Regg Cohn: Blame Doug Ford for turning a blind eye to student immigration abuses

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Reminder of the Ontario government’s role in exacerbating the problems:

….

There’s plenty of blame to go around — federal and provincial, Liberal and Tory, public and private, educators and entrepreneurs.

What makes Poilievre’s public musings so amusing — or laughably unserious — is his political gamesmanship about all those gaming the system. The Conservative leader stressed that visa seekers “are not to blame for (Miller)’s incompetence.”

By posing so earnestly as a protector of foreigners, Poilievre is being too clever by half. While some innocent foreigners might be misled by middlemen, many other migrants know precisely what they’re up to by leveraging student visas to get a job, not an education.

Let’s not insult the intelligence of voters or visa holders about motives. Any approval process based on rules and regulations is open to manipulation — not least an immigration, accreditation and visa system anchored in an overcomplicated federal-provincial framework of overlapping jurisdictions where people fall through the cracks (and seek cover).

Post-pandemic, all that pent-up demand for catch-up visas led everyone to lower their guard, not least the previous immigration minister, Sean Fraser. As his successor, Miller repurposed the term “puppy mills” to describe the fly-by-night immigration and education workers that operate “on top of a massage parlour.”

Henceforth, each province will be assigned work permits in proportion to its population. Ontario will be especially hard hit, as it already fills 51 per cent of them with less than 39 per cent of the population.

The problem has been a long time in the making, but the Ford government had eyes only for traditional puppy mills — the ones that breed puppies — when it announced a crackdown last month: The Preventing Unethical Puppy Sales Act, or PUPS Act, will impose a minimum fine of $10,000 for breeders in the business of abusing animals when it is debated in the legislature next month.

But there’s been no similar alarm or alacrity so far from Ford’s Tories when it comes to outfits that exploit foreigners and dupe our own governments.

While Quebec and B.C. have gotten out ahead of the student visa issue, Ontario allowed problems to fester. On Ford’s watch, an entire industry has arisen — an education-immigration complex akin to the old military-industrial complex that raised alarm bells in America decades ago.

There was easy money — lots of it — to be made off of affluent foreign students, and Canadian universities or colleges understandably wanted a piece of the action. But you can have too much of a good thing when a surge of overseas students overwhelms classrooms, campuses, communities, housing and job markets.

A few universities and most colleges got greedy — counting on high-fee foreign students for one-third or even one-half of their tuition revenues. Meanwhile, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government got stingy.

Five years ago, Ford’s Tories announced a 10 per cent cut in tuition for domestic students, and have kept them in the deep freeze ever since, while keeping overall subsidies unchanged even as more local students showed up in class. No wonder so many public colleges responded to those foregone revenues by counting on foreign students to make up the difference — leaving them vulnerable to precisely the kind of crackdown coming from Ottawa.

…We set targets, see trends, change course and plug the gaps. This is a country that will always need immigrants, always look after refugees, always benefit from foreign students, always need to learn from its mistakes — federal but also provincial and, yes, institutional — without pressing buttons or yanking chains.

Source: Blame Doug Ford for turning a blind eye to student immigration abuses

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Derek Penslar, Harvard Jewish studies professor controversy: This typifies what’s broken in antisemitism debates.

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Good reflections:

It is with a heavy heart that I come to you asking you to care about something happening at Harvard.

I, too, have mocked the sheer quantity of reporting and writing and takes about what happens at a certain university outside of Boston. But this week’s Cambridge-based brouhaha neatly sums up the politicization of the conversation around antisemitism and the struggle against it.

Harvard recently announced two task forces: one on combating antisemitism and one on combating Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias. The university announced Derek Penslar, a faculty professor of Jewish history who directs the undergraduate program in that field, as co-chair of the task force on antisemitism. Shortly thereafter, some commentators denounced him for having signed an open letter that referred to Israel as an “apartheid regime” and for phrases from a book of his that was published this year. Billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted that Harvard was on a “path of darkness.” Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard and former U.S. treasury secretary, called on Penslar to resign. Some went so far as to call the professor an antisemite.

I do not know Derek Penslar, and whether or not he spends his time as co-chair of a task force on antisemitism at Harvard makes very little difference to me, as does what happens at Harvard generally. However, this particular sequence of events has implications beyond Harvard. The row matters not just for Jewish studies scholars, or those of us who write often about Jewish politics, but for anyone who seeks to understand antisemitism historically and in our present moment, so that they might combat it—which is to say, anyone who takes the reality of antisemitism seriously.

There have been a few lines of attack on Penslar, and there are thus a few issues at hand. First, there is the notion that he called Israel a “regime of apartheid.” In fact, Penslar, in the summer of last year, signed on to a letter by “academics, clergy, and other public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad” who sought to “call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” That sentence included the line “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of the judicial overhaul is to tighten restrictions on Gaza, deprive Palestinians of equal rights both beyond the Green Line and within it, annex more land, and ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.”

One can agree or disagree with this assessment, or with the decision to sign an open letter, but as Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky put it to the Harvard Crimson, “You have to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism to suggest that Derek Penslar is not a good fit for this role.” He added, “When you deliberately conflate the two, you utterly silence criticism of Israel, and you utterly silence pro-Palestinian speech—and that we can’t tolerate, not at a university in a free society.”

Others have said that while they take no issue with his scholarship, he isn’t right for this particular role. “I have no doubt that Prof Penslar is a profound scholar of Zionism and a person of good will without a trace of personal anti-Semitism who cares deeply about Harvard,” tweeted Summers. “However, I believe that given his record, he is unsuited to leading a task force whose function is to combat what is seen by many as a serious anti-Semitism problem at Harvard.” Summers went on to say that Penslar has “publicly minimized Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the definition used by the US government in recent years of anti-Semitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel.” Although that’s all well and good for an academic, “for the co-chair of an anti-Semitism task force that is being paralleled with an Islamophobia task force it seems highly problematic.”

Summers’ argument is a long way of saying that while all of this is fine for scholarship, it feels wrong. It feels as if Penslar isn’t taking antisemitism seriously. But shouldn’t the scholarship be used to guide the sentiment? And shouldn’t the scholarship inform the struggle? Leaving aside that it seems strange to suggest that a professor of Jewish studies would downplay antisemitism for the sake of it, shouldn’t this task force’s conclusion be guided by fact? Or is the point of the task force to confirm what Summers already thinks? If its goal is the latter, that’s a bigger problem than Penslar’s appointment. And that’s true of all of us, not only those of us on a campus: that we should try to separate out the facts from our feelings and fear.

Finally, and as egregiously, there is the fact that Penslar’s critics evidently combed through his scholarship for phrases they could present as antisemitic. “Lessons in how NOT to combat antisemitism, Harvard edition,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League. “Start by naming a professor who libels the Jewish state and claims that ‘veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization’ to your antisemitism task force. Absolutely inexcusable. This is why Harvard is failing, full stop.” This is a reference to Penslar’s 2023 book Zionism: An Emotional State, which is roughly 300 pages long and which looks at the emotions that have shaped Zionism, as they have—per the book’s own blurb—all national movements. The New York Post, which pulled out the “veins of hatred” line, also noted that Penslar wrote, “Jewish culture was steeped in fantasies (and occasionally, acts) of vengeance against Christians.”

I am not sure whether the focus on this line was supposed to be damning, but if it was: Yes, Jewish culture has moments of revenge fantasy. For example, Purim, which we will celebrate in about two months, concludes with Jewish vengeance. Exploring themes like vengeance or hatred is not an endorsement of seeing Jews through that lens; it’s part of the work of studying Jewish history, as it would be for any group’s history.

Penslar’s lines were cherry-picked and taken out of context, as the American Academy for Jewish Research has pointed out, but there is a larger point, too, which is that any rigorous work on Jews—like any rigorous work on literally any people, anywhere in the world, at any point in history—will feature moments in which individuals or the collective acted in ways that some might consider less than flattering, if not downright abhorrent.

None of that makes antisemitism acceptable. If a person really cares about the study of and fight against antisemitism, they need to be able to hold in their minds both the nuanced realities of history and present-day politics and the rich and varied tapestry that is Jewish existence, as well as that antisemitism is unacceptable. To write off the former as somehow in conflict with the latter is grossly unfair to scholarship—and it pretends that we can fight antisemitism in a vacuum, divorced from the real world. But it’s the real world in which real antisemitism exists. It isn’t only anti-intellectual and cynical. It’s also counterproductive to the critics’ stated goal.

Source: Derek Penslar, Harvard Jewish studies professor controversy: This typifies what’s broken in antisemitism debates.

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Ottawa to ensure international student cap doesn’t target francophones

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

On the one hand, the feds have correctly made the provinces responsible for study permit allocations by institution, but on the other….

Immigration Minister Marc Miller is preparing measures to ensure that the federal government’s new cap on international student visas does not lead to a sharp drop in the number of francophones studying in Canada.

…Mr. Miller announced the cap earlier this week, saying there would be “no further growth” in the number of international students in the country for the next two years. This would mean cutting the number of new permits issued this year by about 35 per cent, compared to 2023.

…

But the minister’s office said Thursday that he is concerned the cap could lead English-speaking provinces to target francophone institutions, resulting in a disproportionate reduction in the number of French-speaking students in Canada, including those from African countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire.

One option the government is considering is the creation of a separate visa stream for francophone students….

Source: Ottawa to ensure international student cap doesn’t target francophones

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Germany: Would-be migrant workers worried by growing racism

2024/01/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

When German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Labor Minister Hubertus Heil turned up at the Vietnamese-German University (VGU) in Ho Chi Minh City, they were caught by surprise: Screaming students greeted them like rock stars.

Some of those students will go on to work for German companies.

Further acclaim awaited the German political VIPs at the Goethe Institute in Hanoi, where about 6,000 young Vietnamese people per year learn the German language. Seven times that number register for language tests that qualify them for professional training or study in Germany.

At the end of 2023, Germany began implementing its new Skilled Immigration Act, using a point system to lower the obstacles facing skilled workers who want to move to the country.

Since then, high-ranking German politicians have stepped up efforts to woo skilled workers in other countries: Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was recently in the Philippines, for instance, and Development Aid Minister Svenja Schulze is in Morocco. In Vietnam, Steinmeier and Heil signed a memorandum of understanding that improves the regulation of labor immigration to Germany.

Vietnam steps in to help

In communist Vietnam, there is significant interest in working in Germany — where the Vietnamese diaspora has grown to more than 200,000 people. Vietnam is a young country demographically speaking and is thus less threatened by the kind of “brain drain” that affects many other nations. Vietnam’s leadership was also very interested in finding a joint agreement on improving control of labor migration to Germany by its nationals.

The Goethe Institute is important in this regard. For example, it is there that Phuong Phan, 22, is receiving the language training she needs to later work in the hotel and gastronomy industry in Thuringia. The eastern German state is among the first to have signed bilateral contracts with Vietnam.

Phuong Phan said she hopes her training in Thuringia will give her a “practical apprenticeship” while aiding her personal development. Her parents support her in the endeavor, and she combs the internet daily for information on “lovely Germany.”

Recently, however, she came upon something that was not so lovely: reports detailing the xenophobia that is sometimes encountered in Germany, particularly in the east. She does not want to talk about it in her conversation with DW but says the topic has also been dealt with in her language courses.

“Yes, we are watching developments. And gradually, we are starting to have reservations as we take on responsibility for these young people, with regard to their parents as well,” says Nguyen Thi Thanh Tam, a placement officer for Thuringia.

She is currently training another group of young Vietnamese in Hanoi and confirms that the topic of “racism in Germany” has been clearly discussed in recent lessons.

“We want the students to be prepared for unpleasant situations in this regard in Germany,” she says.

400,000 skilled workers needed annually

According to Germany’s Federal Employment Agency (BA), the country has 1.73 million vacant jobs.

Unlike Germany’s campaign to find workers 60 years ago, today’s efforts are not focused on industrial laborers but on highly qualified professionals and people with service-sector experience.

Back then, just under 300,000 people came each year. Today, studies say Germany needs around 400,000 a year.

Recently, Labor Minister Heil traveled to Brazil, India and Kenya to promote Germany as a work destination, and now he’s in Vietnam. “We have improved the conditions with the Skilled Immigration Act; now it’s down to putting things into practice,” he told DW in Hanoi.

Poor coordination

Officially, the Interior Ministry oversees the immigration of skilled foreign workers. But in practice, the responsibilities in this area overlap. One example is the some 350,000 asylum-seekers in Germany, who, if they are rejected, are not integrated into the labor market and many of whom have to leave the country.

More than 17% of people who applied for German asylum in 2023 are now Turks — mostly young, well-educated, liberal-thinking people who wanted to escape from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime. But only one in 10 Turkish asylum-seeks receives protection in Germany. And, at the moment, instead of permitting the rest an opportunity to look for work, Germany orders them to leave the country.

The Foreign Office, on the other hand, is known for its lengthy procedures to obtain a visa — something that also deters skilled workers. The Economy and Labor ministries and the Employment Agency also bear responsibilities, in addition to organizations such as the GIZ development agency and various foundations.

Many companies have their own recruitment and training programs because the bureaucracy prevalent in the public sector is too slow to meet their hiring needs.  Toan Nguyen, the managing director of the TY Academy, which acts as an agency for caregivers who want to go to Germany, complains that there are “too many people to go through and still a lot of obstacles to having qualifications recognized.”

Human trafficking another problem

This makes things difficult for interested skilled workers — and easy for dubious agencies and human traffickers. In Southeast Asia, women are the main prey of the latter, being smuggled into Germany and ending up in low-wage employment or even brothels.

“We must use legal immigration to suppress this practice,” Steinmeier said in Vietnam. The bilateral agreement that has just been signed is meant to provide trustworthy advice about fair working conditions and reputable employment agencies, as well as regular roundtables on work migration involving specialists from both countries.

Germany’s new citizenship law, however, makes the country more attractive to potential immigrants. “In comparison with Japan, where many Vietnamese also migrate but are allowed to work only temporarily, Germany now offers a longer-term perspective,” says Viet Huong Nguyen from the TY Academy.

Xenophobia a deterrent

In light of these positive developments for labor migration, current reports about racist groups in Germany are all the more disturbing.

Labor Minister Heil told DW that no one had spoken to him directly about the issue but that action needed to be taken before it was too late.

“We have to make it clear in Germany that we cannot maintain our prosperity without labor from abroad,” he said.

Vietnamese already living in Germany are also worried. One of them is Huong Trute, whom President Steinmeier invited to accompany him on his Vietnam trip. She has lived in Germany for 40 years and works in the gastronomy sector.

She says she has recently had to answer more and more questions from worried compatriots in Vietnam. After seeing how another group was being prepared for jobs in Thuringian hotels and restaurants at the Goethe Institute, she said: “Honestly? If I had the chance to take these young peopole somewhere else, I would do it.”

She says the developments in Thuringia are coming to a head, and that frightens her.

Source: Germany: Would-be migrant workers worried by growing racism

Filed under Immigration, Racism Tagged with ,

Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Nails it:

The federal government’s decision this week to substantially reduce the number of foreign student visas is the right thing to do, but it undermines the finances of Ontario’s colleges and universities and will hamper their ability to serve the province’s students.

Making Ontario’s post-secondary sector significantly reliant on foreign student tuition was an unsustainable, unwise decision that was sure to end badly. Now it has, and Premier Doug Ford’s government seems unready to respond.

It’s not like federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s move to cut the country’s foreign student visas from 600,000 to 360,000 came out of the blue. The government has been telegraphing it for months.

That wasn’t the first warning the Ford government had. Ontario’s auditor general criticized overreliance on international tuition in both 2021 and 2022. Late last year, an expert panel appointed by the Ford government warned that “Many colleges and universities have passed the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students.”

So far, all the Ford government has done is repeat a second-rate federal Liberal talking point about cracking down on “bad actors,” those being strip mall campuses that licence the curriculum of public community colleges. All with the full knowledge of the provincial government, of course.

There are three bad actors in this story, but none of them operate out of a strip mall.

First, the federal government. It turned foreign student training into a back door immigration system with no limits. Students could work for three years while they studied, then for two or three additional years after that. In all, there are about one million students here on visas now. Only belatedly has the federal government come to admit that flooding the country with unofficial immigrants might contribute to Canada’s housing shortage.

The surge of foreign students worked remarkably well for the Ontario government. Foreign students pay absurd tuitions, as much as $14,300 a year for a college student and $46,443 a year for a university student. According to the Ontario AG, foreign students accounted for 45 per cent of university tuition revenue and 68 per cent of college tuition fees.

The influx of foreign student money papered over the government’s own neglect of the post-secondary sector. In 2019, Ford cut tuition, then froze it. The government’s direct support for the sector has been meagre. The province’s funding per university student is only 57 per cent of what the rest of the country spends, and it’s even worse for college students at 44 per cent.

Finally, there are the universities and colleges themselves. They have overcome inadequate tuition and government funding by milking foreign students for all they are worth, becoming dependent on their tuition fees in the process.

The absurdity of the situation was illustrated earlier this month when international students at Algoma University’s Brampton campus conducted protests after receiving failing marks. One student got right to the heart of the transaction with a sign saying “CAD 26000 are not enough?” One of his compatriots missed the point altogether with his sign, which read “Education is not for sale.” Of course it is, and these students have the receipts to prove it. The university, an obscure Sudbury institution that has set up shop in Brampton to grab some cash, fixed the issue by putting the students’ marks on a bell curve. Smart move. In 2021-22, the Brampton campus generated 65 per cent of the university’s revenue. You have to keep the customers happy.

Unfortunately for the Ford government, the years of pretending none of this was happening are coming to an end. The federal government hasn’t shut off the student tap entirely, but it’s time for Ontario to figure out how to pay for universities and colleges without an ever-increasing flow of foreign student tuition.

The first challenge will be distributing visa quotas, something the province has not done previously. The new visas are based on population, implying that Ontario might get about 130,000 study visas compared to 300,000 in 2023.

Private colleges that were given a veneer of credibility by licensing curriculum from real community colleges should be cut off. Colleges overall will require a significant trim and a return to their mandate of job training for people in their own communities. They can afford it, for now. Foreign student training has been lucrative. In 2022, all but one Ontario college posted a surplus, with the average being $27 million across the system.

Universities are in a different situation. The Council of Ontario Universities says at least 10 Ontario universities are forecasting deficits this year, amounting to $175 million. Next year, the total is expected to be $273 million. A reduction in foreign student tuition will exacerbate that.

This is all a worrisome situation for Ontario students and their parents. The Ford government needs to put a credible fix in place, quickly.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

Source: Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

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Right-Wing Influencers Are Going Full Racist in Anti-DEI Rants – The Daily Beast

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Of note:

Boeing has had its fair share of negative news coverage lately, as the company’s decades of corner-cutting, outsourcing, and neglect led to some recent terrifyingmishaps.

You might wonder what this has to do with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Well, it seems that efforts to create more just and equitable workplaces are the scariest thing imaginable to certain right-wing influencers. So terrifying, in fact, that they could lead to aviation disasters.

Elon Musk, the CEO of a car company whose vehicles have a tendency to catch fire, tweeted, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE.” The obvious innuendo is that Black people are responsible for Boeing’s failures. Musk has also referred to DEI as “just another word for racism.”

But Musk didn’t stop there. He amplified a tweet that suggested Black students have lower IQs, attacked HBCUs, and argued Blacks have “borderline intellectual impairment.” This is eugenics, plain and simple. It’s pseudo-science used to dehumanize Blacks, not dissimilar to when pro-slavery white people argued that Blacks were more suited for field work because they couldn’t learn and had smaller brains.

Not to be outdone, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk—a vocal Donald Trump sycophant—used Boeing’s issues to argue against the employment of Black pilots. During a podcast, Kirk said, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” Other MAGA celebrities expressed similarly racist concerns.

Just 3.4 percent of U.S. airline pilots are Black. White men have flown the friendly skies almost exclusively since the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903. Even with mitigation efforts to make air navigation more reflective of the society it serves, training programs, recruitment strategies, and airlines have fallen short.

United Airlines and Delta Airlines, specifically, have advanced diversity in hiring, but even there the needle hasn’t moved much in diversifying the pilot class—it’s still overwhelmingly majority white male.

So why are the likes of Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, and others using the pilot workforce situation as the target of their DEI takedown?

The simple answer is… because they can. There is a shortage of airline pilots, a growing number of pilots are of retirement age, and the pipeline must be expanded to keep up with consumer demand. These realities scare certain white men who are hellbent on believing they are the master race, and that all others are inherently inferior.

And the attacks on DEI are coordinated and relentless.

As of this week, Florida’s 28 public colleges are prohibited from using government funds for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. And because everything’s bigger in the Lone Star State, Texas boasts 30 new anti-DEI laws. Thirteen states’ attorneys general signed a public letter in July 2023 after the fall of affirmative action in college admissions. The letter had nothing to do with college admissions, but the Republican AGs used the Supreme Court decision as a platform to directly voice their collective opposition to DEI in the workforce.

These efforts don’t even scratch the surface of the anti-DEI architects’ ultimate goal—stratifying the American workforce and reducing access to the C-suite, STEM careers, small businesses, and opportunities previously afforded almost solely to white men. America is more diverse today than it has ever been—and the fix is in to ensure diversity isn’t reflected in high-paying jobs, the highest levels of government, or leadership in America’s top educational institutions.

To be Black in America is to live in a constant threat of attack on your civil rights and humanity, the questioning of your abilities, and a belief that you are unworthy solely because of the color of your skin. Regardless of how often Nikki Haley says, “America isn’t a racist country,” the red, white, and blue time and again finds itself painfully erecting barriers to Black achievement, health access, and any marker of equity.

Source: Right-Wing Influencers Are Going Full Racist in Anti-DEI Rants – The Daily Beast

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

French Constitutional Council rejects large parts of controversial immigration law – Le Monde

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Good summary:

France’s highest constitutional authority rejected more than a third of articles in a contentious immigration bill adopted under pressure from the right, in a decision issued on on Thursday, January 25. The Constitutional Council ruling notably rejected measures toughening access to social benefits and family reunification, as well as the introduction of immigration quotas set by Parliament.

The Council partially or totally rejected 32 articles out of 86 on procedural grounds – ruling that the amendments adopted by Parliament were unrelated to the government’s bill, or “legislative cavaliers.” A further three articles were rejected on the grounds that they were unconstitutional themselves.

The scrapped measures include restrictions to family reunification, access to certain social benefits for non-EU citizens, and the automatic obtention of French citizenship for people who were born and grew up in France. The Council also rejected articles pertaining to student visas and special visas issued for health reasons.

After the Council’s decision, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the Constitutional Council had “validated the whole of the government’s text,” noting that most of the failed measures were rejected for procedural reasons.

The chairman of the far-right Rassemblement National party, Jordan Bardella, denounced, as expected, a “power grab by the judges, with the support of the president [Emmanuel Macron].” He added: “The only solution is a referendum on immigration.” Eric Ciotti, the leader of the right-wing Les Républicains opposition party which struck a deal with the government to pass a hardened version of the bill, said the Council had “judged based on politics rather than on law.” He called for a constitutional reform.

‘Ideological victory’

The nine members of the Council had been asked to rule on whether the highly divisive text, which caused splits inside President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition, was in conformity with the Constitution. Darmanin, who championed the bill, had admitted that several provisions were “manifestly and clearly contrary to the Constitution.”

Some political observers accused Macron of seeking to pass the buck onto the Constitutional Council. The Constitutional Council registered its displeasure, its president Laurent Fabius declaring it is not “a chamber of appeal against the choices made by Parliament.

Macron also defended the legislation, saying it was needed to reduce illegal immigration but also to facilitate the integration of documented arrivals. On December 20, the day after the vote, the head of state declared that it was “the shield we were missing.” He rejected the idea that the law would enshrine a “national preference” demanded by the RN. But Marine Le Pen claimed it was an “ideological victory.”

Dozens of NGOs slammed what they described as potentially the “most regressive” immigration law in decades. Trade unions and associations called for fresh protests on Thursday, after tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country at the weekend.

Source: French Constitutional Council rejects large parts of controversial immigration law – Le Monde

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Thousands of Australians Call National Holiday ‘Invasion Day,’ Protesting British Colonization

2024/01/27 1 Comment

Similar to the “woke” crowd here:

Thousands of Australians protested the anniversary of British colonization of their country with large crowds Friday urging for Australia Day to be moved and for a day of mourning on the holiday some call “Invasion Day.”

The holiday marks the arrival of 11 British ships carrying convicts at Port Jackson in present-day Sydney on Jan. 26, 1788. For many activists, the day marked the beginning of a sustained period of discrimination and expulsion of Indigenous people from their land without a treaty.

Thousands of people, many of whom waved Indigenous flags, rallied in front of the Victoria state parliament in Melbourne, calling for an official day of mourning to be declared across Australia. Roads and tram lines were shut down for more than four hours.

Large crowds in Sydney chanted for the Australia Day date to be moved. Thousands of protesters also rallied in Brisbane, and the second day of Australia’s cricket match against the West Indies was briefly disrupted by demonstrators.

Major sports have stopped calling the holiday Australia Day, and the Australian Football League Players Association, several clubs and hockey teams have called for the date to change.

On Thursday, two monuments symbolizing Australia’s colonial past were damaged in Melbourne. A statue of British naval officer James Cook, who in 1770 charted Sydney’s coast, was sawn off at the ankles, and a Queen Victoria monument was doused in red paint.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people represented 3.8% of Australia’s population of 26 million, according to a Bureau of Statistics census in 2021. Indigenous people are the nation’s most disadvantaged ethnic minority.

Tensions are high after Australian voters in October resoundingly rejected a referendum to create an advocacy committee to offer advice to parliament on policies that affect Indigenous people. The government had proposed the first constitutional change since 1977 as a step forward in Indigenous rights.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday that the national day was an opportunity for Australians to “pause and reflect on everything that we have achieved as a nation.”

Source: Thousands of Australians Call National Holiday ‘Invasion Day,’ Protesting British Colonization

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Prousky: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Yet another crack in international and domestic students:

…It’s not that hard for Canadian high-school students to buy their seats in the country’s most coveted university programs. For a few thousand dollars, students can enroll at private credit-granting “schools” – usually in strip malls – where they’re almost guaranteed top marks. What these students pay in fees, they can often recoup in scholarship money.

…

The whole thing bears a striking resemblance to the issue of pay-for-citizenship private colleges. At some of these institutions, as many as 90 per cent of students are “no shows,” and in all likelihood are just paying the college for the visa and work permit it affords them. Morally, it’s no different than a domestic student who buys a grade they don’t deserve.

Clearly something beyond a cap on student visas needs to be done to restore the country’s meritocratic values. Shoddy private schools need to be held accountable, regardless of whether they target international or domestic, or high-school or college students.

The problem is, there doesn’t appear to be much data on these private schools, and any available data is wanting. At a minimum, provinces would need to know the acceptance, enrolment, graduation and employment rates at each of these schools. Ontario purports to make this data available, but it’s chock full of missing fields.

There are thousands of these private secondary schools across the country, but do the provinces know how many students attend them and on average how inflated their grades are? If they do, they aren’t sharing this information with universities, and despite auditing these private schools, rarely if ever shut them down.

Some universities have taken matters into their own hands. The University of Waterloo in Southwestern Ontario made headlines in 2018 for its “secret list” of high schools for which they adjust applicants’ grades. But if this effort is going to bring about meaningful change, it requires provincewide co-operation.

Jonah Prousky is a management consultant and freelance writer who focuses on business, technology and society.

Source: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry

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‘Total chaos for students’: Canada’s international student restrictions slammed by Colleges Ontario

2024/01/26 Leave a comment

Willful blindness? Should have seen this coming:

Calling the federal government’s new restrictions on international students “a moratorium by stealth,” Ontario public colleges are warning that many thousands of students will soon be left in limbo, their hopes on hold.

The public statement released Thursday by Colleges Ontario, which represents the province’s 24 taxpayer-funded colleges, is the most critical response yet from the post-secondary education sector to changes announced this week by Immigration Minister Marc Miller to rein in a system that he’s previously said had “lost its integrity.”

“The decision has been rushed, resulting in a confusing and damaging early rollout. We urge the federal government to immediately engage with us and our provincial government in a meaningful conversation about the material impacts on students and Canada’s reputation,” said the four-page statement.

“Ontario’s public colleges are very concerned about the attacks on a high-performing, efficient public college system — impacting our reputation with potentially long-lasting negative repercussions.”

Public colleges in Ontario, which have seen an exponential growth of international enrolments over the past few years, had kept silent since October, when Miller started rolling out a series of changes to the international student program in response to public pushback about high levels of immigration and criticisms of its impact on affordable housing.

In December, a new system was put in place to authenticate schools’ letters of admission, followed by a doubling the cost-of-living financial requirement for study permit applicants on Jan. 1 to $20,635, in addition to their first year of tuition and travel costs.

Miller’s reforms

On Monday, after weeks of floating the idea of capping the number of international students in Canada, Miller imposed a two-year cap on new study permits issued in 2024, with an aim of reducing the number issued by 35 per cent from 2023’s level, to 364,000. The cap, however, won’t apply to students for master’s and doctoral programs or in elementary and secondary schools; the intake level will be reassessed in 2025.

Source: ‘Total chaos for students’: Canada’s international student restrictions slammed by Colleges Ontario

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