EU unveils plan to combat racism, increase diversity

2020/09/21 Leave a comment

Better late than never (collecting basic data):

The European Commission presented a series of measures Friday aimed at tackling structural racism and discrimination, acknowledging a blatant lack of diversity among the European Union’s institutions.

The bloc’s executive arm set out its action plan for the next five years, which includes strengthening the current legal framework, recruiting an anti-racism and increasing the diversity of EU staff.

The European Commission’s for values and transparency, Vera Jourová, said that recent anti-racism protests in the U.S. and Europe highlighted the need for action.

“We have reached a moment of reckoning. The protests sent a clear message, change must happen now,” Jourová said. “It won’t be easy, but it must be done.

“We won’t shy away from strengthening the legislation, if needed,” she said. “The commission itself will adapt its recruiting policy to better reflect European society.”

The current College of Commissioners, which oversees EU policies, is made up of 27 members, one from each EU country. All the members of the team set up last year by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are white.

Under the plan, data on the diversity of commission staff will for the first time be collected on the basis of a voluntary survey that will help define new recruitment policies.

Meanwhile, the new for anti-racism will be in charge of collecting the grievances and feelings of minorities to make sure they are reflected in EU policies.

The EU said that more than half of Europeans believe that discrimination is widespread in their country. According to surveys carried out by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, or FRA, 45% of people of North African descent, 41% of Roma and 39% of people of sub-Saharan African descent have faced such discrimination.

The EU’s racial equality directive will also be assessed, with possible new legislation introduced in 2022. In the wake of the Black Live Matters protests triggered by George Floyd’s death in the U.S., the European Commission said it would look carefully into discrimination by law enforcement authorities such as unlawful racial profiling. Meanwhile, the EU agency for fundamental rights will continue to collect data on police attitudes towards minorities.

The European Commission also wants to combat stereotypes and disinformation by setting up a series of seminars and promoting commemorative days linked to the issue of racism. It also encouraged member states to address stereotypes via cultural and education programs, or the media. A summit against racism is planned next year.

“Nobody is born racist. It is not a characteristic which we are born with,” said Helena Dalli, the EU commissioner for equality. “It’s a question of nurture, and not nature. We have to unlearn what we have learned.”

Earlier this year, the European Parliament approved a resolution condemning the Floyd’s death and asking the EU to take a strong stance against racism.

Source: EU unveils plan to combat racism, increase diversity

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

OECD Report: All Hands In? Making Diversity Work for All

2020/09/21 Leave a comment

This report has some very useful comparative charts that I will draw from in the future. This takeaway is a useful reminder of the differences between and among groups:

Existing frameworks must better differentiate the needs of diverse groups

Despite the variety of instruments in place, whether diversity policies actually work in practice and why is still under-researched. This is partly due to few countries evaluating or monitoring the impact of existing policies. Yet, understanding “what works” for which groups and why is crucial. Evidence suggests that existing diversity measures often disregard the considerable heterogeneity both between and within groups and consequently have unequal effects on diverse populations. For example, evidence shows that affirmative action programmes in the United States have benefitted white women more than ethnic minorities. Quota regulations, which have proven effective in getting more women in corporate boards, can be counterproductive when applied to other groups, such as people with disabilities. Such findings demonstrate that there are group-specific barriers, which cannot be addressed through “one-size-fits-all” diversity policies.

Crucially, most existing diversity policies tend to neglect socio-economic disadvantage. Studies on access to higher education suggest that diversity policies primarily benefit the most privileged within an ethnic minority group, e.g. those from families with relatively high incomes or high levels of education. While the principle of equal opportunities should apply to people of any socio-economic background and status, policies fail to help the most disadvantaged within minority groups will not end injustice. Finally, policy makers have to face the danger that disadvantaged individuals who do not happen to fall into the category of any particular “diverse group” may feel left out and discriminated against. Diversity policies, therefore, can only be one part of a broader package of policies to promote equal opportunities among all members of society.

page21image1385687056 page21image1385687344 page21image1385687840 page21image1385688032 page21image1385688320 page21image1385688896

Note: The chart compares differences in employment rates of men and women; native-born and foreign-born; and prime-age (25-54) and older workers (55-64). Disability status is defined as self-perceived, long-standing activity limitations. Employment gaps and perceived attitudes are shown as colour-coded percentiles. Evolution over 10 years (2008 and 2018 for attitudes; 2006/07 and 2016/17 for labour market gaps): “red”: more than a 2 percentage points change to the favour of diverse groups, “yellow” between a +2 percentage points change and a -2 percentage points change, “red“: more than a 2 percentage points change to the detriment of diverse groups (regardless of statistical significance). The evolution refers to differences vis-à-vis the respective comparison group and not absolute values. “Grey”: data are not available.

Source: OECD Gender Portal; OECD/EU Settling In: Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2018; OECD Employment Outlook 2018; OECD Connecting People with Jobs 2014; World Gallup Poll.

Source: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/all-hands-in-making-diversity-work-for-all_efb14583-en

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Immigrant Share Continues Flatlining Under Trump in 2019

2020/09/21 Leave a comment

Good analysis regarding the impact of the Trump administration. Last line captures is “his mere presence has created a social and political environment that is seen as unfriendly toward immigrants”:

For the second year in a row, the proportion of the U.S. population who are immigrants did not increase, according to new numbers from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (its annual “mini‐​census”). This is the first time since the Great Recession that multiple years have passed consecutively with no increase.

The stall also defies Census Bureau 2016 projections which had predicted more than a million more immigrants by 2019, and the change had already placed America on pace to have the lowest growth in its immigrant share of any decade since the 1960s before COVID-19 drastically reduced both legal and illegal entries in 2020.

