Douglas Todd: ‘Astonishing’ findings on Canadian ethnic groups’ earnings and education

2022/02/19 Leave a comment

While not astonishing for those of us who look at this data regularly (including public service employment equity data), nevertheless the differences are striking. Mikal Skuterud’s points on the need for nuance and understanding the life choices people make (and the circumstances that influence them) are important to keep in mind:

The latest Statistics Canada research on ethnic groups’ earnings and educational achievements reveals clues on where to look, and not look, for potential discrimination in the workplace.

Fortunately, the new data doesn’t group visible minorities into one monolithic clump — since the amount of money earned by each ethnic cohort is surprisingly different, with some groups flourishing and others not.

People of South Korean, Chinese and South Asian extraction tend to be the top earners in Canada, broadly speaking. Latin-American and Black people are often among the lowest. Whites are mostly in the middle of the pack in terms of wages, while they are in the lower echelons in regard to university education.

Economist Frances Woolley of Carleton University says such details are crucial. Visible minorities are one of four groups covered by the federal Employment Equity Act (as are women, people with disabilities, and Indigenous Canadians). But rather than assume all visible minorities are susceptible to unfairness, she says it is meaningful to focus on ethnic groups that are actually behind.

The latest StatsCan report, the first of its kind in a decade, measured the weekly incomes of Canadian-born people ages 25 to 44 (which encompasses the millennial generation) in 2016, a census year, based on 12 visible-minority categories.

The study by Theresa Qui and Grant Schellenberg illustrates the setting for Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, which is committed to “removing barriers and promoting a country where every person is able to fully participate and have an equal opportunity to proceed.”

Using white Canadians as a majority baseline, the report pinpoints how some ethnic groups are doing much better than others in earnings and education, as well as striking differences between men and women, and how people of colour overwhelmingly live in cities.

Mikal Skuterud, an economist at the University of Waterloo, said in an interview, “Descriptive studies like this are like paintings — different people will see different things in the numbers. But the reality is that what lies behind the earnings differences reported is nuanced, complex, and largely unknown.”

Workplace and educational outcomes are often not determined by racist bosses or discriminatory educators, suggested Skuterud. They are likely more often determined by complex life decisions that people make, and transparent data is needed to get to the bottom of things, he said. This report provides a hard look at the ethnic groups that appear to be moving up the ladder and those which aren’t.

Asian-Canadians among Canada’s top earners

Most Canadian visible-minority women earn more than white females, who averaged $1,120 a week.

Korean-Canadian women earned $1,450 a week on average; Chinese women $1,440; South Asian women $1,330; Japanese $1,320; Filipino $1,260; and Arab and Iranian $1,120. Meanwhile, Black women earned less, at $1,080, while Latin-American women made $1,000 a week.

Korean, Japanese and South Asian men earned slightly more than white males, who took in $1,530. Chinese-Canadian men earned about the same. Filipino and South-East Asian men earned about 15 per cent less than white males, while Latin-American and Black males earned about 20 per cent lower.

While some wage gaps shrink when variables such as age, place of residence and educational levels are taken into account, others remained significant, Schellenberg said.

The study by Qui and Schellenberg did not look at Indigenous people or immigrants, the latter being a larger visible-minority group than those born in Canada. While people who grew up in Canada are readily comparable, Schellenberg said, immigrants are often held back in the labour market by specific factors: a shortfall of Canadian work experience, lack of fluency in English or French, and foreign work credentials not being recognized.

Even though the Statistics Canada report doesn’t suggest where discrimination might be occurring in Canada, both Schellenberg and Skuterud said the data does appear to raise at least one red flag: Black males fell further behind others in relative earnings in the period between 2006 and 2016.

‘Astonishing’ differences in educational levels by ethnicity

People of colour born in Canada are far more likely than white people to have university degrees.

More than 60 per cent of Chinese and Korean men boasted a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to just 24 per cent of white males, a gulf that Skuterud referred to as “astonishing”.

In addition, more than 40 per cent of South Asian, Arab, West Asian and Japanese men had university degrees. The only ethnic groups less likely to have degrees than white males were Black males (20 per cent) and Latin-American males (17 per cent).

Even though many more white women than white men have university degrees (38 per cent), they still lag behind almost every other ethnic group.

“More than 70 per cent of Korean and Chinese women and around 60 per cent of Japanese and South Asian women had a university degree, compared with 38 per cent of white women,” said the report. They are basically tied with Black women on higher education, and slightly ahead of Latin-American females.

Because of the years many visible minorities spend in college and university compared to white people who move directly into the workforce, Qui and Schellenberg suggest the wages of people of colour, who are on average younger and in more high-skilled jobs, will show up comparatively higher in the 2021 census.

Ethnic segregation is forming along urban-rural lines

People of colour and whites are making remarkably different choices about big cities and small towns.

Sixty per cent of all people of colour in Canada live in just three cities — Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. That compares to only 27 per cent of white people.

Put another way, the report said, “Only about one in 20 (visible-minority members) live in smaller cities, towns and rural areas, compared with about one in three white people.”

Indeed, the report says one reason many people of colour earn more than white people is they live in metropolises, where wages tend to be elevated. The authors also found white people were more likely to be married, have children, and not be living with their parents.

