Nova Scotia still faces a disturbing problem with racism, a problem that can be traced back centuries in the province

2020/01/25 Leave a comment

Of note:

Dartmouth’s Jermaine Parris went into his local RBC branch to complain about his banking fees. A bank employee called police on him – and told them he had been drinking and driving.

Lynn Jones, a lifelong resident of Truro, N.S., was questioned by police after she and two other women stopped along a roadside to take pictures of deer. The officer told her he was investigating a complaint about “suspicious people.”

Santina Rao, a 23-year-old mother, suffered a broken wrist, concussion and injuries to her neck, arm and eye during a violent arrest by police at a Halifax Walmart while shopping with her baby and toddler. Store staff had called police because they suspected her of shoplifting.

Parris, Jones and Rao have one thing in common: They are black. And they were not breaking the law. But someone felt it was necessary to call the police. Those decisions show racial discrimination against blacks remains “alive and well” in Nova Scotia, according to the province’s former lieutenant-governor Mayann Francis.

Less than two months ago, Halifax Police Chief Dan Kinsella issued a historic apology for the practice of street checks, after statistics showed blacks were stopped six times more than whites in the city. Chief Kinsella, whose officers are once again under fire for racial profiling, has called the Ms. Rao incident “disappointing,” and referred the case to Nova Scotia’s police watchdog.

This month’s arrest of the mother in front of her young children has sparked demonstrations at the Walmart, in front of Halifax Regional Police headquarters, and led to calls to freeze the city’s police budget until the service can prove it is no longer racially profiling black Nova Scotians.

Ms. Rao, who says she tried to show her receipts and told police they could search her stroller, was charged with causing a disturbance, assaulting a peace officer and resisting arrest. She was not charged with theft.

Dr. Francis, the province’s first black lieutenant-governor, said she’s been deeply disturbed by the video of Ms. Rao’s arrest, which has been widely shared on social media. It’s made her fearful to go shopping as a black woman, she said.

“It’s affected me very badly. I identified with that. I don’t even like to watch it because it brings up an emotion that breaks my heart,” she said. “It feels like we’ve gone backwards. What’s happening with the police department, it’s just unbelievable.”

She said she can relate to Ms. Rao’s situation, being treated with suspicion simply because of the colour of her skin. Ms. Rao was accused of concealing items because she had a bag underneath her children’s stroller and was putting things into it as she shopped – which Dr. Francis said shows that, even in 2020, there remain different rules for black shoppers and white shoppers.

“Even me, the former lieutenant-governor, has been followed in the stores, has been treated with suspicion,” she said. “When I saw that happen, I said ‘That could have been me’. That could happen to any black person.”

Nova Scotia’s black population has long lived in the shadow of racism in a province where many trace their roots back centuries, to the first waves of Black Loyalists who came here during the American Revolutionary War.

Mr. Parris, whose grandfather was among the last people removed from Africville – a black community demolished by the City of Halifax in the 1960s – said racism remains a part of everyday life for many African Nova Scotians. A police report into his December traffic stop showed there was no evidence he was drinking and an officer “could not detect any smell of alcoholic beverage emitting from the vehicle.”

In his case, a white bank employee at his Brownlow Avenue branch in Dartmouth called police after Mr. Parris left, claiming he was drinking and driving. He believes police were called because he’s black, and he wasn’t showing enough respect when complaining about $60 in fees from the previous month. Within minutes of driving away, he was surrounded by five police vehicles.

“It was humiliating,” Mr. Parris said. “People come with a predisposition toward me before I even get there. It’s been that way my whole life, and I have to learn how to navigate that. I have to be mindful of how I drive, of everything I do and say, in case I offend somebody.”

The bank, for its part, says it called police out of concern for Mr. Parris, and disputed the information in the police report that said he was told not to return to the branch.

“After Mr. Parris left our branch in his vehicle, we were sincerely concerned for his safety and well-being, and we alerted the authorities,” said AJ Goodman, director of external communications for RBC.

In Ms. Jones’s case, her story prompted Truro’s municipal council to pass a motion aimed at addressing concerns around police bias and racial profiling. Ms. Jones said the incident should be an opportunity to help improve the lives of black people by removing employment barriers and improved funding for black businesses.

Many black Nova Scotians say the racism they encounter isn’t usually as public, or nearly as dramatic, as Ms. Rao’s arrest at Walmart last week.

“Our racism is a very polite form of racism. It smiles in your face, it says please and thank you, it calls you sir and ma’am at the same time as it marginalizes you,” said Robert Wright, a social worker and former senior civil servant in the Nova Scotia government. “They’re not yelling at you, they’re not screaming at you, they’re just ill-serving you.”

Mr. Wright says the institutions that were supposed to protect black people’s civil rights, including the courts and the province’s Human Rights Commission, have failed them. That’s why he and others are calling for the creation of an African Nova Scotia Justice Institute, in an effort to reduce the number of black people in the legal system.

Modelled after a legal support clinic for Indigenous people, it would also monitor human rights cases, offer legal defence funding, a restorative justice program, provide court workers and programming for black youths.

The initiative was formally tabled in legislation proposed by the provincial NDP last fall, after stats from an Freedom of Information Act request showed 13 per cent of people incarcerated in Nova Scotia’s prisons are black, compared to less than three per cent of the population.

It will take years for Nova Scotia’s institutions to evolve, Mr. Wright said. But real change can start by taking black Nova Scotians seriously when they say they’re experiencing racism, he said.

“If you want to redress this 400-year history of the marginalization of black people in Nova Scotia, you need to start by believing black people,” Mr. Wright said. “Start by trusting that black people know racism when they see it.”

