Foundation raises $1 billion to fight anti-Asian hate

2021/05/22 Leave a comment

Real money:

A foundation launched by prominent Asian American business leaders earlier this month said Thursday it has raised more than $1 billion to support Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

The announcement from The Asian American Foundation, or TAAF, came minutes after President Joe Biden signed legislation aimed at curtailing the rise in hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States.

Sonal Shah, the foundation’s president, and TAAF board members were also at the White House, where they briefed administration officials, including domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. They discussed how the foundation plans to spend the $1.1 billion in donations to fight back against hate crimes directed at these communities, according to a statement from the foundation. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris dropped by the meeting to express their support, the foundation said.

Thursday’s news builds on the foundation’s prior announcement that it had raised $300 million from its board members and other donors. More donors have since pledged contributions to its “AAPI Giving Challenge,” an initiative to bring additional funding to Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations that have traditionally been neglected in philanthropy.

“TAFF was founded to close critical gaps of support for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and end the longstanding underinvestment in our communities,” said Shah, who previously served as a deputy assistant to former President Barack Obama. ”Today’s historic announcement should send a clear signal to the 23 million AAPIs living in this country that TAAF and our AAPI Giving Challenge partners are here to upend the status quo in favor of a better, brighter future for AAPI communities.”

The Asian American Foundation has said its giving will focus on supporting organizations and leaders measuring and challenging violence against Asian American and Pacific Islanders; developing a common data standard that tracks violence and hate incidents; and helping create K-12 and college curriculums that “reflect the history of Asian American and Pacific Islanders as part of the American story.”

Members of the foundation’s advisory council, including CNN host Lisa Ling and actor Daniel Dae Kim, virtually joined the White House meeting alongside representatives from donors, including Mastercard and the MacArthur Foundation.

Separately, TAFF is producing a TV special designed to expand support for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. The program, called “See Us Unite for Change — The Asian American Foundation in service of the AAPI Community,” will air Friday on multiple channels, including MTV, BET, VH1 and Comedy Central.

Source: Foundation raises $1 billion to fight anti-Asian hate

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Budget funds tackling anti-Asian racism a ‘symbolic’ move, says expert, but foundation’s plans still in flux

2021/05/22 Leave a comment

Of note (significant for the CRRF as previous governments have not provided such funding if memory serves me correctly):

A “groundbreaking” boost to the Canadian Race Relations Foundation to help address the rise of anti-Asian racism is a welcome and “symbolic” investment, says one expert, but details of how it plans to spend the $11-million remain up in the air.

The federal government’s 2021 budget, tabled on April 19 by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (University-Rosedale, Ont.), earmarked $11-million for the foundation over two years, starting in 2021-22. Funds are designed to help the Crown corporation “scale up” its capacity and establish a “national coalition to support Asian Canadian communities.” A fund to support “all racialized communities directly impacted” by a spike in racist attacks during the pandemic will also be created, according to the 724-page document.

Mohammed Hashim, executive director of the foundation (CRRF), said the group is currently working on creating an anti-Asian racism strategy that it hopes to launch in the fall.

“We recognize that there is no one Asian community. There are many Asian communities, and we need to be able to work with all of them to make sure we’re doing things that are appropriate within each of those,” said Mr. Hashim. The summer will be filled with “a ton of consultations” with groups doing anti-Asian racism work, which will help inform “what a coalition could look like.”

By the fall, the foundation plans to release its organizational strategy in full, detailing different grant streams that will be available to external groups. Work is still underway internally to determine how much of the funding will be set aside to boost the foundation’s capacity—though Mr. Hashim said a “good portion” will be dedicated to ensuring the corp can “function as a national entity”—and how much will be handed to organizations fighting Asian racism. Membership of such a “coalition” is also still being discussed, he said.

Bill C-30, the government’s budget bill, has not yet passed and is being studied by the House Finance Committee. The Senate Finance Committee also launched a pre-study of the legislation.

Mr. Hashim, who was named to the post for a five-year term last fall, underscored the significance of the boost, noting it’s the first time the Crown corporation has seen money earmarked as a line item in the budget. Typically, the organization has relied on its endowment income and fundraising, but Ottawa’s “groundbreaking” investment will go toward helping it “embolden” its programming, he said.

The foundation, which falls under the portfolio of the Heritage department, “can play a national leadership role in anti-racism efforts,” said Mr. Hashim, adding the allocation signals the government has “confidence” in it to become just that.

Avvy Go, a director with the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic in Toronto (CSALC), agreed it’s a “good thing” that anti-Asian racism has been listed as a budget item for the first time, as it carries “symbolic” weight.

“But my question is whether $11-million is really enough. The Asian community is a very large community,” she said. According to the 2016 census, nearly 1.8 million people of Chinese origin alone live in Canada, amounting to five per cent of the population. For the Asian diaspora, that figure could climb to just under 20 per cent, she predicted. “So maybe $11-million, if we think of it as seed funding, that’s OK. But if that’s the total amount going forward, then we’ll probably fall short in addressing the complexity of the problem,” she said.

While she supports a coalition being formed, Ms. Go said funds need to be directly and quickly shared with groups that have “very strong track records” with members of the community, including hers and the ChineseCanadian National Council for Social Justice (CCNC-SJ).

“These organizations, some are run by volunteers, so if funding stops, some of the work may have to stop,” she said. “So it would be good for the government to continue to support them.”

The CCNC-SJ recently launched a campaign urging the public to “open its eyes” to anti-Asian racism, which includes a two-minute video that can be shared on social media. It features prominent members of the Asian community, like environmental activist David Suzuki, ice skater Patrick Chan, and Ms. Go herself.

Last year, the CCNC-SJ and South Asian Legal Clinic helped launch an online tool encouraging the public to log their experiences of racism. Heritage provided more than $300,000 for the project to help Ottawa in its efforts to tackle false and misleading information, and the racism and stigma that follows.

The grassroots initiative, which also partnered with other national groups, produced  preliminary results, reporting 138 cases between February and May 2020, with the vast majority (110) registered in May. (At the time, officials said the tool would be in place at least into 2021, and it still appears to be active.)