Despite the unprecedented amount of North American, especially U.S., research that has gone into whether employers discriminate based on race or ethnicity, Skuterud said, “It’s almost a fundamentally unidentifiable problem.”

Rather than automatically believing gaps in earnings and education are rooted in “injustice or unfairness,” Skuterud said it is also important to simply remember, “People make different choices.”

Source: Douglas Todd: ‘Astonishing’ findings on Canadian ethnic groups’ earnings and education

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Wolfson: In pursuit of a world-class health data system

2022/02/19 Leave a comment

Good arguments, challenge given complexity and jurisdictional issues. Some progress through programs like MyChart which makes managing my hospital-based visits and tests so much easier:

Canadians see new and increasingly powerful computerization in almost every facet of their day-to-day lives—everywhere, that is, except for something as fundamental as health care, where systems are too often stuck in the past.

Canadian governments have invested heavily to advance the use of health data, most often without a clear national vision. An incoherent approach for health data is hurting health outcomes, escalating sector costs and expanding inequities.

The health sector relies on data to guide almost every decision, from the choice of an antibiotic for treating an individual’s simple urinary tract infection, to national pandemic policies that affect millions of Canadians.  The challenge is that health and health-related data are so poorly organized and managed in Canada.

While health-care providers create and have responsibility for safe management of records of health care encounters, personal health information in Canada should be available to patients as well.

The reality is that patients continue to have limited access to or insight about data about them, as that remains under the de facto control of myriad and siloed health-service providers. The inevitable result of this scattered provider-centric rather than patient-centric approach is that patient data are typically spread among their various health care providers’ uncoordinated and unstandardized data systems. The result: both providers and patients have to work with incomplete and incoherent information.

The health sector has invested for years in digital technology in the mistaken belief it would immediately solve our health data woes. We have failed to realize the true obstacle to effective health data collection and use is not mainly technological, but a matter of policy and governance.

To realize its tremendous promise, health data in Canada must become centred around the individual. Services would be designed around people and by people. The “life flows” of patients and families would mesh with the “work flows” of providers and institutions. There would be one centrally accessible virtual digital record for each of us.

As patients move from home to care setting, and from provider to provider, data would remain seamlessly accessible for those in the patient’s “circle of care”; no need to repeat your health history for each new provider. Data flows about a person—who sees what—would be transparent to the person involved or to their proxy.

Health-care providers would continue to access personal information for the purposes of individual care, while a new role—health-data stewards—would be mandated to curate population-based data for public good while ensuring privacy and confidentiality.

How can we make this vision a reality in Canada?

This will only happen with a fundamentally reimagined approach to health data policy and governance for the digital age, grounded in mutual trust. Governments need to trust the public by providing clear and complete information, with people in Canada trusted to act for the good of the community. The public would be involved in policies regarding health data collection, sharing, use and communication. And governments need to make real their commitments to respect Indigenous data governance.

Governments must also trust each other and recognize the over-riding importance of coherent pan-Canadian data.  At present, each province and territory has its own health data policies, standards and governance, with very little active coordination across borders. Even in the area of death certification, where the vital statistics registrars have worked together for many decades, we have the current failure to agree on and report COVID-related causes of death in a standardized manner.

Accessing the routinely collected data that do exist is a marathon for fully authorized researchers, for example to study post-marketing drug safety and effectiveness. Even with all the available approval processes in place, it has still proven impossible to analyze these kinds of data for the country as a whole.

These pervasive blockages to generating coherent and timely pan-Canadian information seriously impairs our ability to respond to public health threats and generate insights that could improve health outcomes for all.

Ultimately, we need to rethink—not rejig—how we manage and use health data. The Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy report, authored by an Expert Advisory group, points out the need for a culture shift in health data use. Public input has to be part of the transformation to person-centred health care and health data systems.

Of course, updating health data systems has costs. But given the tens of billions of health-care dollars the federal government is providing to the provinces through fiscal transfers, it is long past time the federal government leveraged this clout—using both carrots and sticks—so that people in Canada can finally have informed, accessible health data when and where they need it most.

Michael Wolfson is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada, and a current member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics. Vivek Goel is president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo. Both are members of the Expert Advisory Group on the Development of the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy.

Source: In pursuit of a world-class health data system

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Know the Risks: A Guide for Journalists on Quoting Immigrant Sources

2022/02/19 Leave a comment

Useful:

WHAT HAPPENED TO ROSA still haunts Maria Hinojosa. Rosa, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, agreed to appear on camera for “Immigrant Nation, Divided Country,” a 2004 CNN documentary helmed by Hinojosa, a veteran journalist. Soon after the program aired, immigration agents arrested Rosa, her boyfriend, and her children.

Hinojosa had taken care not to show where Rosa lived or worked. She later discovered, however, that despite her efforts to protect Rosa’s anonymity, she had missed one small detail: the license plate of a car belonging to Rosa’s boyfriend had appeared, unblurred, in the background of a shot. Hinojosa reasoned that agents must have used the license plate to track Rosa down.

“​I realized,” Hinojosa said in a recent interview, “that the worst could absolutely happen.”

