HASSAN: What Michael Cooper got right and why

2019/06/11 Leave a comment

Andrew Coyne captured the issues better (see below):

We tend to place individuals and ideologies in neat, homogeneous compartments, when shades of grey better convey the reality.

This seems to have happened in the controversy surrounding the tiff between Faisal Khan Suri, president of the Alberta Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Conservative MP Michael Cooper – an exchange which led to the latter’s eviction from a Commons committee.

Cooper stated that lumping conservatism with extremist white nationalist factions was objectionable and defamatory. Suri then accused Cooper of insensitivity when Cooper read out passages from Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto, which has been banned in New Zealand. Cooper simply wanted to demonstrate that Tarrant claimed to have been influenced by China and that he didn’t identify with conservatism.

In effect, Cooper was asserting that white nationalism and conservatism are two separate ideologies. He is right and there is plenty of evidence for this here in Canada.

Andrew Scheer has denounced racist factions by stating that “people know the Conservative Party is open and welcoming … we denounce any elements of society that would promote hate speech.”

Also, just as mainstream conservatism cannot be pigeonholed with extremist white nationalism, neither can most Muslims be automatically associated with the ideologies of extreme jihadist factions. Conservatives understand this, which is shown by the fact that Maxine Bernier’s far-right People’s Party has garnered little support.

Admittedly, white nationalists have in the past leaned towards the political right, and this has created the false impression that white supremacists are an outgrowth of legitimate and peaceful conservatism. A stigma attaches to conservative parties because the alt-right and violent white nationalists have supported them, such as the notion that Ku Klux Klan supporters overwhelmingly leaned Republican in the 2016 U.S. election.

The desire to promote and value the best in what is Western is imperative and therefore commendable, and moderate conservatives see this has no connection with race. What is Western now is far more racially fluid and diverse than what white nationalist extremists perceive. For example, many of us from non-white communities have come to appreciate Canadian values because we have been fully accepted here.

The perception that everything associated with the West is necessarily exclusive to white culture – a notion at the heart of white nationalism – is often anathema to mainstream conservatives.

Millions of us have migrated to open and enlightened Western nations from foreign lands with different traditions. We have come to adopt and appreciate the tolerance our adopted nations have created and honed. Contrary to what some may feel, even a significant segment of Canadian Muslims endorse Western values.

The inclusive democracies that the Western world has built are based on principles of pluralism, human dignity and universal human rights. Enlightened campaigners have engineered this type of society, but liberal principles can be appreciated only by those liberal enough to value them. While some migrants from traditional and patriarchal communities have shown little respect for our open societies, the majority of immigrants are well integrated and law-abiding.

Our values are worth preserving but they need to be seen through a non-racial lens that includes many of us from non-white cultures.

The long-term success of moderate conservatism depends on how far our community can abandon the notion that values are narrow and relative, rooted within the culture of a particular racial group.

Michael Cooper was not insensitive to allude to the Christchurch shooter’s so-called manifesto. He is right to insist that it is a slur to draw any link between those hateful beliefs and established conservative ideas.

Source: HASSAN: What Michael Cooper got right and why

Coyne’s masterful writing what Cooper could and should have said:

The Commons justice committee’s hearings into the problem of online hate were thrown into chaos last week after a Conservative MP, Michael Cooper, rounded on a witness for suggesting terrorists like the one who murdered 51 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year had been influenced, not just by anti-immigrant and alt-right sites, but by “conservative commentators.”

After admonishing the witness, Faisal Khan Suri, president of the Alberta Muslim Public Affairs Council, that he should be “ashamed” of his “defamatory” comments, Cooper read into the record portions of the gunman’s manifesto in which he denounced conservatism and expressed admiration for the Communist dictatorship in China. Needless to say this did not help his cause.

Much of the subsequent reaction was overblown, not a little of it for partisan gain — Cooper is not a racist and does not deserve to be expelled from caucus, as Liberal MP Randy Boissonault demanded. Still, I wonder if Cooper might have been able to make his point in a better way…

“Mr. Suri, there is a well-known rule of argument known as the principle of charity, which obliges us to put the best construction on our opponents’ words and not the worst.

Accordingly, I’m going to assume that when you included ‘conservative commentators’ in your list of terrorist influencers you did not mean to attribute responsibility for terrorist atrocities to mainstream conservatives, or to conservatism, which is an honourable creed professed by millions of Canadians.

It’s particularly important to make this distinction in the current debate. As a conservative I wish to conserve the best traditions of our history, one of which is freedom of speech, but because I do not wish to ban hate speech should not be taken to mean that I have any sympathy with those who propagate it.

Sadly, too many of our opponents have been too quick to make such a slanderous connection, not only suggesting that terrorists were inspired by conservative writings — as if a madman could not find inspiration in anything — but that conservatives are themselves by nature anti-immigrant, racist, white supremacist, and worse. It is dishonest, it is despicable, and it should stop.

But if we are honest with ourselves, conservatives must take some responsibility for this state of affairs. Like any political movement conservatism has its extreme or fringe elements, and of late across much of the democratic world the latter have been on the rise, feeding on public unease over immigration, exploiting fears of Islamist terrorism, and appealing to resentment of “globalist” elites.

These fears and resentments have proven fertile soil for opportunistic politicians, so-called “populists” promising to defend “the people” from whatever it is that is not “the people” if only they are given power — only power that, due to the gravity of the alleged threat, must not be impaired by the usual restrictions of a democratic opposition, a free press, or an independent judiciary.

This dark, authoritarian impulse, most fully embodied in the person of Donald Trump, has nothing whatever to do with the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan or the limited government of Margaret Thatcher. Conservativism is about freedom; populism is about fear. Indeed, populism is not just different from conservatism. It is its opposite. Where conservatives see people as individuals, it divides society into Us and Them.

Where conservatives believe in empowering the people, whether through the deliberative institutions of democratic government or the consumer sovereignty of the market, populism teaches the people to place their faith in strongmen. And where conservatism seeks to uphold the Western liberal inheritance, these new populists’ hatred of liberalism and of liberal elites has led them into a kind of nihilism, in which whatever gets a rise out of liberals — or decent-minded conservatives —is to be desired for its own sake.

