Avvy Go: Canada’s immigration rules kept families apart even before COVID-19. Now, as immigrants suffer from the pandemic, family reunification seems impossible

2021/01/16 Leave a comment

Given that the underpinning of immigration policy is to address an aging demographic, calling for an increase in parents and grandparents beyond the 30,000 is unrealistic. In many ways, the overall increased levels provided the government with flexibility for this increase.

With respect to spousal sponsorship, Go cites a 2015 memo that was rightly condemned as being overly simplistic and biased in its guidelines to visa officers and is no longer being used, I believe.

But like in other areas, spousal sponsorship fraud exists and the government has an obligation to counter it. The question is more in the how, and it is ducking that hard question by only suggesting “anti-oppression” and “anti-racism” training. Perhaps the authors could develop an alternative draft manual or operational guidance bulletin as a more concrete approach to the issue:

The COVID-19 pandemic has made many of us reassess our priorities. It has made us realize that the most important thing in our lives is not money or wealth, but family and health.

Story after story of Canadians losing their loved ones to the deadly virus are gut-wrenching. 

Equally devastating are reports of individuals being barred from visiting their parents or grandparents languishing in nursing homes overrun with COVID-19 cases, and essential workers in the health care being kept apart from their family to keep them safe. 

But for some Canadians, these people are the “lucky ones” — that they’re at last able to see their loved ones through a window, or live in the same area to drop off goods and gifts. But when your parents and spouses live on a different continent, it’s heartbreaking and isolating with the pandemic, and that isn’t even the reason why families and loved ones are being kept apart.

Even before COVID-19, Canada’s immigration policy had already made family reunification an impossible dream for many. The stringent income requirements imposed on sponsors of parents and grandparents (PGP,) and the mean-spirited quota system for this class of immigrants, have disqualified many low income Canadians from becoming sponsors. While the Liberals have relaxed the income rule and promised to increase the quota to 30,000 people in 2021, these measures are insufficient to meet the needs of tens of thousands of Canadians, whose ties with their parents are strengthened not only by love, but by culture and a strong sense of filial piety — to honour and respect their elders.

It should not come as a surprise that the top two source countries of PGP immigrants are India and China, which have both embraced the notion of extended family as a norm. However, given the racialization of poverty in Canada, Canadians of South Asian and Chinese descent are also among those least likely to meet the tough income rule to render them eligible sponsors.

These two communities, along with other racialized communities, have also been hardest hit by the pandemic-triggered economic downturn. With the rising unemployment rates among these communities, it may take years before they could earn enough income to make themselves eligible sponsors again.

While income eligibility is no bar to spousal sponsorship, Chinese and South Asian Canadians who want to bring their spouse to Canada often have their application denied due to systemic bias and racism within the immigration system.

Under the pretext of stopping “fake marriages,” Immigration Canada routinely rejects spousal sponsorship applications, particularly from countries like China, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. According to an internal IRCC documentrecently released by the Star, IRCC sees visa officers as “first line of defence” against marriage of convenience, rather than as civil servants whose job is to assess all applications fairly and objectively. 

The internal document is also filled with culturally and racially biased notions of what a genuine marriage should look like, and what evidence must be presented to support such applications. For instance, IRCC appears to rely on a three-page training which warns officers about sham marriages based on “photos of couples who are not kissing on the lips during the ceremony; university-educated Chinese nationals who marry non-Chinese; a small wedding reception; a Canadian sponsor who is relatively uneducated, with a low-paying job or on welfare.”

Using these criteria, none of the clients served by our two legal clinics would ever qualify. On reflection, our own long-term spousal relationships could easily have been considered “fake marriages.” Whoever came up with these preposterous indicia are probably white, belong to middle or upper-middle class, and know nothing about any other culture but their own.

Instead of relying on any “manual,” immigration officers should receive anti-oppression and anti-racism training to ensure all their decisions are biased free, so that all Canadians, regardless of their race and income, would have an equal chance to family reunification. Let’s hope the COVID-19 is not the only virus that will disappear after the pandemic. 

Let’s get rid of the virus of racism once and for all.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/01/14/canadas-immigration-rules-kept-families-apart-even-before-covid-19-now-as-immigrants-suffer-from-the-pandemic-family-reunification-seems-impossible.html

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As Canadians we’re proud of diversity, so why is multicultural media being left in the dark about COVID-19

2021/01/16 Leave a comment

While I agree that more can and should be done, one of my observations from tracking ethnic media coverage of the 2019 election campaign was that much of their coverage reflected articles in the mainstream media, and those who relied on ethnic media would be reasonable informed on the electoral platforms and choices.

It may be more a matter of resources than anything else but would be nice to know what governments are doing to publicize COVID health related information on ethnic media:

After writing my last op-ed on the underutilization of multicultural media to disseminate clear COVID-19 information, I’ve received an overwhelming response.

Some messages were from physicians and public health officials interested in utilizing these platforms to inform communities on how to stay safe. Others were a nod of acknowledgment from the Canadian public who finally felt seen and heard. And a lot of them were questions regarding why such important platforms remained underutilized when they could have been important tools to disseminate critical life saving information.

One of the things we are most proud of as Canadians is multiculturalism, yet, there’s a divide: a lack of ethnic and linguistic diversity on mainstream media. This is why multicultural and ethnic media is a much needed voice for minority communities across Canada. Along with providing language and culturally sensitive critical health information and public communication, these mediums foster a sense of culture, and community for the minority and immigrant Canadians.

While these media outlets can be very important for people with no knowledge of English or French, these platforms do more than address language barriers. For many Canadians, it’s a platform to help stay connected to one’s culture and heritage and is a heavily relied upon source of information.

The problem? These platforms can play a substantial role in sharing life-saving critical health information, and have proven to do so with information around cancer pre-pandemic. So why aren’t they getting the clear COVID-19 precaution information now?

Firstly, there is a lack of awareness. What emerged from my discussions with many physician colleagues is that many were unaware these channels existed. At the medical school education level, there needs to be better knowledge dissemination about the importance of these community platforms and how multicultural media can be leveraged to provide health related information to the public.

Secondly, there isn’t a clear bridge between mainstream and multicultural media. Mainstream media needs to do a better job at supporting and amplifying the voices of multicultural media platforms. This could be done by hosting multicultural media representatives on mainstream shows and vice versa. Moreover, government and public health bodies need to develop two-way streets with multicultural media outlets and have an ongoing regular communication with these media representatives.

Thirdly, after speaking to various multicultural media spokespersons, I learned that there is a lack of funding and financial support, particularly for the radio show channels. Their hands are tied and they have to heavily rely on advertisements to cover their expenses and are unable to afford the latest technology or means to be on par with popular mainstream outlets. Their sole profit sometimes is from advertisements; some of these advertisements can be alternative care providers or various sources in radio, TV, and print media. As part of the advertisement package, it’s hard for media channels to control knowledge dissemination. This as one can imagine then can be a source of misinformation on top of an already existing information vacuum due to underutilization of the media platforms which is exponentially dangerous.

We as Canadians are proud of our multiculturalism and public health care system and therefore it is heartbreaking to hear that multicultural media struggles to thrive. It’s an important vehicle to deliver health related and public communication to all Canadians. It is critical for us to engage multicultural and ethnic media to ensure pandemic messaging reaches to everyone nationally.

As we combat the second wave, develop an inclusive vaccination strategy, and disseminate vaccine and COVID-19 related information, it’s still not too late to incorporate linguistic and culturally sensitive print, radio and TV media outlets in our armamentarium to deliver critical health related information.