The risks facing undocumented immigrants have only intensified in the years since—particularly during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies vilified Mexicans, Africans, and Muslims, among others. How journalists work with their immigrant sources is critical to reducing those risks, even in a hyper-competitive climate where ambitious stories drive public attention.

Miriam Jordan, a lead immigration reporter for the New York Times, revealed in 2018 that President Trump employed undocumented workers at his private properties. Jordan’s story focused on Victorina Morales, an undocumented immigrant who worked at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. She also quoted Sandra Diaz, who had been undocumented when she worked there, but was a legal resident at the time of the story. Both Morales and Diaz agreed to be identified by their full name—a step Jordan, in an email, said was “essential to the credibility of the piece”—and also to be photographed. Morales told Jordan that Trump’s hateful comments, along with verbal abuse from a supervisor, compelled her to speak out. Jordan later noted the rarity of Morales’s decision:

“In all my years reporting on immigration, I had rarely encountered undocumented workers willing to risk their livelihood — and deportation — to speak out against their employers.”

After the story came out, Morales made numerous media appearances; she also applied for asylum and received a work permit. Eighteen months later, she learned that her asylum case had been referred by US Citizenship and Immigration Services to a court for removal proceedings, where a judge would review her status. (In a follow-up, Jordan reported that Morales would be able to remain in the country while her case was mired in a years’ long backlog.)

In 2020, a selection of immigration reporters told CJR and Migratory Notes that, under the Trump administration, they felt more inclined to grant anonymity to undocumented sources, and to take greater care to explore the consequences of a story with them. Though the administration has changed, the stakes haven’t: polarizing politics have stalled efforts at immigration reform, and some of Trump’s most harmful policies remain in effect under President Biden. Against this backdrop, migrants coming to the border, asylum seekers awaiting court hearings, and those with temporary protections, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, have little incentive to identify themselves on the record.

Anonymity is routinely provided to government officials who are “not authorized to speak publicly”—a practice intended to facilitate reporting without costing an official their job or livelihood. Yet, as an industry, journalism has not widely embraced anonymous sourcing in its coverage of undocumented immigrants.

Journalists who cover undocumented people must be aware that their approaches to stories—including the decisions to name sources and subjects and show images of them —can carry a range of unintended, adverse consequences. With this in mind, Define American created a toolkit on anonymous sourcing, to advise journalists on their responsibilities when working with immigrant sources and, we hope, to help them mitigate risk.

The “Quoting Immigrants” toolkit provides numerous recommendations for ensuring credible coverage across a range of media while also granting partial or even full anonymity; they include a hierarchy of attribution, recommendations for independently verifying a source’s identity, and examples of personal details to consider avoiding. The toolkit honors longstanding journalistic principles of credibility and authenticity, but also spells out the potential consequences for undocumented immigrants who are identified in news reports. Crucially, the toolkit reminds reporters that it’s OK to back off, move on, and not jeopardize or traumatize a source at risk or perpetuate trauma—a subject that Define American explored in a recent research report on the mental health toll on sources in the Dreamer movement.

Throughout the toolkit, several reporters who’ve covered immigration draw on their own experience to offer guidance. “Just understand that these are human beings and you might need to make accommodations,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez, an immigration reporter for CBS News, told us. “They are doing us a favor by talking to us.”

Armando Tonatiuh Torres-García, an immigration reporter for ABC News, cautioned reporters to consider the safety of minors: “If they were in a detention center, just because they are separated from their parents, that does not give you the right to film them as if they were adults.”

Hinojosa now hosts LatinoUSA, a radio program produced by Futuro Media Group, a multimedia organization she founded. When she interviews immigrants now, Hinojosa says she often uses only first names. When migrants readily agree to be identified by their full names, she thinks of her experience with Rosa, and fully considers her options. She wants to expose injustice for asylum seekers, but not if she endangers them.

“My role as a journalist is to get the story in their voice,” Hinojosa said. “And to do no harm.”

Source: Know the Risks: A Guide for Journalists on Quoting Immigrant Sources

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UK axes ‘golden visa’ scheme after fraud and Russia concerns

2022/02/19 1 Comment

Overdue, and one of the few defensible immigration measures by the UK government:

The “golden visa” system that allows wealthy foreign investors a fast track to live in the UK has been axed amid concern about applicants acquiring their wealth illegally and the growing strain on diplomatic relations with Russia.

The home secretary, Priti Patel, announced that the scheme would end with immediate effect to help to stop “corrupt elites who threaten our national security and push dirty money around our cities”.

Launched in 2008, the “tier 1 investor visa” programme allowed people with at least £2m in investment funds and a UK bank account to apply for residency rights, along with their family. The speed with which applicants were allowed to get indefinite leave to remain was hastened by how much money they planned to invest in the UK: £2m took five years, while £10m shortened the wait to just two.

Source: UK axes ‘golden visa’ scheme after fraud and Russia concerns

Filed under Citizenship, citizenship-by-investment Tagged with ,

Impact of birth tourism on health caresystems in Calgary, Alberta

2022/02/19 Leave a comment

This is exactly the kind of detail that is needed for regions and hospitals that have high numbers of non-resident births.