Figure 1 shows the immigrant share of the U.S. population from 2000 to 2019. The share increased by 1.5 percentage points from 2000 to 2007 before dipping in 2008 through 2009 as the housing bubble burst and employment fell. The share then rose again by 1.2 percentage points through 2017 to 13.7 percent where it has stayed during President Trump’s term in office. The Census Bureau in 2017 projected that by 2019, 13.9 percent of the U.S. population would be immigrants.

Figure 2 shows how the actual immigrant population is already down by over a million people relative to the Census Bureau’s 2016 projections. The Census Bureau guessed that the number of immigrants would increase from July 2017 to July 2019 by 1.4 million when, in fact, it increased by little more than 400,000. The Census Bureau’s estimate for the increase in 2017 was 96 percent accurate, but only about 28 percent accurate for 2018 and 2019.

The falloff in the last couple of years is attributable to strong declines from all regions of the world except Oceania. In particular, the European immigrant population fell by 150,000 from July 2017 to July 2019. Northern American immigrants outside of Latin America also declined in absolute numbers. The Asian population grew by almost 200,000 in 2 years as opposed to nearly 500,000 in a single year from 2016 to 2017. The African population grew by 71,554 in 2019, which was half the increase from 2016 to 2017. Latin American immigrants increased by 70,000—half the rate of increase from 2016 to 2017.

The broader historical perspective is key as well. The increase in the immigrant share of the population was the least since the 1960s when it declined. The growth was 0.8 percentage point from 2010 to 2019—less than half the growth from 2000 to 2010.

The change comes despite a wave of more than a million Mexican and Central American asylum seekers and undocumented border crossers in 2019—most of whom were not returned that year. The fact is that it’s lower legal immigration and more immigrants leaving that is driving the decreases in immigrant population growth in the United States. Figure 4 shows how the number of legal immigrants admitted to legal permanent residence from abroad has declined steadily under President Trump by 158,826. But this decrease is not enough to explain lower immigrant population growth. Many immigrants must also be choosing to abandon the United States, such as those caught in decades‐​long green card backlogs.

In a normal environment, immigration should have increased when unemployment reached historic lows. But the president’s anti‐​immigration policies made that impossible, increasing deportations and imposing many new regulations on legal immigration. But it could also be that his mere presence has created a social and political environment that is seen as unfriendly toward immigrants.

Source: Immigrant Share Continues Flatlining Under Trump in 2019

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Douglas Todd: More rigorous study needed on ‘systemic racism’ in Canada’s justice system

2020/09/21 Leave a comment

Looking forward to the more detailed report correlating crime rates by ethnic status is scheduled to be released on Sept. 30 by StatsCan that will help avoid some of the broad generalizations in the article:

Federal Justice Minister David Lametti has been emphasizing to journalists that it’s time to weed out “systemic racism” in the Canadian police and court system.

“It’s part of a larger foundation of colonialism that sadly has played an important part in our history,” Lametti told Postmedia News in the midst of sweeping anger and debate about police violence against Blacks in the United States.

The report found over a 10-year period that Canadian whites accounted for 61 per cent of the serious crimes that warranted federal custody and a mandatory minimum penalty, even as whites in 2011 made up 76 per cent of the population.
The study revealed that Indigenous offenders were incarcerated for 23 per cent of the serious crimes, despite accounting for only 4.3 per cent of the population.

Blacks were jailed for nine per cent of the serious offences, despite comprising 2.9 per cent of the population.

In contrast, other visible minorities were responsible for just nine per cent of the offences involving firearms, sex with minors and drug trafficking, even though they make up 16 per cent of all Canadian residents.

The 2017 StatsCan report on mandatory minimum penalties provided no analysis or commentary related to whether the incarceration imbalances based on Indigenous or ethnic status had anything to do with racism.

Justice Department media officials, in addition to highlighting the single report on mandatory sentencing, also suggested asking Statistics Canada about relevant data that would back up Lametti’s claims about “shocking” systemic racism.

Statistics Canada media officials, in response, provided links to data on homicide rates, which showed the overall murder rate was going down but in 2018 Indigenous people were disproportionately its victims — in 21 per cent of all 651 homicide cases.

While the homicide data compiled by Statistics Canada shows that nen are the most common victims of murder, it didn’t track homicide rates based on whether someone is white or a visible minority (also referred to as a person of colour.)

However, the Statistics Canada media official highlighted how, for the first time in Canadian history, that data correlating crime rates by ethnic status is scheduled to be released on Sept. 30.

That should be an important improvement, because Canada is far behind Britain, Australia and the United States in providing comprehensive analysis of how crime data relate to ethnicity.

Associate Prof. Rick Parent, who has taught criminology at SFU, The University of the Fraser Valley and elsewhere, says the big problem in Canada is that there is no central entity probing the “deeper meaning” of crime data.

“Statistics Canada just sort of throws things on the wall,” he said. It normally publishes police and crime-related data without putting it in broader, relevant perspective.

“The situation does a disservice to marginalized groups,” Parent said, pointing to how Britain, the U.S. and Australia have research teams devoted to understanding how ethnicity relates to arrest rates and other aspects of the justice system.

The problem in Canada, Parent said, is that elected officials and others tend to fling out their positions on crime rates mainly in response to “the loudest voices” on social media and elsewhere.

The justice minister, for instance, used charged concepts, including “colonization” and “racialized,” when he maintained discrimination based on ethnicity is rampant in Canada’s legal system. (“Racialized” is a new term in sociology that refers to ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a group that did not identify itself as such.)

The term “systemic racism” is also disputed. For many it means that racism is a fixed, often subconscious practice within an organization. As some say, a system can be racist even when the individuals in it are not. The term has become so hotly contested that The Oxford Dictionary this summer acknowledged it’s working on clarifying what exactly it means.

