Rioux: L’assimilation

2021/06/19 Leave a comment

All too true in the early days but unclear whether the early largely peaceful environment would have survived if France had remained an imperial power in North America and had evolved from the fur trade to agriculture. After all, the early days of the British empire in Canada were also based on the fur trade and cooperation with Indigenous peoples:

« La civilisation espagnole a écrasé l’Indien ; la civilisation anglaise l’a méprisé et négligé ; la civilisation française l’a étreint et chéri ».

— Francis Parkman

Nous vivons une étrange époque où l’humanité se rêve une et indivisible avec tout ce que cela recèle d’esprit totalitaire. Les Américains ont été esclavagistes, voilà que les Occidentaux se bousculent comme des enfants à la maternelle pour crier : « Moi aussi ! » L’impérialisme américain fait son mea culpa et, dans tous les stades du monde, on met le genou par terre.

Rien de tel pour éradiquer un peuple que de supprimer son histoire propre. Si la citation de l’historien américain Francis Parkman est réductrice, elle a l’avantage de montrer que nous n’avons pas tous eu la même histoire. À l’heure où l’on s’interroge sur les pensionnats autochtones qui ont eu pour mission d’assimiler les Amérindiens du Canada, il n’est pas inutile de donner la parole, non plus aux militants, mais aux historiens. Nombreux sont ceux qui ont estimé que, même si le choc civilisationnel a été partout le même, les colonisateurs français n’ont pas eu le même rapport aux Autochtones que les colonisateurs espagnols et anglais.

C’est la thèse que défend notamment le biographe américain de Champlain David Hackett Fischer. On connaît la célèbre citation du fondateur de Québec rapportée par le jésuite Paul Le Jeune : « Nos garçons se marieront à vos filles, et nous ne ferons plus qu’un seul peuple. » De l’alliance avec le chef montagnais Anadabijou (1603) à la Grande Paix de Montréal à laquelle participèrent une quarantaine de tribus (1701), les Français n’auront eu de cesse de nouer des alliances avec les Amérindiens et d’apprendre leurs langues pour explorer le continent. Exégète de Champlain et responsable de ses œuvres complètes, l’historien français Éric Thierry voit dans celui-ci un humaniste.

D’autres historiens ont souligné que ces alliances étaient une nécessité compte tenu de la faiblesse démographique de la colonisation française. Reste que, contrairement aux colons anglais, les Français se sont alliés aux Amérindiens au point de former au Manitoba une nation métisse, « seule société où Blancs et Amérindiens réussiront à vivre ensemble », écrit Denys Delâge (Le pays renversé, Boréal). Et l’historien de conclure que si « le pouvoir politique canadien » écrasa la société métisse au XIXe siècle, c’est qu’« elle était son antithèse. »

Sans prétendre à une quelconque supériorité morale, des auteurs comme Gilles Havard ont montré que les Français d’Ancien Régime ont cultivé avec les Amérindiens certaines affinités qu’on ne retrouve pas chez le conquérant anglais où le capitalisme était déjà plus avancé et les rapports plus contractuels. Pensons au goût des festins, au sens de l’honneur, du sacrifice, de l’apparat et à l’importance des cadeaux, de la parole et des discours. De Radisson, surnommé l’« Indien blanc », au baron de Saint-Castin, devenu chef Mic Mac, l’histoire unique en Amérique de ces mœurs partagées émaille les récits des voyageurs de l’époque.

« Si tous les Européens partageaient un sentiment de supériorité culturelle vis-à-vis des Indiens et si le désir d’assimilation reposait partout sur la négation de l’Autre […] la Nouvelle-France ne s’en ouvrait pas moins aux Indiens, les intégrait dans son système politico-culturel, quand les colonies anglaises bien souvent les excluaient », écrit Gilles Havard (Histoire de l’Amérique française, Flammarion).

La Conquête aura donc sur eux des conséquences terribles, souligne Denis Vaugeois : « Aussi longtemps que la rivalité anglo-française avait duré en Amérique du Nord, les Indiens […] avaient eu une carte à jouer. En quelque sorte, ils détenaient une forme de balance du pouvoir. Dans les années qui suivirent, ils étaient à la merci du vainqueur. […] Ils sont devenus tout simplement encombrants. » (L’impasse amérindienne, Septentrion).