Some highlights of the study from my perspective:

  • 102/227 patients were identified as birth tourist (45 percent)
  • 83% of patients stated they came to Canada with a Visitor Visa
  • Country of origin: Nigeria (25%), Middle East (18%) China (11%), and India (8%) and Mexico (6%), none from Western Europe or Australia
  • 77% stated that their primary reason to deliver their baby in Canada was for the the baby to be eligible for Canadian citizenship, while only 8% stated their reason to deliver in Canada was to access better health care
  • Almost a third of women had a known preexisting medical condition
  • 29 mothers and 17 newborns had unpaid invoices, $290,000 and $404,000 respectively at the time the report was written.

More kind of this detailed analysis by medical professionals and researchers is needed rather than the legal and policy analyses that diminish the issue (disclosure the researchers and I have been in contact over the past few years).

Hospitals where studies would be useful would be for the top ten hospitals with the largest percentage of non-resident births:

Funding should be provided for these kind of empirical studies rather than for more ideological studies such as the one underway by Megan Gaucher, Jamie Lieu and Amanda Cheong (Insight Grant 2021 Birth Tourism and Citizenship):

Background:  Birth  tourism  refers  to  non-resident  women  giving  birth  in  a  country  outside  of  their  own  in  order  to obtain  citizenship  and/or  healthcare  for  their  newborns. We  undertook  a  study  to  determine  the  extent  of  birth  tourism  in  Calgary,  the  characteristics  and  rationale  of  this  population,  and  the  fnancial  impact  on  the  healthcare  system.

Methods:  A  retrospective  analysis  of  102  women  identifed  through  a  Central Triage  system  as  birth  tourists  who delivered  in  Calgary  between  July  2019  and  November  2020  was  performed.  Primary  outcome  measures  were  mode of  delivery,  length  of  hospital  stay,  complications  or  readmissions  within  6  weeks  for  mother  or  baby,  and  NICU  stay for  baby.

Results:  Birth Tourists  were  most  commonly  from  Nigeria  (24.5%).  77%  of  Birth Tourists  stated  that  their  primary  reason  to  deliver  their  baby  in  Canada  was  for  newborn  Canadian  citizenship. The  average  time  from  arrival  in  Calgary  to the  EDD  was  87  days.  Nine  babies  required  stay  in  the  neonatal  intensive  care  unit  (NICU)  and  3  required  admission  to a  non  NICU  hospital  ward  in  frst  6  weeks  of  life,  including  2  sets  of  twins. The  overall  amount  owed  to  Alberta  Health Services  for  hospital  fees  for  this  time  period  is  approximately  $694  000.00.

Conclusion:  Birth Tourists  remain  a  complex  and  poorly  studied  group. The  process  of  Central Triage  did  help  suport  providers  in  standardizing  process  and  documentation  while  ensuring  that  communication  was  consistent. These  fndings  provide  preliminary  data  to  guide  targeted  public  health  and  policy  interventions  for  this  population.

Source: Impact of birth tourism on health care systems in Calgary, Alberta

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , , , ,

Graves and Valpy: Who supports the ‘freedom’ protesters and why

2022/02/18 2 Comments

Useful and informative public opinion insights:

In the turbulent 1960s, American journalist Hunter S. Thompson spent nearly a year following around the Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle gang. His most striking conclusion was not their violent hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been left behind.

As he wrote in an article for The Nation, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favourite tools of the left.

And in 2016, political scientist Susan McWilliams Barndt, also writing in The Nation, borrowed Thompson’s language to describe her fellow citizens who elected Donald Trump, introducing a new, deeply polarized right-wing politics into her country’s civic life.

Which brings us to the occupation of Ottawa and the blockading of border-crossings and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the federal Emergencies Act — in Canada, for heaven’s sake.

“Thompson was the only American writer to warn coastal, left-liberal elites about their disconnection from poor and working-class white voters,” wrote McWilliams Barndt.

“Thompson’s Angels were mostly working-class white men who felt, not incorrectly, that they had been relegated to the sewer of American society. The manual-labor skills that they had learned and cultivated were in declining demand.

“Though most had made it through high school, they did not have the more advanced levels of training that might lead to economic or professional security,” wrote McWilliams Barndt.

“Their lack of education,” Thompson wrote of the Angels, “rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy.”

Looking at the American future, they saw no place for themselves in it — the “white trash” or “deplorables” of Trump Trump Trump, who felt like strangers in their own land.

This is Canada, after all, and talk of social class differences traverses sensitive turf. But the survey work of EKOS Research suggests that what is taking place in Ottawa and other locales is not the behaviour of fringe Canadians but rather evidence of significant general discontent and unhappiness.

Sympathy with the protests, and their objectives, is felt by a third of Canadians — and by no means a random third but a third defined by clear demographic and attitudinal factors.

The most important driver is generational. Half of under-50 Canadians are sympathetic to the protests and their cause. Other key drivers include education, with college graduates more sympathetic and university graduates more opposed. Social class is also a key factor with working class drawn to the protesters and middle and upper classes opposed.

Moreover, it may be that economic anxieties are driving these protests as much as the named issues of vaccines and mask mandates. Those most adamantly opposed to masks and mandates have (by far) the bleakest economic outlook, resulting in a generational resentment toward an economy that has seen younger Canada faring much worse than their parents or grandparents at a similar stage of life cycle. Wage stagnation exacerbated by inflation and affordability is a key force expressing itself in housing and many other pocketbook issues.

