Denmark’s ‘ghetto plan’ and the communities it targets

2020/01/21 Leave a comment

Hard to see how these measures will improve integration instead of promoting separation and exclusion, particularly those related to differential penalties and punishments:

At the end of each year, the Danish government publishes a list of what it classifies as the country’s “ghettos”. There are currently 28.

Areas where more than 50 percent of residents are immigrants or descendants of “non-Western countries” can be designated a “ghetto” based on the following criteria: income, percentage of those employed, levels of education and proportion of people with criminal convictions.

Denmark is currently executing its controversial national “ghetto plan” – One Denmark without Parallel Societies: No Ghettos in 2030 – introduced by the previous government in March 2018, and now passed into a set of harsh laws and a housing policy.

This involves the physical demolishment and transformation of low-income, largely Muslim neighbourhoods. Residents of these areas – working-class, immigrant and refugee communities – say the measures are aimed at containing as well as dispersing them.

The term “ghetto”, with its negative connotations of festering crime, unemployment and dysfunction is a source of anguish for residents who believe the plan stigmatises them further while offering no improvements to their conditions. Anger, confusion and a feeling of betrayal are mounting among those deemed to be living in “ghettos”.

Residents of “ghettos” are now subject to a different set of rules. Penalties for crimes can be doubled. Certain violations, for example, which are normally finable offences could mean imprisonment.

Laws passed last March require children from the age of one to spend at least 25 hours a week in childcare to receive mandatory training in “Danish values”. There was even a proposal from the far-right Danish People’s party that “ghetto children” should have a curfew of 8pm, although that was rejected by the parliament.

But perhaps one of the most insidious rules is that public housing in so-called “hard ghettos” will be limited to only 40 percent of total housing by 2030. This means that public housing is now either being torn down, redeveloped or rented to private companies. The fear is that thousands across Denmark may have to leave their homes. By some reports, that number could be more than 11,000 people.

Poul Aaroe Pedersen, a spokesperson at the Ministry of Transport and Housing, which is overseeing the housing changes, said in an email that the aim “is to prevent parallel societies” by integrating “socially disadvantaged residential areas” with the surrounding community through the development of different types of housing.

Pederson said it is not possible to provide an exact number for how many people would need to move.

According to lawyer Morten Tarp, two communities, one in the city of Helsingor and the other in the town of Slagelse, whose residents he is working to support, will receive the country’s first housing contract termination notices in early 2020.

Mjolnerparken, a so-called “hard ghetto”, is a four-block housing complex situated in Norrebro, a lively, multicultural and gentrifying district in Copenhagen.

There, 260 residencies will be sold. Residents have been informed through the housing association that they will have to move and are being encouraged to relocate to other areas. Many are uncertain about what will happen next.

We visited Mjolnerparken and spoke to four residents about how the regulations are affecting their lives and their fears for the future.

Source: https://aje.io/8qwf7

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Iran considers dual nationals on downed Ukrainian plane to be Iranians: TV report

2020/01/21 Leave a comment

Not surprising given that all likely entered on their Iranian passport and that Iran doesn’t formally recognize dual citizenship. But incredibly callous towards the victims and their families:

Iran considers dual nationals aboard a Ukrainian plane that was shot down accidentally this month to be Iranian citizens, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

Iran does not recognize dual nationality. Many of the 176 people killed in the disaster were Iranians with dual citizenship. Canada had 57 citizens on board.

“We have informed Canada that Tehran considers dual nationals who were killed in the plane crash as Iranian citizens … Iran is mourning their deaths,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi told a televised weekly news conference.

As protests erupted in Iran over the plane disaster, the British ambassador in Tehran was briefly detained. Officials said he was at an “illegal” rally, while the envoy said he was attending a vigil for victims. Britain criticized his detention.

“Iran respects all foreign diplomats in Iran as long as they do not violate international laws,” Mousavi said.

Source: Iran considers dual nationals on downed Ukrainian plane to be Iranians: TV report

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From India to US, a citizenship crisis is burning across the world

2020/01/20 Leave a comment

Dispiriting reading:

Across the world, there are fires burning and they are not only climate-change induced or climate threatening. The concept of who is a citizen of a nation and what are their rights has become a burning topic.

Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilians who are Amazonian Indians are increasingly under threat. In Bolivia, the fall of leader Evo Morales has disenfranchised indigenous Bolivians. Many living under US President Donald Trump are worried about their lives and the well-being of their families, and fear deportation despite being an integral part of American socioeconomics.

As Brexit looms, there is trepidation among many Europeans who have made Britain their home. The Roma in many parts of Europe continue to face persecution from their governments.