S’instaura alors une forme d’apartheid où l’Indien deviendra un être inférieur, pupille de l’État colonial britannique. Dès le rapport Darling (1828), les pensionnats sont promus dans le but de sédentariser, « civiliser » et assimiler les Autochtones qui sont alors encore semi-nomades. Avant d’être reprise par la Loi sur les Indiens, trois commissions d’enquête viendront confirmer cette véritable politique d’assimilation dont l’esprit est identique à celle que Lord Durham avait préconisée pour les Canadiens français.

Est-ce un hasard si ces pensionnats furent si peu nombreux au Québec où, à deux exceptions, ils n’apparurent que dans les années 1950 ? Les conditions matérielles y seront donc bien meilleures et leur durée de vie très courte. Ce qui n’exonère évidemment personne, notamment les Oblats actifs ailleurs au Canada, des sévices qui purent y être commis. Les 38 morts recensés au Québec semblent sans commune mesure avec les 4134 recensés au Canada Anglais. Dans son livre Histoire des pensionnats indiens catholiques au Québec (PUM), Henri Goulet offre un portrait beaucoup plus nuancé que ce qu’on peut lire dans les médias. L’histoire de cette époque reste pourtant largement à écrire.

Mais, ce serait se leurrer que de s’imaginer que cette politique d’assimilation inscrite dans l’ADN du Canada est chose du passé. La détresse des peuples autochtones ainsi que l’assimilation florissante des jeunes Québécois dans les cégeps anglais en sont la preuve éloquente. Des pensionnats autochtones à l’Université Concordia, le résultat est le même : l’assimilation !

Source:

Filed under Aboriginal Tagged with , ,

MPs’ study of systemic racism in policing concludes RCMP needs new model

2021/06/19 Leave a comment

Yet more indication of the RCMP’s challenges with no easy or quick solutions:

It’s time for Canada to have a “reckoning” about the RCMP, says the chair of a House of Commons committee that studied systemic racism in policing.

John McKay, a Toronto Liberal MP and chair of the House public safety committee, said the Mounties are a globally known Canadian icon, but it’s time to acknowledge the RCMP’s “quasi-military” existence is not working for all Canadians.

“There is a season and a time for a reckoning for every country and its institutions,” McKay said at a news conference Thursday.

“This in my judgment is a time for Canada to have a reckoning with itself and with its premier institutions.”

The public safety committee began the study of systemic racism in policing in June 2020, after weeks of protests in Canada and the United States following the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

Floyd’s death also turned a spotlight on racism and police in Canada. Jack Harris, the NDP public safety critic, moved a motion to study systemic racism in policing on June 23, 2020, and the committee agreed. The report was issued Thursday, based on 19 meetings, testimony from 53 witnesses and more than a dozen written briefs.

The report says MPs on the committee can conclude only that “systemic racism in policing in Canada is a real and pressing problem to be urgently addressed.”

But the MPs also admit that this report is just the latest in a long list of studies and reviews that concluded the same thing, none of which led to much change.

Harris said Thursday “it is more clear than ever before that the RCMP needs transformational change” but is worried because he says the Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “has a history of failing to act on reports.”

“The time is now to take serious and concrete action. The RCMP needs to move away from the paramilitary colonial model to a police service model with strong civilian oversight.”

The committee also calls for mandatory data collection on excessive use of force, better training on de-escalation and responding to people in a mental health crisis, more diversity in police forces and oversight bodies, and better funding for Indigenous police forces, including in urban areas with large Indigenous populations.

The MPs also want better parameters for when force is permitted to be used by police, and “serious consequences” for RCMP officers who use force excessively.

The Conservatives, in a supplementary report, urged more work on that front, saying it is not clear from the witnesses whether the problem is in guidelines for use of force, or a lack of training and enforcement regarding those guidelines.

The committee has requested that the government provide a “comprehensive response” to the report.

