Worries grow that discrimination against Chinese Canadians is getting worse as pandemic continues

2020/04/04 Leave a comment

Despite efforts by political leaders and others. Unfortunately, there will always be some who will use the pandemic for racism and discrimation against Chinese Canadians (concern over the behaviour of the Chinese government is, of course, legitimate and warranted):

Avvy Go knew things were going to get bad in January.

The Toronto lawyer who works with the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic said once China was identified as the epicentre of COVID-19, she was concerned about anti-Asian discrimination growing in Canada.

“Since then we’ve been hearing more and more stories about Chinese Canadians experiencing discrimination in the workplace, or just being called names while they’re just on the street out shopping,” Go said.

“Yes, it has gotten worse. More and more people are talking about what they’ve experienced.”

Go said much of what she’s hearing wouldn’t rise to the Criminal Code definition of a hate crime.But the RCMP is encouraging anyone to report discriminatory acts even if they seem minor.

Reporting racist or hate-motivated incidents can still help police identify trends and potentially stop escalation, said RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Caroline Duval

“Investigating hate-motivated crimes and incidents falls under the mandate of the local police of the jurisdiction where the criminal activity takes place,” Duval said Tuesday.

“Reporting hate-motivated incidents, no matter how minor they may seem, can help police better target crime prevention efforts in the communities. It can also identify trends and prevent a possible escalation towards violence.”

In a recent intelligence report, the FBI warned local police across the U.S. that hate crimes against Asian American communities could “surge” during the pandemic. It didn’t help that President Donald Trump has taken to referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus.”

“The FBI assesses hate crime incidents against Asian Americans likely will surge across the United States, due to the spread of coronavirus disease,” read the report, written by the FBI’s Houston office and obtained by ABC News.

“The FBI makes this assessment based on the assumption that a portion of the U.S. public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations.”

ABC reported that the assessment noted an increase in hate crimes across the U.S.

The RCMP has not issued any warnings about a potential rise in hate crimes targeting Asian Canadian communities. A spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service said there has been no increase in reported hate crimes targeting Canadians of Asian.

“(But) hate-related occurrences often go unreported to police so I’m not sure our numbers would accurately reflect the possible lived experiences for some members of the community,” said police spokesperson Meaghan Gray.

Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, told the Star Thursday that most of the chatter in white nationalist and far-right extremist online circles has focused on baseless theories, like COVID-19 being a bioweapon or a plot by the United Nations.

But Balgord said the conversations have strayed into racist tropes or racially-charged statements, like the desire for more Chinese to die from the virus.

“We have seen members of far-right movements in Canada brag about harassing Chinese people in real life,” Balgord said.

The Chinese Canadian National Council’s Toronto Chapter has created an online forum where people can chronicle any racially-motivated abuse. Justin Kong, the chapter’s executive director, said there have been reports of “intensifying anti-Asian racism, this renewed Sinophobia.”

Kong said there are segments of the community who no longer feeling safe going to public places.

“We wanted to make sure people had a place to share their experiences, and we wanted to collect those experiences …and make sure the voices of communities who are discriminated against, East Asian Canadians, Chinese Canadians, are heard,” Kong said.

Kong is calling on authorities to do more to support Chinese Canadians during the pandemic.

“We’re hoping the government … takes a stance on this and speaks out against racism, and also puts in real policies to fight that racism,” Kong said.

“Especially in this heightened moment.”

Source: Federal PoliticsWorries grow that discrimination against Chinese Canadians is getting worse as pandemic continues

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The Racial Time Bomb in the Covid-19 Crisis Pre-existing health conditions leave one group particularly vulnerable.

2020/04/03 Leave a comment

While Canadian universal healthcare will ensure that racial disparities in death rates should be less than in the USA, expect to see some differences and hopefully the data is being collected on COVID-19 victims beyond age and gender:

Early Monday morning the email arrived. The subject line began, “ALARM AT THE GATE,” written in all caps. Someone had died. That is always what that phrasing means.

The message came via a group email list maintained by the fraternity I joined in college some 30 years ago.

A younger member, a rising chef in his 30s, had died. As the email read, he passed away “due to immune system complications resulting from contracting the Covid-19 virus as a Type-1 diabetic.” He was in Detroit, which has emerged as a hot spot for the virus.

This was the third death I’d heard about of someone with a connection to my college or a friend who went there. All relatively young, all black men, all diabetics. The two others were in New Orleans, another emerging hot spot.

I recalled an arresting article I’d read from “Undark,” a Knight Foundation-funded, science-oriented digital magazine in Cambridge, Mass. (I’m on the advisory board of the magazine.) As the article pointed out, the virus may prove most devastating in the South because of “poorer health, curbed health care access and skepticism of government.”

What the article doesn’t state outright, but I read in the subtext, was that the virus is more likely to be deadly to black people. Most black people in America still live in the South. The states with the highest percentage of black people are in the South.

We may be waiting for a racial time bomb to explode with this disease.