Nation-wide, stress has been well above normal levels for more than two years. Stress is much higher in poor people and declines with upward movement in self-defined social class. Under-50 Canada is experiencing much more stress than over-50 Canada. There is also a striking interaction between age and gender with under 35-women registering 25 per cent higher levels of stress than comparably aged males.

Most alarming, 65 per cent of Canadians believe — and have believed for more than a decade — that if the present trend in the concentration of wealth at the very top continues, Canadians may well see “violent class conflict.”

For under-35 Canada this number rises to 78 per cent agreement and 81 per cent for those who identify as working class. These groups are also being fuelled by disinformation, which is clearly a critical factor and closely resembles the disinformation patterns in the U.S.

What would Hunter S. Thompson have discovered, walking along Wellington Street?

Source: Who supports the ‘freedom’ protesters and why

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US funds for Canada protests may sway American politics too

2022/02/18 Leave a comment

Should it be a surprise that Canadians are being used as props for the US right?

The Canadians who have disrupted travel and trade with the U.S. and occupied downtown Ottawa for nearly three weeks have been cheered and funded by American right-wing activists and conservative politicians who also oppose vaccine mandates and the country’s liberal leader.

Yet whatever impact the protests have on Canadian society, and the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, experts say the outside support is really aimed at energizing conservative politics in the U.S. Midterm elections are looming, and some Republicans think standing with the protesters up north will galvanize fund-raising and voter turnout at home, these experts say.

“The kind of narratives that the truckers and the trucker convoy are focusing on are going to be really important issues for the (U.S.) elections coming ahead,” said Samantha Bradshaw, a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University. “And so using this protest as an opportunity to galvanize their own supporters and other groups, I think it’s very much an opportunity for them.”

By Wednesday afternoon, all previously blocked border crossings had been re-opened, and police began focusing on pressuring the truckers and other protesters in Ottawa to clear out of the capital city or face arrest, fines and confiscation of their vehicles. 

About 44 percent of the nearly $10 million in contributions to support the protesters originated from U.S. donors, according to an Associated Press analysis of leaked donor files. U.S. Republican elected officials, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have praised the protesters calling them “heroes” and “patriots.”

“What this country is facing is a largely foreign-funded, targeted and coordinated attack on critical infrastructure and our democratic institutions,” Bill Blair, Canada’s minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, said earlier this week. 

Demonstrators in Ottawa have had been regularly supplied with fuel and food, and the area around Parliament Hill has at times resembled a spectacular carnival with bouncy castles, gyms, a playground and a concert stage with DJs. 

GiveSendGo, a website used to collect donations for the Canadian protests, has collected at least $9.58 million dollars, including $4.2 million, or 44%, that originated in the United States, according to a database of donor information posted online by DDoSecrets, a non-profit group.

The Canadian government has been working to block protesters’ access to these funds, however, and it is not clear how much of the money has ultimately gotten through.

Millions of dollars raised through another crowdfunding site, GoFundMe, were blocked after Canadian officials raised objections with the company, which determined that the effort violated its terms of service around unlawful activity.

The GiveSendGo database analyzed by AP showed a tally of more than 109,000 donations through Friday night to campaigns in support of the protests, with a little under 62,000 coming from the U.S. 

The GiveSendGo data listed several Americans as giving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to the protest, with the largest single donation of $90,000 coming from a person who identified himself as Thomas M. Siebel.

Siebel, the billionaire founder of software company Siebel Systems, did not respond to messages sent to an email associated with a foundation he runs and to his LinkedIn account.

A representative from the Siebel Scholars Foundation, who signed her name only as Jennifer, did not respond to questions about whether he had donated the money. But she said Siebel has a record of supporting several causes, including efforts to “protect individual liberty.”

“These are personal initiatives and have nothing to do with the companies with which he is associated,” she wrote.

Siebel has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and organizations over the last 20 years, according to Federal Election Commission records, including a $400,000 contribution in 2019 to a GOP fundraising committee called “Take Back the House 2020.”

The GiveSendGo Freedom Convoy campaign was created on Jan. 27 by Tamara Lich. She previously belonged to the far-right Maverick Party, which calls for western Canada to become independent.

The Canadian government moved earlier this week to cut off funding for the protesters by broadening the scope of the country’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules to cover crowdfunding platforms like GiveSendGo. 

“We are making these changes because we know that these platforms are being used to support illegal blockades and illegal activity, which is damaging the Canadian economy,” said Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Perhaps more important than the financial support is the cheerleading the Canadian protesters have received from prominent American conservative politicians and pundits, who see kindred spirits in their northern neighbors opposing vaccine mandates.

On the same day Lich created the GiveSendGo campaign, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn shared a video of the convoy in a post on the messaging app Telegram.

“These truckers are fighting back against the nonsense and tyranny, especially coming from the Canadian government,” wrote Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who served briefly as former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

A few days later, Flynn urged people to donate to the Canadian protesters. Earlier this week, he twice posted the message “#TrudeauTheCoward” on Telegram, referring to the prime minister who leads Canada’s Liberal Party.