For his part, Parent, a former Delta police veteran, says: “Nobody can really say” what contributes to higher incarceration rates for Canada’s Indigenous and Black people.

“Wealth distribution” and lack of adequate housing, he said, may have a more significant correlation to high crime statistics than membership in an ethnic group.

Studies by researchers such as UBC’s Haimin Zhang have consistently shown, for instance, that most immigrants to Canada, three out of four of whom are people of colour, have low arrest rates, Parent said.

“There are lots of well-off and extremely well-off immigrants in North Vancouver and West Vancouver and they’re not committing many crimes. Broad generalities about race and the justice system just don’t fly,” Parent said,  adding people of different economic classes tend to engage in different times of crimes.

Parent also doesn’t believe choices made by specific police officers, prosecutors and judges can explain the disparities in Canada’s incarceration rates. “It’s naive to say individuals have that much power in the justice system.”

Rather than blaming systemic racism, Parent said Canada should follow the lead of other countries that have developed more rigorous ways to examine why Indigenous, Black people or others are more likely to be jailed.

“We have to be more proactive and figure out why these things are happening.”

Source: Douglas Todd: More rigorous study needed on ‘systemic racism’ in Canada’s justice system

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

How The Pandemic Is Widening The Racial Wealth Gap

2020/09/19 Leave a comment

Good data-based analysis:

Joeller Stanton used to be an assistant teacher at a private school in Baltimore and made about $30,000 a year. In mid-March, when the pandemic was just starting, her school closed for what was supposed to be two weeks. “Up to that point, we were under the impression that it wasn’t that serious, that everything was going to be OK,” Stanton recalls.

But as schools in Maryland switched to virtual learning indefinitely, Stanton was let go from her job. She received her last paycheck in March. “I had about $300 savings that was basically gone by the end of March,” she says.

She says she applied for unemployment but was denied initially. And by April, she had no money to pay for rent and utilities, and was struggling to put food on the table for her two children.

Stanton, who is Black, is caught up in a huge wave of economic stress hitting Americans, especially people of color.

Sixty percent of Black households are facing serious financial problems since the pandemic began, according to a national poll released this week by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. That includes 41% who say they’ve used up most or all their savings, while an additional 10% had no savings before the outbreak.

Latinos and Native Americans are also disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s economic impact. Seventy-two percent of Latino and 55% of Native American respondents say their households are facing serious financial problems, compared with 36% of whites.

“The thing that immediately struck me was how large the gap was by race for the people who said they were facing serious problems,” says Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.

The pandemic’s disproportionate financial impact on communities of color reflects — and is worsening — existing racial disparities in wealth, she adds.

Struggles with income, housing, food

“The three groups that are being just ravaged by this epidemic are reporting unbelievable problems of just trying to cope with their day-to-day lives,” says Robert Blendon, professor emeritus of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who oversaw the poll.

Thirty-two percent of Latino and 28% of Black respondents say they’re having problems paying rent or mortgages. About a third of respondents in both groups were struggling to pay credit cards or other loans. And 26% of Latino and Native American respondents say they struggle to afford food, while 22% of Black respondents do.

Among households that reported they lost income, survival is even more of a challenge. For Black respondents, 40% say they’re struggling to pay rent or mortgage, and 43% say they’re having trouble paying utilities. For Latino households that lost income, 46% say they’re struggling to pay mortgage or rent. About a third of both Black and Latino respondents who lost household income said they’re struggling to pay for food.

The fact that many minority groups are also experiencing higher rates of coronavirus infections makes it even harder for them to cope financially, Blendon adds.

“You have people who don’t have savings, they can’t pay bills,” he says. “And then you’re going to tell them, ‘Well, somebody in the household tested positive, nobody can go work.’ How are they going to keep their lives going?”

Stanton’s sister, who works for the city government, got COVID-19 earlier this year and had to isolate in her basement. “She had a cough, and she couldn’t eat because her taste buds were completely gone,” Stanton says. “I would cook meals, and I would take it to the basement, put it down on the floor for her.”

Luckily, she says, no one else in the family — including her 82-year-old mother and her 7-year-old son, who has asthma — got infected.

But Stanton says she has lost a sister-in-law to the disease and had a friend in coma for six weeks on a ventilator. She knows of many others in her community who have died.

And most of her co-workers and friends are out of work.

Worsening existing disparities

Even during the economic recovery of recent years, minority groups were lagging behind, says Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute. “There were significant racial disparities in wages, significant racial disparities in unemployment, significant racial disparities in the kinds of jobs people held.”

Black, Latino and Native American workers were more likely to have jobs that were lost during the pandemic, Wilson says. A Harvard University analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey, released in July, found that 58% of Latino and 53% of Black households experienced loss in earnings early in the pandemic. Wilson’s own research has shown that Latino workers have been particularly affected by job losses during the pandemic.

Wilson adds that people in these groups are also more likely to have jobs that didn’t allow them to work from the safety of their homes, therefore putting them more at risk of getting infected. And they’re also less likely to have substantial savings. As a result, it makes it harder for them to weather times of economic downturn, she says.

Wilson says she worries that the pandemic is worsening racial disparities.

“We’re going to see coming out of this pandemic an expansion of the racial wealth gap,” she says. “We saw the same kind of thing in the Great Recession in 2007-2008 — in particular then with the extensive foreclosures in communities of color and the loss of housing wealth.”

“You just pray”

The pandemic forced Stanton to give up her rental home back in April. But she says she was fortunate not to end up homeless, thanks to her sister.

“My sister helped me get a storage unit,” Stanton says. “I moved my furniture into a storage unit. And I moved in with my sister, me and my two kids — my 11-year-old daughter and my 7-year-old son.”

