conservative Universities and Intellectual Diversity

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Urback: If Trudeau takes his own advice, he will take a stand against Quebec’s religious symbols ban: Robyn Urback

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

Valid test:

October 2018 was less than two years after a madman named Alexandre Bissonnette opened fire in a Quebec mosque, killing six people. And October 2018 was the same month a gunman walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and opened fire, killing 11. By that time, reported hate crimes in Canada had reached an all-time high, with every other week bringing a new report about hateful vandalism appearing in public spaces.

October 2018 was also the last time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in at length on the plan by Quebec Premier FrançoisLegault to implement a ban on religious symbols worn by public servants — a xenophobic dog whistle, for those trained to hear the call.

Not unlike the proposed “values charter” tabled by the Parti Québécois under Pauline Marois, Legault’s religious symbols ban will prohibit teachers and other provincially employed “authority figures” from wearing symbols of faith on the job.

While its defenders point out that the ban will apply to Christians as much as Muslims, Sikhs and Jews — though the crucifix hanging in Quebec’s National Assembly will stay in place, for now — the message is clear in the context of Quebec’s enduring anxieties over immigration and diversity. A province obsessed with maintaining its language and culture is not drawing up legislation to rid the public sector of tiny crosses worn around teachers’ necks.

So back in October, Trudeau issued a warning. When asked about Legault’s threat to use the charter’s notwithstanding clause to implement the ban, Trudeau said: “It’s not something that should be done lightly, because to remove or avoid defending the fundamental rights of Canadians, I think it’s something with which you have to pay careful attention.”

Trudeau also said, ostensibly in reference to clothing such as hijabs, that the state should not “tell a woman what she can or cannot wear.”

It was tepid language for a nakedly bigoted proposal — strikingly so, especially when viewed through the lens of today, after the monstrous act of violence and hatred carried out in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.

The attack on two mosques there last Friday, which left 50 people dead and dozens more injured, struck a nerve globally in a way the Quebec mosque shooting simply did not. Perhaps it was because of the scale of the violence, or in part because the massacre was live streamed on social media, but the Christchurch attack appears to have catalyzed action worldwide.

Here in Canada, the response was swift. The Liberals on the Commons justice and human rights committee, which had been investigating the SNC-Lavalin affair, shut down its inquiry and took up an investigation on how to stem hate crimes in Canada. Cabinet ministers started showing up at mosques to demonstrate their solidarity with the Muslim community. And the prime minister delivered an impassioned 17-minute speech in the House of Commons about the need to speak out against hatred and discrimination.

“The problem is not only that politicians routinely fail to denounce this hatred — it’s that, in too many cases, they actively court those who spread it,” Trudeau said at one point, taking a not-so-subtle shot at Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.

“To politicians and leaders around the world: the dog whistle politics, the ease with which certain people choose to adopt extremist ideology — it has to stop.”

Trudeau went on:

“Politicians stand around, and we offer our condolences, and we say nice things in the aftermath. We say that we’ll do better. We say that never again will such hatred be allowed to fester unchallenged. And then, when the flames die down, and the smoke clears, we look the other way.”

Not looking the other way

Legault has signalled he will table his religious symbols ban sometime this spring. If passed, it will essentially allow the state to discriminate against job applicants because of what they wear for their faith. Vigilante enforcement is sure to follow, given that the province says it will grandfather in workers who already wear religious symbols, though the public will have no way of knowing whether a hijab-wearing teacher, for example, has been granted an exception, or if she is breaking the rules.

So here is an opportunity for Trudeau to put his preaching into practice. It’s easy to call out hatred when it is blatant: an anti-Muslim screed on an online message board or a swastika painted on the side of a building. It is also easy to insist we must speak out against bigotry and xenophobia as general concepts, from a nonspecific source.

It is much more difficult, however, to call out dog whistles and subtle efforts at division and prejudice. Especially in an election year. Especially when it comes from Quebec.

I hold little hope that Scheer is capable of doing so; based on recent appearancesand performances, it’s likely he would short-circuit, smile awkwardly and later insist that he didn’t hear the question. But Trudeau stood in the House of Commons earlier this week and specifically called on politicians to own their influence.

To repeat Trudeau’s words: “Politicians stand around, and we offer our condolences, and we say nice things in the aftermath. We say that we’ll do better. We say that never again will such hatred be allowed to fester unchallenged. And then, when the flames die down, and the smoke clears, we look the other way.”