There are upheavals in the middle economies of the world too, with millions in Hong Kong and tens of millions in India facing an uncertain future. The unfulfilled obligations in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong government’s increasing coordination with Beijing has unsettled many citizens of the special administrative region.

In India, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has decided to implement a two-pronged strategy which threatens the country’s secular ethos. This government’s amendment of a 1955 citizenship act grants citizenship to refugees from neighbouring countries belonging to religions other than Islam. This legislation has been amended in the past to limit citizenship to those having at least one Indian parent and, later, to the parent not being an illegal immigrant.

Simultaneously, there is a plan to conduct a biblically inspired National Register of Citizens which will be the arbiter on the citizenship of each Indian. Though the implementation of both or either is perceived as targeting Muslims, the collateral damage will be in the millions because many people do not have, or have insufficient, documents to prove their citizenship.

Source: From India to US, a citizenship crisis is burning across the world

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ICYMI – Cohen: Polarized politics, climate havoc, growing authoritarianism – a pessimist’s guide to our world in 2020

2020/01/20 Leave a comment

Depressing:

Last Saturday, on a holiday weekend, the Parliament of Spain convened for a series of crucial votes. Its purpose was to choose a new national government, which the country has been without since elections in November.

In reality, the political paralysis here has lasted years. The most recent elections were the fourth since 2017. This old society but young democracy is becoming ungovernable. Riven with regional, ethnic and ideological divisions, the middle ground – which has sustained governments in Spain – has disappeared.

On Tuesday, the Socialists narrowly won the confidence vote and will form a left-of-centre coalition. This happened only because the Catalans (a regional independence party) abstained.

Some wondered why the legislators were meeting over the holidays. A former Spanish diplomat told me: “You have to get a deal while you can. In Spain, you never know what’s going to happen.”

There is nothing new about uncertainty in politics, but it is a byword for today. Anxiety is the zeitgeist.

The rise of authoritarianism, advance of global warming and growing nationalism and religious intolerance define our time. Despite rising incomes and improving medicine, science and technology, it’s hard to be hopeful.

So here’s a pessimist’s guide to our world in 2020 – and beyond.

• In Germany, the engine of Europe, the economy narrowly avoided recession last year and Chancellor Angela Merkel is preparing to leave next year. Her “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats is faltering, and will collapse this year.

• In France, President Emmanuel Macron is personally unpopular and his reformist policies are widely opposed, bringing demonstrations and strikes, comme d’habitude, and a rising right.

• In Great Britain, there is more certainty. With a large majority and the Labour Party in disarray, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has wide latitude. Britain will leave the EU and Scotland will clamour to leave the United Kingdom. Scottish nationalists are pushing Westminster for another referendum on independence.

• In Israel, the paralysis continues. The country holds its third election in a year, this one with Benjamin Netanyahu under criminal indictment. Israel’s economy is strong and the prospect of peace is distant. Worse, Israelis don’t seem to care anymore.

• In Russia, Turkey, Hungary, India and beyond, strongmen continue to rule. There is little likelihood of change.

• In China, the aspirations of Hong Kong are a challenge to central authority, one that Beijing will mishandle. It cannot tolerate dissent. The protests will end violently in 2020.

• In the United States, an impeached (but exonerated) president will run for re-election. Democrats struggle to oppose him. Because several of them are well-financed, their race will go into the spring.

The pessimist argument is that Trump will win in November. More likely, Democrats will choose Joe Biden, who will choose Kamala Harris as his running mate (and his successor after only one term.) The Democrats will reclaim the Midwest and carry the day.

If they don’t, America under a re-elected, untethered Trump will enter a new dark age, akin to the Red Scare in the 1920s and McCarthyism in the 1950s.

In Canada, the Liberals will govern with ease this year. Conservatives will have no traction until early summer, but new leadership will scramble the political calculus. If they choose Rona Ambrose or Jean Charest, they will push for an early election, in 2021 or so. Trudeau will not run again.

There is no reason for optimism in discussing climate change, which goes unanswered around the world and in the United States, in particular. The fires burn hotter and longer in California, the seas rise off Florida, the tundra melts in Alaska.

The fires burning today in Australia are the future of our feverish world. This will become the norm. They show not only the fierceness of nature but a failure of leadership; the ineptitude of the country’s prime minister staggers.

Of all the challenges we face today – war with Iran, growing authoritarianism, a belligerent North Korea, swelling anti-semitism – climate change is the greatest threat, the hardest to solve and most resistant to hope.

