Patrick Luciani: You don’t have to be a conservative to be anti-woke

2023/06/05 Leave a comment

Provocative but needed reminder of the importance of class, rather than just identity and intersectionality. My experience with analysing and discussing birth tourism indicates that many academics and activists have forgotten the importance of class with respect to birth tourists who are among the more affluent given the travel, medical and related costs of being a birth tourist:

When philosopher Susan Neiman decided to write Left Is Not Woke, friends warned her to avoid the word “Woke” in the title. They were concerned it might be taken as a move to the political Right and push her into the camp of Ron DeSantis, Rishi Sunak, or even Eric Zemmour in France. I suspect they were more worried that any attack on wokeness might mean banishment or cancellation by a political movement with all the characteristics of a religious cult. Neiman agonized over the title but stressed in the book that she was still a card-carrying socialist with all the proper credentials. But even that would not have spared her grief and ostracization if she were teaching at a North American university. She is safe for the time being teaching in Germany. 

Most attacks on woke ideology usually come from the defenders of classical liberalism, such as Francis Fukuyama, who stresses free speech, the evils of cancel culture, and policies that relentlessly push the trinity of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity. Professor Neiman now confronts wokeness from the Left and how it has broken with traditional socialist ideals of universality, justice, and progress. Neiman isn’t willing to accept the suggestion that you aren’t Left if you’re not woke.

Her first concern is that wokeism has gone off the rails by abandoning the universal principle of worker solidarity. That concept was too general for today’s politically sensitive crowd. Wokeness pushed the idea that unfair treatment of minorities and the powerless had to be fought at the micro level of society. Throw in the concept of intersectionality and political oppression is now supercharged. It is no longer a question of traditional domination of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. The hierarchy of power dynamics now includes men oppressing women, straight over gays, Whites dominating Blacks, White women over women of colour, the abled over disabled people, ad infinitum. A few years ago, American Black students at Cornell University demanded preferential treatment over foreign Black students since the latter represented a higher proportion of spots on campus. Any group or tribe can claim a special status regarding policies on compensation for past discrimination and grievances. The only groups that don’t qualify in this hierarchy of oppression are Jews, Asians, and rich men who are White. 

Woke thinking compartmentalizes groups according to their identity rather than class oppression. Wokism breaks this connection by moving us into tribes disconnected from each other. And since everyone can claim membership to one group or another, most can claim victimhood. 

Second, Neiman condemns woke attacks on enlightenment thinking. The Enlightenment wasn’t a Eurocentric invention of White men to oppress and justify the subjugation of other nations but a way to use reason to move away from religious and superstitious beliefs that held humans from their full potential. Enlightenment thinkers were some of the harshest critics of colonialism and slavery, including Rousseau, Diderot, and Immanuel Kant. Kant’s teaching was universal when he said that humans should never be treated as a means to an end. The Black scholar Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò—no apologist for the Enlightenment—insists we put Enlightenment ideas in their proper historical context. As he says, ideas must be historicized, not racialized. He even refers to the prominent anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon, who wrote, “The elements for the solution to the major problems of humanity existed at one time, or another in European thought.”

Her final objection to wokeism is the movement’s influence by the work of Michel Foucault and his concepts of power, progress, and truth. Foucault, considered the godfather of wokeism, promoted that power is the defining force between all human interactions and that truth is a naïve conviction of no value. Foucault had a profound contempt for reason and the notion that there was any improvement or progress in social interactions, an idea contrary to socialist thought. Even Noam Chomsky believed that Foucault was thoroughly amoral in his thinking. That isn’t hard to believe, knowing that Foucault endorsed sex between children and adults. For the Left, reason and freedom would liberate humans from superstition, prejudice, poverty, and fear. Foucault had no such faith. 

Professor Neiman has written a brave book against a philosophy cutting through our cultural institutions. And she is right in her criticism. Finding a government, university, or major corporation that doesn’t follow a hiring policy dictated by woke protocol is almost impossible.  

Liberalism was about centring the individual with freedom in personal affairs and commerce. Socialism added rights and entitlement to housing, education, health care, and a decent wage. Wokeness is about victims and victimhood with claims on society’s resources for past and present injustices. Who determines the injustices and compensation? Those are questions we aren’t allowed to ask. But the pushback is out there, and not just from Florida. 

Source: Patrick Luciani: You don’t have to be a conservative to be anti-woke

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

How AI is helping Canada keep some people out of the country. And why there are those who say it’s a problem

2023/06/05 Leave a comment

Well, that’s what filtering, whether human or AI-based does. With high levels, AI needed to maintain applicant service. Yes, more transparency and accountability needed, but this applies to both human and artificial intelligence and decision-making:

Artificial intelligence is helping authorities keep some people out of Canada.

“Project Quantum,” as it’s been dubbed, is a largely unknown AI-assisted pilot project that’s been undertaken by the Canada Border Services Agency.

It essentially screens air travellers before they take off for Canada. In thousands of cases in recent years, it has led the CBSA to recommend a traveller be stopped before even getting on their flight.

Authorities say the program is meant to flag people who could be a threat to this country.

But just who the government is stopping at international airports — and the criteria used to select them — isn’t clear. That has led critics to question how we know the AI-assisted program is targeting the right people, and that discrimination isn’t somehow baked into its process.

Language on the CBSA’s website also says the program is meant to address the issue of irregular migration. Some are concerned it’s having the effect of making asylum — already restricted under Canada’s Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S.— even harder to gain in this country.

Officials say the pre-departure risk-assessment matches passengers’ personal information from commercial air carriers with pre-established indicators of risk identification models that are designed by border officials.

The risk identification models have been developed, they say, based on passenger information sent from commercial carriers to CBSA.

Between its inception in 2019 and the end of last year, Project Quantum referred 13,863 travellers to its overseas liaison officers for further assessments. In total, CBSA recommended to air carriers that they refuse boarding 6,182 travellers on flights to Canada.

The program comes against the backdrop of increasing constraints on irregular migration to Canada. Earlier this year, Ottawa and Washington expanded a bilateral agreement to deny foreign nationals access to asylum across the entire Canada-U.S. border — not just at the official ports of entry. As a result, the number of irregular migrants to Canada has plummeted.

Given Canada’s unique geography and how it is buffered by the U.S., the new interdiction tool against air travellers further limits asylum seekers’ options.

“The objective of this strategy is to push the border out as far as possible, ideally outside of Canada, to where a person lives,” contends University of New Brunswick law professor Benjamin Perryman, who represents two Hungarian Roma families in fighting the CBSA cancellation of their electronic travel authorizations.

“This new technology comes with substantial risks of human rights violations. We’ve seen that in other areas. When we don’t have transparency and oversight in place, it raises some pretty big concerns.”

The CBSA, established in 2003 as the immigration enforcement arm, is the only public safety department without an outside civilian oversight body, despite the border officers’ power to carry firearms, arrest and detain — authorities similar to those of police officers.

Since being elected in 2015, the Liberal government has promised to establish a watchdog for the CBSA, but a bill has yet to be passed to set up such an infrastructure for accountability.

In an email to the Star, CBSA spokesperson Jacqueline Roby said the pilot program seeks to “detect illicit migration concerns” for air travellers at the earliest point.

“It is a targeting approach, i.e. an operational practice, that supports and guides the CBSA officers to identify high-risk and potential illegal activity,” Roby explained.

Those activities, she added, include terrorism or terror-related crimes, human-smuggling or trafficking and other serious transnational crimes.

However, advocates are concerned that the risk indicators of these models could be rife with unintended biases and that they are being used to detect and interdict undesirable travellers, including prospective asylum seekers in search of protection in Canada.

‘Based on quantum referral’

Gabor Lukacs, founder and president of Air Passenger Rights, an advocacy group for travellers, says there’s been very little public information about the pilot program. He only came across Project Quantum through a recent court case involving two Roma travellers who were refused boarding an Air Transat flight in London.

Immigration documents showed the couple were flagged “based on quantum referral.”

The two were to visit a family member in Canada, who arrived previously and sought asylum and who is now a permanent resident. Both travellers had their valid electronic travel authorization — an entry requirement for visa-exempt visitors — cancelled as a result.

The case raises questions, in Lukacs view, of whether an ethnic name, such as the Roma’s, or information about connections to a former refugee in Canada, were among the indicators used by the program to flag passengers. The CBSA declined to answer questions about these concerns, saying to do so could compromise the program’s integrity.

“The problem with AI is it has very high potential of unintended racial and ethnic biases. It’s far from clear to me if there’s a proper distinction in the training of this software between refugee claimants and criminals,” he noted.

Lukacs’s concern is partly based on a written presentation in 2017 by the immigration department about the application of advanced and predictive analytics to identify patterns that enable prediction of future behaviours, and how combinations of applicant characteristics correlate with application approvals, refusals and frauds.

“In the future, we aim to predict undesirable behaviours (e.g. criminality or refugee claims),” said the document released in response to an access-to-information request by Perryman.

The border agency would not say whether potential refugees are flagged, but it said Project Quantum is part of its National Targeting Program, which identifies people and goods bound for Canada that may pose a threat to the country’s security and safety.

Assisted by human intelligence, it uses automated advance information sources from carriers and importers to identify those risks.

The number of quantum referrals for assessments has grown with the number of “flights” tested with the modelling — from 18 in 2019 to 32 by February 2022. The border agency would not say if the “flight” refers to route or participating air carrier, but said the pilot project is “ongoing.”

The National Targeting Centre will alert the relevant CBSA liaison officer abroad to assess the referral if a traveller matches the criteria set out in the risk identification models. The officer, if warranted, engages with the air carrier and/or traveller before making a “board” or “no-board” recommendation.

Opened in Ottawa 2012, the targeting centre, among other responsibilities, runs the liaison officer network, which started with more than 60 officers in 40 countries.