In the early days of the virus, the relatively few cases on the African continent, I believe, gave black people in America a false sense of security, that black people may be somehow less susceptible to it.

But that is not true, and African-Americans should not look to Africa as the model. Even as researchers worry about Africans’ vulnerabilities — some being the same issues that exist in the American South — African countries also have advantages that America and, in particular, African-Americans don’t.

As Berkeley economist Edward Miguel explained, “The median age in a lot of countries is 20 or 18, much younger than in Europe, and it appears that young people who are infected are often asymptomatic or just get a cold.” The median age in the United States is 38. Furthermore, some African nations have a medical infrastructure experienced in dealing with pandemics, and in many cases people still live in rural areas.

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How Census Is Building a Citizenship Database Covering Everyone Living in the U.S.

2020/04/03 Leave a comment

Interesting read on how the US Census bureau is working on getting greater precision on citizenship using statistical modelling. Whether this will provide greater precision than the American Community Survey remains to be seen, as well as protections to ensure privacy and anonymization:

While the 2020 decennial count is underway, the Census Bureau is working on a separate effort to identify the percentage of the U.S. population that has legal citizenship. The result will be a Census-owned database of every person living in the U.S. with a statistical “citizenship estimate” linked to each individual.

The Trump administration initially pushed to include a citizenship question on the 2020 survey of America. However, in June of last year, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to prevent the administration from asking the question, citing poor justification for its inclusion.

A month after the ruling, President Trump signed Executive Order 13880, requiring the bureau to produce data on the citizen voting-age population, or CVAP, by the end of March 2021, and mandating relevant agencies share databases to help Census achieve that end.

Next year, the bureau will release a publicly-available statistical modeling of citizen and non-citizen populations throughout the country, anonymized using a cutting-edge masking system. The effort will also create a dataset with a citizenship estimate for every person in the U.S., which—by law and by practice—should never be seen outside of the Census Bureau.

In an internal document obtained by Nextgov, bureau officials note the Census Unedited File—which is used to determine apportionments, including congressional representatives—will not contain any citizenship data. Instead, the bureau will create a separate micro-data file, or MDF, with the best citizenship estimate associated with each census respondent.

That micro-data file, along with the Census Edited File—an updated version of the CUF that corrects and backfills missing information—will be put through the 2020 Disclosure Avoidance System, “which will do the final record linkage and place a confidentiality protected citizenship variable on the same MDF as will be used to produce the redistricting data,” according to the documents.

While the citizenship status of individuals will not be made public, Census will be publishing CVAP tables that break down citizenship estimates at the block level—the most granular level of census data. Those tables are scheduled for release by March 31, 2021.

However, keeping that amount of public data anonymized is no simple thing. With surprisingly few bits of correlated data, a once-anonymous person can easily be identified. This becomes much easier when coupled with information publicly available on the internet, such as social media profiles.

To prevent criminals and other malicious actors from reverse engineering identities, Census is employing a new disclosure avoidance system for all 2020 census data shared publicly.

“Our decision to deploy a modernized disclosure avoidance system for the 2020 census was driven by research showing that methods we used to protect the 2010 census and earlier statistics can no longer adequately defend against today’s privacy threats,” John Abowd, Census’ associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist, and Victoria Velkoff, chief of the American Community Survey Office, wrote in an October 2019 blog post explaining the new system developed by cryptographers and data scientists.

The new differential privacy system injects “noise” into the datasets by using an algorithm that makes targeted changes to the data to prevent outside actors—malicious or otherwise—from reverse engineering identities.

Census has been using various forms of differential privacy—also known as formal privacy—since 2008, though never at the scale it will be used for on 2020 census data. In the past, Census only added uncertainty to select statistics with a high risk for deanonymization to avoid adding so much noise that the statistics become unreliable.

For the coming count, uncertainty will be added to entire published datasets using state-of-the-art mathematical models.

“The new method allows us to precisely control the amount of uncertainty that we add according to privacy requirements,” Abowd and Velkoff wrote. “And, by documenting the properties of this uncertainty, we can help data users determine if published estimates are sufficiently accurate for their specific applications. In this manner, we can determine the data’s ‘fitness for use.’”

With the public datasets anonymized, it will be up to Census to protect the raw data.

While the disclosure avoidance system is designed to ensure personal data remains anonymous, Robert Groves, provost of Georgetown University, who led the Census Bureau during the 2010 decennial count, said two things will ensure the raw, nonanonymized database is never used to target individuals: law and culture.

Groves, in an interview with Nextgov after reviewing the documents, cited a legal provision known as “functional separation.”

“Once you enter a statistical agency environment, it’s a one-way street,” he explained. “As soon as that Homeland Security dataset enters behind the firewall of Census, the laws of Census apply. It’s no longer a Homeland Security dataset, in a sense. It is controlled by the Census Bureau. And, under the Title 13 law, it is absolutely crystal clear that the combined dataset never exits Census with individual person records on it. Only statistics can exit.”

