U.S. Senators sound alarm over Canada’s acceptance of Gaza refugees

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Not totally surprising, given potential security risks:

Canada’s acceptance of Palestinian refugees from Gaza is setting off alarm bells south of the border.

In a letter Wednesday to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, United States Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) expressed concern over the program, which he warned could lead to an increased risk of allowing individuals with ties to terror groups easy access to the United States.

“On May 27, 2024, the Government of Canada announced its intent to increase the number of Gazans who will be allowed into their country under temporary special measures,” Rubio wrote in his letter, which was signed by five other Republican senators.

“We are deeply concerned and request heightened scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should any of them attempt to enter the United States at ports of entry as well as between ports of entry.”

Cosigning the letter were fellow senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mike Braun, Joni Ernst and Josh Hawley.

Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced a five-fold increase in the number of Gazan refugees let into Canada, upping the program’s cap to 5,000 people.

The government’s initial cap on Palestinian refugees was 1,000.

As well, Palestinian refugees will be able to apply for work and study permits without charge….

Source: U.S. Senators sound alarm over Canada’s acceptance of Gaza refugees

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USA: Noncitizens are less likely to participate in a census with citizenship question, study says

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Of note, the main impact being on those ineligible to have a social security number. Non-issue in Canada where the census has for many years included a citizenship question (with increased disaggregation):

Not Adding a citizenship question to the census reduces the participation of people who aren’t U.S. citizens, particularly those from Latin American countries, according to a new research paper that comes as Republicans in Congress are pushing to add such a question to the census form.

Noncitizens who pay taxes but are ineligible to have a Social Security number are less likely to fill out the census questionnaire or more likely to give incomplete answers on the form if there is a citizenship question, potentially exacerbating undercounts of some groups, according to the paper released this summer by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Kansas.

Other groups were less sensitive to the addition of a citizenship question, such as U.S.-born Hispanic residents and noncitizens who weren’t from Latin America, the study said.

The paper comes as Republican lawmakers in Congress push to require a citizenship question on the questionnaire for the once-a-decade census. Their aim is to exclude people who aren’t citizens from the count that helps determine political power and the distribution of federal funds in the United States. The 14th Amendment requires that all people are counted in the census, not just citizens.

In May, the GOP-led House passed a bill that would eliminate noncitizens from the tally gathered during a census and used to decide how many House seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. Separately, the House in coming weeks is to consider an appropriations bill containing similar language seeking to omit people in the country illegally from the count used to redraw political districts.

During debate earlier this month at a House appropriations committee meeting, Democratic U.S. Rep. Grace Meng of New York described the efforts to exclude people in the country illegally as “an extreme proposal” that would detract from the accuracy of the census.

“Pretending that noncitizens don’t live in our communities would only limit the crucial work of the Census Bureau and take resources away from areas that need them the most,” Meng said.

But Republican U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia argued that including people in the country illegally gives state and local governments an incentive to attract noncitizens so that they can have bigger populations and more political power.

“Every noncitizen that is included actually takes away from citizens’ ability to determine who their representatives are,” Clyde said.

The next national head count is in 2030.

Source: Noncitizens are less likely to participate in a census with citizenship question, study says

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Australia: A major multiculturalism review has recommended bold reforms. How far is the government prepared to go?

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Jakabowicz on the review:

A year ago, the government instigated an independent review of the national multicultural framework.

As more than half of Australia’s population is either born overseas or has one parent who was, this policy is important. It underpins how multiculturalism works in almost every part of life. It aims to ensure equity and inclusion for people from minority groups, and attempts to whittle away at structural racism.

Now the review report has been released. This comes against a backdrop of growing antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australia, as well as the fallout from the failed Voice to Parliament referendum and the vicious racism many communities experienced during the COVID crisis.

The report includes 29 recommendations for improving Australia’s multicultural society. The government has committed $100 million over the next four years to implement the recommendations, though it is still working through the details and timeline. Here’s what it found.