She is grateful to have a roof over her head, but money, she says, is still tight.

She now gets $280 a week from the state of Maryland as unemployment, but it doesn’t go far.

“The first thing I buy is any personal hygiene items me or my kids need,” she says. She buys food, above what food stamps get her; she pays her phone bill and covers her sister’s utility bills. “That’s my only way of telling her, ‘Thank you,’ to show her that I appreciate what she’s doing.”

What little she has left, she buys a treat or two for her children, who have mostly been stuck indoors since the pandemic began: “Just trying to keep them happy,” she says.

But she’s far from happy herself. She hasn’t been able to find a new job because of the nature of remote learning. “They don’t need an assistant right now because the kids are not physically in the building,” she says.

And even if she did find a job, she worries she’d have to use pay to cover child care. Her kids are now also learning virtually from home and need constant supervision.

Stanton says the only way she copes with her daily struggles is through faith. “A lot of prayer and a lot of patience,” she says. “I try not to let things bother me because I don’t want to become depressed. So, you know, you just pray. I hope this is all over soon.”

Source: How The Pandemic Is Widening The Racial Wealth Gap

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

It’s time Canada stood up to more bullies besides Trump. China, for instance.

2020/09/19 Leave a comment

Alan Freeman’s piece, written before foreign minister Champagne’s announcement that Canada abandons free-trade talks with China in shift for Trudeau government raises valid comparisons with Australia’s approach:

Sometimes it pays to stand up to a bully. It’s time Canada made a habit of it.

This week, hours before Canada was about to impose tariffs on a range of U.S. products in retaliation for the Trump administration’s imposition of a 10 per cent tariff on Canadian exports of aluminum, the U.S. caved.

The U.S. tariff was cancelled, and though U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer insisted Washington hadn’t backed down, and the tariffs could be reimposed if Canada didn’t behave itself and restrict exports of the metal in future, it was clear that Canada had won this battle.

The imposition of the aluminum tariff was an absurdity from the start, one that seemed to benefit only a few well-connected aluminum producers and to anger everyone else in the U.S. industry. Yet credit still has to go to the Trudeau government and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland for standing tough all the way through.

A similar no-nonsense approach was essential to the renegotiation of NAFTA, an unnecessary exercise prompted by U.S. President Donald Trump, which only had downsides for Canada at the outset. The fact that the new Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade pact doesn’t seem much different from the old one has to be seen as a victory. It could have been a lot worse.

Although Trump has shown his dislike of Trudeau on several occasions — there’s hardly a democratically elected world leader Trump hasn’t tussled with — it hasn’t meant Canada has been so worried about Trump’s volatility that it’s been willing to back down on trade and other issues, which is a good thing. The basic message is that we value our relationship with the U.S., but we won’t be pushed around.

If only Canada could show more of this backbone when dealing with China. Although the Trudeau government has been firm in its reaction to the suspension of freedoms in Hong Kong, and continues to insist on the liberation of the two kidnapped Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, it still seems reluctant to respond outspokenly to Chinese excesses.

When it comes to standing up to China, Canada should look at Australia. It’s much more dependent on China than Canada is, with China accounting for one-third of Australia’s exports, including huge quantities of coal, iron ore and agricultural products. And Australia depends on big influxes of Chinese university students and tourists to bolster its economy.

Yet relations are tense, because the Australian government is wary of Chinese efforts to influence — some say infiltrate — Australian universities and political life. In June, Australia’s intelligence services are reported to have raided the homes of four Chinese journalists resident in Australia, as well as of a state legislator whose office was suspected of being used to influence Australian politics.

The four journalists have since returned to China, and the visas of two Chinese academics have been cancelled, but not before China had struck back. Chinese police recently conducted midnight interrogations of two prominent Australian journalists in China, who were forced to seek refuge at Australian diplomatic facilities before fleeing the country.

And in what looks like a repeat of the abduction of the two Michaels, TV news anchor Cheng Lei, a star of CGTN, a Chinese government-owned English TV network in Beijing, was detained last month and is being held for suspected “criminal activity endangering China’s national security.” The Chinese-born journalist is an Australian citizen.

Relations between China and Australia have been deteriorating for years, but what appears to have really upset Beijing was the call in April by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for an international investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Not only has China cracked down on journalists in retaliation, but it has launched a series of trade actions targeting Australian exports of barley and beef. China has also started an anti-dumping probe against Australian wine — shades of China’s moves against Canadian canola and pork.

When it comes to Huawei, the Australians have already acted, banning the Chinese technology giant from its 5G networks, while Canada continues to prevaricate. It seems at times that the Trudeau government is wishing it would all go away, including the U.S. extradition request for Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive arrested in Vancouver in December 2018.

While trade tensions haven’t eased, Australia has at least made clear that it won’t be intimidated. Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Peter Duncan has said about the latest row over journalists that “Australia will defend its core values and principles, such as adherence to the rule of law, press freedom and democracy.”

And the Australian government has armed itself with a series of laws that defend against foreign interference in its political institutions. Just last month, the government proposed federal legislation that would require any foreign agreements signed by states, local governments and universities to be first approved by the central government. The bill seemed aimed specifically at agreements with China.

It follows adoption of federal legislation in 2018 that criminalizes foreign interference in Australian government, including covert, deceptive actions or threats aimed at democratic institutions or providing intelligence to overseas governments.

Because the Chinese economic and political presence is so much more important to Australia than it is to Canada, there is none of the naiveté that still seems to influence Canadian attitudes toward China. As the Globe and Mail has reported this week, Huawei is keen to cash in on those gullible China-sympathetic “influencers,” including one-time politicians and academics who’ve been pressing Ottawa for a prisoner swap to free the two Michaels, so far without success.