Source: As Canadians we’re proud of diversity, so why is multicultural media being left in the dark about COVID-19

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Black Conservatives seek to mobilize more support in wake of Leslyn Lewis’ success

2021/01/15 Leave a comment

To watchÈ

Black Conservatives energized by the rising star of Leslyn Lewis hope to use her unexpectedly robust leadership bid to bolster Black representation in the party’s ranks.

The relaunch of one formal group of Black Conservatives and the ramped-up efforts of another come as the Conservative Party of Canada faces pressure to more firmly denounce those within its ranks who display, or even appear to display, extreme right-wing positions similar to those on full and deadly view during the riots in Washington, D.C.

Party leader Erin O’Toole’s promise to get more “Canadians to see a Conservative when they look in the mirror” requires acknowledging the party falters when talking about race, said Akolisa Ufodike, the national chair of the Association of Black Conservatives, a group that formed last year.

“High level, he’s saying that we need to be seen as a more inclusive party so how does he get there without confronting the issue?” he said.

Ufodike said one reason his group formed is to highlight what he sees as a long and proud history of inclusivity by the movement, which he said is a message some within the Black community might be more open to hearing when it comes from Black Conservatives themselves.

The group ignited a firestorm during the leadership race last year, when Lewis was making history by becoming the first Black woman to run for leadership of the party.

Despite entering as a relative unknown, she saw her campaign steadily increase in support thanks in no small part to the throngs of social conservatives attracted to her positions on topics they hold dear.

But her candidacy also suggested to many the party wasn’t entirely the bastion of what former prime minister Stephen Harper once infamously referred to as “old stock Canadians.”

The association, however, endorsed O’Toole instead of Lewis. That led to Lewis publicly slamming the group, a heated conversation between her campaign and O’Toole’s campaign and a decision by his team to decline the endorsement.

Ufodike said to have endorsed Lewis solely because she was Black would be reducing the issue to identity politics.

“We look more at how their policies, their readiness and ability to lead can best serve Canadians, including marginalized communities such as the Black community,” he said.

Lewis ultimately finished third in the race, though in certain regions of the country she had more support at one point than either O’Toole or party stalwart Peter MacKay.

Among her efforts to remain in political life, which includes running in the next election in a safe Ontario seat, was work to revive a group she helped form in 2009: the Conservative Black Congress.

Its chair, Tunde Obasan, denied the group was set up solely in response to leadership race politics.

“Our main focus is to support candidates, even if they are not front-runners,” he said.

” … The more we do that, and the more we get candidates who are from the Black community, the more people who are not currently fine with the party, the more they begin to see the party as for everyone.”

At its formal relaunch Jan. 24, the group plans to unveil a parliamentary internship program named after retired senator Donald Oliver, the first Black Canadian man appointed to the Senate.

The Association of Black Conservatives, meanwhile, has been busy setting up provincial chapters to also support community and civic participation at the local levels.

It is not uncommon, both groups said, to find themselves forced to answer for the Conservatives’ past perceived sins and its more contemporary ones.

Among them, the “barbaric cultural practices” tip line the Harper Conservatives proposed in the 2015 election campaign, O’Toole’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism during the leadership race, and those who leap at any chance to infer the same vein of intolerance running through the U.S. Republicans also runs through Canadian conservatives.

Recently, O’Toole’s office engaged with right-wing organization Rebel Media, sending answers via email in O’Toole’s name. Many Conservatives cut ties with the organization several years ago after inflammatory and derogatory comments by its staff.

Among its more recent reporting has been the repetition of the discredited claims the U.S. election was stolen from the Republicans, claims that led to the deadly riots in D.C.

O’Toole’s office said this week he won’t speak to Rebel Media in the future.

The strength of the party’s right wing is likely to become evident at the upcoming March policy convention. Conservative MP Derek Sloan, who finished the leadership race in fourth place, was actively encouraging his own social conservative supporters to turn out in large force to have a role in the debate.

For now, neither Black organization has committed to getting formally involved at the convention, despite it being a potential avenue to influence policy decisions or the nuts and bolts of the party’s operations.

Both groups said they are looking for direct and clear leadership from O’Toole on putting his promise of making the party more inclusive into practice.

“What I would like to see him do is to be deliberate about it, on how to support more participation from the racialized community, not only in the Black community, from the entire racialized community,” said Obasan.

“That will go a long way.”

Source: Black Conservatives seek to mobilize more support in wake of Leslyn Lewis’ success

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Review finds successes, failures in Liberals’ feminist aid approach in Afghanistan

2021/01/15 Leave a comment

More failures than successes. Money quote: “…failure to ensure Canada’s attempts to increase gender equality included “a deeper understanding of Afghanistan’s local cultural context and Islamic tradition.””

An internal review of the nearly $1 billion in foreign aid that Canada quietly spent in Afghanistan after the Canadian military pulled out has found some successes but also many failures — especially when it comes to helping women and girls.

The Global Affairs Canada review covers the period between 2014 and 2020, during which Afghanistan remained a top destination for Canadian aid dollars even after the last Canadian troops had left and public attention drifted elsewhere.

Published on the department’s website late last month, the reviewers’ final report comes amid another round of peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban to end decades of nearly continuous fighting in the country.

It also follows a Canadian commitment in November to contribute another $270 million in aid over the next three years to Afghanistan, adding to the heavy investment that Canada has already made in the country since 2001.

The reviewers found that the $966 million in Canadian foreign aid spent since 2014 was almost entirely focused on empowering and supporting Afghan women and girls, particularly after the Liberals launched their feminist-aid policy in 2017.

Those efforts led to some tangible progress, including the adoption of gender equality in some Afghan institutions, a decrease in violence against women in some communities, more educational opportunities for girls and better health-care services for both.

“Projects in the womens’ and girls’ rights and empowerment sector resulted in female beneficiaries becoming more active, confident and self-sufficient,” adds the reviewers’ report.

Yet the review, which included analyzing internal Global Affairs documents and interviews with Canadian, Afghan and international government staff and NGOs as well as average Afghans affected by the projects, found many problems as well.

Chief among them was a failure to ensure Canada’s attempts to increase gender equality included “a deeper understanding of Afghanistan’s local cultural context and Islamic tradition.” It also failed to include men and boys in its programs.

“The definition of gender roles was so central to Afghan society and culture during the period that any planned changes required not only consultation with male household members, but also with the larger community,” the report said.

Those shortcomings threatened to leave the perception of gender equality being imposed on Afghans, the report said, adding: “If not carefully managed, there was the risk that gender-equality efforts promoted by Western donors could lead to backlashes and harm.”

The reviewers cited several examples, such as women who used shelters to escape domestic violence being shunned by their families and women in the Afghan army facing direct threats, as among the unintended consequences of current efforts.

Memorial University foreign aid expert Liam Swiss, who has written extensively on the Liberals’ feminist approach to foreign aid, said the report’s findings reflected many of the concerns and criticisms that were voiced when the policy was first launched.

That includes a one-size-fits-all strategy that didn’t take into account the local conditions and culture in the countries where Canadian aid is being channelled — of which Afghanistan is one of the most difficult.

“That’s the problem when you kind of stake out a really broad set of priorities on your aid,” Swiss said. “If you’re trying to make them apply to all and to everywhere, you’re going run into a lot of issues of local appropriateness, local receptivity.”