Roby declined to reveal how the flights or routes were selected, in what regions the modelling assessment was deployed or what indicators travellers were measured against, saying that “would compromise the integrity of the program.”

Critics call the lack of information and transparency troubling, given the complaints of alleged ethnic profiling against CBSA in recent years, including an ongoing court case by a Hungarian couple, who were denied boarding to visit family members who were former refugees.

“If CBSA considers association with refugees an indicator of the person allegedly intending to do something nefarious like overstaying or worse, that’s in and of itself a problem,” said Lukacs.

“The bigger issue is what data sets and indicators have been used for teaching and training the algorithms to decide who to flag.”

Roby of the CBSA says the agency takes these concerns seriously in developing a new targeting tool to ensure compliance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“The Agency works to eliminate any systemic racism or unconscious bias in its operations, its work and policies, which includes addressing instances where racialized Canadians and newcomers have faced additional barriers, and ensuring that minority communities are not subject to unfair treatment,” she said.

Officials must follow strict guidelines to protect the privacy of passengers and crew members and the data is stored in a secure system accessible only by authorized personnel, she added. The use of this data is subject to an audit process and users are liable for any misuse.

However, Project Quantum is not governed by the federal oversight required under the directive on automated decision-making.

The Treasury Board’s “Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) would not apply here. The CBSA relies on the knowledge, training, expertise, and experience of border officers to make the final determination on what or who should be targeted,” Roby explained in an email.

“The CBSA provides advice to an air carrier, however, it is then up to the air carrier to decide whether or not to follow the recommendation.”

The initiative also raises legal questions about Canadian officials’ authority to engage in extraterritorial enforcement and their compliance with the Charter of Rights and international human rights law, said Perryman.

Perryman said he’s open to claims by law enforcement that certain aspects of the CBSA investigation techniques need to be kept confidential to be effective but said there needs to be sufficient transparency and oversight.

“This claim of racial profiling as a legitimate technique is something that we’ve seen police rely on initially in Canada. And when the full spectrum of that racial profiling became public, we decided as a society that it was not a legitimate law enforcement tool,” he said.

“We’ve taken steps to end that type of racial profiling domestically. I’m not completely hostile to that argument, but I think it’s one that has to be approached with some degree of scrutiny and care.”

The border agency said travellers who are refused boarding may file a complaint in writing using the CBSA web form or by mail to its recourse directorate.

Source: How AI is helping Canada keep some people out of the country. And why there are those who say it’s a problem

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

New Canadian babies born via birth tourism less than one per cent of all births

2023/06/05 Leave a comment

More on birth tourism based upon the Alberta study, Canadian doctors say birth tourism is on the rise. It could hurt the health care system, with data from Guelph (not a centre).

Reference to Richmond only refers to 2022, rather than pre-pandemic years when Richmond General was the epicentre of birth tourism in Canada, with almost one-quarter being birth tourism, supported by a cottage industry of birth tourism hostels:

“Birth tourists being specifically people who are coming in specifically to have a birth then go back to their original country,” said Colin Birch, a Calgary obstetrician gynecologist.

They probably come to give birth for the advantage of birthright citizenship for future gains whether it be for themselves or their family, said Birch. “There are still immense advantages of living in a place like Canada,” he said.

“Is it a big problem? Well if you look at the numbers, absolutely not. It’s small.”

“Is it big enough to be a problem? I actually think it is,” he said.

FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Birth Tourism: Rhetoric Ahead of Evidence [my opinion has changed since writing this in 2014]

Reason being Canada is in a healthcare crunch, “every bed is sacred,” said Birch.

As a healthcare system we are suffering from a capacity point of view and the expectation is to do more with less, he said.

“Canada is not really set up because of its socialized healthcare system for private pay patients and the demands that come with private pay patients,” said Birch.

The expectations from paying patients to patients covered by provincial health care are different.

“Not saying their care is different. Care is care,” he said. 

Health care is expensive and when it comes to neonatal care it is astronomical if a baby needs to be in the ICU, he said. 

The unpaid bills of the hospitals are massive, he said.

Calgary has taken a different approach to hospital bills associated with birth tourism. Birch confirmed the Calgary system requires a $15,000 deposit.

“It’s a very honest and upfront system,” said Birch. “It doesn’t pay the hospital fees no. It’s a deposit which pays basically physician fees.”

From the deposit what doesn’t get spent goes back to the patient, he said.

“We wanted to discourage the practice because it was becoming a bigger burden in Calgary,” said Birch. “The potential problem with that is the patients will then start moving to practitioners who are outside the city limits.”

It isn’t a perfect process but it’s an attempt to implement some sort of order, he said.

Prior to the deposit process birth tourism had impacts on the capacity of the hospital and ability at times to care for Canadian patients, he said.

Canada and the U.S. are the only countries in the G7 to offer birthright citizenship according to canadianimmigrationexperts.ca.

“What we need to debunk is the idea that all people who are not insured are not necessarily birth tourists,” said Birch.

“There’s a large undocumented population in the country,” he said. They are contributing members of society but are not documented, Birch said.

He wanted to make it clear undocumented folks who are uninsured are not birth tourists.

Birth tourism is not just a medical issue but a social issue that should be addressed, he said.

In the fiscal year of 2021 to 2022 Guelph General Hospital had a total of 1,707 deliveries, 11 were people from out of country. This breaks down to 0.6 per cent of deliveries were out of country.

Between April 2022 to February 2023 there were 1,543 deliveries and 18 were people from out of country who gave birth at the GGH. This is 1.2 per cent of the deliveries were out of country. 

At the other end of Canada in Vancouver much of the same occurred at Richmond Hospital, in 2022 there were 22 nonresident deliveries. This number accounts for 1.5 per cent of the total deliveries at the hospital.

“All maternity patients coming to Richmond get the care they require to deliver their child safely. Care is always triaged according to the safety of the mother and baby – it is never delayed based on residency,” stated in an email from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH).

VCH also said it does not support marketing of maternity tourism. Births from nonresidents have not led to disruptions of maternity services, said in the email.

“VCH will never deny urgent and emergent care based on ability to pay or where a patient is from, but we do expect to be compensated as we are accountable to B.C. residents for hospital and health care services. We are committed to collecting compensation from non-residents who use our medical services,” said in the email.

Source: New Canadian babies born via birth tourism less than one per cent of all births

Filed under Birth Tourism, Citizenship Tagged with

Australia: Federal multicultural review to examine diversity in the public service

2023/06/05 Leave a comment

Header focus more narrow than actual review:

The federal government will examine the effectiveness of federal diversity, equity and inclusion strategies in the public service, as part of a multicultural framework review announced on Friday night.

The review will, more broadly, look at whether existing Commonwealth institutional arrangements and policy settings support an inclusive multicultural society, and make recommendations.

Australian Multicultural Foundation executive director and company secretary Dr Bulent Hass Dellal AO will serve as chair.

Speaking at the launch event in Sydney, Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Andrew Giles said the review was about “enhancing the capacity of government agencies and service providers to respond to the needs of our multicultural communities”.

Mr Giles said that work had already begun in the Department of Home Affairs to better respond to the needs of multicultural communities, noting that the Multicultural Affairs team had moved from the Countering Foreign Interference division and into the Immigration section.

“The change, though it may seem bureaucratic to some, is symbolic of the role of Multicultural Affairs under an Albanese Labor Government,” he said.

“A portfolio that, at its core, should be about embracing those who have settled in Australia, rather than focusing on who we want to keep out.”

Human rights advocate and former refugee Nyadol Nyuon OAM and Multicultural Australia chief executive officer Christine Castley will also co-author the review.

Panellist Ms Castley said she looked forward to taking part in the review, which falls 50 years after the first multiculturalism policy paper was published under the Whitlam government.

“I am genuinely excited to be a part in this once-in-a-generation opportunity to take an open and honest look at how we ensure genuine inclusion, tackle systemic barriers and engage in the robust conversations we need to have if we are to move forward as a stronger, better, fairer and more inclusive nation,” Ms Castley said.

The panel will be supported by a reference group, which includes former Australian rules footballer Bachar Houli, Multicultural Youth Advocacy national manager Rana Ebrahimi, and Tasmania Australian of the Year John Kamara.

Mr Giles accused the former Coalition government of promoting “fearmongering and division surrounding multicultural Australians”, and said the review was a “concrete step towards an inclusive country”.

“Under their watch, a fragmented and inconsistent approach to engaging with CALD communities saw failures to translate vital health information during the pandemic, and government support and grant programs inaccessible to emerging migrant groups,” he said, in a statement leading up to the review’s launch.

The review is due to deliver its final report with recommendations to the minister by March 2024.

Source: Federal multicultural review to examine diversity in the public service

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The Economist: A new wave of mass migration has begun

2023/06/05 Leave a comment

In contrast to their earlier long-term prognosis (with a shout-out to Newfoundland and Labrador):

Last year 1.2m people moved to Britain—almost certainly the most ever. Net migration (ie, immigrants minus emigrants) to Australia is twice the rate before covid-19. Spain’s equivalent figure recently hit an all-time high. Nearly 1.4m people on net are expected to move to America this year, one-third more than before the pandemic. In 2022 net migration to Canada was more than double the previous record and in Germany it was even higher than during the “migration crisis” of 2015. Listen to this story.

The rich world is in the middle of an immigration boom, with its foreign-born population rising faster than at any point in history (see chart 1). What does this mean for the global economy? 

Not long ago it seemed as if many wealthy countries had turned decisively against mass migration. In 2016 Britons voted for Brexit and then Americans for Donald Trump, political projects with strong anti-migrant streaks. In the global wave of populism that followed, politicians from Australia to Hungary promised to crack down on migration. Then covid closed borders. Migration came to a standstill, or even went into reverse, as people decided to return home. Between 2019 and 2021 the populations of Kuwait and Singapore, countries that typically receive lots of migrants, fell by 4%. In 2021 the number of emigrants from Australia exceeded the number of immigrants to the country for the first time since the 1940s.

The surge in migration has brought back a sense of normality to some places. Singapore’s foreign workforce recently returned to its pre-pandemic level. In other places it feels like a drastic change. Consider Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s second-smallest province by population. Long home to people of Irish-Catholic descent—with accents to match—net migration to the province is running at more than 20 times the pre-pandemic norm. St John’s, the capital, feels more like Toronto every time you visit. Heart’s Delight, a small rural settlement, now has a Ukrainian bakery, Borsch. The provincial government is setting up an office in Bangalore to help recruit nurses. 

The new arrivals in Newfoundland are a microcosm of those elsewhere in the rich world. Many hundreds of Ukrainians have arrived on the island—a tiny share of the millions who have left the country since Russia invaded. Indians and Nigerians also appear to be on the move in large numbers. Many speak English. And many already have family connections in richer countries, in particular Britain and Canada. 

Some of the surge in migration is because people are making up for lost time. Many migrants acquired visas in 2020 or 2021, but only made the trip once covid restrictions loosened. Yet the rich world’s foreign-born population—at well over 100m—is now above its pre-crisis trend, suggesting something else is going on. 

The nature of the post-pandemic economy is a big part of the explanation. Unemployment in the rich world, at 4.8%, has not been so low in decades. Bosses are desperate for staff, with vacancies near an all-time high. People from abroad thus have good reason to travel. Currency movements may be another factor. A British pound buys more than 100 Indian rupees, compared with 90 in 2019. Since the beginning of 2021 the average emerging-market currency has depreciated by about 4% against the dollar. This enables migrants to send more money home than before. 

Many governments are also trying to attract more people. Canada has a target to welcome 1.5m new residents in 2023-25. Germany and India recently signed an agreement to allow more Indians to work and study in Germany. Australia is increasing the time period some students can work for after graduating from two to four years. Britain has welcomed Hong Kongers fleeing Chinese oppression—well over 100,000 have arrived. Many countries have made it easy for Ukrainians to enter. Even those countries hitherto hostile to migration, including Japan and South Korea, are now looking more favourably on outsiders as they seek to counteract the impact of ageing populations.

Economies that welcome lots of migrants tend to benefit in the long run. Just look at America. Foreign folk bring new ideas with them. In America immigrants are about 80% likelier than native-born folk to found a firm, according to a recent paper by Pierre Azoulay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues. Research suggests that migrants help to build trading and investment links between their home country and the receiving one. A slug of young workers also helps generate more tax revenue. 

Some economists hope that the wave of migration will have more immediate benefits. “High immigration is helpful for the Fed as it tries to cool down the labour market and slow down inflation,” says Torsten Slok of Apollo Global Management, an asset manager, expressing a common view. Such arguments may be a little too optimistic. Having more people does increase the supply of labour, which, all else being equal, reduces wage growth. But the effect is pretty small. There is little sign that the countries receiving the most migrants have the loosest labour markets. In Canada, for instance, pay is still rising by about 5% year on year (see chart 2). 

Your people shall be my people

Migrants also lift demand for goods and services, which can raise inflation. In Britain new arrivals appear to be pushing up rents in London, which already had a constrained supply of housing. A similar effect is apparent in Australia. Estimates by Goldman Sachs, a bank, imply that Australia’s current annualised net migration rate of 500,000 people is raising rents by around 5%. Higher rents feed into a higher overall consumer-price index. Demand from migrants may also explain why, despite higher mortgage rates, house prices in many rich countries have not fallen by much. 

Over the next year or so migration may come down a bit. The post-pandemic “catch-up” will end; rich-world labour markets are slowly loosening. In the very long term, a global slump in fertility rates means there may be a shortage of migrants. Yet there is reason to believe that high levels of new arrivals will remain raised for some time. More welcoming government policy is one factor. And migration today begets migration tomorrow, as new arrivals bring over children and partners. Before long the rich world’s anti-immigrant turn of the late 2010s will seem like an aberration. 

Source: A new wave of mass migration has begun

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Globe editorial: Canada’s much-touted labour shortage is mostly a mirage

2023/06/03 Leave a comment

Good to see some serious (and belated) questioning by the Globe. Unlikely that the government will change its approach of appeasing business and other interests rather than focussing on medium- and longer-term impacts on productivity:

No one takes orders at the Burger King in the rest stop off of Ontario’s Highway 401 near Port Hope. Instead, there’s a large touch screen that customers use to select and pay for their Whoppers and fries.

…

Source: Canada’s much-touted labour shortage is mostly a mirage

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

FIRST READING: Canada’s massive (and easily fixed) birth tourism problem

2023/06/03 Leave a comment

Second article in the National Post in a week. Hopper forgot to mention that the Conservative government did make a push to end birth tourism in 2012 (see my What the previous government learned about birth tourism):

Last week, Macleans’ published an interview with Simrit Brar, a Calgary OB-GYN who is one of Canada’s few medical researchers to actually look into the issue of birth tourism.

It’s something that’s long been an accepted fact within Canadian birthing hospitals: Hundreds of non-resident women each year are coming to Canada in the final weeks of pregnancy, having their baby in a Canadian hospital and then immediately returning home. The purpose of the excursion being to ensure that the child has Canadian citizenship by virtue of the country’s jus soli laws.

There are companies openly advertising their services as “birth hotels.” Online forums include questions as to the “cheapest” Canadian hospital for a non-resident to give birth. In the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic, a single hospital in Richmond, B.C. had 502 non-resident births — nearly one quarter of total babies born.

Figures from the Canadian Institute for Health Information show that Canada hosted a record 4,400 foreign births in 2019 — up from 1,354 just nine years prior.

Vancouver’s first baby of 2023, in fact, was born to a birth tourist: Mother Salma Gasser had only recently arrived from Cairo, Egypt, on her first-ever trip to Canada, and told local reporters she did it to secure a Canadian passport for her baby girl.

There’s nothing illegal about birth tourism and birth tourists are all paying handsomely for the service (it costs between $6,000 and $10,000 for an uninsured non-resident to give birth at a Canadian hospital). But for a Canadian health-care system that is constantly on the verge of crisis, the phenomenon is having an impact.

In a two-tier system like Australia, the U.K. or the U.S., an influx of non-residents seeking health-care beds could safely exist on the sidelines without affecting overall health-care access: The system could simply grow organically to accommodate the increased demand.

But Canada rations its supply of doctors and health-care workers, meaning that any extra patient is going to be adding to wait times.

“So even if a birth tourist does pay their bill, if we allow people who have the opportunity to pay to preferentially access beds … that displaces people here,” Brar told Maclean’s.

She added that birth tourism is a “social structure issue.” Ultimately, wealthy people from abroad are able to supplant scarce Canadian health-care resources, with negative results for “disadvantaged” Canadians.

“The system is too strained for us to ignore these questions,” she said.

Brar’s research examined 102 cases of birth tourists who had their babies in Calgary between July 2019 and November 2020. A plurality (24.5 per cent) were Nigerian and all told, the 102 paid $694,000 to Alberta Health Services in hospital fees.

Notably, most of Canada’s birth tourists are coming from countries that do not offer birthright citizenship. Almost all of North and South America grants automatic citizenship based on birthplace — a principle known as “jus soli,” or “right of the soil.”

In most of the rest of the world, citizenship is determined based on the nationality of one’s parents — known as “jus sanguinis,” or “right of the blood.” If a visiting tourist gave birth in Nigeria, for instance, that child would not be considered Nigerian unless they had a Nigerian parent or grandparent.

It would be remarkably easy for Canada to ban birth tourism, or at least make it less easy.

Provincial health-care systems could dramatically raise fees on “other country” birth services in order to discourage patients not insured under the Canadian system.

Some minor tweaks to the Citizenship Act could nullify instant citizenship if a baby is born to a parent temporarily visiting Canada on a tourist visa.

Refugees, asylum-seekers and other newcomers would still have guaranteed full, automatic citizenship for their Canadian-born children.

Or, Canada could simply begin denying visas to foreign nationals booking short trips to Canada at the tail end of a pregnancy. This is what the United States did in order to curb its own rising rates of birth tourism.

In early 2020, the U.S. Department of State issued an order to deny certain classes of recreational visas to foreign nationals if a consular official believed they were doing it just to give birth.

“The Department does not believe that visiting the United States for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child, by giving birth in the United States — an activity commonly referred to as “birth tourism” — is a legitimate activity for pleasure or of a recreational nature,” reads a statement from the time.

U.S. officials have also prosecuted California-based “birthing houses” for counselling foreign nationals to misrepresent their intentions on visa forms in order to enter the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth. Similar charges are feasibly possible in Canada, given that it is illegal under Canadian law to misrepresent one’s intentions for visiting.

Although birth tourism is not addressed or even acknowledged at the federal level, it’s long been deeply controversial in the immigrant-heavy Vancouver communities where it’s most visible.

Jas Johal, MLA for Richmond, has repeatedly denounced birth tourism for turning local hospitals into “passport mills.” Longtime Richmond city councillor Chak Au has often gone on record saying that his constituency — the most Chinese-Canadian in Canada — supports a legislated end to birth tourism.

In 2018, Richmond’s Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido tabled a petition in the House of Commons calling birth tourism an “abuse of Canada’s immigration and citizenship system.”

“The government should say birth tourism is bad. Let’s quantify it and let’s fix it,” he said at the time.

As recently as 2016, Vancouver-area Conservative MPs Alice Wong and Kenny Chiu even led a drive to overturn Canada’s system of birthright citizenship altogether in order to combat birth tourism — although both had reversed course by 2019, when the Conservatives prepared for that year’s election with a platform that mostly side-stepped immigration policy.

Source: FIRST READING: Canada’s massive (and easily fixed) birth tourism problem

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Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

2023/06/03 Leave a comment

Useful reminder that expanded immigration is unlikely to be a viable long-term strategy:

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.Listen to this story.

In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population.

The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast.

Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which levies taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises. 

Low ratios of workers to pensioners are only one problem stemming from collapsing fertility. As we explain this week, younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways . 

This youthful dynamism complements the accumulated knowledge of older workers. It also brings change. Patents filed by the youngest inventors are much more likely to cover breakthrough innovations. Older countries—and, it turns out, their young people—are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Elderly electorates ossify politics, too. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, suppressing productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity. 

All things considered, it is tempting to cast low fertility rates as a crisis to be solved. Many of its underlying causes, though, are in themselves welcome. As people have become richer they have tended to have fewer children. Today they face different trade-offs between work and family, and these are mostly better ones. The populist conservatives who claim low fertility is a sign of society’s failure and call for a return to traditional family values are wrong. More choice is a good thing, and no one owes it to others to bring up children. 

Liberals’ impulse to encourage more immigration is more noble. But it, too, is a misdiagnosis. Immigration in the rich world today is at a record high, helping individual countries tackle worker shortages. But the global nature of the fertility slump means that, by the middle of the century, the world is likely to face a dearth of young educated workers unless something changes.

What might that be? People often tell pollsters they want more children than they have. This gap between aspiration and reality could be in part because would-be parents—who, in effect, subsidise future childless pensioners—cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages or inadequate fertility treatment. Yet even if these are fixed, economic development is still likely to lead to a fall in fertility below the replacement rate. Pro-family policies have a disappointing record. Singapore offers lavish grants, tax rebates and child-care subsidies—but has a fertility rate of 1.0. 

Unleashing the potential of the world’s poor would ease the shortage of educated young workers without more births. Two-thirds of Chinese children live in the countryside and attend mostly dreadful schools; the same fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds in India have not completed upper secondary education. Africa’s pool of young people will continue to grow for decades. Boosting their skills is desirable in itself, and might also cast more young migrants as innovators in otherwise-stagnant economies. Yet encouraging development is hard—and the sooner places get rich, the sooner they get old. 

Eventually, therefore, the world will have to make do with fewer youngsters—and perhaps with a shrinking population. With that in mind, recent advances in ai could not have come at a better time. An über-productive ai-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually ai may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence. Combined with robotics, ai may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand.

If technology does allow humanity to overcome the baby bust, it will fit the historical pattern. Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate. Fewer babies means less human genius. But that might be a problem human genius can fix. 

Source: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

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Connelly: Even high-wage temporary foreign workers are at risk of exploitation

2023/06/03 Leave a comment

Haven’t seen much written one the higher-wage Temporary Foreign Workers or the kind of anecdotes and studies that we see on agricultural and other lower-wage workers.

So the extent to which this is more theoretical (same general points apply to all TFWs), or a real issue is unclear (and Connelly doesn’t indicate that any surveys or other assessment of on-the-ground reality was undertaken which may have been included in her book):

When we think of temporary foreign workers, we usually think of agricultural workers and nannies: vulnerable workers at risk of exploitation. But not every temporary foreign worker does this kind of work. What about software engineers, accountants, and technicians? Unfortunately, they are also at risk.

Many Canadians assume that high-wage temporary foreign workers are less vulnerable because they have more resources at their disposal. But their high incomes and education levels are not enough to protect them.

Temporary foreign workers in the high-wage stream are vulnerable to exploitation because they have closed work permits. With only a few exceptions, they are only allowed to work for the company that hired them. Even when they are aware of their employment rights, they are often reluctant to do anything that they believe could jeopardize their employment, such as complaining to their boss, their HR department, or the government. Most high-wage temporary foreign workers are hoping to apply for permanent residency through a provincial nominee program, and they are concerned that any complaints will be held against them. And even though many high-wage temporary foreign workers eventually become permanent residents, they still have closed work permits while they navigate this process. And in the meantime, they may endure a lot.

High-wage temporary foreign workers are lucrative targets. Because their wages are relatively high, unscrupulous companies have a financial incentive to pay them less than their contracted wage. For example, instead of paying them the agreed-upon $30 per hour, a company may decide to only pay them only $27 per hour: a 10 per cent discrepancy. This pay cut of course violates the temporary foreign worker guidelines, which stipulate that all temporary foreign workers must be paid the agreed-upon wage for the duration of their contracts. They also must be paid at least the local median wage for their occupation.

Three dollars in wage theft may not sound like much, but it adds up. If that employee works 40 hours per week, this represents a savings to the employer of about $6,240 per year, per employee.

Because high-wage workers are so qualified, they are frequently asked to perform extra tasks that are not in their contracts. For example, they may be asked to manage a team or take on more important or complicated responsibilities with less supervision. Many temporary foreign workers are overqualified for their positions, so some companies use this as an opportunity to require them to do extra work without compensation, even though this violates the rules of the temporary foreign worker program.

Companies that have difficulty retaining Canadians because of poor management skills may turn to temporary foreign workers specifically to lower rates of staff turnover. While Canadians and foreign workers recruited through the International Mobility Program (e.g., from a country that has a free trade agreement with Canada) can quit, high-wage temporary foreign workers, who might be doing the exact same job, do not have the same options. In addition to wage theft and unrealistic performance expectations, high-wage temporary foreign workers frequently have to deal with abusive supervisors. 

The solution is to harmonize the high-wage temporary foreign worker program with the International Mobility Program to ensure that these workers all have the same rights. That is, high-wage temporary foreign workers would receive open work permits that would enable them to change employers more easily. A further advantage of open permits is that companies could then promote high-wage temporary foreign workers, or move them to where they are needed.

One could argue that open permits would be inconvenient for employers, because mistreated high-wage temporary foreign workers may quit if their work permits do not force them to stay with their employer. However, employers could adopt the same management strategies that they use to prevent their Canadian or International Mobility Program employees from quitting: careful recruitment, fair treatment, and reasonable wages.

In discussions about temporary foreign workers, those in the high-wage stream are often overlooked. There are not so many of them: only 45,867 were approved to come to Canada in 2022. But as Canadian companies address ongoing labour market challenges, more are likely to be hired. High-wage temporary foreign workers are an important part of the Canadian workforce, and they need the same protections as Canadians.

Catherine Connelly is a Canada Research Chair in organizational behaviour at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, and the author of Enduring Work: Experiences with Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Source: Even high-wage temporary foreign workers are at risk of exploitation

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Black men were likely underdiagnosed with lung problems because of bias in software, study suggests

2023/06/03 Leave a comment

Of note (I have done the pulmonary function test as part of my cancer treatments but was completely unaware of the algorithms involved but I could sense the difference between two tests about a year apart):

Racial bias built into a common medical test for lung function is likely leading to fewer Black patients getting care for breathing problems, a study published Thursday suggests. 

As many as 40% more Black male patients in the study might have been diagnosed with breathing problems if current diagnosis-assisting computer software was changed, the study said. 

Doctors have long discussed the potential problems caused by race-based assumptions that are built into diagnostic software. This study, published in JAMA Network Open, offers one of the first real-world examples of how the the issue may affect diagnosis and care for lung patients, said Dr. Darshali Vyas, a pulmonary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The results are “exciting” to see published but it’s also “what we’d expect” from setting aside race-based calculations, said Vyas, who was an author of an influential 2020 New England Journal of Medicine article that catalogued examples of how race-based assumptions are used in making doctors’ decisions about patient care.

For centuries, some doctors and others have held beliefs that there are natural racial differences in health, including one that Black people’s lungs were innately worse than those of white people. That assumption ended up in modern guidelines and algorithms for assessing risk and deciding on further care. Test results were adjusted to account for — or “correct” for — a patient’s race or ethnicity. 

One example beyond lung function is a heart failure risk-scoring system that categorizes Black patients as being at lower risk and less likely to need referral for special cardiac care. Another is an equation used in determining kidney function that creates estimates of higher kidney function in Black patients.

The new study focused on a test to determine how much and how quickly a person can inhale and exhale. It’s often done using a spirometer — a device with a mouthpiece connected to a small machine. 

After the test, doctors get a report that has been run through computer software and scores the patient’s ability breathe. It helps indicate whether a patient has restrictions and needs further testing or care for things like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or lung scarring due to air pollutant exposure. 

Algorithms that adjust for race raise the threshold for diagnosing a problem in Black patients and may make them less likely to get started on certain medications or to be referred for medical procedures or even lung transplants, Vyas said.

While physicians also look at symptoms, lab work, X-rays and family histories of breathing problems, the pulmonary function testing can be an important part of diagnoses, “especially when patients are borderline,” said Dr. Albert Rizzo, the chief medical officer at the American Lung Association. 

The new study looked at more than 2,700 Black men and 5,700 white men tested by University of Pennsylvania Health System doctors between 2010 and 2020. The researchers looked at spirometry and lung volume measurements and assessed how many were deemed to have breathing impairments under the race-based algorithm as compared to under a new algorithm.

Researchers concluded there would be nearly 400 additional cases of lung obstruction or impairment in Black men with the new algorithm.

Earlier this year, the American Thoracic Society, which represents lung-care doctors, issued a statement recommending replacement of race-focused adjustments. But the organization also put a call out for more research, including into the best way to modify software and whether making a change might inadvertently lead to overdiagnosis of lung problems in some patients.

Vyas noted some other algorithms have already been changed to drop race-based assumptions, including one for pregnant women that predicts risks of vaginal delivery if the mom previously had a cesarean section.

Changing the lung-testing algorithm may take longer, Vyas said, especially if different hospitals use different versions of race-adjusting procedures and software. 

Source: Black men were likely underdiagnosed with lung problems because of bias in software, study suggests

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