Fox News hosts regularly laud the protests, and Trump weighed in with a broadside at Trudeau, calling him a “far left lunatic” who has “destroyed Canada with insane COVID mandates.” Cruz called the truckers “heroes” and “patriots,” and Greene said she cannot wait to see a convoy protest in Washington.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he hopes truckers come to America and “clog up cities” in an interview last week with the Daily Signal, a news website of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Far-right and anti-vaccine activists, inspired by the Canadian actions, are now planning American versions of the protests against COVID-19 mandates and restrictions modeled on the Canadian demonstrations.

Source: US funds for Canada protests may sway American politics too

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Germans less skeptical of immigration

2022/02/18 Leave a comment

Significant shift with respect to skilled immigrants, concerns re refugees (similar pattern in Canada):

Christian Osterhaus knows only too well what the term Willkommenskultur (“welcome culture”) means: When hundreds of thousands of people seeking protection arrived in Germany in 2015, he was one of the first to co-found a local refugee aid organization.

“We didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past,” he tells DW. By welcoming the refugees, he and his team wanted to show “that we don’t exclude people again.” With around 30 fellow campaigners, Osterhaus got involved in Bonn in the fall of 2015. The group cared for 40 to 50 refugees, most of whom came from Syria.

Osterhaus was one of hundreds of thousands of people in Germany who set out to help those fleeing civil war in Syria and other countries, and to help integrate them into German society. “We wanted to give these people a new home,” Osterhaus says looking back.

The special effort at integration became known as Germany’s welcome culture. But in 2015 and 2016, many people also had little understanding for this attitude. They did not want to take in refugees and migrants. The xenophobic protest movement gave rise to the far-right populist Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

More people see benefits of migration

In its representative study “Willkommenskultur zwischen Stabilität und Aufbruch,” (Welcome Culture Between Stability and Departure) the nonprofit Bertelsmann Foundation has now taken a closer look at changes in Germans’ attitudes and identified a trend: Germans are more optimistic about migration and immigration than they were a few years ago.

“In essence, our survey shows that skepticism toward immigration is still widespread in Germany, but it has continually declined in recent years,” says Ulrike Wieland, co-author of the study: “More people now see the potential benefits of migration; especially for the economy. When it comes to perceptions of integration, we find that more respondents than in previous years see inequality of opportunity and discrimination as significant obstacles hampering integration of individuals.”

The Bertelsmann Foundation has been conducting representative surveys since 2012. In the beginning, the researchers set out to determine how Germans felt about the immigration of skilled workers. But in response to the influx of large numbers of refugees in 2015-2016, researchers wanted to gauge attitudes towards these people.

As to long-term effects of immigration, positive and negative assessments roughly balance each other out. But the debate on refugees has somewhat tipped the scales.

Today, many see immigration as a way to help solve Germany’s demographic and economic problems. For example, two out of three respondents see immigration as helping to balance out an aging society, more than half of those polled said it could also compensate for the ongoing shortage of skilled workers, and half of all respondents expect immigrants to generate additional revenue for Germany’s pension fund.

But many respondents remain skeptical: 67% say that immigrants place an additional burden on the welfare state, 66% say they worry about conflicts erupting between people born and raised in Germany and immigrants, and many respondents fear that schools are facing major problems integrating immigrant students.

But there is an important differentiation to make: skilled immigrants seeking employment or academic opportunities are more accepted (71%) than refugees who are primarily seeking protection (59 %).

More than a third don’t want more refugees

The Bertelsmann Foundation study also clearly shows that there is still a lot of skepticism in Germany when it comes to refugees.

Christian Osterhaus notes that many helpers have turned away because of the decrease in acceptance for their work for refugees. “In the beginning we were part of a social movement and felt supported, but for several years we have been working against the social mainstream,” is how Osterhaus describes it to DW.

Germans have overall become more accepting of refugees. But over one-third of respondents (36%) believe that Germany cannot take in any more of them. In 2017, that number stood at 54%. Currently, 20% consider the refugees to be “temporary guests” who do not need to be integrated into society.

“We see that one-fifth of the population is skeptical of refugees or outright rejects them. These people seem to have a worldview that supports the idea of a (far-reaching) social closure against migration,” explains co-author Ulrike Wieland.

Germany should see itself as an immigration society,’ says the study’s co-author, Ulrike Wieland

People with an immigrant background are underrepresented in politics, corporate management and the media in Germany. Respondents see German language skills as a pivotal prerequisite to integration. But many of them also believe that legislation needs to be changed to combat existing inequality when it comes to finding housing, dealing with authorities or schools.

The new coalition government of center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) has already made clear it wants to focus more on integration. For example, they are planning to ensure that even rejected asylum seekers are given the opportunity to stay in Germany permanently if they have learned German and have found work to earn a sufficient income. Family reunification is to be extended to all refugees and it is to become easier to obtain German nationality.

That is basically the right way to go, says researcher Ulrike Wieland: “But it is also important for Germany to develop a positive self-image as an immigration society. To achieve this, politicians and civil society must work together. They must actively shape a diverse society.”

Aid worker Christian Osterhaus looks back at when he started working with refugees: “At the time, I really had the impression that German society had opened up and changed and had actually learned a lot.” He believes that interpersonal connections and friendships are the foundation for the path to building a real welcome culture in Germany.