That protection extends to the highest levels.

“Even if it’s requested by the president, it’s absolutely illegal,” Groves confirmed when asked. “And even if it were an executive order directing Census to do this, the statute would trump the order.”

Beyond the law, Groves said the culture of statisticians and public servants working at the Census Bureau would make it almost impossible for the data to leak out unnoticed.

“If there’s anything I believe most strongly, it’s if there’s any illegal act that is proposed or promulgated, the staff at the Census Bureau would call [reporters] within 30 seconds. They are devoted to supplying the country statistical information under the law,” he said, adding that that devotion is rooted in necessity.

“The reason those laws exist is if individual records were freely given for enforcement procedures from the decennial census, then the cooperation from the public with the census is decimated,” Groves said. “These statistical agencies work with a social confidence—a trust with the public that the laws will be followed—and the laws were established to enhance that trust.”

Estimating Citizenship

While the Census Bureau won’t be able to ask each individual in the U.S. about their citizenship status, leveraging access to data held by other agencies will enable statisticians to match census respondents with information they have shared with the government to build a “best citizenship” estimate for each individual.

The bureau has been working on the algorithm to produce that estimate since April 2018 and planned to finalize the “final specifications and modeling details” before the end of March, according to an internal document.

The bureau did not respond to repeated requests for comments and updates on the status of that work or a comprehensive breakdown of which federal databases are actively being shared for this work.

However, the document offers a look into the main databases being used and the additional data sources most likely to be tapped.

Bureau officials believe about 90% of the U.S. population will be covered by data from two sources: the Social Security Administration’s Numerical Identification System, or Numident, which stores Social Security numbers; and, the IRS’ Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, or ITINs, which are used as a substitute for those without Social Security numbers. Approximately 94% of SSN records include citizenship information.

However, if officials determine these sources are not sufficient, agencies control a host of other datasets that could be added to the mix, including databases managed by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the departments of State and Housing and Urban Development, and Homeland Security Department components like U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the briefing document, Census officials said additional data from Homeland Security, State and other departments “are expected to provide the [personally identifiable information] that enables record linkage for much of the balance of the resident population.” However, that comes with a caveat: “Provided that the PII on the 2020 Census is as reliable as it was in 2010.”

DHS released a privacy impact statement in December outlining how it would share information with Census, though bureau officials did not respond to requests for confirmation that the DHS databases have been accessed or integrated into the citizenship estimates.

That data will be quantified using the finalized algorithm to produce a best estimate for citizenship.

“For a single person, they’ll collect multiple data sources on citizenship. Inevitably, those sources won’t agree. Then, the question is what do you do to estimate the best response for citizenship for that particular person. They will estimate that with modeling across the various databases,” Groves said. “They’ll also use the same sort of model if, despite all their efforts, for you they can’t find a record that you’re a citizen or you’re not a citizen, they will impute your citizenship to that model.”

Groves said we won’t know how accurate those estimates are until well after the fact.

“No one’s ever done this before,” he said. “No one, at this point, I think it’s fair to say, knows what the quality of the resulting estimates will be. We just don’t know that. We’ll know it after this, through evaluation studies. But this is just a good-faith statistical effort.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of track record on this,” he added. “These datasets, to my knowledge, have never been assembled the way they’re trying to assemble them.”

Source: How Census Is Building a Citizenship Database Covering Everyone Living in the U.S.

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Israel Faces Challenges In Fighting Coronavirus In Ultra-Orthodox Communities

2020/04/03 Leave a comment

Like fundamentalists and equivalents of other religions:

Some devout Orthodox Jewish communities have been slow to follow lockdown orders in Israel, helping drive a surge in coronavirus cases that officials are struggling to contain.

Known in Israel as Haredim, or those who tremble in awe before God, ultra-Orthodox Jews make up about 12% of Israel’s population — but they account for as much as 60% of Israel’s COVID-19 cases in major hospitals, according to estimates. More than 6,000 Israelis have been infected and at least 31 have died.

This week marked a turning point for the community’s leadership, after a senior rabbi finally urged his followers to obey government stay-at-home orders. Many in the ultra-Orthodox community only follow the orders of rabbis, not health officials, and for weeks, many ignored government bans against large weddings and prayer services. Many do not own smartphones or TVs, leading authorities and volunteers to employ alternate methods to get the word out about infection prevention.

“Do not hold a prayer gathering! Do not gather for study in synagogues and seminaries! Anyone who defies doctors’ and health officials’ orders to protect against coronavirus is considered as if plotting murder and you must turn him in to authorities!” was the recorded announcement by the ZAKA emergency response organization, whose volunteers drove through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods this week, broadcasting the warning from loudspeakers.

“Now I see a mother and a child crossing the street going into a shop,” ZAKA’s David Rose, himself ultra-Orthodox, told NPR by telephone from the car. “Some people are not aware of how severe this plague is going around.”

“Murderers,” screams a poster plastered in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, addressed to those who defy government orders to close synagogues and schools.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem, helped organize the posters in a private capacity.

