US Officials Fear Moner Mohammad Abusalha’s Jihad Video Will Inspire Others – NYTimes.com

2014/06/18 Leave a comment

More on home-grown terrorism, this time a US example:

Although the suicide bomber was not identified by nationality or name, a video was circulated last month that appears to have documented Mr. Abusalha’s mission. That previous video shows rebels loading what appear to be tank shells into a large vehicle that had been armored with metal plates. Later, there is a large explosion after the vehicle drives down a road.

Mr. Abusalha was born in Florida, played basketball as a teenager and was known as “Mo.” In high school, he would often sneak out to pray instead of study. His mother is American and his father Palestinian. They owned grocery stores in the Vero Beach, Fla., area.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled in three colleges but dropped out of each, and in 2012, he told friends he was moving to Orlando. Shortly thereafter he told friends he was moving to Jordan to take courses as a nursing assistant.

In the past year, he lost touch with his parents. His friends believe that he was recruited by extremists while he was living in Jordan. In Syria, he adopted a nom de guerre, Abu Huraira al-Amriki. He spent two months in a training camp of Nusra Front, the militant group, in Aleppo before going to the northern province of Idlib, where he carried out the suicide attack.

US Officials estimate that some 100 Americans have travelled to Syria. Seems a bit low given Canadian estimates of around 30.

Officials Fear Moner Mohammad Abusalha’s Jihad Video Will Inspire Others – NYTimes.com.

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How Canadian are Hong Kong’s 300,000 Chinese-Canadians? – The Globe and Mail

2014/06/17 Leave a comment

Interesting piece on Chinese Canadian expatriates in Hong Kong, and how they maintain their Canadian identity. As always, identity is more complex than ‘bumper stickers’ like citizens of convenience would suggest.

Surprising that Yuen Pau Woo, of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada didn’t mention this study in his presentation to the Senate Committee examining C-24 last week:

They found that “the lack of opportunities in Canada,” rather than any preference for China, was the primary reason for almost all of these youth moving to Hong Kong. Many worked in fields such as finance where they felt Canada had a glass ceiling for ethnic-Chinese employees: “The nature and systemic discrimination of the Canadian job market pushed many new-generation youth to seek alternative job opportunities.”

Most of them, however, spent much of their time in Hong Kong attempting to maintain a “Canadian” lifestyle. “This,” the researchers note, “includes drinking in bars, watching hockey, reading Canadian newspapers, and drinking Starbucks coffee.” Tim Hortons, it should be noted, is not available in Hong Kong.

“While I am at work, in a break,” one of their research subjects says, “I’m watching a Canucks game through my iPhone.”

And furthermore, they found that the Chinese-Canadians weren’t fitting in to local Hong Kong social circles, because they were determined to keep their Canadian ties: “This group of Chinese-Canadian youth seem to have made a conscious choice not to hang out with local youth, due to their resistance to local Chinese culture. Indeed, their desire for Canadian connections was manifested in the patterns of their social circles, which also showed their detachment from Hong Kong society.”

Most, they found, were experiencing some form of culture shock – while they had the language skills and citizenship necessary to work and live in Hong Kong, they did not feel like Chinese, even if they had lived there for years. “Being Canadian, many felt that they came with a Canadian perspective that differentiated them from local Chinese. They also tended to use Canadian cultural values and practices to distinguish themselves from local Chinese.”

A majority described themselves as Canadian first and Chinese second. And, most importantly, almost all described themselves as “tentatively temporary” immigrants, who fully intended to return to Canada, which they saw as “home,” to put down roots and raise their families at some point in the future.

Another such study, conducted in 2012 in India, found the same result: Second-generation Indian-Canadians living in India saw themselves as Canadians living in India for convenience and money, not as Indians who’d once lived in Canada for convenience.

While there are undoubtedly some Canadian passport holders living abroad who are simply using the citizenship as a convenience, actual research suggests that the majority of such people are loyal Canadians who are using their international connections to benefit their country – which, as they see it, is Canada.

How Canadian are Hong Kong’s 300,000 Chinese-Canadians? – The Globe and Mail.

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La peur des immigrants, une tendance au 450?

2014/06/17 Leave a comment

Interesting and somewhat surprising study on Quebec francophones who feel culturally threatened by immigrants and new Canadians. Suburban dwellers feel more threatened than those in the regions, likely reflecting less diversity than in Toronto’s 905 equivalent:

Pourcentage des francophones qui se sentent culturellement menacés par les immigrants:

  • Montréal 37 %
  • Couronne Nord 47 %
  • Rive-Sud 43 %
  • Régions éloignées 41 %

La peur des immigrants, une tendance au 450? | Hugo Pilon-Larose | Montréal.