Source: Germans less skeptical of immigration

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China’s high-tech repression of Uyghurs is more sinister — and lucrative — than it seems, anthropologist says

2022/02/18 Leave a comment

Keeps on getting worse:

When people started to disappear in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang in 2014, then-PhD student Darren Byler was living there, with a rare, ground-level view of events that would eventually be labelled by some as a modern-day genocide.

The American anthropologist, who learned Chinese and Uyghur languages, witnessed a digital police state rise up around him, as mass detention and surveillance became a feature of life in Xinjiang. He spent years experiencing and gathering testimony on the impact.

“It’s affected all of society,” he told CBC’s Ideas.

Since those early days of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s so-called “People’s War on Terror,”Human Rights Watch says at least one million Uyghur and other Muslims in Xinjiang have been arbitrarily detained in what China calls “re-education” or “vocational training” camps, in prisons or “pre-trial detention” facilities. 

Survivors have recounted being tortured and raped in the camps, scruitinized by the gaze of cameras 24/7, and perhaps most crucially, forced to learn how to be Chinese and unlearn what it is to be Uyghur. 

Countless of their children, says HRW, are forced to do the same in residential boarding schools. 

China — currently in the Olympic spotlight and steering clear of such topics — routinely denies accusations, including from Canada’s House of Commons, that its treatment of Uyghurs amounts to genocide. 

China declared its campaign in 2014 after a series of violent attacks that it blamed on Uyghur extremists or separatists. 

But what all Uyghurs are now facing is more sinister and lucrative than that, said Byler, now an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

It is, he said, a modern-day colonial project that operates at the nexus of state surveillance, mass detention and huge profits, and is enabled by high tech companies using ideas and technology first developed in the West.

Byler calls it “terror capitalism,” a new frontier of global capitalism that is fuelled by the labelling of a people as dangerous, and then using their labour and most private personal data to generate wealth.

“When we’re talking about a frontier of capitalism, you’re talking about turning something that previously was not a commodity into a commodity,” he said. 

“So in this context, it’s Uyghur social life, Uyghur behaviour, Uyghur digital histories that are being extracted and then quantified, measured and assessed and turned into this pattern data that is then made predictable.”

The process Byler describes involves forced harvesting of people’s data and then using it to improve predictive artificial intelligence technology. It also involves using the same population as test subjects for companies developing new tech. In other words, Xinjiang serves as an incubator for new tech.

Also critical is using those populations as unpaid or cheap labour in a resource-rich area considered a strategic corridor for China’s economic ambitions.

“As I started to think more about the technology systems that were being built and understand the money that was flowing into this space, I started to think about it as more of a kind of security industrial complex that was funding technology development and research in the region,” Byler told CBC’s Ideas.

Byler said research shows that tech companies working with Chinese state security tend to flourish and innovate, thanks largely to access to the huge troves of data collected by various levels of government.

David Yang, an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, conducted such research using thousands of publicly available contracts specifically for facial recognition technology procured by mostly municipal governments all over China. 

A contracted firm with access to government data “steadily increased its product innovation not just for the government, but also for the commercial market,” for the next two years, said Yang. 

‘Health check’

Surveillance is a feature of everyday life in Xinjiang, so the personal data crucial to the profits is constantly being collected.

Central to the harvesting is a biometric ID system introduced there in 2017 requiring citizens to provide fingerprints, facial imagery, iris scans and DNA samples.

There are also turnstiles, checkpoints and cameras everywhere, and citizens are required to carry smartphones with specific apps.

“It’s the technology that really pervades all moments of life,” said Byler. “It’s so intimate. There’s no real outside to it.”

It was in 2017 that Alim (not his real name) returned to Xinjiang from abroad to see his ailing mother. His arrest upon landing in China was the start of what he said was a descent into powerlessness — and the involuntary harvesting of his data. 

Alim, now in his 30s, spoke to IDEAS on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals against remaining family in Xinjiang.

At the police station at home, as part of what he was told was a “health check,” Alim had a DNA sample taken and “multiple pictures of my face from different sides … they made me read a passage from a book” to record his voice.

“Right before the voice recording, I had an anxiety attack, realizing that I’m possibly going to be detained for a very long time,” Alim said.

The warrant for Alim’s arrest said he was “under suspicion of disrupting the societal order.” 

In a crowded and airless pre-trial detention facility, he said he was forced to march and chant Communist Party slogans. 

“I was just a student visiting home, but in the eyes of the Chinese government, my sheer identity, being a male Uyghur born after the 1980s, is enough for them to detain me.” 

Once released through the help of a relative, Alim found that his data haunted him wherever he went, setting off police alarms whenever he swiped his ID. 

“I basically realized I was in a form of house arrest. I felt trapped.”

Global connections

While the Xinjiang example is extreme, it is still an extension of surveillance that has become the norm in the West, too, but where consent is at least implicitly given when we shop online or use social media.

And just as the artificial intelligence technology used for surveillance in Xinjiang or elsewhere in China has roots in the computer labs of Silicon Valley and Big Tech companies in the West, new Chinese iterations of such technology are also being exported back into the world, selling in countries like Zimbabwe and the Philippines, said Byler.