Source: Cohen: Polarized politics, climate havoc, growing authoritarianism – a pessimist’s guide to our world in 2020

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ICYMI USA: Not on form, but brawl over citizenship question continues

2020/01/20 Leave a comment

We shall see the net result of these efforts on census participation once the Census is complete and analysed:

The U.S. Supreme Court decided a citizenship question won’t be on this spring’s census form, but that doesn’t mean the fight over it has ended in courtrooms across the country.

In Maryland, civil rights groups are trying to block an order from President Donald Trump to gather citizenship data through administrative records. In New York, other civil rights groups are seeking sanctions against Trump administration attorneys for not turning over documents related to the citizenship question’s origins. Democratic lawmakers in the District of Columbia are fighting for similar documents, and Alabama officials are suing the Census Bureau to keep immigrants living in the country illegally from being counted during the process that determines the number of congressional seats each state gets.

All of the lawsuits touch on whether the number of citizens, instead of the total population, will be used for redistricting or apportionment — the process of divvying up congressional seats among the states after the 2020 census. Opponents say doing so would dilute the influence of minorities and Democrats, which they argue was the true intent of the Trump administration’s desire to add a citizenship question in the first place.

The U.S. Constitution specifies that congressional districts should be based on how many people — not citizens — live there. But the legal requirements are murkier for state legislative districts.

Source: Not on form, but brawl over citizenship question continues

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Is There a Way to Acknowledge America’s Progress? (applies more broadly)

2020/01/18 Leave a comment

Good reminder by Andrew Sullivan that many things have changed for the better. And of course, recognizing progress doesn’t mean doing more may not be needed, but having a historical perspective helps focus debate and discussion on what should be the more pressing issues:

…Why this sudden ratcheting up of rhetoric? On the right, it’s fueled by the kind of absurd hyperbole that Trump uses all the time. On the left, it’s Trump himself. His extremism, misogyny, transphobia, and racism have all provoked a sharp turn to the left among Democrats. But, as you can see from the workforce numbers for women, there’s little he can actually do to prevent the future from being female. He could tip the Court, which could, in turn, repeal Roe, but that would be a highly unpopular ruling and likely provoke a backlash that could lead to more moderate federal legislation in its place. Marriage equality is settled law, according to the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Gay visibility is ubiquitous. Black unemployment is at record lows; black women are seeing real improvement in their careers and earnings; crime in urban neighborhoods is a fraction of what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, we have a bigot in the Oval Office — but his ability to influence these broader cultural tides is quite limited.

Some of the rhetorical excess is also about money. Interest groups for various subpopulations have a financial interest in emphasizing oppression in order to keep donations flowing.

But a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines. In a fascinating experiment, participants were provided with a chart containing a thousand dots that ranged along a spectrum from very blue to very purple and were asked to go through and identify all the blue dots. The study group was then broken in two. One subgroup was shown a new chart with the same balance of purple and blue dots as the first one and asked to repeat the task. Not surprisingly, they generally found the same number of blue dots as they did on the first chart. A second subgroup was shown a new chart with fewer blue dots and more purple dots. In this group, participants started marking dots as blue that they had marked as purple on the first chart. “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”

We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context. As part of the study, the psychologists ran another experiment showing participants a range of threatening and nonthreatening faces and asking them to identify which was which. Next, participants were split into two groups and asked to repeat the exercise. The first subgroup was shown the same ratio of threatening and nonthreatening faces as in the initial round; subgroup two was shown many fewer threatening faces. Sure enough, the second group adjusted by seeing faces they once thought of as nonthreatening as threatening. The conclusion:

When blue dots became rare, purple dots began to look blue; when threatening faces became rare, neutral faces began to appear threatening … This happened even when the change in the prevalence of instances was abrupt, even when participants were explicitly told that the prevalence of instances would change, and even when participants were instructed and paid to ignore these changes.

We seem to be wired to assume a given threat remains just as menacing even when its actual prevalence has declined:

Our studies suggest that even well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own efforts, simply because they view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context that they themselves have brought about. Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.

This study may help explain why, in the midst of tremendous gains for gays, women, and racial minorities, we still insist more than ever that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic era. We constantly adjust our view of our fast-changing world to ensure we don’t believe it has changed at all! Maybe this is simply another way of describing each generation’s shifting of the goalposts. Or maybe it’s because we’ve made so much progress that the injustice that remains appears more intolerable, rather than less. Or maybe, as these psychologists suggest, “holding concepts constant may be an evolutionarily recent requirement that the brain’s standard computational mechanisms are ill equipped to meet.”

But whatever the cause, the result is that we steadfastly refuse to accept the fact of progress, in a cycle of eternal frustration at what injustices will always remain. We never seem to be able to say: “Okay, we’re done now, we’ve got this, politics has done all it reasonably could, now let’s move on with our lives.” We can only ever say: “It’s worse than ever!” And feel it in our bones.