Moya Teklu, executive director and general counsel at the Black Legal Action Centre in Toronto, said the “most promising” recommendations in the report are decriminalizing simple possession of drugs, offering pardons to people previously convicted of simple possession, and ensuring police discretion to offer alternatives to the courts be used equitably for Black and other racialized youths.

She is less enthusiastic about the impact of more training and oversight for the RCMP, saying there isn’t much evidence they’ll help.

“Demilitarization is an important step,” she said. “But only if it also means spending less money on policing.”

Teklu said the report’s findings are not new for Black and Indigenous communities.

“An acknowledgment of the existence and reality of systemic racism at different levels of government is important,” she said. “A reduction in the Black and Indigenous prison populations, and a reduction in the number of Black and Indigenous people that are stopped, questioned, surveilled, arrested, beaten and murdered by police is more important. That is the real change we want to see.”

Quebec Liberal MP Greg Fergus, who chairs the Parliamentary Black caucus and participated in the committee’s study, agreed the existence of systemic racism is not a revelation.

But he said the committee has done valuable work in listening and responding to multiple witnesses who were able to speak about the issue in depth.

“What’s also new is that there’s a road map now, because of this report, this unanimous report of parliamentarians from all walks of life,” he said. They have laid out a very clear process forward to make the changes, “not only in the RCMP but in police services across the country which can be inspired by this.”

“That’s what’s new. That’s what’s important. That’s what’s necessary.”

Source: MPs’ study of systemic racism in policing concludes RCMP needs new model

Filed under Aboriginal, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Museum exhibits works by Polish artist confronting Holocaust

2021/06/19 Leave a comment

Of note:

Warsaw’s Jewish history museum opened an exhibition Thursday featuring works by a renowned Polish artist that confront the lingering and melancholy presence of the Holocaust in Poland, where Nazi German forces carried out their destruction of Europe’s Jews and other atrocities.

“Wilhem Sasnal: Such a Landscape” opened Thursday at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The dozens of paintings and drawings on display confront the Holocaust in the nation’s physical and mental landscape and the difficulty in addressing an unsettled past.

Sasnal, who is not Jewish, has for two decades been grappling with this history. The 48-year-old described a generational need to confront the past, also because parts of Polish society refuse to acknowledge that while Poland was victimized by Nazi Germany, there were also some Poles who joined in the despoliation and murder of the nation’s Jews.

For decades after World War II, such discussions were taboo, with the themes of Polish sacrifice and honor dominating historical memory. But with the new openness that came with the fall of communism in 1989, scholars and artists began studying and speaking openly of anti-Semitism and the participation by some Poles in the German crimes. Each new book or film has touched a raw nerve.

“The history of the Second World War was obscured until 1989,” Sasnal said.

It was then “extremely shocking,” he said, when scholars began to reveal wartime wrongdoing by Poles, including the 1941 killing of hundreds of Jews by Poles in the town of Jedwabne.

“At the beginning I felt anger and shame,” he told The Associated Press.

“And it’s still so difficult to see that people don’t want to acknowledge it. People totally refuse, and this is the mainstream Polish government attitude.”

Sasnal is one of Poland’s most prominent living artists. His works are included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others.

Sasnal also acknowledged that Poland is often unfairly judged — that sometimes those outside of Poland lose sight of the bigger picture.

Poland was occupied by German forces who killed millions of Polish citizens — some 2 million Christian Poles as well as 3 million Jews. Many Poles fought the Germans at home and abroad and the state never collaborated with Nazi Germany. Thousands of Poles have also been recognized by Yad Vashem for risking their own lives to save Jews.

Yet Sasnal believes that Poles must acknowledge the bad along with the good.

“Unless we accept such a complex past, we will be judged and we will be misjudged,” he said.

The exhibition comprises two decades of works that touch in some way on the Holocaust — works that Sasnal did while also dealing with other topics.

The oldest ones were inspired by cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust cartoon stories in his “Maus” books. The newest ones were created this year especially for the exhibition.

There are paintings of former death camps, but they are always contextualized, with Sasnal’s bike or his wife looking from inside a car at the gates of Auschwitz — because to depict the death camps alone would be too banal and brutal, he said.