In the council’s final report, released in March, the organization found most of those who used the tool to report incidents felt they were being scapegoated for the pandemic. A total of 643 incidents were logged, 73 per cent of which included verbal harassment, 11 per cent that involved physical aggression or unwanted contact, and 10 per cent that involved being coughed or spat at. The budget frames the $11-million to the CRRF as an investment in recognition of this “especially disturbing trend.”

Keep the door open for more funding, says expert

Ms. Go’s group is among the “important partners” that will be consulted in the summer, said Mr. Hashim. “This is a groundbreaking investment for the organization from the federal government, and I think it’s one that we’re hoping to rise to the challenge to prove the organization deserves long-term funding,” he added.

To help inform its work on the file, Mr. Hashim said the group is hoping to take part in a virtual national summit on anti-Asian racism, organized by the University of British Columbia. (That event is from June 10 to 11, with the first day open to the public and the second day reserved for “sector leaders.”)

Mr. Hashim said he’s well aware that groups have been working on the ground for years. “There’s a lot of community groups that have a lot of interest in this and we don’t want to get ahead of them by saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ ” he said. “They are certainly leading the charge and we want to make sure we are working in tandem with them.”

As the foundation works to iron out details for its funding, there appears to still be a gap in the government’s overarching anti-racism strategy, unveiled in June 2019.

Last summer, Ms. Go noted this blueprint does not carve out specific efforts to tackle anti-Asian sentiments, though it does make reference to anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, Islamaphobic, and anti-Semitic discrimination. The recent budget does not outline any new funds for this strategy, but Ms. Go said she hopes “the door is still open.”

Over the last year, her group has been talking about the uptick in reported incidents with the anti-racism secretariat, which was established through the strategy and is headed by Peter Flegel. The feds appear to be working toward a definition of anti-Asian racism, she said, which could help “guide” work under its overall strategy, including the creation of specialized funding streams. “I’m hoping that as these conversations continue, there will still be an opening for the government to think about other streams of funding,” she added.

Ottawa ‘behind the eight ball,’ says Kwan

NDP MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.) said there are “a lot of unknowns” about how the foundation will spend its money, and pressed Ottawa to step up in a “key area” and directly assign funds to non-government organizations.

“The fact of the matter is, they have the trust and relationships with the people on the ground and they can also break down the cultural and language barriers,” she said. Ms. Kwan, who was born in Hong Kong, said she is worried the money will be project-based or temporary, instead of “dedicated, stable, and predictable funding” for the groups to better tackle anti-Asian racism.

“We can’t expect NGOs to be doing this work off the side of their desk,” said Ms. Kwan, adding she wondered why the feds took the route of providing the foundation with money instead of what “it normally does,” which is dole out funds directly to groups. (The overarching anti-racism strategy falls under Heritage, with the department responsible for evaluating and accepting proposals through its various funding streams.)

While the pandemic has seen a rise in anti-Asian hate and reported incidents, “it’s not like this is new to us,” said Ms. Kwan. “It’s always been here, and it comes and goes in different cycles at different times. Some sort of incident or some sort of interaction might spur some activities,” she added. Ms. Kwan recounted herself being subjected to such incidents, at times hearing the virus being referred to as the “Kwan-avirus.”

“Right from the beginning, this was happening. People were being attacked. So the government’s been talking about it for a year, about how to define anti-Asian racism? And they still haven’t figured it out?” she said. “That makes me want to weep.”

It’s clear the government is “behind the eight ball,” said Ms. Kwan, when anti-Asian racism is not captured in the feds’ overall strategy and it’s still talking about defining it. The timeline of “deliverables” is also up in the air, like when the funds will start flowing from the foundation to the groups.

Former Liberal Senator Vivienne Poy, whose appointment in 1998 made her the first Canadian Senator of Asian ancestry, said the foundation’s funds could go toward outreach efforts to younger Canadians.

“Racism is learned. Nobody is born with it,” said Ms. Poy, who spearheaded a motion designating May as Asian Heritage Month, which was ultimately adopted by the Senate in 2001.

“They can spend hours and hours consulting with whatever group, but the most important thing” is unlearning on the part of perpetrators, said the retired Senator, and helping them “learn about the positive sides of different cultures” to better understand the people they are attacking are Canadians too. “You can’t legislate and pass laws telling people how to behave.”

Source: Budget funds tackling anti-Asian racism a ‘symbolic’ move, says expert, but foundation’s plans still in flux

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Opposition leaders want juror demographic data to help fight systemic biases

2021/05/21 Leave a comment

Needed:

A lack of information on the race, gender and age of jurors hinders the fight to address systemic racism and other inequities in the criminal justice system, federal opposition leaders and others say.

While studies in the United States show juror race and age have a marked effect on trial verdicts, Canada collects no data allowing similar research here, The Canadian Press reported recently.

New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh, who practised law in Ontario, expressed surprise at the data gap. Having evidence of jury makeup would help lawmakers make more informed decisions about improving the selection process, he said.

Singh said he would like to see laws and practices put in place to ensure juries represent the community, adding he would work with provinces and territories to see demographic information collected.

“The goal should be first identify: Are our juries reflecting the population, and if not what we can do to improve the demographics,” Singh said in an interview. “Better juries, better laws that all have the goal of justice and fairness in mind.”

Similarly, Green party Leader Annamie Paul said a clear picture without jury data on race, gender and occupation among other things is impossible.

“Lack of collecting this data is going to be one of the key barriers to truly dismantling systemic racism within our criminal justice system,” Paul said. “You can’t create legislation, really effective legislation, without this information.”

Sen. Kim Pate, a longtime advocate for justice reform, said collecting disaggregated data — information that does not identify individual jurors — would help understand jury selection and its impact.

“Concerns regarding the lack of this type of data are a recurring theme with nearly every criminal law bill considered by the Senate,” Pate said.

Conservative and Bloc Quebecois leaders Erin O’Toole and Yves-Francois Blanchet did not respond to requests for interviews.

The Prime Minister’s Office referred questions to Minister of Justice David Lametti, who said via a spokesman the government was on board with collecting information that would help address the overrepresentation of Indigenous people and racialized people who end up behind bars, which could include scrutinizing jury makeup.

As one example, David Taylor pointed to the federal-provincial-territorial National Justice Statistics Initiative, which sets goals and objectives related to justice data. Relevant deputy ministers have endorsed the collection and analysis of Indigenous and race-based data as a priority for the initiative, he said.