The reviewers also suggested that Canada was guilty of the same sins as many of its western counterparts in Afghanistan, namely focusing its aid dollars on areas that it was more interested in than what was really needed in the country.

That was reflected in the lack of consultations with local communities and a limited consideration for the specific needs of the many different ethnic and religious communities in Afghanistan, which undermined their effectiveness and sustainability.

In fact, the reviewers found Canada did not actually have a strategy for its engagement in Afghanistan. Global Affairs also failed to adapt to the changing needs and environment as the Afghan government lost territory to the Taliban between 2017 and 2020.

The report instead paints a picture of Canadian diplomats and aid workers keeping their eyes firmly glued on their own priorities even as the Taliban was wresting more and more of the country away from Kabul.

To that end, the reviewers said nearly all of those interviewed as part of their study believed the progress made by Canadian aid efforts over the years will be threatened or completely undone if security in the country deteriorates further.

That possibility continues to loom over Afghanistan’s future amid the peace talks and as the world waits to see whether incoming U.S. president Joe Biden will continue the Trump administration’s work to withdraw American forces from the country.

Global Affairs spokeswoman Patricia Skinner said while the report shows progress has been made in Afghanistan, the department will address the reviewers’ six recommendations — including changing how it promotes gender equality — over the next two years.

Nipa Banerjee, who previously led Canadian aid efforts in Afghanistan before joining the University of Ottawa, said she hopes the review will lead to changes – including a more expansive approach.

“With all the insecurity and everything, shouting about women’s rights only, it’s not going to be very helpful,” Banerjee said.

“And Afghans themselves think that. They’re saying it is important, but without security and without political order, nothing will succeed. Women’s programs will not go anywhere. So there has to be compromises.”

Source: Review finds successes, failures in Liberals’ feminist aid approach in Afghanistan

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Huawei patent mentions use of Uighur-spotting tech

2021/01/15 Leave a comment

Not that surprising…

A Huawei patent has been brought to light for a system that identifies people who appear to be of Uighur origin among images of pedestrians.

The filing is one of several of its kind involving leading Chinese technology companies, discovered by a US research company and shared with BBC News.

Huawei had previously said none of its technologies was designed to identify ethnic groups.

It now plans to alter the patent.

Forced-labour camps

The company indicated this would involve asking the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) – the country’s patent authority – for permission to delete the reference to Uighurs in the Chinese-language document.

Uighur people belong to a mostly Muslim ethnic group that lives mainly in Xinjiang province, in north-western China.

Government authorities are accused of using high-tech surveillance against them and detaining many in forced-labour camps, where children are sometimes separated from their parents.

Beijing says the camps offer voluntary education and training.

“One technical requirement of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s video-surveillance networks is the detection of ethnicity – particularly of Uighurs,” said Maya Wang, from Human Rights Watch.

“While in the rest of the world, such targeting and persecution of a people on the basis of their ethnicity would be completely unacceptable, the persecution and severe discrimination of Uighurs in many aspects of life in China remain unchallenged because Uighurs have no power in China.”

Body movements

Huawei’s patent was originally filed in July 2018, in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences .

It describes ways to use deep-learning artificial-intelligence techniques to identify various features of pedestrians photographed or filmed in the street.

It focuses on addressing the fact different body postures – for example whether someone is sitting or standing – can affect accuracy.

But the document also lists attributes by which a person might be targeted, which it says can include “race (Han [China’s biggest ethnic group], Uighur)”.

A spokesman said this reference should not have been included.

“Huawei opposes discrimination of all types, including the use of technology to carry out ethnic discrimination,” he said.

“Identifying individuals’ race was never part of the research-and-development project.

“It should never have become part of the application.

“And we are taking proactive steps to amend it.

“We are continuously working to ensure new and evolving technology is developed and applied with the utmost care and integrity.”

‘Confidential’ document

The patent was brought to light by the video-surveillance research group IPVM.

It had previously flagged a separate “confidential” document on Huawei’s website, referencing work on a “Uighur alert” system.

In that case, Huawei said the page referenced a test rather than a real-world application and denied selling systems that identified people by their ethnicity.

On Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee and leads the Conservative Party’s China Research Group, told BBC News: “Chinese tech giants supporting the brutal assault on the Uighur population show us why we as consumers and as a society must be careful with who we buy our products from or award business to.

“Developing ethnic-labelling technology for use by a repressive regime is clearly not behaviour that lives up to our standards.”

Facial-recognition software

IPVM also discovered references to Uighur people in patents filed by the Chinese artificial-intelligence company Sensetime and image-recognition specialist Megvii.

Sensetime’s filing, from July 2019, discusses ways facial-recognition software could be used for more efficient “security protection”, such as searching for “a middle-aged Uighur with sunglasses and a beard” or a Uighur person wearing a mask.

A Sensetime spokeswoman said the references were “regrettable”.

“We understand the importance of our responsibilities, which is why we began to develop our AI Code of Ethics in mid-2019,” she said, adding the patent had predated this code.

Ethnic-labelling solutions

Megvii’s June 2019 patent, meanwhile, described a way of relabelling pictures of faces tagged incorrectly in a database.

It said the classifications could be based on ethnicity, for example, including “Han, Uighur, non-Han, non-Uighur and unknown”.

The company told BBC News it would now withdraw the patent application.

“Megvii recognises that the language used in our 2019 patent application is open to misunderstanding,” it said.

“Megvii has not developed and will not develop or sell racial- or ethnic-labelling solutions.

“Megvii acknowledges that, in the past, we have focused on our commercial development and lacked appropriate control of our marketing, sales, and operations materials.

“We are undertaking measures to correct the situation.”

Attribute-recognition model

IPVM also flagged image-recognition patents filed by two of China’s biggest technology conglomerates, Alibaba and Baidu, that referenced classifying people by ethnicity but did not specifically mention the Uighur people by name.

Alibaba responded: “Racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form violates our policies and values.

“We never intended our technology to be used for and will not permit it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups.”

And Baidu said: “When filing for a patent, the document notes are meant as an example of a technical explanation, in this case describing what the attribute-recognition model is rather than representing the expected implementation of the invention.

“We do not and will not permit our technology to be used to identify or target specific ethnic groups.”

But Human Rights Watch said it still had concerns.

“Any company that sells video-surveillance software and systems to the Chinese police would have to ensure that they meet the police’s requirements, which includes the capacity for ethnicity detection,” Ms Wang said.

“The right thing for these companies to do is to immediately cease their sale and maintenance of surveillance equipment, software and systems, to the Chinese police.”

Source: Huawei patent mentions use of Uighur-spotting tech

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Bloc takes aim at new transport minister over ‘Islamic movement’ ties

2021/01/15 Leave a comment

Playing ugly identity politics:

The Bloc Québécois is seeking to sow doubt about Canada’s new Transport Minister Omar Alghabra over his association with what it calls “the political Islamic movement.”

Leader Yves-François Blanchet said in a release that “questions arise” due to the minister’s former role as head of the Canadian Arab Federation.

But the Bloc leader said he “refuses to accuse” the minister of anything specific.

Alghabra was the federation’s president before being elected as a Toronto-area Liberal MP in 2006.

Rather than make specific accusations, the Bloc linked to a 2016 article by a right-wing Quebec newspaper columnist that made implications about Alghabra’s past.

“It’s really questions about his past and also the separation of church and state, which is a profound value for the Bloc,” said spokesman Julien Coulombe-Bonnafous.