The Auschwitz paintings were produced after he and his wife passed by the memorial site on their way home from a New Year’s Eve party on Jan. 1. Millions travel to the site from around the world. But for many Poles — including Sasnal, who lives in nearby Krakow — the presence of genocide memorial sites are part of the landscape of daily life.

A painting of an imagined map of Poland bordering Israel recalls the long co-existence of Jews with Poles in Poland, a Jewish homeland for centuries.

A portrait of Hitler has been covered in black paint and crossed out with a wooden bar, an evil too extreme to depict figuratively.

Paintings that draw on images first created by French painter Edgar Degas, an antisemite, are reminders of the antisemitism pervasive across Europe that created fertile soil for the Holocaust. One evokes a bathing women modeled on a Degas work superimposed with a swastika.

Paintings of Gypsies or stereotypical images of Africans in the popular imagination show how other groups, along with Jews, have long been considered the “other” in society.

Ahead of the opening, the curator, Adam Szymczyk, braced for the possibility that this exhibition, too, might spark anger from nationalists and right-wingers.

But now that a right-wing party runs the country — and is a co-partner in the museum, which is a public-private partnership — he said he expected the reaction to be more muted.

He said both he and Sasnal were driven by a need to express remorse.

“I think this is our way of saying sorry on behalf of others,” he said. “The others don’t say ‘I’m sorry’ so we have to. It’s a duty.”

The exhibition runs until January 10.

Source: Museum exhibits works by Polish artist confronting Holocaust

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

HASSAN: London tragedy exposes need to examine violence against Muslims

2021/06/19 2 Comments

Of note on the need for precision when using terms such as Islamophobia, anti-Muslim hate, antisemitism:

The horrific deaths of a Muslim family in London on June 6 have sparked conversations about loosely, sometimes interchangeably, used terms like Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate. It would be worthwhile to examine these in detail. The ramifications for each term are different regarding freedom of speech issues, especially in the context of M-103, tabled by MP Iqra Khalid in 2018.

Islamophobia is a loaded word that can mean one of several things. It can mean fear of Islam, its practices, Islamic culture and fear of Muslims as its adherents. The last of these can sometimes translate into attacks on Muslims. When the term is used loosely, it can simply mean fear and hatred of Muslims. These have ramifications for Muslims in Canada when it comes to safety and security.

Anti-Muslim hate is specifically hatred toward the Muslim people, whether rooted in a dislike of Islam or not. This, too, can lead to violence against Muslims. In essence, both phenomena can lead to unfortunate results as we have seen a second time in Canada. The meanings tend to overlap.

Can these terms be compared to anti-Semitism? The latter term would correspond better to anti-Muslim hate, although the notion that criticism of the state of Israel is also anti-Semitism has wider ramifications. In the latter sense, we can also compare the term to the all-encompassing “Islamophobia.”

Anti-Muslim hate is utterly reprehensible and has no place in Canada. No community should be despised to the point of being denied the right to life, liberty, and property. Holding a negative opinion of Muslim practices or tenets of the Islamic faith should not automatically mean that Muslims should be wiped out or denied the same rights others take for granted.

But does this mean one has no right to criticize a world religion like Islam? After all, there is complete freedom to criticize other world faiths, including Christianity, followed by most Canadians. Most liberal democracies realize it is the fundamental right of citizens to question their own faith, to have the freedom to speak their minds on matters of faith, values, and ideologies and to scrutinize not only political philosophies but also religious dicta, especially when these have harmed society in general and women and marginalized groups in particular. Public discourse on Islam generally does not castigate an entire community. Often, an effort is made to separate a particular practice or belief from the larger body of believers in public discourse. Castigating an entire community would most certainly violate the rights guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Thus, since the meanings above overlap, it is crucial to examine how we can address violence against Muslims and still uphold freedom of speech as an inalienable right.

The overlap in meaning between Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate makes it that much harder to tread the fine line of criticism of Islam in public discourse and spare Muslims fallout. While public discourse is careful not to cross the boundaries of free speech, it is perhaps just as important for people in private gatherings not to paint all Muslims with the same brush.

Are these boundaries being crossed more often in private rather than public gatherings? Would they continue to generate the type of inordinate hate that translates into heinous crimes like the one we witnessed in London?