At a recent meeting at City Hall, she says, “One of the elderly ultra-Orthodox members of the city council said, ‘You’re asking us to do everything against what our sages tell us to do.’ It’s been very, very difficult with the ultra-Orthodox community because it’s just asking them to go against everything they know and everything they are.”

The community turns to rabbinic texts on Jewish law for guidance on life’s challenges — but the plagues and calamities of the past were never tackled through isolation. And social distancing is anathema to the Orthodox Jewish communal way of life.

Many in the community are impoverished and families can include as many as seven or eight children, all living in two- or three-bedroom apartments. To prevent the virus from spreading easily at home, authorities are preparing hotels to quarantine healthy relatives of those infected with COVID-19 in the community.

The virus is also hitting ultra-Orthodox communities in the U.S., but in Israel, the crisis highlights a long-running friction between the government and the community’s leaders, some of whom initially dismissed the government’s coronavirus lockdown orders.

“Israel is a Jewish state on the one hand, but it doesn’t espouse the version of Judaism that Haredi society would like to see going on,” said ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer of the Tikvah Fund, an educational foundation. “Some of the Israeli regulations and laws are seen to be inhibited or restrictive of the Haredi way of life.”

As the virus hit the country last month, Israeli Health Minister Yaakov Litzman — raised in Brooklyn, New York, and himself ultra-Orthodox — tried to convince rabbis not to allow Jews in quarantine to attend public synagogue gatherings for the Purim holiday. But up until this week, he also permitted prayer gatherings to continue — even though about a quarter of Israeli cases of infection were contracted in synagogues, according to his own health ministry. Now he himself has contracted the virus.

With virus cases rising, Haredi newspapers in Israel ran photos of community members who died in New York, London, Paris and Israel, and the community’s attitude shifted.

This week, a leading Haredi rabbi, Chaim Kanievsky, changed his mind and said his followers should self-isolate and those who ignore the government lockdown should be considered as plotting murder. The mayor of the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, begged residents last weekend to stop prayer gatherings. His wife got the virus.

Some ultra-Orthodox Israelis are still skeptical. Yoel Krois, who lives in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, an ultra-Orthodox enclave, said he is keeping his family inside more but doesn’t trust the government’s infection statistics.

“Whoever is a bit sick or elderly must be careful and should not leave the home, and no one should visit them,” Krois said, “but forbidding young people from buying something on the street or praying, that’s already going too far.”

Some ultra-Orthodox Jews shouted “Nazis!” as police marched through a Jerusalem neighborhood this week, handing out large fines — some over $1,000 — to those ignoring the stay-at-home orders. To impose the restrictions, police set up checkpoints at entrances to some ultra-Orthodox areas and used drones to enforce the rules, even deploying stun grenades to disperse a crowd.

“If they would have been closed three weeks ago, the way that we asked them to, we would be seeing much, much fewer numbers today,” Hassan-Nahoum, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor, told NPR. “They came too late into this.”

Source: Israel Faces Challenges In Fighting Coronavirus In Ultra-Orthodox Communities

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‘It was like Nazis had walked into your living room’: Anti-Semitism group’s Zoom meeting crashed with hateful messages

2020/04/03 Leave a comment

Sigh… Always need to review security settings but deplorable that some people hold these beliefs and zoombomb:

Andria Spindel was at her Toronto home participating in a video meeting on how to stop anti-Semitism when she heard a voice from her computer say “Sieg Heil.”

The executive director of the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation says she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“It was otherworldly. I don’t know how to describe it,” Spindel said. “For a moment there, I actually couldn’t think where I was. This wasn’t my webinar. Where was I? What had happened?

“It was like Nazis had walked into your living room.”

It’s unclear how someone might have infiltrated the foundation’s meeting on the Zoom video-conferencing web platform. The link to access the meeting had been sent to the group’s master list, which includes about 3,500 people and may have been posted on social media. What is clear to Spindel is that people are exploiting technology to spread hate, and with so many people working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom has become a popular target.

Jewish organizations have also proven to be a target of what is being referred to as “Zoombombing,” in which malicious individuals crash video conferences to spread hateful and offensive content. In just the past week, the BBC, Jewish News Syndicate and news site Forward.com have all reported separate incidents of Jewish organizations’ Zoom meetings being disrupted by uninvited guests spreading anti-Semitic content.

Spindel said it highlights an urgent need for the company to address security concerns and for organizations and individuals who may not be technologically savvy to make sure they’re not ignoring any security vulnerabilities.

It was Monday when Spindel was hosting the web seminar, which had the theme of anti-Semitism as a virus that needs to be stamped out. Suddenly, she noticed rude and misogynistic comments in the chat channel. She started hearing strange background noises and marching music. Then the N-word flashed across the screen.

“That’s when I realized immediately something terrible is happening … and then, within seconds, you hear yelling, and screaming and the screen changing and somebody says ‘Sieg Heil.’”

She said she watched in horror as other participants of the web seminar reacted in shock.