In addition, the recent budget earmarked $6.7 million over five years for Justice Canada to improve the collection and use of demographic data, while Statistics Canada would receive $172 million over five years for its “disaggregated data action plan.”

“Effective policy requires good data,” Taylor said. “This investment will support the use of advanced analytics so that we can better tailor interventions and improve social outcomes for different groups of people.”

Canada’s chief statistician, Anil Arora, said Canadians have long been reluctant to collect demographic information but people have come to understand the impact it can have in crafting solutions.

The government now wants to collect demographic information in a systematic way, including addressing gaps related to the justice system, Arora said. Statistics Canada can access data through the justice initiative, he said.

“What we need to do now is to align the disaggregated data at the source of collection, or at least be able to link it to other data sources, to get at what is the profile, whether it’s somebody serving on the jury (or) part of the judicial system itself,” Arora said.

“The country needs this type of information, so that it can see what’s going on sooner and it can react sooner, and it can take decisions.”

Source: Opposition leaders want juror demographic data to help fight systemic biases

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Who Gets to Wear a Headscarf? The Complicated History Behind France’s Latest Hijab Controversy

2021/05/21 Leave a comment

Of note:

The head of French President Emmanuel Macron’s political party withdrew support late last week for one of the party’s own candidates, Sarah Zemmahi, after she wore a headscarf in a campaign poster.

Stanislas Guerini, one of the co-founders of Macron’s centrist Republic on the Move party (LREM), took to Twitter to critique Zemmahi, an engineer who is running for her local council, for wearing her hijab, a religious head covering worn by some Muslim women, in a promotional image.

“Wearing ostentatious religious symbols on a campaign document is not compatible with the values of LREM,” Guerini wrote, after a prominent far-right politician shared the photo. “Either these candidates change their photo, or LREM will withdraw its support.”

While Zemmahi has not yet responded to Guerini’s statements, he received pushback from others in the party. LREM lawmaker Naima Moutchou defended Zemmahi on Twitter, calling Guerini’s criticism “discrimination,” while fellow LREM politician Caroline Janvier called out Guerini’s response in a scathing tweet.

“Undignified. Running after (far-right) votes will only allow their ideas to prevail. Enough is enough,” she wrote.

The conflict over one woman’s choice to cover her head comes in the wake of controversy surrounding an amendment passed by the French Senate last month that would ban girls under 18 from wearing the hijab in public. As part of a proposed “anti-separatism” bill, it was presented alongside amendments that would also prevent mothers from wearing hijabs on their children’s school trips and would ban the “burkini,” a full-body swimsuit.

While some French politicians have defended the amendment as a reinforcement of the country’s adherence to secularism, others have slammed it as yet another instance of part of an ugly strain of Islamophobia in the nation, which is home to the largest Muslim population in Western Europe—a population that has experienced increased discrimination in recent years, in the wake of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in recent years and the rise of far-right politics. One 2019 report found that 44.6% of the country considered Muslims a threat to French national identity, while a government survey from the same year listed that 42% of Muslims (other studies put the figure at 58%) reported experiencing discrimination due to their religion, a number that increased to 60% for women who wore a headscarf.

But understanding why the hijab is the site of so much controversy in France also requires understanding the deep history behind the debate.

While the proposed legislation still needs to be approved by the lower house of French Parliament before it can become a law, it’s already drawn significant backlash from many Muslim women around the world, who see the law as not only xenophobic and discriminatory, but an attack on their agency—a sentiment that has grown over the years as French politicians have argued that laws restricting religious symbolism are in service of women’s empowerment and public safety.On social media, the hashtag #HandsOffMyHijab has become a rallying cry to protest the amendment, started by Somali-Norwegian model Rawdah Mohamed, who used the phrase in a now-viral Instagram post to call out the potential ban. It’s since garnered support from the likes of U.S. congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad.

“How can you have a discussion about my identity, and not include me?” Mohamed told TIME. “I don’t think politicians are the ones who are supposed to define what it means to be a Muslim woman.”

France’s history with headscarves

Scholars trace France’s focus on Muslim head coverings and the women who wear them back to the country’s imperial past in North Africa and the Middle East—particularly in Algeria.

“Banning the hijab is about colonialism,” Alia Al-Saji, an associate professor of philosophy at McGill University, tells TIME. “French colonization of Muslim countries was often about controlling and managing populations that were of diverse religions… The hijab is a way of clearly showing that you are Muslim, which is colonially constructed as being opposed to colonialism. But it’s also a site of potential resistance.”

French colonization in Algeria began with an invasion in 1830 and was characterized by violent genocide, settler colonialism and a series of shifting laws called the “indigénat,” which, among other things, determined who could be a French citizen. Al-Saji notes that these laws were influential in emphasizing difference for the Muslim majority in Algeria; for example, while Jewish Algerian natives were recognized as French citizens in 1870 with the Cremieux Decree, Muslim Algerian natives were not eligible for French citizenship unless they renounced their religion and culture and adopted a French identity.

Inherent in the colonial attitude is the belief that one’s “civilization”—its language, its values and its practices—is an improvement on the lives of those who are colonized. This belief manifested itself drastically in the attitude toward Algerian Muslim women, who were seen as both oppressed and exotic. Under this mindset, their “liberation” could become the moral justification for imperialism’s violent casualties.

This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated during the Algerian War of Independence, when a series of public unveiling ceremonies were organized in 1958. During these ceremonies, many of which were arranged by the French army, Algerian women removed their haiks (traditional wraps worn by North African women) or had them removed by European women, before throwing them to the ground or burning them. Often, speeches were given afterwards in support of the French and the emancipation of Muslim women.

While these highly-publicized ceremonies were framed as spaces of empowerment for Muslim women, other accounts of this history tell a different story. In his book, Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women, 1954-1962, Neil MacMaster notes that some of the women who took part in these ceremonies were very poor, recruited from high schools or, in some cases, pressured to participate with threats to their safety and that of their families. In one harrowing case, when the army could not find a Muslim woman to lead the ceremony, they enlisted Monique Améziane, a young woman from a wealthy and pro-French family who had not previously worn a veil or heik, to speak—in exchange for sparing the life of her brother, whom they had already arrested and tortured.