The flames may die down and the smoke clear by the time Legault tables his legislation. Trudeau’s message that politicians should not allow hatred to fester unchallenged is a necessary one. Yet his anemic response when the topic came up in October was the moral equivalent of looking the other way. In the aftermath of the New Zealand massacre, we should hope that he finally takes his own advice.

Source: If Trudeau takes his own advice, he will take a stand against Quebec’s religious symbols ban: Robyn Urback

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Supreme Court Rules Against Immigration Rights In Detention Case

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

Unfortunate. Should be a limit:

In a blow to immigrant rights, the Supreme Court voted Tuesday in favor of detaining immigrants with criminal records indefinitely pending deportation hearings, even if their cases were adjudicated years before.

The court’s 5-4 ruling overturns the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which limited federal officials to denying bail only if they take immigrants without U.S. citizenship into custody immediately after their release from criminal custody, CNN reports.

In the case brought before the Supreme Court, a group of mostly green card holders said they should be entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge to prove they do not pose a flight risk and are not a danger to the community, NBC News reports.

The five conservative justices voting for the decision argued the U.S. government has limited resources to detain all convicted immigrants immediately after release, so they should be allowed to detain them without bail months or years later.

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

“It runs the gravest risk of depriving those whom the government has detained of one of the oldest and most important of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms: the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law,” Breyer said. He added that the “greater importance of the case lies in the power” afforded to the government.

Under federal immigration law, immigrants with criminal records facing deportation proceedings are subject to mandatory detention, and can be held indefinitely without a bond hearing, even after completing their sentences.

The American Civil Liberties Union responded to the ruling on Twitter and said the government’s interpretation of the statute “has resulted in gross violations of due process for thousands.”

Source: Supreme Court Rules Against Immigration Rights In Detention Case

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Québec évoque un nouvel accompagnement pour mieux intégrer les immigrants

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

While Quebec reduces the number of immigrants, it also invests in integration programs (reducing the gap between the federal government’s block grant to Quebec and Quebec’s actual expenditures):

Le Québec étant aux prises avec des pénuries de main-d’oeuvre à divers degrés dans plusieurs secteurs et régions, le budget du gouvernement Legault a évoqué jeudi un nouveau « parcours d’accompagnement personnalisé » pour les immigrants de même que des moyens supplémentaires annuels de 146 millions au ministère de l’Immigration, de la Diversité et de l’Inclusion. Les détails du parcours seront annoncés plus tard.

Les sommes destinées à l’immigrationreprésentent une hausse de 42 % du budget du ministère, a fait remarquer le Syndicat de professionnelles et professionnels du gouvernement du Québec (SPGQ). Il s’agit ni plus ni moins que d’une « bouffée d’air frais », a déclaré son président, Richard Perron. Sur cinq ans, les nouvelles sommes totalisent 730 millions.

Les efforts visant une meilleure intégration au marché du travail incluront notamment une amélioration des services à la francisation, a indiqué le ministre des Finances, Eric Girard. Mais dans l’ensemble, les nouvelles façons de faire de Québec toucheront plusieurs aspects de l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants, notamment la planification, la prospection, le recrutement international et la sélection. Le budget mentionne également un soutien aux collectivités qui accueillent des immigrants et aux entreprises.

Le gouvernement Legault a confirmé en décembre 2018 qu’il comptait réduire de 53 000 à 40 000 le seuil annuel d’immigration, ce qui avait déçu le milieu des affaires, notamment le Conseil du patronat, qui décrit ces travailleurs comme un bassin « essentiel » pour combler les besoins de main-d’oeuvre de la prochaine décennie.

Le Québec est « ouvert aux immigrants », a dit M. Girard dans son discours, ajoutant que « cette immigration doit cependant répondre aux besoins de main-d’oeuvre existants dans toutes les régions du Québec ».

Source: Québec évoque un nouvel accompagnement pour mieux intégrer les immigrants

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South Florida Sees a Boom in Russian ‘Birth Tourism’

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

Another birth tourism centre and clientele:

Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards — unlike dismal clinics back home — can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation.

The Russians are part of a wave of “birth tourists” that includes sizable numbers of women from China and Nigeria.

President Donald Trump has spoken out against the provision in the U.S. Constitution that allows “birthright citizenship” and has vowed to end it, although legal experts are divided on whether he can actually do that.