At the worst edge of this movement are avowed racists and neo-Nazis, liberated from the margins of public discourse by social media and emboldened by the discovery therein of others of like mind. But scarcely better are those who, seizing on the actions or beliefs of a few extremists to harass and demonize ordinary Muslims, or who interpret freedom of speech, which is a restraint on government, as a licence to say whatever hurtful or idiotic thing comes into their head, without censure or even responsibility.

I was tempted to say that you should be ashamed of yourself for linking conservatives, even inadvertently, to racism and extremism. But as I reflect on it, it is we conservatives who ought to feel shame — shame that such vile opportunists should be able to parade about as ‘conservatives,’ but even more, shame that mainstream conservative parties have been so unwilling to denounce or distance themselves from them.

A cancer has taken root in conservative parties across the West — witness the Brexit madness in Britain, or the Republican surrender to Trumpism — and conservative leaders have too often been too slow to cut it out. Even in this country, conservative leaders have not only failed to confront the populist threat, but have in some cases actively pandered to it — stoking fears about Muslims, as in the infamous “barbaric practices” snitch line during the last election, or pretending a difficult but manageable problem — the influx of asylum seekers at irregular points across our southern border — was a five-alarm ‘crisis.’

And so I want to thank you, Mr. Suri, for this opportunity to set the record straight — to say that this sort of thing has nothing to do with conservatism, and to urge my party to return to its roots as the party of free markets, limited government and equal opportunity. And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield the floor.”

Source: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/andrew-coyne-what-michael-cooper-should-have-said

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Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship questioned by one of UK’s most senior judges

2019/06/11 Leave a comment

On the statelessness aspect:

One of Britain’s most senior judges has called into question Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Isil bride Shamima Begum of her British citizenship.

Jonathan Sumption, who retired as a justice of the Supreme Court in December, indicated that the Home Secretary may have breached international law by effectively making Ms Begum stateless.

Mr Javid claimed that Begum, 19, whose parents came to the UK from Bangladesh, was a Bangladeshi citizen under that country’s law even though she had never been to Bangladesh.

This meant he could remove her British citizenship without making her stateless.

Speaking on the BBC’s Reith Lecture today, however, Lord Sumption said: “I am frankly surprised at the suggestion that she can be regarded as the citizen of a country with which she has never had anything to do but that is the Government’s position and I have no doubt it will be tested in the courts in due course.”

The Bangladesh Government has rejected the British claim that she is a Bangladesh citizen and said it would refuse to accept her, although its nationality laws do include a right of “citizenship by descent” to anyone who is born to a Bangladeshi parent.

This right only lapses when a person reaches the age of 21.

Lawyers for Begum, who fled London to join Isil in Syria and married an Isis fighter with whom she had three babies, all of whom died, are however appealing the Home Secretary’s decision.

Asked if the removal of citizenship also meant a person lost their standing under human rights, Lord Sumption said: “What they lose is their citizenship. That doesn’t necessarily deprive them of their standing when it comes to human rights.

“I have no problem with the notion of depriving people of their citizenship who have gone abroad to fight in foreign wars save this.

“It’s an established principle of international law that you cannot deprive somebody of his or her citizenship if the result would be to render them stateless.

“And whatever they may have done in Syria or anywhere else, that rule has always been applied and will no doubt be applied in this case.”

Source: Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship questioned by one of UK’s most senior judges

Filed under Citizenship, Revocation Tagged with , ,

5 Takeaways About The Trump Administration’s Response To Far-Right Extremism

2019/06/11 Leave a comment

Of note:

Lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee questioned senior FBI and Homeland Security officials this week about their response to white supremacist violence.

This was the latest in a series of hearings, led by Democrats, to gauge the Trump administration’s commitment to fighting a threat that federal agencies deem the most lethal and active form of domestic extremism.

There were no bombshell revelations, but lawmakers did get a few details on some key questions.

Here are five takeaways:

There is no national policy to combat the far-right threat

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who led the hearing, started by asking what he called the fundamental question: “Do we have an overall strategic plan to counter and prevent the threat of white supremacist violence? I fear the answer is no.”

Raskin was right. After more than two hours of questioning, it was clear that, unlike the government’s quick and sweeping response to Islamist militant groups, there’s no comparable national strategy to fight white supremacist and other far-right movements.

Elizabeth Neumann, a senior threat prevention official at Homeland Security, told lawmakers that federal authorities were still adapting to the evolution of both far-right and Islamist extremists: They now self-radicalize online, with little or no direction from organized groups like al-Qaida, which had a clear hierarchy and staged attacks that took months or years to plan.

“Our post-9/11 prevention capabilities, as robust as they are, were not designed to deal with this type of threat,” Neumann said.

She said Homeland Security was developing “a prevention framework” to be implemented in coming years, but she offered no details. Raskin, the lawmaker, said it was “very late in the game” to still be in the development stage of a national strategy, given the deadly far-right attacks in Charleston, S.C., Pittsburgh, Charlottesville, Va. and elsewhere.

Neumann said the delay is partly because “things haven’t been institutionalized” through legislation, an executive order or a national security presidential memorandum focused on domestic terrorism. She noted that the Obama administration also lacked those tools.

“We know we’re not doing enough,” Neumann said.

Federal agents do take this seriously – even if the White House doesn’t

President Donald Trump consistently downplays the threat of white nationalist extremism, which he’s dismissed as “a small group of people.”

Michael McGarrity, assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, bristled when lawmakers suggested that, given the apparent disinterest from the top, federal authorities might not be taking the far-right threat seriously enough. McGarrity bluntly stated, more than once, that racially motivated violent extremists are the deadliest and most active of domestic terrorists.

“We’re not playing with the numbers here,” McGarrity said. “We arrest more domestic terrorism subjects [before they stage an] attack in the United States than we do international terrorism.”

He said the FBI is using many of the same tactics historically used to thwart international groups like the Islamic State: working sources, staging undercover operations and asking courts to authorize wiretaps. McGarrity added that the FBI considers racially motivated extremists a transnational threat, and that the agency shares intelligence with counterterrorism partners overseas.

Homeland Security won’t say much about its prevention effort

In 2015, Homeland Security opened a small office devoted to an approach known as “CVE,” countering violent extremism. The idea is to use community partnerships and other tools to interrupt the radicalization process before it turns to violence. Critics call it ineffective, and say it leads to the stigmatization and surveillance of ordinary Muslims.

Under the Trump administration, the CVE-focused office lost about 90 percent of its old budget and about half its staff, and it’s been renamed twice to signal a shift away from community partnership work. (Some Muslim activists joke that scrapping CVE was the only Trump administration move they supported.)

But it might be premature to declare the government’s CVE program dead. Neumann said CVE-style prevention work will be part of a broad counterterrorism strategy that Homeland Security plans to have ready by this fall. But she gave few details about the program or what’s going on with the restructured office that’s supposed to handle it.

“There’s still more questions than answers at this point,” Raskin complained. “What are the office’s precise functions? Who’s in charge? How many personnel will be assigned to prevent white supremacy violence?”

Debate is heating up over a domestic terrorism law

If a U.S.-based suspect is accused of involvement with an international terrorist organization such as ISIS or al-Qaida, prosecutors have an array of charges to consider that aren’t available for most cases involving white supremacist suspects.

Without a domestic terrorism statute, said McGarrity of the FBI, authorities are restricted as to how much they can police speech and conduct that’s offensive, but protected under the First Amendment.

“The FBI does not investigate rallies or protests unless there’s a credible belief that violent criminal activity may be occurring,” he said.

In some quarters of Congress, support is building for a domestic terrorism statute, ostensibly to correct the double standard in extremist prosecutions. But several rights groups already have rejected the idea, arguing that enforcing existing laws is better than giving even more power to federal authorities.

This debate is one to watch in coming months.

It’s official: Black Identity Extremism is no longer a thing

In the early months of the Trump administration, a leaked FBI report warned about a new kind of homegrown threat: black identity extremists.

The warning reportedly came after six unrelated attacks on police around the country; the FBI portrayed the threat as “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement” by people with “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans.”

The claim was widely endorsed by conservative news media outlets but viewed with equally widespread skepticism as a move reminiscent of the FBI’s demonization of black activists in the civil rights era.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat from Massachusetts, asked McGarrity if there’s a single killing the FBI could link to Black Lives Matter or similar activist groups. McGarrity’s reply: “To my knowledge, right now, no.”

Pressley continued her attack on “this absurd designation” until McGarrity divulged that the category had been retired at the FBI.

“The designation no longer exists?” Pressley asked, sounding skeptical.

“It hasn’t existed since I’ve been here for 17 months,” McGarrity answered.

To recap: The FBI created a new category of threat and two years later quietly abandoned it without explanation.

Source: 5 Takeaways About The Trump Administration’s Response To Far-Right Extremism

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Strict US immigration laws make Canada more attractive to tech workers

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

Yet another article on the attractiveness of Canada. Can’t buy this kind of coverage:

The tech industry in the US is booming. Foreign interest in tech jobs is not.

That’s because despite the country’s acute need for highly skilled tech workers, its immigration system has become increasingly unwelcoming.

Since the beginning of 2018, the share of interest from abroad in US tech jobs has remained about the same, according to new data from the global job listing site Indeed, but by most accounts it should be growing.

“All things equal, with the really strong US job market, you’d expect continued growth in foreign interest in US tech jobs,” Indeed economist Andrew Flowers told Recode.

In the past year, foreign interest in Canadian tech jobs has also been flat, according to Indeed’s data, but Canadian jobs had a higher rate of such interest than US ones. In May, 14 percent of all clicks on Canadian tech jobs posted on Indeed were from foreigners, while 9 percent of US tech jobs had attracted clicks from candidates abroad.

Foreign interest as a share of all interest in Canadian tech jobs has shot up precipitously — 55 percent — in the past four years, according to Indeed. The company’s US data doesn’t go back as far as its Canadian data, so we can’t do a long-term comparison of the two.

The absence of growth in foreign tech job interest likely stems from stricter immigration procedures — including those for high-skilled tech workers, who use a visa called H-1B — that have been enacted following President Donald Trump’s Buy American and Hire Americanexecutive order in 2017. The increased difficulty and duration of the US immigration process, which can now take from months to years, have made some tech workers less likely to consider the US an employment option.

Some experts say the US and Canada have been facing a dearth in native-born high-skilled workers that threatens to inhibit their growing technology industries. But while the US has made it more difficult to employ tech workers from abroad, Canada has streamlined its own tech immigration policies. In turn, Canada has become a technology hub. Recently a number of US tech companies, like Amazon and Microsoft, have expanded their offices in Canada. Presumably that’s easier than dealing with ever-tightening US immigration laws. This indicates that in effect, a fear of foreigners taking US jobs has lead to some US jobs going abroad.

That’s presented a challenge for the US’s most dominant industry. Indeed, CEOs from many tech companies have been clamoring for immigration reform.

Tech companies have been asking the government for years to ease the immigration process and increase the quotas on new H-1B applicants — which has remained at 85,000 and is only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the overall job market — since 2006. In that time, the technology industry has ballooned to be by far the biggest segment of the US economy.

Smaller tech companies are facing steeper challenges

“For super-unique, hard skills, you have to look as wide as possible to find the best possible set of candidates to meet the needs of the company,” Ben Schmitt, of information security at Dwolla, a Des Moines, Iowa-based online payments software company, told Recode.

“Someone with specific advanced knowledge of cryptography is tough to hire for,” Schmitt said.

A year and a half ago the company found the perfect candidate, but he’d need an H-1B visa to work in the states. “The person had worked under a well-known cryptographer; he had experience in really hard skills that nicely aligned with our requirements,” Schmitt said.

Dwolla was able to make the hire because Schmitt and the 100-plus person company’s general counsel have had experience with H-1B applications, and were able to get an approval on the first try. The process can take upwards of a year or two — famously, it took the CEO of the now-public US tech company Zoom nine tries to get approved for a visa.

“It takes a lot of time and there are a lot of unknowns,” Schmitt said. “It requires luck and skill, especially for a small company trying to move fast.“

Bart Lorang, founder and CEO of FullContact, has had much less luck with H-1Bs.

In the past few years Lorang’s Colorado-based identity resolution company has acquired a series of other software companies — in Latvia, India, and Tel Aviv — but has since been unable to move most of those tech workers here.

“Literally we flew every employee in the Latvia office here and gave them the pitch on moving to Colorado.” Those six or so employees all agreed to relocate, but most weren’t able to get H-1Bs for various reasons, including lacking what United States Citizenship and Immigration Services deemed unique enough skills or the right level of education. The company now employs 30 people in Latvia.”

“It got worse in the last couple of years, so we sort of gave up,” Lorang told Recode. “What we ended up doing instead of trying to get people to the states is, we’ve grown our staff in other countries, although that wasn’t our initial strategy. We wanted to bring jobs to the US.”

FullContact now employs about 250 people, many of whom are software engineers. Eighty are in the US. Only one has an H-1B visa.

How the government is adding more hurdles

The Trump administration has systematically stymied immigration at multiple levels, by making criteria more strict, asking for more documentation and generally taking longer to process immigration applications.

Although Trump has stressed the need for high-skill tech workers in the US, at the same time he has made it harder for those workers to come here.

In its latest annual report, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ director drew attention to the increasing absolute number of visas processed, but the processing rate has actually gone down, according to calculations made using the organization’s own data. The USCIS discouraged calculating a rate.

“They frame this report to show they are adjudicating more of these petitions than ever before. But when you look at the amount being adjudicated as percentage of the backlog plus new receipts, it’s actually down,” Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute think tank, told Recode.

As Doug Rand, cofounder of Boundless Immigration, a company that helps people navigate the US immigration system, told Recode: “That’s like the DMV bragging that they processed a record number of appointments today, even though the line is still going out the door and around the block.”

The USCIS is funded almost entirely on processing fees, so it’s not dependent on government allocations to do its job.

India is seeing the brunt of immigration reform

Indeed’s data also delved into how interest in US tech jobs has changed by country.

India, the country that receives by far the most H-1B visas, had an 8 percent decline in interest in US tech jobs from Q1 2018 to Q1 2019, according to Indeed. Meanwhile, interest from Germany, France and Russia increased more than 25 percent in that time. This flip is also one of the reasons that the overall interest in US tech jobs has stayed level.

The change may be connected to new immigration rules that have been directed at outsourcing companies by specifically targeting companies that place workers at third-party sites or where 15 percent or more of their workforce is on H-1Bs. Many of those types of companies are based in India and hire Indians.

Stricter rules geared at Indian tech companies could be having a chilling effect on Indians’ interest in US jobs.

“It’s possible, especially if these groups we’re attacking with higher scrutiny are disproportionally groups that hire Indians, that the general sentiment is that the US is closed for Indians,” Pierce said.

She added that the effect wouldn’t just impact outsourcing companies: “Within those groups, they’re also punishing legitimate companies that are just trying to hire the best and brightest and use programs as intended.”

Meanwhile, Indian interest in Canada tech jobs is up.

Source: Strict US immigration laws make Canada more attractive to tech workers

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Greater share of recent immigrants landing jobs even as Canada welcomes more

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

So far, so good:

The share of recent immigrants of prime working age who had employment reached a new high last year, even though Canada has been opening its doors to more newcomers than ever before, according to an internal federal analysis.

The increase was likely driven in part by the country’s strong job-creation run, which has encouraged companies to hire more people who usually find themselves at the margins of the workforce, says the document prepared for Finance Minister Bill Morneau. Immigrants who arrived less than five years ago fall into that category.

The analysis provides a closer look at the impact of immigration on a labour force that has posted big gains in recent years.

After economic slowdown last winter the unemployment rate has hovered near 40-year lows. As a result, employers have reported challenges when trying to fill job vacancies.

“The performance of recent immigrants on the labour market has markedly improved in recent years, especially when considering the scale of immigrants arriving in Canada every year,” reads the January briefing note, obtained through access-to-information law.

The memo says the employment rate for immigrants aged 25 to 54 who landed less than five years ago, was 71 per cent last year. It was the indicator’s highest level since 2006 — which is as far back as the data goes.

“Similar trends are witnessed for immigrants that landed between five and 10 years ago,” the briefing said.

The labour-force participation and unemployment rates of recent immigrants were better than before the last recession, over a decade ago. Selection criteria have targeted immigrants with better earnings prospects and recent newcomers to Canada are more highly educated, the analysis said.

The share of prime-aged immigrants with post-secondary educations rose from 75 per cent in 2006 to 80 per cent in 2018. That’s nine percentage points higher than the share in the general population in the same age range.

Canada has welcomed more immigrants in recent years — and the government intends to bring in more. It has set targets of nearly 331,000 newcomers this year, 341,000 in 2020 and 350,000 in 2021.

The numbers are rising at a time of growing public debate about some aspects of immigration. It could become an issue in the lead-up to the October federal vote.

A lobby group representing chief executives of Canada biggest companies has urged political parties to avoid aggravating public concerns about immigration during the campaign.

Business leaders made clear the economic case in favour of immigration, especially as baby boomers age and the country seeks workers to help fund social programs, like public health care, through taxes.

The Finance Department document argues that, in general, immigrants in Canada have done well because the country has maintained a positive attitude towards immigration.

“The topic of immigration has become more polarized in a number of countries, which may reflect the poor socio-economic outcomes for immigrants and economic stagnation of the middle class who use immigration as a scapegoat,” it says.

“The economic benefits of immigration are largely dependent on how well newcomers integrate into the labour market. Increasing immigration — or any increase in the population — will drive demand for goods and services, contributing to economic growth.”

The document also noted the strong economic and education outcomes for second-generation Canadians, compared to children of two Canadian-born parents.

Among individuals aged 25 to 44, 95 per cent of second-generation Canadians had completed high school compared to 89 per cent of those whose parents were both Canadian-born. Forty-one per cent of second-generation Canadians had university degrees versus 24 per cent of people with two Canadian-born parents.

In 2017, second-generation Canadians earned average employment incomes of $55,500, versus $51,600 for children of Canadian-born parents.

Source: Greater share of recent immigrants landing jobs even as Canada welcomes more

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Opinion | The Case for Immigration as Reparations

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

One of the most provocative articles I have recently read, pointing out some of the double standards in immigration policy and debates. But one that has no chance of influencing policy given the implications:

There is a lot of debate these days about whether the United States owes its African-American citizens reparations for slavery. It does. But there is a far bigger bill that the United States and Europe have run up: what they owe to other countries for their colonial adventures, for the wars they imposed on them, for the inequality they have built into the world order, for the excess carbon they have dumped into the atmosphere.

The creditor countries aren’t seriously suggesting that the West send sacks of gold bullion every year to India or Nigeria. Their people are asking for fairness: for the borders of the rich countries to be opened to goods and people, to Indian textiles as well as Nigerian doctors. In seeking to move, they are asking for immigration as reparations.

Today, a quarter of a billion people are migrants. They are moving because the rich countries have stolen the future of the poor countries. Whether it is Iraqis and Syrians fleeing the effects of illegal American wars, or Africans seeking to work for their former European colonial masters, or Guatemalans and Hondurans trying to get into the country that peddles them guns and buys their drugs: They are coming here because we were there.

Before you ask them to respect our borders, ask yourself: Has the West ever respected anyone’s borders?

A vast majority of migrants move from a poor to a less poor country, not a rich one. Immigration quotas should be based on how much the host country has ruined other countries. Britain should have quotas for Indians and Nigerians; France for Malians and Tunisians; Belgium for very large numbers of Congolese.

And when they come, they should be allowed to bring their families and stay — unlike the “guest workers” who were enticed to build up the postwar labor force of the colonizers and then asked to leave when their masters were done exploiting them.

The Dominican Republic, where the United States propped up the dictator Rafael Trujillo for three decades, should be high on the American preference list. So should Iraq, upon which we imposed a war that resulted in 600,000 deaths. Justice now demands that we let in 600,000 Iraqis: for each death we caused there, someone should get a chance at a new life here.

Some 12 million Africans were enslaved and carried across the Atlanticby European powers. Should not 12 million people from Africa be allowed to live in the countries enriched by the toil of their ancestors? Both will be better off: the African still suffering from what slavery has done to his country, and the host country that will again benefit from African labor, but this time without enormous pain and for a fair wage.

Just as there is a carbon tax on polluting industries, there should be a “migration tax” on the nations who got rich while emitting greenhouse gases. The United States is responsible for one-third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere; Europe, another one-quarter. A hundred million refugees fleeing hurricanes and droughts will have to be resettled by the end of the century. The United States should take a third, and Europe another quarter.

A huge bill would come to the West, but it is one it should look forward to paying. Without immigration, America’s economic growth would have been 15 percent lower from 1990 to 2014; Britain’s would have been a full 20 percent lower. Immigrants are 14 percent of the American population, but they started a quarter of all new businesses and since 2000 earned over a third of the American Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine.

Migrants are 3 percent of the world’s population but contribute 9 percent of its gross domestic product. Their taxes prop up the pension systems of the wealthy nations, which are not making enough babies of their own.

If you want to help the poorest people in the world, the fastest way to do so is to ease barriers to migration. Migrants sent back $689 billion in remittances last year, which amounts to three times more than the direct gains from abolishing all trade barriers, four times more than all the foreign aid given by those governments and 100 times the amount of all debt relief.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Why are the U.S. immigration norms being tightened?

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

US immigration checking of social media noted in Indian media (a reminder to us all to more mindful when on social media):

The story so far: On May 31, 2019, the U.S. Department of State introduced a change in online visa forms for immigrant (form DS-260) and non-immigrant visas (form DS-160) requiring applicants to register their social media handles over a five-year period. The newly released DS-160 and DS-260 forms ask, “Do you have a social media presence?” A drop-down menu provides a list of some 20 options, including Facebook, Instagram, Sina Weibo and Twitter. There is also a “NONE” option. Applicants are required to list their handles alone and not passwords. All sites will soon be listable according to an administration official who spoke to The Hill, a Washington DC-based newsletter. The policy does not cover those eligible for the visa waiver programme and those applying for diplomatic visas and certain categories of official visas.

How did it come about?

The policy is part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s intent to conduct “extreme vetting” of foreigners seeking admission into the U.S. In March 2017, Mr. Trump issued an Executive Order asking the administration to implement a programme that “shall include the development of a uniform baseline for screening and vetting standards and procedures for all immigrant programs.”

In September 2017, the Department of Homeland Security started including “social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results” information in the files it keeps on each immigrant. The notice regarding this policy said those impacted would include Green Card holders and naturalised citizens. In March 2018, the State Department proposed a similar policy, but for all visa applicants — this is the policy now in effect. Earlier, only certain visa applicants identified for extra screening were required to provide such information. Asking visa applicants to volunteer social media history started during the Obama administration which was criticised for not catching Tashfeen Malik, one of those who carried out a mass-shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015. Malik had come to the U.S. on a K-1 fiancé visa, and had exchanged social media messages about jihad prior to her admission to the U.S.

How will it impact India?

Most Indians applying for U.S. visas will be covered by this policy. Over 955,000 non-immigrant visas (excluding A and G visas) and some 28,000 immigrant visas were issued to Indians in fiscal year 2018. So at least 10 lakh Indians — and these are just those who are successful in their visa applicants and not all applicants — will be directly impacted by the policy.

What lies ahead?

The new policy is expected to impact 14 million travellers to the U.S. and 700,000 immigrants worldwide according to the administration’s prior estimates. In some individual cases it is possible that the visa policy achieves what it is (ostensibly) supposed to — allow the gathering of social media information that results in the denial of a visa for an applicant who genuinely presents a security threat. However, the bluntness of the policy and its vast scope raise serious concerns around civil liberties including questions of arbitrariness, mass surveillance, privacy, and the stifling of free speech.

First, it is not unusual for an individual to not recall all their social media handles over a five-year period. Consequently, even if acting in good faith, it is entirely possible for individuals to provide an incomplete social media history. This could give consular officers grounds for denying a visa.

