What the [USA] Birthright-Citizenship Debate Is Really About

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

More on political posturing by DeSantis and Trump with relevant background:

When my Google Alerts sounded this past week, I knew that birthright citizenship was again lighting up in the news. My interest in debates over birthright is professional and abiding: I’m a historian who in 2018 published a book, Birthright Citizens, that traced this approach to national belonging from its origins in debates among Black Americans at the start of the 19th century to 1868, when the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment established that, with a few exceptions, anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.

On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, looking to advance his presidential campaign, promised to reverse more than a century and a half of law and policy and, as he put it in a statement, “end the idea that children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States.” A few days later, a spokesperson for another GOP presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, said she “opposes birthright citizenship for those who enter the country illegally,” and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign said he would reform birthright by adding new citizenship requirements. Having lived through more than one such outburst in recent years—the first in 2018, when then-President Donald Trump proposed to do away with birthright—I know that any promise to transform our citizenship scheme is sure to set off a debate.

But what, we should ask, is that debate really about? Why does it keep coming up? When we talk about birthright citizenship, we are talking about democracy—its fundamental component that grants equal status to every person born in this country and affords them all the same rights of citizenship.

Let’s briefly review. Although the 1787 Constitution did not bar Black Americans from citizenship, it also did not plainly state what made any person a citizen. The result was that Black Americans received profoundly uneven treatment before the law; most authorities leaned toward the view that color, with its implied links to slave status, disqualified Black Americans from citizenship. Black activists waged a long campaign arguing that, on the face of the Constitution and as a matter of natural rights, Black people were citizens by virtue of their birth on U.S. soil.

Notoriously, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, concluded that citizenship was beyond the reach of Black Americans; their race disqualified them. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, lawmakers remedied this circumstance: first in an 1862 opinion from Attorney General Edward Bates, then in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and finally in the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which installed birthright in the Constitution, guaranteeing that Black people and all those born in the United States were citizens.

Calls today to do away with birthright citizenship are, in large part, political theater, often a way to project a tough stance on immigration. DeSantis outlined only a very loose strategy, saying he would “force the courts and Congress to finally address this failed policy.” Trump, too, was light on specifics. For all the noise that his administration generated around doing away with birthright citizenship, which he threatened to do multiple times as president, nothing came of it. The meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as we knew it before the Trump era remains unchanged.

Campaign pledges to end birthright citizenship might get people’s attention, but lawmakers have kept this objective alive in other quarters. Less well known, for example, is how in every session of Congress from 2007 to 2021, a Republican representative introduced something called the Birthright Citizenship Act. The legislation would have redefined the meaning of a minor clause in the Fourteenth Amendment—one that limits birthright status to persons “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. In 1868, this exception excluded the children of visiting diplomats and those of Native American sovereign nations. Today, some lawmakers propose to newly expand the meaning of this clause by defining children as subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus birthright citizens, only when they have one parent who is a U.S. citizen or national, a permanent resident residing in the United States, or an alien on active duty in the Armed Forces. In Congress, opposition to birthright simmers on the back burner, but it demands our vigilance lest it boil over.

When politicians dispute birthright, they also open up legal questions about where the power to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment resides. Trump suggested that with his authority, as exercised through an executive order, he could reinterpret who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and thus a birthright citizen. Members of Congress similarly have taken the view that that body can legislate the amendment’s meaning. Many legal commentators rightly argue that the U.S. Supreme Court has the final say when it comes to the meaning of the Constitution. Our recently constituted Court has not been tested on the issue of birthright, and we must allow for the possibility that it might defer to Congress or the president when it comes to interpreting its meaning.

When Trump first promised to undo birthright, I was primarily concerned about how immigrants and their U.S.-born children would be harmed by such a change. Today, this worry still figures importantly in my mind, but my concerns have grown broader. Calls to undo birthright, though couched in terms of immigration reform, ultimately aim to undo a key precept of our democracy: equitable access to citizenship. Birthright sets an even bar when it comes to being a citizen—all those born here are subject to the same threshold test, no matter whom they descended from. It ensures that, for those born in the United States, citizenship will not be conferred depending on their politics, race, faith, culture, gender, or sexuality. Birthright safeguards those born here from political leaders who would mete out citizenship as a reward or withhold it as a punishment.

The wielding of citizenship as a weapon is precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent. In 1868, birthright undid the Dred Scott decision. It ensured that the right of Black Americans to belong to this nation was neither open to debate nor susceptible to shifting political whims. Since its ratification, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed the belonging of some of the most vulnerable among us, including generations of children born to immigrant parents. It has protected marginalized, despised, and unpopular people who, when born here, do not need to fear exile or banishment. Birthright citizenship has always been a solution rather than a problem, and our democracy depends on it remaining just that.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, a professor of history, and a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Source: What the Birthright-Citizenship Debate Is Really About

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

Canada’s citizenship numbers are rising. How many passed the test?

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Some useful numbers on pass rates (91-92 percent). Seems largely unchanged once the initial revised version of test was revised around 2011 when the pass rates dropped significantly (language level and complexity of questions):

On Canada Day, more than a thousand people will be pledging their oath to the country as new Canadian citizens.

Ceremonies for 1,130 citizenship recipients are scheduled to take place across the country on Saturday, according to numbers Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada shared with Global News.

Passing a citizenship test is one of the requirements to officially becoming Canadian – and the majority who took the exam this year were successful, recent IRCC data shows.

Between January and May 2023, a total of 119,053 tests were completed – out of which 92 per cent passed, while the rest failed.

It was a similar story last year, with 91 per cent of the people passing among the roughly 260,000 citizenship tests that were completed.

By comparison, Canadians would be less successful, recent polling suggests.

A Leger survey of 1,512 Canadian adults found that only 23 per cent would pass the citizenship test, based on their answers to 10 randomly selected questions.

The average score of the Canadians who were surveyed was only 49 per cent – where 75 per cent is needed to pass the test.

…

Source: Canada’s citizenship numbers are rising. How many passed the test?

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Of interest. Another example of using class-type criteria:

For the head of admissions at a medical school, Dr. Mark Henderson is pretty blunt when sizing up the profession.

“Mostly rich kids get to go to medical school,” he said.

In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D.

The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.

The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling last week against race-conscious admissions, the medical school offers a glimpse of how selective schools across the country might overhaul their admissions policies, as they look for alternative ways to achieve diversity without running afoul of the new law.

Last week, President Biden called adversity scores a “new standard” for achieving diversity.

Word has gotten out about the U.C. Davis scale. Dr. Henderson said that about 20 schools had recently requested more information. And there are other socioeconomic measurements, including Landscape, released in 2019 from the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SATs. That tool allows undergraduate admissions offices to assess the socioeconomic backgrounds of individual students.

But skeptics question whether such rankings — or any kind of socioeconomic affirmative action — will be enough to replace race-conscious affirmative action. And schools that use adversity scales may also find themselves wandering into legal quagmires, with conservative groups promising to fight programs that are simply stand-ins for race.

Over the years, medical schools have made some progress in diversifying their student bodies, with numbers ticking up. But just like undergraduate admissions, wealth and connections continue to play a determining role in who is accepted. More than half of medical students come from families in the top 20 percent of income, while only 4 percent come from those in the bottom 20 percent, according to data from the American Association of Medical Colleges.

There is also a family dynamic. Children of doctors are 24 timesmore likely to become doctors than their peers, according to the American Medical Association. It’s hard to know why the profession passes down from generation to generation, but the statistic drove the association to adopt a policy opposing legacy preferences in admissions.

“That’s a staggering economic gap between medical students and the general public,” said Dr. Henderson, who comes from a working-class upbringing and now serves as associate dean of admissions.

As a consequence, the number of Black doctors remains stubbornly low: About 6 percent of practicing doctors in the United States are Black, compared with 13.6 percent of the American population who identify as Black.

With the Supreme Court decision, “that number is likely to go down,” said Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, the president of Meharry Medical College, formed in 1876 in Nashville to train Black health care providers.

Leaders in medicine say training more Black and Hispanic doctors could help bridge the vast divides in American health care. Research shows that doctors from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are more likely to work in primary care or in locales where doctors are scarce.

And patients have better outcomes when treated by doctors from similar backgrounds, said Dr. Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, president of the American Medical Association.

The U.C. Davis scale has drawn attention because of its ability to bring in diverse students using what the schools says are “race-neutral” socioeconomic models.

In its most recent entering class of 133 students, 14 percent were Black and 30 percent were Hispanic. Nationally, 10 percent of medical school students were Black and 12 percent were Hispanic. A vast majority of the U.C. Davis class — 84 percent — comes from disadvantaged backgrounds, and 42 percent are the first in their family to go to college.

The overall acceptance rate has been less than 2 percent.

In the Davis scale, first used in 2012, eight categories establish an adversity score for each candidate. Factors include family income, whether applicants come from an underserved area, whether they help support their nuclear families and whether their parents went to college.

The higher an applicant rates on the disadvantage scale, the bigger the boost.

There is no set formula on how to balance the scale with the academic record, Dr. Henderson said, but a simulation of the system revealed that students from underrepresented groups grew to 15.3 percent from 10.7 percent. And the share of economically disadvantaged students tripled, to 14.5 percent of the class from 4.6 percent.

At the same time, scores from the MCAT, the standardized test for medical school applications, dropped only marginally.

Still, it’s not easy to persuade medical schools to upend admissions standards, particularly anything that undermines the value of test scores and grades. Dr. Henderson said he had received pushback from his own colleagues.

“Doctors say their kids got into medical school elsewhere, and they didn’t get in here,” he said.

As the children of doctors, he said, those applicants earned an S.E.D. score of zero.

A number of scholars, including Richard D. Kahlenberg, have promoted using class-conscious preferences, which they say could address racial inequities in education without fostering the resentment often prompted by racially based diversity plans.

And President Biden said on Thursday that his administration would develop a “new standard for colleges taking into account the adversity a student has overcome.”

“The kid who faced tougher challenges has demonstrated more grit, more determination,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House, “and that should be a factor that colleges should take into account in admissions.”

He might be talking about someone like Eleanor Adams, a member of the Choctaw Nation, who said that she did not think medical school was an option for her.

“I didn’t grow up with a lot of money,” she said.

But she found mentors who encouraged her, and today she is in her third year of medical school at U.C. Davis, which is in Sacramento. She plans to become an Indian Health Service doctor in Oklahoma — fulfilling one of the school’s goals, Dr. Henderson said, which is to train doctors who will return to their communities.

At schools in other states without affirmative action, such as the University of Michigan, admissions officials have complained that enrolling more socioeconomically disadvantaged students has not significantly increased the share of Black, Hispanic and Native American students.

“Those tools certainly have utility, but they fall short of accomplishing what a race-conscious admission practice does,” said Dr. Ehrenfeld of the American Medical Association.

The socioeconomic rankings could also be legally challenged. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in his majority opinion on affirmative action, wrote that colleges could consider how race had affected an applicant’s life. But he also warned against using proxies for race.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian activist group, has already sued a selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., for using economic factors as stand-ins for race in admissions.

Joshua P. Thompson, a lawyer for the foundation, said the legal questions surrounding these disadvantage indexes were complex.

“I think the devil is going to be in the details,” Mr. Thompson said. “The Supreme Court was pretty clear that what can’t be done directly can’t be done indirectly.”

Should it come to that, Dr. Henderson said that his school’s disadvantage scale would be defensible in court.

“Am I worried about it? Yes,” Dr. Henderson said of a lawsuit. “Is it going to stop me? No.”

Source: With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

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Curry: Removing one of life’s most memorable days with a Zoom call [citizenship ceremonies]

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Another commentary bemoaning the proposed change:

The best part of the Canada Day baseball game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox was not the leadoff home run by George Springer, or, even the game itself. The Jays lost.

It was the opening ceremonies.

But not the giant Canadian flag unfurled on field, or the Canadian Armed Forces team rappelling from the rooftop to the playing field, though both were pretty spectacular.

It was the Canadian citizenship ceremony.

Nine lucky new Canadians were chosen to participate, to match the starting lineup of the Jays. All clad in the Jays’ Canada Day red jerseys, they were individually introduced to the applauding 40,000 plus fans. The looks on their faces, the body language and the sheer joy of the occasion was something to behold.

After taking the oath of allegiance, in both official languages no less, they were all invited to throw out ceremonial first pitches to their Blue Jay counterparts. Some of them even managed to get the ball to the player’s glove.

It was magnificent, and the crowd cheered them on mightily.

Compare this national spectacle (the game was broadcast on Sportsnet) to the latest brain trust decision about citizenship ceremonies.

They will no longer be in person, but virtual.

Have the Ottawa bureaucrats who came up with this notion ever been to a citizenship ceremony? If they have, shame on them for taking away a memory that will last a lifetime for new Canadians.

The Government of Canada website now says most new Canadians will be invited to a virtual Zoom citizenship ceremony, instead of an in-person event.

That should bring a tear to potential participants’ eyes.

Gather around the computer screen, family, and look at other new Canadians, whom you will never meet in person, and a citizenship judge you will never meet, and crack a bottle of Champagne. We will celebrate with our little group, not all the other new Canadians being sworn in.

I have attended only one citizenship ceremony, and it was back when Jay Aspin was our Member of Parliament. I was invited, as the then executive director of the North Bay & District Multicultural Centre, to sit with the dignitaries (who? me?) and then congratulate each new Canadian after they became citizens.

It was a Canada Day outdoor event, in front of the museum. It was sunny and warm and each new Canadian had friends and family attending. It was a joyous event, even if the Blue Jays weren’t there. The

citizenship judge, imported from southern Ontario, was resplendent in his robes and his presence added gravitas to the event.

It was a day I remember vividly, and I was born in Canada. For those that were not, and became Canadian citizens that day, it was one of the most memorable days of their lives.

A lot has been written about this foolhardy decision to go virtual. I subscribe to Andrew Griffith’s daily Multicultural Meanderings blog, and in a recent post he analyzed the feedback the February announcement by the federal government received.

The announcement was made in The Canada Gazette, rather than in the form of a news release from the minister. When governments do that, they are trying to avoid negative feedback. But it came anyway, in droves.

In the almost 700 comments in the Gazette, opposition is nearly universal among citizens and about two-thirds of immigrants. Former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson and former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi spoke out against it in the media, among many others, including former immigration ministers and citizenship judges.

But, Griffith noted, “Interestingly, strong support comes from applicants, many of whom are frustrated with the application process and its delays. This clear divide is telling.”

The government says the move to virtual ceremonies could save three months of citizenship processing time, and people won’t have to take time off work to participate. The clear divide Griffith is referring to is the bureaucratic slowness and backlog in processing citizenship applications that is frustrating applicants.

My take is those in the system that are okay with a virtual ceremony just want to get it done, because the process is taking so long. They have never been to a live in-person ceremony, so they don’t know what they are missing.

It is important for all the new immigrants we are seeing in our city, who one day will become Canadian citizens.

Mayor Peter Chirico is quoted in a Sunday BayToday article about Canada Day, saying “We’re coming up on our 100th anniversary of the corporation of the City of North Bay in 2025. Our city is such a diverse and accepting city. The face of North Bay is changing and we’re changing with it. So, we celebrate Canada Day and what Canada means, that it is an accepting place, that it is a safe, and welcoming place.”

Can North Bay replicate what the Jays did for the new Canadians? Not likely, but it could come close.

How about a Canadian citizenship ceremony right before a Battalion home game at Memorial Gardens? It would be full of people cheering them on, and each new Canadian could each take a shot at the Battalion goalie…who would, of course, let them score. What is more Canadian than hockey?

That would be a memorable evening.

Editor’s Note: Don Curry is a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant living in North Bay, and a member of the Bay Today community advisory committee.

Source: Opinion: Removing one of life’s most memorable days with a Zoom call

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

Review: The underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

In 1923, amid a wave of lynchings, Claude McKay wrote the sonnet “If We Must Die.” He was faced with a society structured by white supremacy and anti-Blackness, a society that wanted Blacks “to die like hogs/ hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.” Confronted with this uniquely American form of death, McKay proclaimed that “we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back.” For McKay, the nobility and humanity of Black people was forged in fighting the monsters of white supremacy.

A similar vision animates Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. For Lloyd, dignity is not something abstracted from a notion of “humanity.” It is wrested from the teeth of domination. It is asserted in the struggle against oppression. It is born the moment the slave seizes his master and throws him down. Perhaps most important for Lloyd, dignity is Black.

Much of Lloyd’s book is about looking at centers of ontological resistance to domination, such as Black love, Black family and Black magic.

Begun while he participated in protests in Ferguson, Mo., and continued in seminars and libraries, Lloyd’s book focuses on the words of generations of Black freedom fighters. To the struggle, he offers the contribution of a keen intellect articulating the underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter. While I disagree with aspects of his book, his core argument is a profound challenge to anyone who takes seriously the struggle for human dignity, antiracism and the work of dismantling white supremacy.

Lloyd’s philosophy depends on some fundamental claims. The first is that we must understand the “depths of anti-Blackness shading America” such that anti-Blackness “is at the center of everything, for everyone.” It is not an incidental, localized or past reality. It is reality. For Lloyd, philosophy is meant to help us understand reality and, more important, to resist and overthrow that reality. Resistance to domination is not on behalf of some antecedent given of human dignity that does not say anything about actual reality. Such abstracted claims about dignity (“all lives matter”) cannot resist anti-Black reality.

Instead, dignity is “something you do, a practice, a performance, a way of engaging the world…. It necessarily means struggle against domination.” The world is oppression; dignity is the refusal of the world. It is dying but fighting back. Black dignity is found in that fighting back. Since anti-Blackness is the primary form of domination, Black dignity is the primary form of enacted dignity.

Philosophers must begin from that fighting back in order to understand reality. Thus Lloyd places a great deal of importance on the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. Generally, these terms would refer to questions about the being of a specific object (ontic) and the being of beings (ontological). You might say the former is small-picture metaphysics and the latter is big-picture. For Lloyd, both have to do with the struggle against domination. The ontic struggle has to do with specific sites of struggle, a struggle against a particular center of domination. The ontological has to do with “struggle aimed at domination” itself. As with McKay’s poem, fighting is not only specific to instances. In asserting Black dignity, one fights the whole system of domination.

Much of Lloyd’s book is about looking at centers of ontological resistance to domination, such as Black love, Black family and Black magic. Each chapter leans into the claim that racism is not just personal or even systematic; it is the being of reality. According to Lloyd, multiculturalism, liberalism and the American project are to be discarded as expressions of that ontology. Since domination is reality, abolitionism is about abolishing everything.

It is here that some of the weaknesses of the book appear. First, Lloyd seems uninterested in Black voices that differ from his more radical approach, voices that show a majority of Black Americans want serious reform of the police and criminal justice system but do not want the abolishment of either. Those voices see arguments like those for defunding of the police as a form of political colonization by urban elites. What does Lloyd think of the majority of African Americans, who agree that “Black dignity” is a non-negotiable struggle and as a consequence want more and better policing? In his book, Black conservatives go unmentioned while establishment Black liberals are depicted as the purveyors of vacuous expressions of multiculturalism.

Perhaps these Black voices belong to those who are just “dreamers” or are trapped by respectability. But then what to make of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass or Rosa Parks? They wanted America to live up to its ideals, not abolish them. Lloyd doesn’t let these voices disturb his text. Rather, he states that “Black dignity is the philosophy of Black Americans.” But whose philosophy of Black dignity? Which vision of antiracism? For Lloyd, “One view is right, others might seem right but are wrong.” Ironically, this sentiment seems to feed into what Lloyd, in Compact magazine, has criticized as an antiracist cult that seeks to silence dialogue.

Lloyd argues we should center dignity discourse on Black dignity. He rightly recognizes other forms of intersecting oppression, but his account still centers on Black dignity as the first philosophy, such that “all philosophy must be routed through the Middle Passage” and understood in light of “domination’s chief paradigm, Blackness.” But shouldn’t we also center dignity on the Indigenous, the refugee, the unborn or the disabled? Lloyd is right that dignity is something struggled for. However, that struggle does not fabricate a dignity not already there; it brings to light the truth of dignity that is always already there.

If white supremacy is to be overcome, anti-Blackness cast down as sin and blasphemy, and Black dignity centered as fundamental reality, we will need books like Lloyd’s.Black dignity is an ethical, even ontological, preferential option for dignity. But if we hold this at the expense of intrinsic human dignity, then other voices and other ways of asserting dignity will be lost. This means we lose the grounding of natural law that Lloyd powerfully presents in his book Black Natural Law. The danger in losing this is that the struggle may devolve into centers of competing power with little orientation to a justice beyond power.

Making dignity entirely performative—and thus downplaying intrinsic dignity and natural law—is likely tied to how ontological Lloyd makes domination. Domination, as reality, is not a privation of a more original good but is instead the original and ultimate position and thus the position that is never overcome. “The object of ontological struggles is,” Lloyd tells us, “impossible to achieve.” More than 500 years of racial domination speak to the truth of this claim. But there are other stories of when people cast down domination. In this, I wish that Lloyd had been willing to be more than a philosopher by being a theologian. As King puts it: “the ringing cry of the Christian faith is that our God is able.” Believing domination can be overcome is not “a fantasy of domination itself,” as Lloyd puts it, but a conviction about God and humanity.

If white supremacy is to be overcome, anti-Blackness cast down as sin and blasphemy, and Black dignity centered as fundamental reality, we will need books like Lloyd’s. For all my criticisms, he does the work of philosophizing on behalf of Black dignity. He is right that dignity must be found and asserted in the struggle for dignity.

But there is a grace beyond assertion. Later in his life, Claude McKay converted to Catholicism, finding in it the only source of racial unity. He “turned to God for great strength to fight” while holding to “the Sacred Light.” We should, too. Starting from Black dignity and from the dignity of all who are oppressed, we may someday—by that sacred light and our efforts—find ourselves with human dignity, achieved.

Terence Sweeney is a professor in the honors program at Villanova University.

Source: Review: The underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful case study:

For decades, the question of affirmative action — whether colleges should consider race when deciding which students to admit — has been the subject of national debate.

And as the nation’s highest court has grown more conservative in recent years, court-watchers wondered if it would reverse decades-old precedents allowing affirmative action.

This week, it happened: The Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions practices at public and private universities and colleges.

Supreme Court justices ruled that the admissions policies at the University of North Carolina, one of the country’s oldest public universities, and Harvard University, the country’s oldest private university, violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

As college admissions offices prepare to tailor their policies to the Supreme Court ruling, California offers lessons on what may be in store for the rest of the country.

Here’s the upshot: A quarter-century after California banned race-based admissions at public universities, school officials say they haven’t been able to meet their diversity and equity goals — despite more than a half billion dollars spent on outreach and alternative admissions standards.

In an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in support of Harvard and UNC’s race-based admissions programs, University of California chancellors said that years of crafting alternative race-neutral policies have fallen short.

“Those programs have enabled UC to make significant gains in its system-wide diversity,” the brief said. “Yet despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.”

The shortfall is especially apparent at the system’s most selective schools, the university leaders said.

An affirmative action ban first caused a huge drop in diversity at top California universities

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, an affirmative action ban at public universities in the state. Before the ban, UC Berkeley and UCLA were roughly representative of the California high school graduate population who were eligible for enrollment at universities, according to Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University.

The ban first took effect with the incoming class of ’98. Subsequently, diversity plummeted at UC’s most competitive campuses. That year, enrollment among Black and Latino students at UCLA and UC Berkeley fell by 40%, according to a 2020 study by Bleemer. As a result of the ban, Bleemer found that Black and Latino students who might have gotten into those two top schools enrolled at less competitive campuses.

“Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities,” Bleemer told NPR. “But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place.”

Black and Latino students were also less likely to earn graduate degrees or enter lucrative STEM fields.

“If you follow them into the labor market, for the subsequent 15 or 20 years, they’re earning about 5% lower wages than they would have earned if they’d had access to more selective universities under affirmative action,” Bleemer said.

The ban has in fact acted as a deterrent to prospective Black and Latino students, Bleemer said. His study found that high-performing minority students were subsequently discouraged from applying to schools where minority students were underrepresented.

“Most do not want to attend a university where there’s not a critical mass of same race peers,” said Mitchell Chang, the associate vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. That’s because attending a school made less diverse by an affirmative action ban, “puts them at greater risk of being stereotyped and being isolated,” he said.

These findings “provide the first causal evidence that banning affirmative action exacerbates socioeconomic inequities,” Bleemer’s study said.

A learning curve

Faced with plummeting minority enrollment, admissions offices began a years-long effort to figure out ways to get their numbers back up.

Admissions offices pivoted to a more holistic approach, looking beyond grades and test scores. Starting in the early 2000s, the UC system implemented a couple of initiatives to increase diversity: The top-performing students graduating most high schools in the state were guaranteed admission to most of the eight UC undergraduate campuses. It also introduced a comprehensive review process to “evaluate students’ academic achievements in light of the opportunities available to them” – using an array of criteria including a student’s special skills and achievements, special circumstances and location of high school.

In 2020, the UC system eliminated standardized test scores as an admission requirement, nixing a factor that advocates say disadvantages underserved students.

However, the effort to boost diversity has come with a heavy price tag. Since Prop 209 took effect, UC has spent more than a half-billion dollars on outreach programs and application reviews to draw in a more diverse student body.

It’s taken 25 years of experimentation through race-neutral policies, for UC schools have begun to catch up to the racial diversity numbers lost in the wake of the affirmative action ban, says UCLA vice chancellor Chang.

“There was no magic bullet. Some things worked better than other things. And this is also work that doesn’t happen overnight,” Chang said.

Still, the California schools are unable to meet their diversity goals systemwide. Chang says his school is not where it wants to be. It still enrolls far fewer Black and Latino students than their share of California high school graduates — a problem it didn’t have before the affirmative action ban.

As with the UC system, experts think that across the country, similarly competitive universities will be most affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Gabrielle Starr, president of Pomona College, a small Southern California school that wasn’t subject to the state ban, fears the selective, private university will lose its racial diversity under the nationwide affirmative action ban.

Starr says that being able to consider race has allowed her school to ensure its ability to put together a diverse class.

“Having a campus that looks like the world in which our students will go onto live is really important just as a bedrock value,” she said.

Source: Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Why Canada’s New Work Permit Isn’t a Death Knell for U.S. Tech Industry 

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful reminder of policies that USA needs to consider and that Canada shouldn’t take for granted its current advantages:

In a move aimed at attracting top tech talent, Canada’s Immigration Minister announced Tuesday the creation of an open work permit stream for H-1B visa holders in the United States. The program will allow 10,000 H-1B visa holders in the U.S. to work in Canada and provide study or work permits for their family members as well.

The new initiative, which is part of the country’s new Tech Talent Strategy, is set to launch on July 16, 2023. Under the program, approved applicants will receive an open work permit valid for up to three years. This permit grants them the freedom to work for any employer anywhere in Canada, offering increased flexibility and opportunities.

Although the plan has the potential to attract top talent in the tech sector, there are several factors that may limit its effectiveness in poaching workers from the United States. These include:

  1. High Taxes and Cost of Living: Canada’s high taxes and cost of living, particularly in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver, may deter some entrepreneurs and tech workers from moving there permanently. The United States has a wider range of affordable cities to live in, which could be more appealing to prospective immigrants.
  2. Strong Existing Tech Ecosystem in the U.S.: The United States already has a well-established tech ecosystem with massive tech hubs in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin. The networks, infrastructure, and resources available in these hubs may still be more attractive to tech talent and entrepreneurs.
  3. Talent Mobility and Dual Intent: Talented individuals who secure Canadian citizenship may choose to return to the United States once they have more secure immigration status. The U.S. may still be perceived as a more lucrative market for career development, so achieving Canadian citizenship could be a stepping stone rather than a final destination.
  4. Limited Scope of Canada’s Initiative: The new program will remain in effect for one year or until 10,000 applications are received. This is a limited scale compared to the size of the tech industry in the United States.
  5. Brand and Perception: The global brand and perception of the United States as a land of opportunity and the center for innovation could continue to attract talent even with competition from Canada.

What the U.S. Can Do:

  1. Reform Immigration Policies: The U.S. could reform its immigration policies to make it easier for highly-skilled talent to obtain visas. This includes reducing processing times, increasing visa quotas, and providing clearer paths to permanent residency and citizenship.
  2. Encourage Investment in Emerging Tech Hubs: Encouraging investment in emerging tech hubs in the U.S. through tax incentives, grants, and other supportive policies would create more options for tech talent.
  3. Engage with the Tech Industry: By engaging with tech companies and understanding their needs, the U.S. government can develop policies that directly address the concerns of the industry.
  4. Educate and Train: Invest in education and training programs that build a domestic talent pool that can complement the foreign tech workforce.
  5. International Partnerships: The U.S. could forge closer ties with other countries to develop international technology partnerships that could benefit both the U.S. and foreign talent.

While Canada’s new strategy is commendable and may attract some talent, it doesn’t mean the U.S. will be left with few tech workers. The U.S. has the ability to adapt and respond to competitive pressures by leveraging its established tech ecosystem and enacting policies that are supportive of high-skilled immigration and innovation.

Source: Why Canada’s New Work Permit Isn’t a Death Knell for U.S. Tech Industry

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Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Interesting take. Welcome return to “class” as a differentiator, although there is intersectionality with race and identity:

Ever since President Bill Clinton advised “mend it, don’t end it,”affirmative action has had an uneasy place in the Democratic coalition, as omnipresent as the party’s allegiance to abortion rights and its promises to expand financial aid for higher education — but unpopular with much of the public.

Now, in striking down race-conscious college admissions, the Supreme Court has handed the Democrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.

The question is, will the party pivot?

“This is a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to course-correct from identity-based issues,” said Ruy Teixeira, whose upcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” looks at the bleeding of working-class voters over the last decade. “As I like to say, class is back in session.”

Conservative voters have long been more animated by the Supreme Court’s composition than liberals have. But the last two sessions of a high court remade by Donald J. Trump may have flipped that dynamic. Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, energized Democratic voters have handed Republicans loss after loss in critical elections.

Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024. Several Republican presidential hopefuls had centered their campaigns on opposition to affirmative action. And the court’s granting of religious exemptions to people who oppose gay marriage, along with last year’s Dobbs decision, may take the sting out of some social issues for conservatives.

In that sense, the staunchly conservative new Supreme Court is doing the ugly political work for Democrats. Its decision last year to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion elevated an issue that for decades motivated religious conservatives more than it did secular liberals.

Friday’s decision to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan enraged progressive Democrats, who had pressed the president to take executive action on loan forgiveness. A coalition of Generation Z advocacy groups, including Gen-Z for Change and the climate-oriented Sunrise Movement, said on Friday that the court “has openly declared war on young people.”

But while the Supreme Court made retroactive higher education assistance far more difficult, it may have boosted the Democratic cause of financial aid, through expanded Pell grants and scholarships that do not saddle graduates with crushing debt burdens. Democrats have long pushed expanded grant programs and legislative loan-forgiveness programs for graduates who embark on low-paid public service careers. Those efforts will get a lift in the wake of the court’s decision.

The high court’s declaration that race-based admission to colleges and universities is unconstitutional infuriated key elements of the Democratic coalition — Black and Hispanic groups in particular, but also some Asian American and Pacific Islander groups who said conservatives had used a small number of Asian Americans as pawns to challenge affirmative action on behalf of whites.

“They were using the Asian community as a wedge,” said Representative Judy Chu, Democrat of California, after the decision was handed down on Thursday. “I stand with the unified community.”

But while they have expressed anger and disappointment over the conservative decisions, Democrats also acknowledge their inability to do much to restore affirmative action, student loan forgiveness and the right to an abortion in the foreseeable future, as long as the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court holds.

“There’s a constitutional challenge in bringing it back,” said Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a longtime Democratic leader on the House education committee.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist pressing his party to expand its outreach to the working class, said adding a new emphasis on class consciousness to augment racial and ethnic awareness would fit well with Mr. Biden’s pitch that his legislative achievements have largely accrued to the benefit of workers.

Infrastructure spending, electric vehicles investment, broadband expansion and semiconductor manufacturing have promoted jobs — especially union jobs — all over the country but especially in rural and suburban areas, often in Republican states.

“By next year, Democrats will be able to say we’ve invested in red states, blue states, urban areas, rural areas,” he said. “We’re not like the Republicans. We’re for everybody.”

But bigotry, discrimination and the erosion of civil rights will remain central issues for Democrats, given the anger of the party base, Mr. Rosenberg said. The Supreme Court’s siding on Fridaywith a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages cannot be separated from the affirmative action, student loan and abortion decisions.

Mr. Teixeira said Democrats were not likely to see their new opportunities at first.

“If you want to solve some of the underlying problems of the party, this should be a gimme,” he said of pivoting from racial and ethnic identity to class. But, he added, “in the short term, the enormous pressure will be not to do that.”

Indeed, the initial Democratic response to the Supreme Court’s actions was not to elevate economic hardship as a key preference in college admissions. Instead, Democrats seemed focused on striking down other areas of privilege, especially the legacy admission preference given to the children and grandchildren of alumni of elite institutions.

“What we’re fighting for is equal opportunity,” said Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “If they get rid of affirmative action and leave rampant legacy admissions, they’re making merit a slogan, not a reality.”

Republicans saw a political line of attack in the Democratic response to the court’s decision. Even before 1990, when a campaign ad by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina featured white hands crumpling a job rejection to denounce “racial quotas,” Republicans had used affirmative action to their political advantage.

Mr. Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” formulation came after a 1995 speech before California Democrats in which he said of affirmative action programs: “We do have to ask ourselves, ‘Are they all working? Are they all fair? Has there been any kind of reverse discrimination?’”

A June survey by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans disapprove than approve of colleges and universities’ using race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, and that Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters are largely unified in their opposition, while Democratic voters are split.

After Mr. Biden expressed his opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision, the campaign arm of the Senate Republicans issued a statement calling out three vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election in Republican states: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

“Democrats are doubling down on their racist agenda and want to pack the Supreme Court to get their way,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Will Democrats like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown denounce Joe Biden’s support of racial discrimination and state unequivocally that they oppose packing the court?”

The House Republican campaign arm called Democratic outrage “the great limousine liberal meltdown.”

But the Supreme Court has offered Democrats a way forward with many of its decisions — based on class. The affluent will always have access to abortions, by traveling to states where it remains legal, and to elite institutions of higher education, where they may have legacy pull and the means to pay tuition.

Those facing economic struggles are not so privileged. Applicants of color may have lost an edge in admissions, but poor and middle-class students and graduates of all races were dealt a blow when the court declared that the president did not have the authority to unilaterally forgive their student loans.

Representative Marilyn Strickland, Democrat of Washington, said her party now needs to recalibrate away from elite institutions like Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the high court’s case against affirmative action, and “respect all types of education and all types of opportunity,” mentioning union training programs, apprenticeships, trade schools and community colleges.

Mr. Scott agreed. “This is going to cause some heartburn,” he said, “but what we need to campaign on is that we’re opening opportunities for everybody.”

Source: Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

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Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Good overview of some of the issues:

Debbie Douglas was 10 when she came from Grenada to join her parents in Canada.

On her first day of school in 1973, her family had to fight with the principal, who wanted to put her back a year and have her take ESL because she spoke English with a Grenadian accent. In the end, she was allowed to attend Grade 5.

“But by the end of the first week on the playground, I got called the N-word, and it shook me to my core,” Douglas recalls. “And I looked around to see if anybody had heard and nobody said anything … In a school of 500, there were three Black kids and I don’t recall any other kids of colour.”

Despite a degree in economics from York University, her stepfather could only find a job as a financial planner. Her mother, a teacher back home, ended up working in a nursing home. 

But if you were to ask Douglas’s mother what her migration experience has been, Douglas says, she would say Canada has been very good to her family.

“My parents worked hard. We went to school. We now have a middle-class life. It’s a great migration story,” Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, told a forum about Canada’s immigration narrative this past May.

“Great” has never meant “easy” for newcomers arriving in this country. Douglas says the stories of immigrants’ struggles and sacrifice were just often not heard.

Yet Canada has long maintained its status as a destination to which newcomers aspire. The immigration story that’s told has, for decades, been one of perceived success — both from the perspective of those forging new lives here, and from the viewpoint of a country eager to grow.

Today, that national narrative appears to be under new strains that are threatening the social contract between Canada and its newcomers.

Canada’s population has just passed the 40-million mark, and it’s growing thanks to immigration. 

Immigration accounts for almost 100 per cent of the country’s labour-force growth and is projected to account for our entire population growth by 2032.

Governments and employers from coast to coast have been clamouring for more immigrants to fill jobs, expand the economy and revitalize an aging population. The more, the merrier, it seemed, even during economic recession of recent years.

Post-pandemic, Ottawa is set to bring in 465,000 new permanent residents this year, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025 to boost Canada’s economic recovery after COVID.

Amid this push, there have been critiques that immigrants are too often being reduced to numbers — to units meant to balance the equations of our economy. While it is clear our economy needs immigration, what is it that newcomers need of Canada to ensure they can settle and thrive here? Are those needs being met?

Meanwhile, the federal government’s plan to bring in a historic level of immigrants has been met with some reservations domestically, as Canadians struggle with stubbornly high inflation amid global economic uncertainty resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and volatile geopolitics.

There is a sense of scarcity emerging in Canada, despite the country’s seemingly great wealth — whether it manifests in the housing crisis, a strained health-care system, or in the lack of salary increases that keep up to inflation. 

While a national dialogue about Canada’s immigration strategy is overdue, some fear anti-immigrant or xenophobic backlash amid news, op-eds and social-media conversation that ties immigration to the strains already being felt.

One poll by Leger and the Association of Canadian Studies last November found almost half of the 1,537 respondents said they believe the current immigration plan would let in too many immigrants. Three out of four were concerned the levels would strain housing, health and social services.

“Canada is at a crossroads in terms of being able to continue to be a leader in immigration. It’s at a crossroads in its ability to provide the Canadian dream to those who move to the country,” says University of Western Ontario political sociologist Howard Ramos. 

“It’s at a crossroads in terms of the infrastructure that’s needed to support this population, and it’s at a crossroads potentially at having widespread support for immigration.”

How Canada got to 40 million

Canada’s immigration strategy has long been about nation-building to meet both the demographic and economic aspirations of the country.

In 1967, Canada introduced the “points system,” based on criteria such as education achievements and work experience, to select economic immigrants. It was one of a series of measures that have gradually moved the immigration system away from a past draped in racism and discrimination.

The point system shifted a system that favoured European immigrants and instead helped open the door to those from the Global South for permanent residence in this country. The 2021 Census found the share of recent immigrants from Europe continued to decline, falling from 61.6 per cent to just 10 per cent over the past five decades. 

Ottawa had turned the immigration tap on and off depending on the economic conditions, reducing intake during recession, until the late 1980s, when then prime minister Brian Mulroney decided to not only maintain but to increase Canada’s immigration level amid high inflation, high interest rates and high unemployment. 

“There are real people behind those numbers — people with real stories, real hopes and dreams, people who have chosen Canada as their new home,” Mulroney’s immigration minister, Barbara McDougall, said back in 1990 of a five-year plan to welcome more than 1.2 million immigrants.

The plan, too, was met with what today sound like familiar criticisms of the country’s ability to absorb the influx of people.

“We don’t think the federal government is taking its own financial responsibility seriously. The federal government is cutting back. They’re capping programs,” Bob Rae, then Ontario’s NDP premier, commented.

“They’re not transferring dollars to match the real cost, whether it’s training, whether it’s (teaching) English as a second language, whether it’s social services.”

Another big shift under Mulroney’s government was the focus on drafting well-heeled economic and skilled immigrants to Canada, which saw the ratio of permanent residents in family and refugee classes drop significantly from about 65 per cent in the mid-1980s to about 43 per cent in 1990s, and about 40 per cent now.

Mulroney’s measures severed Canada’s immigration intake from the boom-and-bust cycle of the economy. Successive governments have stuck to the same high-immigrant intake, regardless of how good or bad the economy was performing.

It has set Canada apart from other western countries, where immigration issues are often politicized. Coupled with the official multiculturalism policy introduced by the government of Pierre Trudeau in 1971 in response to Quebec’s growing nationalist movement, it has contributed to Canada’s image as a welcoming country to immigrants.

Public support for immigration has remained fairly high and Canada seemed to have fared well despite such economic challenges as the burst of the dot-com bubble from the late 1990s to mid-2000s, the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, and the economic downturn driven by the oil-price slump in the mid-2010s.

Observers, however, note the challenges and circumstances of those economic fluctuations were different than what we see today: there was enough housing stock in the 1990s and the impacts of the crashes in the financial, tech and oil markets since were sectoral, regional and temporary.

Canada’s infrastructure problem

Except in Quebec, which has full control over its newcomer targets and selection, immigration is a federal jurisdiction in Canada, planned in silo from other levels of governments that actually deliver health, education, transportation and other services. Yet the impacts of immigration are felt locally in schools, transits and hospitals. 

A lack of infrastructure investments and the rapid immigration growth have finally caught up with the country’s growth. “We spent decades not s upporting our communities,” says Douglas.

“We were not paying attention to building infrastructure. We were all under-resourcing things like community development and community amenities. We haven’t built adequate affordable housing.

“It’s now become a perfect storm. We have all these people and not enough of what is needed for everybody.”

While the majority of newcomers have historically settled in the big cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, a growing number are moving to smaller cities and towns that in some cases are not ready for the influx. The share of recent immigrants settling in the Big Three dropped from 62.5 per cent in 2011 to 53.4 per cent in 2021, with second-tier cities such as Ottawa-Gatineau, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, London and Halifax seeing significant growth.

“I don’t think it occurred to them that they need to build infrastructure to be able to welcome people in. It’s a lack of planning. It is a lack of funding,” Douglas says.

“We’ve raised these immigration numbers without paying attention to what it means, what it is that we didn’t have. We are already facing a crisis and we are bringing in more people without addressing the crisis.”

Canadian employers are champions for more economic immigrants. Half of employers surveyed told the Business Council of Canada they were in favour of raising the annual immigration targets — provided there are greater investments in the domestic workforce, as well as in child care, housing and public transportation.

Goldy Hyder, the council’s president and CEO, says many of the day-to-day challenges Canadians and immigrants face are in fact driven largely by labour shortages, whether it’s in health care, housing, or restaurants and retail.

Around the world, he says, countries build infrastructure to spur population — and economic — growth, but in Canada, he contends, it’s been vice-versa.

Hyder sees this moment as a crucial one for raising immigration targets and maintaining public support. “We are at a seminal moment in the life of this country, because we’re at a seminal moment in the life of the world right now,” he says.

Hyder says the country’s immigration policy shouldn’t be just about bringing in people, it should be part of a bigger workforce and industrial strategy to ensure skills of all Canadians and immigrants are fully utilized in the economy in order to maintain the public support for immigration.

“We need to plan better. We need to be more strategic in that plan. And we need to work together to do that: federal, provincial, municipal governments, regulatory bodies, professional bodies, business groups,” he says.

“Let’s address the anxieties that Canadians are facing. You don’t sweep them aside or under a rug. We must have honest discourse with Canadians, fact-based about what we’re trying to do to make their lives better.”

The tradeoffs that come with population growth

The case made for increased immigration is often an economic one. That said, research has generally found the economic benefits of immigration are close to neutral. That’s because when it comes to population growth, there are always tradeoffs.

While bringing in a large number of immigrants can spur population growth and drive demand for goods and services, it will also push up prices even as the government is trying to rein in out-of-control costs of living, warn some economists. 

When more workers are available, employers don’t have to compete and can offer lower wages. Further, just adding more people without investing into social and physical infrastructure such as housing and health care is going to strain the society’s resources and be counterproductive, economists say.

“For housing and health care, it takes a long time to catch up with the increased demand,” says Casey Warman, a professor in economics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, whose own family doctor is retiring. (He is now on a wait list seeking a new one, with 130,000 ahead of him.)

One of the main metrics of economic success has traditionally been a country’s overall GDP. Immigration and population growth can fuel the pool of labour and consumers and boost the overall GDP.

But there’s an emerging chorus of economists arguing that there is a better reflection of the standard of living and economic health in a country. That’s GDP per capita — productivity per person. The growth of Canada’s GDP per capita has been quite flat over the recent years, growing marginally from $50,750.48 in 2015 to $52,127.87 last year. Despite the recovery and high inflation amid the pandemic, it’s still below the $52,262.70 recorded in 2018.

Uncertainty about rapidly changing economic conditions, as well as the fast pace of technological adjustments, have also created uncertainty about what skills and labour will be in demand as the country moves forward.

“One big unknown now is how automation and especially AI is going to change the landscape for labour demand in the next five, 10 years … Is it going to decrease demand for labour?” Warman asks. 

How to adapt in the face of this uncertainty, and how immigration should be approached in light of it, is a conversation Canada needs to have, experts say.

Ivey Business School economics Prof. Mike Moffatt says that who Canada is bringing in matters as much as immigration levels, and what’s happening with the economy is nuanced.

Economic, family and humanitarian classes are the three main streams of permanent residents coming to Canada, and each group has different impacts on the economy, generally with those who come as skilled immigrants having the highest earnings and weathering economic downturns best.

The profiles of the incoming immigrants and their ability to integrate into the economy matter, says Moffatt. Bringing in foreign-trained doctors and nurses who can’t get licensed from stringent regulators, for example, won’t help address the health-care crisis.

Still, Moffatt says his critique of Canada’s immigration plan is less about the ambitious targeted numbers than the pace of the increases, as well as the short notice for provinces and cities in planning for the influx.

“Whether it be on education, immigration support programs, labour market programs, all of these things, there’s no time to adjust,” says Moffatt, senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute, a think tank with a stated goal of advancing solutions for a stronger, cleaner economy.

“I do think we can have robust increases in the targets. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, but let the provinces and cities know what you’re doing.

“There’s no collaboration. There’s no co-ordination. They are not working with the provinces and municipalities and the higher-education sector in order to come up with any kind of long-term thinking. It’s very short-term in nature.”

Should Canada cap international students and migrant workers?

Aside from questions about the immigration plan Canada has, there are also questions about the plan it doesn’t have.

The national immigration plan sets targets for the number of permanent residents accepted yearly, but leaves the door wide open for temporary residents. 

That has become a bigger issue over the years as Canada has increasingly shifted to a two-step system to select skilled immigrants who have studied and worked in Canada, bringing in more international students and temporary foreign workers than permanent residents.

According to Statistics Canada, there were close to a million (924,850) temporary residents in Canada in 2021, making up 2.5 per cent of the population.

The majority of them, including asylum-seekers, can legally work here; the remaining 8.7 per cent who don’t have work permits includes visitors such as parents and grandparents with the so-called super visa, who can stay for up to five years.

Temporary residents, who don’t have credit history for loans and mortgages in Canada, are more likely to be renters and public transit users (but eligible for some provincial health care), says Anne Michèle Meggs, who was the Quebec Immigration Ministry’s director of planning and accountability before her 2019 retirement.

“In the past, it wasn’t an issue, because we had a relatively small temporary migrant population, so we managed, even though we took the approach that we just bring them in and we don’t look after what happened to them afterwards,” says Meggs, whose book “Immigration to Quebec: How Can We Do Better” was recently published.

“That’s fine. That population wasn’t out of control. So that’s why we still successfully managed and it didn’t become a crisis.”

However, under tremendous pressure from post-secondary institutions to recruit international students, and from employers to quickly bring in foreign workers, she said the balance has tipped. To not set targets for temporary immigration is to get into trouble, Meggs warns.

“We want people to come and we want people to stay. You want things to be good for everybody, including immigrants and including children. And I think the objective has to be to make sure that everyone gets treated with dignity,” she says.

“Immigrants are not just sources of labour or sources of financing of institutions or spending money to increase our national GDP. These are people. We have to get back to talking about the immigrants and not just immigration.”

Canada ‘cannot afford to allow for polarization’

Canada immigration overall has been a success in terms of forging positive public attitudes toward immigration and the political participation by immigrants, says Andrew Griffith, a retired director general of the federal immigration department.

He feels Canada now has the maturity to have an honest and informed conversation about immigration without the fear of being labelled as racist and xenophobic. The focus of the discussion, he says, should be on Canada’s capacity to ensure a good quality of life for those who are already here and those who will be coming.

“It’s not about keeping the immigrants out. It’s more that if we’re going to do this, we have to do it right,” says Griffith. “We have to make sure we have the right infrastructure, the right housing policies and everything like that.”

Any immigration plan, Griffith says, should go beyond the intake levels but study the potential socio-economic impacts and include inputs from provincial and municipal governments.

Canada has grown to become a country of 40 million, and it has not always been smooth sailing.

But Canadians have worked hard to make immigration work for everyone and the success has come down to how the growth has been managed and how the public support for immigration has been maintained.

“We cannot afford to allow for polarization, populism and xenophobia to kick in here because it’s a very slippery slope,” says Hyder, whose family arrived in Calgary from India in 1974 when he was seven. “Other countries have seen it. It can go downhill very fast.

“Immigration is part of the arteries of our soul. It is who we are as a people.”

Source: Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

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Happy Canada Day!

2023/07/01 Leave a comment

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