Paul: When Diversity Isn’t the Right Kind of Diversity

2022/09/19 Leave a comment

Useful reminder that minorities are not monolithic in their political perspectives.

In many ways, it is a positive sign of civic integration when all groups participate in different political parties and formations, as is the case in Canada:

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has dominated headlines this month, homages to her reign and dissections of the Harry and Meghan situation unsurprisingly pushing other news aside, especially other stories from Britain.

But even amid all the pomp, one news item out of Britain has attracted curiously little attention. Liz Truss, the new Conservative prime minister, announced her cabinet, and for the first time ever, not a single member of the inner circle — what’s referred to as the Great Offices of State — is a white man.

The home secretary, Suella Braverman, is the daughter of Kenyan and Mauritian immigrants. The mother of the foreign minister, James Cleverly, emigrated from Sierra Leone. The new chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, was born to Ghanaian parents.

Did the left break into applause? Were there hosannas throughout progressive Twitter heralding this racial, ethnic and gender diversity as a step forward for society?

Not exactly.

Instead, the change was dutifully relayed, often with caveats. “Liz Truss’s cabinet: diverse but dogmatic,” noted The Guardian. The new team was criticized as elite, the product of schools like Eton, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. These people aren’t working class, others pointed out. They don’t sufficiently support the rights of those seeking asylum in Britain or policies that address climate change.

“It’s a meritocratic advance for people who have done well in education, law and business,” Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a think tank that focuses on issues of immigration, integration and national identity, told CNN. “It’s not an advance on social class terms.”

This is an interesting criticism. “Meritocratic,” used here in a pejorative sense, means based on ability and achievement, earned through a combination of talent and hard work. Traditionally, merit served as the primary consideration in hiring, but some people today see the very systems that confer merit as rigged, especially against minorities. In an effort to rectify that imbalance and to diversify the work force, particularly for leadership positions, it has become common practice in hiring — in the business and nonprofit worlds, as in government — to make racial or ethnic diversity a more significant factor.

The trouble is that for many of the same people, ethnic and racial diversity count only when combined with a particular point of view. Even before Truss’s cabinet was finalized, one member of the Labour opposition tweeted, “Her cabinet is expected to be diverse, but it will be the most right-wing in living memory, embracing a political agenda that will attack the rights of working people, especially minorities.”

Another Labour representative wrote: “It’s not enough to be a Black or ethnic minority politician in this country or a cabinet member. That’s not what representation is about. That’s actually tokenism.”

The implication is that there’s only one way to authentically represent one’s race, ethnicity or sex — otherwise you’re a phony or a pawn. Is that fair?

I’m not politically aligned with Truss on most issues. This is not the team I’d choose to lead a country reeling from Covid, an energy crisis and the twin disasters of Boris and Brexit. But it’s Truss’s prerogative to hire people with whom she is ideologically aligned and who support her policies.

And one has to assume those new hires joined her willingly and with conviction. Surely they, like all racial and ethnic minorities, are capable of the same independence of mind and diversity of thought as white people — some people Trumpy, other people Bernie.

Nor are they the first conservative minorities to hold top positions of power in Britain. It was the Conservative Party that, despite widespread antisemitism, first appointed a Jewish-born prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in 1868. The three women who have served as prime ministers — Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and now Truss — have all been Conservatives. The former prime minister David Cameron was no lefty, yet he made a point of emphasizing ethnic and racial diversity among his leadership appointments.

Black and other ethnic minority voters in Britain aren’t uniformly lefty, either. They cast 20 percent of their votes for Conservatives in 2019.

A similar diversity of political opinion among minorities exists in the United States, and it bewilders the left. An increasing number of Latinos are running as and voting for Republican candidates. Donald Trump got more votes from ethnic minorities in 2020 than he did in 2016. Black men’s support for Trump increased by six percentage points the second time around. And that was after the murder of George Floyd, an event assumed to have galvanized many minority voters on the left.

In his prescient 1991 book, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” the law professor Stephen Carter decried many of the assumptions around diversity nascent at that time — including the notion that racial or ethnic minorities are expected to think as a group, not as individuals. He bemoaned “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested with a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

It’s been three decades since Carter’s book was published, and that lamentable assumption has only gained purchase. As he pointed out then: “In an earlier era, such sentiments might have been marked down as frankly racist. Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.”

It seems odd to have to point out in 2022 that “diverse” hires can be every bit as diverse on the inside as they are on the outside. For every Ketanji Brown Jackson, you’re liable to get a Clarence Thomas. Apparently, we need constant reminders that there’s more to people than meets the eye and that in multicultural societies, an acceptance of diversity must be more than skin deep.

Source: When Diversity Isn’t the Right Kind of Diversity

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , ,

Rioux: Quel «dérapage»? [on Premier Legault’s comments on social cohesion]

2022/09/19 Leave a comment

Le Devoir’s European correspondent Christian Rioux comparing EU social cohesion concerns with those of Premier Legault.

While recognizing the differences between Canada’s (and Quebec’s) immigration selection systems and integration programs and those of EU countries, he nevertheless reverts to the same social cohesion concerns without examining the effects of Quebec political discourse and legislation that have contributed to social exclusion, not social cohesion:

« Couvrez ce sein que je ne saurais voir », disait le Tartuffe. Convenons que ses héritiers modernes ont des formules moins élégantes que celles de Molière. Ces temps-ci, ils préfèrent parler de « dérapage ». Mais l’effet est le même. Il consiste à écarter du débat tout propos un peu dérangeant dès lors qu’il aborde une question litigieuse. L’étiquette vaut à elle seule condamnation.

Ainsi en va-t-il des récents propos de François Legault sur l’immigration. Pourtant, qu’y a-t-il de plus banal que d’affirmer comme l’a fait le premier ministre la semaine dernière qu’une forte immigration peut nuire à la « cohésion nationale » ?

On comprend que dans un pays « post-national » comme le Canada, où l’immigration a été sacralisée, ces propos créent la polémique. Mais, vu d’Europe, où le débat est ancien et plus nourri, il est évident que l’immigration massive pose partout et toujours un défi à la cohésion nationale.

Cela se vérifie à des degrés divers dans la plupart des pays européens. En France, sous l’effet d’une immigration incontrôlée et très largement issue du monde arabo-musulman, on a assisté depuis de nombreuses années à un véritable morcellement du pays. Dans toutes les grandes villes sont apparues des banlieues islamisées autrement appelées ghettos. Pas besoin de s’appeler Marine Le Pen pour le constater. Interrogé par des collègues du Monde en 2014, le président François Hollande lui-même n’avait pas hésité à le reconnaître. « Je pense qu’il y a trop d’arrivées, d’immigration qui ne devrait pas être là », disait-il. Et celui-ci de conclure : « Comment peut-on éviter la partition ? Car c’est quand même ça qui est en train de se produire : la partition. » (Un président ne devrait pas dire ça…, Gérard Davet et Fabrice Lhomme, Stock).

Certains diront évidemment qu’en France, ce n’est pas pareil. Soit. Tournons donc nos yeux vers un pays plus à notre échelle.

Avec ses 10 millions d’habitants, son économie de pointe, son climat boréal, son amour du consensus et son parti pris en faveur de l’égalité hommes-femmes, la Suède partage plusieurs points communs avec le Québec.

Il n’y a pas longtemps, dans ce petit paradis nordique, celui qui s’inquiétait de l’immigration massive était accusé de « déraper », quand il n’était pas traité de raciste. Les Suédois regardaient de haut des pays comme la France et le Danemark, soupçonnés de xénophobie. Jusqu’à ce que la réalité les rattrape. La flambée des émeutes ethniques, comme en France, et l’irruption de la violence dans les banlieues ont vite fait de les ramener sur terre. Aujourd’hui, de la social-démocratie à la droite populiste, les trois grands partis estiment qu’il en va justement de la « cohésion nationale ». C’est pourquoi ce pays, qui a toujours été particulièrement généreux à l’égard des réfugiés, a radicalement resserré ses critères d’admission et a multiplié les mesures d’intégration. L’élection sur le fil d’une majorité de droite, finalement confirmée mercredi, ne fera que conforter cette orientation.

Les belles âmes ont beau détourner le regard, en Suède comme en France, il est devenu évident qu’un lien existe (même s’il n’explique pas tout) entre l’immigration incontrôlée et la croissance d’une certaine criminalité. Les événements récents du printemps au Stade de France, où des centaines de supporters britanniques se sont fait détrousser à la pointe du couteau par des dizaines de délinquants, ont forcé le ministre de l’Intérieur à reconnaître ce dont les habitants de la Seine-Saint-Denis se doutaient depuis belle lurette.

La Suède aussi a connu une explosion de la petite criminalité et des règlements de compte entre gangs. Elle a notamment enregistré une croissance des morts par balle parmi les plus fortes en Europe. Aujourd’hui, même la gauche sociale-démocrate l’admet. Et elle s’est résolue à augmenter les effectifs policiers. Contrairement à la France, cette prise de conscience fait aujourd’hui un certain consensus dans la classe politique.

Cela n’a rien à voir avec la peur de l’Autre. Comme nombre de Français, les Suédois ont dû se rendre à l’évidence et cesser d’envisager l’immigration comme une simple question morale. Les peuples ont le droit de réglementer l’immigration sans se faire traiter à chaque fois de raciste par une gauche morale et une droite libérale qui en ont fait leur Saint-Graal.

Bien sûr, l’immigration n’est pas la même en France, en Suède et au Québec. À cause de son histoire et de sa position en Europe, la France connaît une forte immigration illégale et de regroupement familial. Naïvement et par générosité, la Suède a ouvert toutes grandes ses portes aux réfugiés et elle n’a jamais contrôlé son immigration économique. Le Québec, où l’équilibre linguistique est plus que précaire, subit des quotas d’immigration parmi les plus élevés au monde et une immigration temporaire hors de contrôle.

Il n’empêche que, malgré ces différences réelles, les mêmes causes produisent partout les mêmes effets. Ce n’est souvent qu’une question de temps.

Lentement, depuis une décennie, tous les tabous de la mondialisation se sont effrités. Ceux qui ont vécu les années 1980 se souviennent de l’enthousiasme et de la naïveté qui accompagnaient cette nouvelle phase d’expansion du capital. Nous n’en sommes plus là. L’immigration de masse demeure le dernier mythe encore vivace de cette époque.

Source: Quel «dérapage»?

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Tackling the health burden of anti-black racism and violence

2022/09/19 Leave a comment

As described, the new program seems more focussed on histories and ideologies than on practical measures to improve health outcomes for Blacks and other minorities, generally reflecting lower income levels, as the differential impact of COVID made clear:

As professors across Canada have been handing out syllabi and giving their first lectures of this school year, Professor Roberta Timothy has her eyes firmly set on next September, when the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto will welcome the first cohort into the two-year Master of Public Health in Black Health programme.

In addition to the regular public health curriculum, the 10 to 15 students will follow a programme that includes six courses devoted to black public health, including ones on the socio-historical context of black health, chronic diseases and reproductive health and decolonising theory and method.

“A masters in public health in the field of black health is needed,” says Timothy, who proposed the programme in 2021, “because of how the experience of anti-black racism impacts black health. There’s a correlation between what I call ‘anti-black violence’ and black health outcomes. 

“If we’re looking at factors such as higher diabetes rates, higher cancer rates, higher HIV rates and who has been impacted by COVID more, we see there’s a direct correlation with health outcomes and anti-black racism and violence.”

The fight for race-based data

In designing the programme, Timothy has, in large measure, drawn on her 30 years of being a public health practitioner because unlike, for example, the United States, Canada does not routinely collect race-based medical data.

“There are only two million of us, and most of us are located in Toronto, Montreal with smaller populations in Alberta. There’s this kind of notion that we don’t exist.

“We are a smaller population, we are absorbed,” Timothy told University World News, nodding to the fact that blacks account for only 3.5% of the Canadian population, while in the US blacks account for 13.4% and in states like Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia blacks account for more than 30% of the population. “We’ve been fighting to get raced-based data,” Timothy says.

After we spoke, she e-mailed me an April 2020 letter sent to the Ontario government that called for the collection of socio-economic and race-based health data. 

A total of 192 community-based health and advocacy groups and 1,612 individuals signed the letter, which underscored that “Ontario, like other provinces and territories in Canada, continues to deal with the ongoing legacies of colonisation, structural inequality and systemic racism. Responding to COVID-19 with the expectation that all people will experience the pandemic in the same way hurts the already marginalised people and communities.”

When I asked how health outcomes for blacks, who, as in the US and the United Kingdom, are disproportionately poor, differ from poor whites, Timothy noted that there is evidence that shows that in terms of HIV the black community is more impacted.

Further, she pointed to a 2015 study and one she has been working on dealing with COVID rates for two years. The 2015 study showed that in Montreal the maternal morbidity of blacks was three to four times higher than it was for whites. (Because of Canada’s universal medical system, this difference cannot be attributed to lack of access to medical care.)

“I’ve been collecting data on COVID among blacks for two years. If you look at these COVID numbers from the UK, the United States and Canada, we see the similarities in terms of how COVID has disproportionately impacted folks of African ancestry,” says Timothy.

As the students will begin learning next year in the socio-historical course, Timothy told me, this fact, as well as the higher rates of diabetes, HIV and other diseases among blacks in the US, UK and Africa, must be handled extremely carefully. This is because of the long history, going back to the early 1800s, of racialist biological determinism.  

“The connection between African folks [ie, those in Africa or the diaspora] and these disorders is not biological, not as explained by the ‘biological determinist perspective’, but rather from the impact of racism and colonisation globally for black folks. 

“It’s not about being black. It’s about anti-black racism and experiencing anti-black violence. It’s about the implications of that extreme grief, trauma, violence that you experience as a black person anywhere you travel. It’s about a lifetime of being treated that way that impacts our mental and physical health no matter where you are, even if you come from the African continent.”

Critiquing Eurocentric methodologies

By training Timothy is a ‘methodologist’. Accordingly, I asked her how the methodology course she is presently designing differs from a traditional methodology course. The answer does not lie in ignoring traditional methodology. 

Quite the opposite, the course examines the Eurocentric history of research methodologies – in order to critique them. One notorious so-called methodology was that used by George Gliddon (b 1809) and Josiah C Nott (b 1804) in their Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857) in which, via measurements of skulls and other pseudo-scientific methods akin to phrenology, they adduced a hierarchy of brain development that placed blacks between Caucasians and chimpanzees in terms of intelligence.

As well, students will learn about the horrid Tuskegee experiment in the US. In 1932, 400 black men, impoverished sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, were infected with syphilis to “observe the natural history of untreated syphilis”. 

None was given penicillin after its invention in 1947. By 1972 when the study ended, 128 of the men had died either from syphilis or complications arising from it. Forty of the men’s wives had been infected and 19 children had been born with congenital syphilis. The violation of ethical norms and the human cost of the study is one of the reasons why many African Americans are vaccine hesitant.

The students in the programme will learn of the importance of looking at factors such as race, racism, class, gender, gender identity and sexual orientation when they collect data.

By way of example, Timothy turned our discussion to how she would approach a study of post-partum depression among black women. 

Noting the influence of Black Feminist Theory, she said, she would begin with such questions as, “How does the impact of anti-black racism impact the subject you want to inquire about? Does the question make sense to the population being studied?” An equally important question is, “How will the data from this study be used to advance the health care of black women?”

While white women also experience post-partum depression, Timothy notes, they are not burdened by the socio-historical narrative that burdens black women – a narrative that is informed by the experience of American slavery in which female slaves who had just given birth were expected to go back to the cotton fields, often within hours of giving birth. 

Further, because of the sundering of the black family during slavery and continued disruption of it because of the high incarceration levels of black males (which is part of the ongoing anti-black violence Timothy refers to), black women have historically been seen as the rock upon which the family relies.

“This false notion of the strong black woman is of one who is not human. We are not given human qualities. We are not allowed to be vulnerable or human.” 

The violence of the state

Yet, there is a second piece of the violence that is part of this stereotype. “It is the imagining of the violence of the state. It comes from the reality that you don’t have the right to be depressed or emotional because if you are a black person who is, there is a chance that your children will be taken away from you.”

(Timothy, who comes from a working-class background, holds a PhD and has worked in public health for decades and is now at the University of Toronto, exemplified this last point by telling me that when she has to bring her children to the doctor, they are dressed up. “You’d think we were going to church. But I do this because we are racially profiled on a daily basis, even in terms of our children.”)

Timothy’s students will also learn how the experience of being a black male in Canada contributes to diabetes and cardiovascular problems such as high blood pressure.

“The question students will have to ask is how criminalisation (or the threat of it) and anti-black violence by the state contribute to these diseases in black men. The inquiry will show that no matter what their socio-economic status is, where they work or live, black men know that they are profiled on a daily basis and this creates anxiety, higher blood sugar levels and high blood pressure.”

Public health practitioners who provide health care to black men must be aware not only of the effects of being hypervigilant but also of the depression these men carry, of the intergenerational transfer of post-traumatic stress disorder and how systems of enslavement and colonisation violated black men’s masculinity, says Timothy. The heightened tension of being black in Canada does not vanish even when home.

“Your home is never really safe because you are never sure when the police are going to come in the door,” she says, referring to, among others, D’Andre Campbell, a 26-year-old immigrant with mental health issues, who was shot in his home by a constable belonging to the Peel Regional Police (near Toronto) after he had been tasered and was already on the ground.

Professor Akwatu Khenti, who teaches courses on the public health implications of anti-black racism and the criminal justice system, told University Affairs in late August that there is “a lot of epistemic violence that takes place as a sort of intellectual microaggression [that] devalues or invalidates other ways of knowing. For me, it means building appreciation for the epistemic approaches of different groups and [giving] more space to traditional wisdom that worked for thousands of years.”

Inoculation for smallpox, for example, was practised in Ethiopia and West Africa a century or more before Edward Jenner noticed that milk maids with cow pox scars appeared to be immune to smallpox. The first inoculation in America was in 1721 by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who learned of the practice from his slave Onesimus, who had been kidnapped from Africa and whose Latin name meant useful, helpful or, tellingly, profitable.

Dismantling a system

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic two-and-a-half years ago, doctors and public health practitioners have been uncharacteristically vocal for the most part, advocating for masking, the safety of vaccines and for improving ventilation in schools before they re-opened. Timothy views the role of graduates of the Master of Public Health in Black Health programme to be similarly engaged.

“I know that I’m teaching at the University of Toronto. I’m very aware that this education system has a history of colonial violence. Yet, we are going to train people in terms of how to resist anti-black racism and other forms of violence. We’re creating a place where we create practitioners who know how the system works and, therefore, understand how to begin dismantling it.

“Obviously, we are not going to do that tomorrow. But we can begin the conversation about how being a public health practitioner is to be part of a decolonising process. It’s part of a movement towards justice, to dismantle systems that create violence.”

Source: Tackling the health burden of anti-black racism and violence

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Regg Cohn: Is discussion of the Queen problematic? Let’s talk about it

2022/09/19 Leave a comment

Good commentary on excessive “trigger” warnings and the lack of meaningful civics knowledge:

Everyone has an opinion on the Queen, right or wrong.

But in some schools, not every student should have a right to mourn her passing in public — not if other students might be “triggered.”

That edict came from a GTA public school board that instructed teachers to avoid the topic of Queen Elizabeth’s death — and the legacy of her life. In the classrooms of York region, the late monarch was not so much dethroned as deplatformed.

How can the Crown be cancelled in the classrooms of Ontario? How do state schools disavow the head of state?

Good questions. According to a memo distributed to all teachers this month by the York Region District School Board, the answers were strictly black and white.

Diversity of identity trumps diversity of ideas, to wit:

“School staff please refrain from developing tributes or activities to memorialize the death of the Queen,” the note admonishes.

“For some, the death of the Queen is very triggering. We are committed to maintaining neutral learning environments in our schools.”

Neutral? Even going halfway, with half-mast, seemed a stretch to the school board:

“Some students and staff may require support as a result of seeing the flags lowered,” the memo continued.

To be sure, the monarchy affects different people differently, notably if they or their ancestors lived under British colonization. Many believe in abolition or refuse absolution for the Crown’s past sins.

As a foreign correspondent, I covered the referendum on abolition in Australia, which would have succeeded but for the failure of voters to agree on what to replace it with. As a columnist, I’ve written about the absurdity of a foreign-born monarch presiding over our homegrown Canadian democracy while simultaneously juggling more than a dozen other foreign realms — from Antigua to Tuvalu.

I’ve long argued that the Crown has a case of conflicted multiple personality that defies credulity. Be that as it may, it will remain that way for years to come, for Canadians have no appetite for the domestic constitutional combat required to reconfigure our democratic infrastructure.

Like it or not, the ineluctable consequence is that the British King is to be Canada’s King until further notice. That’s a complication that requires education and elucidation, not the silent treatment for fear of offending.

Trigger warnings are cited five times in the school board memo, including this alert about the perils of press coverage: “Media coverage will be frequent … Try to offer a neutral space in your classroom to have a break from this potentially triggering media exposure.”

Remember when students learned media literacy, not sanctuary? Are schools now “safe spaces” from overexposure to newspaper funeral coverage?

The “tip sheet” counsels teachers on how to respond to students who dare to say out loud, “I’d like to honour the Queen.”

Recommended staff response: “Thank you for your idea… While this might feel important and helpful for you, for others in our class/school it might not feel this way … We need to be respectful of everyone.”

In other words: Forget it, kid — no mourning this morning.

Predictably, the memo triggered Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government. Education Minister Stephen Lecce issued a statement reminding school boards of the province’s “expectation (to) honour the Queen on the date of her funeral, and enrich students with a strong understanding of the values and enduring legacy of Canada’s constitutional democracy.”

All schools are expected to observe a moment of “silent reflection” (students are free to opt out) on Monday — designated a day of mourning (or holiday) across Canada — according to a note sent out by the deputy minister of education, Nancy Naylor.

What is most instructive about the peculiar memo from York’s school board is what it says about the state of educational instruction today. Basic civics — teaching students about the complications and contradictions in our constitutional system — can’t be taught if educators are told to duck controversy because of potential sensitivity.

Never mind the endless debates about ending debates — so-called “cancel culture.” Quarreling over the Queen’s legacy should be part of our democratic discourse.

Indigenous leaders from Canada will be at the Queen’s funeral in London, as will our first Indigenous vice-regal representative, Gov.-Gen. Mary Simon. Perhaps they understand it is possible, in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, to also reconcile contradictions — to call out the Crown’s historical blunders and blind spots while still paying respect to she who wore the crown.

It’s called context and critical thinking, as opposed to trigger warnings that compel conformity and uniformity lest anyone feel uncomfortable. Whatever one thinks of the monarchy, the point is to make people think — not to warn teachers against letting students think out loud in classrooms. 

When the schools of state forbid talk about the head of state, it’s time for a refresher course on civics.

Source: Is discussion of the Queen problematic? Let’s talk about it

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Increase in Cuban Migration Has No Historical Precedent

2022/09/19 Leave a comment

Interesting and significant shift:

When it comes to immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border, media coverage tends to focus on the increasing numbers of migrants attempting to cross it. What’s missing from the conversation, however, is the changing demographics of these migrants.  

Historically, the majority of people who attempted to cross the southwestern border between border crossing stations — officially called ports of entry, or “POEs” — were Mexican nationals. This began to change in recent years, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) began encountering  large numbers of Central American migrants also attempting the crossing. Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are known as the Northern Triangle, and many migrants from these countries frequently attempted the crossings in family units. 