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‘I can’t be stateless’: Born-in-Canada criminal fighting deportation after Ottawa decides citizenship not valid

2014/06/17 Leave a comment

Interesting case of Deepan Budlakoti, born, raised and lived in Canada but to parents with diplomatic status but who has lived all his life in Canada:

Mr. Budlakoti is being removed from Canada for ‘serious criminality.’ He served significant jail time [three years] for trafficking both weapons and drugs. Even though Mr. Budlakoti was born in Canada, he is not a citizen due to the 1977 Citizenship Act which amended the rule to exclude all children of foreign-born diplomats born in Canada from Canadian citizenship unless one of the parents was a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. No application for citizenship has ever been made by him or on his behalf.”

Canada is a signatory to a 1961 international convention that imposes a duty to reduce statelessness.

Asking a court to declare Mr. Budlakoti’s citizenship “is an exceptional remedy because this is an exceptional case,” Mr. Hameed said. “It’s exceptional because Deepan was born in Canada, lived his entire life in Canada, and was assured on multiple occasions by the government of Canada that he was a Canadian citizen. … If there was an issue or a problem, the onus was clearly on the Canadian government to have done its due diligence, to determine whether or not there’s some exception to the rule or whether they have their records straight.”

To argue today, more than two decades later, that Canada made a mistake by issuing the passports is “very prejudicial and unfair,” said Mr. Hameed. “Now, with a finding of criminal inadmissibility, it basically bars him from taking the normal steps that he would have taken, or could have taken, to become a citizen earlier on.”

‘I can’t be stateless’: Born-in-Canada criminal fighting deportation after Ottawa decides citizenship not valid

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ICYMI: Bill C-24 set to change who gets to be Canadian | Q with Jian Ghomeshi

2014/06/16 1 Comment

Jian Ghomeshi on C-24 and what it means to be a Canadian (4 minutes):

We as citizens seem to have missed the opportunity to have a larger national debate …. appears to divide Canadians into two classes: those that hold Canadian citizenship and those that hold more than one passport, and somehow that doesn’t ring true … a citizen is a citizen …

Q Essay: Bill C-24 set to change who gets to be Canadian | Q with Jian Ghomeshi | CBC Radio.

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Harper govt poll for Canada’s 150th birthday cites Liberal, NDP icons

2014/06/16 Leave a comment

Not surprising, despite all the efforts by the Government to change this:

The list was topped by former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, followed by marathon-of-hope runner Terry Fox; NDP leader Tommy Douglas; former Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson; astronaut Chris Hadfield; environmental activist David Suzuki; NDP leader Jack Layton; Sir. John A.; hockey legend Wayne Gretzky; and Romeo Dallaire, the soldier and Liberal senator who recently announced his resignation.

The consultation also asked which of Canada’s accomplishments of the last 150 years “make you most proud to be a Canadian?”

Medicare topped that list, followed by peacekeeping, then the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms at No. 3.

The Conservative government, which has recently been buffeted by a series of Charter-based losses at the Supreme Court of Canada, did not mark the 25th anniversary of the Charter in 2007, nor the 30th in 2012.

The rest of the accomplishments list, in order: contribution to the Second World War; the Canadarm; multiculturalism; contribution to the First World War; bilingualism; space exploration; and the Constitution Act of 1982.

Harper govt poll for Cdas 150th birthday cites Liberal, NDP icons.

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David Cameron: British values arent optional, they’re vital

2014/06/16 Leave a comment

UK Prime Minister on British values:

The second is social. Our values have a vital role to play in uniting us.

They should help to ensure Britain not only brings together people from different countries, cultures and ethnicities, but also ensures that, together, we build a common home.

In recent years we have been in danger of sending out a worrying message: that if you don’t want to believe in democracy, that’s fine; that if equality isn’t your bag, don’t worry about it; that if you’re completely intolerant of others, we will still tolerate you.

As I’ve said before, this has not just led to division, it has also allowed extremism – of both the violent and non-violent kind – to flourish.

So I believe we need to be far more muscular in promoting British values and the institutions that uphold them.

That’s what a genuinely liberal country does: it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. It says to its citizens: this is what defines us as a society.

What does that mean in practice? We have already taken some big steps.

We are making sure new immigrants can speak English, because it will be more difficult for them to understand these values, and the history of our institutions, if they can’t speak our language.

We are bringing proper narrative history back to the curriculum, so our children really learn our island’s story – and where our freedoms and things like our Parliament and constitutional monarchy came from.

And as we announced this week, we are changing our approach further in schools. We are saying it isn’t enough simply to respect these values in schools – we’re saying that teachers should actively promote them. They’re not optional; they’re the core of what it is to live in Britain.

DAVID CAMERON: British values arent optional, they’re vital | Mail Online.