Let’s hope that Freeland, with her influence in the Trudeau cabinet at an all-time high, will succeed in convincing her colleagues that Canada needs to stand up to an even bigger bully than Donald Trump. It will take a lot of backbone.

Source: It’s time Canada stood up to more bullies besides Trump. China, for instance.

Filed under foreign policy Tagged with , ,

Home Office immigration unit has ‘no idea’ – MPs

2020/09/19 1 Comment

Another apparent weakness in Home Office policy and management:

The Home Office has “no idea” what its £400m-a-year immigration enforcement unit achieves, meaning it is unprepared for Brexit, MPs have warned.

The cross-party Public Accounts Committee said a lack of diversity at the top of the department also risked a repeat of the Windrush scandal.

Its policies may be based purely on “assumption and prejudice”, it warned.

A Home Office spokeswoman said it used a “balanced” approach to maintain “a fair immigration system”.

The Home Office’s 5,000-strong Immigration Enforcement directorate, and other parts of the system, have been repeatedly reorganised since being branded “unfit for purpose” 15 years ago by the then home secretary.

The latest massive changes will come in January to deal with the end of freedom of movement.

In the highly critical report, the influential committee said officials were reliant on “disturbingly weak evidence” to assess which immigration enforcement policies worked, and why.

Officials had no idea how many people are living illegally in the UK, no idea what their impact was on the economy and public services – and no means of countering claims that could “inflame hostility”.

“We are concerned that if the department does not make decisions based on evidence, it instead risks making them on anecdote, assumption and prejudice,” said the MPs.

“Worryingly, it has no idea of what impact it has achieved for the £400m spent each year.”

The MPs said the the department showed too little concern over failures.

It risked a repeat of the Windrush scandal in which people with a right to be in the UK were treated as illegal immigrants because the Home Office had lost records of their status or did not believe the evidence they provided.

“The significant lack of diversity at senior levels of the department means it does not access a sufficiently wide range of perspectives when establishing rules and assessing the human impact of its decisions,” said the MPs. “Professional judgement cannot be relied upon if an organisation has blind spots, and the Windrush scandal demonstrated the damage such a culture creates.”

From January, unless the UK reaches a deal with Brussels, it will no longer be part of a system that obliges EU members to take back some migrants who have no right to be in another state.

But the MPs said they had been provided with “no evidence” that the Home Office had begun discussions “internally” or with EU nations over how to prepare for the possible impact of that change.

“Without putting new arrangements in place successfully,” warned the MPs, “There is a real risk that EU exit will actually make it more difficult to remove foreign national offenders and those who try to enter the country illegally.”

Committee chairwoman Meg Hillier said: “The Home Office has frighteningly little grasp of the impact of its activities in managing immigration.

“It accepts the wreckage that its ignorance and the culture it has fostered caused in the Windrush scandal – but the evidence we saw shows too little intent to change, and inspires no confidence that the next such scandal isn’t right around the corner.

In response to the report, a Home Office spokeswoman said: “We have developed a balanced and evidence-based approach to maintaining a fair immigration system.

“Since 2010, we have removed more than 53,000 foreign national offenders and more than 133,000 people as enforced removals.

“On a daily basis we continue to tackle those who fail to comply with our immigration laws and abuse our hospitality by committing serious, violent and persistent crimes, with immigration enforcement continually becoming more efficient.”

Source: Home Office immigration unit has ‘no idea’ – MPs

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Douglas Todd: ‘Religious persecution’ claimed by more asylum seekers in Canada

2020/09/19 Leave a comment

Of interest, including the sensible perspective of Richard Kurland “Canadians don’t have to light their hair on fire.”:

A rising number of “irregular migrants” are arriving in Canada and saying they are victims of religious persecution.

Many of the roughly 60,000 of these migrants who found a way into Canada last year are claiming either political or, increasingly, religious persecution, according to an internal report by the Canadian Border Services Agency.

The report reveals that more than four out of five claimants who arrived from India, Iran and China had found an unauthorized way to get onto Canadian soil before they made their “inland” application for refugee status. A smaller number asked to be viewed as asylum seekers when they arrived at either a land border crossing or a Canadian airport. The report doesn’t clarify which proportion claim religious persecution.

A Vancouver immigration specialist, Richard Kurland, obtained the CBSA document through an access to information request. Normally, Kurland said, about four out of 10 irregular migrants are eventually granted refugee status in Canada, regardless of whether they maintain they have been victims of political or religious persecution.

The uptick in the number of applicants in Canada making claims of religious persecution appears to be a sign of the times.

The Pew Research Center has found that, since 2007, governments around the world have generally imposed greater restrictions on religious freedom.China and Iran, major source countries of migrants to Canada, are among the worst for imposing limits on the way citizens’ practice their faith.

Although China, an officially atheist state, says it permits religious freedom, it only allows five major religious groups to operate and they’re subject to control by the United Front and the Communist Party. House churches, underground Catholics, Falun Gung members and Uighur Muslims face harassment, imprisonment and even torture.

Iran, an Islamic republic in which 98 per cent of the population is Muslim (mostly Shia), formally recognizes Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians, but not Baha’is, who are frequently imprisoned and persecuted as “misguided” Muslims. Religious minorities in Iran often report feeling threatened — and apostasy, specifically conversion from Islam, can be punishable by death.

In addition, Pew gives some its worst marks for “high levels of inter-religious tension” and “violence by organized groups” to the large migrant-source countries of India and Nigeria. It also lists Egypt and Pakistan, both Muslim-majority states.

While India is a secular state with a reputation for religious tolerance, since it is the birthplace of Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism, in recent decades there have been anti-Sikh, anti-Hindu, anti-Muslim and anti-Christian riots. There are also reports of vigilantism in regions run by the Hindu nationalist BJP Party.