Beginning in 2020, however, CBP began to encounter increasing numbers of immigrants from outside Mexico and the Northern Triangle. According to CBP data, the number of migrants from countries other than these four has increased 11,000% since 2007, with the sharpest increase occurring in the past two years. Border Patrol apprehensions involving migrants from countries beyond Mexico and Central America’s Northern Triangle were 9% in fiscal year 2019, but climbed to 22% in 2021 and 40% in 2022. In fact, encounters by CBP with migrants from these “other” countries are on track to outpace encounters with migrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle. 

Migrants from these “other” countries come from a handful of nations, including Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Each of these countries has seen dramatic increases in encounters at the southwest border over the past two years. The rapid increase in Cuban migrants is particularly notable. 

Cubans who remain on the island face widespread poverty, inflation, power blackouts, basic supply shortages, and intense government repression following massive anti-government protests in 2021. These conditions are driving a historic increase in Cuban migration, surpassing the 1980 Mariel boatlift. CBP has reported nearly 176,000 encounters with Cuban migrants at the southwest land border since October. 

Hundreds of unaccompanied Cuban children have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in the past year, as more parents appear to be sending their children to safety amid deteriorating conditions in Cuba.  

Since October 2021, CBP reported 662 encounters with unaccompanied Cuban children at the southern border, compared to 32 encounters in the FY 2021 and 57 encounters in 2020, marking an increase of 1,969%. 

In the midst of these increased numbers, USCIS has restarted the Cuban Family Reunification Parole program “to provide a safe, orderly pathway to the United States for certain Cuban beneficiaries of approved family-based immigrant petitions.” 

Source: https://www.boundless.com/blog/boundless-weekly-immigration-news/

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

U.S. Population Growth Has Nearly Flatlined. Is That So Bad?

2022/09/16 Leave a comment

Well worth reading, a useful and needed counterpoint to all the fretting about demographic decline and an aging population. Canadian policy makers and others need to think more about how to manage an aging population that mainly advocating for increased immigration to slow the trend:

“A Demographic Crisis.” “A Blinking Light Ahead.” “The Death of Hope.” Those are some of the dire headlines that have been written in recent years about the sluggish pace of U.S. population growth, which in 2021 fell to its lowest rate ever — just 0.1 percent.

While the pandemic played a major role in driving last year’s decline, the country’s population growth has been slowing for much of the last decade, depressed by declining fertility rates, a surge in “deaths of despair” and lower levels of legal immigration.

But is a population slowdown as much of a crisis as some have made it out to be, or could it actually bring welcome changes? Here’s a look at a longstanding demographic debate.

For a population to replenish itself in the absence of immigration, demographers estimate that there must be, on average, about 2.1 births per woman. In the United States, the fertility rate has been consistently below that level since 2007. And it’s not alone: While some countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are still growing rapidly, the global average fertility rate has been falling for decades, and even China’s population, the world’s largest, may very soon reach its peak.

As a result, the United Nations now predicts that the human population will start declining by the end of the century. (Other demographers have projected an even earlier peak.) Some countries — notably Japan and South Korea, whose fertility rates are among the lowest in the world — are already shrinking.

Why are fertility rates falling? The trend is typically attributed to a combination of economic prosperity, which leads to lower infant mortality, and greater gender equality. “As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born,” Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun reported for The Times last year. Because many of those babies then go on to have smaller families than their parents did, they added, “the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff.”

It’s a stark reversal of the demographic trends of the 1900s, during which the coincidence of high fertility rates and lengthening life spans caused the global population to nearly quadruple in size, from 1.6 billion to six billion. And for much of the 20th century, it was the specter of overpopulation, not stagnation or decline, that animated dystopian visions of the future.

Which raises a question: How much stock should we really be placing in population forecasts? As David Adam explained in Nature last year, medium-term projections are usually quite accurate, as most people who will be alive in 20 to 30 years have already been born.

But over the longer term, projections diverge and become less reliable, in part because technological and environmental shocks that could cause demographic swings are impossible to predict, as Vox’s Kelsey Piper has written: “If, for example, climate change drives currently developed countries back into poverty and drives their birthrates back up, the estimates are poorly equipped to account for that. On the other hand, if more reliable contraceptives are developed and virtually end unintended pregnancies the world over, birthrates could fall much faster than predicted.”

For many futurists, the primary challenge posed by declining population growth is economic: When people live longer and have fewer babies, the population ages, leaving fewer working-age adults to support a country’s swelling number of retirees.

“Older people are more prone to illness, and many rely on publicly funded pensions and eventually require caregiving,” Stephanie H. Murray wrote in The Atlantic in February. “Many countries, including the U.S., are already struggling to meet the needs of the rapidly growing elderly population.”

This can create a kind of national languishing, as the Times columnist Ross Douthat argued last year: “If you assume that dynamism and growth are desirable things (not everyone does, but that’s a separate debate), then for the developed world to be something more than just a rich museum, at some point it needs to stop growing ever-older, with a dwindling younger generation struggling in the shadow of societal old age.”

Aging may take a particularly heavy toll on middle-income countries. Historically, as industrialized countries have become richer, their labor force grew more rapidly than their nonworking population, providing a “demographic dividend.” But in some developing countries, including Brazil and China, fertility rates have fallen to around or below replacement level much more quickly than they did for their higher-income counterparts, and their populations now face the risk of getting old before getting rich.

A population slowdown can be a symptom of other national problems. For example, as Derek Thompson has noted in The Atlantic, while declining fertility is often a sign of female empowerment, it can also be a sign of its opposite, as suggested by the growing gap between how many children Americans say they want and how many they have. “There are many potential explanations for this gap,” Thompson wrote, “but one is that the U.S. has made caring for multiple children too expensive and cumbersome for even wealthy parents, due to a shortage of housing, the rising cost of child care, and the paucity of long-term federal support for children.”

To see how population stagnation or even decline need not spell disaster, you can look at countries where it’s already occurring, as Daniel Moss, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian economies, did last year. Take Japan: “Despite the caricature of the country as an economic failure in the grip of terminal decline, life goes on,” he wrote. “True, growth in overall G.D.P. has been fairly anemic in past few decades, but G.D.P. per capita has held up well.” What’s more, he added, Japan’s unemployment rate is very low and has remained so throughout the pandemic (it was 2.6 percent in July).