Although there have been scattered cases of authorities arresting operators of birth tourism agencies for visa fraud or tax evasion, coming to the U.S. to give birth is fundamentally legal. Russians interviewed by The Associated Press said they were honest about their intentions when applying for visas and even showed signed contracts with doctors and hospitals.

There are no figures on how many foreign women travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter immigration laws, estimated that in 2012, about 36,000 foreign-born women gave birth in the U.S., then left the country.

The Russian contingent is clearly large. Anton Yachmenev of the Miami Care company that arranges such trips, told the AP that about 150 Russian families a year use his service, and that there are about 30 such companies just in the area.

South Florida is popular among Russians not only for its tropical weather but also because of the large Russian-speaking population. Sunny Isles Beach, a city just north of Miami, is even nicknamed “Little Moscow.”

“With $30,000, we would not be able to buy an apartment for our child or do anything, really. But we could give her freedom. That’s actually really cool,” said Olga Zemlyanaya, who gave birth to a daughter in December and was staying in South Florida until her child got a U.S. passport.

An American passport confers many advantages. Once the child turns 21, he or she can apply for “green card” immigration status for the parents.

A U.S. passport also gives the holder more travel opportunities than a Russian one; Americans can make short-term trips to more than 180 countries without a visa, while Russians can go visa-free only to about 80.

Traveling to the U.S. on a Russian passport often requires a laborious interview process for a visa. Just getting an appointment for the interview can take months.

Some Russians fear that travel opportunities could diminish as tensions grow between Moscow and the West, or that Russia might even revert to stricter Soviet-era rules for leaving the country.

“Seeing the conflict growing makes people want to take precautions because the country might well close its borders. And if that happens, one would at least have a passport of a different country and be able to leave,” said Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist for the Latvia-based Russian website Meduza that is sharply critical of the Kremlin.

Last year, Zhegulev sold two cars to finance a trip to California for him and his wife so she could give birth to their son.

Trump denounced birthright citizenship before the U.S. midterm election, amid ramped up rhetoric on his hard-line immigration policies. The president generally focuses his ire on the U.S.-Mexico border. But last fall he mentioned he was considering executive action to revoke citizenship for babies born to non-U.S. citizens on American soil. No executive action has been taken.

The American Civil Liberties Union, other legal groups and even former House Speaker Paul Ryan, typically a supporter of Trump’s proposals, said the practice couldn’t be ended with an order.

But others, like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for less immigration, said the practice is harmful.

“We should definitely do everything we can to end it, because it makes a mockery of citizenship,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an outspoken Russian lawmaker, said the country can’t forbid women from giving birth abroad, and many of them also travel to Germany and Israel.

“Trump is doing everything right, because this law is used as a ploy. People who have nothing to do with the U.S. use it to become citizens,” Zhirinovsky said.

Floridians have shown no problem with the influx of expectant mothers from Russia.

Yachmenev, the agency manager, says he believes it’s good for the state because it brings in sizable revenue.

Svetlana Mokerova and her husband went all out, renting an apartment with a sweeping view. She relished the tropical vibe, filling her Instagram account with selfies backed by palm trees and ocean vistas.

“We did not have a very clear understanding about all the benefits” of a U.S. passport, she said.

“We just knew that it was something awesome,” added Mokerova, who gave birth to a daughter after she was interviewed.

Zemlyanaya said that even her two nights in the hospital were a treat, like “a stay in a good hotel.”

In contrast to the few amenities of a Russian clinic, she said she was impressed when an American nurse gave her choices from a menu for her meals.

“And then when she said they had chocolate cake for dessert, I realized I was in paradise,” Zemlyanaya added.

She even enjoyed how nurses referred to patients as “mommies,” as opposed to “rozhenitsa,” or “birth-giver” — the “unpleasant words they use in Russian birth clinics.”

Zemlyanaya said she was able to work remotely during her stay via the internet, as were the husbands of other women, keeping their income flowing. Yachmenev said his agency doesn’t allow any of the costs to be paid by insurance.

Most of the families his agency serves have monthly incomes of about 300,000 rubles ($4,500) — middling by U.S. standards but nearly 10 times the average Russian salary.

Yachmenev said he expects that birth tourism among Russians will only grow.

Business declined in 2015 when the ruble lost about half its value, but “now we are coming back to the good numbers of 2013-14,” he said.