“I actually thought I heard crying,” Spindel said.

She wasn’t able to immediately stop the meeting, because that function had been assigned to the guest speaker. They were eventually able to end the meeting, which had about 45 people participating.

But the damage was done. There was concern the infiltrators might have been able to steal email lists and contacts, something Spindel says a security expert has told her is possible, but unlikely.

“Do these people know who you are? … You have to sit back and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s just on my screen.’”

Retrospectively, she said the incident highlighted the prevalence of anti-Semitism in the world and the need for her organization to continue the work that it does.

Michael Mostyn, the CEO of Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada, said the organization continues to see a rise in anti-Semitism from year to year, although there was a bit of an anomaly in 2018.

Emerging forms of technology, such as social media platforms, offer those who spread hate anonymity and extended reach, Mostyn said. The crashing of a video-conferencing application such as Zoom is just another way that anti-Semitism is adapting in 2020, he added.

“It’s the morphing of anti-Semitism to modern forms of communication. … Unfortunately, those bigots and hatemongers are taking advantage of the situation and are using it to spread hate.”

Mostyn said anti-Semitism is often deeply rooted in conspiracy theories. Anti-Semitic tropes frequently portray Jewish people as a shadowy cabal with undue influence over the world. Misinformation about the source and spread of COVID-19 has been rife during the coronavirus pandemic, and anti-Semitism has been a factor, Mostyn said.

“The Jewish community has been tied into many of these conspiracy theories with respect to COVID-19,” he said.

Zoom has published several blog posts since March 20 outlining privacy and security best practices, with one titled “Keep the party crashers from crashing your Zoom event.”

In a statement, the company said it has made recent changes to tighten security, such as updating the default screen sharing settings for education users so teachers are the only ones who can share content by default. They also encouraged users to review their security settings.

“We are deeply upset to hear about the incidents involving this type of attack. We take the security of Zoom meetings seriously and for those hosting large, public group meetings, we strongly encourage hosts to review their settings, confirm that only the host can share their screen, and utilize features like host mute controls and ‘Waiting Room,’” a Zoom spokesperson said.

Spindel said the incident made her research the application to avoid similar incidents in the future. She recommends organizations using Zoom for their meetings look at disabling screen sharing, assign more than one moderator and reconsider having an open chat room that anyone can join.

She added that next week is Passover and many families will be holding virtual gatherings.

“This could be so upsetting, you’re sitting at your family dining room table by yourself … and this suddenly happens,” Spindel said. “So everybody needs to take precautions.”

Source: ‘It was like Nazis had walked into your living room’: Anti-Semitism group’s Zoom meeting crashed with hateful messages

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Citizenship is a tough mountain to climb, especially under Trump

2020/04/03 Leave a comment

Good overview of some of the additional hurdles, including increased fees. But of note that the backlog dates from Obama:

Gaining citizenship is a long, expensive and complicated process — one that has gotten more so under the Trump administration.

As the system currently stands, it can take 10 years or more for a person who entered the United States on a visa to become a citizen. Just getting a green card can take at least five years. Becoming eligible to apply for citizenship as a permanent resident after that? Another five years.

If you get to that stage, you then fill out the N-400 form, submit it with a $640 filing fee and then ready yourself for the civics test, biometric appointment and potential further vetting. After clearing those last hurdles, you are home free — a bona fide U.S. citizen.

Except, for an increasing number of people, that process never really takes off.

Around 700,000 applications for citizenship remained pending at the end of 2019 — and wait times have doubled over the past two years to almost three years, according to a September report by the Colorado State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“The substantial delay to naturalization created by the backlog negatively impacts voting rights, civil rights, and the administration of justice,” the report’s authors write.

A backlog results when the number of applications coming in exceed the ones processed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staff, who are tasked with adjudicating immigration benefits. Citizenship applications tend to spike before general elections, so throughout history, there have been crests and troughs in backlogs as the agency tries to catch up to the fluctuating heap of incoming applications.

The most recent uptick in pending applications started during the Obama administration. According to Eric Cohen, executive director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, technological updates instituted by the administration — meant to speed the processing along — actually led to delays due to unforeseen bugs. According to a 2017 report to Congress, the electronic platform initially faced “multiple technical problems, which negatively impacted processing times.”

The 2016 election year saw more applications than expected, as people rushed to apply before candidate Donald Trump could fulfill anti-immigration promises as president, so despite the technical hiccups demand continued to rise.

“It is my understanding that they underestimated the bump [in applications],” says Cohen, whose organization oversees the New American Campaign, a coalition of 150 organizations that provide legal help with naturalizations.

“The Trump effect was more profound than expected.”

The number of pending applications actually doubled under the Obama administration, from around 300,000 in 2010 to around 700,000 in early 2017, when Trump took office. Fast forward two years, at the end of fiscal 2019, when the administration boasted about its processing progress.

“The men and women of USCIS continue to administer our nation’s lawful immigration system, processing a large number of applications and requests while naturalizing 833,000 new U.S. citizens, an 11-year high,” Ken Cuccinelli, then serving as the acting director of USCIS, touted in an end-of-the-year email.

But on the back end, delays compound the backlog, critics say.

The failure to resolve them is partly the result of a tepid response on the part of the Trump administration to the surge in naturalization applications, according to some.

Cohen mentions two other contributing factors causing delays: more interviews and additional vetting, even in cases where neither are needed. He says he has heard stories of people vetted during the asylum process, then again when they sought to obtain their green cards, and then once more during the citizenship process. One elderly Iranian woman was so distraught during the final vetting that she broke down and withdrew her application, Cohen says.

“By doing super vetting, what you’re doing is discouraging people from applying, you’re giving people a really hard time during their interview process, and you’re taking much longer — 50 percent-plus longer,” he says. “Therefore, you’re doing fewer and fewer applications. So there are a lot of these bumps in the road that are there, I would say, purposely.”

USCIS maintains that it is “completing more citizenship applications, more efficiently and effectively — outperforming itself as an agency,” a spokesman said via email, and that “many factors relating to an individual’s case can affect processing times.”

In addition, the administration has put up what critics call the “second wall” — seemingly small rule changes, fee hikes and additional paperwork requirements that altogether make naturalization much more burdensome and prohibitive.

The one proposal advocates are most concerned about is a regulation that would, among other things, increase citizenship application fees from $640 to $1,170, and fees for green card applications from $1,225 to $2,195. It also would eliminate all fee waivers for these applications.

In a comment on the regulation, the National Partnership for New Americans, a group that helps immigrants naturalize, writes that the increase would leave tens of thousands of immigrants it serves unable to undergo naturalization.  It is “undermining the civic and economic benefits that are a direct result of welcoming and naturalizing millions,” the organization writes.

“The agency is proposing to do this during the exact same time that citizenship application fees are beginning to rise in anticipation of the presidential election of 2020.”

Source: Citizenship is a tough mountain to climb, especially under Trump

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Fox’s Fake News Contagion The network spent too long spraying its viewers with false information about the coronavirus pandemic.

2020/04/02 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Kara Swisher. Applies more broadly than COVID-19 but particularly dangerous during a pandemic:

You can relax, Sean Hannity, I’m not going to sue you.

Some people are suggesting that there might be grounds for legal action against the cable network that you pretty much rule — Fox News — because you and your colleagues dished out dangerous misinformation about the virus in the early days of the crisis in the United States. Some might allege that they have lost loved ones because of what was broadcast by your news organization.

But lawsuits are a bad idea. Here’s why: I believe in Fox News’s First Amendment right as a press organization, even if some of its on-air talent did not mind being egregiously bad at their jobs when it came to giving out accurate health data.

And, more to the point, when all is said and done, my Mom will listen to her children over Fox News. One of us — my brother — is an actual doctor and knows what he is talking about. And the other is a persistent annoyance — that would be me.

I’m a huge pest, in fact. “I’m going to block your number, if you don’t stop,” my mother said to me over the phone several weeks ago from Florida, after I had texted her the umpteenth chart about the spread of coronavirus across the country. All of these graphs had scary lines that went up and to the right. And all of them flashed big honking red lights: Go home and stay there until all clear.

She ignored my texts, so I had switched to calling her to make sure she had accurate information in those critical weeks at the end of February and the beginning of March. She is in the over-80 group that is most at risk of dying from infection. I worry a lot.

But she was not concerned — and it was clear why. Her primary source of news is Fox. In those days she was telling me that the Covid-19 threat was overblown by the mainstream news media (note, her daughter is in the media). She told me that it wasn’t going to be that big a deal. She told me that it was just like the flu.

And, she added, it was more likely that the Democrats were using the virus to score political points. And, did I know, by the way, that Joe Biden was addled?

Thankfully, Mom had not gone as far as claiming the coronavirus is a plot to hurt President Trump — a theory pushed by some at Fox News heavily at first. While she has been alternately appalled and amused by the president, and often takes his side, she is not enough of a superfan to think that he is any kind of victim here.

So, she kept going out with friends to restaurants and shopping and generally living her life as it always had been. “What’s the big deal, Kara? Stop bothering me,” she said over the phone. “You’re the one who is going to get sick, if you don’t stop working so much.”

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Facebook, YouTube Warn Of More Mistakes As Machines Replace Moderators

2020/04/02 Leave a comment

Whether by humans or AI, not an easy thing to do consistently and appropriately:

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are relying more heavily on automated systems to flag content that violate their rules, as tech workers were sent home to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

But that shift could mean more mistakes — some posts or videos that should be taken down might stay up, and others might be incorrectly removed. It comes at a time when the volume of content the platforms have to review is skyrocketing, as they clamp down on misinformation about the pandemic.

Tech companies have been saying for years that they want computers to take on more of the work of keeping misinformation, violence and other objectionable content off their platforms. Now the coronavirus outbreak is accelerating their use of algorithms rather than human reviewers.