Source: HASSAN: London tragedy exposes need to examine violence against Muslims

Filed under Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Citizenship Modernization Case Study

2021/06/19 Leave a comment

This deck looks at the Canadian citizenship program and the need for modernization in the context of Budget 2021’s allocation of funding to upgrade IRCC’s IT infrastructure. It contrast the current citizenship process with a streamlined process that makes it easier for applicants and more efficient for the government. This was presented at a modernization discussion organized by the Public Policy Forum.

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Canada’s data gaps hampered pandemic response, hurting vaccination tracking: report

2021/06/18 Leave a comment

An area that governments need to address:

The pandemic has exposed significant problems with how Canada gathers and processes data on everything from case numbers to vaccinations, which has hurt the country’s response to COVID-19, a new report conducted for the federal government says.

Canada could not track the spread of the virus as effectively as it needed to last year, according to a report prepared by the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy Expert Advisory Group that will be made public Thursday. The country is now struggling to keep tabs on vaccine effectiveness because of flaws in the system, including how different jurisdictions record and share information.

These data gaps, created by a patchwork of health systems that don’t always work together and often code data in different ways, need to be addressed with a national approach, the report warns.

“There is no doubt that our response to the pandemic has been severely limited as a result,” says an advance copy of the report, which was reviewed by The Globe and Mail.

The report was ordered by Ottawa last year to examine data problems exposed by COVID-19. The group will put together a list of recommendations to the Public Health Agency of Canada and other departments on how to fix these weaknesses, said Vivek Goel, who chaired the review.

When the COVID-19 outbreak hit, problems in reporting new cases, symptoms and other crucial data became apparent in Canada’s patchwork system. Since provincial and territorial jurisdictions don’t necessarily use the same standards for collecting or codifying information, pooling crucial data on a national level became difficult.

“Early on it was challenging to get a full national picture, even of basic case counts,” Dr. Goel said, noting that crucial information such as the sites of the outbreaks, or the occupations of those who became ill, weren’t always collected, codified, or shared between health jurisdictions. This prevented policy makers from knowing where and how hot spots were developing, and where the next crisis might be lurking.

“That [information] is something that is collected on the front lines of public health as people do their interviews, or it is collected at the time someone goes for testing. But if it’s not collected in a consistent way in every place and then coded and loaded into the system, we don’t wind up with a good picture,” Dr. Goel said.

“I would say if we had some of that information in a more timely manner, we might have had some decisions [by the government] being made sooner,” Dr. Goel said.

The country got better at processing information as the pandemic progressed, but “Canada had had some pretty significant challenges early on in even getting some of that basic data shared and uploaded,” he said.

These data gaps have become magnified as the country tries to mount a rapid immunization campaign across those same varied jurisdictions. Lacking the ability to quickly and effectively pool data from around the country, Canada is struggling to track, in real time, how effectively the vaccines are working in the broader population.

“Probably the most important question around vaccination in Canada is around the effectiveness of the vaccines in the real world with the dosing schedules and approaches that we’ve taken in Canada, because we’re the country that’s taken the longest dose interval,” Dr. Goel said.

“We’ve got reports that have started to come out, but they’re coming out at the provincial level,” he said. “We don’t have a national report, and every province’s systems are slightly different. So we wind up with slightly different estimates. They’re not going to be comparable.”

More detailed data on vaccine uptake is also difficult to compile, he said. “We need to have data coming together around how many people have been immunized by age group, occupation codes, all sorts of information. For example, people want to know how many teachers have had [the vaccine]. But we don’t have systems that really allow us to easily bring that kind of data together,” Dr. Goel said.

Questions specific to Canada, such as the effectiveness of mixing vaccines, are also hard to answer without properly collecting and analyzing data from across the country, he said. “We’ve got more of this mixing and matching coming up, so we need to be generating real-world evidence on how well it’s working,” Dr. Goel said.

The findings echo a report by the Auditor-General of Canada in March that said the government lacked proper data procedures to accurately track the spread of the virus. Dr. Goel said the issues are due to a number of causes, from lack of investment and concerns over privacy breaches to provinces simply wanting to oversee their own systems.

