Democrats press McCarthy, Jeffries to save key naturalization grant – Yahoo News

2023/09/09 Leave a comment

Meanwhile, in Canada, few if any settlement funding goes to citizenship preparation:

A group of Democrats is appealing to party leaders in the House to restore funding to a grant program that helps immigrants prepare for naturalization.

In a letter led by Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), 26 members called on Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to support funding for the Citizenship and Integration Grant Program (CIGP).

The program is a relatively tiny fraction of the Department of Homeland Security budget: It has awarded $132 million in grants since 2009.

But the lawmakers say its effects are substantial.

Through 579 competitive grants over that time, the program “has helped more than 300,000 lawful permanent residents prepare for U.S. citizenship,” they wrote.

Still, they noted, that number represents a fraction of a percent of the estimated 9 million permanent residents eligible to naturalize.

A key target population for grants under the program is immigrants who are poorer and who lack English skills; 32 percent of eligible immigrants targeted by the program have income below 150 percent of the poverty line and about 3 million “speak little to no English.”

“By providing increased assistance through the Grant Program, this eligible population could have greater access to naturalization and English-language classes,” wrote the lawmakers.

Yet all funding for the grant, originally proposed at $10 million for fiscal 2024, was scrapped entirely in the House Appropriations Committee in June.

On the Senate side, the Homeland Security Appropriations bill cleared the committee with $23.5 million for the CIGP.

Gomez, who has pushed to increase funding for the program, last month sent a dear colleague letter to Democrats and Republicans, asking them to join his appeal.

Though only Democrats answered, the co-signers include representatives from nearly every region of the country.

In their letter, the lawmakers made the case that more funding is required to support immigrants who wish to naturalize and who don’t live in cities with high immigrant concentrations.

“… [W]hile [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)] reviewed and supported funding for only 66 organizations nationwide, recipient organizations served both traditional immigrant population centers and emerging immigrant population centers in only 35 states, out of 50 states and several territories,” they wrote.

“Increasing funding for the CIGP will both support immigrant-serving institutions, as well as increase the capacity for additional qualified legal service providers to assist with the naturalization application and process.”

That increased capacity, the lawmakers added, would ease pressure on the overburdened USCIS, “by reducing filing errors, likely contributing to the agency-wide effort towards reducing casework backlogs and improving processing times.”

Source: Democrats press McCarthy, Jeffries to save key naturalization grant – Yahoo News

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John Ivison: Canada’s UN envoy warns of a North American migrant crisis unlike any other

2023/09/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Bob Rae has seen more than his fair share of distressing scenes as Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar, advising the Trudeau government on the Rohingya crisis.

But he said his visit to Panama’s Darién Gap in late August, to bear witness to the irregular migration crisis unfolding in one of the world’s least accessible places, was particularly heartbreaking.

Darién has become a funnel point for a great migration that is turning into a humanitarian crisis, as hundreds of thousands of people brave raging rivers, robberies, sexual assaults and venomous snakes to try to make their way north toward the United States.

Rae said the increasing number of children and single mothers making the dangerous trek is especially concerning.

Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations was flown into the remote jungle area at the invitation of the Panamanian government to observe the torrent of distressed humanity crossing by foot and small boat from South America to Central America.

Rae said 4,000 people arrived in Panamanian reception areas last Monday. “The numbers have really skyrocketed,” the former Ontario premier said.

In 2019, just 24,000 people made the perilous 100-kilometre jungle crossing, which can take up to 10 days. The flow rose to 250,000 last year, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, and it expects that this year numbers will rise to 600,000.

To put that in context, just 180,686 irregular migrants arrived in the European Union last year from Africa and Asia.

There are no roads in the region, so irregular migrants either walk across the border from Colombia or hire Indigenous locals to take them in small boats.

Venezuelans and Ecuadorians make up the bulk of migrants, pushed by rising food insecurity, political instability and gang activity.

But Rae said he was shocked to find that there were also people from China, Afghanistan, Syria and Azerbaijan. “It’s become a global industry telling people how to get on El Camino (the northward route) and go all the way up to the U.S. and Canada,” he said. “(Traffickers) feed them misleading information. The countries in the region are only starting to co-operate to find out what is driving this. It’s quite extraordinary.”

He said he talked to a man from Fujian province on China’s southeastern coast who had flown with around 10 others to Quito in Ecuador. “I asked him what he was doing and, through the translator, he said he tried to get in through Mexico, that there is no work in China at the moment and that he wants a better future for his family in the U.S. or Canada,” Rae said.