“We don’t want to raise any accusations, because I don’t think there’s that much.”

In 2009, then-citizenship and immigration minister Jason Kenney opted to cut funding for the Canadian Arab Federation, whose leader at the time made statements that Kenney called anti-Semitic and supportive of terrorist groups.

The Bloc’s attempt to undermine confidence in Alghabra, who was sworn in as transport minister Tuesday, follows his move to distance himself from a YouTuber who has expressed intolerant views toward LGBTQ communities.

Alghabra said in a statement Tuesday night he is a longtime advocate for LGBTQ rights and was “shocked and disappointed” to learn of a video using homophobic slurs that was posted online by Fadi Younes, whose digital marketing agency Alghabra had hired on a contract that has since been terminated.

“I was not aware of these comments before today and I wholly reject them,” said the MP for Mississauga Centre.

“We must combat ignorance, hate or intolerance in our society. I will continue to support LGBTQ rights, as we continue to build a more inclusive and tolerant society for everyone.”

Alghabra has been subjected to innuendo about his background before.

In 2018, Conservative Sen. Denise Batters apologized to Alghabra, who was born in Saudi Arabia, after she wondered aloud why the then-parliamentary secretary for the foreign affairs minister wasn’t questioned about his place of birth while speaking with the media about Canada’s diplomatic dispute with the country at the time.

“Senator, I’m a proud Canadian who is consistent in defending human rights. How about you?” Alghabra tweeted in response to a Twitter post from Batters.

The next day, he tweeted that she had called to apologize, saying he accepted the gesture and said Batters had told him “this is a lesson to all of us.”

Source: Bloc takes aim at new transport minister over ‘Islamic movement’ ties

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Immigrants are a form of economic stimulus and businesses must help them succeed

2021/01/14 Leave a comment

The business case for immigration (largely Keynesian based given more immigrants means more consumers), by ScotiaBank:

The COVID-19 pandemic over the past 10 months has brought into sharp relief issues that have hindered Canada’s economic competitiveness and left some communities at a disadvantage in trying to achieve their full potential. For Canada to prosper in a rapidly changing world, we must ensure everyone has the opportunity to contribute.

One important way to achieve that goal is by ensuring the seamless integration of new Canadians and creating conditions that allow them to participate fully in the economy. Governments at all levels have a role to play, and so do businesses, including Canada’s financial institutions.

When it comes to the importance of newcomers’ contributions to our economy, the facts are clear. Because of Canada’s low birth rate and aging population, it is only through immigration that Canada’s population has continued to see substantial increases, unlike its Group of Seven counterparts, where population growth is declining or even negative.

Make no mistake: Population is a fundamental building block for an economy. The more educated and productive people we attract, the more our quality of life improves and we can maintain the things that make Canada strong. Immigration is a form of economic stimulus. At a time when governments are doing their utmost to support the economy, we should use every engine of growth we can to carry us through the pandemic.

On that score, Canada has also demonstrated its advantage. About 60 per cent of Canada’s foreign-born population is highly educated, compared with less than 40 per cent in the United States and just 35 per cent across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In part, this is because Canada’s points system for immigration helps match newcomers to gaps in the job market and tests them for language proficiency.

Because of our immigration policies, Canada now welcomes five times as many skilled newcomers as a percentage of its population than the U.S. does. Over the past two years, pre-COVID-19, new Canadians saw significantly higher employment gains than Canadian-born people.

Before the pandemic, Canada increasingly faced labour shortages that were holding back growth. At the end of 2019, there were more than 500,000 job vacancies, Statistics Canada reported. According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, pre-COVID-19, more than 40 per cent of its members reported a shortage of skilled labour, and almost 25 per cent reported a shortage of unskilled and semi-skilled workers.

The federal government recently announced it will substantially increase the number of new Canadians we will welcome every year. This is a positive and timely decision. It recognizes that we are an open, inclusive and diverse country, and immigrants are essential to Canada’s future prosperity.

When they arrive, we must make their transition as seamless as possible by helping them face continuing challenges, including language barriers, difficulties in obtaining professional credentials, lack of social and professional networks, and limited financial literacy.

There are many ways the business community must contribute:

  • Financial literacy: Lack of financial literacy affects all kinds of Canadians, but newcomers often face many complex financial decisions at once in a new country – saving, investing, obtaining credit, buying a home, etc. Financial institutions, in particular, must ensure they make resources available so newcomers can settle quickly and contribute.
  • Recruitment: Companies must take concrete steps to diversify their work forces and ease the path to employment for newcomers. Many studies have shown that diverse views and leadership that reflects all parts of society make organizations more successful and profitable. Yet racialized people continue to experience higher unemployment and lower incomes than non-racialized people.
  • Professional integration: The story of the immigrant professional driving a cab because credentials aren’t recognized here is all too real. While licensing bodies for professions must maintain the highest standards, governments have a role to play in helping new Canadians understand those standards before they arrive and meet them when they get here. Additional funding to help with certification, training, exams, internships and apprenticeships, and language programs will get highly qualified new Canadians more quickly into the work they are equipped and motivated to do. Business can help to provide those opportunities and more.
  • Social and professional networks: Canadians take for granted how much we rely on our extensive personal and professional connections to help us in our careers and personal lives. We must help newcomers access networking and mentorship so they can build the relationships that will help them succeed.

These are all areas of significant focus for Scotiabank. As part of our new 10-year, $500-million commitment called ScotiaRISE, we will support community and academic partners to promote economic resilience by accelerating newcomer integration, increasing high-school graduation and postsecondary participation, and removing barriers to career advancement.

The pandemic will eventually pass, but the need to strengthen Canada – economically, demographically and culturally – will not go away. Let’s make sure immigration continues to be the Canadian advantage.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-immigrants-are-a-form-of-economic-stimulus-and-businesses-must-help/

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DOL H-1B Visa Wage Rule: Donald Trump’s Bad Parting Gift To Immigrants

2021/01/14 Leave a comment

Two contrasting views on the Trump administration’s rule imposting higher salary requirements on H-1B visas. The first from the National Foundation for American Policy opposes the change, the second, from the Niskanen Center, supports it. From a self-interested Canadian perspective, the Trump rule provides an immigration advantage to Canadian firms.

Starting with opposition to the change: 

The Department of Labor (DOL) reissued a controversial rule designed to price H-1B visa holders and employment-based immigrants out of the U.S. labor market, setting up new legal battles and a decision by the Biden administration on whether to keep a rule that fulfills a key part of White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigration agenda. The final rule makes only minimal substantive changes from the original rule and was drafted to avoid the violations of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) that caused three judges to issue opinions blocking the regulation.

Under immigration law, employers must pay H-1B visa holders the higher of the prevailing wage or actual wage paid to similar U.S. workers. DOL determines the prevailing wage with data from the government’s Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) wage survey and uses a mathematical formula to create four levels of wages for each occupation.

A formula is already problematic, since it is much less accurate than asking employers what they pay employees at different levels of experience. A formula can be manipulated to achieve a result, as analysts note, by artificially raising the required wage. That is what the Department of Labor has done in the two versions of its wage rule.

The Department of Labor (DOL) reissued a controversial rule designed to price H-1B visa holders and employment-based immigrants out of the U.S. labor market, setting up new legal battles and a decision by the Biden administration on whether to keep a rule that fulfills a key part of White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigration agenda. The final rule makes only minimal substantive changes from the original rule and was drafted to avoid the violations of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) that caused three judges to issue opinions blocking the regulation.