He also noted that various reports and governments have tried to address these issues in the past, but the problems were never fixed. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, Ottawa oversaw the creation of a database system known as Panorama, intended to improve infectious-disease surveillance and immunization tracking on a national level. However, the project struggled to gain support, ran into numerous roadblocks and was never effective.

“Despite all these good intentions, we don’t seem to make the progress we’d like to see,” said Dr. Goel, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health who is leaving to become president of the University of Waterloo next month.

The report calls for Ottawa to work with provinces and territories, as well as First Nations, Inuit and Métis organizations, to build a system where health data, including information on outbreaks and immunization, can be pooled effectively, and governments can act faster. Overcoming privacy concerns is a key challenge, and any such initiative must ensure that personalized information is protected, the report says.

“We need to tackle the root causes of the problems that have plagued our ability to make progress toward a common aim for all Canadians,” the report says. “Put simply, our systems, processes and policies are geared towards an analog world, while we live in a digital age.”

Dr. Goel said there are several examples of countries that collect, share and process data better than Canada, while still protecting privacy and respecting regional autonomy. Several Scandinavian countries have systems Canada should seek to emulate, he said, while the British, despite having data challenges of their own, have a more effective surveillance system implemented across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

“There are models for how we could approach that in Canada, but until we get to the point where we work together on these things, we wind up with these siloed sorts of approaches across the country,” Dr. Goel said.

“These issues have been underscored through Canada’s response to COVID-19,” the report says. The challenges include “timely collection and use of testing, case and vaccination data; assessing impacts of the pandemic in specific populations; sharing genomic data for management of variants; and the persistent challenges of long-term care.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadas-data-gaps-hampered-pandemic-response-hurting-vaccination/

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

South Korea citizenship law change proposal sparks anti-China backlash

2021/06/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

South Korea is trying to increase its future working population by making it easier for children of foreign residents to become citizens, but its plans have run into trouble in the face of rising anti-China sentiment.

A measure proposed by the Ministry of Justice — first made public in April — called for easing the pathway to citizenship for children born to long-term foreign residents, by simply notifying the ministry.
But a presidential petition opposing the revision has gathered over 300,000 signatures. The chatroom of an online hearing held to discuss the proposal in May was overwhelmed with expletive-laced complaints by tens of thousands of viewers.
The justice ministry has said it is still taking into account public opinion and the advice of experts before submitting the proposal to the Ministry of Government Legislation.
“Given the strong backlash, I would say the ministry has already lost much of the momentum to push ahead with the proposal,” said Jang Yun-mi, an attorney who specializes in issues related to children.
The controversy highlights the challenges South Korea faces as it seeks to ensure a robust future population in the face of declining birthrates and rapidly aging workers, and the potential policy implications of increasingly negative views of China, its biggest trading partner.
Data from last year suggests only about 3,930 people would be eligible under the rule change, but the fact that 3,725 of them were of Chinese heritage prompted much of the criticism.
South Korean views have been colored by what some see as economic bullying by Beijing, its initial poor handling of the Covid-19 crisis, and the assertion by some Chinese that dearly held aspects of Korean food and culture, such as kimchi and the traditional hanbok dress, have roots in China.
Among immigrant communities, the proposed measures are not seen as worth the backlash, said Kim Yong-phil, editor-in-chief of E Korea World, a local newspaper for Chinese-Koreans.
“Anti-Chinese people could use this issue as a pretext to attack Chinese-Koreans,” he said.