Japan’s example lends some credence to the view of Kim Stanley Robinson, a widely acclaimed science-fiction writer, who believes that an aging population with a smaller work force could actually lead to economic prosperity. “It sounds like full employment to me,” he argued in The Washington Post last year. “The precarity and immiseration of the unemployed would disappear as everyone had access to work that gave them an income and dignity and meaning.”

The challenges of an aging population could push countries to pursue policies that improve quality of life:

  • One 2019 analysis estimated that if the European Union eliminated inequities in educational attainment and in women’s and immigrants’ labor force participation, it could cancel out more than half of the labor force decline it might otherwise experience by 2060.
  • Another way governments have responded to labor shortages caused by population aging is by investing more in the automation of work, an M.I.T. study found last year. As The Times’s John Yoon reported last month, “The prospect of a shrinking work force has put South Korea at the forefront of developing robots and artificial intelligence for the workplace.”
  • In the view of the Times columnist Paul Krugman, the biggest economic problem of an aging population isn’t increased strain on the social safety net, but rather weak investment from businesses anticipating reduced consumer demand. If that scenario comes to pass, though, “why not put the money to work for the public good?” he wrote last year. “Why not borrow cheaply and use the funds to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, invest in the health and education of our children, and more? This would be good for our society, good for the future, and would also provide a cushion against future recessions.”

Fertility rate declines may also be making climate change easier to combat, albeit not in the way many think: As Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post has explained, fossil fuel consumption is driven primarily by increases in affluence, not the number of people on the planet per se. So while population growth in poor countries hasn’t led to large increases in planet-warming emissions, a sudden baby boom in high-income countries like the United States almost certainly would.

For some demographers, the prospect of population stagnation or decline isn’t any more a cause for alarm than population growth was; it’s simply a change that governments will need to manage. “Rather than panicking or trying to forestall this for ourselves,” Leslie Root, a demographer and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in The Washington Post last year, “we should be thinking about what that transition will mean globally — both for rich countries and for poor ones that will be far more burdened by aging populations than we will.”

Source: U.S. Population Growth Has Nearly Flatlined. Is That So Bad?

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Activists push Trudeau to broaden permanent-residency plan for undocumented migrants

2022/09/16 Leave a comment

As activists do:

As MPs return to business after the summer break, advocates are calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to offer a pathway to permanent residence for the estimated 500,000 undocumented migrants in the country.

“The next Parliament must not wait. It cannot wait. The time for comprehensive, immediate and inclusive regularization is right now,” Syed Hussan of the Migrant Rights Network told a news conference on Wednesday to launch the call for actions from Ottawa.

“Half a million people in this country are undocumented because of failures of immigration policy. Finally, Mr. Trudeau now has the historic opportunity to begin to correct these wrongs and be remembered for ensuring equal rights for these members of our society. There is cross-country support for such a move.”

Since the spring, the minority Liberal government, backed by the New Democrats, has been quietly working on a so-called regularization plan for non-status migrants, many of them precariously employed with often-exploitative jobs in construction, cleaning, caregiving, food processing and agriculture.

They face a range of vulnerabilities, including poor mental and physical health caused by social isolation and abusive working conditions.

The Star has learned that the new program builds on a previous smaller-scale initiative that helped undocumented construction workers obtain permanent status in Canada, and would likely focus on workers in particular sectors.

However, advocates are urging the government to take a broader-based approach.

“We are all here to insist that absolutely each and every undocumented person should be included. No one should be left behind. Equality is equality. And there can be no exceptions. All exceptions are discrimination,” said Hussan.

The Migrant Rights Network’s campaign is endorsed by 480 civil society organizations, including Canada’s largest human rights, climate, health, legal and labour groups.

Caroline Brouillette of the Climate Action Network Canada, a coalition of 140 groups, said the climate crisis forces more and more people from their homes, and ensuring equal rights for migrants is fundamental to climate justice.

“Transforming our unequal, exploitative system into one that ensures dignity and safety for all is a key step toward addressing Canada’s climate debt,” she said. “We urge the federal government to seize this opportunity.”

Like the majority of undocumented residents who came to Canada legally, Danilo De Leon arrived in Edmonton in 2009 from the Philippines under the Temporary Foreign Worker program as a cleaner.

In 2018, he was issued an exclusion order by border enforcement agents after his work permit and temporary resident permit expired.

“We came here to work because you need workers. We are more than just workers that feed your economy. We are human beings who have the rights to live in Canada with dignity,” said the father of two, whose deportation was only recently stayed by the court. “We need a regularization program that does not discriminate.”

Advocates say more and more migrants are arriving in Canada as temporary residents, but many struggle to extend their stay to gain permanent residence.

“Most temporary permits, whether a work permit, study permits or refugee-claimant permits, are the only gateways to Canada for low-waged and racialized people. But these pathways are actually a path off a cliff,” said Hussan.

“At one point or the other, these permits expire and cannot be replaced. The only choice, which is no choice at all, is living in Canada without any status or returning to a country that you may not be able to live in, whether it’s to escape war or poverty, climate catastrophe or discrimination.”

The Migrant Rights Network recommends a moratorium on deportations and detentions, and a free and simple application process that can be easily completed without immigration advisers.

Rallies will be held this Sunday in 12 Canadian cities, including Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to support the call for immigration justice.

Source: Activists push Trudeau to broaden permanent-residency plan for undocumented migrants

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Paradkar: No, I do not mourn the Queen

2022/09/16 Leave a comment

Wonder how common this sentiment is among immigrants and their descendants from former colonies or other countries that suffered under British rule or influence. The November 2021 Angus-Reid survey showed relatively minor differences between visible and not visible minorities, but there is likely considerable variation among groups:

No, I don’t mourn the Queen. Like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I see no reason to.

But you’d hardly know from the hagiographical public discourse in Canada that the world is far from unified in grief over the death of a person under whose title a nation unleashed unspeakable violence, the wounds of which remain fresh. There is little room for the views of millions who vociferously reject Britain’s self-proclaimed greatness, and its royal family.

Condolences to those personally near and dear to Elizabeth. Sorry for their loss, human to human. By all accounts, she sounds like a person of dignity who took her duties seriously and untiringly.

The British monarch’s duties have been referred to as a service to the nation. But what were these duties? Were they merely innocuous ribbon-cutting ceremonies and charming royal walkabouts? Were those weekly meetings with the prime minister idle chit chats? What were these formalities servicing? A symbol, perhaps, but of what?

To many, the Crown is a symbol of economic and racial power and its consolidation in one family, in one institution, in one nation — and its offshoots. It’s the power to assent to laws, whatever their intent or consequence. The power to reside above the most powerful. The power to be unaccountable.

You won’t see a British ruler or a parliamentary leader hauled up before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity — neither in Kenya, nor in the Middle East neither India nor Argentina neither Ireland nor in the Caribbean or, heaven forbid, Canada. 

Through all this pillaging and bloodshed, leaders marauded under the royal banner while the monarch was positioned as an apolitical figurehead, made mystical by remoteness. It’s an ingenious sleight of hand. 

Still, if one accepts that the queen was merely a figurehead, free from any responsibility for what she symbolized, then exactly what are we mourning? That this figureheaded-ness was handled with grace? 

A range of justifications for the monarchy — divine ordination, tradition, continuity — have been used to keep the plebs from questioning the grandiosity of royalty too closely, with royals entitled to the thousands of gaudy, glittering baubles. Perhaps it still serves to keep us from questioning why Charles, the new King, can legally avoid paying estate tax, something even other obscenely rich people cannot, on inheriting parts of estate estimated at $500 million US from his mother.

The position of Queen afforded Elizabeth significant immunity from criticism. But when the title was criticized, the person was protected. 

She is eulogized as a paragon of progressive ideals. She was anti-apartheid! Nelson Mandela was her buddy! This, even though hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, Iraqis, Yemenis, Koreans, Malayans were displaced and massacred during her reign.

It appears we must endlessly laud royals of great power and wealth, particularly this family, who took and took but contributed nothing to humanity. At least celebrities — actors, musicians, singers, artists, athletes, heck, even TikTok and Insta influencers — possess skills that entertain us, move us and enrich our understanding of the mysteries of life.

But hush. This is not the right time to criticize the Queen, we’re told. It’s insensitive. It’s impolite.

Polite, is it, to ask those who lost life and limb, land and wealth, ancestors and children, and even their own histories to mourn the very symbol of their suffering?

Sensitive, is it, to live in Canada and suggest the tyranny of British colonialism is a thing of the past, even while the Indian Act of 1876 in its various iterations and colonial philosophies continues to tragically upend Indigenous lives, an example of which played out as the James Smith Cree Nation torn apart just this month? I wonder how many of these mourners will show up as “allies” in orange shirts on National Truth and Reconciliation Day without recognizing their inconsistency.

How can British colonialism be a thing of the past when there never has been reconciliation with it? When the paternalistic attitudes (quite apart from greed and extraction in the name of exploration) that drove it still thrive? When, as the author John Newsinger wrote, the blood never dried?

If Tucker Carlson, that depthless denialist with a megaphone on Fox TV, is to be believed, we — the people of colonized lands — ought to be grateful to the colonizers.

“When the British pulled out of India they left behind an entire civilization, a language, a legal system, schools, churches and public buildings, all of which are still in use today,” he said this week, extolling British benignity. As if all of those things did not exist before the British set foot on the land. Yes, churches, too. Christianity has existed in India since 52 AD, as a one-second Google search shows. 

Carlson’s disinformation is low-hanging fruit for the bashing, but it is worth noting because many so-called centrists, the supposed not-crazies, believe colonialism at least modernized, if not civilized already ancient and sophisticated civilizations. Indeed, many among the colonized themselves affect a fondness for what was essentially an era of looting. After all, colonization could not have been carried out without the help of insiders. The colonizer-colonized relationship is neither linear nor a love/hate binary.

But there seems little space for nuance or critique around the death of this symbol of coloniality. Not only is it impolite to criticize the revisionist propaganda around the Queen, it’s now apparently dangerous to question the automatic ascension of Charles as king.

In recent days, U.K. police arrested at least four people for protesting the monarchy. One woman was charged for “breach of the peace” because she held a sign saying: “Abolish monarchy.” One was led away by police for holding a sign saying, “Not My King.”

Meanwhile, Charles himself appears set on defying the blatant efforts to rehabilitate his terrible image. Deliciously insightful videos of him with distinct “let them eat cake” vibes are circulating online. In one, he’s displaying his foul temper with an outburst at a leaky ink pen. In another, he appears to peremptorily and dismissively wave at stationary to be taken off his desk, rather than, you know, moving it himself. 

Here’s to Charles then, the crusty king of England, who might yet be our best bet for stirring revolt and revolution.

Source: No, I do not mourn the Queen

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Florida flies dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard

2022/09/16 Leave a comment

Deplorable weaponization of asylum seekers, following the lead of Texas (where the migrants originated from), not to mention the way they were reportedly lured to get on the plane:

About 50 migrants arrived by plane in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., Wednesday on a flight paid for by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and that originated in San Antonio, Texas.

The migrants touched down at about 3:15 p.m. local time. Later Wednesday, a spokesperson for DeSantis sent a statement to NPR and other news outlets confirming that the migrants were transported by Florida under a state program that was funded by the legislature earlier this year. The statement reads in part: “States like Massachusetts, New York and California will better facilitate the care of these individuals who they have invited into our country by incentivizing illegal immigration.”

The Florida statement refers to two planes, but local officials at Martha’s Vineyard say there was only one.

However, a number of migrants told NPR their flight originated in San Antonio, and that they were being transported to Boston.

NPR confirmed that a plane originated in San Antonio, made a stop in Florida and then another stop in South Carolina before flying on to Martha’s Vineyard. But apart from that layover, the migrants NPR interviewed had not spent time in Florida.

The unannounced flight drew anger from Massachusetts officials.

“We have the governor of Florida … hatching a secret plot to send immigrant families like cattle on an airplane,” said state Sen. Dylan Fernandes, who represents Martha’s Vineyard. “Ship them women and children to a place they weren’t told where they were going and never alerted local officials and people on the ground here that they were coming. It is an incredibly inhumane and depraved thing to do.”

NPR was able to interview three of the migrants late Wednesday. “They (the migrants) told us they had recently crossed the border in Texas and were staying at a shelter in San Antonio,” NPR’s Joel Rose said on today’s Morning Edition.

The migrants said a woman they identified as “Perla” approached them outside the shelter and lured them into boarding the plane, saying they would be flown to Boston where they could get expedited work papers. She provided them with food. The migrants said Perla was still trying to recruit more passengers just hours before their flight.

Andres Duarte, a 30-year-old Venezuelan, said he had recently crossed the border into Texas and eventually went to a shelter in San Antonio.

“She (Perla) offered us help. Help that never arrived,” Andres said. “Now we are here. We got on the plane with a vision of the future, of making it.” He went on to explain why he boarded the plane with so little information in hand. “Look, when you have no money and someone offers help, well, it means a lot.”

In Martha’s Vineyard, the migrants are staying at a church shelter while local authorities and nonprofit organizations figure out what’s going to happen next. Lisa Del Castro, who runs a homeless shelter on the island, said resources were initially scarce.

“Everything from beds to food to clothing to toothbrushes, toothpaste, blankets, sheets. I mean, we had some of it … but we did not have the numbers that we needed.”

Most of the arrivals spoke little or no English, and Spanish-speaking high school students were pressed into service as interpreters.

Edgartown Police Chief Bruce McNamee said many of the migrants were confused.

“We have talked to a number of people who’ve asked, ‘Where am I?’ And then I was trying to explain where Martha’s Vineyard is.”

The Wednesday flight extends a tactic by Republican politicians in primarily southern states have used to send migrants to Democrat-controlled cities in the north. Republican leaders have used this step to protest the rise in illegal immigration during President Biden’s time in office, and the issue figures to be prominent in November’s midterm elections.

Martha’s Vineyard has a reputation as a destination for the progressive elite, and DeSantis has been regularly bringing up the island enclave at his press conferences. Republican governors in Texas and Arizona have also been transporting migrants from the border to northern cities at taxpayer expense.

Democrats and immigrant advocates say those governors are essentially using migrants as political pawns. But the governors say are simply calling attention to a very real problem.

The U.S. Border Patrol is on pace to record 2 million apprehensions in a fiscal year for the first time ever.

Del Castro, who runs the Martha’s Vineyard shelter where the migrants spent the night, said the group is resilient.

“There’s some really sad stories. And then some people, the only thing they were expressing is how grateful they are to be here, and to be safe, and cared for, right? And, you know, their needs are immense right now.”

NPR spoke with Yesica, a migrant who gave only her first name because of her undocumented immigration status. She said she was uncertain about her future.

“Oh, goodness. I don’t know what is going to happen to us,” Yesica said, speaking in Spanish. “The truth is I am worried. It will be whatever God wishes, no? We’re here now and there’s nothing we can do.”

“Not even,” she added, “to take a step back.”

Source: Florida flies dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard

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Vancouver election chief challenges use of Chinese and Persian names on ballots

2022/09/16 Leave a comment

Of note. Tend to think better to only have Latin characters only for consistency and level playing field. Names in any case largely indicate ethnic ancestry:

Vancouver’s chief election officer has filed a court application seeking to declare that 15 candidates in upcoming municipal votes are not entitled to have their names on the ballot papers using Chinese, Persian or other non-Latin characters.

Rosemary Hagiwara filed the application to provincial court on Tuesday, naming respondents who include the Non-Partisan Association’s mayoral candidate Fred Harding, incumbent NPA councillor Melissa De Genova, and veteran Vision Vancouver school board trustee Allan Wong.

The application said all of the respondents submitted their “usual name” to be used on the Oct. 15 ballot papers in both Latin characters and either Chinese or Persian.

Ten are from the NPA, two from Vision Vancouver, and one each from Forward Together and COPE.

Hagiwara argued that none of the respondents who have previously stood for municipal elections used non-Latin versions of their names in the earlier nomination papers.

The matter is set to be heard by the provincial court in Robson Square on Thursday morning.

Harding said in an interview his Chinese name wasn’t something “plucked out of a hat.”

He said he has had a Chinese name for many years because half of his family on his wife’s side are Chinese.

“So telling me that this is not my usual name, you can understand this is like, ‘You really don’t know me,'” said Harding.

Hagiwara’s affidavit said that when Harding initially submitted his nomination on Sept. 6, he did not include Chinese characters in his usual name, but three days later he revised his nomination to add them.

She also said Harding did not include Chinese characters when he ran for mayor in 2018.

Harding said that although the NPA had access to lawyers, none could respond to the matter by Thursday morning.

Vision Vancouver said in a statement that Wong and council candidate Honieh Barzegar were dismayed by the possibility that their “unique and usual names” printed in non-Latin characters would be removed from ballot papers.

But the party also accused other candidates of using “cultural appropriation” by adopting Chinese names by which they are not commonly known, to seek an unfair advantage at the polls.

COPE school board candidate Suzie Mah said in a statement she felt “shock and disbelief” at being included among the respondents because her Chinese name was chosen by her parents and is part of her identity.

“The reason for using my Chinese name as well as my English name on the ballot is important to me. This is not about gaining extra votes with the Chinese community,” said Mah, adding she was not someone who sought to “make up a Chinese name” to use in the election.

Mah said in an interview her Chinese name was well-known among the Chinese-speaking community.

“I think that in the future if we want people to run for office and we want people to be part of democracy, voting has to be accessible. When you put in another barrier for people to take to run for office, it is very disturbing,” said Mah.

She said time was too short for her to seek legal advice before the hearing.

Hagiwara said in her affidavit that she is not aware of any candidate seeking to use non-Latin characters on ballot papers before 2014.

Only one candidate in each of the 2014 and 2018 polls had used non-Latin characters on the ballot, she said.

Source: Vancouver election chief challenges use of Chinese and Persian names on ballots

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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