Ironically, given the UK’s citizenship revocation policy, even for those who would be left stateless, he closes with a reference to the Magna Carta, which abolished banishment as a form of punishment (although not for the convicts who settled Australia):

Next year it will be the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. Indeed, it was on this very day, 799 years ago, that the Great Charter was sealed at Runnymede in Surrey.

It’s a great document in our history – what my favourite book, Our Island Story, describes as the ‘foundation of all our laws and liberties’.

In sealing it, King John had  to accept that his subjects were citizens – for the first time giving them rights, protections and security.

 

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Yale Law Journal Forum: Citizenship, Passports, and the Legal Identity of Americans

2014/06/16 Leave a comment

For citizenship legal and policy wonks, a lengthy article on US practices in relation to citizenship and passport revocation. Current US approach is to revoke passports (overly so, the author argues) while US citizenship has been largely untouchable since the 1967 Afroyim v, Rusk case:

Yet Afroyim has reversed this classical conception of sovereignty. In his majority opinion, Justice Black—after having conceded that all nations possess an implied attribute of sovereignty—stated that “[o]ther nations are governed by their own constitutions, if any, and we can draw no support from theirs. In our country the people are sovereign and the Government cannot sever its relationship to the people by taking away their citizenship.” It is on the basis of the sovereignty of the citizen—a sovereignty limited to the status of citizenship itself and to certain privileges and immunities stemming from it—that American citizenship has become absolutely secured. However, since Afroyim, the Supreme Court has not ruled on a case that would allow the Justices to bring the privileges and immunities of the U.S. citizen up to date with this new understanding of citizenship. Is it not time for the Court to read the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Slaughter-House jurisprudence in the spirit of Afroyim—i.e., to declare as an absolute right the possession by all Americans abroad of a document attesting to their legal identity, a right to which the executive and legislative powers must defer?

…

When the power to naturalize was transferred by the Immigration Act of 1990 from the courts to the Attorney General, another provision of the same Act transferred to the Attorney General the power “to correct, reopen, alter, modify, or vacate an order naturalizing the person.” But in 2000, in Gorbach v. Reno, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the exclusive statutory competence of the courts to revoke citizenship. Following this decision, the Department of Homeland Security has not attempted to resume the use of administrative denaturalization.73 Since 2001, only several dozen naturalized Americans have lost their citizenship, through judicial proceedings, largely because they committed different kinds of fraud during the naturalization process. This small number is in part explained by Kungys v. United States, in which the Court refused to uphold the denaturalization of Juozas Kungys because the government had not shown that his misrepresentation concerning the date and place of his birth were facts that, if known, would have warranted denial of citizenship.

The Yale Law Journal – Forum: Citizenship, Passports, and the Legal Identity of Americans: Edward Snowden and Others Have a Case in the Courts.

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It’s a mystery how middle-class Calgary man turned suicide bomber was recruited into ISIS terror group: family

2014/06/14 Leave a comment

More on the cases of Salman Asrafi and Damian Clairmont:

“To be honest, we don’t know what happened to Salman,” a relative said in an email exchange. He asked not to be identified because he did not want to be associated with Mr. Ashrafi’s suspected involvement in terrorism.

While his recruitment into ISIS is puzzling, it is evidence the strength of the extremist group is due partly to its recruitment of foreign fighters. Founded by Al-Qaeda members, it is one of three armed groups in the region that have attracted the most outside volunteers.

Mr. Ashrafi was a Pakistani-Canadian with no affiliation to Iraq. But in Calgary, he had apparently fallen in with a circle of extremists who lived in the same apartment building above a small Islamic centre. Those who run the centre said they had tried to discourage the zealous young men, but they formed their own prayer group.

According to an account posted online by one of the men, who now goes by Abu Dujana, they worshipped Anwar Awlaki, the pro-Al Qaeda propagandist whose videos urge Muslims in the West to either go abroad and fight or conduct terrorist attacks at home.

Isolated by their own accord and with no guidance except the Internet, they decided that being a Muslim meant “jihad and sacrifice for Islam” rather than attending seminars in “an air-conditioned university hall,” wrote Abu Dujana.

The historical figures they admired were uncompromising men of action. “They were not just talking the talk,” he wrote, “but actually walking the walk. They were busy either killing the enemies of Allah or being awarded with martyrdom by being killed in the battlefield.”

There were between three and five members of the group. They included Damian Clairmont, a Muslim convert with a history of mental problems, but another was an engineer named Wassim who divided his time between Toronto and Calgary.

Under the Government’s proposed revocation measures, if they hadn’t been killed, but returned to Canada, and convicted, Salman could be stripped of his Canadian citizenship as a dual national while Damian could not. Same crime, different punishment.