The symbolic power of the veil during this time, however, was not only recognized by the French, but also by those fighting for Algerian liberation. In his essay Algeria Unveiled, Frantz Fanon makes the case that the veil can be a tool of anti-colonial resistance and a way of limiting access to oppressors, going so far as to call it a “bone of contention in a grandiose battle.”

During the war, the veil also became a literal tool of resistance. Some female freedom fighters for the National Liberation Front used haiks to conceal weapons and classified information; after this tactic was discovered, they used unveiling to their advantage, adopting European dress as a way to fly under the radar of the French.

How the veil has been reclaimed—and weaponized

Within France, at the intersection of gender, ethnic and religious identities, the Muslim veil or head covering took on new significance in the 20th century. Because of the popularity of orientalist art during this time, the veil already had stereotypes of the foreign and forbidden. But veiling was no longer just a physical marker of religious or cultural difference—it was also seen as an affront to assimilation, a visible symbol of resistance to colonization.

This meaning was intensified by the state’s staunch espousal of a unified French cultural and social identity, in opposition to multiculturalism. This belief can be traced all the way back to the French Revolution, which has also been credited with planting the seeds for laïcité, France’s principle of secularism. Although laïcitéoriginated in a 1905 law about the separation of church and state, it has been used in recent years as the driving force behind the anti-hijab policies.

In 2004, Muslim headscarves were among the array of religious symbols banned from being worn in French public schools. And in 2010, the country prohibited full-face veils like niqabs in public spaces like streets, parks and public transportation, becoming the first European country to enforce a nation-wide ban and even launching a government campaign that proudly stated, “the Republic is lived with an uncovered face.”

This sentiment took on a new irony at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 when France mandated mask-wearing in public spaces, while still banning Muslim face coverings.

“Muslim women who wear the hijab have always been on the receiving end of Islamophobia for their visible identity,” Nazma Khan, the founder of World Hijab Day, told TIME. “Simply put, the proposed hijab ban is a systematic vilification and discrimination against Muslim women in hijab.”

The Collective against Islamophobia in France, a non-profit that was forced by the French government to dissolve in 2020 in a move that Human Rights Watch called a “threat to basic human rights and liberties,” reported in 2019 that 70% of Islamophobic hate speech and acts in France were directed at women.

To advocates, the intense focus on a physical marker of otherness, along with the rhetoric touting women’s empowerment, can distract from what’s really at stake: what they see as France’s attempt to control citizens, as territorial residents were controlled in the past.

“If it was about giving Muslim women more agency, then in that case, you could let them or let all women wear whatever they wanted,” says Al-Saji. “But It’s actually about controlling what women wear and how they appear and what gets seen and that their bodies are seen, this kind of colonial male desire, that constructs Muslim women as trapped and pawns of their culture and needing to be unveiled.”

Source: Who Gets to Wear a Headscarf? The Complicated History Behind France’s Latest Hijab Controversy

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

How imperial hopes for the Commonwealth led to British citizenship being redefined along racial lines

2021/05/21 1 Comment

Interesting history of the policies and policy objectives:

It’s just over a year since the government released the Windrush Lessons Learned Review, an attempt to come to terms with the Windrush scandal. Recommendation six of the Review states among other things that Home Office staff should ‘learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world’. Meanwhile, recommendation eleven states that the Home Office should make sure its staff ‘understand the history of immigration legislation’. Policy reviews don’t usually redirect to history in such a definite way, and we should pay attention to the fact that this one does.

As it turns out, the connections and correlations between immigration laws and Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world in the post-war era are many and strong. The legal architecture (a mix of immigration law and nationality law) at stake in the Windrush scandal did not begin with the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts. Nor did it begin with Theresa May’s tenure as home secretary. The story is much bigger and more intrinsic to Britain’s gambit in the post-war world. This story began in 1948 and was largely complete by 1971 (a year mentioned 35 times in the Review). Fifty years ago this year, the 1971 Immigration Act was the legislative culmination of Britain’s struggle against its own nationality law, and began Britain’s modern immigration system.

The 1948 British Nationality Act set the tone for post-war Britain. It was greeted by a New York Times headline that declared ‘British empire gets new nationality act’. In other words, the act might have been named the British Imperial Citizenship Act. The 1948 act created a single, non-national citizenship around the territories of the British Isles and the crown colonies. It was momentous because it gave rights of entry and residence in Britain to millions of non-white people around the world on the basis of their connection to existing crown colonies or independent Commonwealth states. These citizenship rights were given to  ‘citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ – the forerunner to what is now called British citizenship – and to ‘Commonwealth citizens’.

The true motivations behind the 1948 Act were squarely imperial – namely, keeping the colonies and Commonwealth unified at the level of nationality, and keeping a soon-to-be-republican India in the Commonwealth. Yet, despite the fact that Britain’s formal empire was all but over by 1965, successive governments refused to dismantle these imperial structures of British nationality and citizenship, instead passing immigration laws as so many bandages on nativist wounds as the imperial heartland became home to more and more non-white migrants.

There was something strange going on here: immigration laws were targeting citizenship rights provided in British nationality law. Bizarrely, it was the post-war immigration laws (in 1962, 1968, 1971), not British nationality law itself, that dictated who ‘belonged’ in Britain, both politically and legally. At the level of British nationality and citizenship, decolonisation did not begin in Britain until 1981 and the British Nationality Act of that year. In other words, British nationality and citizenship remained imperial throughout the age of decolonisation.

These confusions intensified in the late 1960s. Worried about South Asian British citizens in East Africa migrating to Britain, a Commonwealth Office official wrote to his colleagues in 1967 that ‘we had obviously made a big mistake’ in passing the 1948 Act, which was equivalent to ‘handing out British citizenship to large numbers… Having made this mistake, we have somehow now got to pay for it’. Most of the South Asians in Kenya facing majoritarian policies in the late 1960s held an identical citizenship to Labour prime minister Harold Wilson himself and an unrestricted legal right of entry to Britain. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was designed to block their entry and left them with ‘the husk of citizenship’, as the home secretary put it in a key Cabinet meeting. This was the first time that an immigration law had been levelled at British citizens per se, and left them stateless in reality, despite their still being described as British citizens in law.