Under immigration law, employers must pay H-1B visa holders the higher of the prevailing wage or actual wage paid to similar U.S. workers. DOL determines the prevailing wage with data from the government’s Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) wage survey and uses a mathematical formula to create four levels of wages for each occupation.

In October 2020, the Department of Labor issued an interim final regulation that raised the required wage employers must pay not just to H-1B visa holders but for employment-based immigrants who required labor certification. Three courts blocked the rule on grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act by claiming a “good cause” exception to allow the regulation to go into effect immediately without notice and comment. Judges cited, among other things, a National Foundation for American Policy analysis that showed the unemployment rate for computer occupations had not increased during the pandemic.

The new rule does not go into effect for 60 days. It also phases in the latest higher salary requirements over several months. Trump officials hoped that would force employers and universities to argue that the regulation violates the statutory language or did not properly address comments, rather than the more straightforward violations of the Administrative Procedure Act contained in the original rule that were defeated in court.

The Fragomen law firm summarized the regulation’s phase-in:

  • “Phase 1, Rule Effective Date through June 30, 2021: LCAs [labor condition applications] filed and PWDs [prevailing wage determinations] issued during this timeframe are to remain subject to current wage levels, with Level I at the 17th percentile, Level II at the 34th percentile, Level III at the 50th percentile and Level IV at the 67th percentile.
  • “Phase 2, July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022: The new wage levels will take effect, however, they are to be adjusted downward as follows – Levels I and IV are to be set at the higher of either 90% of the wage value calculated at the 35th and 90th percentile or the mean of the lower one-third of the current OES wage distribution. Levels II and III are to be set using the wage calculations outlined in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which rely on the amounts listed in Levels I and IV.
  • “Phase 3, July 1, 2022 and after: The new wage levels are to take effect without any adjustments, with Level I at the 35thpercentile, Level II at the 53rd percentile, Level III at the 72ndpercentile and Level IV at the 90th percentile.”

“The revisions to the rule don’t change the fact that it still fails to do what the law requires—to reflect the actual, prevailing wage for workers in that geographical area doing similar work,” said Kevin Miner, a partner at Fragomen, in an interview. “The fact that Level 1 wages are now tied to around the 35th percentile rather than the 45th percentile doesn’t change the fact that it is artificially inflating required wages. Prevailing wage data published by DOL should reflect the actual wages paid in the market. It should be math, not politics. If Congress wants to make changes to the H-1B statute, it can do so. But DOL shouldn’t be trying to do that through rulemaking.”

The new rule has the same defects as the earlier version, even if the wage effects are slightly less extreme, according to a preliminary analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy. In effect, at the 35th percentile, the new rule would require employers to pay an entry level employee the same or more than 35% of the people working in the same occupation and geographic location, even if those individuals have much more experience.

One way of looking at the new rule is since the current Level 2 wage is at the 34th percentile, and the new Level 1 is at the 35th percentile, then what the new rule does is eliminate the entire Level 1 wage level and pushes everything else upwards. “That is one of the ways the rule violates the statute,” said Miner.

The wages mandated under the DOL rule do not reflect market wages or meet the definition of a prevailing wage. “The prevailing wage rate is defined as the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment,” according to the Department of Labor.

Compared to the regulation in effect for years, the new DOL rule will require employers to pay, on average, 34% higher salaries at the Level 1 wage for biochemists and biophysicists, 29% higher for software developers and database administrators, and 28% more for computer programmers, according to a National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) estimate of the new rule’s impact.

To examine how much above the market wage the new rule requires employers to pay, NFAP looked at private wage survey data. Under the new DOL mandated minimum salary, an employer in the San Jose, California area would pay an electrical engineer at Level 4 more than $41,000 above the market wage, as indicated by a private wage survey (Willis Towers Watson). At Level 1, an employer in San Jose would pay an electrical engineer more than $36,000 above the market wage, according to an NFAP estimate.

The Department of Labor wage rule is designed to make it as difficult as possible for employment-based immigrants and visa holders to enter or work in America. The DOL wage rule should be viewed the same as Trump administration’s policies that ended nearly all refugee admissions, prevented individuals from applying for asylum, banned people from several Muslim-majority nations and stopped family immigrants from entering the United States.

H-1B visas are important because they generally represent the only practical way for high-skilled foreign nationals, including international students, to work long-term in the United States and have a chance to become employment-based immigrants and U.S. citizens. Analysts note the visas are a crucial part of America’s ability to innovate at a time when elected officials want companies to develop and produce more products and services in the United States.

Pricing visa holders and immigrants out of the U.S. labor market will push more work to other nations and further discourage international students from coming to America. Economists recognize there is a global market for labor, which is ignored in the DOL rule: “[A]ny policies that are motivated by concerns about the loss of native jobs should consider that policies aimed at reducing immigration have the unintended consequence of encouraging firms to offshore jobs abroad,” according to research by Britta Glennon, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of Business.

Litigation is expected from employers. The more critical issue is whether the Biden administration will implement the Trump administration’s most recent assault on high-skilled immigration or move to rescind or substantially revise the regulation through the rulemaking process.

The DOL wage rule is Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s parting gift to immigrants, universities and high technology companies. The Biden administration must decide if it wants to carry out the Donald Trump-Stephen Miller agenda on immigration.

Source: DOL H-1B Visa Wage Rule: Donald Trump’s Bad Parting Gift To Immigrants

In support, from the Niskanen Center:

Just days before the 2020 election, the Trump administration proposed a new ruleto change how H-1B visas are allocated. The final rule was announced last week and is set to go into effect before the 2022 H-1B lottery. The Biden administration will have many Trump-era immigration rules to reverse. But this rule — uniquely — is worth supporting after the end of the Trump administration, since it ensures visas go to the best and brightest, reduces risk for H-1B employers, protects native workers, and fulfills one of Biden’s campaign promises.

Allocating visas efficiently

The demand for cap-subject H-1Bs consistently outpaces the 85,000 that are allowed each year. The result is a zero-sum game; one employer’s approval is necessarily one fewer visa available to other employers. And the lottery-based allocation established under the old rules dictates that virtually all employers are equally likely to win, regardless of their petitions’ relative merit.

The new rule replaces the random lottery with a wage-based ranking, awarding visas to employers offering the largest salaries. Under wage-based allocation, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services no longer has to be indifferent between a superstar who is a perfect fit for a lucrative niche job and a worker to fill an entry-level position. Instead, USCIS can ensure visas are going to the most valuable workers.

Of course, much of this zero-sum competition is artificially imposed by the low H-1B cap — even the less productive H-1B-eligible workers with sponsors would still be of enormous benefit to the United States. But the Department of Homeland Security can’t get rid of the cap. It can make sure that in the face of the cap, visas go to the best and brightest of the best and brightest.

Pro-worker and pro-business

In addition to allocating H-1Bs efficiently, wage-based allocation yields three other significant benefits.

First, it protects native workers. Labor market competition between H-1B workers and natives is largely overblown, with H-1B workers earning much more on average than natives of the same level of education. However, there are several disturbing cases where businesses use H-1B workers to replace or undercut natives, even if such cases are quite rare. However uncommon, such cases are bad for the native workers affected and bad for the H-1B program’s political prospects. After all, how can lawmakers be persuaded to raise the cap if H-1Bs are already displacing workers?