“We’re seeing that play out in real time at a scale that I think a lot of the companies probably didn’t expect at all,” said Graham Brookie, director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters that automated review of some content means “we may be a little less effective in the near term while we’re adjusting to this.”

Twitter and YouTube are also sounding caution about the shift to automated moderation.

“While we work to ensure our systems are consistent, they can sometimes lack the context that our teams bring, and this may result in us making mistakes,” Twitter said in a blog post. It added that no accounts will be permanently suspended based only on the actions of the automated systems.

YouTube said its automated systems “are not always as accurate or granular in their analysis of content as human reviewers.” It warned that more content may be removed, “including some videos that may not violate policies.” And, it added, it will take longer to review appeals of removed videos.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rely on tens of thousands of content moderators to monitor their sites and apps for material that breaks their rules, from spam and nudity to hate speech and violence. Many moderators are not full-time employees of the companies, but contractors who work for staffing firms.

Now those workers are being sent home. But some content moderation cannot be done outside the office, for privacy and security reasons.

For the most sensitive categories, including suicide, self-injury, child exploitation and terrorism, Facebook says it’s shifting work from contractors to full-time employees — and is ramping up the number of people working on those areas.

There are also increased demands for moderation as a result of the pandemic. Facebook says use of its apps, including WhatsApp and Instagram, is surging. The platforms are under pressure to keep false information, including dangerous fake health claims, from spreading.

The World Health Organization calls the situation an infodemic, where too much information, both true and false, makes it hard to find trustworthy information.

The tech companies “are dealing with more information with less staff,” Brookie said. “Which is why you’ve seen these decisions to move to more automated systems. Because frankly, there’s not enough people to look at the amount of information that’s ongoing.”

That makes the platforms’ decisions right now even more important, he said. “I think that we should all rely on more moderation rather than less moderation, in order to make sure that the vast majority of people are connecting with objective, science-based facts.”

Some Facebook users raised alarm that automated review was already causing problems.

When they tried to post links to mainstream news sources like The Atlantic and BuzzFeed, they got notifications that Facebook thought the posts were spam.

Facebook said the posts were erroneously flagged as spam due to a glitch in its automated spam filter.

Zuckerberg denied the problem was related to shifting content moderation from humans to computers.

“This is a completely separate system on spam,” he said. “This is not about any kind of near-term change, this was just a technical error.”

Source: Facebook, YouTube Warn Of More Mistakes As Machines Replace Moderators

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Opinion: Tunisia has a problem with internalised Islamophobia

2020/04/02 Leave a comment

More the tension between more conservative strains of Islam and more secular Muslims than Islamophobia:

On March 13, the Tunisian government announced emergency measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

The measures included closing its sea borders, suspending international flights, shutting cafes from 4pm and completely closing mosques.

It was this last decision that sparked controversy on social media and among religious scholars and reminded many Tunisians of something they have long suspected; a deep-seated Islamophobia that has framed internal Tunisian policies and politics since the country’s independence from French colonial rule in 1956.

While the importance of prevention measures and controlling the spread of the virus is not debatable, the choice to completely close down mosques while only partially closing cafes was met with dismay.

Hicham Grissa, president of Zitouna University in Montfleury, criticised the decision as being “unresponsive” to people’s need for religious and spiritual practices in these times.

Grissa said while the spread of the virus will determine future actions, right now “you should not be talking about prohibiting prayer in mosques, unless the same measures are being taken for cafes and clubs.”

One mosque-goer in Nabeul, where I am from, told me: “I went to pray at dawn and the mosque was closed.

“We are usually only a dozen people at the Fajr prayer in the neighbourhood mosque, and we’re only there for 10 or 15 minutes. I just don’t see how that poses a higher risk than cafes downtown that host hundreds of people throughout the day.”

As schools and universities were closed from March 12, Tunisian youth took to cafes, sitting in confined spaces, drinking coffee and playing card games.

The decision to suspend prayer in mosques was, therefore, perceived by many social media users as the continuation of a state tradition of what they see as internalised Islamophobia, and “problematising” Islam and Islamic practices as the first step in dealing with crises.

This is all reminiscent of another problematic decision illustrating the internalised Islamophobia of the Tunisian state – the niqab ban imposed in July 2019.

After a double suicide bombing in June, Tunisia’s prime minister, Youssef Chahed, issued an order banning the wearing of the Islamic face veil in all state buildings and institutions for “security reasons”. This, despite the fact that the Ministry of Interior denied that the culprit had been wearing a niqab to disguise himself.

Several civil society organisations and politicians considered this to be a repetition of the hijab ban which has been imposed several times in Tunisia’s modern history. Over time, such bans have taken their toll on women’s rights and on freedom of religion, with resulting arrests, imprisonment, suspension from work and even police violence.

In 2019, activists argued that, if security is a concern, the state can take several measures to ensure security without infringing on freedom of religion and banning clothing. For example, female police officers or employees could carry out identity checks or searches at the entrance to public buildings in case of security concerns.