Source: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/andrew-sullivan-is-there-a-way-to-acknowledge-our-progress.html

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Roger Scruton’s brand of conservatism became a licence for bigotry

2020/01/18 Leave a comment

Among all the eulogies, this dissenting voice:

Since Roger Scruton’s death on Sunday, virtually the entire Conservative establishment has united in eulogising him. The prime minister hailed him as “the greatest modern conservative thinker”; Daniel Hannan called him “the greatest conservative of our age”. But when it comes to politics, Scruton’s greatest contribution has been to help make a modernised version of Enoch Powell’s bigotry – the idea that it is impossible for immigrants to integrate successfully – part of the mainstream debate.

Writing in Powell’s defence, Scruton once attacked liberal politicians for believing “the proposition that pious Muslims from the hinterlands of Asia would produce children loyal to a secular European state”. He was clear that just being born and brought up here didn’t make someone “one of us”; indeed, for certain ethnic and religious categories, the very idea was laughable. His view that Christianity was an essential component of English identity, and that of other European countries, meant that Muslim immigrants could only be seen as a threat.

So Scruton’s “conservative” conception of national identity, much praised over the last week, was not just about his love of foxhunting or the countryside. It was explicitly exclusionary. And his views on what that meant for public policy were not confined to architecture, but ranged far wider. He argued that European countries should explicitly discriminate (in jobs, housing or welfare benefits) in favour of “indigenous European communities”, on the grounds that “all coherent societies are based on discrimination”.

Scruton’s thinking has been influential both in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. His focus specifically on the “Muslim threat” predated that of his friend Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, and most other European “national populists”, who have now made it their near-exclusive focus. His continued popularity among British conservatives – and Conservatives – reflects the fact that Islamophobia is respectable, acceptable, and indeed electorally useful, in a way in which anti-black racism or antisemitism, by and large, is not (at least in public).

In this country, Scruton’s most obvious disciple, Douglas Murray, advances a version of the “great replacement” thesis – which was the inspiration for the Christchurch massacre – that Europe is being overrun by Muslims, encouraged by deluded or malign liberal policymakers. Murray’s bestselling book, The Strange Death of Europe, has been lauded by Orbán and other leaders of the European far right. Meanwhile, Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck, takes a more moderate tone. But he implicitly echoes Scruton in arguing that we should prioritise the “ethnic self-interest” of the “white majority” by explicitly introducing racial and religious preferencesinto immigration policy.

So what does Scruton’s continued influence mean for British politics and policy? There are certainly those on the right who embrace the connection between his views on national identity and the success of national populists elsewhere in Europe, and would like to see policies to match. Last month, the influential Conservative thinker, Scruton admirer and, until recently, Downing Street “social justice adviser” Tim Montgomerie endorsed Hungary’s exploration of “the limits of liberalism”. This includes, presumably, Orbán’s expulsion of the Central European University, the political subservience of the judiciary, and his muzzling of NGOs who don’t toe the government line.

But there have long been tensions between Scruton’s brand of social conservatism and the liberal, free-market approach that has dominated economic thinking on the right since Thatcher – and these will, if anything, be exacerbated by Brexit. Take immigration. Scruton would have hated Boris Johnson’s policy of a non-discriminatory, Australian-style, points-based immigration system. The idea that immigration policy should prioritise the “skills we need” would have been anathema to him – both because of the priority it gives to economics over culture, and because it will probably increase the number of Asian immigrants at the expense of Europeans.

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As 2020 Olympics Approach, Japan’s Treating Foreign Workers Like Indentured Labor

2020/01/18 Leave a comment

Frightening comparable to  Qatar with the 2022 FIFA World Cup and other Gulf states where passports and other documentation are held by employers:

As Japan ages and the population declines it needs foreign workers more than ever, but it’s unlikely to get them when employers can snatch your passport and keep it, even after you quit—leaving you in legal limbo.It all seems like something that you’d expect to happen in a dodgy part of the Middle East, but nope, it’s happening in the Land of Omotenashi, where everyone is putting on a friendly face with the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on the horizon.

Foreign tourists with money are very welcome. Foreign laborers? Not so much. Yet they are needed. The Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) union published a report last year, The Dark Side of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, claiming that laborers—many of them foreign—already are being overworked and exposed to dangerous conditions. There simply aren’t enough Japanese to do the jobs that need to be done.

Even if all the sporting venues, new hotels, and housing for the Olympics are completed in time for the start of the games in July, staffing those facilities adequately may be a colossal challenge.

There’s even concern there won’t be enough security staff to police the venues, and the Japanese government is considering asking Japan’s Self Defense Forces to do the job. But soldiers can’t take up the slack elsewhere.

Japan’s Cabinet Office announced last year that the nation has a shortage of about 1.2 million workers, primarily in the construction, agriculture, fishing and hotel industries. Teikoku Data Bank lists 10 major industries in Japan that already are short on labor, not only in construction, but in the automobile industry and information technology.

Perhaps that is why Japan is willing to look the other way when laws get bent, as long as empty workbenches are filled. But Japan’s rep among potential recruits is such that many are discouraged from coming here. The abuse of foreign workers often occurs within the antiquated laws of this country, and the Japanese government seems to have no interest in solving the problem.

BRENDA’S STORY

On Thursday, a Filipino woman, with the financial aid and support of the independent nonprofit called POSSE, which supports labor issues here, sued her employer in the Yokohama District Court. She is requesting the return of her confiscated passport and her graduation certificate, as well as financial compensation. Without her passport, she cannot find a new job or leave the country. Her employer, ironically, is an Immigration Law Firm in Yokohama.

According to the lawsuit and her lawyers, “Brenda”—who has asked us not to use her name, lest she be branded a troublemaker when she seeks future employment—arrived in Japan in 2017. After finishing Japanese language school, she began working for the law office in Yokohama in April of 2019.

“If I give you your documents, you’ll run away.”
— Brenda’s Japanese employer

Brenda was asked to give her employer the documents necessary to process her visa paperwork, and she signed a contract that allowed her boss to “manage” these materials. She did interpreting, translating Tagalog into English, and other secretarial work for the firm. However, when she was paid after the first month she discovered her entire salary was under 100,000 yen (about $900), well below the cost of living. That was half of what she had been promised. She tried to quit the firm, but her boss refused to give her back her papers, saying, “If I give you your documents, you’ll run away.”

Eventually, in early July she did resign, but the firm still refused to give her back her passport. She went to POSSE, which is known for helping young workers, students and foreign laborers.

Makoto Iwahashi, a staff member there, says that when they went to the law office with Brenda to talk to her employer, he refused to cooperate and yelled at them to leave.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” says Iwahashi. “In order to make non-Japanese work long hours for very little pay without quitting, a number of companies confiscate their employees’ passports.” Many foreign workers complain about poor conditions, wage arrears, workplace injuries, and unfair dismissal, he said, but regulations to protect the rights of foreign workers are far behind where they need to be.”

“This is, after all, a country where Karoshi (death by overwork) is a word everybody knows.”
— Shoichi Ibusuki, labor rights lawyer

“Many workers speak little Japanese,” says Iwahashi, which is a major handicap. “They are afraid to speak up or report the harsh conditions.”

Iwahashi notes that in many countries withholding an employee’s passport is against the law. The Immigration Bureau of Japan says there is nothing illegal about an employer keeping the passport of a foreign worker who is not under the technical trainee program. The Labor Ministry of Japan has issued guidelines discouraging employers from holding onto passports, but there are no penalties for violators.

If Japan wants to attract the large number of workers it needs, says Iwahashi, it’s going to have to do a better job protecting their rights.

Brenda told The Daily Beast, “I had heard stories about foreign workers being treated badly in Japan, but I never expected it from an Immigration Law Office. I guess because they know the law, they know they can get away with it.” She said she feels like an untethered kite in the wind, unable to find work because now she doesn’t have the necessary paperwork to apply for a job, and unable to leave Japan because she does not yet have a new passport, or her old one back.

Still, Brenda is a little lucky. POSSE is paying for the lawsuit and soliciting funds for the court case, which may take up to two years. “Even if the embassy reissues my passport, I’m going to fight this. I will stay and I will work and I will fight. I’m surely not the first foreigner in Japan to suffer this treatment, but I would like to be the last one.”

Brenda’s former employer, the Yokohama legal firm, has not yet responded to requests for comment, despite phone calls, letters, and emails.

Shoichi Ibusuki, the noted labor rights lawyer representing Brenda, says that it’s very rare to sue for the return of a passport in Japan. Most employers would simply return the passport rather than go to court. “But then again very few foreigners would ever be able to take their employers to court in the first place.”

The road to restitution and fair treatment for foreign workers is long and hard; the odds of winning are not on their side.

CHICKENS AND EGGS

“In 2015, I was able to gain back wages from one surly employer of a foreign agricultural worker,” says Ibusuki, “but I had to get a court order to seize 1,000 chickens and their eggs, in lieu of compensation.”

At that point the recalcitrant employer chickened out, as it were, and paid up what he owed—after what had been more than a court battle of more than two years.