Naturally, the issue is the lottery system, which often awards visas to the least deserving petitions and incentivizes the proliferation of outsourcing companies and H-1B dependent firms. Assigning visas to the workers who will earn the highest salaries automatically makes cases of abuse financially unviable. Making employers compete for visas by offering better wages is pro-worker and can help recover some of the program’s damaged reputation.

Second, wage-based allocation is good for business and reduces a tremendous amount of waste. Under a lottery, businesses face costly uncertainty about whether all the money and time spent trying to secure a visa will pay off. If an employer wins the lottery, their new employee will make the process worth it, but if they lose, the resources are squandered. On top of the waste, the uncertainty and risk deters some businesses from participating at all. Wage-based allocation addresses these issues, giving high-paying employers security and reliability, while providing lower-paying employers the signal they need to know they won’t win a visa if they petition for one.

Third, a wage-based allocation generates valuable information to lawmakers about the value of H-1Bs. Each year’s salary cutoff — that is, the lowest salary that still secures a visa — sends a  much stronger signal about the demand for H-1B labor than does the number of lottery applicants, which can obscure the underlying need for workers by only including employers who are willing to take on the risk inherent in entering the lottery. As demand for labor increases, it might not show up clearly in the number of H-1B applications because the value of an H-1B application decreases as the probability of winning the lottery decreases. Therefore, the number of H-1B applications is a mixed signal about the demand for workers and the risk-aversion of employers that is hard to disentangle. On the other hand, movement in a salary cutoff can more transparently inform lawmakers how to set the cap and assure them that increasing it won’t lead to low-wage labor.

As it happens, this policy is included in Biden’s immigration plan. “An immigration system that crowds out high-skilled workers in favor of only entry level wages and skills threatens American innovation and competitiveness,” his plan reads. Then it follows with Biden’s proposal to fix it: “first reform temporary visas to establish a wage-based allocation process.” Granted, Biden’s plan indicates that he hoped the change would come from Congress.

Nevertheless, allowing the rule to stand would make sure that talent and resources aren’t squandered in the next lotteries before Congress has a chance to get to it — if it does at all. Meaningful H-1B reform to charge innovation and productivity growth doesn’t stop at wage-based allocation, but it’s a promising start.

Source: Trump’s One Immigration Reform That Biden Should Keep

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Sweden proposes language requirement for would-be citizens

2021/01/14 Leave a comment

Pretty standard requirements elsewhere:

Justice and Migration Minister Morgan Johansson presented details of an inquiry into the proposals on Wednesday morning.

“Language is the key to work, but also the key to society,” said Johansson as he outlined why the government thought it needed to find “a better balance between rights and responsibilities” for would-be citizens.

Foreign nationals applying to become Swedish would need proof of Swedish skills at A2 level for speaking and writing, the second lowest out of six levels on the Common European Framework of Reference, and B1 for reading and listening.

To take the test, it would cost 500 kronor ($60) for the section relating to civil society and 2,000 kronor for the language component.

Citizenship applicants could alternatively provide proof of passing Grade 9 in a Swedish high school, or a course at upper secondary school, or the highest level of the Swedish For Immigrants (SFI) course.

The language requirements would apply to people aged between 16 and 66 who apply for Swedish citizenship, but certain exceptions are proposed, including for people with certain disabilities or those who are from a vulnerable background – for example being stateless or illiterate – who can prove they have tried to reach the required knowledge level but been unsuccessful.

Citizens of other Nordic countries who live in Sweden would also be exempted, as they are subject to a different process and are only required to notify authorities, rather than apply, in order to receive citizenship.

The proposals were put together based on reviewing the processes in place in other European countries, of which only three including Sweden do not currently require a language test.

But the details aren’t finalised yet. The next stage is to send the proposals out for consultation from relevant authorities, and they may be adapted depending on the responses received. Then a proposal would need to be passed by parliament and work to begin on putting together the tests.

“This is a reasonable proposal and we hope that it can be put into place as soon as possible, but of course this is a large organisational challenge,” said Johansson.

The government committed to investigating language tests for citizenship applicants in the cross-bloc deal struck with the Centre and Liberal parties, whose support the Social Democrat-Green coalition needed to form a government.

Separately, the government is looking into whether language skills should be required for permanent residence in Sweden.

Source: https://www.thelocal.se/20210113/sweden-proposes-language-requirement-for-would-be-citizens

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

From facial recognition, to predictive technologies, big data policing is rife with technical, ethical and political landmines

2021/01/14 Leave a comment

Good long read and overview of the major issues:

In mid-2019, an investigative journalism/tech non-profit called MuckRock and Open the Government (OTG), a non-partisan advocacy group, began submitting freedom of information requests to law enforcement agencies across the United States. The goal: to smoke out details about the use of an app rumoured to offer unprecedented facial recognition capabilities to anyone with a smartphone.

Co-founded by Michael Morisy, a former Boston Globe editor, MuckRock specializes in FOIs and its site has grown into a publicly accessible repository of government documents obtained under access to information laws.

As responses trickled in, it became clear that the MuckRock/OTG team had made a discovery about a tech company called Clearview AI. Based on documents obtained from Atlanta, OTG researcher Freddy Martinez began filing more requests, and discovered that as many as 200 police departments across the U.S. were using Clearview’s app, which compares images taken by smartphone cameras to a sprawling database of 3 billion open-source photographs of faces linked to various forms of personal information (e.g., Facebook profiles). It was, in effect, a point-click-and-identify system that radically transformed the work of police officers.

The documents soon found their way to a New York Times reporter named Kashmir Hill, who, in January 2020, published a deeply investigated feature about Clearview, a tiny and secretive start-up with backing from Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire behind Paypal and Palantir Technologies. Among the story’s revelations, Hill disclosed that tech giants like Google and Apple were well aware that such an app could be developed using artificial intelligence algorithms feeding off the vast storehouse of facial images uploaded to social media platforms and other publicly accessible databases. But they had opted against designing such a disruptive and easily disseminated surveillance tool.

The Times story set off what could best be described as an international chain reaction, with widespread media coverage about the use of Clearview’s app, followed by a wave of announcements from various governments and police agencies about how Clearview’s app would be banned. The reaction played out against a backdrop of news reports about China’s nearly ubiquitous facial recognition-based surveillance networks.

Canada was not exempt. To Surveil and Predict, a detailed examination of “algorithmic policing” published this past fall by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, noted that officers with law enforcement agencies in Calgary, Edmonton and across Greater Toronto had tested Clearview’s app, sometimes without the knowledge of their superiors. Investigative reporting by the Toronto Star and Buzzfeed News found numerous examples of municipal law enforcement agencies, including the Toronto Police Service, using the app in crime investigations. The RCMP denied using Clearview even after it had entered into a contract with the company — a detail exposed by Vancouver’s The Tyee.

With federal and provincial privacy commissioners ordering investigations, Clearview and the RCMP subsequently severed ties, although Citizen Lab noted that many other tech companies still sell facial recognition systems in Canada. “I think it is very questionable whether [Clearview] would conform with Canadian law,” Michael McEvoy, British Columbia’s privacy commissioner, told the Star in February.

There was fallout elsewhere. Four U.S. cities banned police use of facial recognition outright, the Citizen Lab report noted. The European Union in February proposed a ban on facial recognition in public spaces but later hedged. A U.K. court in April ruled that police facial recognition systems were “unlawful,” marking a significant reversal in surveillance-minded Britain. And the European Data Protection Board, an EU agency, informed Commission members in June that Clearview’s technology violates Pan-European law enforcement policies. As Rutgers University law professor and smart city scholar Ellen Goodman notes “There’s been a huge blowback” against the use of data-intensive policing technologies.