Nigeria’s population of 200 million is roughly divided between Muslims and Christians. In recent years gun battles have burst our between young, often-educated members of rival Christian and Muslim sects, leading to dozens of deaths and the burning of mosques and churches.

No doubt there is severe religious persecution occurring in many places. But not all maltreatment narratives are believed by Canada’s border officials, who reject the majority of irregular applicants.

Regardless of the reasons irregular migrants have for claiming refugee status, Kurland emphasizes, “The big question is: ‘How many of the failed applicants are actually removed from Canada?”

Canadian officials, like those in other immigrant-receiving nations, typically only get around to forcibly removing about 15 per cent of failed claimants, he said. The rest find ways to work with immigration officials to stretch out their stays in Canada for years.

“It’s not Amazon.com. You can’t just pack them up and return them,” Kurland said.

What is the common pattern for recent irregular migrants? The reality is that most who end up in Canada first go to the U.S., Kurland said, before they illicitly cross the land border into Quebec or Ontario.

Most don’t apply for refugee status as they cross a land border or touch down at a Canadian airport, he said, because they justifiably fear being immediately deported.

(Government-assisted refugees are in a different category, since they come to Canada recommended and approved by the United Nations.)

There are weaknesses in arguing you were persecuted for religious beliefs, Kurland said.

The main drawback is border and immigration officials will likely ask why you didn’t escape persecution by moving to another region of your own country. So-called “internal flight” is a common way to avoid harassment, especially in India, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Despite the many inconsistencies involved in the way Canada and other immigrant-receiving countries deal with irregular migrants, Kurland believes we don’t have a terrible system. “Canadians don’t have to light their hair on fire.”

Since the worst applicants are returned to their country of origin, the many others who find ways to drag out their stays often end up contributing. Many marry, find sponsors and hold down jobs, eventually obtaining permanent resident status.

“They’re the ones who’ve beaten the Darwinian system.”

Source: Douglas Todd: ‘Religious persecution’ claimed by more asylum seekers in Canada

Filed under Refugees, Religion Tagged with ,

Ontario families living in more racialized neighbourhoods less likely to send children back into classroom, Globe analysis finds

2020/09/19 Leave a comment

Interesting possible explanations for a counter-intuitive effect, as I had thought that it would be those with higher socioeconomic status that would be best able to support remote learning:

As some of Ontario’s largest school boards scramble to accommodate a mass migration to remote learning, an analysis by The Globe and Mail shows families living in more racialized neighbourhoods are less likely to send their children back into the classroom.

The Globe analyzed the percentage of remote learners for hundreds of schools across the Greater Toronto Area, identifying patterns related to income, race, density of housing and COVID-19 cases. The data reveals regional and neighbourhood differences, suggesting the government’s back-to-school approach of offering a choice between online learning and in-class instruction could be forcing people with the fewest resources into unfamiliar learning environments.

“The numbers of parents opting for online due to concerns about the back-to-school plan is understandable to protect their child, but the potential impact on educational inequities between in-school and out-of-school learning for students is deeply concerning,” said Carol Campbell, an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She added that early evidence indicates the students with the most negative experiences of remote learning in the spring were students living in low income households, students with special education needs and those learning the English language.

The four boards analyzed by the Globe – Toronto District, Peel, York Region and Hamilton-Wentworth – represent more than a quarter of the student population in the province. Ontario’s approach is similar to Alberta’s, while the B.C. government has allowed boards to offer the remote learning option to families.

The Globe’s analysis revealed that 78 per cent of families in Toronto’s high-income neighbourhoods chose to send their children to the classroom compared with 64 per cent of families in low-income neighbourhoods. Similarly, more than 80 per cent of families in Toronto neighbourhoods with a low-racialized population opted for in-class learning, and only 60 per cent of families who live in high-racialized neighbourhoods did the same.

The Globe’s analysis divided neighbourhoods into four quarters, respectively, based on their median household income and percentage of visible minorities in the neighbourhood. The demographic and economic information was based on the 2016 census.

Kwame McKenzie, chief executive of the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto think-tank, said family decisions are often influenced by neighbours and friends.

“Complex social trends can be less complex than we think because people are connected,” Dr. McKenzie said. “Yes, there are the stats [on COVID-19] but do not underestimate the importance of social connections. We look and see what other people are doing and talk to people before we make decisions.”

At Crescent Town Elementary School in east Toronto, about half of students have opted for online learning this year. The school is in the Taylor-Massey neighbourhood, which is low-income and has a medium-to-high visible minority presence. About 77 per cent of residents live in apartment buildings that are more than five-storeys tall, which Razia Rashed, a parent who sits on Crescent Town’s school council, said is a major contributing factor. Living in a dense neighbourhood has made families nervous, she said: they’re worried about community transmission, especially if they have to ride the elevator twice daily to take their children to and from school.

Much of the neighbourhood is composed of immigrants from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and Ms. Rashed said many parents in the community have more closely followed news and stories from relatives in their countries of origin, rather than domestically, about the toll COVID-19 has taken (the worst outbreaks in South Asia have been in India and Bangladesh).

“How it is back home matters,” Ms. Rashed said.

In Toronto, online learners are also over-represented in low income neighbourhoods, in contrast to Brampton – a hot spot for COVID-19 and one of the country’s most diverse cities – where high income neighbourhoods have the lowest rates of in-class learning. Many parents are working from home and are opting to keep their children there as well. Brad Teeter, the principal of Eldorado Public School in Brampton, said students also live in multi-generational homes with elderly grandparents who are more vulnerable to infection.

His school, part of the Peel District School Board, is in a high-income neighbourhood with a large East Indian population and just over 40 per cent of students have opted for virtual learning.