Population decline

Naturalization was rare in South Korea until the early 2000s — just 33 foreigners gained South Korean citizenship in 2000, for example — but rose to nearly 14,000 last year, immigration data show.
Of them, nearly 58% were from China, and 30% from Vietnam. The rest included people from Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Japan, Korea Immigration Service data showed.
The latest proposal is needed to encourage future workers to stay by allowing them to foster a South Korean identity from an early age and stably get assimilated into society, the justice ministry told Reuters in a statement.
Kim Yong-seon, who came from China in 2004 to study and was naturalized in 2014, said the amendment is useful as it provides more options for immigrants, but the more pressing matter is making it easier for adults to become citizens.
“Over the past few years, the requirements for permanent residency and citizenship have only gotten harder,” he said, citing changes that require high amounts of income or assets.
Like the majority of Chinese nationals residing in South Korea, Kim is ethnic Korean — his grandfather migrated to China a century ago.
More than 70% of the 865,000 Chinese nationals residing in South Korea are of Korean descent, according to immigration data.
Negative views of China among South Koreans have hit historic highs recently, with as much as 75% having an unfavorable opinion of them late last year, compared to around 37% in 2015, according to Pew Research.
“Some Chinese people are already committing a ‘cultural fraud’ against the whole world by making unreasonable claims that kimchi and hanbok are also Chinese,” opposition People’s Party chairman Ahn Cheol-soo said.
“If left as is, it will lead to a ‘cultural invasion’ in which they claim that even Korea’s priceless culture is theirs.”

Source: South Korea citizenship law change proposal sparks anti-China backlash

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

Rosie Abella said she’d answer questions when she turned 75

2021/06/18 Leave a comment

Good long interview by Paul Wells.

Money quote regarding her 1984 employment equity report:

What Abella knew was that she didn’t much like examples from American jurisprudence. “It was based on the individual. No concept of membership in groups as defining identity, as defining equality.” The more she thought about it, the more Abella decided that one concept of equality—simply treating everyone the same—constituted a dead-end path. “I thought, equality, to me, is not sameness. Civil liberties are sameness. Everyone should have the same right in their relationship with the state to be treated as well as the leaders. There is no such thing as ‘more rights,’ vis-à-vis the state, for one individual over another.

“But that’s different from human rights, where you are treated a certain way because of the groups you belong to. So if you are a woman, if you are a Muslim, if you are Jewish, if you are disabled, people treat you based on your identity. And so I thought, you can’t say, ‘Treat everyone the same.’ If you treat everyone the same, the person in a wheelchair is treated like the person who’s able-bodied, and there’s no need for a ramp, if you’re going to treat everybody the same.

“So it occurred to me that what equality really was, was acknowledging and accommodating differences. So people could be treated as an equal and not excluded arbitrarily for things that had nothing to do with whether or not they could contribute to the mainstream.”

This philosophy is encapsulated in a quote from the French poet Anatole France that opens Abella’s commission report, which she has cited frequently in her work since: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” She would define a different law, less majestic and more alert to nuance. She coined a new term, “employment equity,” to describe “programs of positive remedy for discrimination in the Canadian workplace.”

The first surprise was when Flora MacDonald, Brian Mulroney’s employment minister, called Abella and said the Progressive Conservative government would implement the report’s recommendations. Another surprise came when countries around the world began to adapt elements of the report to their local circumstances.

Source: Rosie Abella said she’d answer questions when she turned 75

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Who’s Afraid of Big Numbers? Pretty much everyone. But it doesn’t have to be that way, two mathematicians contend.

2021/06/18 Leave a comment

Some interesting thoughts on how to communicate numbers. For immigration examples, 400,000 (current target) in seconds is the equivalent of 4.6 days. In terms of immigrants, just under 1,100 per day:

“Billions” and “trillions” seem to be an inescapable part of our conversations these days, whether the subject is Jeff Bezos’s net worth or President Biden’s proposed budget. Yet nearly everyone has trouble making sense of such big numbers. Is there any way to get a feel for them? As it turns out, there is. If we can relate big numbers to something familiar, they start to feel much more tangible, almost palpable.

For example, consider Senator Bernie Sanders’s signature reference to “millionaires and billionaires.” Politics aside, are these levels of wealth really comparable? Intellectually, we all know that billionaires have a lot more money than millionaires do, but intuitively it’s hard to feel the difference, because most of us haven’t experienced what it’s like to have that much money.

In contrast, everyone knows what the passage of time feels like. So consider how long it would take for a million seconds to tick by. Do the math, and you’ll find that a million seconds is about 12 days. And a billion seconds? That’s about 32 years. Suddenly the vastness of the gulf between a million and a billion becomes obvious. A million seconds is a brief vacation; a billion seconds is a major fraction of a lifetime.