There’s nothing new about surveillance or police investigative practices that draw on highly diverse forms of electronic information, from wire taps to bank records and images captured by private security cameras. Yet during the past decade or so, dramatic advances in big data analytics, biometrics and AI, stoked by venture capital and law enforcement agencies eager to invest in new technology, have given rise to a fast-growing data policing industry. As the Clearview story showed, regulation and democratic oversight have lagged far behind the technology.

U.S. startups like PredPol and HunchLab, now owned by ShotSpotter, have designed so-called “predictive policing” algorithms that use law enforcement records and other geographical data (e.g. locations of schools) to make statistical guesses about the times and locations of future property crimes. Palantir’s law-enforcement service aggregates and then mines huge data sets consisting of emails, court documents, evidence repositories, gang member databases, automated licence plate readers, social media, etc., to find correlations or patterns that police can use to investigate suspects.

Yet as the Clearview fallout indicated, big data policing is rife with technical, ethical and political landmines, according to Andrew Ferguson, a University of the District Columbia law professor. As he explains in his 2017 book, The Rise of Big Data Policing, analysts have identified an impressive list: biased, incomplete or inaccurate data, opaque technology, erroneous predictions, lack of governance, public suspicions about surveillance and over-policing, conflicts over access to proprietary algorithms, unauthorized use of data and the muddied incentives of private firms selling law enforcement software.

At least one major study found that some police officers were highly skeptical of predictive policing algorithms. Other critics point out that by deploying smart city sensors or other data-enabled systems, like transit smart cards, local governments may be inadvertently providing the police with new intelligence sources. Metrolinx, for example, has released Presto card user information to police while London’s Metropolitan Police has made thousands of requests for Oyster card data to track criminals, according to The Guardian. “Any time you have a microphone, camera or a live-feed, these [become] surveillance devices with the simple addition of a court order,” says New York civil rights lawyer Albert Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP).

The authors of the Citizen Lab study, lawyers Kate Robertson, Cynthia Khoo and Yolanda Song, argue that Canadian governments need to impose a moratorium on the deployment of algorithmic policing technology until the public policy and legal frameworks can catch up.

Data policing was born in New York City in the early 1990s when then-police Commissioner William Bratton launched “Compstat,” a computer system that compiled up-to-date crime information then visualized the findings in heat maps. These allowed unit commanders to deploy officers to neighbourhoods most likely to be experiencing crime problems.

Originally conceived as a management tool that would push a demoralized police force to make better use of limited resources, Compstat is credited by some as contributing to the marked reduction in crime rates in the Big Apple, although many other big cities experienced similar drops through the 1990s and early 2000s.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks sparked enormous investments in security technology. The past two decades have seen the emergence of a multi-billion-dollar industry dedicated to civilian security technology, everything from large-scale deployments of CCTVs and cybersecurity to the development of highly sensitive biometric devices — fingerprint readers, iris scanners, etc. — designed to bulk up the security around factories, infrastructure and government buildings.

Predictive policing and facial recognition technologies evolved on parallel tracks, both relying on increasingly sophisticated analytics techniques, artificial intelligence algorithms and ever deeper pools of digital data.

The core idea is that the algorithms — essentially formulas, such as decision-trees, that generate predictions — are “trained” on large tranches of data so they become increasingly accurate, for example at anticipating the likely locations of future property crimes or matching a face captured in a digital image from a CCTV to one in a large database of headshots. Some algorithms are designed to use a set of rules with variables (akin to following a recipe). Others, known as machine learning, are programmed to learn on their own (trial and error).

The risk lies in the quality of the data used to train the algorithms — what was dubbed the “garbage-in-garbage-out” problem in a study by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology. If there are hidden biases in the training data — e.g., it contains mostly Caucasian faces — the algorithm may misread Asian or Black faces and generate “false positives,” a well-documented shortcoming if the application involves a identifying a suspect in a crime.

Similarly, if a poor or racialized area is subject to over-policing, there will likely be more crime reports, meaning the data from that neighbourhood is likely to reveal higher-than-average rates of certain types of criminal activity, a data point that would justify more over-policing and racial profiling. Some crimes are under-reported, and don’t influence these algorithms.

Other predictive and AI-based law enforcement technologies, such as “social network analysis” — an individual’s web of personal relationships, gleaned, for example, from social media platforms or examined by cross-referencing of lists of gang members — promised to generate predictions that individuals known to police were at risk of becoming embroiled in violent crimes.

This type of sleuthing seemed to hold out some promise. In one study, criminologists at Cardiff University found that “disorder-related” posts on Twitter reflected crime incidents in metropolitan London — a finding that suggests how big data can help map and anticipate criminal activity. In practise, however, such surveillance tactics can prove explosive. This happened in 2016, when U.S. civil liberties groups revealed documents showing that Geofeedia, a location-based data company, had contracts with numerous police departments to provide analytics based on social media posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Among the individuals targeted by the company’s data: protestors and activists. Chastened, the social media firms rapidly blocked Geofeedia’s access.

In 2013, the Chicago Police Department began experimenting with predictive models that assigned risk scores for individuals based on criminal records or their connections to people involved in violent crime. By 2019, the CPD had assigned risk scores to almost 400,000 people, and claimed to be using the information to surveil and target “at-risk” individuals (including potential victims) or connect them to social services, according to a January 2020 report by Chicago’s inspector general.

These tools can draw incorrect or biased inferences in the same way that overreliance on police checks in racialized neighbourhoods results in what could be described as guilt by address. The Citizen Lab study noted that the Ontario Human Rights Commission identified social network analysis as a potential cause of racial profiling. In the case of the CPD’s predictive risk model, the system was discontinued in 2020 after media reports and internal investigations showed that people were added to the list based solely on arrest records, meaning they might not even have been charged, much less convicted of a crime.

Early applications of facial recognition software included passport security systems or searches of mug shot databases. But in 2011, the Insurance Corporation of B.C. offered Vancouver police the use of facial recognition software to match photos of Stanley Cup rioters with driver’s licence images — a move that prompted a stern warning from the province’s privacy commissioner. In 2019, the Washington Post revealed that FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigators regarded state databases of digitized driver’s licences as a “gold mine for facial recognition photos” which had been scanned without consent.

In 2013, Canada’s federal privacy commissioner released a report on police use of facial recognition that anticipated the issues raised by Clearview app earlier in 2020. “[S]trict controls and increased transparency are needed to ensure that the use of facial recognition conforms with our privacy laws and our common sense of what is socially acceptable.” (Canada’s data privacy laws are only now being considered for an update.)

The technology, meanwhile, continues to gallop ahead. New York civil rights lawyer Albert Cahn points to the emergence of “gait recognition” systems, which use visual analysis to identify individuals by their walk; these systems are reportedly in use in China. “You’re trying to teach machines how to identify people who walk with the same gait,” he says. “Of course, a lot of this is completely untested.”

The predictive policing story evolved somewhat differently. The methodology grew out of analysis commissioned by the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 2010s. Two data scientists, Jeff Brantingham and George Mohler, used mathematical modelling to forecast copycat crimes based on data about the location and frequency of previous burglaries in three L.A. neighbourhoods. They published their results and soon set up PredPol to commercialize the technology. Media attention soon followed, as news stories played up the seemingly miraculous power of a Minority Report-like system that could do a decent job anticipating incidents of property crime.