In his conversations with families, Mr. Teeter lets them know about the health and safety measures in his school, and he knows parents are wrestling with difficult decisions. The Peel board has delayed the start of its live online school to the week of Sept. 21 after seeing enrolment jump to 64,000 students, an increase of more than 10,000 in the past week.

“We would love to see every kid in the building … [but] there’s still, I think, a lot of COVID fears that are happening and parents are making decisions in the best interests of their families and safety for the kids and each member of the family,” Mr. Teeter said.

Satinder Gill, whose three children attend school in Brampton, said the decision to have them learn online was difficult. She and her husband did not want to compromise the health of her in-laws, who live with relatives next door, or her parents living close by. In her Punjabi Indian culture, she said that the “extended family plays a very big role.”

“Our kids are exposed to many people in the family and we love that about our culture. That makes these types of decisions very difficult to make,” Ms. Gill said.

Sonia Reid, whose daughter attends Heart Lake Secondary School, also in Brampton, said the family’s plans called for her daughter to attend school in-person, but then Ms. Reid grew worried as she watched people in her area become less cautious, coupled with a rise in COVID-19 cases. She said that among her group of friends, only one has decided to send their child into the classroom.

“All those little things, and watching the numbers go up, I definitely knew that starting in September, I had to switch her to completely online,” Ms. Reid said.

Overall, a significant portion of Ontario students are not returning to the classroom. That number is most stark in Brampton, where only 56 per cent of elementary students will be in school, compared with Hamilton where 83 per cent of elementary children will learn in classrooms. In Toronto, meanwhile, preliminary data showed that 69 per cent of elementary children and 75 per cent of high school students are returning to the classroom. The Toronto and Peel boards have said this week that thousands of families have been switching to online learning in recent days amid rising COVID-19 rates.

In Ontario, families have been given a choice between in-person and virtual learning. Alberta school districts, too, have offered families an online option. The B.C. government said school districts have flexibility to provide remote learning options, but there is confusion among parents and school officials as to what that means. In Montreal, school districts did not provide a school-by-school enrolment breakdown of online and in-class learning. Online options in Quebec are only for children with medical exemptions and those forced to stay home because of illness or quarantine. The English school board said it had given about 400 medical exemptions that allow children to receive online learning among 19,600 students. The Centre de services scolaire de Montréal has 363 students online among its 77,500 students.

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Why the ideal of meritocracy only deepens inequality

2020/09/18 Leave a comment

Relevant questioning:

If the Western world has a unifying social concept any longer, it’s the ideal of meritocracy, of establishing an equality of opportunity that allows every individual to rise to whatever level their hard work and innate abilities can take them to. It’s an ideal, however aspirational, that seems both obvious and profoundly moral to contemporary society: we all get what we deserve. Yet it has had its doubters from the start. The very word was coined in a 1958 satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy, by British sociologist Michael Young, which imagined a 2034 uprising by disenchanted proles against an arrogant, credentialed governing elite, all selected to their positions by virtue of their talents and education.

More recently, this foundational notion has come under the critical gaze of several scholars, often—as in the case of Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits, author of 2019’s The Meritocracy Trap—high-ranking faculty at major universities. That seems paradoxical at first, given that the authors’ academic credentials, some of the world’s most prestigious, mark them as significant winners in the meritocratic race. But that perception changes when Markovits’ argument is examined: our meritocracy requires an endless, stress-filled, life-consuming competition even among the winners. It is perhaps even less paradoxical once the role major universities play as engines of increasingly hereditary privilege and contemporary socio-economic inequality is considered.

None of those previous critiques of meritocracy attracted the attention currently drawn by the newest, The Tyranny of Merit, by Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel. Partly that is a matter of timing. Released on Sept. 15, in the midst of one of the most rancorous presidential elections in American history, Sandel’s book primarily explores the political responses of meritocracy’s losers, whose populist backlash helped put Donald Trump in the White House in 2016 and may well send him back for another four years in November. But there is much more than electoral politics involved. The Tyranny of Merit is infused with moral urgency, elegantly written and cogently argued, with a core conclusion both succinct and indisputable: meritocracy does not counter inequality, it justifies it.

Q: There has been extraordinary interest in your book, even before publication. You really hit a nerve, didn’t you?

A: Well, it seems so. I’ve been deluged with responses, so many emails—it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. So it seems to be touching on something that people have been feeling, but haven’t quite worked out or articulated.

Q: Does meritocracy’s support for growing inequality make it the prime source of bitter political discontent, especially in your country?

A: The faults of meritocracy get us to the heart of the failure of mainstream parties to address the frustrations and anger and resentment that have created such deep polarization. The divide between winners and losers has been deepening, poisoning our politics and driving us apart. This divide has partly to do with inequalities in income and wealth, but we’ve been aware of that for a while, right? It also has to do with what we don’t see, the changing attitudes towards success and failure, which have accompanied the deepening inequality. Somehow, those on top in recent decades have come to believe that their success is their own doing entirely. It’s the measure of their merit. By implication, then, those who’ve been left behind must deserve their fate as well. My Harvard students all feel they deserve their place there on the basis of their own efforts. They do not consider the higher-quality schools they attended or the resources their parents put into years of SAT preparation, the role of good fortune in their lives. This is what I call the meritocratic hubris of the elite. And it accounts for the sense among many working people that the elite look down on them. Feeling looked down upon, that’s a source of resentment, of humiliation and anger. And this explains, I think, the populist backlash against elites that we’ve witnessed since 2016, in Brexit as well as with Trump.

Q: It also explains why anti-elitists in America have no problem with the most billionaire-stuffed presidential cabinet in history. They don’t link the elite with money. They link the elite to attitudes.