Three years later, the 1971 Immigration Act was an attempt to bring order to Britain’s immigration system. By placing the administrative burden of proof on individuals themselves, it also laid the foundation for the Windrush scandal. The 1971 Act created a peculiar new concept – a ‘patrial’, a term that referred primarily to a person’s birth in or ancestral connection to the territories of the British Isles. The home secretary himself admitted that he was not quite sure how to pronounce the archaic word. It was the patrial who now commanded the right of entry (now called ‘right of abode’) in Britain. Because patriality now served to grant rights of citizenship (entry and residence), this effectively detached citizenship rights from both citizenship of the UK and Colonies and Commonwealth citizenship. Being a patrial meant that you ‘belonged’ in Britain. As Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Henry Asquith and grandmother of Helena Bonham Carter, put it in a House of Lords debate during this period, ‘a belonger usually has a white face’. The Economist, meanwhile, described the word patrial as ‘a nasty piece of tribal jargon’.

This was indirectly a tiering of British citizenship (citizenship of the UK and Colonies) and Commonwealth citizenship along racial lines, allowing in practice white settlers to ‘return’ to Britain but keeping out non-white migrants. Tanzania’s prime minister, Julius Nyerere described British immigration policies as ‘decadent racism’. Swaran Singh, India’s minister of external affairs, lambasted the ‘racial overtones’ of the proposed 1971 Act in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament, adding that it ‘introduces the concept of “patrials” as a privileged category’. In Port of Spain, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, subsequently condemned Britain’s ‘open unadulterated and ambiguous racialisms’. But the most devastating criticism came from the veteran Indian diplomat, Apa Pant, then the Indian high commissioner to the UK. Pant intervened with home secretary Reginald Maudling, telling him that the ‘concept of “patrials”’ was ‘unmistakably racialist’ and ‘breaks up the Commonwealth into white and non-white’. Its provisions on police registration would make ‘the already tense police-immigrant relation more tense and intolerable’, while those on employment turned the working migrant into ‘virtually a “brown/black” slave labourer’. This was to say nothing of the executive powers of deportation attendant on the 1971 Act.

Britain suffered a significant reputational cost at the hands of its exclusivist immigration laws, including at the European Court of Human Rights in 1973. Why did Britain create such laws without dismantling the imperial structures of the 1948 British Nationality Act? The answer is that the 1948 Act was a constitutional pillar of what various officials, diplomats, and politicians hoped would be a British-led imperial Commonwealth – a vehicle by which to contend in the making of the post-war world. To dismantle the 1948 Act was to give up on the imperial promise of the post-war Commonwealth.

‘There is in the Commonwealth a complex of links, not only political, but economic, educational, administrative and professional’, wrote Commonwealth Office officials in 1967. The Commonwealth was ‘a special asset which could give Britain a position of central importance in the world in, say, the last two decades of this century, out of proportion to her comparative economic and military strength’. Britain wanted to have it both ways: a grand Commonwealth based on a perceived ‘Anglocentricity’ abroad and exclusivist immigration laws at home.

Source: How imperial hopes for the Commonwealth led to British citizenship being redefined along racial lines

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Burton: Time for transparency in China’s dealings with Canadian universities

2021/05/21 1 Comment

Indeed:

Canada’s free society is based on cultural expectations of reciprocal fairness and goodwill in our dealings with fellow citizens. This is what makes Canada a great place to live, and so attractive to immigrants. But our trusting nature is also vulnerable to being exploited by foreign actors with agendas that threaten our security and sovereignty.

In the case of China, its intricate manipulation practices have had enormous success in transferring research data from Canadian universities in strategically sensitive areas that serve PRC purposes. According to former CSIS director Richard Fadden, these areas include avionics, space technology, nuclear science and high-level optics research.

The fact is, China’s interference and espionage activities are hiding in plain sight in our open institutions. We need transparency about what these activities comprise, which Canadians are receiving benefits from agents of foreign states, and what form these benefits take.

Recent and troubling media reports reveal that, in 2018, the China Institute at the University of Alberta accepted a major donation from Hong Kong-based billionaire Jonathan Koon-Shum Choi, but refuses to disclose the size of Mr. Choi’s gift, the purposes to which the money has been allocated, and who are the de facto beneficiaries of this largesse.

Choi is a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), part of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), whose main mission is to gain outside support for Beijing’s political agenda.

As the U of A is a public institution, surely Alberta taxpayers deserve transparency regarding any money that supports or influences the university’s research.

Under an agreement with China’s Minister of Science and Technology, U of A researchers have had access to at least 50 state labs in China since 2005, while upward of 60 professors have received funding for more than 90 joint projects with state and national labs in China. Likewise, at the University of British Columbia, more than 300 professors have significant professional interest in China, and faculty have partnerships with over 100 Chinese institutions.

But agreements through China’s Ministry of Science and Technology are not like those with partners in democratic societies. These are not simply benign, mutually beneficial collaborations between autonomous scholars seeking to expand the frontiers of science and human understanding, as much as the UFWD would have us believe.

In China, professors are cadre-ranked state employees, their research dictated by the state ministries to which their universities and labs are subordinate. Their ultimate goal is to advance the Chinese Communist Party’s five-year plans for domestic development and global geo-strategic advantage.

China would not be funding Canadian researchers if there were no ability to access the data which the professors generate. This is about obtaining information or intellectual property that could serve the PRC’s economic and military objectives. Indeed, some Canadian participants over the long term appear to derive significant Chinese income streams beyond their university salaries, through lucrative PRC-associated board appointments and commercial inducements.

The money is an effective device. Chinese grants help Canadians pursue research projects that might not have been so well funded by Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. The profs gain prestige from undertaking work in important and sensitive areas, enjoy wonderful hospitality in China, and benefit from considerable talented Chinese research assistance — providing they hand over their work to the Chinese state to develop. The strategy spends years cultivating a Canadian target, with the recipients often not fully aware of what they’re getting themselves into.

It is reassuring that Alberta government officials have promised to protect Canada’s national interest by curtailing U of A collaborations with China in strategically sensitive science and technology, but will Ottawa initiate federal legislation such as requiring transparency in reporting of foreign sources of income? There is a powerful pro-PRC lobby in Ottawa, mostly retired politicians who are on China-related boards, including Canadian companies and law firms that benefit from the PRC. In taking China’s money, they are expected to support the interests of the PRC in Canada in return.

