Five years after call to add Indigenous rights to citizenship guide, no changes made

2021/02/16 Leave a comment

Valid critique. The government has prepared an advanced draft (Revamped citizenship guide still a work in progress as election nears.  and has tabled C-6 to change the oath), but whether the new guide will be issued or the bill receive Royal Assent before a likely election in the summer or fall remains to be seen:à

More than five years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on the federal government to revise the Canadian citizenship oath and exam guide, newcomers still study a book that contains a single paragraph on residential schools and they take an oath that doesn’t refer to treaties with Indigenous Peoples.

Calls for action Nos. 93 and 94 in the commission’s final report in December 2015 called on the government to update the citizenship guide and oath to reflect a more inclusive history of Indigenous Peoples and a recognition of their treaties and rights.

The Liberal government introduced a new law in October to adopt a revised oath of citizenship that will have new Canadians swear to faithfully observe the country’s treaties with Indigenous Peoples. Two previous versions of the law died with the 2019 election.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino told the House of Commons Indigenous and northern affairs committee last month that his department is consulting with national Indigenous organizations to revise the citizenship guide to include more information.

The five largest Indigenous organizations in the country told The Canadian Press that they have not been involved in any formal consultations recently with the government on the new guide. The organizations are the Assembly of First Nations, the Metis National Council, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Native Women’s Association of Canada.

AFN Alberta Regional Chief Marlene Poitras said Indigenous Peoples’ history and culture should be reflected in the materials that newcomers study to become citizens.

“Absolutely, (the citizenship guide) should be changed,” she said in an interview.

“Education is key — about who we are, how we existed here and welcomed the newcomers here, signed treaties, then had to deal with residential schools.”

Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said his organization worked with the Immigration Department in 2017 and 2018 on a new guide, but work has stopped.

The AFN asked the department in 2018 to seek out First Nations historians to ensure inclusion of First Nations content in the guide.

“Officials from (the department) have been in touch with AFN recently to discuss next steps and to share a new version of the guide. A meeting has not yet been scheduled,” the AFN said in a statement.

The department said in a statement the new citizenship guide will be published “as soon as we can,” noting that a launch date for the new guide has not been set.

Clement Chartier, the president of the Metis National Council, said his organization received a draft of the revised guide on May 3, 2018.

“Since then, I’ve not seen anything,” Chartier said.

NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said her party shares concerns about the slow progress on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls for action.

She said the government’s introduction of Bill C-8 to revise the oath of citizenship came too late.

“This is the third time in which this bill has come before Parliament, and each time prior to this the government’s chosen to introduce the bill so late in the day,” she said.

Kwan said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has talked recently about the possibility of having an early federal election.

“Will Bill C-8 once again be railroaded and not be completed?” she said.

Poitras is worried C-8 would die in Parliament if an election is called, since that wipes the legislative agenda clean.

“I’m hearing that there’s another election and they still kind of go back and forth about the semantics of it,” she said,

“It’s not going to go anywhere again.”

The department said Mendicino is grateful to the parliamentary committee members for voting to sending C-8 back to the House of Commons for third reading he looks forward to seeing it pass through the Senate and become law as soon as possible.

Conservative Indigenous services critic Gary Vidal said it’s unfortunate that the Liberals once again seem to be missing an opportunity to act.

“The Liberal government has been big on promises of reconciliation but slow on action,” he said.

Lorraine Whitman, the president of Native Women’s Association of Canada, said she was invited to testify on Bill C-8 last week, only two days before the committee meeting.

“It would have been nice to be able to be included prior to it,” she said.

National Chief Elmer St. Pierre of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples said his organization was not consulted on any of the new laws the government has put forward to advance the rights and the livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples.

“I was able to speak for six minutes on the citizenship,” he said referring to his testimony at the committee meeting on Bill C-8.

“We weren’t really informed and it was kind of like the 11th hour when they gave us the opportunity to talk,” he said.

Poitras said all political parties should work together to pass Bill C-8 quickly.

“Make this a non-partisan issue,” she said.

“If Canada is really serious about addressing systemic racism and dealing with truth and reconciliation, they would honour those recommendations and move forward with this legislation to receive royal assent.”

Source: Five years after call to add Indigenous rights to citizenship guide, no changes made

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Immigration Hard-Liner Files Reveal 40-Year Bid Behind Trump’s Census Obsession

2021/02/16 2 Comments

Good long read of the history behind undercounting the US population in the census:

Even before taking office, former President Donald Trump’s administration obsessed over the U.S. census.

From a failed bid for a citizenship question to a presidential memo about unauthorized immigrants that was fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, its moves over the past four years followed a playbook first drawn up more than four decades ago by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

In 1979, the hard-line group that became the most influential advocate for extreme restrictions on immigration launched a campaign that has held onto one consistent goal — obtaining an official count of unauthorized immigrants through the census to radically reshape Congress, the Electoral College and public policy.

Starting with a lawsuit filed weeks before the official start of the 1980 census, FAIR documented its strategy in a paper trail that NPR has reviewed in the organization’s archives at the George Washington University, as well as those of FAIR’s founder at the University of Michigan.

“It’s always been on the agenda,” Dan Stein, FAIR’s president, tells NPR, noting that it’s “very possible” that, as early as November 2016, the group discussed with Trump officials the possibility of excluding unauthorized immigrants from a key set of 2020 census results.

To some, it may seem curious that part of Trump’s agenda zeroed in on an often overlooked government tally of every person living in the U.S.

But census numbers hold what Trump has always wanted — power.

That power comes in the form of 435 votes in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Once a decade, those votes are up for grabs among the states based on new census numbers. The more residents included in a state’s population count, the more of a say it has for the next 10 years in how federal laws are made and how the next occupant of the White House is chosen.

The Constitution has spelled out specific instructions for the census. Not just citizens or voters, but “persons” who reside in the states are supposed to be counted. Congress eventually codified the 14th Amendment’s language into federal law that calls for the “whole number of persons” living in each state and the “tabulation of total population” to be used when reapportioning House seats and electoral votes.

Census counting does have a thorny history. Before the Civil War, the fifth sentence of the country’s founding document required an enslaved person to be counted as “three fifths” of a free person. And it was just before the 1940 census that the Census Bureau determined the phrase “excluding Indians not taxed” could no longer omit some American Indians from the apportionment counts.

But since the first U.S. head count in 1790, this has been an unwavering truth: No resident has ever been left out because of immigration status.

Trump officials attempted to break with that 230-year precedent. The administration, like FAIR, wanted to subtract unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment counts, taking power away from those residents and the communities where they live.

One of President Biden’s first executive orders officially quashed the Trump memo that called for that extraordinary change.

But during the Trump years, FAIR came closer to getting that count of unauthorized immigrants than it has ever before.

A page out of an old playbook

The start of the Trump administration’s four-year census saga centered around a hotly contested question: Is this person a citizen of the United States?

Trump officials wanted to use the census to directly ask for the citizenship status of every person living in every household in the country for the first time in U.S. history. That proposal has long been considered anathema to best practices for a complete and accurate head count, and the administration was not up front about exactly why it wanted to add the question to the 2020 census.

Many opponents of that citizenship question argued it was originally intended to depress census participation. Under federal law, no government agency or court can use personal information collected by the Census Bureau against anyone. But a long history of distrust of the census has made many noncitizens, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other historically undercounted groups wary of telling the government their household’s citizenship status.

Some of the question’s critics also pointed to a scheme concocted by a GOP redistricting mastermind, Thomas Hofeller, to use the neighborhood block-level citizenship data the question would generate to politically benefit Republicans and “Non-Hispanic Whites” in state and local elections for years to come.

To Roger Conner, who led FAIR until 1988 as the group’s first executive director, it was clear that the Trump administration had another goal in mind — to change how congressional seats and electoral votes are reapportioned in order to curtail the political representation of areas where unauthorized immigrants live.

“I was saying to myself, ‘This is perfectly obvious. Why can’t someone figure out what’s going on?’ ” Conner says, recalling the Trump administration’s push for a citizenship question. “I assume that’s because they thought it was not in their interest to let everybody know what their strategy was.”

That strategy (which the administration never directly connected to apportionment until Trump’s memo was released years later) began percolating through Trump’s world even before he took office.

During the 2016 campaign, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — an immigration hard-liner who has worked as a counsel to FAIR’s legal arm and was described by FAIR’s president as an “invaluable asset” to Trump’s immigration team — discussed a census citizenship question with campaign officials.

Shortly after the inauguration in 2017, Kobach talked about the question with Trump, then-chief strategist Steve Bannon and then-chief of staff Reince Priebus, according to Kobach’s testimony to congressional investigators.

Kobach later urged Wilbur Ross, the Trump-appointed commerce secretary overseeing the bureau, to add a specially-worded citizenship question to the census. It should also ask about immigration status, Kobach suggested in an email, so that the responses could address “the problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted for congressional apportionment purposes.”

Other internal emails released for the lawsuits over the question show that the reapportionment of congressional seats was top of mind for Ross shortly after taking over the Commerce Department. In a March 2017 message from fellow Trump appointee Earl Comstock with the subject line “Your Question on the Census,” Ross received a link to a Census Bureau webpage that answered: “Are undocumented residents (aliens) in the 50 states included in the apportionment population counts?”

“Yes,” the bureau’s official response said.

But when Ross officially announced a citizenship question in 2018 as a late addition to the 2020 census form, it didn’t come with Kobach’s apportionment reasoning or checkboxes about immigration status. Instead, Ross used the Voting Rights Act to publicly justify the question, claiming the responses would help the Justice Department better enforce the civil rights era-law and protect “minority population voting rights.”

More than a year later, the Supreme Court rejected that justification for appearing to be “contrived” and blocked the question from appearing on the 2020 census.

By that point, career civil servants at the Census Bureau had repeatedly warned Trump officials that adding the question would not only likely lower response rates in some areas, but also produce citizenship data less accurate and more expensive than what could be generated from government records.

After threatening to delay the census in the wake of his Supreme Court loss, Trump issued an executive order in July 2019 that directed other federal agencies to share their citizenship records with the Census Bureau, which was already under orders from Ross to use records to produce anonymized, block-level data about the U.S. citizenship status of every adult living in the U.S. that states could use for redistricting.

Buried within Trump’s order about citizenship data was a new policy of developing “complete and accurate” data on “illegal aliens in the country” that did not attract much attention at the time. Existing estimates by the Department of Homeland Security and academic researchers, the order said, are not reliable enough to “evaluate” policy proposals about enforcing immigration laws and changing eligibility rules for public benefits.

“Data tabulating both the overall population and the citizen population could be combined with records of aliens lawfully present in the country to generate an estimate of the aggregate number of aliens unlawfully present in each State,” said Trump’s order, which Biden reversed last month.

At the White House Rose Garden announcement for Trump’s directive, the then-head of the Justice Department, William Barr, made no direct mention of how the DOJ could use the data to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Barr made sure to highlight how the data “may be relevant” to a lawsuit filed in 2018 by the state of Alabama “over whether illegal aliens can be included for apportionment purposes.”

FAIR’s underground beginnings

These signals from the Trump administration echoed arguments FAIR first made more than 40 years ago.

Toward the end of the 1970s, FAIR was a fledgling advocacy group desperate to emerge from a windowless basement office in Washington, D.C., as a national voice.

The U.S. was more than a decade into major demographic shifts: A greater and greater share of people living inside the U.S. were born elsewhere, and a predominantly white population was becoming less so.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had ended an earlier quota system that favored people from Northern and Western Europe, while also imposing the first caps on the number of people allowed to enter from Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. The landmark law, along with the end of a legal program for temporary farmworkers from Mexico, helped usher in a rise in immigration, both legal and illegal, from Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world.

That led John Tanton — an eye doctor from a mostly white resort town along Lake Michigan who held a particular interest in population control as a form of environmentalism — to start FAIR.

The group’s calls for an end to illegal immigration and fewer legal pathways for newcomers were not met with fanfare.

“We were obviously very small fish in a very big pond, and so got little attention,” Tanton later recalled in an oral history interview that touched on FAIR’s early days working underground with less than a handful of staffers.

To try to make a splash, FAIR went to court in December 1979.

Its federal lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter’s administration called for a citizenship question to be included on both the long and short versions of the 1980 census form. The responses, FAIR argued, would generate a count of noncitizens that could eventually produce a state-by-state tally of unauthorized immigrants by matching noncitizens with green cards to government records.

Concerned about persistent undercounts, some census advocates at the time focused their energy on encouraging unauthorized immigrants to participate in the count.

Conner, FAIR’s first executive director, recalls reading a 1979 newspaper article about that effort and says FAIR sued partly out of concern that including unauthorized immigrants in the apportionment counts would increase the political power of “institutions that would favor the perpetuation, the expansion of immigration.”

Roger Conner, shown here in 1981, led the Federation for American Immigration Reform as its first executive director until 1988. Now a woodworker in Nashville, Tenn., Conner condemns Trump officials’ efforts to alter census apportionment counts. “I can only understand it as a pure expression of racism and evil,” Conner says. “And yet I have to own I took this same position 40 years ago.”

Still, in a 1980 statement to the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigation, Conner wrote that while FAIR wants unauthorized immigrants excluded from apportionment, it also “supports and encourages a full and accurate counting of illegal immigrants in the 1980 Census.”

“This is a difficult and perhaps impossible undertaking,” Conner added, “but it should nevertheless be worthwhile to attempt to gather more accurate information than we now possess about the number and characteristics of illegal immigrants within the United States.”

Finding lawyers in Washington willing to make FAIR’s arguments in court, though, was not easy.

“I had to explain to them why limiting immigration was the right thing, and FAIR wasn’t a racist group,” Conner explained in a 1989 oral history interview documented in the organization’s archives. “It was a lost cause.”

“The language of the Constitution is not ambiguous”

FAIR’s last-minute lawsuit eventually paid off in terms of media attention. It garnered a radio segment on NPR’s Morning Edition and a front-page, below-the-fold story in The New York Times, among other news coverage.

But the case was tossed out of a lower court, and the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. FAIR and the other plaintiffs did not have a right to sue, the three-judge panel of the lower court in D.C. ruled. And their case, the panel noted, appeared “very weak on the merits.”

“The language of the Constitution is not ambiguous,” the judges wrote in their opinion. “It requires the counting of the ‘whole number of persons’ for apportionment purposes, and while illegal aliens were not a component of the population at the time the Constitution was adopted, they are clearly ‘persons.’ ”

Going back to the 1920s, the judges pointed out, there have been multiple attempts to leave unauthorized immigrants and other noncitizens out of the apportionment counts. But with no change to the country’s founding document, they have all failed. Their opinion quotes the remarks of Rep. Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York, during a 1940 House debate over whether unauthorized immigrants could be omitted:

“The Constitution says that all persons shall be counted. I cannot quarrel with the founding fathers. They said that all should be counted. We count the convicts who are just as dangerous and just as bad as the Communists or as the Nazis, as those aliens here illegally, and I would not come here and have the temerity to say that the convicts shall be excluded, if the founding fathers say they shall be included. The only way we can exclude them would be to pass a constitutional amendment.”

Sen. David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania, came to the same conclusion more than a decade earlier in the 1920s.

After the 1920 census, reapportioning House seats was so heated, in fact, that for the first time in U.S. history the process didn’t happen at all that decade. The Republican majority of a mostly rural Congress stalled on the constitutional mandate, refusing to use numbers that confirmed the U.S. had become a predominantly urban nation.

Weeks before lawmakers passed the 1929 law that turned reapportionment into an automatic process after the 1930 count, Reed took part in a Senate debate over whether “aliens,” including unauthorized immigrants, could be excluded from the counts.

Reed was a namesake and architect of the Johnson-Reed Act, also known as the Immigration Act of 1924 that was designed to suppress people from Eastern and Southern Europe, and completely stop people from Asia, from immigrating to the U.S.

“I disagree to the bottom of my heart,” Reed emphasized on the Senate floor, with the Constitution’s original framers and the 14th Amendment’s drafters choosing to use the term “persons” in their apportionment instructions instead of “citizens” or “voters who actually have cast their votes at the last general election.”

But Reed could not support a bill amendment for excluding unauthorized immigrants and other noncitizens because, the senator said, “the oath which we take to support the Constitution includes the obligation to support it when we dislike its provisions as well as when we are in sympathy with them.”

“It is literally now or never”

Despite losing in the courts, FAIR tried to muster support for more legal action after its 1979 lawsuit.

Tanton, FAIR’s founder, looked for donors to stand up a $50,000 a year litigation program. In a 1980 letter written to a potential funder before FAIR’s appeal ended, Tanton said that if their census lawsuit failed, “illegals will have Representatives beholden to them, effectively foreclosing any chance of stemming their influx. It is literally now or never: the decision rests on those of us who understand the problem.”

The census lawsuit was a tool for getting “middle America” to support FAIR’s work, Tanton later explained in a 1981 letter to an attorney who helped start the group’s litigation program, by showing them that immigration was a “problem” not just for states like Texas, California and Florida.

In the same letter, Tanton floated the possibility of also pushing for the exclusion of green card holders, who are authorized to permanently stay in the U.S., and carrying out “citizen-only reapportionment,” which “would further sweeten FAIR’s prospects by shifting seats away from areas where politicians are compromised by an immigrant constituency.”

According to records in FAIR’s archives, though, the group stayed focused on the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants. One of FAIR’s attorneys tried to persuade the states of Indiana and Missouri, which each lost a vote in the House and Electoral College after the 1980 census, as well as Alabama and Georgia, to sue over the apportionment results, and Conner, FAIR’s first executive director, worked on selling the idea to the organization’s board of directors.

“This lawsuit, with a potential for altering the 1984 Presidential election, will garner an inordinate amount of publicity,” Conner wrote in an internal memo that year, suggesting the attention would be “extremely useful as a device to shift the news media focus” toward “the problems caused by illegal migration” and away from criticism of a FAIR-backed proposal for sanctions against employers who hire unauthorized immigrants.

Even so, it would take four more years before FAIR filed its second lawsuit over census apportionment counts. In 1988, it challenged the administration of former President Ronald Reagan over its plans for the 1990 census. This time, FAIR was joined by the states of Alabama, Kansas and Pennsylvania, as well as a more high-profile lead plaintiff — U.S. Rep. Tom Ridge, the Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who later became the state’s governor and the country’s first homeland security secretary.

In an attempt to recruit lawmakers to their cause, FAIR targeted delegations from states that were projected to lose House seats if the apportionment counts were altered to leave out unauthorized immigrants. FAIR emphasized that if successful, the lawsuit would not hurt states’ bottom lines. Unauthorized immigrants would still be counted in the census numbers used to guide the distribution of federal grants to states, just not in the counts for dividing up House seats and electoral votes.

But the outcome in court turned out the same: The case was dismissed without a trial.

Still, Tanton was not ready to give up. Months after that loss in 1989, Tanton wrote a letter to the head of FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, about a news report on the likelihood of Michigan losing two House seats after the 1990 census.

“This stirs the pot,” Tanton said, “and again makes me wonder about refiling the census suit[,] say from Michigan, after the results are announced and before apportionment takes place when the actual shift of seats will be known. How complex would this be?”

“Trying to stop” the “browning of America”

The year before FAIR lost its second attempt to exclude unauthorized immigrants through the courts, Tanton came under public scrutiny. A 1988 article in The Arizona Republic revealed that he had denigrated Latinos and warned of a “Latin onslaught” in a memo written for an immigration conference.

“How will we make the transition from a dominant non-Hispanic society with a Spanish influence to a dominant Spanish society with non-Hispanic influence?” asked Tanton, who, until he died in July 2019, was listed on FAIR’s website as a member of its national board of advisers. “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”

“What they were trying to stop was the browning of America,” says Arnoldo Torres, who was a vocal critic of FAIR’s policies as the executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens until 1985.

Among FAIR’s policy positions — which over the years have included opposing pathways to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants and ending the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship — altering the census apportionment counts was “not the issue that they led off with,” but was “always an undercurrent,” Torres recalls. “This was not a passing fancy.”

“They were in for the long haul. They knew they were not going to get it right away,” Torres says. “They knew eventually that the tide would change.”

In the meantime, FAIR developed plans to change the apportionment process and get a count of unauthorized immigrants through the two other branches of government, having so far failed in the courts. An internal report prepared for FAIR’s board of directors in October 1987 called it a “three-pronged approach.”

One strategy included lobbying Congress to require the Census Bureau to “differentiate illegal aliens from citizens and legal residents on its questionnaire” for the head count, Simin Yazdgerdi, FAIR’s then-director of government relations, wrote in the report.

During an August 1987 strategy session, FAIR determined its legislative strategy “should be conducted quietly so that the courts would not be tempted to a) delay making a decision until Congress had acted; or b) use any negative legislative history (i.e., floor statements, testimony) against us,” according to an internal memo by Yazdgerdi.

“Emphasize how Republicans will be hurt most by inclusion of illegal aliens,” the memo specified about how to persuade the Reagan administration’s Justice Department and Office of Management and Budget to “influence” the Census Bureau.

While FAIR may have expected a more receptive audience among GOP members, support for omitting unauthorized immigrants from apportionment did not fall neatly along party lines in the 1980s.

In fact, among the plaintiffs joining Rep. Ridge in FAIR’s lawsuit before the 1990 census were House Democrats from Alabama, Connecticut, Kansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Before the suit was filed, Ridge and Democratic Rep. Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut spearheaded a 1987 House bill that called for excluding unauthorized immigrants and including U.S. military and civilian Defense Department employees stationed abroad, who at the time were not expected to be counted for apportionment.

In 1988, the Justice Department told lawmakers that it opposed the bill because excluding unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment counts, it concluded, is unconstitutional. “If it were passed, we would recommend that the President veto it,” wrote then-Acting Assistant Attorney General Thomas Boyd, a Reagan appointee.

The House bill stayed stuck in committee, but it had bipartisan support, including from Democratic cosponsors from Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and Texas.

“It’s hard to explain to people. The Democrats were aligned with organized labor [and] didn’t want immigrants,” says Antonia Hernández, who opposed FAIR on immigration policy as president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund for close to two decades beginning in 1985. MALDEF tried to intervene in FAIR’s 1988 lawsuit to defend the inclusion of unauthorized immigrants in apportionment counts.

As for the third prong of FAIR’s strategy, the group mapped out the possibility of a “favorable White House decision” that would instruct the Census Bureau to collect information on people’s immigration status, according to the group’s 1987 board report. But that path did not open until Trump became president 30 years later.

“The efforts have been clumsy”

After the 1990 census, FAIR shifted its focus toward Congress given its lack of headway in the courts and with presidential administrations.

“You don’t want to involve yourself in quixotic efforts that are doomed to fail,” says Stein, the group’s president who first joined FAIR in 1982.

But FAIR’s calculations changed after Trump won.

After entering office, the Trump administration put in place many hard-line immigration proposals long championed by FAIR and the network of organizations that grew from it — including cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S. down to historic lows. Former FAIR staffers, including Julie Kirchner, who became the ombudsman at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services after running FAIR for nearly a decade as its executive director, also joined the administration’s ranks.

Though Trump’s White House press office did not respond to NPR’s questions about whether the administration consulted with FAIR on its push to exclude unauthorized immigrants from apportionment counts, Stein says: “It was certainly part of our legislative plan for the new administration back in November of 2016.”

Hernández, MALDEF’s former president, says that the lack of comprehensive immigration reform helped thrust the apportionment issue front and center during the Trump administration. “It’s just gained steam and gained steam,” Hernández says.

In the decades since its basement beginnings, FAIR has expanded into a suite of offices near the U.S. Capitol, across the street from the office of the USCIS director. FAIR’s staff, including its legal arm, now totals 36, according to spokesperson Matthew Tragesser.

With the Trump administration in power, FAIR gained an invaluable advantage — a ready and willing partner inside the federal government during the final 2020 census planning stages.

“What they haven’t been yet able to do through the courts, they’ve been able to do through the executive branch,” Hernández says. “And they’ve been in such a hurry to do something, the efforts have been clumsy.”

The administration’s inconsistency was on full display during the citizenship question lawsuits. Public statements about Voting Rights Act enforcement fronted behind-the-scenes discussions about altering census numbers for House seat reapportionment.

A redacted August 2017 email appeared to foreshadow what became the administration’s ultimate strategy — citing a 1992 Supreme Court rulingto argue that the president has the discretion to decide whether to include unauthorized immigrants in the apportionment counts.

“Ultimately, we do not make decisions on how the data should be used for apportionment, that is for Congress (or possibly the President) to decide,” wrote then-Commerce Department attorney James Uthmeier. “I think that’s our hook here.”

Then, while testifying under oath about the citizenship question in 2018, Trump officials could not avoid bringing up apportionment.

John Gore — a Justice Department appointee at the time who testified that adding the citizenship question to census forms was not necessary for enforcing the Voting Rights Act — confirmed that when Jeff Sessions was U.S. attorney general, there was discussion at the highest levels of the DOJ about reapportioning House seats using “some other measure” than the total number of residents in each state.

Trump himself tied the push for a citizenship question to apportionment the same day the White House released the July 2020 presidential memo about excluding unauthorized immigrants. In a written statement, Trump said:

“Last summer in the Rose Garden, I told the American people that I would not back down in my effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population. Today, I am following through on that commitment by directing the Secretary of Commerce to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment base following the 2020 census.”

Some career Census Bureau officials suspected that Trump’s memo helped drive the administration to suddenly direct the bureau to rush counting last summer and cut back on quality checks for the 2020 census results, a report by the Commerce inspector general’s officerevealed. The administration appeared desperate to get a hold of census results before the end of Trump’s term in case Biden won the election.

Practical challenges

Despite posing serious threats to the count’s accuracy and the bureau’s credibility as a statistical agency, Trump’s memo, like the administration’s other census efforts, largely flew under the radar, frequently sidelined by other controversies.

At a press conference in July, hours after the release of a memo calling for the unprecedented exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment counts, not a single reporter asked Trump a question about the directive.

Weeks later, federal courts began declaring the memo unlawful and in some of the cases, unconstitutional as well. After the Supreme Court agreed to squeeze in a hearing for the Trump administration’s appeal last fall, though, the high court’s conservative majority ruled it was too early to weigh in.

In the end, timing and bureaucracy thwarted Trump’s plans to alter the latest state population counts. The administration tried to pressure the Census Bureau to prematurely end quality checks, which were delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. But career civil servants postponed releasing the first set of census results after unearthing incomplete and duplicate responses.

As the inauguration of President Biden drew closer, another reality was setting in that made Trump’s apportionment plan practically impossible. The Census Bureau could only come up with reliable numbers for a fraction of the unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S.

Still, even during its final days in office, the administration did not give up on trying to get state-by-state figures of unauthorized immigrants and other noncitizens. A last-minute push by the Trump-appointed Census Bureau director, Steven Dillingham — as well as two controversial appointees, Nathaniel Cogley and Benjamin Overholt — sparked whistleblower complaints about demands to produce “statistically indefensible” data, and Dillingham ultimately resigned.

Without a citizenship or immigration status question on the 2020 census forms, government records the Trump administration directed the bureau to use could only generate a state-by-state count of unauthorized immigrants in detention centers.

For the rest of the population, the bureau could produce estimates. But the methods it would have to use are saddled with “difficult-to-verify assumptions” and could “introduce substantial imprecision” to the census results, top career officials warned in a March 2020 memo.

“It is our professional judgement that these methods produce estimates of the undocumented foreign-born population at the state level that could inform policy makers,” but they may not be usable when reapportioning House seats because they require the use of statistical sampling, which is not allowed, wrote John Abowd, the bureau’s chief scientist, and Victoria Velkoff, associate director of the bureau’s demographic programs.

The bureau has also warned, for decades, that using the national head count to identify unauthorized immigrants could undermine public trust in the federal statistical agency. That, in turn, could exacerbate historical undercounts of immigrants and people of color and reduce their areas’ share of census-guided federal funding.

“We realize that our job would be made still harder … if we had an image of being an investigative unit,” Leo Estrada, who was serving as a special assistant to the bureau’s deputy director, told NPR in 1980 in response to FAIR’s first apportionment lawsuit.

Producing figures of unauthorized immigrants should be a “job for some other agency,” Estrada said.

The bureau has shelved the Trump administration’s project for creating unauthorized immigrant counts. But that work could play a role in the ongoing lawsuit by the state of Alabama and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, a Republican from that state who voted against certifying Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and told crowds at a rally before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that it was the day for “taking down names and kicking ass.”

Biden’s executive order has restored the longstanding policy of including all residents regardless of immigration status in apportionment counts. But Brooks and the office of Alabama State Attorney General Steve Marshall are still trying to convince U.S. District Judge R. David Proctor to order unauthorized immigrants to be left out.

The future of “we the people”

For Conner, FAIR’s first executive director, it’s long past time to end this fight.

More than four decades after helping to launch FAIR’s campaign, Conner says he has since come to recognize the long ties many unauthorized immigrants have to the U.S.

“When you say ‘we the people of the United States,’ you have to include them,” Conner says.

Now a woodworker based in Nashville, Tenn., Conner condemns the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement for not focusing on deterring employers from hiring unauthorized workers.

“For this administration to take up the census lawsuit after they have subverted any effort to recognize the implicit invitation for immigrants to come undocumented to this country to work, to live,” Conner says, “I can only understand it as a pure expression of racism and evil. And yet I have to own I took this same position 40 years ago.”

FAIR, however, remains committed to changing who is counted in apportionment and obtaining numbers of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.

“You want to have as much data as possible about the fiscal, environmental and societal impacts of immigration,” says Stein, FAIR’s president.

Stein acknowledges the stakes of bringing this issue before the highest court in the land. If the justices declared that reapportioning House seats and electoral votes without unauthorized immigrants is unconstitutional, FAIR would have to resort to advocating for a constitutional amendment, which Stein calls a “very heavy lift.”

But the Trump administration left office with no definitive Supreme Court ruling on its plan to alter counts that, according to the Constitution, must include the “whole number of persons in each state.”

That leaves the door open for Alabama’s lawsuit and any future legal challenges to test their limits in the courts. And as planning ramps up for the 2030 census, it leaves behind a lingering question: How much further could FAIR’s campaign go if another president in line with its ambitions enters the White House?

Source: Immigration Hard-Liner Files Reveal 40-Year Bid Behind Trump’s Census Obsession

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Perception and reality across Canada’s urban-rural divide

2021/02/15 Leave a comment

This divide also maps neatly with age, percentage of immigrants and visible minorities, and political leanings:

Canadian policy-makers and citizens must be more attuned to the potential for rising political polarization in our democracy. It would be wrong to assume that the country is immune to the forces that are fracturing politics in the United States and elsewhere.

One potential fault line in Canadian society is our urban-rural divide. Voting patterns increasingly point to divergent political preferences along these place-based lines. In the 2019 federal election, the median population density for the 157 Liberal ridings was more than 38 times higher than that of the 121 Conservative ridings.

Yet, notwithstanding these different political outcomes, we don’t know much about the extent to which urban and rural Canadians actually think differently about politics, public policy, the country’s economic prospects or broader social trends. There’s little polling or other forms of empirical analysis to help us understand these questions.

Two new reports from the Public Policy Forum (Perceptions and Polarization and Fault Lines and Common Ground) aim to establish such an evidence base for understanding the urban-rural divide in Canada. The reports use survey data to (1) see how urban, suburban and rural Canadians perceive one another’s circumstances, experiences and perspectives and (2) determine whether there are actual differences in their economic, cultural and political viewpoints.

This exercise in measuring and comparing perception versus reality is highly relevant because research shows that distorted perceptions not only fuel polarization, but that polarization can in turn lead to even more distorted perceptions. The result is a vicious cycle that can contribute to rising political polarization and further social attenuation.

Let’s start with Canadians’ perceptions. Our research used a sliding-scale methodology to produce a “perception score” across 11 specific topics (such as unemployment, immigration and the prevalence of conservative social values). Respondents were presented with a scale ranging from 0 to 100, where 0 was “a lot less than the Canadian average,” 50 was “average,” and 100 was “a lot more than the Canadian average.” Scores of more than 50 indicate that respondents think Canadians in some places are above the average on a particular measure, while scores below 50 indicate that they believe Canadians in some places are below the average.

What did we find? Canadians perceive significant place-based differences in these economic, cultural and political issues.

Take economic growth, for instance. Respondents held broadly similar perceptions that cities have experienced much-higher-than-average economic growth, suburbs have had higher-than-average economic growth, and rural communities are far-below-average growth. The average “perception score” was 63.1 for cities, 57.5 for suburbs, and 44.2 for rural communities. This is 19-point gap conveys that Canadians perceive significant differences in the economic conditions between big cities and small towns.

These perceptions of significant place-based differences are something that policy-makers ought to be cognizant of. The risk is that these perceived differences contribute over time to a lack of common experiences and perspectives, and in turn a diminished sense of cohesion and unity.

What’s interesting, however, is that while respondents perceived significant place-based variations among urban, suburban and rural places, these perceptions were widely held across places. That is to say our perceptions don’t seem affected by where we live. Urban, suburban and rural perceptions of one another’s experiences and perspectives tend to cluster in a narrow range. The economic growth example works here as well. Respondents from all three types of places – urban (66.0), suburban (63.9) and rural (62.3) – perceive economic growth is highest in urban cities. We share a broadly similar understanding of how our fellow citizens think, live, work and vote.

As we observe in the paper, these differences fall broadly along a continuum between optimism and anxiety, openness and closedness, and modernism and tradition.

What about urban and rural Canadians’ actual circumstances, experiences and perspectives?

Our analysis, which draws on data from the Canadian Election Study, finds considerable common ground between urban and rural Canadians on a number of cultural, economic and political issues. Most place-based disagreements on matters of policy and politics are best measured by degree rather than fundamental principle.

Yet there are a handful of issues – including the state of the economy; environmental policy;  immigration and diversity; values and tradition; and trust in government – where consistent and significant place-based differences are evident.

As we observe in the paper, these differences fall broadly along a continuum between optimism and anxiety, openness and closedness, and modernism and tradition. They no doubt reflect to some degree a combination of differing economic circumstances and psychological dispositions rooted in urban and rural experiences and perspectives. The process of self-selection inherent in migration patterns invariably reinforces these differences. The basic idea here is that people with similar backgrounds, interests and economic prospects tend to cluster in the same places. American writer Will Wilkinson has described this tendency and its sociopolitical consequences as the “density divide.” It’s quite possible therefore that we’ll continue to see divergence along these continuums in the future.

There are two reasonable ways to interpret these data: positive and negative.

The positive interpretation is that although Canadians perceive significant place-based differences on matters of economics, culture and politics, these perceptions are commonly held and are generally unaffected by where one lives. More importantly, the evidence suggests that these perceptions may be overstated. Urban and rural views are broadly similar across a wide range of policy and political issues from assisted death to free trade.

The upshot: The evidence tells us that there is more that connects us than separates us — no matter whether we live in a big city or a small town.

The negative interpretation is that Canadians’ perceptions of significant place-based differences on matters of economics, culture and politics are reflected in differing views on key issues including the state of the economy; climate policy; immigration and diversity; values and tradition; and trust in government. These differences are important because (1) they manifest themselves in polarized voting patterns and (2) they represent issues that are associated with the rise of populism and polarization elsewhere.

The risk, of course, is that we experience a growing urban-rural divide driven by a complex relationship between perception and reality on these key hot-button issues. The consequence could be a significant place-based polarization that fractures the country along urban-rural lines.

It’s too early to know which interpretation will ultimately be correct. That answer will depend on whether Canada’s political parties, our policy-makers and citizens are prepared to build bridges across these divides and cultivate a politics of empathy, unity and respect.

The first step is understanding perception and reality across Canada’s urban-rural divide. We hope that these new reports are a useful contribution to such an ongoing effort.

Source: Perception and reality across Canada’s urban-rural divide

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Danish politicians could reject more citizenship applications under new proposal

2021/02/13 Leave a comment

Denmark keeps on proposing new barriers to citizenship based on country of origen:

A proposal by the far-right Nye Borgerlige (New Right, NB) party would change the way the Danish parliament processes citizenship applications so that individuals can be more easily rejected, according to a report by newspaper Politiken.

The plan has received the backing of the Danish People’s Party (DF) , the other anti-immigration party on Denmark’s far right. Significantly, it also has signs of support from the governing Social Democrats, the newspaper writes.

Under Danish law, citizenship can only be granted to foreign nationals via legal nationalisation: applications must actually be voted for by a parliamentary majority.

Accepted applications are normally processed via bills put in front of parliament twice yearly, in April and in October.

NB wants to change this practice so that, instead of approving a single bill with hundreds of (pre-approved) citizenship applications, parliament can more easily reject individual claims by splitting them into different bills.

The party wants to discriminate claims based on the nationality of the applicant, according to Politiken’s report.

We favour, for example, that persons from so-called ‘Menapt’ countries [Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey, ed.] be put on a separate bill so they can be voted against,” NB citizenship spokesperson Mette Thiesen told the newspaper.

“We want to be able to vote for the people who really deserve a citizenship, but not those who we absolutely don’t think should have it,” Thiesen added.

People who apply for Danish citizenship must fulfil a series of criteria and pass a citizenship test, and their claims are assessed by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration prior to being sent for the parliamentary bill. As such, the applications that come before parliament have already fulfilled the legal criteria.

Negotiations over potential changes to citizenship rules are ongoing between Danish parties. Earlier this week, the centre-right Liberal party said it wanted assessment of applicants to include a personal interview to determine whether that person has “Danish values”.

Thiesen told Politiken that “of course” politicians could sort citizenship applicants based on source country if they so wish.

“We’re the ones giving out citizenship. It’s not a right to get Danish citizenship,” she said.

It should be noted that, even if applications were voted for in different bills, it would still require a parliamentary majority to reject them.

The Danish People’s Party said it backed the idea. The party has previously voted against bills formalising citizenship applications.

“We would actually like to vote yes to many Nordic citizens and people from South Schleswig [German border region, ed.], but because we oppose so many from Middle Eastern and Muslim countries getting citizenship, we vote no to the bills as they are. And thereby end up voting no to some people who we really want to have citizenship, and that situation is a shame,” DF citizenship spokesperson Marie Krarup told Politiken.

The spokesperson for the governing Social Democrats, Lars Aslan Rasmussen, appeared open to the suggestion in a comment given to the newspaper.

“The premise itself, that there are special problems with people from those Menapt countries, we recognise that,” Rasmussen said.

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Egypt: Activist Stripped of Citizenship @HRW

2021/02/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Egyptian government should reverse its arbitrary and abusive decision, made in December 2020, to revoke the citizenship of political activist Ghada Naguib, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Parliament should amend abusive citizenship laws so that they comply with Egypt’s international human rights obligations.

On December 24, 2020, Egypt’s Official Gazette published the government’s decision, signed by Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly, to strip Naguib, who lives abroad, of her Egyptian nationality. The action is based on the Law 26 of 1975, which gives the government the power to do so without judicial review.

“Egypt’s decision to revoke Ghada Naguib’s citizenship is a shocking and dangerous precedent,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Egyptian authorities are stooping to a new low in punishing dissent.”

Naguib, 49, is a political activist who has lived in Turkey since late 2015 with her family. Law 26 of 1975 Regarding Egyptian Nationality is subject to abuse as it gives authorities great discretion, without legal oversight or court review, in stripping Egyptians of their nationality.

Under article 16, the prime minister can strip anyone, whether born Egyptian or naturalized, of their Egyptian nationality for several reasons, including if they “maintain normal [i.e., permanent] residence abroad and are convicted of a felony that harms state security from abroad.” That paragraph was cited in the government’s decision against Naguib.

Article 15 of the same law gives the government even wider powers to strip the nationality of those who acquired citizenship through naturalization.

The government decision notes that Naguib was born in Cairo, but falsely claims that she was “originally Syrian.” Naguib shared identification and school documents with Human Rights Watch that confirm she is Egyptian and was born in Cairo, where she grew up and went to school. She lived most of her life in Egypt and has never lived in Syria. She was born to an Egyptian mother and a Syrian father but has only had an Egyptian passport.

The government and pro-government media have frequently targeted Naguib and her husband, Hisham Abdallah, an Egyptian actor and TV host, because of their opposition activities since late 2013.

Human Rights Watch previously documented that the government harassed, intimidated, and arrested members of their families in Egypt in July and August 2018. In January 2019, a Giza criminal court for “terrorism” and “state security” cases sentenced Naguib and Abdallah to five years in prison, in absentia, in a mass trial of over 25 defendants in what is known as the “Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) media” case (Supreme State Security Case 1102 of 2017), on charges of joining an illegal organization and disseminating false news to undermine national security.

Human Rights Watch reviewed the court verdict, which shows the entire case was based on National Security officers’ allegations about the defendants’ peaceful political activities. The security officers accused the couple of plotting to overthrow the government through media, political, and human rights work.

The charges contravene basic rights, including freedom of association and free speech. The court convictions should be annulled, Human Rights Watch said.

In mid-December 2020, security forces arrested five of Hisham Abdallah’s nephews from Marsa Matrouh and Kafer al-Sheikh governorates. They were missing for two days. On December 23, the State Security Prosecution ordered all five detained pending an investigation on accusations of joining and financing a terrorist organization.

Human Rights Watch has documented an escalating pattern of the government harassing, arresting, and prosecuting relatives of dissidents abroad.

Naguib told Human Rights Watch that she was not able to immediately hire a lawyer to appeal the government’s decision in Egypt. She said that the Egyptian consulate in Istanbul has repeatedly refused to provide her with consular services.

Since 2014, President al-Sisi’s government has invoked article 15 of the nationality law to strip Egyptian nationality from dozens, most likely hundreds, of people, the majority of whom were born to Palestinian fathers and Egyptian mothers and naturalized.

In 2004, Egypt amended its nationality law to rectify discrimination against women by allowing children born to Egyptian mothers and foreign fathers to be granted Egyptian nationality like children of Egyptian men. Those born before the 2004 amendment had to file requests for naturalization, which the Interior Ministry regularly denied.

Following the 2011 uprising, the government granted many of those people Egyptian nationality, but following the 2013 military coup the government stripped the nationality of many of those naturalized in 2011 and 2012.

Additionally, Human Rights Watch is aware of several cases in which authorities stripped Egyptians born in Egypt to Egyptian parents of their nationality, particularly Egyptian men and women married to Palestinians, Israelis, or Palestinian-Israelis.

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality.” Egypt’s nationality laws contravene international law on the right to nationality. The 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination obliges states in article 5 to “guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, color, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law,” notably in the enjoyment of fundamental human rights, including “the right to nationality.” The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women also calls for states to grant women equal rights with men with respect to the nationality of their children. The UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessnessgoes further in article 9, which states that governments “may not deprive any person or group of persons of their nationality on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds.”

The UN Human Rights Council has said in several resolutions that the arbitrary deprivation of nationality, including on political grounds, is “a violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms” and that governments use it to deprive people of basic human rights.

“The Egyptian government seems intent on stripping nationality of mostly those born to Egyptian mothers and foreign national fathers and in doing so, discriminating against women and their children,” Stork said. “Egyptian authorities should immediately restore Ghada Naguib’s citizenship and stop using the nationality issue as a weapon to silence political critics.”

Source: Egypt: Activist Stripped of Citizenship

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Douglas Todd: China drops hammer on Hong Kong residents holding Canadian passports

2021/02/02 Leave a comment

Given that, according to an Asia Pacific Foundation poll that a majority of Canadian citizens resident in Hong Kong had only lived in Canada for 4 to 5 years (“Canadians of convenience” to use the previous government’s phrase), will be interesting to see how many return and when:

The leaders of Hong Kong are pressuring about 350,000 residents who hold Canadian passports to make an ultimate decision about their citizenship.

Under the thumb of Mainland China — which does not allow dual citizenship — the territorial government is squeezing people who have been living and working for decades in the financial hub while holding passports from other nations, most commonly Canada.

China’s authoritarian leaders, Lee speculated, are cracking down on dual passport-holders in Hong Kong in retaliation against Western politicians who have been criticizing the regime, particularly for crushing democracy advocates in the special administrative region, which became part of China in 1997.

Residents of Hong Kong who don’t renounce their second passports so they can retain the same rights as citizens of China run the risk of losing many economic and travel privileges, said Lee.

They could soon be treated like any other foreigner in the territory of 7.5 million, which is also home to an estimated 100,000 people with American passports and 85,000 with Australian passports.

Canadian immigration lawyers Sam Hyman and David Lesperance say many people with Canadian passports live in Hong Kong because they can make much more money in the turbo-powered financial centre while not being subject to Canadian income taxes, which are higher.

“The Chinese government is basically saying if you want to continue to live and work in Hong Kong, you’re going to have to make a choice,” Hyman said.

In the 1990s, a wave of middle-class and wealthy Hong Kong residents moved to Canada and obtained passports, but many returned to their homeland. There are fewer people from Hong Kong living in Canada in recent years (about 215,000) than there were in 1996 (241,000).

Greater Toronto has 100,000. Metro Vancouver, with 71,000, has the most Hong Kong-born residents per capita outside of East Asia.

If full-time residents of Hong Kong with Canadian passports end up being treated like foreigners, Lee said, they would lose certain rights to owning property and would have to regularly report to officials for work visas.

There is also a distinct chance, Lee said, that a person who tries to enter any region controlled by China with a Chinese passport, while also being found to secretly hold one from Canada or another country, could be arrested.

Even though holding a Canadian passport is supposed to offer people diplomatic protection, observers say China’s officials are increasingly treating someone as a Chinese citizen based simply on their ethnicity and family history.

China has recently jailed Hong-Kong residents who thought they were protected by their Canadian passports, including billionaire Xiao Jianhua and Falun Gong practitioner Sun Qian. Many of those arrested renounced their Canadian citizenship, reportedly under duress.

It’s hard to predict how many will turn their back on Canadian citizenship in order to stay in Hong Kong, agreed Lee and Hyman.

For many, Hyman said, it would mean giving up a lifestyle as transnational migrants — people who travel back and forth between countries doing business and buying real estate, but with varying degrees of loyalty to each place.

Many Hong Kong residents, Hyman said, obtained Canadian passports in the 1990s because they wanted to feel they had a haven, including for property, in the event China failed to live up to its commitment to give Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy until 2047.

“For many a Canadian passport was their fallback position,” Hyman said.

An Asia-Pacific Foundation poll found the majority of people holding Canadian passports in Hong Kong had only lived in Canada for four or five years. Many did not tell Chinese authorities they had a second citizenship.

The study found 46 per cent considered Canada their home “sometimes” or “all the time.” But 37 per cent of Hong Kong-born Canadians stated they would “never” consider Canada home. The survey was conducted before democracy protests swept Hong Kong in 2019-20, which caused China to arrest many activists and impose much more severe restrictions.

Even though Hyman considers China a “rogue” nation, the immigration lawyer said its move to extend its long-standing ban on dual citizenship over Hong Kong is in some ways not dissimilar to many European countries, which also don’t permit more than one passport. Canada, he said, only began approving them in 1977 and the U.S. in 1990.

Many Hong Kong residents have favoured Canada as destination of choice because of its generous and relatively undemanding approach to immigrants, Hyman said, including minimal requirements about residing in the country.

And, unlike the U.S., say Hyman and Lesperance, Canada does not impose tax on citizens based merely on their nationality.

Canada contains more residents with roots in Hong Kong than any region outside Asia: 215,000. In contrast there are about 200,000 Hong Kong immigrants in the much larger U.S., 96,000 in Britain and 87,000 in Australia.

Source: Douglas Todd: China drops hammer on Hong Kong residents holding Canadian passports

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How to design language tests for citizenship

2021/01/30 Leave a comment

Immigration-based countries tend to have more pragmatic approach to language training than some of the European examples cited:

“Perfect swedish is overrated. But comprehensible Swedish is deeply underrated,” says Ulf Kristersson, the leader of Sweden’s centre-right Moderate party, which supports a language requirement to become a Swedish citizen. The left has come round, too: the Social Democrat-led government plans to introduce a language test. Sweden would thereby leave the small club of European countries that do not make passing such a test a condition of naturalisation.

To learn the language of the country you live in is the key to a full life there. But many experts in language policy oppose testing for citizenship—because they suspect a less compassionate motive in some who propose them. “Becoming a Danish citizen is something one has to become worthy of,” said Inger Stojberg in 2015, when she was the immigration and integration minister in Denmark’s centre-right government—implying that the unworthy had been slipping through. Her thinly camouflaged goal was not to improve immigrants’ Danish, but to naturalise fewer of them.

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Ivison: 300,000 dual citizens in Hong Kong must choose between Canada and China after policy change

2021/01/29 Leave a comment

To watch the choices that these Canadian citizens make:

Ottawa is growing increasingly concerned about the rights of 300,000 Canadian citizens in Hong Kong, after the territory’s government declared that dual citizens must choose the nationality they wish to maintain.

“Canada is aware of the Hong Kong government’s decision to require dual nationals to declare the nationality they wish to legally maintain while in Hong Kong,” said spokesperson John Babcock. “At this moment, we understand that this policy predominantly affects dual nationals serving prison sentences in Hong Kong. Canada has expressed its concern to the Hong Kong government about the possible loss of consular access that this change implies.”

China doesn’t recognize dual nationals under its Nationality Law and Hong Kong residents of Chinese descent are regarded as Chinese citizens. The Hong Kong government has stated that residents, around 300,000 of whom hold Canadian passports, are not entitled to consular protection unless they make a declaration of change of nationality. If that process is successful, they are no longer regarded as Chinese citizens – but it may affect their right of abode in Hong Kong, which allows people to live and work in the territory without restrictions. Foreign nationals can only acquire right of abode after a seven years residency requirement, which gives them the right to vote but not hold a territorial passport or stand for office.

“This is another important development potentially because it looks as if China is now applying its citizenship law to Hong Kong and forcing people to declare who they are,” said Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador in Beijing. “It is something that will have to be watched.”

He pointed out that the Vienna Convention on consular relations stipulates that if you enter a country using one nation’s travel documents, you cannot claim citizenship of another country. If dual citizens entered the territory using a Hong Kong or Chinese passport, it may affect their claim on Canadian citizenship, Saint-Jacques said.

The ramifications of loss of Canadian citizenship are huge for those on the wrong side of the law, said Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, senior fellow at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa. Ultimately, aside from the possible loss of consular access, dual citizens might be prevented from leaving Hong Kong, she said.

The experience of dual citizens in mainland China offers an indication of what may be in store for Hong Kongers. Three Chinese-born Canadian citizens have been sentenced to death in the past two years for drug offences and their names are rarely raised by Canada. “It’s very likely that the Chinese government has instructed the families and embassy not to name them publicly, as Canadian citizenship is not recognized and the prisoners themselves may have renounced it under duress,” said McCuaig-Johnston.

That happened in the case of Sun Qian, a Canadian citizen who was given eight years in prison for being a Falun Gong practitioner. News reports said she renounced her citizenship in the process. Former justice minister Irwin Cotler said she should still be regarded as a Canadian and accused the Chinese of securing a false confession.

Global Affairs spokesperson Babock said Canada’s consular general in Hong Kong is seeking additional information from local authorities about the potential impact of this latest change.

The suspicion is that it is designed to weaken links between dual citizens and their adopted countries.

Britain will start accepting applications from people with British National (Overseas) status this week. BN(O) passport holders include 5.4 million Hong Kongers, who will soon be eligible to move to the U.K. and apply for citizenship after six years.

Such moves have led to calls of retaliation by a growing chorus of Chinese academics and politicians. Calls for curbs on dual citizenship, include the demand that those who obtain foreign nationality should be stripped of right of abode.

Regina Ip, a former security chief for the territory, said earlier this month that Beijing should end its special treatment of Hong Kongers and impose its own nationality laws.

This followed just days after 50 of the territory’s most prominent democracy activists were arrested and accused of trying to overthrow the government, in the biggest crackdown since China imposed its security law last summer.

The sheer size of the diaspora in the territory has put Canada at the centre of the citizenship debate.

Tens of thousands of Hong Kong-born immigrants landed in Vancouver after the 1997 handover from Britain and while many returned home, they retained Canadian citizenship.

Since the crackdown started, Canada has accepted a number of asylum-seekers fleeing arrest, prompting the Chinese ambassador in Ottawa, Cong Peiwu, to warn that receiving “violent criminals” could jeopardize the “health and safety” of the 300,000 Canadian passport holders in the Hong Kong.

For now, those people are free to leave. In an interview with the National Post last summer, Cong re-affirmed the right of exit, saying it is up to Canadian passport holders whether they stay or go.

But Avvy Go, director of Toronto’s Chinese and South-east Asian legal clinic, said there has been a pattern of China not recognizing foreign citizens, “particularly when it suits their purpose”.

“Canada should have an evacuation plan, just in case” China introduces exit controls, she said.

Source: 300,000 dual citizens in Hong Kong must choose between Canada and China after policy change

Filed under Dual Citizenship, foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

COVID-19 scrutiny has stopped some women headed to Canada to give birth, documents allege

2021/01/28 Leave a comment

While the article is unbalanced, only citing Jamie Liew who dismisses the importance of the issue and the data (Jamie and I continue our debate at Policy Options and elsewhere), good to know that officials are identifying women suspected of misrepresenting their purpose of travel.

While the ATIP under question pertains only to Abu Dhabi, would be interesting to have comparable reports from other main source countries of birth tourists particularly China.

As to the question of the numbers, have written extensively on the strengths and weaknesses of the CIHI numbers (far from perfect but more realistic than the StatsCan/vital stats dramatic understating).

2020 numbers, likely available mid-summer, will provide a good indication of the practice given that visitor visas have declined 96 percent post-COVID, in contrast to other temporary residents where the decline has been much less (international students: 32 percent, IMP and TFWP down by 14 percent, April to November 2020 compared to the same period in 2019).

IRCC work on linking health and immigration data does not appear to have advanced much given COVID-19:

Greater scrutiny of travellers, prompted by COVID-19, has yielded new instances of women from other countries coming to Canada with what officials say is an unspoken plan to deliver their baby here, documents obtained by the Star show.

Some observers have repeatedly cautioned that the practice controversially dubbed “birth tourism” — which is legal — is being overblown and that focus on it has been driven as much by racism as real concern.

The federal government, meanwhile, has said it is studying the issue in an effort to understand the scope of what is happening.

An August 2020 report, obtained through an access-to-information request, offers a look at some of the information the government is getting. 

It was prepared by Canadian government staff in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It says that over a two-week period in June, airline staff, with support from Canada Border Services Agency liaison officers, “intercepted” prior-to-boarding 19 foreign nationals from the Middle East, who were all carrying temporary resident visas, because they were suspected of misrepresenting the purpose of travel.

The report suggests new restrictive citizenship measures in the United States, falling oil prices and economic vulnerability due to the pandemic could be driving more pregnant women from the region to seek to give birth in Canada.

All babies born in Canada receive automatic Canadian citizenship.

Language in the government document states: “While birth tourism is not illegal in Canada, it can undermine Canadians’ confidence in (the government’s) management of migration and citizenship programs.”

Observers, however, say the trend has been exaggerated and that critics are unfairly demonizing non-resident mothers. They note that, generally speaking, many of the foreign women giving birth in Canada are, in fact, not “birth tourists” but international students, migrant workers, foreign government personnel, those seeking to become permanent residents, as well as Canadians living abroad who have chosen to return to Canada to give birth.

“There isn’t enough contextualized data out there to know why people are giving birth in Canada as foreign residents,” said Jamie Liew, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

“It’s not clear to me that it’s people just floating in and floating out.”

Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, foreign nationals cannot be prevented from travelling to Canada to give birth. They can be, however, if they lie about the purpose of travel on their temporary resident visa application.

For its part, the Trudeau government says it is trying to understand the extent of the practice and is in the middle of collecting better data, including how many non-resident mothers are short-term visitors who come to Canada to give birth then leave. A spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says the government’s analysis is expected sometime this year.

In some Canadian cities, unregulated for-profit businesses, including so-called “maternity hotels,” have emerged catering to non-resident expectant mothers.

In the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, B.C. — whose main hospital has seen the highest number of non-resident births in Canada outside Quebec, according to the federal government — the city council last year passed a motion urging Ottawa to end birthright citizenship altogether. Most non-resident mothers at that hospital list a permanent address in China, provincial records say.

There is wide discrepancy in the existing national data. The Canadian Institute for Health Information says the number of non-resident births in Canada (outside Quebec) has steadily climbed from 3,600 in 2017-18 to 4,400 in 2019-20, representing about one per cent of the 380,000 births in Canada each year. Data from Statistics Canada has previously shown that the number is only in the hundreds.

The report obtained by the Star says “COVID-19 travel restrictions have brought to light a number of birth-tourism related temporary resident visa applicants within IRCC Abu Dhabi’s caseload, as the restrictions have led to closer scrutiny of the purpose of travel at the time of boarding.”

According to the report, the purpose of travel most commonly cited at the time the 19 applied for their visas was “tourism” or “family visit.”

Five of the 19 travellers were women who had previously given birth in Canada and were travelling to give birth in Canada a second time. They were travelling with family members or other companions.

“Some foreign nationals are using their relationship to their children previously born in Canada to attempt to justify entry to Canada to give birth a second time,” the report states. Others cited medical needs of their Canadian-born child.

Ultimately, 18 of the 19 were not allowed to board and their visas were referred back to immigration offices in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh for review. The one traveller who was permitted to board was refused entry in Canada but eventually allowed in due, in part, to possible risk to her pregnancy.

The 18 who were denied boarding were allowed to make their case in writing in response to “procedural fairness letters.” Some acknowledged they had given birth in Canada on a previous trip but noted they had also visited family or done tourism.

“If a traveller visited family and also gave birth, it is harder to reach a finding of misrepresentation as the declared purpose of travel is not false, but incomplete,” the report says.

It is unclear how many of the 18, if any, were eventually allowed to travel to Canada.

The report noted that since the start of the pandemic travel restrictions, the Canadian immigration office in Abu Dhabi had received 30 online requests from individuals seeking an exemption to travel to Canada to allow them to give birth as a “medical procedure or treatment.” The requests for travel were all denied.

“Few, if any, of the above cases would have come to IRCC’s attention in the absence of the COVID-19 travel restrictions,” the report contends. “The considerable number of cases over a short period raises questions regarding the frequency with which residents of the Gulf region are travelling to Canada for birth tourism under normal circumstances, and remaining under the radar. Indeed, the present numbers might be even higher were it not for limited flight availability and hesitation among expecting parents to board a 14-hour flight during a pandemic.”

The report notes that the decision by the U.S. in early 2020 to stop issuing temporary visitor visas to foreign nationals believed to be travelling to the U.S. to give birth, along with increasing economic uncertainty in the region and falling oil prices “will increase push factors for birth tourism to Canada.”

Asked if the pattern cited in the summer report was continuing, a CBSA spokesperson said the agency does not comment on trends or fluctuations.

An IRCC spokesperson said in an email a person is not inadmissible nor can they be denied a visa solely on the grounds that they are pregnant or that they may give birth in Canada.

However, providing false information is considered misrepresentation and has “immigration consequences.”

“While these statistics indicate that birth tourism is not widespread, the Government of Canada recognizes the need to better understand the extent of this practice,” the email said.

Liew, the law professor, said she worries the government could be prematurely concluding that cases represent birth tourism or that birth tourism is on the rise.

“There is very little data out there that indicates this is a growing problem,” she said. “I would say it seems like a very benign problem in my estimation.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/01/27/covid-19-scrutiny-has-stopped-more-women-headed-to-canada-to-give-birth-documents-allege.html

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , ,

John Baird, Nigel Wright head up new group to organize right-leaning Canadians abroad

2021/01/27 Leave a comment

Of note. Canadian political parties to date have been inactive compared to the parties of other countries where expatriate voting rights have been longstanding such as the US and UK:

A new group headed by some prominent Conservatives aims to mobilize right-leaning Canadians living overseas — and marks a changed attitude toward longtime expat voters after the Supreme Court of Canada significantly expanded their voting rights.

“It’s one of the last truly untapped areas of the electorate,” John Baird, former Conservative cabinet minister, told the National Post. Baird is the honorary president for the new group, called Canadian Conservatives Abroad (CCA).

Baird said expats “overwhelmingly” don’t vote in elections, and noted the estimated three million Canadians living abroad is equivalent to about 30 electoral ridings. About 20,000 expat voters were registered ahead of the 2019 election.

The push to form the group is in part motivated by a 2019 Supreme Court decision that ruled it was unconstitutional to bar Canadian citizens from voting if they’ve lived outside Canada longer than five years. That prohibition had been in place since 1993 (though sometimes enforced loosely), but the Liberal government lifted it with Bill C-76 in 2018.

Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Conservatives fought against allowing longtime expats to vote and cracked down on the practice, alleging people were using loopholes to get around the five-year rule. Embracing the expat vote is somewhat of an about-face, but it’s also a recognition that the prohibition isn’t coming back and the Conservatives are missing an opportunity by not organizing among this population.

The CCA will be modelled after similar organizations for Americans (Republicans Overseas), Britons (Conservatives Abroad) and Australians (Australian Liberals Abroad). Democrats Abroad, which organizes overseas for the U.S. Democratic Party, is another well-known example.

Nigel Wright, a former chief of staff to Harper, will chair the CCA’s executive committee. The group is based in London and the leadership team includes Conservatives spread around the world, according to a news release.

The CCA will operate independently of political parties, but look for supporters of both federal and provincial conservative parties. “We’re starting with a solid base in the U.S., U.K., the Middle East and Asia,” Wright said in a statement.

Baird said he expects the CCA will be primarily focused on voter education, mobilization and assistance with administrative hurdles, but it will also organize virtual events and other forms of networking for overseas Conservatives. Another goal is to help drive Canadian policy discussions on global affairs from a right-wing perspective.

“We’re a group of volunteers that are just getting started, so we’ll see what form it takes,” Baird said. “It’s an exciting opportunity.”

The CCA’s first event will be a discussion on the establishment of a “CANZUK” alliance between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom that would aim to coordinate matters of migration, education, free trade and foreign policy between the countries. The event will be held to coincide with the upcoming Conservative policy convention in March.

Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/john-baird-nigel-wright-head-up-new-group-to-organize-right-leaning-canadians-abroad

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