ICYMI: US Supreme Court declines to consider challenge to racist citizenship laws [America Samoa]

2022/10/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to reconsider the so-called “Insular Cases,” a series of cases decided in the early 1900s that are infamous today for their racist foundation.

The court’s action dashes hopes of American Samoans who were seeking birthright citizenship. It also leaves intact a Tenth Circuit decision that has been seen as “breathing new life” into constitutional distinctions between U.S. states and territories — which former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said establish “a second-class of unequal Americans.”

Attorney Neil Weare, president of the organization representing the plaintiffs in this case, echoed the sentiment: “The Supreme Court’s refusal to reconsider the Insular Cases today … reflect[s] that ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ does not mean the same thing for the 3.6 million residents of U.S. territories as it does for everyone else.”

Who is a citizen?

At issue in this case was the way that people born in various U.S. territories are treated under law when it comes to U.S. citizenship. The Constitution says that anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” is a citizen of the country. But for U.S. territories, eligibility for birthright citizenship in the territories is controlled only by Congress – it is not constitutionally guaranteed.

Residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas Islands are deemed U.S. citizens under the Immigration and Nationality Act. But American Samoans are not. Congress has not granted birthright citizenship to residents of American Samoa or Swains Island, both of which are classified only as “outlying possessions.”

It is this disparate treatment that was before the court, after three American Samoans living in Utah brought a challenge to the Immigration and Nationality Act, contending that the statutory denial of citizenship is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

The Citizenship Clause was adopted after the Civil War primarily to protect the birthright citizenship of Black Americans, which was rejected by the Supreme Court prior to the Civil War. However, the meaning of the clause for residents of the territories has historically been contested — as has the force of constitutional protections in the territories altogether. In this case, Fitisemanu v. U.S., the American Samoans contend that the residents of all the territories should be considered “in the United States” for the purpose of citizenship.

While American Samoans who live in the States may apply for citizenship, before they successfully do so they are denied many of the rights attached to citizenship, such as the right to vote, run for office, or serve on juries. The plaintiffs in this case say their career opportunities have been curtailed and that, as non-citizens, they are unable to sponsor immigration visas for their families. Applying for citizenship itself is onerous, can take several years, and is not guaranteed.

A brief history of the Insular Cases

But this case was not just about the reach of the Citizenship Clause. The Constitution’s underlying disparity in treatment between the 50 states and the U.S. territories was enshrined in the Insular Cases, a series of cases decided in the early 1900s after the Spanish-American War. These cases — so called because of their “insular” (island-related) focus — held that full constitutional rights apply only to “incorporated” territories destined for statehood, such as Hawaii, but not to “unincorporated” territories, which then included Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Infamously, the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories rested on explicitly racist stereotypes about individuals from those territories. Opposing Filipino statehood, for example, one senator called Filipinos “unruly and disobedient.” Another called them “mongrels.”

Under the Insular Cases, which were primarily about tariffs and jury trials in the territories, the Supreme Court upheld this suspect “incorporated vs. unincorporated” framework of rights. The Court’s language and reasoning was hardly any better than that of Congress. One case emphasized that “differences of race, habits, laws and customs” in the territories might require action on the part of Congress that wouldn’t be required if the territory were “inhabited only by people of the same race.” Another referred to “savage tribes” which may be “[in]capable of self-government.”

It is this insidious foundation of the Insular Cases that has drawn the condemnation of both liberal and conservative justices. In Vaello-Madero, a case from last term about Puerto Ricans’ eligibility for disability benefits, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a 10-page concurrence calling for the Insular Casesto be overruled — something that is now unlikely to happen any time soon.

Gorsuch did not note any dissent from Monday’s action.

Monday’s action is a victory for both the Biden administration and the American Samoan government itself, though neither party defends the offensive language in the Insular Cases. Nor does the United States affirmatively oppose American Samoan citizenship. The United States rests its argument instead on the text of the Citizenship Clause, which it contends intentionally excludes the territories from birthright citizenship conferred by the Constitution. The U.S. argues that American Samoans have the legislative route to birthright citizenship available to them, and that if there is a consensus in favor of birthright citizenship, they should pursue that through their representative in Congress. Otherwise, however, the United States says it does not want to tread on the self-governance of American Samoans.

To that end, the American Samoan government intervened in the case to argue that U.S. birthright citizenship for American Samoans would undermine the island’s ability to self-govern and maintain cultural autonomy.

Source: Supreme Court declines to consider challenge to racist citizenship laws

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Kent: Historical sense is what keeps us human – and future generations might lose it, if we’re not careful

2022/10/22 Leave a comment

Good discussion and reflection:

“Imagining the functionality of a human being without historical sense is really scary.”

It was an uncharacteristically grim observation made by my old college tutor, Perry Gauci, during a Zoom conversation in the summer of 2020. My peers and I had always regarded Dr. Gauci as indefatigably cheery: His infectious grin had reassured and encouraged me through my first round of Oxford history interviews, and his pre-exam pep talks were as energizing and inspiring as the best cornerman encouragements. But what he’d said also made complete sense at a moment when the world felt as if it were teetering on the brink; when many of us were at once scrambling to try to see into the future while maintaining some semblance of normality in the “now.”

Imagining a human being without historical sense is scary. The thought of living exclusively in a blinkered present moment is scary. Scarier still is the thought of an entire generation, not to mention society, operating from a position of historical ignorance. And yet that is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves today.

The people and events of history may be rooted in the past, but how we talk about those things, what we write about them, and how we teach them (in other words, how we practise history as the record of human experience) tell us a lot about who we are and what we value right now. It’s easy to think of all those who came before us as either foolish or luckless enough to have lived in a time that’s not the present. But conditioning ourselves to believe that we’re the exception is, at best, naive and, at worst, a fatal mistake.

Thinking of ourselves as a chapter in an as-yet unwritten history book, on the other hand, is likely to force deeper self-reflection: Whose stories will we champion? What values will we defend? What models will we offer ensuing generations? In an era of environmental change, rising inequality and seismic shifts in the international political arena, we need to understand how our institutions have developed in order to understand why they don’t always have adequate responses to these crises. History gives us this power. No other subject helps us to understand so comprehensively what it is to be human. No subject is more vital to our very humanity.

That’s why it was so shocking to read, as of September, 2020, that almost two-thirds of surveyed Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 did not know that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believed Jews caused the Holocaust. In a survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, The Guardian reported, 23 per cent of respondents said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. Twelve per cent said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

The implications of this kind of ignorance are staggering, but the ignorance itself isn’t entirely surprising given the downgraded status of history in most schools. Here in Canada, the Ontario social-studies curriculum for Grades 1 to 8 contains not a single mention of the Holocaust. In early 2022, the cost of this became frighteningly clear. In January, several participants in the so-called Freedom Convoy to Ottawa displayed flags and signage bearing swastikas. The following month, the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre called on the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) to recognize antisemitism as a “crisis” after another alleged incident at a middle school. The organization’s president and chief executive officer, Michael Levitt, said in a release: “Anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions at TDSB, and it is time for the board to recognize this as the crisis that it is. It is unfathomable and shocking that, in 2022, a Jewish teacher is faced with Nazi salutes and a ‘Heil Hitler’ chant in her classroom. Clearly, something is broken in Toronto’s public school system and requires immediate attention.”

It’s dispiriting, to say the least, to realize that we are sleepwalking toward becoming a Visigoth state like the one described by Neil Postman. “[For] the Visigoths,” he wrote in his popular and widely circulated graduation speech, “history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper.” If you’re reading this, chances are you already know that history is much more than that. It is, in fact, everything and all of us: It’s quite literally inescapable. As educator and author Susan Wise Bauer observes in The Well-Trained Mind, history isn’t just a subject: It’s the subject. “Unless you plan to live entirely in the present moment, the study of history is inevitable,” she writes. For many, myself included, history is inherently, inevitably and infinitely compelling, but there will still always be those who question its “usefulness.”

One simple answer is that historical knowledge is power: The control of history, which shapes our political and cultural identity, is precisely why cathedrals of knowledge from the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress (and from Catholic collections during the Reformation, to Jewish collections during the Holocaust, to Islamic collections during the Balkan wars of the 1990s) have been targeted for destruction and appropriation since earliest times. “There is no political power without power over the archive,” Jacques Derrida observed: Ancient Mesopotamian rulers used the texts preserved in their libraries to decide when to go to war, while today authoritarian regimes and major technology companies vie for control of the archive as it migrates to a digital realm.

On an individual level, studying history gives us roots: a context for our existence. Individuals who lack that context lack a significant element of self-understanding but also an understanding of their relationship with the rest of society. Rootlessness limits our ability to function, to empathize, to feel invested in anything beyond our own immediate needs. It also disempowers us.

Powerless people become easy targets for exploitation, propagandizing and manipulation, particularly by those who appear to offer membership to a group or cause. As University of Michigan associate professor Bob Bain put it to me, “Stories help orient us to the present. If you’ve got no story, then you’re primed for someone else to give one to you.”

Not surprisingly, there’s a great deal of skittishness over the idea of teaching children any kind of agreed-upon narrative, because no one wants to be accused of forcing the “wrong” kind of story on impressionable minds. But the result of teaching no coherent story at all is a fragmentation of knowledge, what Dr. Bain described to me as “the byproduct of a generation of people like me who were taught that any grand narrative is manipulative, paternalistic and evil, without realizing how necessary it is.”

There’s an obvious tension at play: On the one hand, we need history to build understanding and appreciation for shared values and responsibilities, while on the other we need to remain vigilant against distortions that create an oversimplified narrative, the kind that, as renowned historian Margaret MacMillan writes, “flattens out the complexity of human experience and leaves no room for different interpretations of the past.”

In her brilliantly concise and accessible The Uses and Abuses of History, Dr. MacMillan details many examples of such a flattened history: from the 19th-century Grimm brothers collecting German folk tales to prove that there was such a thing as a German nation dating back to the Middle Ages, to dictators, including Robespierre and Pol Pot, creating new calendars to begin history afresh, and Mao and Stalin writing their enemies out of the record. The BJP government has consistently attempted to rewrite history to present India as a Hindu nation from its earliest beginnings, while here in Canada, French-Canadian nationalists have often focused on the past as a story of humiliation at the hands of the British while neglecting examples of co-operation (for instance, over the building of the railways and through the early years of Confederation) or, indeed, French-Canadian sympathy for a rival foreign government during the Vichy regime.

More recently, the trend in the West has veered the other way, toward deconstructing and challenging inherited national narratives in pursuit of a type of historical catharsis. So, do we teach history to build a sense of national pride, or to poke holes in it? As Daniel Immerwahr wrote in The Washington Post toward the end of one of the most tumultuous years in living memory, “Such questions have always struck me as odd, for two reasons. First, we design curriculums around what students will learn rather than how they’ll feel. The aim of a geometry class is not for students to love or hate triangles but to learn the Pythagorean theorem. Similarly, the point of U.S. history isn’t to have students revere or reject the country but to help them understand it. The second reason is that, by imagining history class as a pep rally or a gripe session, we squeeze the history out of it. The United States becomes a fixed entity with static principles, inviting approval or scorn. And that makes it hard to see how the country has changed with time.”

Clearly, in an age of “fake news,” Google and Wikipedia, engaged citizens need to be culturally literate, critical thinkers. There is no better subject than history to develop an appreciation of context and an ability to interrogate evidence. Just as we expect a math curriculum that systematically builds on blocks of knowledge and developing skill sets, we should also expect a logical history curriculum (preferably an international one) for our children. If it were commonplace to hear graduates claim that they’d never learned to divide, there would be an outcry. So should there be now.

Such knowledge-based learning needn’t tell students what to think, but would rather provide the tools to learn how to think. In the digital age, perhaps more than ever, “users” (to adopt the purposefully dehumanizing tech term) require a sense of sequence and consequence, a nose for collecting sound evidence, and an ability to discern the difference between sophisticated and oversimplified analogies. To look something up, you need to know what you are looking for.

And in these hyper-partisan times, history reminds us of the importance of nuance and the enduring fact that there will always be contradictions. No single group is right all the time, and we all need to be able to hold two opposing ideas in our head at once.

It’s easy to reach an exhaustion point: to throw up our hands in despair at the relativism of everything. Lynn Hunt captures this problem beautifully in History: Why It Matters: “If it is so easy to lie about history, if people disagree so much about what monuments or history textbooks should convey, and if commissions are needed to dig up the truth about the past, then how can any kind of certainty about history be established?”

The fact remains that, imperfect though it is, we need historical truth. Without it, we have no leg to stand on to counter the claims of dictators or Holocaust deniers. But just what exactly is historical truth? Most would agree that it boils down to actions or events, and arguments as to their causes and consequences, which can be verified by historical evidence. As the evidence changes, so must the story. Historians’ work will never be done, therefore, because the stories we record and interpret are in constant need of correction, adjustment and reinterpretation based on the available evidence. And the questions they ask will necessarily keep changing, because we’re always wanting to ask questions that are relevant to the present.

As Julia Lovell, winner of the 2019 Cundill History Prize for her book, Maoism: A Global History, explained in a panel discussion with fellow shortlistees, “Historians always have to answer the ‘So what?’ question.” Traditionally, the questions posed about 19th-century China could often be reduced to “Why did it fail so badly?” But now, in light of China’s rise to 21st-century superpower, that question has become “How can we find the seeds of China’s contemporary success in the 19th century?” Evidently, the practice of history teaches us a number of things: not least, flexibility, patience, humility, and the value of keeping an open mind.

The good news is that the public appetite for history has never been greater. Anthony Wilson-Smith is president and CEO of Historica Canada, an organization devoted to promoting an understanding and discussion of Canadian history. The fabled Heritage Minutes, commercial-length history lessons blending re-enactment and narration, are arguably Historica’s greatest achievement, reaching about 27 million users annually. The first ones aired in 1991 and featured Valour Road, the Winnipeg street that was home to three Victoria Cross recipients; the Underground Railroad, which brought runaway slaves to freedom; and Jacques Plante’s invention of the goalie mask. Lines such as “Doctor, I smell burnt toast!” and “I need these baskets back” quickly entered the cultural lexicon of many young Canadians. One of my friends, of South Asian family heritage, said that the Minutes (in particular, the one about the Chinese workers who built the railroads) did more to teach her about diversity in Canada than anything she learned in school in the 1980s and 90s.

Current events have also informed a spike in interest. “We track the top five most-read pieces every week in the Encyclopedia,” explained Mr. Wilson-Smith (Historica Canada operates Canada’s national encyclopedia on a digital platform). “At the outset [of the COVID-19 pandemic], pieces on the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 1919 Spanish Flu routinely made the list. Once the public focus on BLM and Indigenous rights and discrimination erupted, we saw an immediate spike in related stories. For more than 10 weeks, articles on residential schools and Black history in Canada (including pre-Confederation slavery) have been among the top five.”

The success of the Heritage Minutes illustrates the potent combination of human interest and contemporary relevance in making history appealing. Curiosity about the past often starts on a personal level, which perhaps explains the explosion of interest in ancestry websites, DNA test kits and TV shows exploring celebrities’ family histories. The sensational success of the musical Hamilton illustrated the power of a compelling and important story, creatively told (the main character might be a dead white guy – a lawyer, banker and politician, to boot – but a hip-hop-influenced score and majority-Black cast brought fresh appeal and insights to a new generation of audiences). “Reality” series featuring historical re-enactments – families “sent back in time” to experience life as pioneers or on the home front during the Second World War – as well as computer games, Netflix series such as The Crown, and historical fiction also indicate the enduring claim of history on the public imagination. There’s a comfort in the sense of order that can be imposed on the past, particularly when our own times seem to be characterized by great upheaval and unpredictability.

So what’s the bad news? In short: plummeting history enrolment at universities, concerns among practitioners that the subject is fragmenting beyond recognition, and students who don’t recognize themselves in the history they study at school and can’t connect the disconnected fragments they have learned. There’s been plenty of hand-wringing in Ontario over nosediving elementary math scores, with fewer than half of Grade 6 students meeting the provincial standard in the 2021-2022 school year. By comparison, there’s been resounding silence around another subject in which elementary students have long fallen behind. By now, you can probably guess which subject that would be.

But it’s STEM jobs that are hiring, we’re told. “Historians make lattes” was the wry observation of one history teacher I spoke with. Certainly, schools are getting much better at teaching previously overlooked aspects of our history, including Indigenous history (which the last curriculum overhaul made compulsory) and social history. But these bits have been superimposed on a disjointed, incomplete curriculum – a curriculum that, as it stands, doesn’t only threaten to kill off student enthusiasm for history as a subject but sends them into the world with huge knowledge gaps. It’s a muddled curriculum, pieced together by the separate agendas of politically capricious governments, boards and education departments. It’s a timid curriculum, reluctant to embrace the conflict, collisions, controversies and paradoxes in history. It’s a curriculum heavy on centring “deep dives with lots of primary sources,” as Dr. Bain described equivalent American syllabi to me, but shy of providing a connected overview, leaving these projects “like postholes with no fences to connect them.”

The alternative doesn’t have to be a return to “rote” learning, but rather a joined-up attempt at building broad knowledge from the earliest years to create context for understanding later on. When history is only introduced as a subject in Grade 7, after which it’s limited to a couple of years of Canadian history taught largely out of any kind of chronological or global context, the results aren’t surprising: Students enter middle school without any sense of the “story” of history, high-school teachers despair that students come to them without the knowledge or skills to learn how to think historically, universities experience plummeting numbers of history applications, and, in turn, we as a society become increasingly ahistorical in our outlook, not to mention distressingly polarized in our discussions of such things as the toppling of statues.

“In the nation as a whole there is now a knowledge gap, a communications gap, and an allegiance gap. We don’t understand one another; we don’t trust one another; we don’t like one another.” This is E.D. Hirsch writing about America in 2020, though much of what he describes could equally be applied elsewhere. A loss of cohesion, Dr. Hirsch argues, is the partial result of “a loss of commonality in what we teach and therefore in what we know.” If change is to happen, it needs to happen with coherence, commonality and specificity.

We pay a certain lip service to this idea by framing history as a part of “civics” education, but the fact is that it is so much more than this. The title of my book refers to a “vanishing” past not because history itself is going anywhere, but rather because the discipline of history has become segmented, sidelined and co-opted for other purposes. “History fights for its place in the curriculum with civics and geography,” Dr. Bain observed during our conversation, “but its attention to time, place and context is what makes it really distinct.” In other words, history doesn’t simply tell us how to be good citizens: It equips us with the knowledge we need to comprehend our world clearly, and the ability to analyze it accurately.

“Precision is not a skill: It’s a value, an obligation, a moral duty,” Dr. Gauci observed toward the end of our Zoom conversation. The skills-versus-knowledge debate is an old one in history teaching, and generally it’s a misleading one: You need both to do history properly. Dr. Gauci worries about how little many students seem to know about the political process, as well as about limited public discernment when it comes to discussions around current events. But history, to him, is about even more than this. “It’s always been the instinct of many of the most creative minds to look back,” he said, and here I was pleased to see the old smile return. “The great dreamers all needed the past. We stare into space and we wonder, so it seems strange not to do it in the rear-view mirror, too.”

Source: Historical sense is what keeps us human – and future generations might lose it, if we’re not careful

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Nicolas: Questionner comme Émilie Bordeleau

2022/10/22 Leave a comment

Rather than eliminating from history and knowlege:

Entre la fin des années 1980 et les débuts des années 1990, Émilie est devenu l’un des prénoms les plus donnés aux petites filles québécoises. Le succès monstre des Filles de Caleb, d’abord par les romans d’Arlette Cousture, puis par l’adaptation télévisée de Jean Beaudin, n’est certainement pas étranger à cette mode.

J’étais encore au primaire lorsque j’ai dérobé Le chant du coq et Le cri de l’oie blanche de la bibliothèque de ma mère. Je me suis ensuite tournée vers la télésérie, qui avait aussi été préservée sur des VHS maison pour la postérité. J’étais intriguée par Émilie Bordeleau, cette héroïne forte qui, comme moi, ne cherchait qu’à lire et à apprendre, et qui, pour son époque, avait du front tout le tour de la tête. Par Les filles de Caleb, j’ai appris tôt qu’une Émilie, par définition, est une femme qui se tient droite et qui n’a pas peur de déranger.

J’ai vu, durant les derniers jours, moult commentateurs dénoncer Netflix, qui a décidé de mettre en ligne la série tout en en retirant le deuxième épisode, où Roy Dupuis (Ovila Pronovost) est maquillé en blackface. On comprendra qu’en tant qu’Emilie, notamment, je me suis sentie personnellement concernée.

Si j’ai bien compris l’opinion dominante, Netflix aurait tort de juger une oeuvre des années 1990, qui décrit le tournant du XXe siècle, avec les valeurs d’aujourd’hui. Le blackface, dans ce contexte-là, serait banal, voire étranger à la culture québécoise.

Là-dessus, on a tout faux. Les minstrel shows étaient un phénomène nord-américain populaire à l’époque d’Émilie Bordeleau. Des troupes mettaient aussi en scène ce type de spectacles au Québec, et des Québécois — dont Calixa Lavallée, l’auteur du Ô Canada — ont participé à des tournées américaines. Si le personnage d’Ovila se fait « étriver » par ses pairs pour son maquillage, c’est aussi à cause du racisme ordinaire de l’époque.

Les enseignantes de cette génération travaillaient avec des curriculums scolaires remarquablement semblables à ceux qui circulaient en Europe et ailleurs dans les Amériques à la même époque. L’école québécoise enseignait, en histoire et en géographie, les théories en vogue sur l’inégalité des races humaines — comme partout ailleurs en Occident. Et on enseignait la grammaire, l’orthographe et même le calcul avec des exemples souvent racistes issus tout droit de l’imaginaire colonial. Vous ne me croyez pas ? Il faut lire L’école du racisme, de l’historienne Catherine Larochelle, qui a épluché les manuels scolaires québécois qui ont circulé entre 1830 et 1915.

Faut-il pour autant applaudir Netflix, qui, de son côté, retire tout contenu qui contient du blackface ? Permettez-moi de défendre plutôt une troisième voie : celle de Disney+.

Les studios Walt Disney, fondés en 1923, sont indissociables de l’histoire du racisme à l’écran. Ses premiers cartoons s’inspirent d’ailleurs fortement de l’esthétique et de la violence « humoristique » typiques des minstrel shows. Retirer le racisme de Disney, c’est un peu comme espérer qu’une maison tienne encore si on lui enlève ses fondations. En mettant sur pied la plateforme Disney+, le géant américain a donc plutôt fait le pari de tout mettre en ligne, tout en nommant clairement, dans des avertissements, la présence de racisme dans certains contenus. Ce semble être la voie dont Radio-Canada s’est inspirée en publiant l’ensemble des Filles de Caleb — sauf qu’en comparaison, le texte de Tou.tv est faible, et manque de franc-parler.

Si j’avais à enseigner, aujourd’hui, Les filles des Caleb dans un cours de littérature, mon premier instinct serait de présenter les romans et la série en parallèle avec un succès de librairie plus contemporain, soit le Kukum de Michel Jean. D’un côté, on a un roman qui se concentre sur la réalité canadienne-française de la Mauricie, où l’on explore peu ce que le personnage d’Ovila fait lorsqu’il « prend le bois » vers les camps de bûcherons. Les Autochtones sont à peine représentés dans les romans comme dans la série, sinon comme des accessoires à l’alcoolisme, à la déresponsabilisation parentale et à la perdition qui attend le protagoniste.

De l’autre, Kukum expose les conséquences terribles de l’industrie forestière sur les communautés innues. On peut facilement imaginer comment les camps de bûcherons et la drave sur la Saint-Maurice ont affecté les Atikamekw d’une manière similaire. Une trentaine d’années plus tard, lelivrede Michel Jean vient en quelque sorte combler, ou du moins interroger les angles morts importants de l’oeuvre d’Arlette Cousture. Présenter Les filles de Caleb et Kukum ensemble — avec un ou deux chapitres de Catherine Larochelle en prime, pour le contexte — permettrait d’explorer de manière beaucoup plus complète ce qu’était le Québec au début du XXe siècle. L’exercice susciterait aussi une discussion sur l’évolution de la culture populaire au Québec, des années 1980 jusqu’à aujourd’hui.

Le problème, c’est que la plupart d’entre nous ont appris et intégré un récit de l’histoire du Québec qui a, grosso modo, à peu près les mêmes angles morts que l’oeuvre de Cousture et la série de Beaudin. S’ensuit une levée de boucliers lorsque vient le temps de parler de la place du racisme dans la société qui est la nôtre. Au fond, tant Netflix qu’un commentateur québécois qui s’étonne qu’un blackface soit reçu comme un symbole lourd manquent de courage. Les deux, chacun à leur manière, feignent de vivre dans un monde magique où le colonialisme et le racisme n’existent pas.

Pour se pencher sur les mythes véhiculés par la culture populaire et les étudier, il faut avoir assez de colonne pour examiner les oeuvres et leur contexte, sans les effacer, ni chercher à banaliser la violence qu’ils peuvent contenir. Il faut interroger les idées reçues sur notre histoire avec les mêmes intégrité et obstination qu’une Émilie Bordeleau, qui, de son rang de Saint-Stanislas, affrontait déjà son père en remettant en question la place des femmes dans l’ordre domestique.

Source: Questionner comme Émilie Bordeleau

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Douglas Todd: Chinese travellers to Canada plunge. What does it mean?

2022/10/22 Leave a comment

Visitor visas from China have also plumeted, by close to 80 percent compared to pre-pandemic (January to August, 2022 compared to 2019):

Three years ago, 55 jumbo jets from China were touching down at Vancouver International Airport every week.

Now there are only eight flights a week from the world’s most-populous country.

There has been an almost similar plunge in the proportion of Chinese nationals applying for Canada’s 10-year visas. A related decline means fewer people from China are seeking student visas, and showing relatively modest interest in permanent-residence status.

China’s draconian pandemic lockdowns — which are more strict than anywhere in the world — have reduced travel in and out of the country, with the number of international air passengers across all of China’s airports falling from 74 million in 2019 to 1.5 million last year.

But that’s not the only reason for the decline.

With China’s Communist leaders poised this month to hand strongman Xi Jinping an almost unprecedented third five-year mandate, crackdowns are increasing on Chinese citizens, including through digital surveillance, censorship, arrest of dissenters, party infiltration of private businesses — and far less travel to other countries. Most observers believe obsessive control will be China’s new normal for a long time.

The drastic decline in the transnational mobility of the people of China feeds into the debate in the West over what it means to have far less engagement with China’s regime and its citizens, even while many are not necessarily tied to the authoritarian government.

In response to tighter controls in China, Canada has been shifting. While five years ago people from China made up the largest group of visitors and students, Indian nationals now comprise by far the largest group.

Two new books argue each side of the China engagement coin. In The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic Leadership, economist Fred Bergsten argues corporate engagement has been a success, despite tragic failures on the human rights front.

Bergsten belongs to the camp that champions the free global movement of money and humans, saying Western countries should continue to offer a warm reception to entrepreneurs, students, workers and visitors from China. It’s good for business.

However, another book, by Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg, titled Getting China Wrong, calls the West’s engagement with China a gamble that didn’t pay off. He says the challenge now is how to reduce ties to a threatening regime run on draconian Leninist principles.

Wherever one comes down on such arguments, the reality is the flow of people from China into the U.S., Canada and other Western countries has reduced dramatically.

Canada’s travel industry is among those hurting, especially in B.C. And that’s only partly because, as Destination B.C. official Kristen Learned says, visitors from China spent the most of any tourists: $2,021 each.

In 2019, more than 15,500 people were flying each week into Vancouver from China, now it’s just 2,600. That’s as airport officials say international flights from every other nation are almost back to pre-COVID levels.

Three years ago Canada brought in 712,000 visitors from China, who stayed an average of four weeks. Destination B.C. figures show 334,000 of them spent their days in B.C., which made them to the province’s second-largest international tourist market, after the U.S.

In 2019, travellers from China bought over $586 million worth of goods and services while on the West Coast, especially on hotels, luxury resorts and Airbnbs, as well as dining out while visiting relatives.

But by midsummer of this year, only 36,000 visitors from China had flown into Canada, with just 18,000 to B.C. That’s reflects a drastic overall rate of decline in three years of about 91 per cent.

Meanwhile, travellers into Canada from India, Britain and France are soaring.

Additional data reveal just a few years ago people from China were by far the biggest group applying for Canada’s popular 10-year visas.

Since the 10-year visa program began in 2014, allowing people to travel to the country for six months at a time as many times as they want, Chinese citizens have accounted for 3.2 million of the 13 million visas issued.

But a sharp drop in visa applications from China occurred even before the pandemic hit. At the same time, requests from India skyrocketed.

As a result, by midsummer of 2022 a relatively low number of people from China, 49,000, had applied this year for the 10-year visas. In the same period, applications from India skyrocketed to 355,000.

The highly valued multiple-entry visas are generally a benefit to Canada’s economy, say immigration lawyers. But they caution they can be abused by “shadow investors” in housing to avoid property and income taxes in Canada.

Educational relationships between China and Canada have also declined, although not as precipitously.

In 2017, study visa application rates from both China and India were equal — amounting to roughly 82,000 students a year from each giant nation, together accounting for almost half of all foreign students.

But in 2021, the second year of the pandemic, the numbers of Chinese international students seeking to come to Canada dropped to 56,000, while expanding from other countries — especially India, at 169,000.

The trend has continued into October of this year, with students from India accounting for 38 per cent of all study visa applicants and those from China just 11 per cent.

Meanwhile, the number of Chinese nationals gaining admission to Canada as permanent residents remains flat — at the rate of about 30,000 a year, compared to 127,000 from India.

The immigration path into Canada is not as strong an indicator of China’s internal politics as other measures — because anyone from China who becomes a Canadian citizen, technically, forgoes their Chinese citizenship and the ties that go with it.

What does it mean? As Xi tightens his hold on power, no one absolutely knows what’s on in his mind.

But even figures who advocate the unrestrained movement of financial and human capital realize Xi is dangerously bent on weakening democratic governments and further policing Chinese citizens in both his country and abroad.

This month, the pro-free-trade Economist magazine called on the West to continue to “welcome Chinese students, executives and scientists, rather than treat them as potential spies. Remember, always, that the beef should be with tyranny, not the Chinese people.”

That appears to sum up the federal government’s open approach, even while China’s autocrats are ensuring there will be fewer people-to-people connections between our two countries.

Source: Douglas Todd: Chinese travellers to Canada plunge. What does it mean?

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Date set for Bundestag debate on dual German citizenship

2022/10/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

As part of a major overhaul of the country’s immigration policy, the German traffic-light coalition government has set a date to debate a draft law that would allow dual citizenship for residents.

Bundestag to debate German dual citizenship

Until now, the prospect of dual German citizenship seemed impossible for many of the country’s migrants. But yesterday evening The Localannounced in an exclusive article that the Bundestag will debate a new draft law which would allow dual German citizenship. This means that migrants with non-EU nationality would be able to naturalise as German citizens without having to sacrifice their other citizenship status. The policy was first brought to the table as a cornerstone of the traffic-light coalition agreement last year.

The new law would also minimise the time that non-German nationals have to wait before beginning the naturalisation process. The timeline is expected to be reduced from eight years to five years. In some cases, where applicants prove that they are integrated into German society and can certify German language proficiency, they would be able to apply for naturalisation after just three years living and working in Germany.

“People who come here, build a life for themselves and feel a permanent connection to Germany should be able to naturalise quickly,” FDP member of the Bundestag’s interior committee, Stephan Thomae, told The Local. “We want people who live with us, who have integrated well linguistically, legally, economically, and culturally, who contribute to our society’s success and fulfil their responsibilities – to also have the associated rights and make them a permanent offer of integration.”

As of yet there is no set date when the law would come into effect, but it is certain that long-term residents eligible to apply for naturalisation can expect a wait while details of the bill are ironed out before it can come into law. Speaking to The Local, the chair of the SPD body in the Bundestag’s interior committee, Sebastian Hartmann, said, “If the cabinet makes its expected decision in December, we should be able to complete the parliamentary procedure by summer 2023 at the latest.”

Residency versus citizenship rights in Germany

While people with temporary German residency can be granted the security of permanent residence, this status does not come with the same rights and security as holding German citizenship. Over the past years, these circumstances seemed unlikely to change, as Angela Merkel’s CDU were firmly opposed to updating citizenship laws.

Until now, residents in Germany have been able to apply for German citizenship through three methods: through naturalisation (Einbürgerung) after eight years of living in Germany; by right of blood (Abstammungsprinzip) if you are a direct descendant of a German parent; and by right of soil (Geburtsortsprinzip) if you were born within German borders to non-German parents.

The limitations of the latter method, that at least one of your parents must have been a permanent resident in Germany for at least eight years and possess the necessary permissions to remain in Germany indefinitely, means that many people with migrant backgrounds in Germany who were born and have grown up in the country, do not hold citizenship.

Since only those who hold a German passport are entitled to vote in German elections at federal level, the introduction of a dual nationality law could also impact Germany’s voting tendencies. According to broadcaster ZDF, 14 percent of the German population over the age of 18 (9,7 million people) were not eligible to vote in the country’s federal elections last autumn.

Source: Date set for Bundestag debate on dual German citizenship

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Where $30 Billion to Fix Systemic Racism Actually Goes

2022/10/22 Leave a comment

Of interest:

It seemed like a big number.

Two years ago, after a summer of widespread protests over police brutality and racial inequality, JPMorgan Chase made a sweeping vow. In an Oct. 8 announcement that was sent to reporters and linked to a sleek new web page, the bank pledged to put $30 billiontoward closing the racial wealth gap.

Many of its peers were making similar pledges. In late September, Citigroup had proffered a plan worth $1 billion. Bank of America’s pledge, also $1 billion, dropped first, on June 2, the week after George Floyd’s murder. But JPMorgan’s pledge was the biggest.

“The existing racial wealth gap puts a strain on families’ economic mobility and restricts the U.S. economy,” the bank’s announcementsaid. “Building on the firm’s existing investments, this new commitment will drive an inclusive economic recovery, support employees and break down barriers of systemic racism.”

Broadly, the bank was referring to the fact that Black Americans’ household wealth had held below 15 percent of white Americans’ for 60 years.

Closing the wealth gap is, of course, a job too big for any one company, even with a $3 trillion balance sheet like JPMorgan’s. In my book “The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America,” from which this article is adapted, I detail some of the systemic and individual discrimination that Black Americans face even now when trying to work at or do business with large banks.

I wondered what might change with this $30 billion pledge.

The website for the pledge outlined its components without going into much detail. At first glance, it was hard to tell what was charity and what was part of the bank’s regular business.

The pledge would obviously provide good P.R. in an area — racial equity — where JPMorgan did not often get it. But as representatives from the bank walked me through specifically what was in it, I came to understand that these big commitments all raised the same question: What does it mean for a private-sector company, with responsibilities to its shareholders to earn money, to try to fix society?

In JPMorgan’s words, the bank would do things like “promote and expand affordable housing and homeownership for underserved communities” and “improve financial health and access to banking in Black and Latinx communities.”

But to expert observers, that seemed complex — and worth seeking specifics to understand what was a significant change in business and what was simply rhetoric, perhaps helpful in the height of 2020 protests but lacking lasting financial impact.

“They’re willing and happy to do anything that goes into their regular business without sacrificing anything,” said Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies racism and inequality in the financial system. “There’s a long legacy of companies doing this stuff, announcing things that make sense for the bottom line.”

I asked Jesse Van Tol for help. He is a pragmatist about what large financial institutions can do, believing both that there’s room for improvement in the industry’s behavior and that it’s worth continuing to push for change.

Mr. Van Tol is president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit that helps banks fulfill their requirements under the Community Reinvestment Act, which was enacted in 1977 as a way to make up for decades of practices that specifically cut off Black Americans from housing and credit opportunities. He works with lenders of all sizes to develop pledges like JPMorgan’s.

His advice was simple: Look for as many specifics as possible, including time frames for increasing activity, benchmarks against which increases can be measured, and clear differentiations between charity and business.

How does Mr. Van Tol judge the strength and value of these pledges?

“I look at: Is it one big number without a breakdown of what it’s really for?” he said. “Can you measure the dollars or units? Do you know what time period it’s for? When the time period is done, can you go back and verify whether what was being committed to is done? Is it an increase? Is it new money?”

Mr. Van Tol did not help design JPMorgan’s pledge, so he felt free to help me analyze it. Given that JPMorgan had indeed provided details for how pledge activity would be carried out and a timeline to measure its progress, Mr. Van Tol judged it to be one of the industry’s best.

JPMorgan’s package included mortgages, small-business loans and loans to big developers vowing to create affordable housing.

At the top of its list, according to the web page announcing the pledge, was a vow to underwrite 40,000 mortgages for Black and Latinx borrowers over five years. The bank’s estimate for how much money it would lend out was $8 billion. Another $4 billion in mortgage refinancings would help lower interest rates for 20,000 Black and Latinx borrowers.

There was no information about JPMorgan’s previous lending to the groups specified in its pledge, to show what kind of an increase the 40,000 loans over five years would be.

“It is all incremental — dollars and units,” a JPMorgan spokeswoman, Patricia Wexler, said in a conversation in the spring of 2021, when she went over the pledge with me in detail for the book. She said the bank would compare its pledge activity with the volume and dollar amount of mortgages it had made in 2019, when interest rates were low and its home lending was “among our highest volumes.”

Another huge chunk of JPMorgan’s pledge came from its plans to make loans to real estate developers. It would do $14 billion in loans and other capital infusions for projects that included affordable housing units, mostly apartment buildings, with the goal of financing — an activity that can include rehabbing older units — 100,000 rentals.

Loans to developers are quite lucrative for banks on their own, not just because they can be made at higher rates and traded, but also because some projects come with a special tax credit. There is still an overwhelming shortage of affordable housing in major American cities even as developers and banks continue to benefit from this extra incentive.

“Win-win,” Ms. Wexler said. “It’s good for affordable housing and the families that can benefit from it and good for the banks that finance the developers.”

Another $2 billion in the bank’s activity was also for profit: small-business loans to borrowers with businesses in neighborhoods where the majority of the population is nonwhite.

The design of this component seemed to show that JPMorgan officials didn’t want to pour money indiscriminately into a neighborhood. The money was targeted not toward wealthy outsiders planning to buy up real estate, increase rents and open expensive stores and restaurants that priced locals out of the picture — in other words, to gentrify the area — but toward residents who had been unable to get financing for their small businesses.

Ms. Wexler explained that JPMorgan would create a program that paired “technical assistance” with loans to borrowers without the credit history to qualify for a more conventional arrangement. The program would be available only in certain cities at first; then it would be expanded. The bank provided a list of the cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and Atlanta — where it would begin in 2020 and 2021 and added that the education program would start first and that the lending would come afterward.

Another $750 million was straightforward business expenses. The bank said it would spend that much hiring minority-owned vendors to do things it could not do in-house.

A further $50 million would be invested in minority-owned banks and community development financial institutions, those frequently nonprofit organizations that make loans and grants to people who cannot get normal ones from a for-profit bank.

C.D.F.I.s need outside capital because although they function like banks in some respects, they don’t have a wide base of deposits to draw on. But banks like JPMorgan don’t provide those capital infusions for free. While some of the money that goes to C.D.F.I.s comes in as philanthropic gifts, other infusions have strings attached.

Banks collect dividends from the minority-focused institutions in which they invest, at varying rates. JPMorgan hasn’t disclosed the terms of its investments in minority-owned banks and C.D.F.I.s as part of its pledge, but since announcing its initial $50 million allocation, it has increased the commitment in its racial equity pledge to $75 million, then to $100 million.

The bank also announced that it was extending its philanthropic program, which originally pledged $1.75 billion over five years beginning in 2018 to “drive an inclusive economic recovery and support Black, Latinx and other underserved communities” and would now be worth $2 billion over five years starting in 2021, a $250 million increase in the total pledge.

So charity, it turned out, was a small piece of the puzzle.

“When the public sees a big number, they may think that that is philanthropic money,” Mr. Van Tol said. “But a major breakdown in a lot of these communities is what is debt and what is philanthropy or equity?”

Loading poor communities up with debt from new loans can be risky, he explained. “I’m a big believer in homeownership and homeownership’s role in building wealth, but debt is not automatically good,” he said, adding: “That’s very different from the bank giving away $50 million or $100 million.”

The last countable components that Ms. Wexler walked me through did not quite add up to $30 billion.

“There are other incremental investments and expenses that get us to, or beyond, the $30 billion commitment,” Ms. Wexler said. She did not specify what they were.

The bank’s summary of its pledge mentioned other spending in general terms, including a new effort to market its services to nonwhite people.

“We are building trust and awareness because in some of the communities where there is a large minority presence and where we’re trying to grow our customer base, we don’t have enough local employees on the ground to establish those important relationships with nonprofits and other community partners,” Ms. Wexler said.

“As such, we’ve hired hundreds of local community relationship advisers and community home lending advisers, many of whom are Spanish speaking in communities where that is the preferred language. Also, we’ve significantly increased our marketing spend in order to reach more customers in minority tracts across the country.”

More activity that fell into the “win-win” category: It counted as the bank’s effort to bring about racial equity while it also happened to be good business.

Some components of the pledge were presented entirely without numbers, time frames or any specifics, such as JPMorgan’s vow to “amplify education and counseling programs to prepare more Black and Latinx communities for sustainable homeownership.”

“We do not require people to go through education programs to qualify for a mortgage with us,” Ms. Wexler said. “However, there may be additional financial incentives if they do.”

Customers getting a $5,000 down payment assistance grant could get an additional $500 if they took a “first-time home buyer course.”

“It feels funny when they respond by saying, ‘These people need more information’ or ‘We’re going to help them with technical assistance,’ despite the fact that their tentacles are part of this whole economy, they are so implicated in these problems,” Ms. Baradaran said.

In general, though, Ms. Baradaran and others agree that business — not charity — is exactly what large corporations should be doing in their efforts to address inequality. After all, the racial wealth gap was created with willing participation by the private sector, from the period of slavery all the way to Jim Crow, when banks and housing developers carried out city officials’ restrictions on doing business with Black residents.

The problem with charity is it doesn’t build people’s own resilience,” said Eugene A. Ludwig, who served as comptroller of the currency from 1993 to 1998, during the Clinton administration, where he was a steward of the Community Reinvestment Act and brought more race-discrimination cases against banks than any of his predecessors.

“Doing good business has a double-whammy benefit,” Mr. Ludwig said. “It brings people into the real economy of the country.”

Another beneficiary of the pledge is JPMorgan itself.

“It shields them from any kind of criticism that rightfully should be directed to them,” Ms. Baradaran said.

A year after announcing the effort, in October 2021, JPMorgan declared that it had completed $13 billion of the $30 billion, including the pledged $4 billion in mortgage refinancings, as well as an expansion of its home buyer grant program. By the end of 2021, the completed portion had risen to $18 billion, according to the bank.

In an email on Wednesday, Ms. Wexler said: “We have committed to making sustainable, long-term systemic change to help close the racial wealth gap and fight racial inequality. We are tracking investments and initiatives to ensure they are making a significant impact.” She later added that the bank intended for the work to go well beyond its initial five-year commitment.

But JPMorgan didn’t seem to have publicized a legitimate bragging right: The proportion of its mortgage customers who were Black rose from 4 percent in 2019 to 5 percent at the end of 2021, according to an analysis of government data by a fair-lending information service, LendingPatterns. That was still below the 6 percent proportion among all banks, according to the analysis, but a 25 percent increase from the earlier period.

There are other mortgage lenders that do more, like New American Funding, a non-bank lender where Black borrowers account for nearly 8 percent of all its loans.

The company achieved that rate through a concerted effort to lend to more Black customers beginning in 2016, said Rick Arvielo, its chief executive. The loans cost New American Funding more to make and to service, because Black borrowers so often have lower credit scores as a result of the decades of subpar terms and services offered to them by financial institutions.

The loans are less profitable and more time-consuming, Mr. Arvielo said, but, in his view, the effort is worthwhile.

“We’re mission-driven,” he said. “This is our goal.”

JPMorgan’s mission is still, of course, to be a bank.

To some observers, when a bank pledges $30 billion toward closing the racial wealth gap, the best way forward is for it to act like a bank and track and report key performance indicators.

Ms. Baradaran, the scholar of racism in finance, wanted more precise measurements of success, such as: “This many people who wouldn’t have owned houses own houses now,” she said. “We increased wealth by this much.”

Marc Morial, the president and chief executive of the National Urban League, said he had spent several hours on the phone with JPMorgan officials in 2020 designing the pledge “to suggest the kinds of things as a bank they should do.”

Two years later, Mr. Morial said he thought it was too early to tell how effective JPMorgan’s pledge really would be. He noted that the bank had agreed to allow a third party to audit the package, a step in the right direction for transparency.

“A $30 billion commitment, to me, is a down payment,” he said.

Source: Where $30 Billion to Fix Systemic Racism Actually Goes

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with

Elghawaby: How celebrating our histories are a form of resistance

2022/10/21 Leave a comment

Sometimes, these are forms of resistance, sometimes more forms of recognition and celebration. As most of these are now part of government programs or sponsored partly by governments, business and others (arguably co-opted), I doubt that all of the participants in the various events view them from a resistance perspective.

Certainly that was not my experience when I routinely attend these events when running the multiculturalism program a number of years ago.

Events involve others outside the particular community improve awareness and understanding of community specific heritage and issues across a broader range of Canadians compared to those that do not:

There may come a time when celebrating Islamic Heritage Month, Latin American Heritage Month, or Women’s History Month, will seem quaint and unnecessary. Yet, marking these three commemorations this month, and countless other similar occasions throughout the calendar year, are in fact acts of resistance and defiance.

As American academic Jessica M. Parr noted last year in the digital magazine Public Books “ [ …] the choices a society makes in terms of how and what it chooses to remember and acknowledge of its past beg important questions: What do the choices say about a society’s identity and values? What do they imply about who belongs within that society, and whose experiences matter?”

Oftentimes, it takes visionaries to persist in telling stories that are undervalued, silenced, or simply forgotten. 

Take Afua Cooper, a multidisciplinary artist and scholar at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. She had to fight to study Canadian Black history when she first started work on her PhD over two decades ago. Cooper would eventually be vindicated.

“I persevered and I didn’t listen to [those who told me not to study this area],” she told me by phone earlier this month. We spoke days before she would be accepting an honorary doctorate from Simon Fraser University and just weeks after receiving the J.B. Tyrrell Historical Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, the highest honour available in the field. Her work has been instrumental in advancing Black Canadian studies and which preceded an eventual “explosion in Black history and Black studies as a whole.”

Cooper, who is also a dub and spoken word artist, has previously served as poet laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality for the 2018-2020 term. Her career draws from intersectional identities and is informed by her varied histories. 

“We have to take oral cultures as seriously as we take scribal cultures, the written cultures,” she explained to me. “That resonated with me as a Muslim because the early culture of spoken word was so important to the early history of the Arabs and of the first Muslims [ …] having this oratory among the diverse African nations and communities was so important.”

It isn’t enough for people like Cooper to do the work to bring recognition to the histories that underpin our societies, even as they are too often skipped in history textbooks. There is a heavy responsibility on many of us to create space in our workplaces, schools, universities, associations, to mark these histories and join communities in interrogating the historic experiences and contributions made. The burden shouldn’t solely depend on communities’ themselves to take the opportunity that special government designations offer, but on fellow colleagues, supervisors and leaders to encourage collective sharing and learning.

Furthermore, encouraging communities to bring positive light to their presence helps to dispel dangerous stereotypes and encourage robust civic engagement. Among the key activities at the Toronto-based Hispanic Canadian Heritage Council is an eight-week School4Civic program, which encourages greater participation in our democratic institutions.

This month also marks the 30th anniversary of Women’s History Month, with Person’s Day falling on Oct. 18. The month’s theme, “She Did, So Now I Can,” is an apt nod to those who break barriers to defy expectations, serving as inspiration to those coming afterwards.

And earlier this fall, the House of Commons voted unanimously to designate November as Hindu Heritage Month. Each designation, each recognition affords all of us the chance to resist harmful and divisive narratives that risk fraying a social fabric that requires constant effort to hold together.

So ask yourself: how are you marking these special months? How are you advancing your learning about the struggles and triumphs experienced by those with whom you share space?

Don’t let your answers disappoint.

Source: How celebrating our histories are a form of resistance

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with

A Shrinking Town at the Center of France’s Culture Wars

2022/10/21 Leave a comment

Of interest and not declining rural populations of course not unique to France:

A shrinking town set among cow pastures in Brittany seems an unlikely setting for France’s soul searching over immigration and identity.

The main square is named after the date in 1944 that local resistance fighters were rounded up by Nazi soldiers, many never seen again. It offers a cafe run by a social club, a museum dedicated to the Brittany spaniel and a hefty serving of rural flight — forlorn empty buildings, their grills pulled down and windows shuttered, some for decades.

So when town council members heard of a program that could renovate the dilapidated buildings and fill much-needed jobs such as nurses’ aides and builders by bringing in skilled refugees, it seemed like a winning lottery ticket.

“It hit me like lightning,” said Laure-Line Inderbitzin, a deputy mayor. “It sees refugees not as charity, but an opportunity.”

But what town leaders saw as a chance for rejuvenation, others saw as evidence of a “great replacement” of native French people that has become a touchstone of anger and anxiety, particularly on the hard right.

In no time, tiny Callac, a town of just 2,200, was divided, the focus of national attention and the scene of competing protests for and against the plan. Today it sits at the intersection of complex issues that have bedeviled France for many years: how to deal with mounting numbers of migrants arriving in the country and how to breathe new life into withering towns, before it is too late.

As in many towns across France, Callac’s population has been in slow decline since the end of the Trente Glorieuses, the 30-year postwar growth stretch when living standards and wages rose. Today, around half the people who remain are retirees. The biggest employer is the nursing home.

A wander around downtown reveals dozens of empty storefronts, where florists, dry-cleaners and photo studios once stood. The town’s last dental office announced in July it was closing — the stress of continually turning new patients away, when her patient list topped 9,000, was too much for Françoise Méheut.

She stopped sleeping, she burst into tears over the dental chair and she turned to antidepressants before finally deciding to retire early.

“It’s a catastrophe,” Dr. Méheut said. “I have the impression of abandoning people.”

“I am selling, and no one is buying,” she added of her business. “If there was a dentist among the refugees, I would be thrilled.”

While many in town say there are no jobs, the council did a survey and found the opposite — 75 unfilled salaried jobs, from nursing assistants to contractors, despite the local 18 percent unemployment rate.

The council still hopes to carry out its plan in cooperation with the Merci Endowment Fund, an organization created by a wealthy Parisian family that had made its fortune in high-end children’s clothing and wanted to give back.

In 2016, the matriarch of the family volunteered to host an Afghan refugee in the family mansion near the Eiffel Tower. Her three sons, seeing the joy he brought to their mother’s life and the talents he offered, wanted to expand the idea broadly.

“The idea is to create a win-win situation,” said the eldest son, Benoit Cohen, a French filmmaker and author who wrote a book about the experience called “Mohammad, My Mother and Me.”

“They will help revitalize the village.”

The Merci project has proposed handpicking asylum seekers, recruiting for skills as well as a desire to live in the countryside. Then, the Cohens promise to develop a wraparound program to help them assimilate, with local French courses and apartments in refurbished buildings.

The plan also called for new community spaces and training programs for all — locals and refugees together — something that most excited Ms. Inderbitzin, the project’s local champion on the council and a teacher in the local middle school.

The town has more than 50 nonprofit clubs and associations, including one that runs the local cinema, and another that delivers food to hungry families in town.

“Social development for all — that’s in Callac’s genes,” said Ms. Inderbitzin. “It’s a virtuous circle. They could bring lots of energy, culture, youth.”

Not everyone is as excited at that prospect. A petition launched by three residents opposing the project has more than 10,000 signatures — many from far beyond Callac..

But even in town, some grumble about lack of consultation or transparency. They worry Callac will lose its Frenchness and will trade its small-town tranquillity for big-city problems. Others question the motives of a rich family in Paris meddling in their rural home.

“We aren’t lab rats. We aren’t here for them to experiment on,” said Danielle Le Men, a retired teacher in town who is starting a community group to stop the project, which she fears will bring “radical Islam” to the community.

Catching wind of the dispute, the right-wing anti-immigrant party Reconquest, run by the failed presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, organized a protest in September, warning the project would bring dangerous insecurity and complaining that it would introduce halal stores and girls in head scarves.

There was a time, she said, when she offered billiards and karaoke and kept the taps running late. But with the town’s youth departed, she recalibrated her closing time to match her remaining clientele’s schedule — 8 p.m.

“Why would we give jobs to outsiders?” she said. “We should help people here first.”

Standing on the street outside his small bar, which doubles as a cluttered antiques store, her neighbor, Paul Le Contellac, assessed the proposal from another angle.

His uncle married a refugee who had fled Spain with her family during the civil war and found shelter in this village. Later, when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, his grandmother harbored resistance fighters in her attic.

“This is a town that has always welcomed refugees,” said Mr. Le Contellac. “Callac is not ugly, but it’s not pretty either. It needs some new energy.”

While immigration may hold the potential to do that, the issue remains hotly contested, even while the migration crisis had been dampened by the pandemic.

Today, as the pandemic appears to wane, the numbers of asylum seekers arriving to France is climbing again, threatening to restore the issue’s volatility.

Since the height of the migration crisis several years ago, the government of President Emmanuel Macron has attempted to split the difference on its immigration policy.

On the one hand, it has aimed to deter asylum applicants by increasing police at the border and by cutting back some state services.

On the other, for those who are accepted as refugees, it has poured resources into French lessons and employment programs to ease their integration.

The government has also tried to disperse asylum seekers outside of Paris, where services are strained, housing is hard to find and large tent camps have sprung up.

Recently, Mr. Macron announced that he wanted to formalize the policy in a new immigration bill, sending asylum seekers from the dense urban centers, already plagued with social and economic problems, to the “rural areas, that are losing people.”

The plan is a lot like that being put in place already in Callac, which, paradoxically, has been receiving refugee families since 2015, about 40 people at present, with little or no notice, like many small French towns.

Mohammad Ebrahim heard the noise of the warring protests from his living room window, but had no idea what the commotion was about — certainly not about him, his wife and four children, who arrived a year ago.

Kurds who escaped Al Qaeda in Syria, they have felt nothing but welcome, flashing photos on their cellphones of community meals and celebrations they have been invited to. But the perks of village hospitality are offset by the logistics of living in the countryside without a car. Training, medical appointments, even regular French classes are all far away.

When he hears the plan to offer wraparound services and school in Callac, Mr. Ebrahim smiles broadly. “Then we could go to French class every day,” he said.

Callac may now prove to be a testing ground of whether a more structured approach can work and divisions be overcome.

“This became about French politics,” says Sylvie Lagrue, a local volunteer who drives refugees to doctor’s appointments and helps them set up their internet. “Now, everyone hopes this will quiet down, and we continue with the program.”

Though the project still has no official budget, timeline or target number of asylum seekers to be resettled, the town council nevertheless is tiptoeing ahead.

It recently bought a hulking abandoned stone school, rising like a ghost in the middle of town, and announced it planned to convert it into the “heart” of the project — with a refugee reception area, as well as a community nursery and a co-working space.

The Merci fund has already bought the building where the town’s last book store closed in August. It now plans to reopen the store for the community, while housing a first family of asylum seekers in the upstairs apartment.

“The beginning has to be slow,” Mr. Cohen said. “We have to see if it works. We don’t want to scare people.”

Source: A Shrinking Town at the Center of France’s Culture Wars

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Business Council of Canada urges Chrystia Freeland to focus on energy, deficit, immigration [more] in fall fiscal update

2022/10/21 Leave a comment

Little surprise that the BCC is calling for further increases. Will be interesting to see how this call is answered given Minister Freeland’s signal that new program funding has to come from within existing funding and the expected economic downturn and possible recession:

…

On immigration, the letter says 80 per cent of employers have reported having difficulty finding skilled workers, which is contributing to the delay or cancellation of major projects.

“With an aging work force and a declining labour participation rate, Canada’s future prosperity depends on further increases to the annual number of economic-class applicants who are granted permanent resident status,” the letter states.

The business council recommends that Canada’s immigration targets for 2023-2025 should be equal to 1.2 per cent of the Canadian population, with 65 per cent of new permanent residents entering the country under an economic-class program. That category includes those who are selected for factors such as their ability to meet labour market needs or to start, operate or invest in a business.

Both targets are slightly higher than the government’s current plans, which would welcome 451,000 permanent residents in 2024, of which 267,750 would be from the economic category.

“In support of this goal, we recommend that the fall economic statement provide additional funding to rapidly modernize immigration IT systems, open new processing centres, and increase the ranks of border agents and settlement services personnel,” the council’s letter states.

Source: Business Council of Canada urges Chrystia Freeland to focus on energy, deficit, immigration in fall fiscal update

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

COVID-19 Immigration Effects – August 2022 update

2022/10/21 Leave a comment

NEW DATA on Settlement Services, showing an overall decline compared to the pre-pandemic with only partial recovery. Afghanistan and Ukraine have shown the greatest increase given the number of refugees from those two countries. Pre-arrival information and orientation, language assessment and resettlement assistance have increased the most.

While the government has made some progress in reducing backlogs with respect to temporary residents and citizenship, it has not made progress with respect to Permanent Residents.

PRs: Decline compared to July. YTD 308,000,  2021 same period 222,000.

TRs/IMP: Increase compared to July. YTD 280,000, 2021 same period, 228,000.

TRs/TFWP: Slight decrease compared to July. YTD 100,000, 2021 same period 90,000.

Students: Large seasonal increase compared to July (may reflect processing issues). YTD 366,000, 2021 same period 295,000.

Asylum claimants: Stable. YTD 53,000, 2021 same period 10,000.

Settlement Services (July): Decrease compared to June. YTD 1,031,000, 2021 same period 918,000.

Citizenship: Increase compared to July. YTD 248,000, 2021 same period 55,000.

Visitor Visas. Increase compared to July. YTD 752,000, 2021 same period 67,000.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

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