However, consecutive Tunisian governments from 1956, while more lenient today than in the past, have continued to exhibit an internalised Islamophobia that has propagated throughout Tunisia.

In the 1960s, Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first post-independence president, sought to weaken Islamic culture and establish a secular national identity. He closed the historical Islamic Zitouna University and discouraged fasting, personally appearing on TV drinking orange juice during Ramadan and advising Tunisians to do the same.

The Bourguiba administration abolished the system of religious endowments and religious courts, banned groups and political parties with an Islamic focus and officially banned the hijab in 1981, a policy that remained in place until the Tunisian revolution in 2011.

This state-sanctioned anti-hijab sentiment can be traced back to French colonial rule when women were encouraged to remove their veils as a statement of modernity and civilisation. This began in Algeria, but it was this Western notion of “modernity” that Bourguiba later sought to enforce in Tunisia.

This imposition of secular national identity resulted not only in the persecution of large groups of people but also in a growing societal mistrust of certain Islamic practices.

Restrictions on Islamic practices intensified during the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali administration from 1987 to 2011, when the state leveraged the fear of the threat of terrorism to crack down even more on religious freedoms and further entice fear of Islam among its population.

The Ben Ali administration enacted the 2003 anti-terrorism law, for example, which served to further alienate and persecute political opposition and ordinary religious people.

According to reports by organisations such as Amnesty International, between 2,000 and 3,000 people were prosecuted under this law. The law was vague and activities that were deemed to warrant police investigation included praying in mosques and owning Islamic items.

Just like the Bourguiba government before it, the Ben Ali administration established an increasingly authoritarian rule, under the cover of “modernity” and “fighting terrorism”, amid silence from Western allies such as the United States and France.

People who wore the hijab, who went to the mosque regularly or who engaged in Quran studies or recitation were perceived as “too religious”, and as a threat to Tunisian homogeneity and state security.

Documents found by protesters in police stations during the 2010 to 2011 protests showed how informants would keep logs of the numbers of people who went to a specific mosque, who was in the front row, how many women wore the headscarf and even how many women wore the headscarf but with more conservative, loose-fitting dresses.

A classified internal document from the Ministry of the Interior dated 2009, which started circulating on social media a few weeks ago, reads: “I am honoured to let you know that on 18/03/2009, a girl wearing a headscarf was detained [….] after investigation it became clear that she practises her religious duties regularly. She was warned about the necessity to remove the sectarian dress and she showed willingness to do so.” “Sectarian clothing” was the term used by the government to describe the headscarf at that time.

The government’s use of both police and neighbours/colleagues to watch out for each other’s “level of religiousness”, has resulted in these policies being adopted at a societal and individual level.

Despite the political changes brought by the revolution in 2011, these policies seeped into certain domains and became part of the culture.

Women wearing the hijab are still discriminated against. They are prohibited from certain swimming pools for “hygiene reasons” while men with long beards are still perceived as a threat.

After the striking incident of the suspension of a hijab-wearing flight attendant from Tunisair in 2015, the then-Minister of Transport declared that the hijab reduces hearingby 30 percent, putting the lives of passengers in danger.

While the justifications switch from safety, national security and hygiene to health concerns, the Tunisian state continues a decades-long tradition of internalised Islamophobia and remains quick to pursue policies that target Islamic practices first and foremost.

Source: Tunisia has a problem with internalised Islamophobia

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Portugal gives migrants and asylum-seekers full citizenship rights during coronavirus outbreak

2020/04/02 Leave a comment

Of note. Best approach from a public health perspective (not full rights, can’t vote):

Portugal has temporarily given all migrants and asylum seekers full citizenship rights, granting them full access to the country’s healthcare as the outbreak of the novel coronavirusescalates in the country.

The move will “unequivocally guarantee the rights of all the foreign citizens” with applications pending with Portuguese immigration, meaning they are “in a situation of regular permanence in National Territory,” until June 30, the Portuguese Council of Ministers said on Friday.
The Portuguese Council of Ministers explained that the decision was taken to “reduce the risks for public health” of maintaining the current scheduling of appointments at the immigration office, for both the border agents and the migrants and asylum seekers.
The US is swiftly removing migrant children due to new coronavirus restrictions
Portugal declared a State of Emergency on March 18 that came into effect at midnight that day and was due to last for 15 days. Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said during a news conference that “democracy won’t be suspended.”
The country was a dictatorship for decades, with democracy being restored in 1974.
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa called the Covid-19 pandemic “a true war,” which would bring true challenges to the country’s “way of life and economy.”
Rebelo de Sousa also praised the behavior of Portuguese citizens, “who have been exemplary in imposing a self-quarantine,” reflecting “a country that has lived through everything.”
Portugal has has 6,408 cases of coronavirus, with 140 deaths and 43 recovered, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

Source: Portugal gives migrants and asylum-seekers full citizenship rights during coronavirus outbreak

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