Some of the recommendations are symbolic and have appeared in every multicultural review over the past 50 years. But other recommendations are far more concrete.

Firstly, it suggests there be a federal Multicultural Commission (a proposal the Greens have had on the parliamentary agenda without Labor support for some years). This body would be empowered to provide leadership on multicultural issues, hold opponents of human rights to account, and promote close collaboration between stakeholders at all levels.

Secondly, the panel proposes breaking up the Department of Home Affairs. This would be an attempt to reverse the surveillance and punishment approach that many believe the department to have towards migrants, refugees and some ethnic groups.

Instead, it suggests a new-look, nation-building, Cabinet-level Department of Multicultural Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship.

And from a policy perspective, the report recommends:

  • better ways to protect people’s languages
  • a citizenship process that is less about learning cricket scores and more about appreciating diversity and the importance of mutual respect
  • diversifying our media sector so it more effectively reflects and involves our minority communities
  • and ensuring the arts and sports sectors are spaces for intercultural collaboration and cooperation.

Overall, the report shows how marginal multicultural affairs have become in government – these ideas would go a long way toward refocusing the government’s attention where it is needed.

Why was this review needed?

The review was tasked with assessing how effective Australia’s institutions, laws and policy settings are at supporting a multicultural nation, particularly one that’s changing rapidly. This included looking at the challenges of refugee and immigrant settlement and integration, as well as the impact of world events on Australia’s multicultural society.

There’s also an economic element. The review looked at how we can ensure the wide-ranging talents of Australia’s residents are fully harnessed for personal and broader societal benefit.

These questions point to the need to bring together political, economic, cultural and social priorities in our government programs and policies. They also recognise the deeper challenges of racism, social marginalisation and isolation, which are often compounded by other factors, such as age, gender, class, health and disability.

These are not new questions. What is new is the recommendation for a strategy to engage in a sustained and interconnected way with the causes and consequences of our current failures. It is very unusual for a government to ask a review to do this.

The findings also bring together the perspectives and insights that many advocates in this space have long championed, but which have been swept aside and neglected for over two decades.

Importantly, the report stresses that a national commitment to multiculturalism demands bipartisanship.

I made an argument for a research strategy element in the review in 2023, and was later commissioned to develop a paper on research and data for a multicultural Australia.

The panel has now recommended that a national multicultural research agenda be developed by the new Multicultural Commission, taking account of my recommendations.

What will the government do?

There is still a long row to hoe – none of the recommendations have been publicly accepted (nor dismissed) by the government, and as yet no specific resources have been committed (despite the $100 million commitment overall). Significant action, however, is likely over the coming months and in future budgets.

While it is unlikely Home Affairs will be broken up immediately, some major moves to upgrade the capacity of the public service to deliver on the government’s commitments are likely. The courage of the government to advance these priorities in the election will depend in part on public reactions to the report and its implementation, as well as the stance of the Opposition.

Will the panel’s extensive work improve cohesion, enable better community relations, and unleash the social and economic benefits of a more collaborative society? The first test will be in how a proposed Multicultural Commission would be structured, led and resourced. We may not have long to wait.

Source: A major multiculturalism review has recommended bold reforms. How far is the government prepared to go?

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Immigration Minister Marc Miller on international students, asylum seekers and life in the hotseat — plus an admission about one promise

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Good and interesting intv:

It was a day after his constituency office was found vandalized, with windows smashed and pink paint sprayed over, but that didn’t stop Immigration Minister Marc Miller from cracking jokes with the audience at a special citizenship ceremony in Toronto to mark Cirque du Soleil’s 40th anniversary.

“Anyone want to change their mind? You still have time,” Miller said jokingly at Friday’s event. “But I’m pretty sure no one is going to change your mind if I look at the smiles on your faces. This is a beautiful time for you.”

Miller personally welcomed 368 new citizens from 60 countries as they took their oaths of allegiance to Canada under the big tent of one of the world’s most famous circuits. 

Meeting proud immigrants who work hard to become Canadian and seeing the light in their eyes at events like this is a reminder for Miller of the value of Canadian citizenship — and the challenge the country faces today.

On the eve of his anniversary at the helm of the Immigration Department on July 26, the minister sat down with the Star to share the good, the bad and the ugly of this job in the past year, as well as what’s on his to-do list with the next federal election expected 15 months from now, in October 2025.

“Canadians are less tolerant of errors right now or of a system that lacks the rigour and discipline that it needs,” the Liberal minister said. “We’re not immune to social media and what people have seen in Europe, with large flow of irregular migration and the political systems that have leveraged that or weaponized that, and swept in typically right-wing governments.”

Miller said that on top of his mind is the rapid growth of refugee claimants in Canada since 2022, when international travel returned to normal after the pandemic.

The annual number of people who sought protection here was way above the pre-COVID level of 64,030 in 2019, reaching record 91,700 in 2022 and 143,580 in 2023. In the first five months of this year, already 77,725 claimants were reported. Some 186,000 claims are pending in the system.

Although most developed countries are also seeing a rise in asylum seekers as part of the growing global displacement, the minister believes this influx is what has contributed to the public perception that Canada has lost control of its border when they see refugees sleeping on the streets and staying in homeless shelters.

It’s important to bolster the integrity of the visa processing system, he said, given that many of the asylum seekers were temporary residents who came as visitors, students and workers.

“The system itself is undermined when we see flows that are coming in and not for the reasons that they were supposed to in the first place,” said Miller. “There are a number of measures that we are looking to take and will take, and hopefully announce in short order to further bolster that integrity, including in the international student area.”

He was frustrated that proposed reforms to streamline the refugee determination process were carved out from the recent federal budget bill under pressure by advocates. That means it will now take longer to push through those changes to address the refugee board’s unsustainable backlogs.

Two other issues are also on Miller’s priority list: Fixing the foreign worker program to crack down on fraud and passing legislative amendments to help Indigenous people travel seamlessly on their native lands across the Canada-U.S. border.

Miller said he’s working with Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault to make changes to the labour market impact assessment process to ensure only those employers faced with a real labour shortage are entitled to bring in foreign workers.

“LMIA fraud is a big concern,” he said. “You (workers) shouldn’t have to pay for it … These things do get shopped around and that’s not right. Enforcement is one aspect of it, but making sure that we disincentivize that in the first place is key, particularly where we see a constricting labour market.”

Miller was shuffled from his job as minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations to his current post amid rising borrowing rates and an affordability crisis that has seen the cost of housing and living spiralling — and changing public attitudes toward immigration and immigrants.

Earlier this year, he surprised observers by introducing caps to rein in the number of international students and temporary residents as well as measures to restrict access to work permits, despite objections from the post-secondary education sector and employers. While he’s happy with the trending numbers he is seeing so far, he reminds Canadians that it takes time to see the impact.

Miller said it pained him to try to properly explain the affordability challenges faced by all Canadians when making these changes.

“We can’t blame immigrants for absolutely everything relating to affordability,” he said. “At the same time, the pure volume of temporary migration that we’ve seen in the last few years does contribute to the economic argument.

“We can’t have an unbridled backdoor entry system into Canada under the guise of an international student program that has seen exponential increases in its volume. So that does need to come under control.”

That “lack of discipline” of the immigration system is what Miller calls “the bad.” “The ugly” is the scapegoating that’s targeted new immigrants.

Poll after poll has shown Canadians’ support for immigration is declining, and Miller said he understands people’s frustration with an imperfect system. Yet, there are reasons to be hopeful.

“You have perhaps some people with undertones and frustrations, but you don’t have a major party that is running its campaign against immigration,” he pointed out. “I think that is important. At the same time, I don’t think we can discount the fact that there will be parties in the next election” that might do that.

Miller said he will continue to work on improving client experience and digitalizing the department, but is less certain about delivering the promised regularization plan that would grant permanent residence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants toiling in Canada’s underground economy.

At best, he suggested, a smaller-scale plan may be possible for those in the construction and health-care sectors.

“Regularization, as I confess to you quite openly, has been a challenge we recognize, particularly in this political atmosphere, in the sense of where Canadians are,” he explained. “As ambitious as we are, with 15 months to go, we have to be realistic about what we can achieve.”

Miller, 51, has been an MP since 2015, representing a Montreal riding. He said being the immigration minister is a “difficult” job but he enjoys the work challenge, and said he’s planning to run in the next election.

When asked to confirm the rumour that he was not happy to take up the immigration minister’s job, Miller said that wasn’t true but he would have liked to finish “the unfinished job” at Indigenous Relations.

Source: Immigration Minister Marc Miller on international students, asylum seekers and life in the hotseat — plus an admission about one promise

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Austin Harper: The Emerging Bipartisan Wokeness

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Of interest:

…Underlying left-wing wokeness, even at its most performative and excessive, is a series of partial truths about American society: Even if die-hard progressives are wrong and anti-Black racism does not explain every problem in this country, it does explain quite a few of them. And 2020’s summer of reckoning did draw much-needed attention to entrenched and structurally reinforced racial inequalities in the United States, despite the movement quickly getting derailed by “elite capture”—the tendency of radical social movements to get co-opted by corporate and other rarefied interests.

As someone who became a professor in August 2020, at the incandescent height of progressive wokeness, I have watched higher education around the country become ever more outwardly progressive. But the social-justice rhetoric that now suffuses academia has done absolutely nothing to stop the relentless pace of gigification. More and more academics every year are employed as contingent laborers rather than as tenure-track professors. In fact, a good case can be made that wokeness greases the skids for this trend by allowing universities to appear like benevolent actors, hiring greater numbers of women and people of color, even as they pull the rug out from under labor by placing those new hires in adjunct roles.

It’s easy to argue that we should have known better, that the progressive ideas championed by CEOs and elite-university presidents were probably not that progressive after all, but the reckoning of 2020 happened for a reason. The Great Awokening was so galvanizing for so many precisely because it always had one foot in reality. The same can be said of conservative wokeness.

The right’s renewed focus on anti-white racism, its opportunistic seizing of the anti-Semitism debate, and the broader anti-DEI craze it has stirred up are also appealing to the masses precisely because they have some truth in them. For example, although it is not true that white men are unemployable in academia, the subject of a recent high-profile social-media culture-war battle, it is obviously the case that efforts to diversify the faculty at many universities mean that white candidates are viewed less favorably. The rise of racially themed cluster-hire initiatives—which allow universities to gerrymander diverse candidate pools by writing job ads for minority-majority subfields such as “decolonial theory”—are a way for academic institutions to skirt antidiscrimination laws. Likewise, although the right’s attempt to portray university students as hardened pro-Hamas, bike-lock-wielding terrorists is plainly ludicrous, it is just as plain that anti-Semitism within the progressive movement is real, however fringe these elements may be. If the ways the right characterizes these issues are often disingenuous and overexaggerated, they are not wholly fabricated either.

But as with left-wing wokeness, conservative wokeness preys on people moved by these legitimate issues to sell them on a hyperbolized politics. Woke conservatism leverages reasonable concerns about a range of issues—the plight of working-class white men, anti-Semitism, misandry, and the like—only to foment a hysteria that distracts from the fact that its principal champions are also the causes of many of the problems it allegedly seeks to solve. The primary threat to the job prospects of many working-class white men in America is not “reverse racism,” affirmative action, or pesky minorities, but accumulated decades of deindustrialization, market fundamentalism, and anti-union efforts that sent blue-collar jobs overseas and gutted the ones that remained. As for the loud warnings about left-wing anti-Semitism, the sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi has demonstrated that “liberals are consistently the least antisemitic ideological group in the US, and white liberals—the Americans most likely to embrace ‘woke’ ideology—are the least antisemitic people in the country by far.”

Wokeness is now the air we all breathe, a noxious miasma of bad faith, hysteria, and shameless opportunism that is animated by not ultimate principles but ultimate convenience. It has not peaked, and it is not peaking. Wokeness has become the status quo, a bipartisan lingua franca, the ruling style of American politics.

Tyler Austin Harper is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Source: THE EMERGING BIPARTISAN WOKENESS

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Geoff Russ: A future Conservative government must fight the culture war, not stand idly by 

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Of note and likely reflects some of the thinking among conservatives given some of the excesses of the current government and elsewhere. Would prefer the term “correction” or “rebalancing” to “war:”

…There is much to be undone from the past ten largely unpleasant years. Canada Day fireworks celebrations are no longer hosted by the federally-funded Port of Vancouver, for example. The new lyrics that made “O Canada” gender-neutral are grammatically inaccurate, horrific to listen to and another example of this Liberal government’s love of making headlines without any worthy substance. If restoring the older lyrics is off the table, replacing the lazy “In all of us command” with a lyric befitting the style of the anthem, like “In all thy souls command,” would be a welcome correction.

Making “O Canada” sound nice again or once again funding fireworks celebrations on July 1st that are worthy of the country’s birthday would be great first steps, but we need much more than that. The Conservatives need a year-round, muscular cultural policy that is active, aggressive, and interventionist. This could start with a bold appointment of a Canadian heritage minister who is actually viewed as a senior member of the cabinet.

There will be major pushback from the usual suspects at university faculty lounges and in the opinion pages of newspapers like the Toronto Star, but the Conservatives and their supporters must stand their ground. This is not the 1980s anymore, when wokeness hadn’t yet reared its ugly head. Conservative attitudes toward the role of government and crafting national culture need to change.

If someone constantly strove to focus only on their past mistakes and embarrassments, they would lead a very miserable life, possibly even going insane. That is exactly what Canada has been inflicting on itself for nearly a decade, with the federal government’s full backing.

There are certainly more effective and creative ways to fight the culture war than those suggested here, but fighting back against post-nationalism or the “woke” vandalism of Canada is a task that only a Conservative government can undertake.

Given the current atmosphere of progressive politics, there should be no expectation that the Liberals or NDP will abandon post-nationalism. If the Conservatives will not fight the culture war with a will to win, they may as well just embrace post-nationalism themselves.

Source: Geoff Russ: A future Conservative government must fight the culture war, not stand idly by

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Groups representing minorities say they’re alarmed by foreign interference legislation

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Of note. Telling that NCCM adds “Ukrainian dissidents, Uyghur activists” to groups possibly affected when their real concern is with respect to “Palestinian citizens,” arguably more likely to be accused of being subject to foreign interference as we see in some coverage of the anti-Israel/pro-Palestine demonstrations.

Expect “intimidation” will end up being defined through case law, but certainly we have seen examples:

Groups representing minority communities are warning that a recently introduced law giving Canada’s intelligence agency and the federal government new powers to counter foreign interference is open to abuse.

Bill C-70 received royal assent on June 20.

The law introduces new criminal provisions against “deceptive or surreptitious acts” done “for the benefit of or in association with, a foreign entity,” to prejudice Canadian interests or with the “intent to influence … the exercise of a democratic right in Canada.”

It also allows for broader sharing of sensitive information among national security agencies, and establishes a foreign influence transparency registry.

C-70 amends the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) to allow the Immigration Minister to ask the courts for the detention and removal of a permanent resident or other non-Canadian citizen if their actions are deemed injurious to “international relations.”

IRPA previously provided the minister with that same authority, but only in cases where someone was inadmissible to Canada on grounds of security, human or international rights violations, or criminality.

That section is alarming the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the World Sikh Organization of Canada.

Nusaiba Al-Azem, director of legal affairs at the NCCM, told CBC News the organization is troubled by “the vagueness of the international relations piece.”

The WSO’s legal counsel, Balpreet Singh, agreed.

“International relations is the reason that four decades of Indian interference targeting Sikhs in Canada has gone completely unknown in the mainstream,” he said.

“Canada has on many occasions ignored Indian operations targeting Sikhs in order to preserve trade relations and trade talks with India. That’s really been at the expense of the Sikh community.”

In a petition that is still online, the NCCM warned that the “international relations” provision could lead to the expulsion of “Ukrainian dissidents, Uyghur activists, or Palestinian citizens.”

C-70 also amends the Security of Information Act, which deals with crimes against national security. The previous version of the law gave authorities such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) the ability to charge individuals who use “threat, accusation, menace or violence” in association with a “foreign entity or terrorist group” to harm Canadian interests, with penalties ranging up to life imprisonment.

The new law adds “intimidation” to the list of potential misdeeds. The NCCM and WSO said the law doesn’t define “intimidation” — a lapse the WSO says “raises concerns about potential misuse against activists.”

“That could have real concerns for, for example, civil liberties groups who are often levied with charges that their protest behaviours may amount to intimidation,” said Al-Azem.

CBC News reached out to the offices of Immigration Minister Marc Miller and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc with questions.

Leblanc’s office replied by saying C-70 was developed “after extensive consultations” and “it respects Canadian fundamental rights and freedoms, including those protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Though the legislation itself has already passed, the NCCM said it hopes it can be tweaked through the regulations.

The WSO said it will closely watch how C-70 is implemented. The legislation is required to undergo parliamentary review every five years.

“If we see reasons for concern, then we will certainly be raising those along the line, and certainly at the review,” Singh said.

Source: Groups representing minorities say they’re alarmed by foreign interference legislation

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Multicultural Framework Review – Australian Government Response​

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Suspect that any Canadian review will result in comparable insights (with obvious inclusion of French language):

The Panel travelled across Australia to consult more than 1430 individuals and 750 organisations, including community and faith groups, First Nations bodies, local government, business representatives, and service and sports clubs.

Among many insights arising from consultations and submissions, the Panel found:

  • Australians are living in a new era of uncertainty, in which beliefs and concepts they once counted on for stability were being put into question.
  • While government has a crucial role in establishing laws and policy to prevent discrimination, promote equal opportunities and provide access to strong public services, all people who call Australia home share responsibility for building and sustaining our multicultural society.
  • Education and English language learning are vital tools for defining and communicating a shared Australian identity, and promoting understanding and connection between Australia’s communities.
  • Effective and sustainable language services are essential to providing access and equity to key services, particularly in high-risk health and legal settings.
  • Regional, rural and even remote communities are increasingly culturally diverse and an important part of the multicultural story.
  • Many factors shape the diverse lives of Australians, including cultural background, gender, sexuality and socio-economic disadvantage, along with barriers to social and economic inclusion. The Government must consider intersecting forms of discrimination when making policy.
  • Young people, who will inherit and define Australia’s multicultural future, must be at the heart of policy-making considerations, and were a key focus of the Review.

Dr Dellal, Chair of the Review, has observed that simply being a culturally diverse society is not the same as being a successful multicultural society. Effective government policies and the engagement of all Australians are also essential. The Review creates a foundation on which to develop and communicate such policies. 

Foundations for future generations: the Government response

The Panel made 29 recommendations, noting the particular importance of data, research and evaluation to underpin future work. The recommendations emerge from three core principles of the Review:

  • Connection – setting the foundations of a multicultural Australia through leadership, planning, and accountability between three tiers of government and communities.
  • Identity and belonging – creating a welcoming Australia through English language programs, citizenship policy, and participation in arts, culture, sports, and media. Experiences of discrimination and racism comprise the second of the top ten themes identified in submissions to the Review.
  • Inclusion – building cultural capability into public services, modernising grant programs, ensuring digital inclusion, ensuring a sustainable language services sector, and meeting the unique needs of young people and regional areas.

This is among the most substantial reviews of Australian multiculturalism ever conducted. Its comprehensive consultation processes and thoughtful deliberations create the opportunity to strengthen government and community efforts into the future.

The Government commits to the Framework’s principles and will be guided by them, as we build on our commitment to ensure Australia’s multicultural settings are fit-for-purpose to harness the talents of all Australians.

Multicultural Framework Review – Government Response​ (435KB PDF).

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LILLEY: Trudeau fails to deal with out-of-control immigration

2024/07/24 Leave a comment

Repeats the same mistakes that Passifume made in ignoring drops in web interest, processed applications, and drop in April and May. But fits his narrative of the government doing nothing when in fact Minister Miller has starting trimming.

But agree, of course, on the overall numbers of permanent and temporary migrants being too high and the government being too timid in bringing them back to more reasonable levels:

We’ve already admitted more foreign students into Canada than we did in the same time period last year.

In the middle of a housing crisis.

At a time when health systems across the country struggle to hire enough doctors and nurses to care for the population that is already here.

What’s worse, we aren’t just increasing the number of foreign students, we are also increasing immigration on all fronts and even the number of people claiming asylum in Canada is up over last year. If you thought you heard the Liberal minister in charge of all of this say something about capping numbers, you’d be right.

The problem is, he hasn’t done that yet even as his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has admitted the problem.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration, whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students, in particular, that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb,” Trudeau said at the beginning of April.

What’s been done since then?

Nothing.

As National Post first reported, between Jan. 1 and May 31, the Canadian government approved 216,620 study permits compared to 200,205 during the same period in 2023. For those keeping track, 2023 was a record year for foreign student admissions into Canada with more than 680,000 permits granted last year.

In January of this year, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said the system was being abused.

“Enough is enough,” Miller said. “Through the decisive measures announced today, we are striking the right balance for Canada and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system while setting students up for the success they hope for.”

If that balance is coming, the numbers aren’t showing it.

Meanwhile, from January through May we took in 30,785 compared to 28,980 in the same period for 2023. Our immigration target for permanent residents in 2023 was 465,000 and we brought in 471,550.

A decade ago we were bringing in what was then considered a historic high of just over 250,000 per year and this year we will likely bring in double that.

Now, when you add all the different ways we bring people in, it’s a staggering figure. According to the Statistics Canada’s population clock which tracks growth in real time, our current population as of writing is 41,481,200.

On Dec. 19, 2023 when I wrote about our growing population, the clock stood at 40,720,342 meaning we’ve added 760,858 people in seven months or an average of 109,000 per month.

Again, all in a housing crisis and a health-care crisis.

Bringing in people on scale, faster than we can absorb them to use Trudeau’s terminology, means housing costs rise and health care wait times grow longer. Then there is the economic impact of such massive and uncoordinated growth.

A recent report from The Royal Bank found that Canada’s per-capita household spending is down, and that per capita GDP growth has declined in six of the last seven quarters.

“Canada’s economy might not be in recession but it feels like one,” the report stated.

Our population growth is masking the weaknesses in the Canadian economy.

“Surging population growth has prevented outright declines in Canadian gross domestic product, but per-person output is falling, and the unemployment rate is rising like it usually only would be during a recession,” RBC said.

So, we have a housing crisis, that is being made worse by a lack of supply and increased demand due to immigration, but that immigration is also masking a recession that would be taking place if it weren’t for all the consumer spending of newcomers.

Meanwhile, unemployment is rising in large part because we add more people to the workforce each month. StatsCan has been warning for the last year that population growth is outstripping job growth.

It’s a fine mess we find ourselves in, one created entirely by the policies of the Trudeau government.

Source: LILLEY: Trudeau fails to deal with out-of-control immigration

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Krugman: Trump’s Cynical Attempt to Pit Recent Immigrants Against Black Americans

2024/07/24 Leave a comment

Indeed. But continue to see from time-to-time articles from Black Americans arguing the same.

Obviously, the big political news of the past couple of days has come from the Democratic side. But before last week’s Republican National Convention fades from view, let me focus instead on a development on the G.O.P. side that may, given everything else that has been happening, have flown under the radar: MAGA rhetoric on immigration, which was already ugly, has become even uglier.

Until now, most of the anti-immigration sloganeering coming from Donald Trump and his campaign has involved false claims that we’re experiencing a migrant crime wave.

Increasingly, however, Trump and his associates have started making the case that immigrants are stealing American jobs — specifically, the accusation that immigrants are inflicting terrible damage on the livelihoods of Black workers.

Of course, the idea that immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans, including native-born Black Americans, isn’t new. It has, in particular, been an obsession for JD Vance, complete with misleading statistical analysis, so Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate in itself signals a new focus on the supposed economic harm inflicted by immigrants.

So, too, did Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday, which contained a number of assertions about the economics of immigration, among them, the notion that of jobs created under President Biden, “107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens” — a weirdly specific number considering that it’s clearly false, because native-born employment has risen by millions of jobs since Biden took office.

What seems relatively new, however, is the attempt to pit immigrants against Black Americans. True, Trump prefigured this line of attack during his June debate with Biden, when he declared that immigrants are “taking Black jobs,” leading some to mockingly question which jobs, exactly, count as “Black.”

But the volume on this claim has been turned way up.

At the Republican convention, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, someone very likely to have a role in the next administration if Trump wins, spoke of “a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans.”

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published last week, Trump went even bigger, declaring that “The Black people are going to be decimated by the millions of people that are coming into the country.” He continued, “Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the migrants coming in illegally into the country.” He went on to say, “The Black population in this country is going to die because of what’s happened, what’s going to happen to their jobs — their jobs, their housing, everything.”

Trump’s diatribe forced Bloomberg to add this, parenthetically, as a fact check: “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of employment gains since 2018 have been for naturalized U.S. citizens and legal residents — not migrants.”

There was a time when a rant like this would have signaled that a politician lacked the emotional stability and intellectual capacity to hold the highest office in the land. Alas.

Also, it’s hard to overstate the cynicism here. Trump has a history of associating with white supremacists, not to mention his longstanding obsession with crime in urban, often predominantly Black precincts. Still, he clearly perceives an opportunity to peel away some Black voters by playing them off against immigrants.

But again, even if we ignore the cynicism, this new line of attack on immigration is just wrong on the facts.

If immigrants are taking away all the “Black jobs,” you can’t see it in the data, which shows Black unemployment at historic lows. If Black wages have, as Trump claims, gone way down, someone should tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says that median Black earnings, adjusted for inflation, are significantly higher than they were toward the end of Trump’s term. (You should ignore the spurious bump during the pandemic, which reflected composition effects rather than genuine wage gains.)

You might ask why, given we have indeed seen a surge in immigration, that we aren’t seeing signs of an adverse, let alone cataclysmic, impact on Black wages or employment. After all, many recent immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, lack college degrees and maybe even high school education. So aren’t they competing with native-born Americans who also lack college or high school degrees?

The answer, which we’ve known since the 1990s, is that immigrant workers bring a different set of skills to the table than native-born workers, even when those workers have similar levels of formal education. And yes, I mean skills: If you think of workers without a college degree as “unskilled,” try fixing your own plumbing or doing your own carpentry. It shouldn’t need to be said, but a lot of blue-collar work is highly skilled and highly specialized. As a result, immigrants tend to take a very different mix of jobs than native-born workers do — which means that there’s much less head-to-head competition between immigrant and native-born workers than you might think, or what Trump and Vance want you to think.

The bottom line is that the attempt to portray immigration as an apocalyptic threat to Black Americans is refuted by the facts. Will it nonetheless work politically? I have no idea.

Source: Trump’s Cynical Attempt to Pit Recent Immigrants Against Black Americans

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