Operationally, police forces used PredPol’s system by dividing up precincts in 150-square-metre “cells” that police officers were instructed to patrol more intensively during periods when PredPol’s algorithm forecast criminal activity. In the post-2009 credit crisis period, the technology seemed to promise that cash-strapped American municipalities would get more bang for their policing buck.

Other firms, from startups to multinationals like IBM, entered the market with innovations, for example, incorporating other types of data, such as socio-economic data or geographical features, from parks and picnic tables to schools and bars, that may be correlated to elevated incidents of certain types of crime. The reported crime data is routinely updated so the algorithm remains current.

Police departments across the U.S. and Europe have invested in various predictive policing tools, as have several in Canada, including Vancouver, Edmonton and Saskatoon. Whether they have made a difference is an open question. As with several other studies, a 2017 review by analysts with the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy, at Ghent University in Belgium, found inconclusive results: some places showed improved results compared to more conventional policing, while in other cities, the use of predictive algorithms led to reduced policing costs, but little measurable difference in outcomes.

Revealingly, the city where predictive policing really took hold, Los Angeles, has rolled back police use on these techniques. Last spring, the LAPD tore up its contract with PredPol in the wake of mounting community and legal pressure from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which found that individuals who posed no real threat, mostly Black or Latino, were ending up on police watch lists because of flaws in the way the system assigned risk scores.

“Algorithms have no place in policing,” Coalition founder Hamid Khan said in an interview this summer with MIT Technology Review. “I think it’s crucial that we understand that there are lives at stake. This language of location-based policing is by itself a proxy for racism. They’re not there to police potholes and trees. They are there to police people in the location. So location gets criminalized, people get criminalized, and it’s only a few seconds away before the gun comes out and somebody gets shot and killed.” (Similar advocacy campaigns, including proposed legislation governing surveillance technology and gang databases, have been proposed for New York City.)

There has been one other interesting consequence: police resistance. B.C.-born sociologist Sarah Brayne, an assistant professor at the University of Texas (Austin), spent two-and-a-half years embedded with the LAPD, exploring the reaction of law enforcement officials to algorithmic policing techniques by conducting ride-alongs as well as interviews with dozens of veteran cops and data analysts. In results published last year, Brayne and collaborator Angèle Christin observed “strong processes of resistance fuelled by fear of professional devaluation and threats of performance tracking.”

Before shifts, officers were told which grids to drive through, when and how frequently, and the locations of their vehicles were tracked by an on-board GPS devices to ensure compliance. But Brayne found that some would turn off the tracking device, which they regarded with suspicion. Others just didn’t buy what the technology was selling. “Patrol officers frequently asserted that they did not need an algorithm to tell them where crime occurs,” she noted.

In an interview, Brayne said that police departments increasingly see predictive technology as part of the tool kit, despite questions about effectiveness or other concerns, like racial profiling. “Once a particular technology is created,” she observed,” there’s a tendency to use it.” But Brayne added one other prediction, which has to do with the future of algorithmic policing in the post-George Floyd era — “an intersection,” as she says, “between squeezed budgets and this movement around defunding the police.”

The widening use of big data policing and digital surveillance poses, according to Citizen Lab’s analysis as well as critiques from U.S. and U.K. legal scholars, a range of civil rights questions, from privacy and freedom from discrimination to due process. Yet governments have been slow to acknowledge these consequences. Big Brother Watch, a British civil liberties group, notes that in the U.K., the national government’s stance has been that police decisions about the deployment of facial recognition systems are “operational.”

At the core of the debate is a basic public policy principle: transparency. Do individuals have the tools to understand and debate the workings of a suite of technologies that can have tremendous influence over their lives and freedoms? It’s what Andrew Ferguson and others refer to as the “black box” problem. The algorithms, designed by software engineers, rely on certain assumptions, methodologies and variables, none of which are visible, much less legible to anyone without advanced technical know-how. Many, moreover, are proprietary because they are sold to local governments by private companies. The upshot is that these kinds of algorithms have not been regulated by governments despite their use by public agencies.

New York City Council moved to tackle this question in May 2018 by establishing an “automated decision systems” task force to examine how municipal agencies and departments use AI and machine learning algorithms. The task force was to devise procedures for identifying hidden biases and to disclose how the algorithms generate choices so the public can assess their impact. The group included officials from the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, tech experts and civil liberties advocates. It held public meetings throughout 2019 and released a report that November. NYC was, by most accounts, the first city to have tackled this question, and the initiative was, initially, well received.

Going in, Cahn, the New York City civil rights lawyer, saw the task force as “a unique opportunity to examine how AI was operating in city government.” But he describes the outcome as “disheartening.” “There was an unwillingness to challenge the NYPD on its use of (automated decision systems).” Some other participants agreed, describing the effort as a waste.

If institutional obstacles thwarted an effort in a government the size of the City of New York, what does better and more effective oversight look like? A couple of answers have emerged.

In his book on big data policing, Andrew Ferguson writes that local governments should start at first principles, and urges police forces and civilian oversight bodies to address five fundamental questions, ideally in a public forum:

  • Can you identify the risks that your big data technology is trying to address?
  • Can you defend the inputs into the system (accuracy of data, soundness of methodology)?
  • Can you defend the outputs of the system (how they will impact policing practice and community relationships)?
  • Can you test the technology (offering accountability and some measure of transparency)?
  • Is police use of the technology respectful of the autonomy of the people it will impact?

These “foundational” questions, he writes, “must be satisfactorily answered before green-lighting any purchase or adopting a big data policing strategy.”

In addition to calling for a moratorium and a judicial inquiry into the uses of predictive policing and facial recognition systems, the authors of the Citizen Lab report made several other recommendations, including: the need for full transparency; provincial policies governing the procurement of such systems; limits on the use of ADS in public spaces; and the establishment of oversight bodies that include members of historically marginalized or victimized groups.

Interestingly, the federal government has made advances in this arena, which University of Ottawa law professor and privacy expert Teresa Scassa describes as “really interesting.”

The Treasury Board Secretariat in 2019 issued the “Directive on Automated Decision-Making,” which came into effect in April 2020, requires federal departments and agencies, except those involved in national security, to conduct “algorithmic impact assessments” (AIA) to evaluate unintended bias before procuring or approving the use of technologies that rely on AI or machine learning. The policy requires the government to publish AIAs, release software codes developed internally and continually monitor the performance of these systems. In the case of proprietary algorithms developed by private suppliers, federal officials have extensive rights to access and test the software.

In a forthcoming paper, Scassa points out that the directive includes due process rules and looks for evidence of whether systemic bias has become embedded in these technologies, which can happen if the algorithms are trained on skewed data. She also observes that not all algorithm-driven systems generate life-altering decisions, e.g., chatbots that are now commonly used in online application processes. But where they are deployed in “high impact” contexts such as policing, e.g., with algorithms that aim to identify individuals caught on surveillance videos, the policy requires “a human in the loop.”

The directive, says Scassa, “is getting interest elsewhere,” including the U.S. Ellen Goodman, at Rutgers, is hopeful this approach will gain traction with the Biden administration. In Canada, where provincial governments oversee law enforcement, Ottawa’s low-key but seemingly thorough regulation points to a way for citizens to shine a flashlight into the black box that is big data policing.

Source: From facial recognition, to predictive technologies, big data policing is rife with technical, ethical and political landmines

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