Calvin Lawrence, a black police officer in Halifax and later with the RCMP, said police need to be better trained and supervised to ensure they know how to de-escalate conflict with black people instead of letting a confrontation end in an unnecessary arrest, he said.

The retired officer says he has serious concerns about Ms. Rao’s arrest, and argues a more sensitive approach may have ended the situation peacefully. He says black communities sometimes need a different approach to policing.

“The defining emotion of the black experience is anger. The challenge is to live with that anger without it debilitating us,” said Mr. Lawrence, whose book, Black Cop, detailed his 36 years dealing with racism inside the police.

“If police want voluntary compliance, they shouldn’t always be doing a one-up, ‘I’m in charge here, do as I say or you’re going to jail’… They need to be able to read the streets, be able to read people and be able to talk to people. It’s a learned art.”

Apologies from chiefs of police for historical mistreatment are helpful, Mr. Lawrence said, but until real change filters down to the officers on the front lines and their supervisors, problems will continue.

“How much time do we spend on the Taser, the gun or the baton, compared to how much time we spend teaching officers how to actually speak to people on the street?” he said.

Source: Nova Scotia still faces a disturbing problem with racism, a problem that can be traced back centuries in the province

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Trump’s New ‘Birth Tourism’ Policy Is A Way To Control Women

2020/01/25 Leave a comment

More negative commentary, particularly around the subjectiveness of determinations:

On Friday, a new policy to stop pregnant women from traveling to the U.S. for “birth tourism” will go into effect. Consular officers can now deny visitor visas to women who they have “reason to believe” will give birth in America in order to get their child U.S. citizenship.

The policy is already controversial because it gives officers, who are not medical experts, broad discretion to determine whether or not someone is pregnant. If an officer thinks a woman is likely to have a baby in the U.S., they can automatically conclude that a person’s “primary purpose” for travel is birth tourism, and prevent them from entering the country.

Women’s health advocates and experts said the rule is a blatant attempt to control women and that it could prevent expecting mothers from receiving life-saving medical care.

“It’s hugely discriminatory and also is putting women’s lives at risk,” said Nora Ellmann, a research associate for women’s health and rights at the Center for American Progress. “The rule is positioning pregnant women as a national security threat.”

The Trump administration has a history of stomping on reproductive rights, especially regarding women of color. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) largely stopped detaining pregnant women under a President Barack Obama directive, Trump reversed that order and the number of expecting mothers in detention has jumped by 52% since he took office. Scott Lloyd, the former director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), blocked pregnant immigrant teenagers in ORR custody from getting abortions, and allegedly tracked their menstrual cycles. And Trump has talked about using an executive order to end birthright citizenship, to stop immigrants from having what he calls “anchor babies.”

The rule is positioning pregnant women as a national security threat.Nora Ellmann, research associate for women’s health and rights at the Center for American Progress

The topic of “birth tourism” recently made headlines after a woman traveling from Hong Kong to Saipan, a United States territory in the Pacific, was forced to take a pregnancy test before boarding the flight. She had to sign a medical release form that said she had “a body size/shape resembling to a [sic] pregnant lady,” according to a blog post the woman wrote. Though there are no credible statistics on how widespread birth tourism is, media coverage usually focuses on women from China and Russia.

The new policy does not apply to the 39 countries whose citizens can travel to the U.S. without a visa — like France, Ireland and New Zealand — and it’s unclear how it will work for foreign travelers from other countries.

In an email to HuffPost, a State Department spokesperson said officers would only raise the topic of pregnancy if “they had a specific articulable reason to believe a visa applicant may be pregnant and planning to give birth in the United States.” The spokesperson did not answer HuffPost’s question about how an officer would determine whether or not someone is pregnant, how far along they are, and if a medical professional would be involved in a screening.

Women’s health advocates worry the dystopian process will involve an officer behind a glass window sizing up a woman’s body, which could result in discrimination based on gender, age and size.

“It’s clearly a huge violation of a woman’s privacy and dignity,” said Sung Yeon Choimorrow, the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. “There is so much room for subjectiveness in this. What types of questions are you going to ask? The whole thing is just so absurd.”

The rule also makes the false assumption that pregnant women only travel to give birth in another country, when they might be going overseas for business or vacation, Choimorrow added.

Even more concerning is that an officer with no medical background now has the power to decide if someone is pregnant and if they deserve medical treatment in the U.S., said Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an obstetrician-gynecologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s just completely outside of the realm of what they can and should be doing.”

Though the rule specifies that pregnant women seeking medical treatment in the U.S. can be granted visas if they have the means to pay for their medical bills, the policy also states that pregnant women have to prove, “to the satisfaction of a consular officer,” that they have a “legitimate reason” for seeing an American doctor. This phrasing leaves serious, potentially life-saving decisions up to people with no medical background, according to Ellmann.

“They may say, ‘Well, we don’t think that’s a sufficient basis, because you can get the treatment, which may or may not be that good, right outside of the United States,’” said Jeffrey Gorsky, a lawyer who worked in the State Department’s visa office for 36 years.

Dr. Sufrin said that even if the State Department does plan to involve medical professionals, it would be highly unethical for any doctor to be involved in a process that denies medical care to someone based on factors such as their nationality, citizenship status, or for any other reason.

Gorsky said the rule seems extremely hard to implement, especially given the fact that women interested in “birth tourism” can apply for long-term travel visas years before they are pregnant. He thinks the new policy is more symbolic than practical ― a muscle flex for Trump’s anti-immigration base.

“I think the political motivations are what’s driving this,” he said. “This administration does not have a record of caring for the needs of people who are not U.S. citizens.”

Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-birth-tourism-policy-women_n_5e2b407bc5b67d8874b16ccf

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

Older refugees have high levels of depression even decades after immigration to Canada

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Most research on the mental health of refugees focuses on the first few years after resettlement in the host country, but little is known about their long-term mental health.

A new study of Canadians aged 45-85, released this week, found that refugees were 70% more likely to suffer from depression than those born in Canada when age, sex and marital status were taken into account — even decades after immigration.

“Our findings indicate that the refugee experience casts a long shadow across an individual’s lifespan,” says the study’s first author Shen (Lamson) Lin, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto’s Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW).

“While our data did not capture reasons for the high levels of depression among refugees, we believe it may be influenced by exposure to pre-migration traumas such as genocide, forced displacement, human trafficking, sexual assault, famine, and separation from family.”

In order to untangle the potential contribution of post-migration challenges, which face all immigrants, from the pre-migration trauma unique to refugees, the research team also investigated depression among immigrants who did not arrive as refugees. Post-migration problems may include downward socioeconomic mobility, racial discrimination, higher levels of unemployment, language barriers, and reduced social networks.

The prevalence of depression among non-refugee immigrants (16.6%) was much closer to that of their Canadian-born peers (15.2%) than to that of refugees (22.1%).

“Our results suggest that post-migration challenges are less important than pre-migration traumas when it comes to depression,” says senior author, FIFSW Professor Esme Fuller-Thomson, who is also cross-appointed to U of T’s Department of Family & Community Medicine and is is director of the University’s Institute for Life Course & Aging.

“The greater prevalence of depression among refugees — half of whom arrived more than four decades ago — underlines the importance of providing mental health resources for our refugee community both immediately after arrival, but also in the ensuing decades.”

The study investigated factors that may have influenced levels of depression among participants, including age, sex, marital status, income, education, health, chronic pain, health behaviors and the frequency of social contacts. But even when these characteristics were accounted for, refugees still had much higher odds of depression than individuals born in Canada.

The researchers found that social support is a key. A lack of social support was associated with higher levels of depression among refugees — they were also more likely to have less of it. Refugees were more likely than those born in Canada to report that they lacked: 1) someone who showed them love and affection (17% versus 8%), 2) someone to confide in about their problems (27% vs 16%), and 3) someone to give them good advice about a crisis (27% versus 16%). (The level of social support among immigrants who did not arrive as refugees was relatively similar to the Canadian born group, and much less vulnerable than the refugee group.) When the availability of these three levels of social support was high, the relationship between refugee status and depression significantly diminished.

“Our study indicates that the quality of relationships, rather than the quantity of social connections, matters most for refugees’ mental health.” says co-author Karen Kobayashi, a professor in the Department of Sociology and a research affiliate at the Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health at the University of Victoria. “This highlights the importance of investigating ways to promote powerful positive social relations among refugees and asylum seekers in their families, neighbourhoods, and communities.”

The study’s findings also have important policy implications.

In Canada, two different sponsorship programs are currently in place. Government-assisted refugees (GARs) get basic financial aid and assistance offered by professionals to help with the settlement process. Privately sponsored refugees (PSRs) are supported by a network of engaged volunteers, often members of a church, mosque or synagogue who are able to provide extensive assistance with all kinds of settlement issues including housing, health needs and job searches.

According to recent studies on Syrian refugees in Canada, PSRs report having more help in daily errands, fewer unmet needs and a higher employment rate than GARs.

“We anticipate that refugees sponsored under the PSR program may be more likely to thrive post-migration because of a stronger social support network and this may set them on a positive employment and mental health trajectory for decades after their arrival.” says co-author Hongmei Tong, Assistant Professor of Social Work at MacEwan University in Edmonton.

Consistent with earlier studies, Canadian adults in this study who were poor, experiencing chronic pain and those with more co-morbid health conditions had a higher prevalence of depression.

“It is not surprising that Canadians who have household incomes under $25,000 per year have double the odds of distress compared to those with incomes above $75,000. Struggling to pay the rent and feed one’s family can be extremely distressing,” said co-author Simran R Arora, Master of Social Work student at the University of Toronto.

“Mental health professionals must be careful not to neglect physical health concerns such as chronic pain,” said co-author Karen Davison, Health Science Program Chair at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C. “We really need to be treating the whole person in order to address depression.”

Source: Older refugees have high levels of depression even decades after immigration to Canada

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America’s census looks out of date in the age of big data

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

Similar issues with the Canadian census, no doubt, and the debate over StatsCan accessing bank financial data is an illustration of the potential and the privacy and political roadblocks (globalnews.ca › news › statistics-canada-pause-plan-obtain-banking-re…Statistics Canada hits pause on plan to obtain banking …):

A DOG-SLED or a snowmobile is the surest way to reach Toksook Bay in rural Alaska, where Steven Dillingham, the director of America’s census bureau, will arrive to count the first people in the country’s decennial population survey on January 21st. The task should not take long—there were only 590 villagers at the last count, in 2010—but it marks the beginning of a colossal undertaking. Everyone living in America will be asked about their age, sex, ethnicity and residence over the coming months (and some will be asked much more besides).

This census has already proved unusually incendiary. An attempt by President Donald Trump to include a question on citizenship, which might have discouraged undocumented immigrants from responding, was thwarted by the Supreme Court. His administration has also been accused in two lawsuits of underfunding the census, thus increasing the likelihood that minorities and vulnerable people, such as the homeless, will be miscounted.

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Islamic leaders make ‘groundbreaking’ visit to Auschwitz

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

Significant:

Muslim religious leaders joined members of a U.S. Jewish group at Auschwitz on Thursday for what organizers described as “the most senior Islamic leadership delegation” to visit the site of a Nazi German death camp.

The interfaith visit came four days before the 75th anniversary of the camp’s Jan. 27, 1945, liberation by Soviet forces and as world leaders gathered in Jerusalem to commemorate the Holocaust.

The secretary general of the Muslim World League, Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, and the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, led the tour to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Poland. The Nazis operated extermination and concentration camps in Poland when Germany occupied the country during World War II.

The American Jewish Committee said that Al-Issa, who is based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, led a delegation of 62 Muslims, including 25 prominent religious leaders, from some 28 countries during the “groundbreaking” visit. At one point, they prayed with their heads pressed on the ground at Birkenau, the largest part of the camp and the most notorious site of Germany’s mass murder of European Jews.

The AJC delegation included members of the organization, among them children of Holocaust survivors.

“To be here, among the children of Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish and Islamic communities, is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” Al-Issa said. “The unconscionable crimes to which we bear witness today are truly crimes against humanity. That is to say, a violation of us all, an affront to all of God’s children.”

Auschwitz was the most notorious in a system of death and concentration camps that Nazi Germany operated on territory it occupied across Europe. In all, 1.1 million people were killed there, most of them Jews from across the continent.

The visit comes as Saudi Arabia works to be seen abroad as a moderate and modernizing country following decades of adherence to a hard-line interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism. The Muslim World League, under al-Issa’s leadership, has embraced the effort.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s strategy to modernize the kingdom is aimed in part at attracting greater foreign investment and fostering a national Saudi identity that is not founded solely on conservative religious values.

Al-Issa’s outreach to Jewish organizations also coincides with a broader alignment of interests and ties emerging between the Arab Gulf states and Israel, which share a common foe in Iran.

On Friday, members of the delegation will visit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and attend Muslim and Jewish religious services there.

Source: Islamic leaders make ‘groundbreaking’ visit to Auschwitz

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The Laughable “Security” Justification for Cracking Down on Birth Tourism

2020/01/24 1 Comment

Good analysis by David Bier:

The U.S. Department of State announced a new rule for tourist visa applicants today: prove you’re not going to give birth in America. The rule will not protect national security, will create more fraud and crime, and will cost America people who will contribute productively to this nation.

The tourist visa statute allows noncitizens to visit the United States for “pleasure,” which State has always interpreted to mean “legitimate activities of a recreational character, including tourism, amusement, visits with friends or relatives, rest, medical treatment, and activities of a fraternal, social, or service nature.” — in other words, most anything. But now, “The Department is revising the definition of ‘pleasure’” (p. 2) to exclude giving birth in the United States.

The State Department asserts that the “rule addresses concerns about the attendant risks of this activity to national security.”

The previous regulation failed to address the national security vulnerability that could allow foreign governments or entities to recruit or groom U.S. citizens who were born as the result of birth tourism and raised overseas, without attachment to the United States, in manners that threaten the security of the United States.

The State Department not only doesn’t present any evidence that this is occurring or has ever occurred, but it doesn’t even explain what the threatening “manners” might be that could somehow harm America. It can’t even imagine a hypothetical scenario to give flesh and bones to nightmare. The evidence that it does provide is that “Birth tourism companies advertise their businesses abroad by promoting the citizenship‐​related benefits of giving birth in the United States” (emphasis added). In other words, these are capitalist enterprises led by the market, not governmental efforts led by foreign security agencies.

I have dug through hundreds of national security and terrorism cases over a 30‐​year period to identify the origins of the offenders, and not a single case that I have reviewed followed this fact pattern.

The State Department lists the following reasons for people choosing to give birth in the United States:

obtaining a second citizenship for their child, the perceived low‐​cost medical services available to women in the United States, the lower cost of obtaining U.S. citizenship through birth tourism than through a U.S. investor visa, and the perceived guarantee of a better socioeconomic future for their child.

Not included on this list: developing stealth agents to (somehow) undermine America.

It’s also interesting that the State Department didn’t include the evasion of China’s 1‑child/​2‑child policy. One woman named Liou said in 2015 that she only came to the United States to “skirt China’s one‐​child policy” and will return to China after giving birth. The reason is that the child limit only applies to children born in mainland China. A Shanghai reporter assessed the situation this way in 2011:

American journalists continue to generate stories about birth tourists from China, most often explaining them as seekers of the American dream. They rarely touch on what the Chinese people, and their media, know is a leading cause of the phenomenon: an attempt to evade the Chinese government’s population controls.

This explains why — as I described in 2015—out‐​of‐​county births to mainland Chinese have spiked all around the world, not just in the United States. You would think that the State Department would want to treat people thwarting Chinese totalitarianism as potential allies, rather than threats. Obviously, these women choose to give birth in the United States rather than elsewhere because they believe their children could benefit from having the option to come and live here, but it takes a bizarre sort of nativist paranoia to see this aspiration for the American dream as a threat rather than an opportunity.

The State Department cites a few instances of birth tourism companies defrauding immigrants, hospitals, and property owners, but those actions are already illegal and this rule does nothing to stop fraud. Indeed, by banning this activity, this rule will inevitably push the industry underground and lead to more fraud. Far from protecting women seeking to give birth here, it will place them in much more vulnerable situations.

This rule has no justification other than a desire to keep out foreigners. Indeed, it repeatedly cites the fear that parents of the child could eventually receive green cards when their children reach adulthood. That’s not a fear any reasonable person would treat as a security threat. In fact, the State Department notes that the birth tourists are hoping their children will eventually return to contribute to America. How is this a problem?

The State Department is denying the public the ability to comment on the rule before it becomes finalized — as all other rules must do — because it wants to avoid having to “respond publicly to pointed questions regarding foreign policy decisions.” It must be nice to have the power to harm the lives of tens of thousands of peaceful people, all without the fear of having to answer any questions about it.

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/laughable-security-justification-cracking-down-birth-tourism

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

The Trump Administration’s Travel Ban Against Women of Child-bearing Age

2020/01/24 Leave a comment

One of the initial critiques. Should a future Canadian government decide to implement a comparable measure, many of these points would apply and would need to be considered before implementation.

And it will be interesting to see if the US action diverts birth tourists to Canada, that will take some time to show up in the CIHI data:

Without any new action by Congress, the Trump administration posted a new regulation, effective tomorrow, that bans women of child-bearing age from being issued a visitor visa simply because they could be pregnant. The bottom line: a vast group of women visitors to the U.S. could be barred simply because a consular officer thinks they are pregnant or could become pregnant.  Unless they are able to overcome a new obstacle — proving to a consular officer that, just because they could be pregnant, they do not have the intention to obtain U.S. citizenship for their child by giving birth in the U.S. — millions of women could be denied access to America.

There were approximately 7 million visitor visas issued in 2018, so this rule could apply to millions of women from around the world seeking to visit our country, but not men. The first barrier to entry starts with being a woman. The second: a consular officer’s subjective guess about a women’s reproductive cycle. Third: the fact of a woman’s pregnancy or her ability to become pregnant — which is not, in fact, a bar to visiting the U.S. under the law passed by Congress.

This new rule would apply to a pregnant woman traveling with her family to Disneyland, a pregnant woman coming to the United States for a business meeting, and a pregnant woman who needs specialized medical care to save her baby’s life and her own during birth. Worse yet, the language of the new regulation is so overly-broad, it conceivably could bar any woman in her child-bearing years just because she could possibly become pregnant and have a baby while visiting the U.S. within the ten years that a visitor visa is typically valid for many foreign nationals.

Ur Jaddou, Director of DHS Watch and former USCIS Chief Counsel, said: “Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric of this administration. This new rule is nothing more than a new roadblock for women just because their bodies can become pregnant. This new rule very specifically states that just because a consular officer ‘has reason to believe’ a woman ‘will give birth during her stay in the United States,’ she is automatically presumed to be coming to the United States ‘for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for the child.’ Because the language of the new regulations is so overly-broad, it would not only cause a consular officer to ‘have reason to believe’ an eight-month pregnant woman ‘will give birth during her stay in the United States,’ it could also mean that a consular officer might have ‘reason to believe’ that a woman of any child-bearing age — approximately 30-40 years of her life — ‘will give birth during her stay in the United States.’  That is because a B visa could be granted, and often is granted, for up to 10 years. Even if a woman of child-bearing age is not pregnant on the day of her visa interview, she could conceivably become pregnant, travel to the U.S. while pregnant within the 10 years of her valid B visa, and give birth while in the U.S. during one of those visits. Therefore, a consular officer in any U.S. embassy or consulate could conceivably be banning a woman from the U.S. just because she could one day within the next 10 years be pregnant and give birth during a visit in the U.S. This new regulation is more than absurd and a clear attack on women and their bodies just because they can have babies.”

David Leopold, Counsel to DHS Watch, Chair of Immigration at Ulmer & Berne and former President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said:  “The Trump administration has effectively placed a travel ban on women of child-bearing age. Under the false pretext of national security and crime prevention, the administration has concocted a discriminatory rule which empowers overseas visa officers to deny a visitor visa to any woman the officer ‘has reason to believe’ will give birth in the U.S. Translated into plain English that means a consular officer can deny a visa to any woman of child-bearing age. So, with the stroke of a pen Trump has now given low level embassy bureaucrats effective control over women’s bodies. Clearly, any woman seeking to visit the U.S. will be placed in the humiliating position of having to convince a U.S. consular official that she’s not pregnant or going to get pregnant before she travels to the U.S. or while she’s visiting. This indefensible regulation will potentially impact millions of women who seek to travel to the U.S. for business or pleasure. Of course, like many other Trump immigration schemes, the impact of this regulation will be largely on women of color. The rule does not apply to citizens of most Western and industrialized nations who are eligible to travel to the U.S. without a visitor visa.”

The new regulation is deceptively short and simple:  

Any B nonimmigrant visa applicant who a consular officer has reason to believe will give birth during her stay in the United States is presumed to be traveling for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for the child. 

But what it means is much more insidious.  

The regulation gives consular officers vast new power to establish a “reason to believe” that a woman seeking a visitor visa “will give birth during her stay in the United States.” Because there is no limit in the regulation as to what is considered a “reason to believe,” there are so many circumstances that could give rise to that “reason to believe.” Could it be that she appears pregnant during a visa interview? How would a consular officer determine that? Could it even be that any woman of child-bearing age could reasonably become pregnant and give birth in the United States during the 10 years that a typical tourist visa is valid?

As soon as that “reason to believe” is triggered, the presumption is triggered and women are then faced with the roadblock of proving that they do not have the “primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for the child.” But there is little in this regulation that explains how a woman can overcome this burden.

Moreover, this regulation is squarely aimed at women, banning women unless they overcome the presumption. But what about men who may be coming to support or accompany a woman for the birth of a child? Under the new regulation, there is no additional burden for men, just women, yet both could share the same purpose for the visit that this regulation claims to address.

Understanding the Visa Process

To understand the practical impact of this regulation it is necessary to understand how visa issuance works. After completing an online application the visa applicant is usually briefly interviewed while standing before a row of windows by a consular officer who appears behind a glass partition. During the interview, which is usually no more than a few minutes, the consular officer generally assesses the purpose of the trip to the U.S. and the applicant’s ties to her home country in an effort to determine whether or not she will return home after her temporary trip to the U.S. This regulation now permits the consular officer to legally deny a visa to any woman whom he “has reason to believe” will give birth during her stay in the U.S. because she will be presumed to be traveling to the U.S. to obtain U.S. citizenship for the child. Thus, a business executive, who is pregnant, could be denied a visa for a business meeting in the U.S., even though she has a close economic and family ties in her home country.

Furthermore, depending on the applicant’s country, visitor visas can be issued for up to 10 years. In evaluating visitor visa eligibility under this new regulation, a consular officer is now permitted to estimate whether or not there is reason to believe a woman may at some point during the validity period of a visa — up to 10 years — give birth in the U.S. If so, in addition to existing regulations that apply to both men and women seeking visitor visas, she must overcome the new presumption that she does not have the primary intention of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the U.S. to a child she may potentially have at some point in the next 10 years.

Racial Disparity

The State Department regulation specifically states that it “does not change Department of Homeland Security regulations regarding the admissibility of aliens, including Visa Waiver Program travelers.” The Visa Waiver Program allows foreign nationals to travel to the United States without first applying for a visitor visa and only foreign nationals from certain countries may use the VWP program, mainly Western and industrialized nations. Therefore, this new regulation does not apply to women who come from primarily Western and industrialized nations, but does apply to all other nations. The impact, therefore, is likely to fall squarely on women of color seeking to visit the U.S. for business or pleasure, requiring them to overcome the seemingly insurmountable burden of showing they do not intend to give birth in the U.S. for the purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for their child.  Women from industrialized countries face no such obstacles if they travel on the Visa Waiver Program.

Source: americasvoice.org/press_releases…

Filed under Birth Tourism, Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with

What Lunar New Year Reveals About the World’s Calendars

2020/01/23 Leave a comment

Neat article:

Lunar New Year kicks off Saturday as one of the most important holidays in Vietnam, South Korea, China and other Asian countries. Typically, it starts on the second new moon after winter solstice.

On the Gregorian calendar, the civil calendar used in most countries, including the United States, the Lunar New Year changes every year, as do the dates of holidays like Rosh Hashana, Diwali and Ramadan.

It can be easy to think of a calendar as a scientific given, or a reflection of the laws of the universe. In fact, as these holidays remind us, there are as many ways to track time as there are cultures and languages. Each calendar reveals something about how the people who created it relate to the world around them while also preserving rich cultural identities and memories.

Most time-keeping traditions track the movement of the sun, moon and stars. Others consider seasonal events, like the autumnal swarming of sea worms, used to orient each year in the Trobriand Islands off New Guinea, or the flowering of immortelle trees into hundreds of tiny vermilion flames, which marks the start of the dry season in Trinidad.

With any calendar, the basic question is which of thousands, if not millions, of cycles in the world to follow, said Kevin Birth, an anthropology professor at Queens College. Calendars “always come down to this cultural choice,” he said, so using one system over another is ultimately a social contract, regardless of how scientifically accurate or sophisticated a calendar is.

A solar year — the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun — lasts around 365 days, while a lunar year, or 12 full cycles of the Moon, is roughly 354 days. Because of this discrepancy, a purely lunar calendar — like the Islamic, or Hijri, calendar — doesn’t stay aligned with the seasons. Islam’s holy month of Ramadan may fall in summer one year, and winter a number of years later.

To correct for seasonal drift, the Chinese, Hindu, Jewish and many other calendars are lunisolar. In these calendars, a month is still defined by the moon, but an extra month is added periodically to stay close to the solar year.

A solar calendar is useful for farming, fishing and foraging societies that need to plan ahead for particular times of the year. But a purely solar calendar, like the Gregorian, tells you nothing about the phases of the Moon.

The traditional Hijri calendar requires an observation of the early crescent moon to start a new month, and thus encourages paying attention to the cosmos. The Gregorian calendar can’t be tracked in the sky, which might be why many Westerners have less awareness of the moon and other natural phenomena, said Sacha Stern, a professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London.

Major events on the calendar shape cultural identity. When Jews around the world celebrate Sukkot, a harvest festival, they are observing the timing of the harvest in Israel, and preserving a connection throughout the diaspora, Dr. Birth said.

Holidays also structure personal and historical narratives. Some secular holidays in the United States center on legacies of war, which fits “when you think that the United States also has the largest military budget in the world,” Dr. Birth said. Chinese holidays usually emphasize family union and honoring ancestors, said Haiwang Yuan, a professor of library public services at Western Kentucky University, which aligns with the importance of filial piety.

Many ancient calendars, like the Chinese and Mesoamerican ones, build in fortunetelling, with prescriptions for when to build a house, get married, have a funeral and other life events. Similar calendars provide structure and comfort to people today. Britt Hart, an astrologer based in Philadelphia, said she thinks people can be drawn to horoscope-based calendars because they’re seeking a grander sense of time and order in the universe.

In the context of history, staying connected to an alternative calendar can also be a form of resisting the mainstream, or maintaining an identity outside of it. When a calendar is imposed on a society, it usually has to do with politics and power. The ability “to say when the year will start, or decide that a religious festival should be celebrated at a particular time, can be quite useful for a politician,” Dr. Stern said.

The Gregorian calendar has only been used as a global standard for about a century, and is “very much a reflection of European commerce and colonialism,” Dr. Birth said. It has now been built into computer architecture, but that doesn’t mean another calendar couldn’t one day become dominant.

A Hijri calendar from the Gregorian year 2014 hangs in Dr. Birth’s office. On it, Christmas falls on 3 Rabi al-Awwal, the third day of the third month.

He loves the reminder that, “holidays you think are stationary actually move, and those you think move are actually stationary.” It shows “how cultural these things are, rather than natural,” he said.

Source: What Lunar New Year Reveals About the World’s CalendarsRather than a scientific given, calendars say a lot about the history and cultural values of the societies that created them.

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Birth Tourism, Belts, and Braces

2020/01/23 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of the visa screening proposal by the Trump administration and some of the implementation issues:

A news story about the likelihood of a crackdown on birth tourism by the current administration got me thinking about birth tourism as a challenge, in and of itself, and how its management is complicated by the number of migration screenings experienced by a pregnant alien woman.

Birth tourism, as my colleagues and I have argued over the years, is a problem because it not only allows instant citizenship for the infant involved, it grants immigration benefits to that child’s parents 21 years later — all without any governmental control, and all beyond the numerical ceilings that control most legal immigration. CIS has estimated that there are about 33,000 such births a year.

The news story reports that the State Department has announced that it is contemplating issuing a new regulation that a tourist visa should not be used in connection with birth tourism, and that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) may being doing the same.

Were both State and CBP to come up with such policies, how would they be enforced? This leads to my comments about the varying number of screenings that a pregnant alien could experience on her way to becoming a birth tourism mother. The more processes, the more likely the pregnancy would be noticed.

The number of barriers that an expecting mother faces would vary, to some extent, by the likelihood of her giving birth in the United States. Women arriving from China, Russia, and Nigeria, often mentioned in this connection, would have a harder time bringing this off than, say, a Canadian, but it’s unlikely that a Canadian would be interested in birthright citizenship for her expected child. (Aliens from the first three countries need visas to enter the United States; Canadians do not.)

In some cases, to use a British metaphor, there would be a single barrier (or belt) to birth citizenship, and in others there could be as many as one belt and two pairs of braces; here are the variations:

  • One belt: The mother in question is from a visa-waiver country, so she would not need a visa, she simply has to get past the immigration officer at the U.S. airport where her plane lands.
  • One belt: The mother is Canadian and needs to be admitted at a port of entry; she might be a passenger in a car, at night, with her body shape hidden in clothing.
  • One belt plus one set of braces: The mother’s nation of origin is such, say Peru, that she needs a visa to come to the United States, so she is screened once at the embassy and again at the airport.
  • One belt plus two sets of braces: That visa-bearing Peruvian woman is in China when she finds out she is pregnant; she chooses to fly to Guam to see her sister, is inspected there, and inspected again in Hawaii on her way to California, another birth tourism hot spot.

The reader will note that the proposed control of birthright citizenship is confined to people with tourist visas. Other longer-term visas are not involved. Some tourist visas are issued for multiple years, and the visa-issuance process regarding birth tourists would not be effective in those cases.

My musing about the number of barriers erected by policymakers is not just a matter of immigration trivia because one of the prime centers of birth tourism is the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, just north of Guam. Chinese nationals, while needing a visa to come to the Mainland or Hawaii do not need one to go to CNMI; so there is only the CBP officer at the Saipan airport between them and birth tourism.

Birth Tourism Is Not for Everyone. The baby’s parents have to be financially strong enough to pay the bills, young enough to be parents, and farsighted enough to go through this whole maneuver; though my colleagues may disagree, this is not a bad combination.

Birth tourism, like the movement of immigrant investors in the EB-5 program, attracts well-to-do migrants, as family migration, generally, does not. And both birth tourism and EB-5 are apparently very attractive to well-to-do, but nervous, people from China.

EB-5 is limited to 10,000 visas a year, but there are no limits to birth tourism.

Source: Birth Tourism, Belts, and Braces

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

Immigrants new to U.S. are farming its lands with old ways

2020/01/23 Leave a comment

Interesting. Wonder if any of this is happening in Canada (apart from the Canadian Sikhs in British Columbia):

It was pitch-black in the early morning after the Washington region’s first snowfall, when the Nigerian farmer went to check on his crops. Olaniyi Balogun pushed open the fence, took two steps, then stamped his boot against the soil. He bent over the rows of kale and gently touched the underside of a palm-size, sprouting leaf.

“Hmm,” he grunted, frowning. Just like he thought — frozen.

Most farmers in the Maryland suburbs stop growing their crops by mid-January, but Balogun wants to stretch out the season as far as he can. His wife says it’s because he’s a workaholic; he disagrees. In the rural towns outside Akure, the city in southwestern Nigeria where he was born, people farm year-round.

“For me, this is the only thing I know how to do,” said Balogun, 53, a stocky man with a deep, steady voice. Every time he steps out onto his farm, he said, he remembers himself as a boy, leaping off a crowded pickup truck into the cornfields, slingshot in hand.

“This is what makes me happy.”

Agriculture was once the driving economic force of Montgomery County, now a booming suburb of 1 million people. But after World War II, rapid industrialization drew residents and resources away from the land, leaving just several hundred farmers in what is now the county’s protected 93,000-acre agricultural reserve.

As the county’s demographics change, another shift is underway. Immigrants, many of whom grew up farming in their home countries, are taking over small pockets of the land — part of what advocates say is a national trend that is most pronounced in West Coast states such as California and Washington.

In the United States, farmers have been — and are — predominantly white and male. A third of them are over 65, and as they march toward retirement, many struggle to find successors, contributing to a crisis within the industry that has seen rises in bankruptcies, loan delinquencies and suicides.

From New York’s Hudson Valley to California’s Central Coast, public and private organizations are trying to connect immigrants with the resources they need to start their own farms or cultivate land owned by others, hoping to infuse the industry with new energy and traditions.

The U.S. agriculture census does not track farmers based on national origin, but judging by its data on race, the growth of immigrant farmers seems likely, experts say. From 2007 to 2017 (the most recent year the census was conducted), the number of farms with Hispanic producers grew about 30%, from 66,000 to 86,000. Those who study the census note that since many land-leasing contracts happen informally, these figures may undercount the number of foreign-born farmers who are bringing their agricultural traditions to U.S. shores.

In her recent book “The New American Farmer,” Syracuse University professor Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern says immigrant farmers often introduce new crops and their own, more sustainable farming practices — complementing a growing U.S. “food movement” that urges consumers to take back control of what they eat.

Some immigrant farmers in Maryland have become their neighborhood’s local producers, reviving fading relationships among buyers, farmers and landowners.

“These farmers, their heart and soul are in the land,” said Caroline Taylor, a Maryland farmer and the head of the nonprofit Montgomery Countryside Alliance. “It’s something people miss.”

A love match service: land + farmer

The alliance runs a program, called Land Link, that matches potential farmers with landowners who don’t want to farm but want to keep their land active. The goal, Taylor said, is to revitalize the agricultural reserve and in turn fend off developers hungry for the land.

Since it started in 2011, the Land Link program has helped to lease out nearly 500 acres. It has gained more momentum in recent years, Taylor said, in part because of increasing demand from immigrant and minority farmers, who constitute the majority of applicants. Alliance staff members receive a growing number of inquiries each week on the program, Taylor added, some from people not even in the country yet.

Before he moved to the United States, Balogun ran his own farm in Nigeria that spanned more than 120 acres. In 2016, he married Tope Fajingbesi, a self-described “city girl” who left Lagos in the early 2000s to study, and later settle in College Park as a lecturer at the University of Maryland. They agreed that he would join her if — and only if — he could farm. But in wealthy Montgomery, buying land, even renting, seemed impossible.

“I said to him, ‘Yes, of course we will do it,’ but inside, I thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s no way,’ ” Fajingbesi, 42, recalled. “What was the plan? I don’t know. We had no plan.”

When Land Link first matched them with landowners Dorothy and Brad Leissa, Fajingbesi crunched the numbers. “$500 a month,” she told her husband. That’s all they could shell out. At an introductory meeting, the Nigerian couple nervously asked the Leissas how much it would cost to rent the acre of land around the their 19th-century farmhouse. When the landlords asked for a dollar, Fajingbesi thought she had misheard. One dollar, the Leissas repeated.

“We’re happy to share,” said Dorothy, a soft-spoken schoolteacher. “Really, we’re happy to let them use it.”

Slowly, Balogun began to build up Dodo Farms, spending 11 — sometimes 12 — hours at the site each day. When he harvested his first tomatoes, he brought a bag to the Leissas’ farmhouse at the top of the hill. At Thanksgiving, he turned up at their door with a 25-pound turkey.

Last year, the couple brought him a gift: a wooden sign for the dim-lit shed where he does his administrative work. On it, the words “OFIISI NIYI” — Yoruba for “Niyi’s office.”

They wanted to show Balogun that he belonged on the farm, Dorothy said.

And that it belonged to him.

What’s old is new again

Minkoff-Zern, the Syracuse professor, interviewed 70 immigrant Latino farmers for her book. Nearly all showed a preference for a specific farming style, she wrote, “one where they are able to regain control over their daily labor and reproduce a specific agrarian way of life.”

They limit use of chemicals, opting for natural alternatives that were used in family farms in their home countries. They go out of their ways to ensure that the crops are safe and healthy. As one Mexican farmer in New York told Minkoff-Zern: “We were organic [in Mexico], we just didn’t know we were.”

Balogun is similar: Instead of commercial fertilizer, he uses cow manure, which he gets free from a nearby cattle rancher. He avoids pesticides, picking out weeds and insects by hand.

“These farmers are working with natural systems, using quote-unquote old school conservation techniques,” Taylor said. “These are folks that have things to teach us.”

Immigrant farmers also offer different crops. In the summer, Balogun grows a type of spinach often used in Nigerian stews but not easily found in this country. Another Land Link farmer, Tanya Doka-Spandhla, 54, almost exclusively grows crops native to South and West Africa — vegetables that grew in the backyard of her childhood home in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Doka-Spandhla, who came to the U.S. two decades ago, said she started her farm in 2015 because she missed food from home. She wanted the mustard greens, “tsunga,” that are sautéed with peanut butter sauce, and the pumpkin leaves, “mubura,” that are boiled and eaten with porridge. She craved the jelly-meat of the bright yellow horned melon, called “kiwano.”

On summer weekends, her three-acre farm in Gaithersburg is a buzzing hub for Montgomery’s expanding West African population.

“It just makes sense,” Taylor said. “We have a million people in the county now. They aren’t all people who want to eat baked potatoes.”

Dodo Farms, too, has earned a loyal following — and not just among immigrants. Among the more enthusiastic fans is Alexa Bely, a 50-year-old biology professor who not only gets most of her household’s produce from Balogun but has persuaded her neighbors in College Park to do the same.

For those who cannot make it to the College Park farmers market, where Balogun sells produce on the weekends, Bely picks up their vegetables and delivers them herself.

“I’ve become a bit of a nut about this,” she admitted, laughing. “But he’s doing something that I really believe in.”

“And,” she added, “his carrots are the best I’ve ever tasted.”

Source: Immigrants new to U.S. are farming its lands with old ways

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