Second, there is a significant degree of discretion involved in determining what constitutes a visa-disqualifying social media post and this could stifle free speech. For instance, is criticising the President of the United States or posting memes about him (there are plenty of those on social media these days) grounds for visa denial? What about media professionals? Is criticising U.S. foreign policy ground for not granting someone a visa?

Third, one can expect processing delays with visas as social media information of applicants is checked. It is possible that individuals impacted by the policy will bring cases against the U.S. government on grounds of privacy or on grounds of visa delays. The strength of these cases depends on a number of factors including whether they are brought by Green Card holders and naturalised citizens (who were impacted by the September 2017 policy not the May 31 one) or non-immigrants. The courts could examine the intent of the U.S. government’s policy and ask whether it has discriminatory intent.

Source: Why are the U.S. immigration norms being tightened?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

The European Left’s Dangerous Anti-Immigrant Turn

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

Good overview of how far the centre has shifted:
Denmark’s center-left Social Democrats came in first in the country’s June 5 parliamentary elections—the third Nordic country where voters recently backed a left-leaning party in a Europe otherwise marked by social democracy’s decline.

Wednesday’s outcome broke with the past two decades of Danish politics. Social Democrats leader Mette Frederiksen, 41, became the country’s youngest-ever prime minister and the second woman to hold the job. Her party’s success—91 of the parliament’s 179 seats—upended a political landscape long dominated by the right. And on the heels of the European Parliament elections, in which populist, xenophobic parties saw important gains in France, Hungary, Italy, and Poland, the far-right Danish People’s Party saw its votes cut by more than half, after an unprecedented score in 2015.

But this week’s vote says less about the far right’s demise than about its steady creep into the mainstream. In something of a paradox, the center left returned to the scene only by lurching to the right. The Social Democrats, faced with waning support in the past two decades, have parroted the Danish People’s Party on immigration, backing hard-line policies they characterize as necessary to save the country’s prized welfare state.

Social-democratic parties across Europe have opted for that strategy, but in Denmark the dynamic is particularly pronounced. “While other social-democratic parties have adopted tougher immigration laws in times of ‘crisis’ and used anti-immigration and Islamophobic language, no party has so openly ran on a nativist and welfare-chauvinist agenda as the Danish Social Democrats,” Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who specializes on populism, said by e-mail.

Take, for example, the so-called “ghetto package,” a series of policies aimed at improving integration and reducing crime in low-income areas that the state categorizes as “ghettos” because, among other criteria, more than half of their residents are of “non-Western” background. The package, introduced by the Danish People’s Party but backed by the Social Democrats, included measures ethnic minorities consider discriminatory: One law doubles punishments for crimes committed in “ghettos”; another requires “ghetto children” from age 1 to 6, the age when public education is required for the general population, to attend mandatory courses in Danish values and traditions, as well as language courses. Families that refuse to comply risk being stripped of government benefits.

The “ghetto package” is among the slew of policies targeting immigrants—particularly Muslims—that Denmark has embraced in the past few years, often with the Social Democrats’ support. These include a 2016 law that allows authorities to seize cash and valuables from asylum-seekers ostensibly to help the state finance their benefits, or a 2018 ban on the burqa—the full-face veil worn by only about 200 Muslim women nationwide. A law making handshakes a mandatory requirement for citizenship followed, clearly targeting Muslims who refuse to shake hands with the opposite sex. Plans are underway to isolate foreigners who have criminal records and served their sentences—asylum-seekers among them—on a far-off island, currently home to a center for researching highly communicable animal diseases. In 2005, the government required UN resettlement to be based on “integration potential,” and in 2016 it withdrew from the UN resettlement program entirely, with the Social Democrats’ support.

“The Social Democrats have made it very clear: They realize they’ve lost elections since the late 1990s by being outflanked by the right on immigration,” Rune Stubager, a political scientist at Aarhus University, told me. “They knew they’d have to change their position on the issue to win.”

The Social Democrats’ rightward shift has earned it the moniker “Danish People’s Party lite” among some Danes, disillusioned with what they see as the party’s betrayal of its progressive ideals. “There’s no question: They saw that, without anti-Islam as a central part of their platform, they have no chance of success,” Naveed Baig, an imam and the vice-chair of the Islamic-Christian Study Center in Copenhagen, told me, noting that Islam and immigration have become synonymous in current political debates. The climate has become so toxic, he said, that some Muslim families have considered leaving Denmark altogether.

Natasha Al-Hariri, a lawyer and minority-rights advocate, agreed. “It’s disturbing to see Frederiksen in the prime-minister spot,” she said. “She’ll adopt whatever position gets the most votes, even if that means aligning with the far right. When is enough enough?”

The Social Democrats say they’ll stick to their new line on immigration, which they describe as critical to maintaining Denmark’s welfare state, one of the most robust in Europe. “We need to have enough money and enough room in our country, to take care of our citizens,” Nanna Grave Poulsen, a party chairwoman, told me. “All of our immigration policies need to be put in the context of the welfare issue.”

But the number of migrants and asylum-seekers Denmark has admitted has actually declined in recent years, and its overall acceptance rate has been far below the EU average. The country’s economy is strong, and research indicates that strains to the welfare state stem from an aging population, not migrants, refugees, or Danes of “non-Western background.”

The mainstreaming of far-right views—and anti-immigrant rhetoric’s ability to capture the national attention—is evident in the emergence of two new parties to the right of the Danish People’s Party: the Hard Line and the New Right, the latter of which managed to enter parliament, just exceeding the 2 percent threshold. In the months leading up to the elections, the media fixated on Hard Line leader Rasmus Paludan, a lawyer who campaigned on a platform to deport all Danish Muslims. Paludan sparked riots in April when he threw the Quran in the air and let it hit the ground during a rally in a multicultural neighborhood in the capital. Since then, the state has spent around $6 million protecting him at his campaign rallies, during which he burns the Quran or stuffs it with bacon.

Although Paludan’s Hard Line didn’t end up entering the parliament, the media’s focus on his provocations propelled him to national significance. Before the April riots, he had garnered only around 5,000 of the 20,000 signatures necessary to present his candidacy; in the days that followed, he managed to multiply his following and enter the race.