Beijing seems confident that, once Canadian public outrage fades over the latest reports of China’s shameless flouting of the norms of international relations, the Canadians on the PRC gravy train will resume quietly lobbying for Ottawa’s restraint in any new measures. This United Front work is a sophisticated engagement of Canada, and the PRC always seems to end up on top.

Charles Burton is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and non-resident senior fellow of the European Values Center for Security Policy in Prague. He is a former professor of political science at Brock University, and served as a diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing.

Source: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/opinion-time-for-transparency-in-chinas-dealings-with-canadian-universities/wcm/d6768c22-f35e-4eea-849c-8b41e2bf4191

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My latest: Increasing immigration to boost population? Not so fast.

2021/05/21 Leave a comment

In Policy Options:

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney recently called for a government white paper on immigration to support the Century Initiative’s advocacy in favour of a Canada of 100 million people by 2100. Immigration is seen as the most likely way to address Canada’s aging population and ensure there are a sufficient number of working adults to pay for increased health care and other costs of seniors, with calls for more than 80 per cent of Canada’s population growth to be due to immigration.

In many ways, this has parallels with the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada initiated under a Liberal government in the early 1980s that paved the way for the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement under the Conservative Mulroney government.

While a comprehensive and independent look at our immigration policies and programs is merited, any such review should take a critical look at Canada’s current and future needs, what fundamental questions need to be asked and the realities of what an increase would entail across Canadian society.

In the short term, we need to consider what the experience of past economic downturns tells us about immigrant economic outcomes. Statistics Canada’s Feng Hou gave a presentation in January of this year regarding the labour market outcomes during the COVID-19 lockdown and recovery. That presentation pointed out that following the 1990-91 recession, many recent immigrants were unemployed and under-employed, leading to criticism that Canada was overselling immigration. In contrast, immigrants arriving around the time of the 2008-9 recession were largely unscathed. It is too early to tell whether immigrant outcomes will resemble the deep and prolonged impact of 1990-91 or the minimal impact of 2008-9.

However, given what we know about which sectors (hospitality, travel, retail) and which groups (women, immigrants and visible minorities) have been most affected during COVID-19, how confident should we be that these sectors and groups will bounce back quickly? Will increased immigration exacerbate the difficulties these sectors and groups face? How likely is increased immigration to result in improved working conditions and equality for those we now recognize as “essential workers?”

In the longer term, it is striking the relative lack of attention regarding what sectors and workers are more likely to be vulnerable to automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and remote work, particularly in the context of setting a target some 80 years from now. Will professionals such as accountants, lawyers and other white-collar occupations become increasingly replaced in whole or in part? Will increased automation and AI result in “creative destruction” and new industry and job creation, or a further hollowing out of manufacturing? Will improved remote working technology lead to more offshoring and reduce the interest of moving and immigrating?

Only 8.7 per cent of recent immigrants settle outside our major urban areas. How realistic is the call for more immigrants to settle outside our major cities and urban areas? While the Provincial Nominee Program has had some success as have the various pilots (e.g., Atlantic, Northern and Remote), most new immigrants tend to settle in the larger provinces and urban centres. Government efforts to encourage immigration to francophone communities in English Canada continue to fall short of targets.

There are a number of other medium- and longer-term issues that will need to be addressed to successfully manage such growth.

To start, will governments invest in the public and private infrastructure needed to accommodate such growth, ranging from roads, transit, housing, health care, utilities and parks? Doug Saunders, in Maximum Canada, makes the convincing case that large-scale immigration requires these investments, along with other measures such as zoning to increase population density. However, experience to date suggests that Canadian governments have not done so, hampering growth and quality of life.

Canada already has difficulties meeting its climate change commitments. How likely is it that Canada will be able to do so with a significant increase in population creating further urban sprawl? Even if Canada manages to reduce emissions on a per-capita basis, a larger population will mean an overall increase in carbon emissions.

Will the general consensus among provincial governments in favour of more immigration increasingly confront the reality of Quebec’s reduced percentage of the Canadian population and the consequent increasing imbalance between population and representation in our various political and judicial institutions? How will Indigenous peoples, the fastest-growing group in Canada, perceive increased immigration, compared to addressing their socioeconomic and political issues?

The coalition that the Century Initiative is building in favour of increased immigration across the business community, non-governmental organizations, academics and others is impressive. The business community interest is clear: more immigrants mean more customers. But for any review or commission to be meaningful, it needs to engage with a broader group than those who already favour increased immigration and focus on per capita, rather than overall, growth.

Moreover, such a review has to question the fundamental premise that more immigration will “substantially alter Canada’s age structure and impending increase in the dependency ratio” when the available evidence suggests it will not.

A white paper that largely replicates the group think of the Century Initiative and related players rather than a much-needed more thoughtful and balanced discussion would be a disservice to Canadians.

Source: https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2021/increasing-immigration-to-boost-population-not-so-fast/

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After Australia Banned Its Citizens in India From Coming Home, Many Ask: Who Is Really Australian?

2021/05/20 3 Comments

Valid questioning:

When Ara Sharma Marar’s father had a stroke in India in early April, she got on the first flight she could from her home in Melbourne, Australia to New Delhi.

She had planned to return to Australia, where she works in risk management at a bank, on May 14. But then her government banned her from coming home. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced on April 27 that travelers from India—including citizens—were barred from the country. The government emphasized that anyone who tried to come home would face up to five years in jail and a $50,000 fine.

“It’s immoral, unjustifiable and completely un-Australian because, you know, Australia prides itself saying that we are multicultural, we embrace all cultures, we welcome everyone,” she says.

Morrison faced a furious backlash from many corners from the country—especially from Australians of South Asian ethnicity, many of whom said the ban was racist—and quickly backed down. On May 15 the first repatriation flight from India landed in Darwin. But around 9,000 Australians remain stranded in India and the saga has revived the debate about what it means to be Australian—a longstanding, at times acrimonious, national conversation driven by the country’s ever-changing demographics.