China may be the site of “some of the sharpest, most egregious manifestations of tech oppression, but it’s by no means the only place in the world,” said lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar, who is associate director with the Refugee Law Lab at  York University in Toronto.

One such place is the modern international border, not only in the U.S. but also in Europe, where Molnar is studying how surveillance technology affects migrant crossings.

Molnar said China’s avid investment in artificial intelligence is creating an “arms race” that carries risks of “normalizing surveillance” in competing countries with stricter human rights laws. 

“How is this going to then impact average individuals who are concerned about the growing role of Big Tech in our society?” she said from Athens.

“It seems like we’ve skipped a few steps in terms of the kind of conversations that we need to have as a public, as a society, and especially including the perspectives of communities and groups who are the ones experiencing this.” 

‘A lot more nuance to this story’

Despite human rights concerns, other countries are loath to condemn China over Xinjiang because it is such an important part of the global economy, said Byler.

But he points out that he focuses on the economics of Xinjiang partly “to destabilize this easy binary of ‘China is bad and the West is good.'”

China’s “People’s War on Terror” should be seen as an extension of the “war on terror” that originated in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks and is now a global phenomenon, said Byler.

“If we want to criticize China, we also have to criticize the ‘war on terror.’ We have to criticize or think carefully about capitalism and how it exploits people in multiple contexts,” he said. 

“There’s actually a lot more nuance to the story.”

The West’s complicity, he said, begins with “building these kinds of technologies without really thinking about the consequences.” 

Byler’s observations on the ground form the basis of two books he’s authored on the situation in Xinjiang — and of his policy suggestions to lawmakers, including Canadian MPs, about the repression in Xinjiang. 

He’s called on lawmakers to demand China’s leaders immediately abolish the re-education detention system and release all detainees. He’s also called for economic sanctions on Chinese authorities and technology companies that benefit from that process and for expediting asylum for Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims from China.

“I am a scholar at the end of the day,” said the Vancouver-based anthropologist.

“Maybe I can nudge people to think in ways that advocate for change. It takes many, many voices and I’m just trying to do my best with what I know how.”

Source: China’s high-tech repression of Uyghurs is more sinister — and lucrative — than it seems, anthropologist says

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Alberta launching new programs to boost rural immigration

2022/02/18 Leave a comment

Always an uphill challenge, and latest Census data indicates ever increasing percentage flocking to urban areas. That being said, even small increases in rural areas can make a difference there even if one of the motivators is political:

Alberta’s United Conservative government is hoping two new programs will bring more immigrants to rural Alberta communities.

Speaking at the Fairness for Newcomers Summit in downtown Calgary on Wednesday, Premier Jason Kenney said the programs will encourage skilled workers from abroad to settle outside the province’s big cities to help fill anticipated labour shortages.

“We’re determined to get more than our share of newcomers,” Kenney said. “Newcomers don’t take jobs away from Albertans but help to create jobs. They create additional demand, they create additional wealth and, very typically, they create additional businesses that hire people.”

The Rural Renewal Stream will allow municipalities outside the Calgary and Edmonton metropolitan areas with fewer than 100,000 people to apply to become a designated community for immigrants.

The other program, the Rural Entrepreneur Stream, will let immigrants who want to start or buy a business in rural Alberta visit communities to assess their plans. The UCP had first pitched the programs as campaign promises before the 2019 provincial election.

The Wednesday announcement comes in the wake of the 2021 census, which revealed Alberta has seven of the 10 fastest-shrinking municipalities across Canada, all in far-flung rural areas, as rural communities face aging populations and a dwindling workforce.

One difficulty for immigrants to rural communities is having their foreign credentials recognized, said UCP Associate Minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism Muhammad Yaseen. He said the government is aiming to make it easier for trained professionals to put their skills to use, which he said could help alleviate the province’s ongoing rural doctor shortage.

“A larger issue is, how do we get international medical graduates who are here, in Calgary or Edmonton, who are also willing to go to rural Alberta?” Yaseen told Postmedia.“We’re doing whatever we can to help them, to facilitate them, and not only doctors but engineers and pharmacists and others. We don’t want anybody left behind just because their credentials are not recognized.”

Yaseen immigrated to Canada from Pakistan with his family when he was 17, and in 1979 took his first job in Rimbey, about 65 kilometres northwest of Red Deer. At the time, he was the only person of colour in the rural community, something he said has shifted in the intervening decades.

Yaseen did face some discrimination, but said many people welcomed him into the community.

“Rural Alberta culture is a culture of hospitality, a culture of generosity, a culture of sharing and caring, and I learned a lot when I moved there,” he said.

Immigrant Services Calgary applauded the new initiatives, saying they expect plans to boost rural immigration to have broader economic benefits for the province.

“The rural immigration streams announced today will not only contribute to the local economies of small towns and centres across Alberta, but they’ll also support and grow the provincial economy,” said Hyder Hassan, CEO of the local non-profit.

The Opposition NDP criticized the announcement, saying additional community supports need to be established in communities that will be welcoming immigrants.

“These new streams will not be enough to help communities set newcomers up for success,” NDP labour critic Christina Gray said in a statement.

Source: Alberta launching new programs to boost rural immigration

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