Source: South Florida Sees a Boom in Russian ‘Birth Tourism’

Filed under Birth Tourism, Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

The White-Extinction Conspiracy Theory Is Bonkers

2019/03/22 1 Comment

Farhad Manjoo, who used to write on tech issues, takes down the “replacement” arguments:

“The Great Replacement” is a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that holds that white people face existential decline, even extinction, because of rising immigration in the West and falling birthrates among white women (caused, of course, by feminism).

That’s pretty much the whole argument; as a bit of rhetoric, the theory is about as deep as the one pushed by flat-earthers, though without that group’s scientific rigor. White people are not going extinct. As a group, they are only maybe, possibly, becoming a smaller share of the population in the United States and Europe — but how much smaller is a wide-open question among demographers, because the future is unknowable and demography is an imprecise science.

Demography is not destiny, either. Even if, several decades from now, whites do become a racial minority, they will not automatically lose much of their vast economic and political power, because this is America, where inequality is tolerated and an aggrieved and wealthy political minority can hold sway indefinitely, thanks to the Senate and the Electoral College.

But what “The Great Replacement” lacks in any factual basis it makes up for in digital branding appeal. The white-extinction theory plays well online. It has found its greatest purchase among a certain type of basement-dwelling incel edgelord, to whom it offers both an explanation for self-pitying personal circumstance and a set of convenient antagonists (roughly, the blame falls on race-betraying, sexually empowered women; immigrants; and the Jews said to control the whole system).

The theory has also found a foothold in more mainstream political circles. Donald Trump has flirted with Twitter users who espouse white-extinction theory, Tucker Carlson caresses it lovingly every now and then, and Steve King grabs it by the baby.

Still, to really pop, the theory needed a hashtag, something catchy. “White genocide” was one branding possibility, but that label has failed to take off — perhaps because a claim of “genocide” requires unmistakable mass death, and what we’re talking about here is gradual, peaceful demographic change. As one pseudonymous YouTuber who has made a fantastic video debunking the white-extinction theory notes tartly: “That’s white privilege for you: We even get the nice version of genocide.”

Enter “The Great Replacement.” For white supremacists, the new term offers several branding advantages. First, it sounds kinda smart. The phrase was coined in 2012, as “le grand remplacement,” by theFrench writer Renaud Camus, giving the whole movement a patina of ivory tower intellectualism. “Replacement” is also more polite than “genocide,” which fits with a long-term effort among white supremacists to craft a cleaner-cut image for themselves (that’s why the hipster new term for “white supremacist” is “identitarian,” though to me that sounds like a Brooklyn dietary preference.)

But for budding racist influencers, perhaps the best marketing feature of “the Great Replacement” is that it offered fantastic possibilities in search results. On Google and YouTube, there are not a lot of sites and videos tied to that keyword — and, in particular, there are not that many sources countering their arguments.

Which brings us to why I’m writing to debunk the theory now: when a man killed 50 people in a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week, he called his loopy manifesto “The Great Replacement.”

“The attacker was structuring his manifesto not only to speak to audiences but to algorithms,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard. “‘The Great Replacement’ is a ‘data void,’ in the sense that it would be very easy to capture that space on the front page of Google.”

Which is just what happened. After the shooting, Google searches for “great replacement” spiked. And although Google returns several skeptical articles and videos for the term, it also gives a lot of pro-conspiracy content — including, for much of the weekend, the shooter’s manifesto on the first page of search results.

Consider this column, then, an attempt to fill that data void. Research shows that when you present white people with facts that counter the white-extinction theory, they become less alarmed and anxious about demographic change.

So, to anyone who got to this piece after searching “great replacement,” here are some facts:

Racial categories are blurry, and there’s a big debate among demographers about how one of the fastest-growing racial groups — people of mixed-race who have one white parent — will identify in the future. It could be that they will not be thought of as “white.” It could also be that they will marry white people, have mostly white children, and generally become “absorbed” into mainstream white culture, which is what has happened with previous generations of immigrants who were not considered white (like Eastern and Southern Europeans). Under the most inclusive definitions of whiteness, America could remain a white-majority society indefinitely.

It’s true that there are some pernicious social problems affecting white Americans, among them a rise in death rates from drug overdoses and suicide, known as “deaths of despair.”

But these negative trends are not racially existential. Overall, across a range of health measures like infant mortality and life expectancy, white Americans are neither the least nor the most healthy Americans — they are somewhere in the middle. And white people are still by far the wealthiest Americans. The net worth of the median black American family is only around fifteen percent of that of the median white American family. While most other groups experienced a net decrease in wealth in the six years after the Great Recession, “white families’ net worth was essentially unchanged,” according to government surveys. Whites are also less likely than people of other races to live in poverty, and they are more likely to be among the superrich. Just about every American chief executive, billionaire and large political donor is a white person.

The current Congress is the most racially diverse in history — and about 8 of 10 members is white. Every single one of our 45 presidents has been a white man, except one, who was half white. By my count, there are now 17 candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination; 11 of them, or almost two-thirds, are white, including the two who have raised the most money so far.

Sure, white political overrepresentation is likely to fall. But not quickly, and not drastically. According to one projection, in the 2036 election, 59 percent of voters will be white.

The Great Replacement is a lie. The country is becoming more diverse, but white people are not losing their grip on America, nor on the world, not by a long shot.

Source: The White-Extinction Conspiracy Theory Is Bonkers

Filed under Multiculturalism

What is gained by stripping ISIL returnees of citizenship?

2019/03/22 Leave a comment

While I agree citizenship revocation is counterproductive, I find this to be an overly sympathetic view of the women who supported ISIL, given the difficulties is establishing what they did and did not do during their time there, not to mention the difficulty in laying charges and securing convictions:

The first ISIL recruit I interviewed, in 2014 in Delft, the Netherlands, was a 22-year-old woman who had become an ISIL bride after being indoctrinated by a recruiter. It took the recruiter two months of continuous communication online to convince her to join what he called “the cause” and to be “part of the global struggle against the atrocities of the West.”

After months of clandestine planning, Zoleikha (not her real name) cautiously set out for the airport, ready to step aboard a flight to Iraq. She had followed every detail of the recruiter’s guidance except one: She left a short note to her family, telling them of her decision.

The family had suspected something was up. Zoleikha had been evasive for a while, and they had got in the routine of searching her room for clues when she was out of the house. When her father found the note, his heart skipped a beat and he could barely breathe. He knew what he had to do. Not more than an hour went by before the authorities stopped Zoleikha as she was about to board the plane.

I spoke with her father, a man of Moroccan descent, who owned the local dry-cleaning business. He was a hard-working family man. Of his four children, one was in high school and three had graduated from college, including Zoleikha. He had built a new life for his family and hoped his children would prosper.

He and his family followed some cultural traditions and occasionally attended mosque services. But it was important to him that his children assimilate into European culture. When he found the note, he remembered an Imam who had spoken about the challenges of radicalization and the need to be vigilant about recruiters within their community. The Imam had encouraged partnership with the local government and trust of the authorities.

Out of desperation, the father called the authorities. He told me he had done it for his daughter’s sake and for the sake of the country that had given him a new beginning. Zoleikha never reached Iraq. She was arrested, and then she was lucky enough to be released conditionally under court supervision.

There are many women who were not fortunate enough to have such an intervention. By most estimates, approximately 5,000 European citizens have been recruited to Iraq and Syria by ISIL since 2013. Many of the women left family, freedom and fortune to pursue an uncertain future. They arrived in Syria and Iraq, and what happened to them after that is a mystery. However, now, with the demise of the Islamic State, they are contemplating returning to the countries they left behind.

In Europe, conversations about the fate of returnees have intensified since the UK Home Office decided to strip British citizenship from Shamima Begum — who joined ISIL at 15 along with two other schoolgirls from the UK. The question for us as a society is: What do we do in these cases? Is appropriate to indiscriminately strip members of such a heterogeneous group of citizenship?

Debate has focused on legal questions that surround such a move, which would cause the troublesome dilemma of creating stateless individuals. However, human rights and counter-terrorism strategies deserve more consideration than they have gotten.

There are three main factors to consider in the complex matter of ISIL recruits who want to come home.

Why they left their home country

The first step is figuring out whether those who joined ISIL qualify as foreign terrorist fighters or whether they just went along for the ride. Some of the recruits have carried out unspeakable acts, but there are others who have supported ISIL through nonviolent means (as jihadi brides) or were forced to go along (wives and children).

It is vital to understand the spectrum of active participation to passive victimhood, as it has become clear that some of the women have suffered repeated traumas while having little willful participation in ISIL activities. Of course, few cases are likely to fall at the extremes of the spectrum. The majority of returnees likely will fall somewhere in the middle.

We need to approach the way we deal with these returnees across a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum we can imagine rare instances where an individual would be welcomed home without retribution and would re-enter society. There might also be exceptional instances where revoking citizenship and/or meting out the harshest punishments is appropriate. A case-by-case approach would help in the determination of what is a proportional response and appropriateness of criminal investigations.

How vulnerable to coercion were they?

The global terrorism database suggests that a leading factor in the ultimate decision to pursue a life of terrorism is a sense of societal alienation. This can be particularly heightened in young people whose sense of self is still developing and who suffer from self-estrangement. My field work shows that those who have sought to join ISIL from Western countries are not poor or uneducated, although poverty and lack of education are typically possible factors leading to vulnerability.

Alienation has been described as a leading driver, particularly among second-generation immigrants. Those who experience feelings of alienation seek empowerment, identity and a purpose often in misguided ways. Counselling can help with identity crisis, however, youths can fall into recruiters’ traps of before any such help arrives. This is not to release all blame and culpability for unforgivable actions. But many of the young women who were coaxed into joining the cause with a promise of identity and empowerment were subject to further alienation and subjugation. A person whose vulnerabilities have been exploited is quite different from one who knowingly and purposefully seeks out “the cause.”

The circumstances of their return

No country wants to threaten the security of its citizens by welcoming with open arms anyone who has been radicalized and continues to hold on to a jihadi mission. However, not all of those who wish to return are still aligned with “the cause.” Some returnees admit that they lived through nightmare experiences that were nothing like what they had been promised. And now they feel regret and remorse.

Policy-makers and academics can work with former recruits and terrorists and tell their stories in compelling ways so that others can learn why they started on a terrorist trajectory and see how it did not work out. They can shed light on the coercive tactics used by recruiters and ultimately help to devise counter-terrorism strategies that are not reactive but rather preventative.

In the world of securitization and advanced terrorism studies, the goal of counter-terrorism is to prevent attacks. Populist extrajudicial rulings against returnees, for example stripping them of their citizenship, could weaken and drastically derail these long-term prevention efforts by deepening society’s divisions. They could also create a perfect breeding ground for further radicalism. By allowing people who joined ISIL back into their home countries and putting them on trial, we can reduce such risks and furthermore create societal benefits.

As Fiona de Londras shows, upholding human rights and the rule of law does not hamper our ability to act. It enhances it, and is essential to the long-term success of counter-terrorism efforts.

Of course, until the police and courts determine whether and to what degree the returnees are culpable, returnees should be put in some sort of penitentiary facilities. If the courts find them guilty, they have to be sentenced for their crimes. If the courts and the police agree that they do not pose a substantial danger (be it through radicalization of others or inflicting violence), returnees should enter into a reintegration program that will help them re-establish familial and community ties. These returnees need help to find ways to participate in society and to address the alienation they might have experienced. Reintegration is important in the long term to reduce the risk of radicalization – both for the individual and for society. It fosters belonging, which is something the politics of fear cannot do.

These returnees might well serve as the best source of data. In counter-terrorism studies, field research is very limited. Because of security and access restrictions researchers often depend on incomplete secondary accounts and analysis. Working with returnees would allow us to better align counter-terrorism measures with the forces that activate terrorism, thereby achieving the goal of deterrence and perhaps prevention.

Disillusionment and disengagement in returnees can serve as cautionary tales for others by illustrating the false realities of joining such a mission. Stripping citizenship and other arbitrary punishments only support the extremist belief that the West does not care about the rest (i.e., Muslim citizens), leading to further escalation by pushing marginalized individuals and communities farther away from mainstream society. Such acts breed mistrust, making it less likely that marginalized groups will approach authorities when there is a problem of any kind.

“Why did you want to join ISIL?” I asked Zoleikha. She looked conflicted. “What could be greater than being part of building a new state?” she responded. She still seemed to be grappling with her identity.

Her father was relieved that he had been able to stop her before it was too late. And if she had been stripped of her citizenship? Perhaps it would make the next scenario where a father discovers his daughter about to join ISIL a different one. Perhaps that father would not do what Zoleikha’s father did: Report her to authorities, which prevented her from joining ISIL.

Source: What is gained by stripping ISIL returnees of citizenship?

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Chris Selley: Look who’s talking tough on border security now

2019/03/22 Leave a comment

We will see if the US administration is really willing to accept such a change to the STCA given their overall anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. Why would the US do this favour for Canada as there is nothing in it for them?

But Selley’s observations of the change in tone and focus are valid:

The federal Liberals have always bristled at the suggestion that tens of thousands of “irregular” border crossers from the United States might constitute a problem. The system, they insist, works just fine. “This process is working to keep us safe,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told The Canadian Press before Christmas, and he accused the Conservatives of deliberately trying to frighten Canadians into believing otherwise. “It’s always easier to try and scare people than to allay fears in a time of anxiety,” he said. In January, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen accused the Conservatives of planning “to militarize the border,” which is certainly not an example of trying to scare people rather than allaying their fears.

One of the ideas the Conservatives have long supported is “closing the loophole” in the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) that allows “irregular” arrivals — those who cross between official border posts — to claim asylum. (There’s no point blaming them: If they tried to arrive “regularly,” they would be turned back.) The idea has long been dismissed as unworkable, if not unconstitutional.

But wouldn’t you know it, in an interview with The Globe and Mail this week, Border Security Minister Bill Blair said he was in negotiations with Washington on precisely this point.

“If, for example, there was an agreement of the United States to accept back those people that are crossing at the end of Roxham Road (in Champlain, N.Y.), then Canadian officials … could theoretically take them back to a regular point of entry … and give effect to (the STCA) regulations at that place,” Blair said — i.e., would-be asylum-seekers actually apprehended crossing the border would be sent back.

It’s not clear why the Americans would agree to this: If thousands of non-citizens want to decamp and take their chances in Canada’s refugee determination system, one suspects President Donald Trump would be most inclined to let them. But it’s intriguing enough the Canadian government now wants to be seen pursuing the idea.

“Closing the loophole” might be difficult to negotiate, but unlike everything else the Liberals have tried, it would almost certainly accomplish the goal they can never quite admit to having: To keep these people away. The most resourceful and desperate migrants would try to sneak across the border and claim asylum inland, once it couldn’t be proven how they arrived — a dangerous and potentially deadly undertaking and an invitation to human smugglers, Liberals would argue if they were in opposition. But that’s infinitely more complex an undertaking than packing your suitcases, bundling up the kids and clambering over the border into a waiting RCMP car. The vast majority of people would be dissuaded.

It’s clear enough heading into the election campaign that the Liberals want to be seen fighting irregular border crossers rather than managing them as the legitimate asylum-seekers they always insisted they were.

The federal budget’s section on border security, meanwhile, is altogether extraordinary. It claims that “elevated numbers of asylum seekers, including those that have crossed into Canada irregularly, have challenged the fairness and effectiveness of Canada’s asylum system.” It proposes to target “individuals who cross Canadian borders irregularly and try to exploit Canada’s immigration system.” It moots “legislative amendments … to better manage, discourage and prevent irregular migration.”

This is the same government that has sworn blind no one is jumping any queue, that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the system no matter whence they arrive, that the system is working perfectly — all repudiated in a single paragraph.

It adds up to a $1.18 billion commitment over five years. And the proposals are vague enough that Finance Minister Bill Morneau doesn’t seem to understand what they entail: “If someone comes across the border (and) claims asylum, we want to make sure we process that quickly so they either are moved back to where they came from, if it’s inappropriate, or in the case where they are legitimately seeking asylum, we deal with them in a compassionate and rapid way,” he told reporters on Tuesday. That’s baffling. How do you decide what’s an “appropriate” or “legitimate” claim without adjudicating the damn thing?

Nevertheless, it’s clear enough heading into the election campaign that the Liberals want to be seen fighting irregular border crossers rather than managing them as the legitimate asylum-seekers they always insisted they were. The way to do the latter would be to spend scads more money hiring scads more people than they already have to adjudicate asylum claims as normal — only much, much quicker. That was what refugee advocates argued for nearly 20 years ago, when hundreds of people headed north for fear of a post-9/11 immigration crackdown. Refugee advocates lost the argument; the STCA, ratified under Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government, put an end to the northbound queues at border crossings; and most everyone in Canada instantly forgot those people ever existed.

A significant political headache had been expertly healed. It’s both telling and appropriate, as Trudeau’s government rapidly abandons its touchy-feely schtick, that the Liberals would land again on a “get tough” approach at the border.

Source: Chris Selley: Look who’s talking tough on border security now

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

La droite européenne suspend le parti de Viktor Orbán

2019/03/22 Leave a comment

Overdue:

La droite européenne a décidé mercredi de suspendre le parti du dirigeant populiste hongrois Viktor Orbán de ses rangs, pour une durée indéterminée, à la suite de ses dérapages contre Bruxelles ou l’immigration, deux mois avant le renouvellement du Parlement de Strasbourg.

Le Parti populaire européen (PPE), qui réunit les formations de droite et du centre-droit de l’UE, comme la CDU de la chancelière allemande Angela Merkel ou les Républicains en France, a pris cette décision à une écrasante majorité (190 pour, 3 contre), lors d’une assemblée politique du parti à Bruxelles.

Concrètement, cette suspension signifie que le Fidesz n’aura — jusqu’à nouvel ordre — plus le droit de participer aux réunions du PPE, sera privé de ses droits de vote et ne pourra pas présenter de candidats à des postes, a précisé le président du PPE, le Français Joseph Daul, dans un tweet.

« La présidence du PPE et le Fidesz ont convenu d’un commun accord la suspension du Fidesz jusqu’à la publication d’un rapport par un comité d’évaluation [de ce parti] », selon le texte de compromis adopté.

Aucune durée de suspension n’est mentionnée dans le compromis. Selon l’eurodéputé français Franck Proust qui participait au vote, « une décision sera prise à la remise du rapport des experts, à l’automne ». Ce comité indépendant d’évaluation doit notamment être présidé par Herman Van Rompuy, ancien premier ministre belge et ancien président du Conseil européen.

Avant la réunion, la tension était montée d’un cran. Le gouvernement hongrois avait averti qu’en cas de suspension, le Fidesz « quitterait immédiatement le PPE ».

Mais un compromis a finalement été trouvé, avec la précision que cette suspension avait lieu « d’un commun accord », selon plusieurs sources.

Dans un entretien mercredi à la radio allemande Deutschlandfunk, le président de la Commission européenne Jean-Claude Juncker avait réclamé une fois de plus une exclusion du Fidesz.

« Sa place est hors du PPE », avait affirmé M. Juncker, membre de ce parti mais qui ne participait pas à cette réunion, affirmant que « depuis des années », le Fidesz « s’éloignait des valeurs démocrates-chrétiennes ».

Certains craignaient qu’exclure l’enfant terrible du PPE, une première dans l’histoire de cette formation, la plus importante du Parlement européen, n’ouvre la voie à une scission entre l’Est et l’Ouest du continent.

Risque d’une alliance avec Salvini

Ils s’inquiétaient également de le voir se jeter dans les bras du vice-premier ministre italien et ministre de l’Intérieur, Matteo Salvini, le chef de la Ligue, parti d’extrême droite.

Cela fait des mois que la droite conservatrice se divise sur le cas Orbán.

Mais, en lançant une campagne d’affichage le 19 février contre M. Juncker, le premier ministre national-conservateur hongrois avait dépassé les bornes pour ses détracteurs.

Sous le slogan : « Vous avez aussi le droit de savoir ce que Bruxelles prépare », ces affiches montraient Juncker, ricanant aux côtés du milliardaire américain juif d’origine hongroise, George Soros, et l’accusaient de soutenir l’immigration sur le Vieux continent.

Furieux, treize partis membres du PPE originaires de dix pays différents, réunis autour d’un noyau dur constitué par les pays du Benelux et de la Scandinavie, avaient réclamé début mars « l’exclusion ou la suspension » du Fidesz.

Le chef de file pour les élections européennes du PPE, Manfred Weber, avait également accentué la pression la semaine dernière à Budapest sur Viktor Orbán, devenu une source d’embarras croissant pour l’Allemand qui brigue la succession de M. Juncker.

Le Bavarois avait posé trois conditions pour le maintien du dialogue : l’arrêt de la campagne anti-Bruxelles, des excuses auprès des autres partis membres du PPE et le maintien à Budapest de l’Université d’Europe centrale (CEU) fondée en 1991 par Georges Soros.

Depuis, Viktor Orbán, 55 ans, avait fait retirer les affiches controversées. Il avait présenté ses excuses au PPE, même si elles avaient été jugées insuffisantes.

Mais concernant l’Université d’Europe centrale, sa bête noire, M. Orbán n’avait pas bougé. Cet établissement de droit américain, s’estimant chassé par le premier ministre nationaliste, va déménager l’essentiel de ses activités à Vienne

Source: La droite européenne suspend le parti de Viktor Orbán

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

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