The Hard Line and New Right have both solidified the Danish People’s Party’s position as a mainstream party and undermined its appeal. “It’s terrifying that these Nazis, knocking on Parliament’s door, make the Danish People’s Party look ‘meh,’” Al-Hariri said. “But at the same time, it would be incorrect to say it’s not part of the establishment.”

“All the focus on Paludan squeezed the Danish People’s Party, which suddenly seemed moderate on immigration,” Karina Kosaria-Pedersen, a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen, told me. Electorally speaking, the party’s transformation—from the margins to the mainstream—didn’t work in its favor. Its cooperation with major parties and success in dictating immigration policies made it look “more like the elite it had claimed to challenge,” she said. That new dynamic, plus an ongoing scandal over allegations of misused EU funds, have curbed the party’s steady ascent.

The Social Democrats, the clear winners of this political climate, now have to determine just how they will govern. The party has stood fast on its immigration policies. “We don’t want to lose the voters we’ve managed to take away from the far right,” Poulsen, the party chairwoman, told me. But it has also moved to the left on welfare and the environment, two critical issues for Danes. Accordingly, Prime Minister–elect Frederiksen rejected a proposal from the outgoing prime minister to enter a “grand coalition” with his conservative Liberals party, which won 75 seats. Instead, Frederiksen intends to form a minority government, working with parties across the spectrum on an ad hoc, issue-specific basis.

That won’t be easy. “She will be at odds with the left-wing parties, who want her to make concessions on immigration,” Stubager, the political scientist, said. She’s also likely to clash with conservative parties, who seek concessions on the economy; during their campaign, the Social Democrats promised to increase public spending, raise taxes on the wealthy, and make it easier for Danes to take early retirement after 40 years in the labor force. “It’s going to be a lengthy negotiation process,” Stubager said.

Stubager expects left-wing parties to “tie her down,” attempting to block Frederiksen from cooperating with the right on immigration. “They haven’t made it easy for themselves,” he said. “But I’m convinced that without their move on immigration, they wouldn’t have performed as well.’”

One Social Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the party’s slide had cemented Islamophobia into the center of Danish politics, but that Denmark wasn’t alone in this. “When it comes to our debate on immigration, the far right has won,” she told me. “The left has lost. The center has lost. This is true all over Europe.”

Source: The European Left’s Dangerous Anti-Immigrant Turn

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Pedophiles, anti-vaxxers, homophobes: YouTube’s algorithm caters to them all

2019/06/08 Leave a comment

Denise Balkissoon on the business models driving some of the hate:

Social-media platforms appear to be having an amorality contest, and this week it was YouTube’s turn to shrug at the harm that it’s caused.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that the platform failed to protect children from people who sexualize them, even though it has known about the problem for months. When prompted with a search for erotic videos, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is still serving up images of increasingly young children doing what should be innocuous, such as playing in swimsuits or doing gymnastics.

The next day, Vox journalist Carlos Maza received a reply to his complaints about being targeted by a YouTube vlogger who he said had spent years aiming homophobic, racist and hateful insults at him. The vlogger has almost 4 million subscribers, some of whom allegedly targeted Mr. Maza across multiple platforms and in his personal inbox with death threats and threats to release his personal information online.

Even so, replied YouTube, “while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies.” Which is confusing, since those policies advise users not to post content that “makes hurtful and negative personal comments/videos about another person” or that “incites others to harass or threaten individuals on or off YouTube.”

Every major social-media platform – Twitter, Facebook, Reddit – has played a part in creating this age of disinformation and extremism. But unlike the other platforms, YouTube shares the ad money it makes with content creators: Tech journalist Julia Carrie Wong argues that it’s effectively their employer, whether it accepts that title or not. That means the platform is directly delivering rewards to its creators, including those who propagate prejudice, creepiness and lies. In fact, it even helps them spread their message.

Some inside the company have tried to solve the issue. In April, Bloombergpublished a story for which it interviewed “scores of employees” who said they had long known that the site’s recommendation algorithm was leading people toward “false, incendiary and toxic content.”

But senior executives, including chief executive officer Susan Wojcicki, seem to be so focused on the advertising money that YouTube’s audience brings in that they ignore the well-being of those same users. They dismissed these warnings, along with suggestions of how to counter the problem. The site’s growth depends on “engagement,” after all – the raw amount of time people stare at the screen. And what keeps them there is a recommendation engine that pushes out increasingly extreme or explicit content.

At the 2018 South by Southwest conference, Bloomberg reported, Ms. Wojcicki defended the problematic content YouTube hosts by comparing the platform to a library. “There have always been controversies, if you look back at libraries,” she said.

But YouTube isn’t a bookshelf. It’s a billion-dollar bookseller, promoting some of the hundreds of millions of stories in its possession over others. Its algorithm doesn’t ignore, or even bury, the factless ramblings of vaccine-science deniers (including at least one in Montreal, a city now seeing an uptick in measles cases). No, it lifts them out of its infinite catalogue and thrusts them out into the world, with the book cover facing out and an “Audience Favourite” sticker slapped on the front.

Revelations of this kind of social-media irresponsibility now lead, reliably, to a certain kind of reaction: the patchwork, flip-flopping, half-measure responses that platforms think will fool us into believing they care. After learning that pedophiles were using comment sections to try to goad children into exploiting themselves, YouTube took comments off of some, but not all, videos featuring children. When Mr. Maza’s situation led to a huge outcry, YouTube “demonetized” the vlogger in question, cutting off his access to ad revenue without a clear explanation about why it was changing its decision, or when and how the revenue might be reinstituted. The criticism continues, as does the company’s inadequate solutions; now YouTube is demonetizing or removing creators it deems extremist entirely, interfering with documentary makers and researchers in the process, and putting itself at risk of being criticized for interfering with free speech.

Free speech is a political issue. Free amplification, though, is a business decision that YouTube is actively making. Which is why the one response that insiders, observers and experts have long advocated continues to be ignored: designing a new, more ethical recommendation algorithm that doesn’t reward repugnant behaviour.

Doing so would reduce traffic, and therefore revenue, for creators, a spokesperson told the Times this week. Somehow, though, she didn’t get around to pointing out that the bulk of that money ends up with YouTube.