Today, there are more foreign-born Australians than at any time since 1893, when Australia was still a British colony. Migrants make up 30% of all Australians, and Indian-born Australians are the second-largest group. (British immigrants remain the largest foreign-born population, with people from China in third place). Immigration is now the main driver of population growth in several states and migrants are a significant driver of economic growth. But some immigrants say they aren’t always accepted in a country that once closed its doors to non-Europeans.

“Many Anglo-Celtic Australians still believe that we are but guests in this country and that to acknowledge us as equals they will somehow lose their Australianism,” says Molina Asthana, co-founder of advocacy group Asian Australian Alliance. “Does being Australian mean you have to be light skinned, blond, love your barbies, brekkies and beers?” she asks.

‘Fortress Australia’ strands citizens overseas

Several countries, including the U.S., restricted flights from India or tightened quarantine rules on travelers coming from the country as a devastating second wave hit it. But Australia’s total ban on arrivals from India follows a pandemic policy of imposing of some of the strictest COVID-19 border controls in the world.

Australia bans nearly all non-residents from traveling to the country, and those who are able to enter must quarantine for 14 days in a hotel. Caps on international arrivals have prevented tens of thousands of Australians from returning from overseas during the pandemic. The hashtag #strandedaussies has been used hundreds of times on social media, and some have started referring to the country as “Fortress Australia.” One group of Australians is taking a complaint against the Australian government to the United Nations Human Rights Committee for not allowing its citizens to return home.

Nevertheless, the controls are very popular. A poll in conservative newspaper The Australian found that 73% of voters supported international borders remaining closed until at least mid-2022. That’s likely because the policies—along with swift, strict lockdowns when cases pop up—mean that the country has had remarkable success against COVID-19. With a population of 26 million, it has recorded fewer than than 30,000 coronavirus cases and just 910 deaths. Life appears normal. Employees have returned to their offices. Thousands of mostly maskless fans packed into a Melbourne stadium to watch the Australian Open in February and the following month saw tens of thousands of not-so-socially-distanced revelers attend the LGBT+ celebration Sydney Mardi Gras.

Authorities justified the blanket ban on arrivals from India as necessary to protect public health; India is facing a devastating second wave of COVID-19 and a variant first identified there—which scientists say is likely more infectious and better at evading human immune systems—is being detected across the Asia-Pacific. Australia’s chief medical officer Paul Kelly said on May 7 that the ban was explicitly linked to Australia’s limited quarantine capacity.

But many Australians of Indian descent feel singled out because the Australian government has not barred citizens returning home from other countries with large outbreaks. “Why weren’t these steps taken when it was America or U.K.?” asks Sharma Marar, who believes that the government has failed all of its nationals stuck overseas. She says that she is suffering from panic attacks and having trouble sleeping as the result of the stress of not being able to return home.

Kim Soans-Sharma, who remains stuck in Mumbai, India after she traveled there in January following her father’s death, says the ban has made her feel “unwanted.” That’s something she has never felt in Perth, Australia, which she’s called home since 2013. She adds that vitriolic comments from some Australians on social media showing no sympathy for other citizens like her stuck in India have been hard to bear.

“At this stage, I’m not proud to call myself an Australian,” she says.

How Australia became an ‘immigration nation’

Australia’s rising diversity in recent decades follows the expressly racist White Australia Policy that prevented migration by non-Europeans for much of the 20th century. When it became clear that immigration from Britain couldn’t provide the necessary population growth, more migrants from continental Europe were allowed, and the policy was slowly eased after World War II. The first step towards dismantling it was made in 1966, when the government allowed migration based on what skills people could offer Australia, instead of race or nationality. The White Australia Policy was then formally renounced in the early 1970s, and the government officially embraced multiculturalism.

However, the topic of immigration has been used as a political football for decades, with some successive governments unsupportive of migration. Many who arrive in Australia are skilled migrants, and some economists say that the country’s 27-year recession-free streak would not have been possible without immigration. A report by the research institute the McKell Institute calls the country “the world’s most successful” multicultural society. “Australia has truly embraced multiculturalism following an approach of integration between the different ethnicities and cultural groups where the dominant and minority groups are expected to respect each other’s cultures,” it says.

There are some tensions, however. Concerns over immigration have sparked a nativist movement, including a right-wing populist political party with an anti-immigration platform that has had minor success at the polls. A 2020 report on social cohesion released by the Scanlon Foundation, a foundation focused on fostering social cohesion in Australia, found that a large majority of Australians think that having a multicultural society makes Australia better, but 60% of people agreed with the statement that “too many immigrants are not adopting Australian values.” The report also noted substantial negative sentiment towards immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

In one 2019 survey, more than two-thirds said that Australia did not need more people. The same year, Morrison announced a cap on permanent migration at 160,000, a cut of 30,000 a year, to address crowding in cities that has increased real estate prices and caused congestion. “This plan is about protecting the quality of life of Australians right across our country,” he said.

Like in many places in the world, immigrants in Australia have faced racism as the result of the pandemic. The Asian Australian Alliance has received 530 reports of COVID-19-related racism since April 2020. When a COVID-19 surge hit Melbourne in mid-2020, representatives from a Muslim migrant community spoke out about being unfairly blamed. In March, Australia’s race discrimination commissioner Chin Tan called for a new national anti-racism framework to address prejudice against Asian-Australians related to the coronavirus pandemic and the legacy of “hatred” towards Muslims.

Asthana, of the Asian Australian Alliance, says the India travel ban is emblematic of the racism that migrants can face in Australia. “Whether it is overt racism or unconscious bias, most migrants have been at the receiving end of discriminatory treatment,” she says. “Only the communities change over time, from Greek and Italian to Chinese, then the Vietnamese, Indian and African and now back to the wider Asian Community during COVID.”

Tim Soutphommasane, Australia’s former race discrimination commissioner, says that Australia’s multicultural diversity is not represented yet in its major institutions. “It’s not yet there among our leaders of politics, government, and business. Nor is it there among the faces you see in the national media,” he says. “So that can feed into a sense within our elite political, business and media circles that being Australian is still essentially being Anglo-Celtic or European.”

Other experts say that what it means to be Australian is shifting along with its demographics. “Australia is a settler country,” says Catherine Gomes, an ethnographer at RMIT University in Australia, with a “social and cultural identity, that keeps on changing. Those identities start to adapt, according to how demographics are also changing.”