Comparisons to ordinary distances provide another way to make sense of big numbers. Here in Ithaca, we have a scale model of the solar system known as the Sagan Walk, in which all the planets and the gaps between them are reduced by a factor of five billion. At that scale, the sun becomes the size of a serving plate, Earth is a small pea and Jupiter is a brussels sprout. To walk from Earth to the sun takes just a few dozen footsteps, whereas Pluto is a 15-minute hike across town. Strolling through the solar system, you gain a visceral understanding of astronomical distances that you don’t get from looking at a book or visiting a planetarium. Your body grasps it even if your mind cannot.

Likewise, vast sums of money become more comprehensible if they are reframed in terms of more familiar amounts. In a 2009 blog post, the mathematician Terry Tao rescaled the entire United States federal budget to the annual household spending for a hypothetical family of four. In Dr. Tao’s rescaling, a $100 million line item in the budget became equivalent to a $3 expenditure for the family.

Research in psychology and science education supports Dr. Tao’s strategy. In 2017, cognitive scientists found that students could grasp extremely long time periods — say, between the extinction of dinosaurs and emergence of humans — more readily if they created a personal timeline of the most significant events in their lives and rescaled it to progressively longer time spans: all of American history, all of recorded history and so on. These students were also better than controls at estimating numbers in the billions, an ability that is vital to understanding geological time, astronomical distances or the bewildering sums in the federal budget.

To that end, we thought it could be instructive to update Dr. Tao’s exercise, this time using the numbers in Mr. Biden’s proposed 2022 budget. For simplicity, the total money entering the federal budget — call it “income” — has been scaled to be $100,000. Meanwhile, as the graphic shows, this hypothetical nation-family spends about $144,000 a year, exceeding the budget by about $44,000. Most of the expenditure goes to four big-ticket items: about $29,000 to pay for Social Security, $18,000 for Medicare, the same for Defense and around $14,000 for Medicaid.

Scaling the Budget

Taken together, these four items add up to almost $80,000 in expenses for our nation-family. In addition, we must still pay off the interest on the national debt, for another $7,000, plus $36,000 on other assorted mandatory programs. So exceeding the budget by as much as Mr. Biden is proposing leaves only about $22,000 to spend on the other things we care about, the so-called nondefense discretionary spending.

When the numbers are reframed this way, the trade-offs become clearer. Want to increase funding to historically Black colleges and universities? Mr. Biden does, and he is asking the nation-family to chip in 36 cents (in these rescaled terms) to that end. What about former President Donald J. Trump’s border wall? Our nation-family spent about $388 on it in 2021. In comparison, Mr. Biden is proposing to spend $255 next year to ensure clean, safe drinking water in all communities and $5 to expand school meal programs. These choices are political ones, but at least now we can wrap our minds around how much money we’re talking about.

Why not employ a more typical diagraming strategy, like a bar chart? Well, a bar chart would reduce most items to barely visible slivers. Sometimes such large numbers are recast as percentages of the whole, but that approach suffers from the same drawback, generating confusingly small figures, like 0.01 percent. As Dr. Tao recognized, $100,000 trades on a scale with which most people are intimately familiar. Few among us, alas, will ever be a billionaire, much less a trillionaire. But we can all reasonably budget like one.

Aiyana Green is an undergraduate majoring in policy analysis and management in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. Steven Strogatz is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University and the author, most recently, of “Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/science/math-numbers-federal-budget-tao.html

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

#COVID19 impact on #immigration and related programs, April 2021 update

2021/06/18 Leave a comment

The latest monthly update (May for web traffic). Slide 3 has the summary numbers and changes.

Slight dip in number of Permanent Resident admissions compared to March, annualized rate now 275,000 (although likely to increase given the various policy measures announced (e.g., lowering of minimum CRS scores, special temporary program and Hong Kong measures).

Citizenship started to recover compared to earlier months but still far lower than historic levels.

Given the extremely low levels in all programs in April 2020 (travel restrictions and shutdowns), the year-over-year increases appear spectacular. Compared to April 2019, of course, changes are more modest and provide a more accurate picture of the impact.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →