Goldberg: The Censoring of an Iranian American Artist

2023/02/15 Leave a comment

Here we go again…. I’m much more concerned about the physical health and safety of the brave women and men who have been risking all to protest against the mandatory dress code for women and the general repressive nature of the Iranian regime:

The work of the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand is cheeky, erotic and defiantly anticlerical. One painting in her new midcareer survey, “Taravat,” incorporates Iranian bank notes whose images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini have been dosed with LSD. A graphite drawing, titled “Blasphemy X,” depicts a veiled woman giving the finger while lifting her robe to reveal high heels and a flash of underwear. There are sculptures of women in niqab face coverings with enormous exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of Iran’s recent nationwide protests against the morality police, is written in neon in English and Persian.

When “Taravat” opened late last month at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in St. Paul, Minn., with a focus on internationalism, some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress, and thus of them. They expressed their outrage, and this month Macalester responded by temporarily closing Talepasand’s show, and then, apparently unaware of the irony, surrounding the gallery windows with black curtains.

Those curtains astonished Talepasand, an assistant professor of art practice at Portland State University. “To literally veil a ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ exhibition?” she exclaimed to me.

The uproar over “Taravat” was directly connected to a recent controversy at Hamline University, a few minutes’ drive away from Macalester, where an adjunct art history professor named Erika López Prater was fired for showing a 14th-century painting of Muhammad in an art history class. In late January, Macalester — where, as it happens, Prater now teaches — hosted a discussion between faculty and students, most of them Muslim, to address issues raised by the Hamline incident. There, some students described being upset by “Taravat.”

“I invited them to share what emotions they were holding in their bodies,” one faculty member wrote in an email, part of which was shared with Talepasand. “They named ‘undervalued, frustrated, surprised, disrespected, ignored, and it felt like hit after hit.’”

Ultimately, Macalester handled the student complaints better than Hamline did. No one was fired, and after being closed for a few days, “Taravat” reopened. But the administration’s response was still distinctly apologetic, demonstrating the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety.

In a message to campus, the provost, Lisa Anderson-Levy, said that Macalester understands “that pieces in the exhibition have caused harm to members of our Muslim community.” The black curtains came down, but they were replaced with purple construction paper on the gallery’s glass entrance and frosted glass panels on its mezzanine windows, protecting passers-by from “unintentional or nonconsensual viewing,” in the words of the administration. A content warning is affixed to the door. Next to it, some students put up a yellow sign asking potential visitors to show solidarity with them by not going in.

“There’s a lot of nuance and complexity in these kinds of situations,” Anderson-Levy said in a statement when I reached out to talk. “We believe that taking time to slow down and listen carefully to the diverse perspectives across our campus community allowed us to create space for conversation and learning.”

At least some students seemed to be learning to approach contentious art cautiously. A senior sociology major who’d visited the gallery with their sculpture class when Talepasand was still assembling the exhibition told me they were thinking of returning to see what had changed. But they worried that could be an act of entitlement, and felt the need to reflect “on my place as a white person” who is “not affected by the harms as much as others.”

Some readers might object to dwelling on one instance of misguided sensitivity at one small college when the country is in the midst of a nationwide frenzy of right-wing book bans, public school speech restrictions, and wild attempts to curtail drag performances. But I think this moment, when we’re facing down a wave of censorship inspired by religious fervor, is a good time to quash the notion that people have a right to be shielded from discomfiting art. If progressive ideas can be harnessed to censor feminist work because it offends religious sensibilities, perhaps those ideas bear rethinking.

In her excellent 2021 book “On Freedom,” the poet and critic Maggie Nelson described how, in the 20th century, the avant-garde imagined its audience as numb, repressed and in need of being shocked awake. The 21st-century model, by contrast, “presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection.”

There is value in this approach. Mary Gaitskill recently published a captivating essay about two writing classes that she taught 25 years apart. Each included a menacing male student obsessed with sadistic violence against women. In 1997, the guy was named Don, and Gaitskill was struck by how enthusiastically his female classmates seemed to respond to his imagined scenes of torture and murder. It is only toward the end of the semester, after another student’s outburst, that the young women express their fear of Don. Until then, surrounded by a culture that valorized shock and darkness, they demonstrated a “seemingly bizarre forbearance” that blunted their authentic reactions.

“But these days that breed of forbearance is looking like an indulgence that we cannot afford,” Gaitskill writes. “These days, niceness is looking pretty damn good; these days, the darkness is just too overwhelming.” In her 2022 class, she writes, almost half the class had spent time in mental institutions. Relentless demands for safety can simply be a sign of how vulnerable people feel.

Still, to automatically give in to those demands is to suffocate the arts. This becomes especially clear when you see how easily the language of trauma and harm can serve reactionary ends. Just last week, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a school district in New Jersey that removed Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” a frequent target of conservative censorship, from the freshman honors curriculum. A parent had complained that exposure to the book’s “graphic images of sexual violence” could be “emotionally traumatizing.” This, said Talepasand, “is where the far left and the far right look very similar.”

I’m not naïve enough to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free speech, the right would give up its furious campaign against what it calls wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to what has become a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work. Art need not defer to religion. If that’s no longer obvious we’ve gone astray.

Source: The Censoring of an Iranian American Artist

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Why promoting multiculturalism could increase support for the EU

2023/02/15 Leave a comment

Interesting study and linkage (may be more correlation than causation):

Many political parties combine pro-EU policies with critical stances toward immigration and multiculturalism. But are these two approaches contradictory? Drawing on a new study covering France and Germany, Natalia Bogado, Evelyn Bytzek and Melanie C. Steffens highlight that discourses emphasising the threat of cultural diversity can increase Euroscepticism among voters, while discourses promoting multiculturalism are associated with an increase in support for the EU.

Since the 1990s, the Leitkultur debate – ironically spearheaded by later Wilkommenskulturchampion, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – has been at the heart of discourses about immigration and asylum in Germany. In a nutshell, the debate is a body of discourses (more or less extreme) grounded on the notion that without a German guiding culture that everyone equally adopts (i.e. a culture into which everyone has been equally assimilated), German society would fall apart.

In other words, social cohesion and peace can only exist in conditions of complete cultural assimilation. Multiculturalism is thus disparaged as an unsustainable ideology that leads to a lack of social unity, violence, criminality, and even terrorism by those who have allegedly failed to adopt the cardinal tenets of the German culture. Accordingly, Merkel famously declared multiculturalism dead in 2010, and the notion that cultural diversity poses a serious threat to peaceful coexistence in Germany was a constant in her political rhetoric throughout her 16 years in power.

Beyond Germany and the Leitkultur, assimilation has dominated public debates about immigration and asylum in many European countries. In France, assimilationist discourses have been the leitmotif of the far-right populist Rassemblement National and the lifeline that secured electoral success for many centre-right candidates – famously, Nicolas Sarkozy, but others as well. Similarly, Brexit followed a campaign where immigration and the threat it allegedly poses to the British cultural identity were highly salient. Armed with a wide array of nationalist and assimilationist slogans, the UK Independence Party and the anti-EU factions of the Conservative Party were able to turn fears over national-identity loss and immigration into anti-EU votes.

Evidence from France and Germany

Brexit offered anecdotal evidence of the negative impact of assimilationist discourses that present immigration, asylum, and cultural diversity as a threat to the nation on support for the EU. In a new study covering Germany and France, we provide scientific evidence to support these assumptions.

Specifically, we found that reading electoral pledges (taken from the 2019 European Parliament election) such as “We must regulate immigration to preserve Europe’s cultural integrity” or “We must protect our European way of life and our Christian values under threat by unconditional migration,” decreased support for EU integration, identification with the EU and – particularly concerning in light of Brexit ­– increased intentions to vote to leave the EU.

Thus, our study evidenced that something as (apparently) innocent as expressing concern about cultural diversity threatening the integrity of national cultures and customs can fuel Euroscepticism and intentions to leave the Union. Conversely, reassuring voters of the benefits of multiculturalism and cultural diversity increased support for the EU.

Reading electoral pledges that emphasised the importance of promoting multiculturalism and respecting cultural diversity improved EU attitudes and reduced intentions to vote to leave the EU. Electoral pledges such as “We celebrate cultural diversity and want to make Europe a safe place for all” and “We are determined to defend the right of asylum and of migrants to live in Europe without having to abandon their cultural identities” had a positive impact on support for the EU, identification with the EU, and intentions to remain in the Union.

The way forward

In a context where Euroscepticism continues to grow, our research helps us to understand how politicians’ assimilationist messages can promote Euroscepticism. These findings have important implications for political and media discourse. Assimilation discourses are not exclusive to the populist far-right: many pro-EU centre-right parties have also emphasised the threat of cultural diversity in their immigration discourses.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel – who advanced a strong pro-refugee agenda, welcoming hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and urging other EU countries to do the same – framed immigration and asylum almost exclusively in assimilation terms. In light of our findings, it is hardly surprising that during Merkel’s tenure, Germany saw the electoral rise of the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany and the rise of radicalised groups like Pegida and others. Beyond Germany, our study highlights why, despite many politicians’ efforts to promote a pro-EU agenda, the persistence of assimilation discourses means that Euroscepticism will continue to grow among Europeans.

Furthermore, the echoes of Brexit still threaten the continuity of the Union, as exposure to information emphasising the United Kingdom’s sovereignty gains following its exit from the Union increases Euroscepticism and willingness to leave the EU. As such, the importance of adopting multicultural discourses when framing immigration and asylum for the future of the EU cannot be understated.

Additionally, our study offers further hope: in addition to promoting the benefits of multiculturalism, fostering an emotional connection to the EU can also protect the Union from the impact of assimilationist discourses. Unfortunately, data from the 2018 European Social Survey is not reassuring, as EU attachment remains moderate to low among Europeans. However, research has offered some avenues to promote EU attachment.

Recently, studies have found that policies like EU Cohesion Policy and the adoption of the euroincreased emotional attachment to the EU. Future research should continue to explore ways to achieve this longstanding goal of increasing Europeans’ attachment to the Union. At the moment, the Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a watershed moment for the EU to display its political, financial, and cultural leadership in the region and thus strengthen European citizens’ emotional attachment to the Union.

Source: Why promoting multiculturalism could increase support for the EU

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

CSIS warned Trudeau about Toronto-area politician’s alleged ties to Chinese diplomats

2023/02/15 Leave a comment

Fortunately, the truth generally always emerges; unfortunately, it appears the PM and government didn’t take the warnings seriously:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and senior aides were warned on at least two occasions that government MPs should be cautious in their political dealings with former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister Michael Chan because of alleged ties to China’s consulate in Toronto, national-security sources say.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has a dossier on Mr. Chan that contains information on his activities in the 2019 and 2021 federal election campaigns and meetings with suspected Chinese intelligence operatives, according to the two security sources. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the sources, who risk prosecution under the Security of Information Act.

Mr. Chan, now deputy mayor of the city of Markham, told The Globe that he is a loyal Canadian and accused CSIS of character assassination, saying they never once interviewed him about his alleged involvement with the Chinese consulate.

“Your own statement to me about a recent briefing by CSIS to Prime Minister Trudeau, serves only to ignite xenophobia and cause continued, unwarranted and irreparable damage to my reputation and the safety of my family,” he said.

He added: “CSIS has never interviewed me regarding their false and unsubstantiated allegations. However, I am aware that they have conducted intimidating interviews with my friends and acquaintances and then instructed them to keep their mouths shut.”

Mr. Chan, 71, was elected as a regional councillor in Markham’s Oct. 24 election last year and, as the councillor with the most votes, he also became deputy mayor. In 2018, he retired from provincial politics, where his last post was minister of international trade for Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government. He has been a key organizer and fundraiser in Ontario’s Chinese-Canadian communities for the federal and provincial Liberal parties.

CSIS has observed Mr. Chan meeting in the past years with Chinese diplomat Zhao Wei, whom one source describes as a “suspected intelligence actor,” and Beijing’s former vice-consul-general Zhuang Yaodong. CSIS believes Mr. Zhuang handled security files out of the Toronto consulate, the source said. Mr. Zhao’s code-name for Mr. Chan is “The Minister,” the source said.

In 2019, Mr. Chan had a number of meetings with Mr. Zhao that were described in a CSIS 2020 briefing package as “clandestine in nature” and were allegedly election-related, the source said. In that same year, CSIS observed Mr. Chan and an associate meeting with Mr. Zhao and Mr. Zhuang at a Chinese restaurant.

Mr. Chan said in his statement to The Globe that his meetings with Chinese consular officials are not unusual for politicians. He also said that he met frequently with consular officials from many Asian and Southeast Asian countries in 2019 relating to business activities abroad.

“Meetings to discuss business and trade between Consular officials and Canadians, politicians or otherwise, are a common practice,” he said. “Just in case you were not aware, I met a few days ago with the Deputy Consul-General from China in Toronto and Mr. Wei Zhao.”

The source said Mr. Zhao, who came to Canada in 2018, has also been observed meeting with a number of constituency staffers for Liberal MPs in Toronto, including an assistant for International Trade Minister Mary Ng. Some of those aides were asked by Mr. Zhao to keep their MPs away from pro-Taiwan events, according to the source.

CSIS Director David Vigneault flagged Mr. Chan’s return to public office during a fall 2022 briefing that he delivered to the Prime Minister and his national security adviser, Jody Thomas, on Chinese election interference. He cautioned that Liberal MPs should be vigilant in their dealings with Mr. Chan, according to two other sources. The Globe is not identifying them because they were not authorized to speak about sensitive matters.

In that same briefing, Mr. Vigneault said China’s consulate in Toronto had targeted 11 candidates from the Greater Toronto Area, a mix of Liberals and Conservatives, in the 2019 federal election, the sources said. But the sources said the CSIS director told Mr. Trudeau there was no indication China’s interference efforts had helped elect any of them, despite the consulate’s attempts to promote the campaigns on social media and in Chinese-language media outlets.

The Globe has previously reported that Mr. Chan had been on CSIS’s radar, stretching as far back as 2010, because of alleged close ties to the Chinese consulate. He had also been involved in community events with leaders of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations, considered one of the consulate’s unofficial lobby groups.

In a 2019 briefing for the Prime Minister’s Office, one of the national-security sources and a government source say, security officials also flagged Mr. Chan’s Chinese consular connections soon after he was recruited by Ms. Ng to serve as her campaign co-chair in that year’s federal election.

In the 2019 briefing, security officials told senior PMO staff, including Mr. Trudeau’s Chief of Staff, Katie Telford, that Mr. Chan should be on “your radar” and that “someone should reach out to Mary to be extra careful,” according to one source. That security briefing also dealt with foreign interference, tactics and Chinese tradecraft, the source said.

Ms. Ng told The Globe that no one from the PMO told her to steer clear of Mr. Chan, who also co-chaired her 2017 by-election campaign when she replaced veteran Liberal MP John McCallum. The Prime Minister opened the Markham-Thornhill riding for Ms. Ng, who had earlier served as his director of appointments, by naming Mr. McCallum as Canada’s ambassador to China.

Mr. Trudeau later fired Mr. McCallum after he criticized the American request for Canada to detain and extradite Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou.

In the interview with The Globe, Ms. Ng said that Mr. Chan never actually took up the role of campaign co-chair in 2019 because, she said, there were other capable volunteers to help.

“We were working with so many members of my community – the Chinese members of our community, Tamil members of my community, Muslim Canadian and Jewish Canadians – so really it was really a cross section of people. So the campaign, you know, it just was working as it was and I felt very supported by a lot of people who were on the ground,” she said.

She added: “I haven’t talked to Michael in quite some time.”

A confidant of Ms. Ng said the MP quietly dropped Mr. Chan as co-chair after public comments in the late summer of 2019 where he condemned Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrators and supported China’s crackdown on them, attributing the protests to alleged manipulation by foreign actors. Mr. Chan agreed to step aside because he did not want his comments to reflect badly on Ms. Ng, the confidant said. The Globe is not naming the confidant, who was not permitted to publicly discuss the matter.

“Your statement to me regarding Mary Ng’s campaign is utterly false,” Mr. Chan said. He did not elaborate.

The confidant also said that Ms. Ng’s assistant, who used to work for Mr. McCallum, likely met Mr. Zhao at Chinese-Canadian community events, often frequented by Chinese consulate officials. He stressed, however, that Ms. Ng has avoided meeting Chinese consulate officials since she became Trade Minister in 2021. She became Minister for Small Business in a cabinet shuffle in 2018.

Ms. Ng received the necessary vetting to obtain a security clearance to serve in cabinet in 2018 when she became Small Business Minister.

In the 2017 by-election campaign, then Chinese consul-general He Wei gathered Chinese-Canadian media at the consulate and urged them to support her election, saying they needed a friend like Mr. McCallum in Ottawa, according to one of the security sources. Ms. Ng’s confidant said she was not aware of the intervention by Mr. He, now a senior official in China’s Foreign Ministry.

CSIS has repeatedly warned that China has been conducting foreign interference operations in Canada, including efforts to influence the political process.

On Thursday, Adam Fisher, CSIS director-general of intelligence assessments, told the House of Commons committee on procedure and house affairs that Beijing uses a variety of means to influence the political process, including attempting to get information from unwitting politicians.

“They are not necessarily relying on trained agents. They use cutouts. They use proxies. They use community groups. They use diaspora organizations and community leaders,” he said.

Cherie Henderson, CSIS assistant director of requirements, also noted that states like China will funnel money directly to proxies.

“They will use whatever avenue they can to achieve their objectives,” she told the committee, which is studying alleged Chinese interference in the 2019 election.

In June, 2015, Mr. Chan was the subject of a Globe investigation, which revealed that CSIS was concerned that the then-minister may have grown too close to the Chinese consulate in Toronto, prompting a senior official to formally caution the province about the minister’s alleged conduct in a 2010 briefing.

Around that time, then-premier Dalton McGuinty dismissed the CSIS warnings as baseless. When The Globe brought the allegations to Ms. Wynne in 2015, she also dismissed them. Mr. Chan wrote in 2015 that “there is a persistent theme that there is a perceived risk that I am under undue influence and that I am an unwitting dupe of a foreign government. This is offensive and totally false.” Mr. Chan has steadfastly denied the assertions made by Canada’s spy agency.

He brought a libel action against The Globe, but the case has not gone to court.

In his recent statement to The Globe, Mr. Chan said the 2015 article was “especially egregious and disheartening for someone like myself who has always put the interests of Canada and Canadians first and foremost, and who has a long, true record of exemplary public service.”

Source: CSIS warned Trudeau about Toronto-area politician’s alleged ties to Chinese diplomats

Filed under disinformation, foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Canadian Heritage changes vetting process for anti-racism funds after nixing contract

2023/02/15 Leave a comment

Of note. This should catch most of the problems and the inclusion of reviewing social media activities is unfortunately necessary with respect to all forms of hate, whether antisemitism, anti-Asian, anti-muslim etc:

Canadian Heritage has changed the way it vets funding requests for community and anti-racism projects after it cut ties with an organization that was accused of antisemitism.

The federal government terminated a contract with the Community Media Advocacy Centre in September after it granted the group more than $122,000for projects to help combat anti-racism.

Ottawa has since attempted to recoup the funds, but has been unsuccessful in getting the money back, said Mala Khanna, an associate deputy minister at Canadian Heritage.

“It would be possible for the minister to take legal action,” she told a House of Commons committee on Monday.

That option has not yet been pursued, she said.

The federal government’s relationship with the group ended a few days after media reported that a senior consultant had posted what federal ministers described as antisemitic content on Twitter. The ministry decided to review its vetting process and says a new procedure is now in place.

Those applying for money will now have to put into writing that they will not espouse hate or discriminate, Khanna said.

Unlike before, the minister will have the power to immediately terminate a contract if its terms are violated. And staff involved with doling out funding have received anti-racism and antisemitism training.

Under the new vetting process, the government will also review the social media accounts of the staff of organizations that apply for government funding, Khanna said.

“Racism, hate and discrimination would make you ineligible for government funding, and requiring applicants to attest upfront themselves that they or anyone that is associated with the project will not engage in hate,” Khanna said.

“I think those are important lessons that we’ve learned.”

Michael Levitt, president and CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said staff at the Canadian Heritage department need rigorous training so they can better understand and identify antisemitism.

“While we appreciate that Canadian Heritage has implemented new processes to prevent organizations and individuals who espouse antisemitic and racist views from receiving government funding, this can only be effective under certain conditions,” Levitt said in a written statement Monday.

He said it’s imperative that staff remain committed to real and meaningful action so that someone who promotes antisemitic views “never receives another cent of Canadian taxpayer money.”

Members of Parliament for the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois were critical of Canadian Heritage for its approval of the contract in the first place, and then its delay in cancelling it.

“The concerns are very legitimate, and the fact this antisemitism was funded by the government, by the taxpayers, I find unbelievable,” NDP MP Peter Julian said at the heritage committee on Monday.

“We can’t have a federal government that takes that long to respond to egregious cases of hate being disseminated, whether that’s online or any other venue.”

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said he raised concerns with the department in mid-July regarding social media posts by Laith Marouf, a senior consultant with the Community Media Advocacy Centre. The organization had been awarded government money to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting.

One tweet read: “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, a.k.a. the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of thier (sic) Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.’’

Marouf and his lawyer Stephen Ellis could not be reached for comment. However, Ellis previously told The Canadian Press that Marouf harbours no animus toward the Jewish faith as a collective group. He drew a distinction between his client’s tweets about people he calls “Jewish white supremacists” and Jewish people in general.

The department didn’t receive the tweet until Aug. 2, Khanna said, and it wasn’t until Aug. 20 that they suspended the contract. On Sept. 23, the contract was officially terminated.

“We could have moved faster. I wish we moved faster,” Khanna said.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said it is still waiting for other departments to adopt the same policies and practices.

“This is larger than one program and one organization. It is a holistic, all-of-government commitment that must be undertaken,” its president and CEO, Shimon Fogel, said in a statement.

Khanna said other government departments that issue grants and contributions have expressed interest in the work Canadian Heritage has done over the last few months. She said she has met with two other departments to discuss what they learned.

“I’m confident that the measures we put into place will make a difference,” she said. “If we were in such a situation again, I believe we would be able to move more quickly. Within a matter of days.”

Source: Canadian Heritage changes vetting process for anti-racism funds after nixing contract

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Stanford: Humans aren’t widgets, and Canadian workers are not in ‘short supply’

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Needed reminder and useful counterpart to the self-serving nature of many of those complaining about labour shortages:

Busy people often lament, “I wish there were more hours in the day!” They struggle to get all their tasks completed. An extra hour or two each day would surely ease the pressure.

While this frustration is understandable, no-one seriously believes our days are too short — nor that time pressures would be solved by stretching the day to 25 hours. Almost certainly, our to-do lists would just get longer, and we’d quickly face the same time crunch again.

This same flawed logic infects the chorus of complaints these days about a so-called ‘labour shortage.’ Employers moan they can’t find enough workers. They preferred it when unemployed workers abounded, and simple job ads could elicit dozens of applications.

Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada, also cites employers’ complaints as justification for painful interest rate hikes. He aims to ‘solve’ the labour shortage by deliberately raising unemployment.

The federal government, too, is catering to employers by increasing immigration targets to all-time highs. Properly planned and supported immigration is good for the economy and for society. But importing masses of workers just to make life easier for employers is the wrong way to do it (especially using exploitative temporary migrant programs).

At any rate, just increasing the number of people in the country doesn’t magically fix the labour market. Yes, there are more people to work, but now there is more work to do (since the population requiring housing and subsistence also grows). It’s like lengthening the day to 25 hours, while adding more tasks to your list.

Labour shortage narratives are also heard loudly in the social policy arena. For example, employers want Employment Insurance benefits cut, to compel unemployed workers to accept lower-paying jobs.https://d-14355908711088163416.ampproject.net/2301261900000/frame.html

Others want to postpone the retirement age, to pressure Canadians to work longer. This, too, is a false solution. Yes, Canada’s population is aging. But it’s wrong to assume this will translate into a crisis in labour supply. Strong labour force participation (including many over 65 who voluntarily keep working) is offsetting demographic trends, and keeping the labour force growing.https://amp.thestar.com/amp-ymbii.html?pos=1&path=/business/opinion/2023/02/11/humans-arent-widgets-and-canadian-workers-are-not-in-short-supply.html&sitename=thestar#amp=1

All these policies would make it harder for Canadians to find and keep good work — which should be our central economic goal. Pushing more workers into the labour market, while reducing job opportunities, will certainly make like easier for HR managers. But it will undermine life chances for most Canadians.

Statistics prove that Canada is not anywhere near ‘running out’ of workers. There are more than a million officially unemployed. Another million or more are underemployed, working short hours or in menial jobs that don’t fully utilize their abilities. And at least a million more potential workers (including hundreds of thousands of female parents, and hundreds of thousands of nonemployed who aren’t counted as officially ‘unemployed’) sit on the sidelines of the labour force.

Fully employing these Canadians would expand national output by 15 per cent. It would reduce poverty and exclusion. And it would allow us to undertake vital priorities: like strengthening health care, expanding green energy, and building affordable housing. Instead, the economy is being deliberately held back to maintain an ample buffer of idle workers, ready anytime employers need them.

To be sure, employing every available worker (and achieving genuine full employment) would require careful planning and supports. We’d need stronger vocational training pipelines to train and retrain workers, and connect them with relevant jobs. We’d need better child care, flexible hours, and public transit to support healthier work-life balance. And we’d need different ways of setting wages: through industry-wide negotiations that lift real wages steadily and sustainably (alongside productivity), rather than using unemployment as a weapon to keep wages in line.

Ultimately, the terminology of ‘labour shortage’ propagates an employer-centric vision. It portrays the economy as a machine — and human beings as just another input to that machine (like energy, raw materials, or widgets).

In fact, the economy is there to serve us, not the other way around. The economy is the place where we use our energy and skills to produce the goods and services we need for a good life. If workers are fully occupied, that means we’re doing a good job supporting ourselves.

We shouldn’t complain about that, or try to prevent it. We should celebrate it.

Source: Humans aren’t widgets, and Canadian workers are not in ‘short supply’

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Mims: The AI Boom That Could Make Google and Microsoft Even More Powerful

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Good long read. Hard to be optimistic about how the technology will be used. And the regulators will likely be more than a few steps behind corporations:

Seeing the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbots touted in dueling announcements this past week by Microsoft and Googledrives home two major takeaways. First, the feeling of “wow, this definitely could change everything.” And second, the realization that for chat-based search and related AI technologies to have an impact, we’re going to have to put a lot of faith in them and the companies they come from.

When AI is delivering answers, and not just information for us to base decisions on, we’re going to have to trust it much more deeply than we have before. This new generation of chat-based search engines are better described as “answer engines” that can, in a sense, “show their work” by giving links to the webpages they deliver and summarize. But for an answer engine to have real utility, we’re going to have to trust it enough, most of the time, that we accept those answers at face value.

The same will be true of tools that help generate text, spreadsheets, code, images and anything else we create on our devices—some version of which both Microsoft MSFT -0.20%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Google have promised to offer within their existing productivity services, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. 

These technologies, and chat-based search, are all based on the latest generation of “generative” AI, capable of creating verbal and visual content and not just processing it the way more established AI has done. And the added trust it will require is one of several ways in which this new generative AI technology is poised to shift even more power into the hands of the biggest tech companies. 

Generative AI in all its forms will insinuate technology more deeply into the way we live and work than it already is—not just answering our questions but writing our memos and speeches or even producing poetry and art. And because of the financial, intellectual and computational resources needed to develop and run the technology are so enormous, the companies that control these AI systems will be the largest, richest companies.

OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E 2 image generator AIs that have fueled much of the current hype, seemed like an exception to that: a relatively small startup that has driven major AI innovation. But it has leapt into the arms of Microsoft, which has made successive rounds of investment, in part because of the need to pay for the computing power needed to make its systems work. 

The greater concentration of power is all the more important because this technology is both incredibly powerful and inherently flawed: it has a tendency to confidently deliver incorrect information. This means that step one in making this technology mainstream is building it, and step two is minimizing the variety and number of mistakes it inevitably makes.

Trust in AI, in other words, will become the new moat that big technology companies will fight to defend. Lose the user’s trust often enough, and they might abandon your product. For example: In November, Meta made available to the public an AI chat-based search engine for scientific knowledge called Galactica. Perhaps it was in part the engine’s target audience—scientists—but the incorrect answers it sometimes offered inspired such withering criticism that Meta shut down public access to it after just three days, said Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun in a recent talk.

Galactica was “the output of a research project versus something intended for commercial use,” says a Meta spokeswoman. In a public statement, Joelle Pineau, managing director of fundamental AI research at Meta, wrote that “given the propensity of large language models such as Galactica to generate text that may appear authentic, but is inaccurate, and because it has moved beyond the research community, we chose to remove the demo from public availability.”

On the other hand, proving your AI more trustworthy could be a competitive advantage more powerful than being the biggest, best or fastest repository of answers. This seems to be Google’s bet, as the company has emphasized in recent announcements and a presentation on Wednesday that as it tests and rolls out its own chat-based and generative AI systems, it will strive for “Responsible AI,” as outlined in 2019 in its “AI Principles.”

My colleague Joanna Stern this past week provided a helpful description of what it’s like to use Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Edge web browser with ChatGPT incorporated. You can join a list to test the service—and Google says it will make its chatbot, named Bard, available at some point in the coming months.

But in the meantime, to see just why trust in these kinds of search engines is so tricky, you can visit other chat-based search engines that already exist. There’s You.com, which will answer your questions via a chatbot, or Andisearch.com, which will summarize any article it returns when you search for a topic on it.

Even these smaller services feel a little like magic. If you ask You.com’s chat module a question like “Please list the best chat AI-based search engines,” it can, under the right circumstances, give you a coherent and succinct answer that includes all the best-known startups in this space. But it can also, depending on small changes in how you phrase that question, add complete nonsense to its answer. 

In my experimentation, You.com would, more often than not, give a reasonably accurate answer, but then add to it the name of a search engine that doesn’t exist at all. Googling the made-up search engine names it threw in revealed that You.com seemed to be misconstruing the names of humans quoted in articles as the names of search engines.

Andi doesn’t return search results in a chat format, precisely because making sure that those answers are accurate is still so difficult, says Chief Executive Angela Hoover. “It’s been super exciting to see these big players validating that conversational search is the future, but nailing factual accuracy is hard to do,” she adds. As a result, for now, Andi offers search results in a conventional format, but offers to use AI to summarize any page it returns.

Andi currently has a team of fewer than 10 people, and has raised $2.5 million so far. It’s impressive what such a small team has accomplished, but it’s clear that making trustworthy AI will require enormous resources, probably on the scale of what companies like Microsoft and Google possess.

There are two reasons for this: The first is the enormous amount of computing infrastructure required, says Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management at Johns Hopkins University who studies human-AI interaction. That means tens of thousands of computers in big technology companies’ current cloud infrastructures. Some of those computers are used to train the enormous “foundation” models that power generative AI systems. Others specialize in making the trained models available to users, which as the number of users grows can become a more taxing task than the original training.

The second reason, says Dr. Dai, is that it requires enormous human resources to continually test and tune these models, in order to make sure they’re not spouting an inordinate amount of nonsense or biased and offensive speech.

Google has said that it has called on every employee in the company to test its new chat-based search engine and flag any issues with the results it generates. Microsoft, which is already rolling out its chat-based search engine to the public on a limited basis, is doing that kind of testing in public. ChatGPT, on which Microsoft’s chat-based search engine is based, has already proved to be vulnerable to attempts to “jailbreak” it into producing inappropriate content. 

Big tech companies can probably overcome the issues arising from their rollout of AI—Google’s go-slow approach, ChatGPT’s sometimes-inaccurate results, and the incomplete or misleading answers chat-based Bing could offer—by experimenting with these systems on a large scale, as only they can.

“The only reason ChatGPT and other foundational models are so bad at bias and even fundamental facts is they are closed systems, and there is no opportunity for feedback,” says Dr. Dai. Big tech companies like Google have decades of practice at soliciting feedback to improve their algorithmically-generated results. Avenues for such feedback have, for example, long been a feature of both Google Search and Google Maps.

Dr. Dai says that one analogy for the future of trust in AI systems could be one of the least algorithmically-generated sites on the internet: Wikipedia. While the entirely human-written and human-edited encyclopedia isn’t as trustworthy as primary-source material, its users generally know that and find it useful anyway. Wikipedia shows that “social solutions” to problems like trust in the output of an algorithm—or trust in the output of human Wikipedia editors—are possible.

But the model of Wikipedia also shows that the kind of labor-intensive solutions for creating trustworthy AI—which companies like Meta and Google have already employed for years and at scale in their content moderation systems—are likely to entrench the power of existing big technology companies. Only they have not just the computing resources, but also the human resources, to deal with all the misleading, incomplete or biased information their AIs will be generating.

In other words, creating trust by moderating the content generated by AIs might not prove to be so different from creating trust by moderating the content generated by humans. And that is something the biggest technology companies have already shown is a difficult, time-consuming and resource-intensive task they can take on in a way that few other companies can.

The obvious and immediate utility of these new kinds of AIs, when integrated into a search engine or in their many other potential applications, is the reason for the current media, analyst and investor frenzy for AI. It’s clear that this could be a disruptive technology, resetting who is harvesting attention and where they’re directing it, threatening Google’s search monopoly and opening up new markets and new sources of revenue for Microsoft and others.

Based on the runaway success of the ChatGPT AI—perhaps the fastest service to reach 100 million users in history, according to a recent UBS report—it’s clear that being an aggressive first mover in this space could matter a great deal. It’s also clear that being a successful first-mover in this space will require the kinds of resources that only the biggest tech companies can muster.

Source: The AI Boom That Could Make Google and Microsoft Even More Powerful

Filed under Data, Other Tagged with , , , , ,

Wolfson and Castle: Ottawa’s new health funding is tied to better data. What will that really mean?

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Good data discussion on outputs vs outcome measures, with the latter harder to measure but more important:

The federal government has just offered the provinces and territories substantial new funding to address the obvious failings in Canada’s health care sector. They have also rightly coupled reform with major improvements in health data collection, including the need for new and better indicators to measure progress. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly said, “What gets measured gets done.”

But as with all data, the devil is in the details.

What exactly are health outcomes? Are they the same as health indicators? How will they be measured, and how can we ensure they are reported meaningfully and transparently for all Canadians? And most importantly: Will new health data meaningfully improve health care for Canadians?

In health care, for example, indicators can include the percentages of Canadians who have access to a family care team and the number of new family care practitioners; in fact, these are two of the indicators specified by the federal government. But while these are valuable, neither measures a health outcome. Instead, these indicators provide information on volume and accessibility for a key input in health care, namely primary care.

To the extent that these indicators can provide more detail – for example, by ethnicity or socioeconomic status, which should be essential lenses – they can shed light on important issues of equity and timeliness of health care. And as these indicators are tracked over time, they can provide a partial picture of whether health care is improving.

But health-outcome measures go beyond indicators, and require more detailed kinds of data.

A health outcome needs to consider a patient’s health status both before and after an intervention, such as a knee replacement or cataract surgery. It’s not just the waiting lists that matter; we also need to know how often a knee replacement has to be redone within a short period of time, or how frequently a cataract surgery fails to improve vision as much as anticipated.

Regularly measuring these kinds of health outcomes is fundamental to learning how well different parts of health care are performing, and whether we are receiving quality health care in the most cost-effective manner.

So how does this understanding of outcomes align with the federal government’s proposed “indicators” and data initiatives requirement? Short answer: we don’t know.

Provinces and territories have control over what health care data are routinely collected. For example, if we really want to know about health outcomes related to primary care, we first need to understand the various ways primary care is currently delivered – whether by solo fee-for-service doctors, or by teams, which include nurse practitioners as well as physicians who are remunerated by capitation, or some other model.

There is enough variety in primary care delivery across Canada that it should be possible to learn what works best by careful and probing comparisons across and within jurisdictions.

We then need to follow samples of individuals over time, to track which mode of primary care organization has patients with fewer illnesses, fewer hospitalizations and longer lives.

It is only with these kinds of longitudinal, person-level data that we’ll be able to produce evidence on which we can base valid indicators of health outcomes, and connect them to jurisdictions’ current and evolving ways of providing primary care to their residents.

Will the provinces collaborate, agree on standardized definitions and, with federal financial support, make the investments needed so these critical data become available? The federal government’s wording on this is ambiguous: “To access their share of the federal funding, including the guaranteed 5 per cent growth top-up payments to the CHT, for the next five years, provincial and territorial governments are asked to commit to improve how health information is collected, shared, used and reported to Canadians to promote greater transparency on results.”

Is this general statement merely cajoling, or is the federal government actually waving a serious fiscal stick? That will ultimately dictate the data outcome, because past decades of federal initiatives have repeatedly shown that if Ottawa fails to wield meaningful fiscal penalties, the momentum on serious health care reform is bound to face disappointment.

Michael Wolfson is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada and an adjunct professor in the faculties of medicine and law at the University of Ottawa. David Castle is professor of public administration at the University of Victoria. They both served on the Expert Advisory Group of the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy convened by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Source: Ottawa’s new health funding is tied to better data. What will that really mean?

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Asylum seekers using well-organized system for crossing irregularly into Canada

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Have to admire the entrepreneurial spirit of those helping irregular arrivals:

Moments after a Greyhound bus from New York City pulls into a gas station bus stop in Plattsburgh, N.Y., Friday at 5:25 a.m., several minivan taxis swarm the vehicle.

About a dozen passengers descend from the bus — mostly single men, but also several couples and a family with three young daughters. They are greeted by four pushy taxi drivers.

The drivers begin to shout: “Frontera!” — the Spanish word for border — “Roxham Road! 60 dollars! Come! Come!”

As the passengers unload luggage from under the bus, the taxi drivers are relentless, beckoning them into their cars for the 30-minute drive to Roxham Road, the wooded route into Canada that has become an unofficial border crossing for tens of thousands of asylum seekers over the past several years.

Most of the bus passengers approached by The Canadian Press refused to talk; some shielded their faces. Many weren’t dressed for winter: they wore T-shirts, thin jackets, sneakers. One couple, however, were prepared, wearing warm winter jackets, tuques, gloves and boots.

One single man hopped into a cab. Asked where he was from, he said, “Haiti.”

Anxiously waiting for the taxi to depart, the man said his bus ticket was “purchased by a friend.”

Last week, reports said officials from New York City were providing free bus tickets to migrants heading north to claim asylum in Canada. New York City Mayor Eric Adams told Fox 5 his administration helps in the “re-ticketing process” for people who arrive in the city but want to go elsewhere.

In December, a total of 4,689 migrants entered the country through Quebec’s Roxham Road — more than all would-be refugees who arrived in Canada in 2021. Crossing the irregular border allows them to take advantage of a loophole in a deal between the United States and Canada.

The Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement requires that asylum seekers make a refugee claim in the first “safe” country they reach. In practice, it means that border officials in Canada turn back would-be asylum seekers who show up at official checkpoints from the U.S. But they are not required to turn back asylum seekers who cross irregularly at places such as Roxham Road.

On average, about 100 migrants arrive daily at the Greyhound bus stop on their way to Roxham Road, according to Chad Provost, who runs his own shuttle service for migrants. On his business card is written “Roxham Road Border,” his WhatsApp number, and “24 hour service to and from the Canadian border. Asylum seekers and refugee safe transportation.”

Provost, standing at the bus station outside his minivan with three passengers inside, said he sometimes provides asylum seekers with free rides.

“A lot of them come from mess-up places. A lot of them just want a better life,” Provost said.

“There are some people I have driven for free. A lot of them don’t have any money. Some of these other drivers will just leave them here to freeze …. The gas station is closed at night.”

He says he doesn’t need to wrestle with the other taxi drivers to fill up his van — he gets his customers through word of mouth.

“My customers call me in advance to set up pickups from the bus stop to Roxham Road.”

For months, Quebec has been calling for the federal government — which controls Canada’s borders — to stop the flow or migrants, or at least ensure they are more equally distributed across the country after they arrive. The vast majority of people who enter irregularly into Canada cross into Quebec, putting a strain on the province’s social services.

The opposition Parti Québécois, meanwhile, has called for the provincial police to shut down Roxham Road entirely — but the party hasn’t said what it thinks should be done if asylum seekers choose another of the many forested routes into the country.

The province recently announced $3.5 million in aid for community organizations that have been struggling to provide food, clothing and housing for rising numbers of asylum seekers.

On Thursday evening, along the muddy trail leading up the border, a sign says “road closed.” A second sign a few metres away says, “Stop” in French. To the left, blue barrels act as pillars at the front of a makeshift entryway where asylum seekers line up and are met by RCMP agents.

One of those migrants is David Jesus Binto, 17, who arrived to Roxham Road in a taxi with another young man. Jesus Binto, wearing sneakers, jeans and an old-looking windbreaker over a T-shirt, says he and his friend are from Venezuela.

“We heard about (Roxham Road) through word of mouth. We left Venezuela for economic reasons,” he said in Spanish.

When asked if he had acquired the bus tickets for free, he replied that they had purchased the tickets themselves.

RCMP agents tell the migrants that if they cross the blue bins into Canada, they will be placed under arrest.

Jesus Binto, his friend and several others walk in single file toward the agents and into Canada.

Source: Asylum seekers using well-organized system for crossing irregularly into Canada

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Lynch and Mitchell: Instead of adding new programs, Ottawa should focus on proper delivery of the ones it has

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Likely a perennial refrain among officials having to respond to political-level demands but valid nevertheless as capacity limits of the public service in areas such as passports, immigration and others have become painfully apparent post-pandemic.

Of course, one of the ironies of former DMs and ADMs raising these issues is that the vast majority rose up through the policy ranks, helping governments introduce new programs, rather than in service or delivery!