It’s a mystery how middle-class Calgary man turned suicide bomber was recruited into ISIS terror group: family | National Post.

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C-24 Citizenship Act – Senate Hearing 12 June with Minister Alexander

2014/06/13 1 Comment

Coverage of yesterday’s Senate hearings on C-24 with Minister Alexander and officials:

Alexander and his officials attempted to clarify what would happen to Canadian-born dual citizens convicted here or abroad of serious terrorism, treason or espionage offences that carry a penalty of five years or more. He stressed a convicted offender wouldn’t have to worry if he didn’t hold dual citizenship.

Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati says countries like Iran recognize as its citizens people who are born “five generations out” whether they want to be its citizens or not.

Alexander said: “There is a way of renouncing every citizenship. No one in our country can be forced to be a citizen of any country. And under the laws of Canada, citizenship can be renounced, either ours or those of other countries.”

“That might not resolve a difference of opinion with Tehran or other capitals who consider someone to be a citizen. But in our eyes,” Alexander said, the individual would be — as a Conservative senator suggested — assumed to be a citizen of Canada not subject to revocation of their Canadian passport.

Tories insist changes to Citizenship Act will respect Charter, Constitution | Toronto Star.

From the Globe:

The bill will also require citizenship applicants to declare an “intent to reside” in Canada, another controversial move. Along with boosted penalties for fraud, it raised fears people would be stripped of citizenship for leaving the country. “The government should be encouraging citizenship, not discouraging it. Amend this bill and remove the ‘intention’ clause,” Barbara Caruso, another member of the CBA’s Immigration Law Section, told senators.

Mr. Alexander said flatly that would not happen. “There’s no requirement for a citizen of Canada to remain physically in Canada, once granted in citizenship,” he said.

Liberal Senator Art Eggleton said the bill does allow for a court hearing for people who object to losing their citizenship. The power is in the hands of the minister. Mr. Alexander earlier said there is a de facto appeal right. “Anyone can go to the federal court if they think the government has not fulfilled its statutory mandates. And they do go,” he told The Globe.

 Minister Chris Alexander under fire as citizenship bill poised to pass 

Some points of interest:

  • Efforts by the Minister to clarify the informal nature of Canadian citizenship prior to the first Citizenship Act of 1947 in response to Melynda Jarratt and Don Chapman’s arguments that Canadian citizenship had more formal status before 1947;
  • “Canadians would be sick to stomach if they knew the extent of fraud,” stated Alexander, which would be addressed through physical residency, filing tax returns etc. He cited immigration lawyer Raj Sharma on the “rampant fraud” and how people would “lie, cheat and steal” to get a Canadian passport;
  • Alexander started to go down the path of criticizing the Liberals, NDP and the “small fringe group” of the CBA. “No one else” was challenging C-24, other lawyers “were embarrassed” by the CBA position. The Liberals didn’t “enforce the rules.” Why did they “spend so much time protecting the rights of those committing the most serious violations of rule of law.”
  • Chair reminded him and others to avoid partisan attacks.
  • Alexander stuck to the bureaucratic distinction between time spent as a temporary and permanent resident, defending the elimination of partly counting pre-P.R. time towards citizenship. Hard to understand given that many comparative countries do allow this, and given the Government’s efforts to encourage international students to settle in Canada;
  • On intent to reside, Alexander reiterated again that it only applies to the application period. Once citizenship is granted, it is no longer in force. CIC DG Citizenship and Multiculturalism Nicole Girard stated that intent to reside has to be read within the larger context of requirements to become a citizen, not post-citizenship. Senator Cordy was “still uncomfortable” despite these assurances. Alexander was not pressed to clarity whether it could be used to revoke citizenship in case of misrepresentation during that period;
  • On revocation, Girard walked through the various tests that would apply:
    • was the person a dual citizen?
    • if convicted abroad, was the offence equivalent to a Canadian offence?
    • was the sentence 5 years or more?
    • were there concerns with the process or independence of the judiciary?
    • In witness testimony, even witnesses supporting the Government (CIJA, FDD) noted the need for an explicit reference in the Act to the last test (equivalency of process). Not clear why the Government not accepting that.
  • Alexander glossed over the distinction between seeking leave before the Federal Court and having judicial review and was not pressed on that point. He also was not challenged on the question of oral hearings “Minister has authority to hold a hearing,” confirming the default of a paper process.
  • Citizenship judges would have more time for citizenship promotion, given that officials would be the decision makers, except for difficult cases such as those involving residency.
  • Alexander, in response to criticism of a harder and more costly process, stated “the higher the bar, the more attractive citizenship becomes.” Past experience with the more rigorous language and knowledge requirements had not resulted in fewer citizenship applications and lower rates of naturalization.

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