A: Exactly. That’s why this wealthy real estate developer is able to be the voice of a populist backlash. The one authentic thing about Trump is his sense of grievance and resentment. This he feels viscerally because he feels that throughout his career New York elites, financial elites, intellectual elites, media elites have all looked down on him. So he’s able to connect with the sense of humiliation experienced by the working people who vote for him, despite the fact that most of his policies don’t help them. But it’s not about the policies, it’s about the grievances, and some of the grievances are understandable and legitimate. It’s important to disentangle them from the ugly dimensions of Trump’s appeal—the xenophobia, the racism, the misogyny. Those two streams, the racial and the socio-economic, overlap. It’s worth remembering that there were millions of people who voted for Trump who had previously voted for Obama.

Q: You devote considerable space to American higher education, discussing how something that is supposed to be—and is widely seen as—central to equality of opportunity is actually an engine of inequality in the U.S.

A: Yes. Even though we think of universities as the means to individual upward mobility, few disadvantaged applicants get into the most selective schools, and fewer than two per cent of the students in some 1,800 colleges and universities overall came in poor and rose to the top 20 per cent in income. The universities have become sorting machines, and I worry that their credentializing function is beginning to crowd out their educational mission. You saw how Brett Kavanaugh pleaded his Yale credentials as his defence during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing? That was remarkable. What bearing did that have on the question of whether or not he committed sexual assault while in high school? The college admission scandal was telling, too: parents willing to cheat their kids through a “side door” into highly selective institutions whose front doors they couldn’t have passed through on their own—because it wasn’t the education that mattered, it was the credentials. And even the front-door students needed an enormous investment of resources unavailable to poorer kids—hereditary privilege is digging its way back in.

Q: That brings us to the idea that has brought the most media attention to The Tyranny of Merit: university entrance by lottery. Once Harvard and its peers have gathered all their applications—multiples larger than the available places—just pull the names out of a hat. You had a lovely line to justify this lottery: “It summons chance to chasten hubris.”

A: The lottery idea arises in part out of an awareness of how impossible it is to make fine-grained judgments about future achievement at age 18. I don’t care how good the admissions office is at Harvard. No one can predict that. But more than that, it’s also to send a much-needed message to the students and their parents, the students who get in and the students who don’t, to remind them of the role that luck, accident, contingency, fortune play in life.

Q: You argue that meritocracy and its discontents have resulted in a politics of humiliation, more combustive and more corrosive than the politics of injustice.

A: Complaints about injustice in policy and law are a familiar part of everyday politics. But the politics of humiliation are different. They run deeper because they’re about one’s self-esteem and standing in society and anger at being looked down upon, at the feeling that the work one does is not appreciated by the wider society. As well, part of the politics of humiliation involves the sense—our meritocratic society can encourage this sense—among those who are left out that, well, maybe those on top are more hardworking and talented than me. Maybe I just didn’t make it. Maybe I share the blame for my condition. When meritocratic assumptions take hold to that extent and shape the self-understandings of those left behind, then along with the sense of exclusion comes a nagging sense of self-doubt, which creates a toxic politics.

Q: Looking back over recent political history, you find the root of this malaise 30 or 40 years ago, when most parts of the political spectrum, including the centre-left, embraced market-driven solutions for social and economic issues. And when the centre-left did that, it then had more in common with the professional classes than with its former working-class base.

A: Exactly, and that’s why it took the brunt of the backlash from the working class. Otherwise, it’s very hard to explain why the backlash was primarily right-wing in expression. Part of the problem can be seen in the credentialism of political representatives. FDR’s cabinet was not very credentialed, and Clement Attlee’s post-war British government—one of the most successful in British history, creator of the national health service—had seven cabinet ministers who had been coal miners. The idea that only the so-called best and the brightest, as proven by their credentials, can govern well is belied by this history—actually, the elites from 1980 to 2020 have done a far worse governing job than the elites in the 40 years before.

Q: A crucial difference lies in the makeup of those governing elites.

A: Yes, yes. In 1979 41 per cent of Labour MPs in Britain did not have a university degree, now that’s 16 per cent; 37 per cent of them had backgrounds in manual occupation, now that’s seven per cent. In Congress, 95 per cent of House members and 100 per cent of senators are college graduates. The credentialed few govern the uncredentialed many—but it wasn’t always this way. In the early 1960s about a fourth of Congress hadn’t a college degree. Congress has become more diverse in race, ethnicity and gender, but less in class—and therefore in life and working experience. It’s true across the Western world, which has reverted back to the way things were before most workers had the right to vote, when parliaments belonged to aristocrats and landed gentry.

Q: What about meritocracy in the pandemic? COVID is certainly exposing fault lines: the rich are getting richer (consider the stock market), the affluent, working from home, are staying affluent, and the working class gets to lose their jobs or their lives. Do you see any hope in our new awareness?

A: I think the pandemic offers a possible moment for rethinking, because it shines a bright light on the divisions that were already present, and highlights the gulf between those who can work relatively removed from risk and those who have little choice about exposing themselves to risk. It’s made us aware of our deep dependence on workers we often overlook—we call them essential now. So this could be a moment for rethinking the dignity of work and in trying to reconfigure the economy so that it better rewards and better honours people on whom we all depend. It’s just possible that when the pandemic recedes, we could use this growing awareness to try to create a better kind of politics, a politics of the common good.

Q: What other possible positive developments do you see?

A: The other hope that I see in the current crisis is Black Lives Matter. I do think this movement has become a multiracial and multigenerational one that is opening up possibilities for a public debate about what makes for a just society. That would be a morally engaged kind of public discourse of a kind that we’ve not really had in recent decades. We have outsourced our moral judgments to markets. We have assumed that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good. And this is a mistake, but it’s a mistake that arises from having outsourced our moral judgment to markets.

Source: Why the ideal of meritocracy only deepens inequality

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →