Is Australia headed for another citizenship saga?

2019/07/12 Leave a comment

Appears not, despite the heade questionr:

Bill Shorten, Jacqui Lambie and Chris Bowen are among a list of more than two dozen politicians who may not be eligible to sit in the Australian parliament.

Legal academics in Western Australia have put the constitution under the microscope and concluded that 26 MPs and senators may fall foul of the nightmarish Section 44(i).

The section disqualifies anyone who holds allegiance to a foreign country from sitting in the federal parliament.

While much of the attention during the 2017-2018 political crisis that claimed 15 scalps centred on the section’s second criteria -which covers the issue of dual citizenship – the third criteria went largely unnoticed.

‘Right of abode’ in UK

This disqualifies anyone from sitting in parliament if they are entitled to the rights and privileges of citizens of a foreign power.

This means that Australians born before January 1, 1983, to a British parent, probably still hold a ‘right of abode’ in the United Kingdom – which confers almost all the rights and privileges of a full British citizen.

‘We seem to have only scratched the surface.’

“While many Australians perhaps hoped that multiple High Court decisions and resulting by-elections would mean that the country could put the parliamentary eligibility crisis behind it, instead we seem to have only scratched the surface,” says legal academic Lorraine Finlay.

Finlay is co-author of the paper But Wait…There’s More: The Ongoing Complexities of Section 44(I), published in the University of Western Australia Law Review.

At the very least, says Finlay, the third criteria is “significantly more ambiguous” than the second.

Allegiance

And she says it would be up to the High Court to determine if the rights conferred on an Australian holding a right of abode in the UK are significant enough to create an “imputed sense of allegiance”.

Any member of a Commonwealth nation, who holds the right of abode in the UK, is free to enter and exit the UK “without hindrance”, as well as to work, study, apply for welfare, vote and stand for public office in the country.

Finlay says it is interesting to note that the rights afforded to European Union citizens in the UK are “distinct” and lesser than those afforded to Commonwealth Citizens with the right of abode in the UK.

After examining the parliamentary citizenship register, Finlay concludes there are at least 26 current parliamentarians who potentially could have the right of abode in the UK, based on the information they have provided on their British family history.

Australian politicians dual citizenship list

LABOR (14)

  • Bill Shorten (Vic), Chris Bowen (NSW), Mark Butler (SA), Nick Champion (SA), Lisa Chesters (Vic), Pat Conroy (NSW), Alexander Gallacher (SA), Katy Gallagher (ACT), Andrew Giles (Vic), Madeleine King (WA), Susan Lines (WA), Brian Mitchell (Tas), Louise Pratt (WA) and Glenn Sterle (WA).

LIBERAL (5)

  • John Alexander (NSW), Angie Bell (Qld), Ben Morton (WA), Dean Smith (WA) and Alan Tudge (Vic).

NATIONAL (3)

  • George Christensen (Qld), Patrick Conaghan (NSW) and Perin Davey (NSW).

GREENS (2)

  • Adam Bandt (Vic) and Rachel Siewart (WA).

OTHER (2)

  • One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts (Qld) and independent Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie.

Challenge unlikely

For any of the above to be ruled ineligible, they would have to be challenged in the parliament and referred to the High Court.

With 14 under a cloud, it’s safe to assume Labor will let sleeping dogs lie.

And while a challenge could be to the coalition’s advantage, the Liberals and Nationals might feel the brunt of a backlash if it forces voters back to the polls for another slew of by-elections.

Finlay concludes that an examination of eligibility in light of the Commonwealth right of abode is therefore unlikely to go any further.

“(But) it demonstrates that there may still be a significant number of current Australian parliamentarians who are not actually eligible to sit in the parliament,” she says.

“Clarifying the scope and reach of section 44(i) is essential to maintain public confidence in the legitimacy of the current Australia Parliament, and also to avoid uncertainty with regards to future elections.”

Source: Is Australia headed for another citizenship saga?

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Latest Danish citizenship test has one-in-two pass rate

2019/07/08 Leave a comment

In contrast, when the Conservative government changed the knowledge test by increasing the required pass mark from 60 to 75 percent, rotated questions to reduce cheating along with a new citizenship guide (Discover Canada), all pre-C-24, the rate dropped to close to 80 percent from 96 percent.

Adjustments and changes were made subsequently that resulted in a pass rate of about 90 percent last time I checked.

Canadian citizenship tests are largely designed to facilitate citizenship, Danish ones to make it harder:

At a 52.77 percent pass rate, the success ratio for those hoping to become Danish nationals was slightly lower than the previous test in November 2018, which saw 53.48 percent pass.

A total of 3,502 people took the June 6th test at 52 language centres across Denmark, according to figures released by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration.

Since 2015, the Danish citizenship test (indfødsretsprøven), held twice annually, has consisted of 40 multiple choice questions on Danish culture, history and society. The pass mark is 32.

The pass rate for the test, for which the registration fee is currently 783 kroner, generally hovers around the 50 percent mark.

Passing the test is a prerequisite for all applicants for Danish citizenship. The content and difficulty level of the exam is monitored by the immigration ministry’s International Recruitment and Integration Board (Styrelsen for International Rekruttering og Integration, SIRI).

“It makes me very happy to see that foreigners who live here in Denmark want to become Danish citizens. Congratulations to those who passed the test – they are now one step closer to becoming citizens,” Minister for Immigration and Integration Mattias Tesfaye said in a ministry press release.

“They have shown the will and motivation to learn about our culture, history and democratic system. Citizenship brings with it many new rights, but also an obligation to protect Denmark and help to build our lovely little country,” Tesfaye added.

The next citizenship test will take place on November 27th.

Source: Latest Danish citizenship test has one-in-two pass rate

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Québec élargit l’accès à la francisation pour les immigrants

2019/07/08 Leave a comment

Noteworthy in the background of Bill 21 discrimination and the reduction in immigration levels:

Davantage d’immigrants auront accès à la francisation et ils seront mieux compensés pour se présenter en classe, a annoncé cet avant-midi le ministre de l’Immigration.

Cet élargissement du programme est permis par un investissement supplémentaire de 70 millions décidé par le gouvernement.

« Au Québec, les personnes immigrantes doivent évoluer en français, a dit le ministre Simon Jolin-Barrette en conférence de presse au centre-ville de Montréal. C’est pourquoi nous devons mettre en place le meilleur système possible pour favoriser la francisation. »

Parmi les mesures annoncées :

• L’allocation pour les étudiants en francisation à temps plein passera à 185 $ par semaine (contre 141 $ actuellement)

• Les étudiants en francisation à temps partiel recevront une allocation de 15 $ par jour (contre 0 $ actuellement)

• Les frais de garde de ces derniers seront remboursés à hauteur de 9 $ par jour (contre 7 $ actuellement).

• Les étudiants étrangers et les travailleurs temporaires auront aussi accès à la francisation.

Par ailleurs, tous les Québécois d’adoption auront accès à la francisation, peu importe depuis combien de temps ils sont installés dans la province. Jusqu’à maintenant, seuls les immigrants arrivés depuis moins de cinq ans y avaient droit.

« En donnant la possibilité à toutes les personnes immigrantes de se franciser, nous améliorons leurs chances de se trouver un emploi correspondant à leurs compétences et à répondre aux besoins du marché du travail », a dit le ministre Jolin-Barrette. « L’immigration est l’une des solutions à la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre. »

Accueil positif

Des organismes actifs dans le domaine de la francisation se sont dits satisfaits des annonces du ministre, cet avant-midi.

« C’étaient des revendications qu’on faisait depuis de nombreuses années, a fait valoir Pablo Altamirano, directeur de l’Alliance pour l’accueil et l’intégration des immigrations. L’allocation pour les étudiants à temps partiel va aider énormément pour l’assiduité des étudiants : les gens ne pouvaient pas toujours se déplacer à cause du coût des transports. »

Anait Aleksanin, du Centre d’appui aux communautés immigrantes, s’est aussi réjouie de l’annonce. « C’est une très bonne nouvelle. Il y a beaucoup de mesures qu’on attendait depuis longtemps », a-t-elle dit.

La Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec a accueilli positivement l’annonce, particulièrement en ce qui a trait aux cours de francisation à temps partiel. « Les nouveaux arrivants pourront mettre leurs compétences à contribution plus rapidement, en plus de mettre en pratique leur apprentissage du français au quotidien, avec leurs collègues de travail », a déclaré le grand patron de l’organisation, Stéphane Forget, via communiqué.

La Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ) s’est montrée plus ambivalente : elle a salué les améliorations annoncées, mais aimerait voir davantage de francisation dans les milieux de travail.

« Il faut que les travailleurs et travailleuses puissent être libérés de leurs tâches pendant les heures de travail afin de pouvoir assister à des cours de francisation tout en étant rémunérés », a indiqué la centrale syndicale dans un communiqué. « C’est un gros pari que de penser qu’après leur journée de travail, ces travailleurs […] vont être prédisposés à se déplacer pour aller suivre une formation en français. »

Source: Québec élargit l’accès à la francisation pour les immigrants

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Citizenship question causing an uproar in U.S. has been part of Canada’s census since 1901

2019/07/08 1 Comment

Politicization and weaponization in contrast to the more neutral approach in Canada:

A politically divisive debate continues to rage over U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census. That same question has been part of Canada’s census form for over a century without a ripple.

Trump has been waging a fierce fight to add the controversial query to the 2020 census, and said Friday he’s now considering an executive order to get it done after a Supreme Court ruling blocked his efforts.

Canada’s own long form census asks: “Of what country is this person a citizen?” Respondents have a choice of three possible answers: ‘Canada, by birth,’ ‘Canada, by naturalization’ or ‘Other country – specify.’

A spokeswoman for Statistics Canada, which manages the census, said the citizenship data is vital to various programs.

“The citizenship question has a long history on the Canadian census, being introduced for the first time on the 1901,” said Emily Theelen in an email.

“This information is used to estimate the number of potential voters and to plan citizenship classes and programs. It also provides information about the population with multiple citizenships and the number of immigrants in Canada who hold Canadian citizenship.”

Theelen said Statistics Canada’s data quality assessment indicators have not flagged any issues specifically related to the citizenship question. The Library of Parliament could not find any significant debate, controversy or court case related to the inclusion of a citizenship question on the Canadian census form.

In the U.S., the Republican administration’s push has triggered a partisan firestorm because of the enormous political stakes.

The once-a-decade population count determines the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives among the states, and the disbursement of about $675 billion in federal funding.

Disadvantage for Democrats

The Census Bureau’s own experts have said the question would discourage immigrants from participating in the census, which would result in a less-accurate census. That, say critics, would redistribute money and political power away from Democrat-led urban districts — where immigrants tend to cluster — and toward whiter, rural areas where Republicans do well.

Immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman said the political and electoral landscape in Canada is drastically different from the one in the U.S. and would not allow for that kind of “gerrymandering” — the manipulation of electoral boundaries to favour one party over others.

“In Canada, we have an impartial electoral commission that redistributes the electoral boundaries according to the law based on objective criteria,” he said. “It’s not an issue here at all, because we don’t have that kind of gerrymandering that they have in the U.S.”

No sign of abuse in Canada

Waldman said it’s possible a census result showing a high percentage of undocumented people in a specific region of the U.S. could lead to stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols there.

Up to now, there has been no evidence that census information has been abused in that way in Canada.

The U.S. Justice Department said Friday it will continue to look for legal grounds to include the question on the census, but it did not say what options it’s considering.

The U.S. government already has begun the process of printing the census questionnaire without the citizenship question, but Trump suggested Friday that officials might be able to add the citizenship query to the questionnaire after it’s been printed.

In the Supreme Court’s decision last week, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal members in saying the administration’s justification for adding the question “seems to have been contrived.”

The Trump administration has said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box.

Canada conducts a census every four years. The next census is due in 2020.

Source: Citizenship question causing an uproar in U.S. has been part of Canada’s census since 1901

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How The U.S. Citizenship Oath Came To Be What It Is Today

2019/07/06 Leave a comment

But while the 1790 naturalization law established a framework for becoming a citizen, it didn’t implement a standard oath for the country, leaving the naturalization process varied from state to state for more than 100 years.

With no uniform process in place, a presidential commission was created in 1905 to study how to reform the country’s naturalization process.

“Due to the high number of immigrants from all different locations spreading through all over and across the U.S., by then there was as many as 5,000 courts with naturalization jurisdiction, and each of these courts had developed its own processes for administering the oath,” Wang says.

Many of the commission’s recommendations were included in the Basic Naturalization Act of 1906, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. While the recommendations still didn’t lead to a standardized oath, at this point the decision was made to include language about defending “the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; and bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” according to the USCIS website.

It wasn’t until 1929 that the oath’s text was standardized. For much of the next two decades, the oath stayed the same. But with the U.S. facing a growing threat from the Soviet Union, the oath was amended in 1952 to emphasize service to country.

“There was an intent to make it more explicit that in becoming a citizen of the United States that you are also explicitly going to take action in defending this country when asked to,” Wang says.

The three major changes, Wang says, included, “adding [a part] around bearing arms on behalf of the United States when required … performing noncombatant services in the armed forces when required, and then the final one was added around performing work of national importance under civilian direction.”

These changes still exist in the oath used today.

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

Wang has gone to many naturalization ceremonies and has heard the oath recited many times, including by his own parents. No matter how often he hears those 140 words, he says, they still have emotional significance to him.

“Words matter, and when you hear people say this, each of them are doing what my parents did, which is actually give up part of their identity,” he says. “Something that they grew up with. Something that their family is.”

As people take the oath, they are often embracing a new identity and completing a journey that has lasted years and possibly even decades, Wang says.

“It truly is something that matters deeply to each and every one of the individuals that say it,” he says. “So when you see the tears on their faces, you can’t help but feel them welling up in your own.”

Source: How The U.S. Citizenship Oath Came To Be What It Is Today

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Historical Fiction at the Supreme Court: The Census and Citizenship

2019/07/03 Leave a comment

Good critique:
A divided Supreme Court last week blocked Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross from adding an untested citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Court’s ruling is a victory for representative democracy over the Trump administration’s latest power play, which would have led to a dramatic undercount of the country’s noncitizen population, with substantial implications for federal funding and political representation. In the process of reaching the right outcome, however, the Court has rewritten history, with justices up and down the bench joining together to create an atmosphere of normalcy around a question that is anything but.

Coming into the Supreme Court after a series of decisive trial-court defeats, Donald Trump’s administration really had only two defenses for the citizenship question: first, that it would help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act on behalf of minority communities; and second, that the administration was simply “reinstating” a question that had a deep “pedigree” stretching back “nearly 200 years.”

The Court rejected the Voting Rights Act defense as a pretext. That was all the challengers needed legally, since the law governing federal-agency decision making requires the stated reason for an agency’s action to be the real reason. But the Court accepted much of the administration’s historical argument—which is wrong, as we explained in a law-review article based on research into centuries-old census instructions, mid-century statistical texts, and decades of congressional proceedings.

Most significant, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion and the partial concurrences are littered with assertions that the Trump administration was trying to “reinstate” the citizenship question. Even justices who were otherwise skeptical of the administration’s scheme and seemed to have a better grip on the historical record—Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—referred repeatedly to “reinstatement.” That word obscures the nature of what the administration was trying to do.

Never in the 230-year history of the census has the complete-count questionnaire (or its equivalent) asked for the citizenship status of everyone in the country, as Ross proposed. When citizenship was asked at all, it was directed to small segments of the population, such as foreign-born men 21 or older (1890 to 1910) or foreign-born people (1930 to 1950), mainly to figure out how well they were assimilating into the United States. After the 1950 census, questions about citizenship or naturalization were confined to sample surveys that went to only a small percentage of households.

The Court acknowledged the change in census practice after 1950, but it mangled the details of the practice leading up to that point, incorrectly treating questions about “birthplace” and “citizenship” as equivalent and asserting that “between 1820 and 1950, the question was asked of all households.” The fact is that multiple censuses during that period had no citizenship question (1840, 1850, 1860, and 1880), and—as mentioned—those that did include one did not direct it at every person in a household. These various errors allowed the Court to ignore the ultimate conclusion it should have drawn from the history: The Trump administration’s gambit was unprecedented, not a return to form.

The majority opinion also soft-pedaled the Census Bureau’s decision to remove all citizenship and naturalization questions from the decennial census following the 1950 count. It is true, as the Court claims, that the bureau concluded that citizenship information had declined in importance to the government, researchers, and other users of census data by this time. But the bureau didn’t just get rid of questions that were unimportant—it overhauled its whole approach, because traditional practices were deficient in accomplishing the one thing the Constitution’s enumeration clause requires the government to do: count everyone in the country.

Traditionally, the federal government tried to do two things at once with the census: count all heads and collect other useful information. By the 1950s, the Census Bureau’s social-science skills had evolved sufficiently that it could evaluate how well it was doing its job, and it found that the second ambition was impeding the first; the count was missing millions while wasting resources. So the bureau stripped out extraneous questions from the main survey, including dozens of other “demographic questions,” as the Court called them. Census Director Robert W. Burgess explained the benefits of these changes to Congress in the lead-up to the 1960 census: “For a long time, the Census Bureau has believed that enumerators were being burdened with more instructions and work than they could effectively handle, with the result that both coverage and content suffered.

The majority similarly understated the Census Bureau’s resistance to proposals in the 1970s and ’80s that would have required it to assess everyone’s citizenship status. According to the Court, the bureau was concerned that such efforts “would discourage noncitizens from responding to the census,” and, in the words of a 1980 district-court opinion characterizing the bureau’s position, that those efforts would “inevitably jeopardize the overall accuracy of the population count.” During this period, Census Bureau Director Vincent Barabba warned that the “census is just not designed for” asking everyone’s citizenship status, and that doing so would erode “the credibility of the Bureau, and, more importantly, the credibility and public confidence in—and, indeed, the accuracy of—the figures embodied in the final census results.” Similarly, the bureau warned—in language from the 1980 case omitted by the Court last week—that “questions as to citizenship are particularly sensitive in minority communities and would inevitably trigger hostility, resentment, and refusal to cooperate.” The concern during this period, then, wasn’t some unspecified loss of accuracy due to “discouragement”; it was a full collapse of the census and everything it stands for, driven by widespread fear of, and anger toward, the government.In his partial concurrence, Breyer supplied some of this crucial context, but a majority made up of Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh overlooked it in ruling that the administration’s decision didn’t violate the Constitution’s enumeration clause. They asserted that citizenship questions have been “open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Republic.” This is preposterous. If “history matters”—as the conservative majority asserts—it must matter that Ross proposed to do something that has, in fact, never been done before. And it must matter that, for the past 70 years, the Census Bureau—the agency primarily charged with counting everyone—believed that citizenship questions and a whole host of other demographic questions didn’t belong on the decennial headcount, because they made it impossible to … count everyone. The Court thus sent the message that a citizenship question on the decennial census would be normal. The Court blocked the question because Ross lied about why he wanted it; but if he hadn’t lied, it would have been fine.

For more than a year now, the simple prospect of a citizenship question on the 2020 census has elevated vulnerable communities’ fears of the federal government. The Supreme Court’s ruling should help mitigate those fears somewhat. But the Court could have and should have taken a far stronger posture than it did, ruling not that the citizenship question was administratively imperfect, but that it was unconstitutional and un-American.

Source: Historical Fiction at the Supreme Court

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Countries urged not to strip terror suspects of citizenship

2019/07/03 Leave a comment

More on citizenship revocation for treason or terror:

Stripping terror suspects of citizenship does not increase national security and may even make it worse, legal experts told a conference on ending statelessness.

They are particularly concerned over the increasing use of the measure by Britain which this year revoked the nationality of “jihadi bride” Shamima Begum who left London to join Islamic State in 2015 at the age of 15.

Britain is also considering the case of British-Canadian Muslim convert Jack Letts who joined ISIS as a teenager and is now being held in a Kurdish-run jail in northern Syria.

“Stripping nationality is a completely ineffective measure – and an arbitrary measure,” said Amal de Chickera, co-founder of the Institute on Statelessness, which is hosting the conference in The Hague.

He said countries should retain responsibility for nationals accused of supporting ISIS and ensure they are prosecuted.

“Stripping nationality when people are abroad merely exports the problem to other countries,” he said, adding such measures were also likely to have a serious impact on families back home.

Countries should recognize that women married to ISIS fighters, and their children, may have been victimized, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Friday.

The conference heard that Britain stripped nationality from more than 100 people in 2017, compared to a total of 12 people between 1950 and 2002, but most cases were done quietly.

De Chickera said it was crucial that all countries’ counterterrorism policies should not result in more people becoming stateless – which means someone is not recognized as a national by any country in the world.

To avoid making people stateless, Britain has focused on dual nationals.

But Audrey Macklin, a human rights law professor at the University of Toronto, said if all countries had laws to revoke citizenship from dual nationals then you would get a race to see who could do it first “and to the loser goes the citizen.”

“Is this a policy that makes sense as a global practice directed at making the world more secure, at reducing the risk of terrorism? To my mind, not so much,” she said.

She said citizenship was a right rather than a privilege and described citizenship deprivation followed by expulsion as the “political equivalent of the death penalty.”

The conference comes midway through a UN campaign to end statelessness in a decade. An estimated 10 to 15 million people are stateless worldwide, often deprived of basic rights.

Jawad Fairooz, a former Bahraini MP who was rendered stateless after being stripped of his nationality in 2012, said revoking citizenship should never be used as a political tool or a punishment.

Bahrain has stripped hundreds of people of nationality since a 2011 uprising although many have since regained citizenship.

“If you lose [citizenship], you lose the rest of your rights,” said Fairooz, chairman of Salam for Democracy & Human Rights.

“If you are born in a country and serve the country and you [are] part of it and quite suddenly your name is deleted from that country it is really heartbreaking.”

Source: Countries urged not to strip terror suspects of citizenship

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Over 80% of Canadians would fail a citizenship test, new poll reveals

2019/07/03 Leave a comment

No real surprise. More Canada Day clickbait than serious:

To become a Canadian citizen, hopeful permanent residents must achieve a score of 75 per cent or higher on the Canadian Citizenship test.

However, a recent poll by Forum Research found that almost 90 per cent of Canadians would fail this test, and the average score among those polled was just 50 per cent.

According to the results, men, the country’s highest earners, post-graduate degree holders and residents of British Columbia are among the most likely to pass the test.

Survey respondents were asked a series of 10 questions, which included questions about the title of the royal anthem (often confused with the national anthem), who the Métis are, the year the Charter of Rights and Freedoms came to Canada and Canada’s head of state.

Canadians scored most poorly on questions about the title of the Royal Anthem of Canada, civic duties, and Canada’s head of state.

When asked about the title of the royal anthem, only 36 per cent correctly answered, “God Save the Queen,” while 56 per cent responded “O Canada,” and six per cent said it was the Star Spangled Banner.

Respondents were also given a list of official responsibilities Canadian citizens have and were asked to select which item was not an official responsibility. Only 26 per cent correctly responded “driving safely.”

Lastly, over 80 per cent of respondents did not know that the Queen Elizabeth II remains Canada’s head of state to this day

Areas where respondents seemed to know their Canadian trivia included Canadian geography, the English translation of the word “Inuit,” and the significance of the Canada Pacific Railway (CPR).

In the former, 63 per cent of respondents were able to identify that the Midwest is not a Canadian geographical region. In the latter, two thirds of respondents knew that the CPR, which stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, is representative of unity.

Other questions on which respondents scored fairly well included the year the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was brought to Canada (1982), and identifying the founding peoples of Canada (Indigenous, French and British).

The Forum Poll™ was conducted by Forum Research with the results based on an interactive voice response telephone survey of 1645 randomly selected Canadians. The poll was June 25th -27th, 2019. Results based on the total sample are considered accurate +/- 3%, 19 times out of 20. Subsample results will be less accurate.

Source: Over 80% of Canadians would fail a citizenship test, new poll reveals

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On Canada Day, let’s reconsider the high cost of citizenship

2019/07/02 Leave a comment

While I have long advocated for a decrease in citizenship fees, given the mix of personal and public benefits of citizenship, her points on permanent residency fees miss the fact that these only cover processing costs, not the more than $1 billion the government spends on settlement services such as language training.

Both Conservative and Liberal governments in their substantial funding for settlement services demonstrate their recognition of the public, not just personal, benefits of immigration.

Similarly, while citizenship data (administrative and Census) show some groups adversely affected by the 2014-15 fee increases and other changes, visible minorities form close to 80 percent of all immigrants, so hard to make the case that this is a major barrier:

At any international airport, the passport of those making their way through customs could be a source of envy or a source of pity, quietly communicating the perceived quality of life lived by its holder. Voluminous emigration and immigration have turned citizenship into the “most significant class lottery remaining in the modern world,” in the words of one journalist. Perhaps recognizing this, many countries including Canada have successfully capitalized on immigration.

The path to Canadian citizenship has gone through a series of changes. In the past, in addition to being able to marry into citizenship, one could literally buy citizenship – a program Quebec continues to this day. Currently, the journey to citizenship begins with permanent residency. Apart from transitioning from a student or worker to a permanent resident, other options include using foreign entry programs such as Family Sponsorship, Economic, and Business Immigration.

Regardless of the option, in addition to the application cost comes a payment of $490 for the right of permanent residence fee, without which permanent residence status is not granted. Protected persons are exempt from this expense.

Introduced in 1995 and levied on individuals seeking permanent residency,first at a hefty price of $975, the fee is seen as “a partial compensation for benefits which accrue to the person who acquires permanent resident status and helps to defray various costs incurred in delivering the immigration program.” But this may not have been the only reason for its introduction.

The right of permanent residence fee (then called right of landing fee) came at a time when there was an increase in immigrants from Asia and the Middle East and a plummet in the numbers originating from the U.S. and Europe.

In a world where economic parity is heavily influenced by gender and colour, this fee continues to be a major impediment for many and is especially intensified if one is a woman of colour. Exceptions made for protected persons aside, and though levied regardless of the country of origin, it favours those with economic stature, which in today’s world continues to be withheld from women and people of colour, thereby contributing to inequities in education and employment opportunities.

After proving one’s worth as an upstanding permanent resident, if financial means allow, then the next step toward active civic engagement is in the form of an application for citizenship (bumped to $530 from $100 in 2015) which, once again, could be loaded with added costs.

In total, the price paid to acquire Canadian citizenship quickly escalates, approximately amounting to between $3,000 and $4,000 (or more) and may include translation fees; lawyer’s fees that could be as steep as $400 for a consultation; medical exams and diagnostic testing, which aren’t covered by provincial health care plans; official language testing by a third party; miscellaneous costs such as citizenship certificates; permanent resident card renewal; photographs, conveyance and mailing. And this is without factoring the expenses associated with holding the status as an international student or worker (before applying for permanent residency) within Canada.

In 2017, Canada should have received more than $78-million from 159,262 economic immigrants, solely based on the right of permanent residence fee, many of whom pay this amount even before arriving to Canada. Once here, if these individuals choose to pursue citizenship, then once again it translates into millions of dollars wending their way to government coffers.

There is privilege attached to becoming a Canadian citizen. But it isn’t something that is easily afforded for many. Of the total cost of the arduous, emotional and financially stressful path to citizenship, approximately 15 per cent to 20 per cent is directed toward buying the permanent residence and citizenship rights – to be able to belong, to be able to vote, and most importantly, to be able to call oneself Canadian. The fact remains that, today, the current immigration system, consciously or unconsciously, promotes gender and economic disparity globally. In a world where immigration is more than just a means to move from one country to another, it is time to recognize what this has evolved into – a booming business that only profits certain countries.

Source: On Canada Day, let’s reconsider the high cost of citizenship

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

Why Trump Lost the Census Case

2019/06/29 Leave a comment

Good analysis from the right:

I’ll freely admit, I’m surprised. In April I predicted that the Trump administration would prevailin its effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census form. I based my conclusion on the combination of Congress’s broad delegation of authority to the executive branch to conduct the census in the “form and content” that the secretary of commerce determines, the historical norm of including citizenship questions, and the traditional leniency of so-called arbitrary and capricious review.

Against this legal background, I believed that — like with the travel-ban case — a chaotic process would matter less than the very broad discretion granted the president by existing law. I was wrong.

Today, Justice John Roberts joined the four more progressive judges to reach a legal conclusion (articulated in a complex series of interlocking and competing concurrences and dissents) that roughly goes as follows: Including a citizenship question in the census is not “substantively invalid.” However, the Administrative Procedure Act applies, and it is “meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public.” Since the administration’s explanation for its agency’s action was “incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process,” the administration failed to meet its APA obligations.

The secretary of commerce had pointed to an assertion from the Department of Justice that the question would assist in voting-rights enforcement. To put it simply, the majority did not buy that explanation, finding that it was more of a rationalization: The secretary of commerce decided to include the question, went hunting for a reason, and eventually got the DOJ to help.

Quite frankly, this sounds about right. As the Court put it, “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.” This section of the opinion is instructive:

“The record shows that the Secretary began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA [Voting Rights Act] enforcement in connection with that project. The Secretary’s Director of Policy did not know why the Secretary wished to reinstate the question, but saw it as his task to “find the best rationale.”

A different way of putting the opinion is that the APA, at the very least, requires an honest process.

Why was this outcome different from that of the travel-ban case? In that case, the president himself offered evidence that the stated reasons for the administration’s actions were pretextual. The president himself provided evidence that anti-Muslim animus provided at least part of the justification for his order. Yet in that case the statue at issue was different. If the census statutes granted the president considerable discretion, the statute at issue in the travel ban granted him truly immense discretion, unbounded by the APA. Different statutes yield different outcomes.

So now what? There is much speculation on Twitter that the administration may have time to go back to the drawing board, conduct a proper process in accord with truthful, justifiable reasoning, and obtain legal approval in time to print the census forms.

It’s possible, but I’m skeptical. First, there are now real questions as to whether the process was improperly influenced by arguments by deceased Republican redistricting expert Thomas Hofeller that adding the citizenship question would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” Evidence of racial animus would almost certainly alter the legal calculus and require the administration to go to great lengths to show that any new process has been cleansed from any racist taint.

Plaintiffs will again challenge any effort to include the question, they’ll likely obtain injunctions in favorable jurisdictions, and then the clock will become the administration’s enemy. I could well be wrong, but I’m doubtful SCOTUS will have an opportunity to opine before that clock runs out.

There is a lesson here, one that the administration (and indeed, all litigants) would do well to remember. When engaged in conduct that’s likely to lead to litigation, make it easy for the court to rule for you. Chaos can lose cases. Evidence of disingenuousness alienates judges.

Process matters, and you always want to appear to be the most reasonable party before the court. The Trump administration has gotten away with chaos before. It did not today, and as much as conservatives may once again grow angry at Justice Roberts for joining the Court’s progressive wing, if they want to place real blame for today’s Supreme Court setback, look to the administration. Its lack of candor caught up to it, and honesty may now come too late.

Source: Why Trump Lost the Census Case

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

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