Social media is full of accounts that suggest the Darién Gap can be crossed easily in a day. The reality is quite different. “It’s very dangerous, the rivers are very fast-flowing and people are dying on the route,” Rae said. The very remoteness of the crossing means there are no reliable records of how many have perished on the way.

A published interview by a worker from the UN’s International Organization for Migration with a recent arrival in Panama detailed a typical journey.

Gabriela left Ecuador with her 15-year-old son, hoping to get to the U.S., having watched a video that said Darién could be crossed in a day.

Ecuador has been plagued by chronic political instability and spiralling crime rates — homicides have quadrupled in two years.

Gabriela said she took the decision to leave to provide for a younger son who has special needs. But she said found herself lost in the mountainous jungle and swampland after losing contact with the group she was travelling with. She was rescued and said she would never do it again. But crossing the Darién Gap is just the beginning. Migrants are attempting to fulfill their American dream, despite being warned that travellers who arrive irregularly in the U.S. will be returned to their country of origin.

Rae said the Panamanians have been keen to move new arrivals to the Costa Rican border, providing buses that have carried over 200,000 people toward their northern neighbour.

Costa Rica has declared a state of emergency along its southern border, as its ability to cope with sanitation and health issues has been swamped.

In the town of Paso Canoas, which straddles the Costa Rican-Panamanian border, makeshift refugee camps have grown up, overwhelming the local community.

Those with US$30 for the bus fare can head north on the Inter-American Highway to Nicaragua.

The rest are stranded in a garbage-strewn camp with only half a dozen bathrooms. There is little in the way of food or shelter. Migrants endure 30-degree heat and daily downpours. The Red Cross is present, providing rudimentary first aid for people with stomach complaints from drinking untreated water on the journey, according to local media accounts.

In April, Colombia, Panama and the U.S. held a trilateral meeting to discuss joint efforts to meet the emerging crisis, including combatting human-smuggling networks and expanding lawful pathways for Colombians, such as temporary work visas.

The continuing flow of migrants, and Panama’s public comments, suggest those efforts have been in vain.

Panama is set to launch a publicity campaign: “Darién is a jungle, not a road” to discourage would-be travellers.

Panamanian officials complain that Colombia continues to “indiscriminately” send migrants their way. Rae said the crisis is increasing tensions in the region.

In August, Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chavez met his American counterpart, Joe Biden, in the White House to discuss legal pathways for some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have arrived in his country to move onward to the U.S.

Rae said one of the things Canada can do is to bring together countries in the region to deal with what is an increasingly serious humanitarian situation.

“It’s not about pointing fingers at each other. We have to work together,” he said.

“Obviously along the route, we donate to the Red Cross and others who are helping, but we have to encourage everyone to create a policy that will deal with this together. Each government on their own gets desperate — the Panamanians were talking last week about closing the border. Well, it’s not physically possible to close the border. But there’s a lot of agitation and people are getting angry.”

Source: John Ivison: Canada’s UN envoy warns of a North American migrant crisis unlike any other

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Rioux: L’abaya, un vêtement comme les autres?

2023/09/09 Leave a comment

Le Devoir Paris correspondant on the French abaya ban (consistent in his support for dress restrictions):

Lundi, c’était jour de rentrée scolaire en France. Mais ce n’était pas une rentrée ordinaire. Dans une grande partie des collèges de France, on était littéralement sur les nerfs. Comment cela allait-il se passer ? Comment réagiraient les élèves ? Les parents viendraient-ils protester devant les grilles ? Bref, on craignait le pire.

C’est qu’une semaine plus tôt, le tout nouveau ministre de l’Éducation nationale, Gabriel Attal, avait décrété l’interdiction du port de l’abaya en classe. L’abaya est cette tunique traditionnelle musulmane que portent un nombre croissant de jeunes d’origine maghrébine afin de dissimuler leur corps. Tout juste nommé, à une semaine de la rentrée scolaire, le jeune ministre de 34 ans a décrété que ce vêtement distinctif identifié à la culture arabo-musulmane n’avait « pas sa place à l’école ». Le message était clair. On ne se présente pas devant un professeur en revendiquant sa religion.

Cela faisait des mois que, partout en France, enseignants et directeurs d’établissements réclamaient une intervention du ministre. Laissées à elles-mêmes, les directions étaient aux prises depuis plus d’un an avec des campagnes islamistes sur les réseaux sociaux incitant ouvertement les jeunes musulmanes à contourner la loi qui, depuis 2004, interdit aux élèves le port de tout signe religieux ostensible. Pas surprenant qu’en deux ans, le nombre d’incidents scolaires portant atteinte à la laïcité ait plus que doublé.

Or, quoi de plus ostensible que cet accoutrement patriarcal destiné à dissimuler tout le corps ? Dans sa déclaration, il aura suffi d’une seule phrase à Gabriel Attal pour clarifier le débat. « Lorsque vous entrez dans une classe, vous ne devez pas être capables d’identifier la religion des élèves », a-t-il tranché.

Les associations musulmanes eurent beau prétendre qu’il s’agissait d’une simple tenue traditionnelle sans la moindre connotation religieuse, il est clairement apparu dans le débat que l’abaya était aussi musulmane que la ceinture fléchée est québécoise. D’abord, rien de plus difficile dans la civilisation musulmane que de distinguer clairement ce qui relève de la culture de ce qui est proprement religieux. Comme l’a brillamment expliqué le philosophe Rémi Brague dans son essai magistral Sur l’islam (Gallimard) publié l’an dernier, contrairement à la chrétienté, l’islam est ce qu’il appelle « une religion intégrale » où « tout est culte » puisqu’il intègre un code juridique et définit les moeurs des bons musulmans.

Comme l’expliquait la spécialiste de l’islamisme Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, il n’existe pas de vêtements qui seraient par essence religieux, seulement « un habit qui permet de se conformer à une norme religieuse, celle qui d’après les rigoristes considère que la femme ne doit pas montrer les formes de son corps ». Comme le voile en 2004, ce rôle revient aujourd’hui à l’abaya. Il suffit de consulter les publicités sur Internet pour voir combien les marchands de guenilles le considèrent comme un prolongement du voile permettant de rompre avec la tradition laïque de l’école française.

Une tradition plus que centenaire que les Français ne semblent pas prêts à renier. Soutenue par 81 % des Français, l’interdiction de l’abaya fait l’objet d’un consensus encore plus fort que celui observé en 2004 sur la loi interdisant les signes religieux à l’école. Même les jeunes ayant entre 18 et 24 ans, que l’on dit pourtant multiculturalistes, se rangent à 63 % derrière la décision de Gabriel Attal. Ce consensus s’étend à toutes les familles politiques sans exception, mettant d’ailleurs en porte-à-faux la majorité de la gauche française avec ses électeurs. Ainsi, 58 % des partisans de La France insoumise (LFI) approuvent la décision du ministre alors même que son leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fait un virage électoraliste à 180 degrés sur le sujet, dénonçant « une mesure dangereuse et cruelle ».

Certaines féministes ont aussi de graves questions à se poser. Alors que l’écologiste radicale Sandrine Rousseau dénonce une « machine de broyage » des adolescentes, le caractère religieux de l’abaya ne fait aucun doute pour 74 % des Françaises qui se disent féministes. Rarement un événement aura illustré de manière aussi évidente le cul-de-sac dans lequel s’est engagée depuis plusieurs années une grande partie de la gauche en se ralliant aux thèses du multiculturalisme et en ne craignant pas de s’allier aux musulmans les plus obscurantistes.

Lundi, comme en 2004, après moult explications de la part des proviseurs, à peine quelques dizaines de jeunes filles ont dû être renvoyées chez elles. Les autres se sont facilement conformées à la règle. Le cours normal de l’école a ainsi pu reprendre. Cela démontre que, pour peu que l’on fasse respecter les lois et la tradition laïque de l’école, l’immense majorité des élèves musulmans se conformeront aux traditions et règles de vie de leur pays d’accueil. Ils n’attendent qu’une chose, qu’on le leur dise !

Pour tous les Québécois que l’on stigmatise en permanence pour avoir simplement osé exiger des enseignants qu’ils se gardent d’exprimer par la parole ou le vêtement leurs convictions religieuses à l’école, le message est on ne peut plus clair : pour être respecté, encore faut-il se tenir debout.

Source: L’abaya, un vêtement comme les autres?

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Paul: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Good column:

Elitism is a frequent target of criticism, especially in politics. Historically, Americans haven’t liked elitists. They don’t appreciate the hoity-toity who look down on everyone else.

These days that disdain emanates most vocally from the populist right. To these self-described down-to-earth folk without airs or fancy talk, “the elite” is shorthand for those who are more educated and have more power, especially cultural power, code for people they don’t agree with and resent.

But the left also has a beef with elitism. To those concerned with social inequity, “the elite” symbolize a flawed meritocracy. In their view, certain demographic groups get elevated over others and bar access to those historically deprived of power, especially political and economic power.

Whatever their respective merits, both critiques are hard not to read as variations on “I want what you have.” The word “elite,” after all, signifies something people aspire to. We admire elite athletes. We rely on elite research institutions to make medical advances. Most people wish they too could sit in first class. Until then, they hotly resent whoever does.

A more sophisticated and productive critique of elites comes from Fredrik deBoer, known to those who read his popular newsletter as Freddie. DeBoer, a Marxist, activist and the author of the book “The Cult of Smart,” is one of the sharpest and funniest writers on the internet. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s always thoughtful and he pushes me to think. I hope his new book, “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” will be read especially by those on the left, because the left is where his heart lies and the failings of the left seem to break his heart most. In this, he and I are fully aligned.

“It’s OK to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your own side,” he writes. “You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.” As deBoer points out, it’s far better for those of us on the left to clean up our own mess than to hand it over to conservatives as easy fodder for mockery. To that end, he scrutinizes the self-interests of the nonprofit industry, the “elite capture” of the Black Lives Matter movement, the neglect of class as a primary category of political thought and other failures and shortcomings among progressive movers.

What drives deBoer’s argument here is the idea that on the left, elites are undermining progress for the average Joe. Worse, they’re doing it in the name of progress. It’s time, he says, to forcefully question exactly what elites on the left claim is best for everyone else, especially when evidence suggests otherwise.

One of the bravest chapters in his new book examines the elitism of the defund the police movement, which, deBoer argues, hurts the cause of racial justice. Research shows more policing has reduced homicides, which disproportionately affect Black Americans. Black Americans are about 13 percent of the population but make up more than half of homicide victims. As deBoer explains, “police abolition and incremental efforts to reduce policing could easily result in more hardship for the very community that we’re ostensibly fighting for.”

In deBoer’s view, this misplaced enthusiasm for police abolition is largely a result of the economic and cultural gulf between elite activists of all races and the vast majority of Black Americans. What’s easy for radical activists and academics to write on a placard turns out to be hard for many Black Americans to actually live with. Taking police off the streets may minimize the possibility of police violence against Black people, but it will do little to mitigate the far greater problem of all other violence against Black people.

Many Black people, particularly outside of elite circles, are all too aware of this. As deBoer notes, “significant majorities of Black Americans want not less policing but better policing.” In 2022, Black Democrats were twice as likely as white Democrats to say reducing crime should be a top priority. A 2021 survey found that white liberals were more inclined than Black Americans to support defunding the police: “71 percent of white liberals say they would support reducing police budgets and shifting funding to social services,” compared with 53 percent of Black Americans; a significant 44 percent of Black people oppose it altogether.

Yet for many on the left, to point out these facts is considered sacrilege, somehow racist and essentially tantamount to serving the enemy. Many white progressives are so terrified of being labeled “racist” themselves that they prioritize self-protection and fear of their critics over helping out the very people they profess to want to help — people they may not understand well at all.

For deBoer, police violence and other problems of social justice require action from people of all races and ethnicities, rather than heeding the empty diktats of elite discourse. “I feel strongly that there must be a way — there must be a way — to take police violence against Black people immensely seriously and to fight for major police reform,” he writes, “while acknowledging that crimes and violence committed against Black people by those other than police are far more common.”

Last month I met deBoer for lunch near where he lives in Connecticut. He talked a lot about the class disparities of the state, which contains many of the wealthiest pockets in the nation alongside extreme poverty. He sees himself writing in the tradition of leftist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawm, Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty and Adolph Reed. It seems to pain him that the left so often shoots itself in the foot.

When I asked why he wrote this book, he said, “I really do believe that we live in a country and a culture with deeply entrenched racial inequality, and all decent people have a duty to try to confront that inequality.” However, he emphasized, it’s not only something we have a moral duty to do — we also have a moral duty to do it well. The number of people who genuinely thought there was a chance of police abolition was very small, he told me. “But by making that a centerpiece of their demands, it allowed them to say afterward, ‘Look at how awful things are now, we didn’t go far enough.’”

It’s a way for the left, deBoer explained, to look like “a beautiful failure.”

DeBoer doesn’t consider himself an optimist, but he nonetheless doesn’t want to concede that kind of defeat. The left, he told me, needs to return to the “up from below” approach of the socialist politician Eugene Debs: It needs to invest in real change for those in need rather than heed elite rhetoric. To my ears, all this does sound quite optimistic, considering the polarized discourse and politics of 2023, where shouty or performative extremism often gets in the way of duller and more difficult action. But as deBoer says, a bottom-up approach may be the best, or only, option for meaningful social progress.

Source: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

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Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

2023/09/08 1 Comment

Ignored then and no sign yet of meaningful action today:

North America’s foreign-student system is no longer a humanitarian endeavour to lift up the planet’s best and brightest, and support the developing world.

Instead, it’s become a commercial competition full of marketing rhetoric, which is creating chaos in higher education.

That’s what the West’s leading experts in international education told me 10 years ago.

They were describing how governments and post-secondary institutions were adopting an increasingly cynical attitude toward foreign students.

Philip Altbach, Hanneke Teekens and Jane Knight were ahead of their time in lamenting how international education was turning into a “cash cow” for public and private universities and colleges in the U.S. and especially Canada, where there are at least eight times more per capita than in the U.S.

While the concept of international education continues to have upsides, it’s now becoming obvious to many in Canada that the foreign-student system is creating hard times, especially for students from abroad. Even the Liberal government, long in denial, is starting to admit it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government acknowledges it has pumped up the number of foreign students in Canada to, officially, 900,000. That compares to 225,000 in 2013. And experts say Ottawa’s number is a serious undercount.

The Liberals are still not necessarily admitting the obvious: That governments and post-secondary institutions are addicted to foreign-student spending and fees, which are four times higher than those of domestic students. Ten years ago, foreign students brought $8 billion into Canada, now Ottawa estimates it’s up to $30 billion.

The main problem, however, that has suddenly drawn more attention to foreign students is the out-of-control cost of housing, particularly renting.

International students, say housing analysts, are hiking competition for places to live. The average rent for a one-bedroom in Canada has jumped to a worrying $1,800, according to Rentals.ca. Vancouver is the most extreme in the country, at a devastating average of $3,013. A one-bedroom in Toronto is $2,592.

Foreign students are an expanding factor in such expensive housing — and it’s hurting the study visa holders themselves, who, according to both social media and the mainstream media, are increasingly feeling taken advantage of.

Even Canada’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, last month used the word exploited. And he finally admitted universities and colleges are bringing in far more students than they could possibly provide housing for.

That was before Benjamin Tal, chief economist for the CIBC Capital Markets, told Liberal cabinet ministers the government is dangerously undercounting the number of temporary residents, particularly foreign students, in Canada.

While the government, and Statistics Canada, state there are more than one million non-permanent residents in Canada, Tal’s calculations show there are at least one million more missing from the count. “Housing demand is stronger than what official numbers are telling you and that’s why we’re approaching a zero vacancy rate.”

The government’s calculations, Tal said, have ignored that many foreign workers and students don’t leave the country when their visas expire. They stay on in hopes of applying to become immigrants. Census methods for surveying foreign students, he added, are misleading.

Giacomo Ladas of Rentals.ca says, “International students do add pressure to the rental market,” even while he emphasized it’s not their fault.

“There’s such a supply and demand issue in the rental market right now and they add to this imbalance. The study permits for international students have increased by 75 per cent in the last five years. So, that’s a huge influx of people coming in and nowhere to put them.”

Delegates at a recent Union of B.C. Municipalities’ housing summit heard how rapidly foreign students and other non-permanent residents are adding to demand for housing.

The number of non-permanent residents and newcomers to Metro Vancouver has in five years almost doubled, delegates were told. Foreign students and other recent arrivals own eight per cent of all homes in Metro Vancouver, and account for 25 per cent of renters.

Canada’s housing minister received a lot of media attention in August when he responded to a reporter’s direct question by saying he wouldn’t rule out a cap on international students.

But since then both he and Immigration Minister Marc Miller have backtracked, and Trudeau has warned not to “blame” foreign students.

Miller admitted Canada’s “very lucrative” foreign student system “comes with some perverse effects, some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen to be a backdoor entry into Canada.”

Whatever the Liberal cabinet is starting to admit in the past month, however, the public would be naive to expect any real reforms.

In addition to anxiety over the housing crisis, many economists also worry international students are being taken advantage of by employers to keep wages down. An earlier StatCan study showed up to one out of three foreign students aren’t attending school.

While some representatives of universities and college, especially private ones, are trying to shut down debate by accusing critics of blaming study visa holders for high housing costs and low wages, the reality is those raising concerns can be seen as standing up for people on study visas.

Many people are aware of a high suicide rate among international students, including alarms raised by funeral homes. The largest cohort of foreign students, by far, now comes from India, and it is often South Asian voices in Canada who are pointing to their victimization, including employer abuse and sexual harassment by landlords.

And Vancouver immigration lawyers such as Richard Kurland and George Lee add the federal government’s decision to allow unlimited international students is setting up many for future immigration disappointment.

Canada is building far too big a pool of people who will be highly qualified for permanent resident status, they say. Not everyone can win the immigration points-system competition, which has an annual cutoff.

The trouble is a lot of vested interests are eager for the foreign-student gravy train to keep chugging along, regardless of the unintended suffering it causes — including for students desperate for a place to live.

Source: Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

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UN envoy links temporary foreign worker program to ‘contemporary forms of slavery’

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Of note. Wonder how Canada compares to other Western countries, let alone the workers in Gulf countries:

A United Nations official on Wednesday denounced Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Tomoya Obokata, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, made the comments in Ottawa after spending 14 days in Canada.

“I am disturbed by the fact that many migrant workers are exploited and abused in this country,” he said.

Source: UN envoy links temporary foreign worker program to ‘contemporary forms of slavery’

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Antisemitic Comments by Palestinian Leader Cause Uproar

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Sigh….

Video has emerged of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, recently asserting that European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he said were their predatory lending practices, rather than their religion.

Mr. Abbas’s false claim drew swift condemnation from Israeli and European officials. It also fueled accusations that Mr. Abbas — an architect of interim peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s — is not genuinely committed to resolving the ongoing conflict.

In a speech late last month, Mr. Abbas said: “They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews.”

“No,” Mr. Abbas added. Jews were persecuted, he continued, because of “their social role, which had to do with usury, money, and so on.”

Mr. Abbas also repeated a widely discredited theory that European, or Ashkenazi, Jews have no ancient roots in the Middle East. Instead, Mr. Abbas claimed that European Jews were the descendants of a nomadic Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism during the medieval period, and therefore were not victims of antisemitism.

“When we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism — the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites,” Mr. Abbas said.

Mr. Abbas’s comments were broadcast live on Palestinian television two weeks ago, in a speech to members of his secular political party, Fatah,

The remarks were brought to a wider audience on Wednesday, when the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based monitoring group that mainly translates extremist comments by Arab and Iranian leaders, distributed a subtitled version of Mr. Abbas’s speech.

Mr. Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that has administered parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the 1990s, when the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships signed interim peace accords.

His comments illustrated why he has developed a checkered reputation among Israeli and Western partners. Mr. Abbas was one of the chief negotiators in the peace process, and often is credited with helping to reduce tensions following a wave of violence in the 2000s. At times, he has also described the Holocaust as a crime against humanity.

But Mr. Abbas also has a long history of antisemitic remarks. He made similar comments in 2018 about usury and Ashkenazi Jews, and last year he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

In 1984 he published a book in which he condemned the Holocaust but also cited historians who disputed the widely accepted death toll of as many as six million Jews.

“This is the true face of Palestinian ‘leadership,’” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, wrote on social media in response to Mr. Abbas’s latest speech.

“It is no wonder that mere hours ago a Palestinian teenage terrorist hacked innocent Israelis with a meat cleaver,” Mr. Erdan added, referring to an attack on Wednesday in the Old City of Jerusalem that wounded at least two people.

The European Union said in a statement that Mr. Abbas’s “historical distortions are inflammatory, deeply offensive, can only serve to exacerbate tensions in the region and serve no-one’s interests.”

The statement added: “They play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated for.”

Source: Antisemitic Comments by Palestinian Leader Cause Uproar

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‘Impossible situation’: Ottawa’s lengthy delays in processing citizenship for adopted kids has parents scrambling

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Unfortunate yet another example of IRCC delays:

Backlogs within Canada’s immigration bureaucracy are creating what one observer calls an “impossible situation” for families adopting children from outside of the country, with processing delays now far outlasting their children’s visas and rendering the kids ineligible for provincial health coverage.

Last weekend, Greg Hanniman and wife Marli Nicol arrived home from Bulgaria with their newly adopted two-year-old son Aleksandar, at the end of a long and expensive process for the Arnprior, Ont. family.

While Aleksandar is adjusting well to his new home and family, Hanniman says they’re now dealing with maddening uncertainty as they wait for bureaucracy at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to even begin processing Aleksandar’s application for citizenship.

Children adopted overseas are usually granted a six-month temporary residence permit, essentially a tourist visa, upon entering Canada. That used to be sufficient to allow IRCC to finish processing their citizenship applications. But delays for processing citizenship for adopted kids are now running close to two years, well past the expiry of temporary visas. That is leaving parents scrambling to get extensions and the children ineligible for basic social programs.

“The major concern we have now obviously is health care,” said Hanniman, a Canadian Armed Forces combat veteran who now works in the computer industry.

The couple began looking into adoption in 2019 and, after meeting Aleksandar in Bulgaria earlier this year and falling in love with him, they submitted their paperwork to IRCC in March.

“It’s clear that he will be granted his citizenship, there’s really no reason why he won’t, but now we have to wait years for the bureaucracy to sort itself out.”

Pavel Georgiev, intercountry adoption co-ordinator with Toronto-based Loving Heart International Adoption Agency, said adopting from out of country entails a two-step process to obtain Canadian citizenship for the child.

In the past, IRCC’s turnaround times for the first part’s approval — where the parents notify where they’re adopting from and demonstrate they are both citizens —  was well within the six-month tourist-visa window, Georgiev said. But these approvals are now taking upwards of 20 months. And families are being placed in the position of their newly adopted children overstaying their visas.

“Throughout my 10-plus years of experience in the field of intercountry adoption, this is by far the longest waiting times we’ve seen,” Georgiev said.

“It’s a bit of an impossible situation for adoptive parents.”

Upon landing in Montreal on August 27, Hanniman said he managed to convince immigration officers to grant Aleksandar a two-year visitor record instead of the standard six-month visitor visa. Taking Aleksander back to Bulgaria after a visitor visa expires in six months would have been a non-starter, Hanniman said. And he wasn’t ready to wait nearly two years to bring their son home while IRCC processes his citizenship application

While the extended residency permit has solved most of the family’s short-term problems, it still leaves Aleksandar ineligible for Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) coverage until his paperwork makes its way through IRCC.

“We have his doctor appointment Tuesday and a dentist on Thursday, but once again, without OHIP, it’s going to be all coming out-of-pocket,” Hanniman said.

When he recently called IRCC to find out the next steps, he said the phone agent told him the government wouldn’t even begin to look at the file until 19 months had passed.

Parents have so far dealt with the uncertainty either by persistently hounding IRCC or their local MP to speed up the approvals, Georgiev said. But he said these are not acceptable solutions.

“Many children who are adopted through intercountry adoption will want to take the child to have a complete assessment by their family doctor,” Georgiev said. But without health coverage, parents are left to pay the medical costs.

Hanniman said he isn’t looking forward to dealing with IRCC when it finally gets around to processing Aleksandar’s paperwork.

“They were not helpful in the slightest,” he said. “They didn’t even try to help.”

IRCC spokesperson Mary Rose Sabater said that IRCC “understands the emotional and financial hardship” experienced in these situations.

She said the two-step process “may take up to six to eight months from start to finish. Depending on the child’s country of origin, it is not unusual for the process to last for two years or even longer.”

Enacting separate adoption-specific immigration streams could help alleviate backlogs, Georgiev said. Once IRCC receives confirmation that an adoption has actually been completed, he said, the government could expedite the paperwork.

“If there were a standardized process through which, once notified and shown documentation that an adoption has been finalized they expedite their review of the part one application and issuance of the approval, that would entirely resolve this problem,” he said.

Processing delays and red tape have become a common complaint for those dealing with Canada’s immigration bureaucracy.

International invitees and delegates, mostly from Africa and southeast Asia, scheduled to attend last year’s Collision technology conference in Toronto were left in the dark after backlogs left them without visas.

Similar processing delays prevented hundreds of African researchers and advocates from attending last year’s International AIDS conference in Montreal, despite many applying months in advance.

Source: ‘Impossible situation’: Ottawa’s lengthy delays in processing citizenship for adopted kids has parents scrambling

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Integration – General Deck 2022 data

2023/09/07 Leave a comment

This is an updated version of my earlier deck with 2022 numbers across immigration, citizenship, settlement and multiculturalism, OECD integration indicators and polling data. The narrative has also been updated to reflect the ongoing shift to two-step immigration, and arguably a shift from an immigration-based country to a migration-based country.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration, Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Missing million temporary residents in figures casts doubt on how many have jobs: report 

2023/09/07 Leave a comment

Good analysis by Mikal Skuterud along with policy implications:

A discrepancy of around a million temporary residents between official figures from two federal bodies is leaving Canada in the dark about how many of those residents actually have jobs, an economist is warning.

Mikal Skuterud, a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, also says Statistics Canada may be dramatically undercounting the number of temporary residents, including international students and temporary foreign workers, employed in Canada. He describes the findings in a report to be published later this week by the C.D. Howe Institute.

The report notes that Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey – which is used to set Canada’s unemployment rate – suggests there were 503,079 temporary residents with jobs in Canada in December last year.

But Mr. Skuterud says information from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the federal department that issues work permits and study visas to foreign nationals, suggests there were 1,585,664 temporary residents with jobs at that time.

“The problem is that the margin of the difference has become so large, now exceeding one million workers, that labour market analysts are increasingly in the dark,” Mr. Skuterud says in a summary of the report.

He told The Globe and Mail that he believes the true number probably falls somewhere between the survey figures and the IRCC numbers.

“I want to know the truth,” he said. “What’s the true number here? The reality is that nobody knows what the truth is – nobody. And that’s a problem.”

The report says undercounting of temporary residents in labour force figures could have a serious impact on planning to alleviate labour shortages, and could also affect wages.

Mr. Skuterud said accurately assessing the contribution of temporary residents in alleviating labour shortages is crucial for policy-makers.

“As this population continues to surge, the significance of this measurement issue is critical,” he added.

The report, Canada’s Missing Workers: Temporary Residents Working in Canada, says there has been a large increase in the number of temporary residents working in Canada since 2006. Since then, the report says, the discrepancy between the IRCC and Statistics Canada figures has widened.

Mr. Skuterud’s analysis found that Statistics Canada’s labour market survey suggests an increase of 391,600 temporary residents with jobs from 2006 to December, 2022.

But IRCC data – which include information on international students permitted to work, as well as temporary residents in the temporary foreign worker program and the international mobility program – suggest an increase of 1,330,404 over the same period, the report says.

The report does not account for undocumented people working illegally in Canada.

“Since the inflow of temporary residents shows no signs of slowing, it is imperative and urgent that Statistics Canada and IRCC revise their data collection to obtain better estimates of employment in the temporary resident population,” the report concludes.

Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC Capital Markets, cautioned federal ministers at their August cabinet retreat that there may be around one million more temporary residents living in Canada than government estimates suggest. He reiterated this in a report, published last week.

Melissa Gammage, a spokesperson for Statistics Canada, said in a statement last week that the agency’s statistics on non-permanent residents “are accurate, produced using robust mechanisms and in collaboration with many stakeholders.”

But she said the agency constantly reviews its methodology, and that starting on Sept. 27 it will publish new data tables on non-permanent residents “computed using a revised methodology and going back to 2021.”

The new tables will include new details on non-permanent residents, “such as their estimated numbers and permit types, as well as other methodological improvements,” Ms. Gammage said.

Mr. Skuterud said it is if unclear if this new methodology will include better estimates of employment in the temporary resident population.

The Labour Force Survey samples around 60,000 Canadian households every month and identifies the work activities of people 15 and older. It has lower response rates in certain subpopulations, which may lead to a downward bias in its estimates, Mr. Skuterud’s report says.

The report says there are also serious questions about the accuracy of the IRCC figures, which it says may have an “upward bias.” This could have partly to do with the fact that holders of valid work permits and study permits are not always employed for the entire time their papers are valid. And some temporary residents might hold both types of permits, potentially leading to double counting.

“Unfortunately, with available data sources, it is impossible to determine the magnitude of the upward bias in the estimates based on the administrative data from IRCC,” the report says.

Source: Missing million temporary residents in figures casts doubt on how many have jobs: report

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