And one should not underestimate the difficulty of briefing the political level against a particular initiative or program based on service delivery grounds:

Most Canadians expect value for money in their spending, especially in these uncertain and inflationary times. With worker shortages, empty offices, supply chain woes, high energy prices, soaring inflation and painful accommodation costs, Canadian consumers are worried about their financial health.

But what about governments? Are they delivering value for Canadians’ hard-earned tax dollars? For anyone seeking a passport or visa, lining up for airport security screening, trying to get a Nexus card, waiting for a routine medical procedure or watching government procurement systems that cannot deliver payroll, the answer is unambiguously negative.

Core government services are not being delivered well today, and this not only erodes confidence in government as an institution – it also undermines productivity and competitiveness in the Canadian economy.

What are the causes? While there is no single answer, it is clearly not due to a shortage of spending, public servants, consultants or debt. At the federal level from 2015 to 2022, the size of the public service grew by 30 per cent, the use of consultants shot up 40 per cent, government spending skyrocketed by 66 per cent and government debt almost doubled. In short, the size of government expanded, considerably, while the efficiency of government declined, noticeably – not a good combination.

In fact, the stratospheric and scattered spending is one root cause of the delivery problem.

Before, during and since the pandemic, the federal government has unleashed a vast array of new programs. New program delivery is complex and time-consuming work, requiring highly capable, experienced and empowered public servants. Indeed, “delivery” is the nuts and bolts of policy implementation and program operations – it encompasses the design of new programs, the stress testing of the design to avoid unintended consequences, ensuring robust IT and data systems to support the program, the hiring and training of staff, establishing quality control and compliance systems, and communicating to the intended beneficiaries how the program works.

There is a risk of moral hazard here – as governments try to do more and more, they may end up achieving less and less. The problem arises from the scale, scope and speed of new spending. Too many new programs, with too little prioritization, that are too quickly rushed to the “press release stage” is a recipe for delivery problems, not only of the new programs but also related existing programs on common platforms.

Today’s reality of government not being particularly good at actually delivering things – both core services and new programs – should be a matter of concern well beyond the Ottawa bubble. If you believe what government does matters to Canadian society and the economy, as we do, then less-than-stellar delivery of government services neither serves the public interest nor bolsters the public’s trust in our institutions of government.

What can be done? Like any complex problem, there is no single solution, but four possible actions deserve serious consideration.

First, pause the proliferation of new spending and new programs. This is needed to restore operational integrity and program delivery capacity as well as to support fiscal sustainability in a period of high inflation, high interest rates and high debt. And yet, the risk today is a proliferation of new government programs and the scaling up of existing ones ranging from new industrial policies to new energy transition programs, national dental care and pharmacare, new health transfers, increases in defence spending and expanded immigration. Whatever the policy merits of these proposed initiatives, this is simply not the time to expand government. Rather, it’s the time to refocus on meeting the expectations of Canadians for quality and timely delivery of government services.

Second, reverse the extreme centralization of decision-making within government. This is necessary for better governance as well as better program delivery. Too much decision making has been vested in the Prime Minister’s Office at the expense of ministers, cabinet and Parliament. Ministerial accountability and collective decision making, with fearless advice from an empowered, non-partisan public service, are central to our Westminster system of government. The sad fact is we have strayed far from that guiding ideal.

Third, modernize the architecture of compliance and oversight within government. This requires a profound shift from an operating culture of control and risk avoidance to one of innovation, risk taking and delegation. In the name of protecting the taxpayer, there is a compliance morass pervading government today, with overlapping oversight bodies, excessive red tape and needless reporting – all of which impedes getting things done and delivered.

Fourth, invest in the public service. This is not a call for a larger public service but a better equipped one. The public service needs the IT and data systems that allowed the banks to develop online banking and companies like Amazon to revolutionize delivery. It needs the skill sets for a digital world not an analog one, and should engage consultants as the exception not the rule. The public service should be an exciting place to work, empowering public servants to make a difference and attracting the best and brightest – and public servants are up to the challenge.

Better service delivery is in everyone’s interest. These changes would result in a higher-performing, more productive public sector. That should be part of Canada’s competitive advantage in a challenging world.

Kevin Lynch was clerk of the Privy Council and vice-chair of BMO. Jim Mitchell is an adjunct professor at Carleton University and a former assistant secretary to the cabinet.

Source: Instead of adding new programs, Ottawa should focus on proper delivery of the ones it has

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Crackdown on ‘birth tourism’ as pregnant Russians flock to Argentina

2023/02/13 Leave a comment

Of note. Sharp contrast to the pre-pandemic and pre-invasion of Ukraine preference of oligarchs and ultra-rich Russians for Miami as these women appear to have limited financial resources. Given Canadian visa requirements, does not appear to be any surge in Canada although there are some lawyers who in the past had marketed their services to Russian birth tourists:

Immigration authorities in Argentina are cracking down on Russian women who since the invasion of Ukraine have started travelling to Buenos Aires to give birth in order to gain Argentinian citizenship for their children.

The director of Argentina’s immigration office, Florencia Carignano, said on Friday that a judicial investigation has been launched into what she described as a lucrative business that promises Argentinian passports for the Russian parents.

Carignano spoke after 33 expecting women – all between 32 and 34 weeks into their pregnancies – arrived on the same flight late on Thursday. Several of the women were initially turned away at passport control but were eventually let into the country.

While the concept of birth tourism isn’t new, Moscow’s isolation from the west as a result of the war has made Argentina, where Russians face no visa requirements, a popular destination for families looking to give their children the privileges of second citizenship.

Some 10,500 pregnant Russians have arrived in the South American country in the past year, Carignano said.

Carignano said in a Telenueve channel interview on Friday that “5,800 of them [were] in the last three months, many of them declaring they were in the 33rd or 34th week of pregnancy.”

The official said that about 7,000 of the women returned home after giving birth, leaving Argentinian lawyers charged with applying for Argentinian citizenship for the baby – and then the parents.

“The problem is that they arrive, have their children and then leave Argentina never to come back,” Carignano said. “We cannot allow them to shamelessly lie to us saying that they are tourists when they are not.”

Source: Crackdown on ‘birth tourism’ as pregnant Russians flock to Argentina

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

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