Partly for cultural reasons, Japan has never been a model nation when it comes to labor laws and worker protections. This is, after all, a country where Karoshi (death by overwork) is a word everybody knows. Japan’s working hours are some of the longest in the world, according to the International Labor Organization, despite numerous attempts at reform.

It may be a lot to expect a country notoriously unfriendly to labor conditions with its own people to integrate foreign labor successfully, and the history is not encouraging.

In the old days, Japan solved labor shortages in part by conquering Korea or parts of China and integrating them into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This doesn’t work so well anymore, but the archaic labor laws have not advanced far from this “golden era” when labor was synomous with slavery.

Modern-day servitude in Japan is more subtle, and a prime example of how it works is the Technical Intern Training Program. It started in 1993 and has come under fire repeatedly  as a breeding ground for the exploitation of foreign labor.

“The ultimate virtue of a Japanese worker: endure silently and work long, long, long hours for low pay.”
— Yoshihisa Saito, an associate professor at Kobe University

The Japan Times in an editorial, “Overhaul Foreign Trainee Program”, bluntly stated that a large number of trainees “are in fact used as cheap labor under abusive conditions.”

“Japanese labor laws are deeply flawed and outdated, unfit to protect Japanese workers, much less foreign workers,” says Yoshihisa Saito, an associate professor at Kobe University Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies. He notes that while there appears to have been progress made in integrating foreigners into the workplace, most of these advances are merely cosmetic. Saito emphasizes, “There are a multitude of legal ways that a Japanese company can keep a non-Japanese employee in servitude, other than simply taking their passport.”

In the end, Saito points out, the Japanese system for recruiting “is not about measuring skill but measuring endurance. Japanese companies want people who have gone through and completed spartan training programs, who make no complaints, and can build pleasant relationships at their workplace. This is seen as the ultimate virtue of a Japanese worker—endure silently and work long, long, long hours for low pay.”

Japan is a lovely place to visit as a foreign tourist. But currently if you want to work at Hotel Japan as a foreign laborer, you will need to check your human rights and your passport at the front desk.

You can’t change hotels and, to paraphrase The Eagles, while you can check out anytime you like, you may not be able to leave.

Source: As 2020 Olympics Approach, Japan’s Treating Foreign Workers Like Indentured Labor

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A dangerous discourse prevails that draws on long-standing racist ideas about who deserves citizenship. Better data and a new focus are needed.

2020/01/18 Leave a comment

The latest in response to CBC’s Fifth Estate birth tourism episode with the same issue of conflating issues related to wealthy “birth tourists” and the cottage industry that supports them and those pertaining to other temporary residents, which appears to be the main focus of this and related articles. Working on a piece to unpack this and related data issues:

The phrase “birth tourism” has been used by media and political parties to derogatively describe the circumstances in which noncitizen women come to Canada to give birth; the suspicion is that the women do this so that the children can claim citizenship and thus take advantage of their birth country’s education and health care systems, and eventually the children can sponsor their parents to immigrate. At its 2018 convention, the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) went so far as to pass a nonbinding resolution to refuse automatic birthright citizenship to children born to two nonresident parents, as a solution to the “crisis” of birth tourism. Echoing these sentiments, a recent investigation of birth tourism by the CBC’s Fifth Estate drew three conclusions: Canadian birth tourism is on the rise, it demands a legislative response, and it is a disingenuous pathway to citizenship

All three of The Fifth Estate’s conclusions are flawed, and they have serious implications for those pregnant migrant women who are being labelled birth tourists.

Take the argument that birth tourism is on the rise. Neither the Canada Border Services Agency nor Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada tracks the entry of pregnant nonresidents into the country. Moreover, hospitals are not legally required to inquire about the mother’s nationality, as it is not a prerequisite for a birth certificate. Researchers at the Canadian Institute for Health Information have developed a workaround based on hospital financial data, which include a code for services provided to nonresidents (“other country resident self-pay”). These data show that 3,628 births (1.2 percent of total births) in Canada(not including Quebec) in 2017 were to nonresident mothers. They also show that this number has doubled since 2010 but is geographically focused, primarily in 25 hospitals in Ontario and British Columbia (with comparable numbers in Montreal). But this is only a proxy measure for birth tourism, because it includes international students, migrant workers, those with work visas and foreign government personnel, all of whom could have given birth in Canada, but whose entry into the country was not likely a product of birth tourism.

Nevertheless, the focus on birth tourism has persisted. Parliamentary petitions to refuse birthright citizenship to children born to two nonresident parents were sponsored by Conservative MP Alice Wong in 2012 and in 2018 by Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido. The Fifth Estate segment is the latest in a series of media investigations into the perceived dangers birth tourism presents, not for the pregnant migrant women at the heart of this narrative but for the integrity of Canada’s immigration system and Canadian citizenship at large.

Birth tourism does happen, but the available numbers do not suggest a trend in need of government action — especially action in the form of birthright citizenship refusal. Ministers of both parties reached the conclusion that no measures were necessary: in 2012, it was the Conservative minister of citizenship and immigration, Jason Kenney, and in 2018, the Liberal minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, Ahmed Hussen. The two MPs’ parliamentary petitions failed to gain any legislative traction; provincial legislatures in Ontario and British Columbia also voted against legislative action. Even the CPC opted not to include any mention of birth tourism in its 2019 electoral platform, despite its convention resolution. The continued focus on birth tourism misrepresents the actual urgency of birth tourism, and ultimately this harms nonresident pregnant women by casting them as illegitimate and glossing over the barriers they face with the Canadian immigration system.

Temporary residents often migrate with their families or stay in Canada for prolonged periods — years — and form intimate personal relationships in their Canadian communities.

Discussion of nonresident births must be contextualized within broader immigration trends and the limitations on access to health care. The number of temporary residents arriving in Canada has steadily increased, and many of these people will pursue permanent residency through programs such as the Canadian Experience Class and contribute substantially to the social and economic well-being of their communities and the country.

For nonresidents temporarily residing in Canada, access to public health insurance depends on their immigration category. For example, international students’ access to health coverage in Quebec is limited by nationality; in Ontario and Manitoba it is not available to holders of study permits. For temporary workers, coverage is restricted based on the type or duration of work permit and can require a three-month wait period. Furthermore, people with temporary-resident visas or who are without formal status do not qualify for any medical coverage whatsoever. People enter and live in Canada with temporary resident visas for all kinds of reasons, including to live with their spouse while waiting for their family sponsorship applications to be processed. Temporary residents often migrate with their families or stay in Canada for prolonged periods — years — and form intimate personal relationships in their Canadian communities. The desire to have a family and children is widely considered a natural aspiration that all people should be free to pursue alongside studying and working. While many nonresidents can access public health insurance, access is not universal — a distinction not addressed in the current data. Our research, which is still ongoing, shows that when nonresident women without insurance arrive at a hospital or clinic seeking perinatal care, they are often assumed to be “birth tourists” and treated as if they are unfairly taking advantage of Canada’s health care and immigration systems.

While technically legal, birth tourism is presented as a way to jump the immigration queue by utilizing a disingenuous pathway to Canadian citizenship, and ultimately taking away resources from more “deserving” and “committed” Canadian citizens. MP Wong spoke in favour of the nonbinding convention resolution, saying that “passport babies” take away resources from Canada’s system and that Canada should “fight for our own babies.” This framing of so-called birth tourists and their children as system cheaters is part of a larger trend of criminalizing migrants using the language of deservedness, desirability and illegality to pit “undeserving” migrants against the generosity of Canadians. To this end, birth tourists and their children are marked as less desirable because they are using what is thought of as an improper — albeit legal — channel to obtain Canadian citizenship.

Claims of deservedness suggest that citizens must have an ongoing commitment and obligation to Canada, and children being born as a result of birth tourism are said to disrupt this because there is no way for them to actively demonstrate a clear connection to their acquired status once they’re adults. This, however, is not the defining feature of birthright citizenship: Canadian-born citizens do not actively commit to their status. Moreover, political scientists Rita Dhamoon and Sunera Thobani, among others, conclude that Canadian-born citizens — specifically white Canadian-born citizens — rarely undergo ongoing evaluations of their commitment to the Canadian state. How, then, do we reconcile this double standard where Canadian children born to nonresident parents are held to different, and arguably unrealistic, expectations around citizenship than those born to resident parents? The unspoken accusation here is that “undesirable” migrants are using a legal channel to claim Canadian citizenship.

The result is that nonresident pregnant women are framed as potential perpetrators of migration or citizenship fraud. While available data do not distinguish between racialized and nonracialized mothers, most media and political analysis focuses on racialized birth mothers. This echoes the historical treatment of nonwhite and non-European immigrants as a security concern. For example, Canada’s heavily racialized temporary foreign worker programs have largely restricted family migration and permanent settlement, and there has been increased scrutiny of our family sponsorship program as officials look for marriage fraud. It is important to also consider how this narrative draws on broader problematic perceptions of racialized (and other marginalized) women as not making “ethical” reproductive decisions: for example, choosing to have children to procure state resources for themselves. Considering that the evidence does not support the broad claim that birth tourism is an imminent threat to the country, we question whether it is an issue in need of a legislative response or simply a dog whistle that calls back long-standing sexist and racist immigration legacies that perpetuate the criminalization and surveillance of racialized pregnant nonresident women.