But for some Australians, those changes aren’t coming quickly enough. Despite the lifting of the ban, Sharma Marar says she won’t forget being barred from coming home.

“I think the scars of these policies and what has been done in last few weeks,” she says, “will live with us forever.”

Source: After Australia Banned Its Citizens in India From Coming Home, Many Ask: Who Is Really Australian?

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H-1B visa: American Silicon Valley veteran employs foreign workers in Canada for U.S. firms

2021/05/20 Leave a comment

Canadian competitive advantage:

When a client of Marc Pavlopoulos’ tech-recruiting company asked for help placing an engineer outside the U.S. four years ago, Pavlopoulos thought of a possible solution: Canada. It might be a long shot since he knew from his time getting an MBA and working there that immigration officials were wary of foreign citizens taking jobs from Canadians. It turned out things had changed up north.

Eager to build up its technology industry, Canada had just launched a pilot project to provide Canadian companies with fast, reliable access to skilled foreign workers by making visas quick and easy to obtain. “Sure enough, we got the person in,” recalled Pavlopoulos, who spent years in Silicon Valley watching companies and foreign workers struggle with U.S. immigration and work permit systems.

But it wasn’t until he responded to another request for help from a frustrated Bay Area startup founder, and ended up talking to a Canadian immigration officer who encouraged him to use the new “Global Talent Stream” program to bring in “a bigger volume” of tech workers, that Pavlopoulos realized he might be onto a budding new business: employing tech workers for U.S. companies in Canada.

His outsourcing startup, Syndesus, makes an end-run around a big problem plaguing U.S. businesses seeking top tech talent. Foreign workers are often out of reach because the H-1B visa, allocated by lottery and intended for jobs requiring specialized skills, is hard to get and the path to a green card and citizenship is long and uncertain. Syndesus, a small but growing part of Pavlopoulos’ tech-talent business, helps American companies obtain workers who can’t get a visa in the U.S.

“Same laptop, same job, but they’re sitting in Vancouver,” he said.

Pavlopoulos has found opportunity amid a confluence of thorny issues in a global tech market: competition for skilled workers, a shortage of American workers with specialized skills, high labor costs in Silicon Valley and other U.S. hubs, and underlying it all, dramatic differences between the American and Canadian processes for bringing in foreign workers. In Canada, permanent residency — the equivalent of a green card — usually comes after a year or two, and citizenship typically follows in three to four-and-a-half years, Pavlopoulos said. In the U.S., the average wait for a green card is nearly six years, according to a Cato Institute report, with another five years before citizenship is possible. Many foreign workers wait much longer.

At the root of the problem for U.S. employers is that their demand outstrips the supply of new H-1B visas allocated each year. Around 200,000 applications from employers typically pour in each year for 85,000 visas. When an employer’s candidate — or a worker already employed on an expiring student visa — has not won the H-1B lottery, firms like Pavlopoulos’ step in. They remotely employ the workers, pay them and provide benefits and legal compliance, while billing the U.S. company for their costs and services.

America’s furor over immigration has swept up the H-1B, which helps firms secure foreign workers but whose critics say is used to acquire cheaper labor. Uncertainty about lingering effects from a crackdown on the H-1B program by the administration of former President Donald Trump, combined with relatively onerous immigration and work permit processes and a pandemic-induced shift to remote work, have made the demand for Syndesus’ services stronger.

“Every day now, I’m on a call with someone whose H-1B didn’t get picked in the lottery,” Pavlopoulos said.

Pavlopoulos, who worked in the Bay Area in software sales before launching a recruiting firm, is now based in New York, employing a handful of skilled workers in Canada on behalf of U.S. companies through an outsourcing model known as a “professional employer organization.” Typically, PEOs provide a worker with the benefits of direct employment in a structure that resembles contract work.

Canada’s Consul General in San Francisco said the PEO industry is expanding rapidly, to his country’s benefit. “We’re in a global talent race right now,” Rana Sarkar said.

Canada, after relying for decades on logging, mining, hydroelectric power, and oil and gas to power its economy, has diversified rapidly and successfully into tech, leveraging a group of high-caliber universities and world-leading research centers. The country for nearly a decade has been smoothing the way for foreign workers to feed its boom, even buying billboard ads in Silicon Valley to woo workers at one point.

Pavlopoulos also believes the PEO industry is ripe to expand, in part because “most Silicon Valley tech companies do not know that this option exists.” In the first two years of his new business, Syndesus helped three tech workers who couldn’t stay in the U.S. get Canadian work visas. Pavlopoulos is applying for work permits for another six tech workers on expiring student visas and expects they’ll be living and working in Canada in four to eight weeks.

Companies whose work is done in Canada via a PEO also get the advantage of lower health insurance costs, and usually, lower salaries, Pavlopoulos said. But what many employers say they want most is good people, and quickly, he said.

Daniel Mandelbaum, a Toronto immigration lawyer who works with Pavlopoulos, added that Syndesus provides certainty for U.S. companies and employees. “The worker doesn’t have to be looking over their shoulder on temporary residence status,” he said.

Given Canada’s drive to bring in 1.2 million immigrants this year and the next two, and U.S. demand for skilled workers continuing to outstrip available visas, Mandelbaum expects he’ll continue to “feed this hungry beast south of the border” with tech workers located in Canada.

“This is the start of it,” Mandelbaum said. “We’re ramping up.”

Source: H-1B visa: American Silicon Valley veteran employs foreign workers in Canada for U.S. firms

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Kheiriddin: Boycotting Beijing 2022 may not change China, but it will spoil its glory

2021/05/20 Leave a comment

Of note and agree:

As the countdown continues to the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, human rights groups called this week for a full-blown boycott, given accusations of China committing genocide against its minority Uyghur Muslim population and its recent suppression of basic freedoms in Hong Kong.

According to a coalition that includes Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kong residents, “The time for talking with the IOC (International Olympic Committee) is over.” The statement comes the same week that the U.S. Congress is holding hearings on the issue, and days after the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said boycotts are ineffective and only hurt athletes.

Source: Boycotting Beijing 2022 may not change China, but it will spoil its glory

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