Source: Pedophiles, anti-vaxxers, homophobes: YouTube’s algorithm caters to them all: Denise Balkissoon

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Trump’s tariff threat to Mexico is based on all the wrong data

2019/06/08 Leave a comment

Good overview of the data, and making the case that it is more a capacity issue of the asylum system (as in Canada):

For years Americans have looked at how many people border patrol agents catch as an indicator of undocumented immigration.

Since October, those numbers—known officially as “apprehensions”—have more than doubled compared to the same period the previous year to nearly 600,000 people. The surge prompted US president Donald Trump to threaten Mexico with import tariffs if authorities in that country don’t intercept more immigrants before they cross the Rio Grande.

“This sustained influx of illegal aliens has profound consequences on every aspect of our national life—overwhelming our schools, overcrowding our hospitals, draining our welfare system, and causing untold amounts of crime,” he said in a statement last week announcing the tariff strategy.

The strategy is questionable, both legally and in practice. And so is Trump’s math.

He is missing some pretty crucial figures, starting with the number of undocumented immigrants who actually settle and live in the United States. For years, that population has been shrinking. He also needs to subtract asylum seekers, who account for a large share of the intercepted immigrants. Under US and international law, they have a right to legally stay in the United States until a judge rules on their case, regardless of whether they entered the country illegally.

We took a historic dive into immigration data and found why Trump’s narrative doesn’t add up. Here are the holes, in seven charts:

The long view

The number of border crossers is rising, but remains historically low. The reason for this is the collapse in the number of Mexicans trying to sneak into the United States. Better opportunities and lower fertility rates in Mexico cut down the number of people desperate to leave. On the US side, the Great Recession dried up jobs, and increased border security made it harder to get in.

It would take many more Central American caravans for the the number of border apprehensions to reach the historic high of nearly 1.7 million from the 1980s.

Other than Mexican

These days, it is people from other countries who are shaping border traffic. They include Central Americans, who now account for well over half of apprehensions along the border. That’s partly because US immigration authorities are taking more Central Americans into custody, but mostly because they are arresting fewer Mexicans.

Most of these migrants are fleeing violence and poverty in the Northern Triangle, the trio of countries that include Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The number of apprehended immigrants from that region is up, but that doesn’t mean illegal immigration is rising.  Trump is leaving out a key distinction between apprehensions in the past and today. What they reflect is changing.

Back when Mexican economic migrants were the most common type of border crosser, apprehensions acted as a proxy for undocumented immigration—if not a very good one. At that time, it was much easier to evade the Border Patrol. So, observers looked at the number of people being caught for clues on how many people overall were making the trip north.

These days border patrol agents are far more effective at intercepting immigrants. In fact, they don’t even have to chase after them. Many Central Americans actually turn themselves in to request asylum.

The profile of “apprehended” immigrants has also changed. More than half of the Central Americans intercepted at the border since last October were families traveling with children, not men looking for work as in the past.

Many among this new group have pending asylum cases. They shouldn’t be considered undocumented unless a judge decides they’re not eligible to stay permanently. Subtract them from the number of apprehensions, and the total looks much smaller.

Many are deported

The crisis at the border is not really a numbers crisis. It’s a bureaucratic emergency because the United States has failed to adapt to the shift in immigration flows from Mexican men seeking work to Central Americans seeking asylum.

Unlike Mexican men, whom it could quickly deport, it is obligated by law to give those who fear going back to their country a day in court. It’s a much longer, back-office-heavy process that immigration authorities are ill-equipped to do. For years, they’ve directed much of their funding towards border agents and fences. That’s why they’re struggling now, even though the number of immigrants is significantly smaller than what they handled in the past.

Even taking into account that mismatch, the US deports thousands of immigrants every year.

That’s another group of people that should be removed from Trump’s tally of undocumented immigrants.

Border crossers vs. residents

Even after those adjustments, apprehensions are not the best statistic to look at if what’s worrying Trump are undocumented immigrants. (Those who are caught and have no permission to be in the United States will be deported. As we said above, asylum seekers are allowed to stay.)

He should instead focus on people who live in the United States without permission. That number has come down from a pre-Great Recession peak of more than 12 million to less than 11 million in 2016, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Again, the drop in the number of Mexican immigrants coming to the United States is partly behind that math. In addition, many immigrants are leaving, whether through deportation or on their own. Add to that the number of undocumented residents who die and those who get papers to legally live in the county, and you get more immigrant residents exiting the undocumented column than entering it.

Data from the Center for Migration Studies show that’s been the case in recent years:

Most don’t enter illegally

Of the undocumented population living in the United States, not all entered illegally. In recent years, more than half of the people settling in the country without permission entered on a visa and overstayed it. “It’s hard to walk here from India,” said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at Pew.

While many asylum seekers show up in the apprehension figures, visa overstayers don’t at all. That’s another reason why the number of people border patrol agents catch shouldn’t drive the immigration debate.

Does the border crisis change the math?

Immigration hawks fear that the asylum seekers showing up at the border will eventually become undocumented immigrants. US authorities have been releasing many of the new arrivals because there’s not enough detention space. And there are rules that limit how long officials can keep immigrant children in custody.

Immigration statistics lag, so we won’t know for a while how many of those people end up living in the United States illegally. Robert Warren, a senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies, doesn’t believe they’ll make much of a difference given recent trends. The potential impact of border crossers has shrunk along with their share of the undocumented population.

A look at border crossers who were caught and those who settled in the United States sheds some light on what we might see. The number of immigrants requesting asylum started to swell a few years before Trump took office, and so did the number of apprehensions. The number of undocumented immigrant residents who entered the country illegally went up too, but remained well below apprehensions.

That’s not to say Trump should discard apprehension statistics. He just needs to work on the takeaway. Apprehensions don’t equal undocumented immigrants. What they’re showing these days is that the asylum system is clogged up. That’s keeping the United States from protecting Central Americans at risk, and encouraging more of them to come.

“It is a very serious situation when you have so many families and children coming up to apply for asylum,” Warren said. “The thing that might be getting missed is we haven’t set up our capacity to handle that situation.”

Source: Trump’s tariff threat to Mexico is based on all the wrong data

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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