More research needs to be done on birth tourism. Rather than furthering narratives that demonize and criminalize nonresident mothers as birth tourists, we need to shift the focus to how these women’s experiences are eclipsed as a result of this dangerous discourse. Marking these women as queue jumpers and citizenship fraudsters ignores the real-life obstacles they encounter within the health care system and the Canadian immigration system. In our research, we find that these women face challenges accessing perinatal care, building trusted relationships in health care settings and having their voices heard. They pay high hospital and doctor fees, resulting in situations where they forgo necessary care at their own personal risk. It is this crisis rather than the perceived crisis of birth tourism that is in need of further legislative attention.

Source: Birth tourism and the demonizing of pregnant migrant women                                                                

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

ICYMI: Montreal aims to break down barriers for immigrants in the workplace

2020/01/17 Leave a comment

Once again, contrast between Montreal and the regions:

Mayor Valérie Plante stood in front of 10 red doors inscribed with messages like: “Let’s open doors to employment for them,” “We hold all the keys” and “We can all play a role.”

The life-size doors on display at Complexe Desjardins aim to illustrate the barriers that still face immigrants in the job market and to urge employers to hire them.

“Sixty per cent of immigrants arriving in Quebec choose to settle in Montreal but unfortunately, even today, the doors to employment are still mostly shut rather than open for immigrants,” said Plante, as she launched a month-long public awareness campaign with Shahir Guindi, national co-chair of the Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt law firm and chair of the board of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal.

While unemployment is at a historic low of five per cent, it is much higher among newcomers, despite the fact that 40 per cent of immigrants are university educated and 10 per cent hold graduate degrees, Plante said.

Montreal ranks fifth among the North American metropolitan regions that attract the most immigrants, according to Canadian and U.S. immigration numbers. However, it lags behind other Canadian cities in helping them integrate and find jobs.

The unemployment rate among newcomers to Montreal was 9.8 per cent in 2016, compared with 5.9 per cent for residents who were born in Canada, according to the Canadian Index for Measuring Integration (CIMI), coordinated by the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS).

More than 22 per cent of immigrants in Montreal live below the poverty line, compared with 12 per cent of Canadian-born citizens, it shows.

Overall, the city ranks 30th out of 35 among Canadian cities for immigrants’ economic performance compared to the rest of the population, according to CIMI.

Plante said she met with about 50 business leaders and officials with the provincial immigration department last year to chart a strategy to improve outcomes for newcomers.

The awareness campaign has support from 18 executives at the National Bank, Métro, Deloitte Canada, Mouvement Desjardins, as well as public or non-profit organizations like the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), Centraide and the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Its French-only website encourages employers to favour diversity in their workforces by making it a company value and requiring managers to implement inclusive policies. It also calls on average Montrealers in the workforce to become aware of their own prejudices and to reach out to immigrants in their work and social circles by sharing contacts and helping them with their CVs.

However, ACS president Jack Jedwab said that while the initiative was praiseworthy, it did not address the negative message the Quebec government has sent by reducing the number of immigrants to Montreal by 24 per cent in 2019 over the previous year.

“We should do what we need to do to encourage and help people to improve their skills, so that they are in line with the needs of the economy,” he said.

“But the bigger messaging from the government isn’t as positive,” Jedwab noted.

The Coalition Avenir Québec government’s rationale for slashing immigration despite the current labour shortage was that newcomers are not integrating sufficiently into Quebec society, he said.

“You are sending a message that suggests that there is a problem out there,” he said.

Greater Montreal received 28,900 immigrants in the first 10 months of 2019, the last period for which numbers are available, compared to 38,315 for the corresponding period in 2018, Jedwab said.

The city received a total of 43,795 newcomers in 2018 and 44,725 in 2017, he said.

In 2019, Vancouver surpassed Montreal for the first time as a destination for newcomers, with 34,095 immigrants from January to October 2019. It received 35,265 immigrants in 2018 and 29,830 immigrants in 2017.

Toronto received 102,965 immigrants in the first 10 months of 2019. The number of newcomers was 106,460 in 2018 and 86,580 in 2017.

“Toronto is reaping a lot of the benefits of immigration in terms of its economy,” Jedwab said, noting that immigration “is the single source of growth for our population.”

In Toronto, the unemployment rate among immigrants in 2016 was 7.5 per cent, compared with 7.7 per cent among the Canadian-born population. However, immigrants in Toronto had higher rates of poverty than the native-born population, with 19 per cent of newcomers living below the poverty line compared with 11 per cent of people born in Canada.

Source: Montreal aims to break down barriers for immigrants in the workplace

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

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