Scoop: Trump to target “birth tourism” in new immigration fight

2020/01/21 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if this proposal proceeds and, if so, the inevitable implementation and court challenges:

The Trump administration has a new target on the immigration front — pregnant women visiting from other countries — with plans as early as this week to roll out a new rule cracking down on “birth tourism,” three administration officials told Axios.

Why it matters: Trump has threatened to end birthright citizenshipand railed against immigrant “anchor babies.” The new rule would be one of the first tangible steps to test how much legal authority the administration has to prevent foreigners from taking advantage of the 14th Amendment’s protection of citizenship for anyone born in the U.S.

  • “This change is intended to address the national security and law enforcement risks associated with birth tourism, including criminal activity associated with the birth tourism industry,” a State Department official told Axios.
  • The regulation is also part of the administration’s broader efforts to intensify the vetting process for visas, according to another senior administration official.

The big picture: “Birth tourists” often come to the U.S. from China, Russia and Nigeria, according to the AP.

  • There’s no official count of babies born to foreign visitors in the U.S., while the immigration restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies — which has close ties to Trump administration immigration officials — puts estimates at around 33,000 every year.

How the new regulation would work: It would alter the requirements for B visas (or visitor visas), giving State Department officials the authority to deny foreigners the short-term business and tourism visas if they believe the process is being used to facilitate automatic citizenship.

  • It’s unclear yet how the rule would be enforced — whether officials would be directed to consider pregnancy or the country of the woman’s citizenship in determining whether to grant a visa.
  • Consular officers who issue passports and visas “are remarkably skilled at sussing out true versus false claims,” the senior official said.
  • “The underlying practical issue is that very few people who give birth in the U.S. got a visa for that specific purpose. Most people already have visas and come in later,” according to Jeffrey Gorsky, former chief legal adviser in the State Department visa office.

This is but one step in the administration’s plans to make it harder for people from other countries to benefit from birthright citizenship.

  • “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” the senior official said. “Just the legal recognition that this is improper and wrong and not allowed is a significant step forward.”
  • The plans to address the use of B visas for birth tourism were included in the latest version of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.
  • Immigration experts expect there to be a similar rule for Customs and Border Protection to go along with the State Department’s regulation.

What to watch: Most of Trump’s major immigration moves have been met with lawsuits. If the regulation leaves it to officers’ discretion to ensure that B visas aren’t used for birth tourism, it would be difficult to challenge in court, according to Lynden Melmed, an attorney and former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

  • “State Department officials have all the discretion in the world to deny people visas,” said Sarah Pierce of the Migration Policy Institute. Foreign nationals who are outside the U.S. and have not yet received visas “don’t have a lot of legal standing.”
  • But specific restrictions that could keep out non-birth tourism visitors — such as pregnant women coming to the U.S. for business, etc. — would be legally questionable, according to Melmed and Gorsky.

Source: Scoop: Trump to target “birth tourism” in new immigration fight

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Iran considers dual nationals on downed Ukrainian plane to be Iranians: TV report

2020/01/21 Leave a comment

Not surprising given that all likely entered on their Iranian passport and that Iran doesn’t formally recognize dual citizenship. But incredibly callous towards the victims and their families:

Iran considers dual nationals aboard a Ukrainian plane that was shot down accidentally this month to be Iranian citizens, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

Iran does not recognize dual nationality. Many of the 176 people killed in the disaster were Iranians with dual citizenship. Canada had 57 citizens on board.

“We have informed Canada that Tehran considers dual nationals who were killed in the plane crash as Iranian citizens … Iran is mourning their deaths,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi told a televised weekly news conference.

As protests erupted in Iran over the plane disaster, the British ambassador in Tehran was briefly detained. Officials said he was at an “illegal” rally, while the envoy said he was attending a vigil for victims. Britain criticized his detention.

“Iran respects all foreign diplomats in Iran as long as they do not violate international laws,” Mousavi said.

Source: Iran considers dual nationals on downed Ukrainian plane to be Iranians: TV report

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From India to US, a citizenship crisis is burning across the world

2020/01/20 Leave a comment

Dispiriting reading:

Across the world, there are fires burning and they are not only climate-change induced or climate threatening. The concept of who is a citizen of a nation and what are their rights has become a burning topic.

Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilians who are Amazonian Indians are increasingly under threat. In Bolivia, the fall of leader Evo Morales has disenfranchised indigenous Bolivians. Many living under US President Donald Trump are worried about their lives and the well-being of their families, and fear deportation despite being an integral part of American socioeconomics.

As Brexit looms, there is trepidation among many Europeans who have made Britain their home. The Roma in many parts of Europe continue to face persecution from their governments.

There are upheavals in the middle economies of the world too, with millions in Hong Kong and tens of millions in India facing an uncertain future. The unfulfilled obligations in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong government’s increasing coordination with Beijing has unsettled many citizens of the special administrative region.

In India, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has decided to implement a two-pronged strategy which threatens the country’s secular ethos. This government’s amendment of a 1955 citizenship act grants citizenship to refugees from neighbouring countries belonging to religions other than Islam. This legislation has been amended in the past to limit citizenship to those having at least one Indian parent and, later, to the parent not being an illegal immigrant.

Simultaneously, there is a plan to conduct a biblically inspired National Register of Citizens which will be the arbiter on the citizenship of each Indian. Though the implementation of both or either is perceived as targeting Muslims, the collateral damage will be in the millions because many people do not have, or have insufficient, documents to prove their citizenship.

Source: From India to US, a citizenship crisis is burning across the world

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ICYMI USA: Not on form, but brawl over citizenship question continues

2020/01/20 Leave a comment

We shall see the net result of these efforts on census participation once the Census is complete and analysed:

The U.S. Supreme Court decided a citizenship question won’t be on this spring’s census form, but that doesn’t mean the fight over it has ended in courtrooms across the country.

In Maryland, civil rights groups are trying to block an order from President Donald Trump to gather citizenship data through administrative records. In New York, other civil rights groups are seeking sanctions against Trump administration attorneys for not turning over documents related to the citizenship question’s origins. Democratic lawmakers in the District of Columbia are fighting for similar documents, and Alabama officials are suing the Census Bureau to keep immigrants living in the country illegally from being counted during the process that determines the number of congressional seats each state gets.

All of the lawsuits touch on whether the number of citizens, instead of the total population, will be used for redistricting or apportionment — the process of divvying up congressional seats among the states after the 2020 census. Opponents say doing so would dilute the influence of minorities and Democrats, which they argue was the true intent of the Trump administration’s desire to add a citizenship question in the first place.

The U.S. Constitution specifies that congressional districts should be based on how many people — not citizens — live there. But the legal requirements are murkier for state legislative districts.

Source: Not on form, but brawl over citizenship question continues

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A dangerous discourse prevails that draws on long-standing racist ideas about who deserves citizenship. Better data and a new focus are needed.

2020/01/18 Leave a comment

The latest in response to CBC’s Fifth Estate birth tourism episode with the same issue of conflating issues related to wealthy “birth tourists” and the cottage industry that supports them and those pertaining to other temporary residents, which appears to be the main focus of this and related articles. Working on a piece to unpack this and related data issues:

The phrase “birth tourism” has been used by media and political parties to derogatively describe the circumstances in which noncitizen women come to Canada to give birth; the suspicion is that the women do this so that the children can claim citizenship and thus take advantage of their birth country’s education and health care systems, and eventually the children can sponsor their parents to immigrate. At its 2018 convention, the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) went so far as to pass a nonbinding resolution to refuse automatic birthright citizenship to children born to two nonresident parents, as a solution to the “crisis” of birth tourism. Echoing these sentiments, a recent investigation of birth tourism by the CBC’s Fifth Estate drew three conclusions: Canadian birth tourism is on the rise, it demands a legislative response, and it is a disingenuous pathway to citizenship

All three of The Fifth Estate’s conclusions are flawed, and they have serious implications for those pregnant migrant women who are being labelled birth tourists.

Take the argument that birth tourism is on the rise. Neither the Canada Border Services Agency nor Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada tracks the entry of pregnant nonresidents into the country. Moreover, hospitals are not legally required to inquire about the mother’s nationality, as it is not a prerequisite for a birth certificate. Researchers at the Canadian Institute for Health Information have developed a workaround based on hospital financial data, which include a code for services provided to nonresidents (“other country resident self-pay”). These data show that 3,628 births (1.2 percent of total births) in Canada(not including Quebec) in 2017 were to nonresident mothers. They also show that this number has doubled since 2010 but is geographically focused, primarily in 25 hospitals in Ontario and British Columbia (with comparable numbers in Montreal). But this is only a proxy measure for birth tourism, because it includes international students, migrant workers, those with work visas and foreign government personnel, all of whom could have given birth in Canada, but whose entry into the country was not likely a product of birth tourism.

Nevertheless, the focus on birth tourism has persisted. Parliamentary petitions to refuse birthright citizenship to children born to two nonresident parents were sponsored by Conservative MP Alice Wong in 2012 and in 2018 by Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido. The Fifth Estate segment is the latest in a series of media investigations into the perceived dangers birth tourism presents, not for the pregnant migrant women at the heart of this narrative but for the integrity of Canada’s immigration system and Canadian citizenship at large.

Birth tourism does happen, but the available numbers do not suggest a trend in need of government action — especially action in the form of birthright citizenship refusal. Ministers of both parties reached the conclusion that no measures were necessary: in 2012, it was the Conservative minister of citizenship and immigration, Jason Kenney, and in 2018, the Liberal minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, Ahmed Hussen. The two MPs’ parliamentary petitions failed to gain any legislative traction; provincial legislatures in Ontario and British Columbia also voted against legislative action. Even the CPC opted not to include any mention of birth tourism in its 2019 electoral platform, despite its convention resolution. The continued focus on birth tourism misrepresents the actual urgency of birth tourism, and ultimately this harms nonresident pregnant women by casting them as illegitimate and glossing over the barriers they face with the Canadian immigration system.

Temporary residents often migrate with their families or stay in Canada for prolonged periods — years — and form intimate personal relationships in their Canadian communities.

Discussion of nonresident births must be contextualized within broader immigration trends and the limitations on access to health care. The number of temporary residents arriving in Canada has steadily increased, and many of these people will pursue permanent residency through programs such as the Canadian Experience Class and contribute substantially to the social and economic well-being of their communities and the country.

For nonresidents temporarily residing in Canada, access to public health insurance depends on their immigration category. For example, international students’ access to health coverage in Quebec is limited by nationality; in Ontario and Manitoba it is not available to holders of study permits. For temporary workers, coverage is restricted based on the type or duration of work permit and can require a three-month wait period. Furthermore, people with temporary-resident visas or who are without formal status do not qualify for any medical coverage whatsoever. People enter and live in Canada with temporary resident visas for all kinds of reasons, including to live with their spouse while waiting for their family sponsorship applications to be processed. Temporary residents often migrate with their families or stay in Canada for prolonged periods — years — and form intimate personal relationships in their Canadian communities. The desire to have a family and children is widely considered a natural aspiration that all people should be free to pursue alongside studying and working. While many nonresidents can access public health insurance, access is not universal — a distinction not addressed in the current data. Our research, which is still ongoing, shows that when nonresident women without insurance arrive at a hospital or clinic seeking perinatal care, they are often assumed to be “birth tourists” and treated as if they are unfairly taking advantage of Canada’s health care and immigration systems.

While technically legal, birth tourism is presented as a way to jump the immigration queue by utilizing a disingenuous pathway to Canadian citizenship, and ultimately taking away resources from more “deserving” and “committed” Canadian citizens. MP Wong spoke in favour of the nonbinding convention resolution, saying that “passport babies” take away resources from Canada’s system and that Canada should “fight for our own babies.” This framing of so-called birth tourists and their children as system cheaters is part of a larger trend of criminalizing migrants using the language of deservedness, desirability and illegality to pit “undeserving” migrants against the generosity of Canadians. To this end, birth tourists and their children are marked as less desirable because they are using what is thought of as an improper — albeit legal — channel to obtain Canadian citizenship.

Claims of deservedness suggest that citizens must have an ongoing commitment and obligation to Canada, and children being born as a result of birth tourism are said to disrupt this because there is no way for them to actively demonstrate a clear connection to their acquired status once they’re adults. This, however, is not the defining feature of birthright citizenship: Canadian-born citizens do not actively commit to their status. Moreover, political scientists Rita Dhamoon and Sunera Thobani, among others, conclude that Canadian-born citizens — specifically white Canadian-born citizens — rarely undergo ongoing evaluations of their commitment to the Canadian state. How, then, do we reconcile this double standard where Canadian children born to nonresident parents are held to different, and arguably unrealistic, expectations around citizenship than those born to resident parents? The unspoken accusation here is that “undesirable” migrants are using a legal channel to claim Canadian citizenship.

The result is that nonresident pregnant women are framed as potential perpetrators of migration or citizenship fraud. While available data do not distinguish between racialized and nonracialized mothers, most media and political analysis focuses on racialized birth mothers. This echoes the historical treatment of nonwhite and non-European immigrants as a security concern. For example, Canada’s heavily racialized temporary foreign worker programs have largely restricted family migration and permanent settlement, and there has been increased scrutiny of our family sponsorship program as officials look for marriage fraud. It is important to also consider how this narrative draws on broader problematic perceptions of racialized (and other marginalized) women as not making “ethical” reproductive decisions: for example, choosing to have children to procure state resources for themselves. Considering that the evidence does not support the broad claim that birth tourism is an imminent threat to the country, we question whether it is an issue in need of a legislative response or simply a dog whistle that calls back long-standing sexist and racist immigration legacies that perpetuate the criminalization and surveillance of racialized pregnant nonresident women.

More research needs to be done on birth tourism. Rather than furthering narratives that demonize and criminalize nonresident mothers as birth tourists, we need to shift the focus to how these women’s experiences are eclipsed as a result of this dangerous discourse. Marking these women as queue jumpers and citizenship fraudsters ignores the real-life obstacles they encounter within the health care system and the Canadian immigration system. In our research, we find that these women face challenges accessing perinatal care, building trusted relationships in health care settings and having their voices heard. They pay high hospital and doctor fees, resulting in situations where they forgo necessary care at their own personal risk. It is this crisis rather than the perceived crisis of birth tourism that is in need of further legislative attention.

Source: Birth tourism and the demonizing of pregnant migrant women                                                                

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Airline Apologizes for Requiring Passenger to Take Pregnancy Test Before Flight

2020/01/17 Leave a comment

Any measures to reduce birth tourism should not be outsourced to an airline rather than government visa or other requirements:

A Hong Kong-based airline has apologized for requiring a passenger to take a pregnancy test before a flight in November to Saipan, a United States territory in the Western Pacific that is a popular destination for so-called birth tourism.

The carrier, Hong Kong Express Airways Limited, said in an emailed statement this week that it had stopped administering pregnancy tests after re-evaluating the contentious practice.

The apology came a little over two months after the passenger, Midori Nishida, blogged about her experience on a Nov. 9 flightfrom Hong Kong International Airport to Saipan, which is in the Northern Mariana Islands.

The commonwealth has become a magnet for expectant Chinese mothers because babies born on the island are eligible for United States citizenship.

“We would like to apologize unreservedly to anyone who has been affected by this,” the airline said in the statement.

Ms. Nishida, 25, a Tokyo resident, was raised on Saipan and was visiting her parents when the episode occurred, she wrote in a blog post on the website of The Saipan Tribune newspaper.

“Despite being a frequent flier to Saipan, none of my previous experience would have prepared me for what happened during my most recent flight: Take a pregnancy test or be denied boarding,” she wrote.

After filling out a mandatory questionnaire from the airline stating that she was not pregnant, Ms. Nishida was selected to undergo a “fit-to-fly” medical assessment and was asked to sign a medical release form, her blog post said.

The form read: “The passenger has been observed to have a body size/shape resembling to a pregnant lady,” according to Ms. Nishida, who said she showed airline employees her return plane ticket, but to no avail.

“I was then led by a female in plainclothes, who claimed to be the medical practitioner, to a public restroom,” she wrote. “I was handed a pregnancy test and when the result came out negative, she failed to record this on the medical form and instructed me to throw the test into the trash. Satisfied that I had no baby in me, the airline staff finally issued me a boarding pass.”

The airline, which Cathay Pacific bought in July, said the pregnancy test requirement arose early last year.

“In response to concerns raised by authorities in Saipan, we took actions on flights to Saipan from February 2019 to help ensure U.S. immigration laws were not being undermined,” the airline said. “Under our new management, we recognize the significant concerns this practice has caused. We have immediately suspended the practice while we review it. We’d like to apologize for the distress caused.”

The United States Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday night.

Ms. Nishida wrote that she was well aware of Saipan’s reputation as a “hot spot” for birth tourism, but that she was appalled by the way the airline had treated her.

“Coming back to Saipan has always been a happy time for me as I look forward to seeing my family and catching up with friends,” she wrote. “But after this incident, I can only think of how I will be suspected, investigated and humiliated before I can return to a place I consider home.”

Source: Airline Apologizes for Requiring Passenger to Take Pregnancy Test Before Flight

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Reaction to Fifth Estate segment on birth tourism

2020/01/10 Leave a comment

I was given a copy of this letter to CBC complaining of the segment on birth tourism on the Fifth Estate. CanadaLand also had a critical segment but one that was reasonably balanced.

My take is different. The segment focuses on birth tourism, characterized the 5,000 as non-residents and not all birth tourists, and had some good interviews with medical practitioners and politicians.

As to the numbers, I had shared my CIHI numbers with the Fifth Estate and had a number of exchanges regarding what they included and their limitations and do not believe these were mischaracterized as all 5,000 being birth tourists.

In any case, we will have better numbers hopefully late spring/early summer given the work underway by IRCC, CIHI and StatsCan to link immigration status and healthcare data, thus allowing us to isolate those on visitor visas from other temporary residents.

My impression is that some of these critiques reflect an unwillingness to consider that birth tourism is an issue (it certainly is in Richmond) and/or a means to raise other valid healthcare-related issues of asylum seekers and other precarious groups:

Dear Mr Nagler,

I wish to express my concerns about the seriously inaccurate and biased content of the 5th Estate’s documentary “Passport babies: The growing shadow industry of birth tourism”, broadcast on January 5, 2020, and the accompanying web articles.

Since 2003, I have worked as a researcher at the SHERPA Research Centre, affiliated with McGill University, focusing on the impact of public policies on the health and well-being of asylum seekers and precarious status migrants in Canada. Since 2012, one of my main research areas has been access to health care for asylum seekers and other precarious status migrants, and I have co-authored a number of scientific publications on this topic.

The major problem with the “Passport babies” documentary is that it incorrectly and repeatedly suggests that the 5000 ‘non-resident’ births per year in Canada all involve tourists who come to Canada for the sole purpose of conferring Canadian citizenship on the baby.

This phenomenon does exist. However, the documentary fails to explain that the category of ‘non-resident births’ is far broader than tourists. Although precise figures are very difficult to obtain, there is every reason to believe that babies born to tourists represent only a small minority of the 5000 ‘non-resident’ births per year in Canada. If the 5th Estate had done even minimal research on the question, they would have found this out. They clearly failed to conduct a basic, balanced investigation into the topic, and consequently produced a documentary that is very seriously misleading and inaccurate.

The figure of 5000 ‘non-resident’ babies per year is drawn from hospital financial databases. The category involved is actually people who do not have medical insurance and (usually) who do not have permanent status in Canada, rather than being people who do not live in Canada. The content of hospitals’ ‘non-resident’ category varies somewhat from province to province, and even between hospitals, but it typically includes:

  • International students in Canada with a temporary study visa. They generally have private insurance, but this typically does not cover costs related to pregnancy and childbirth, or only a small fraction thereof.
  • Some categories of temporary foreign workers (some temporary work visas allow access to public health care, others do not)
  • Non-status (undocumented) migrants living in Canada. This includes people who are in the process of regularizing their status, e.g., people who have applied for permanent residence based on humanitarian or compassionate reasons.
  • Canadian expatriates, who have lost their entitlement to provincial health coverage because they live outside of the country
  • Tourists who are in Canada for a brief period, with a temporary visitor’s visa

The reason that hospitals place these heterogeneous groups in a single category is because 1) they all have to pay their hospital bills out of their own pockets (no public or private medical insurance) and 2) they are either physically residing outside of Canada (in the case of expatriates and tourists) OR are residing in Canada, but with temporary status. In short, the category is based on billing procedure. Note that asylum seekers (refugee claimants) are in a different category because they are covered by the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP).

Sadly, there are tens of thousands of people living, working or studying, and paying taxes in Canada who do not have any public health care coverage. And even for those who have private medical insurance, childbirth costs are usually not covered. Most have temporary visas (student or work visas), while others are currently without formal status. In either case, these are not people who have come to Canada for a few months in order to have a ‘passport baby’, but rather people who are here for work or study who happen to get pregnant while they are here. In Québec, for example, hospitals typically charge about 10,000$ to 15,000$ for a birth without complications, and far more if there are complications (e.g., C-section). Unsurprisingly, this population often has difficulty paying these very steep bills.

The situation of tourists who deliberately come to Canada in order to have a ‘passport baby’ is very different. This is the group that is portrayed in the 5th Estate’s documentary. Typically, these are wealthy people who can well afford to pay the hospital and doctor’s bills, as well as the cost of the stay in Canada.

The fees charged to all individuals in the ‘non-resident’ group are unregulated. Typically, hospitals charge at least 3 times as much as they could claim from the public health insurance system. If the ‘non-resident’ is able to pay, this can be very lucrative for the hospitals and doctors. On the other hand, if the person is unable to pay (as is often the case for people living in Canada with a temporary visa or without status), the hospital may be unable to collect on the debt.

It is impossible to know what proportion of the 5000 babies in the hospitals’ ‘non-resident’ category are born to tourists who have come to Canada for the sole reason of having a ‘passport baby’. Logically, however, there is every reason to believe that this is only a minority, simply because the other groups – e.g., international students and non-status migrants living in Canada –   number in the tens of thousands.

To sum up, the 5th Estate documentary contains two major errors:

  • It incorrectly implies that the 5000 ‘non-resident’ babies born in Canada per year are all born to tourists seeking to have a ‘passport baby’. The documentary completely omits any mention of the groups that compose the majority of this category, who are almost all people living in Canada for extended periods in order to study or work.
  • With regard to the implications for the Canadian health system, the documentary confuses two separate issues.
    • Tourists who come to Canada to have ‘passport babies’ typically pay their hospital and medical bills; hospitals and doctors tend to see them as a lucrative source of income. There may be legitimate concerns that some hospitals prefer to prioritize the needs of these high-paying patients over those of people living in Canada.
    • On the other hand, people living in Canada with a temporary visa or without status may have great difficulty paying hospital and doctor’s fees associated with childbirth, especially if there are complications. Understandably, hospitals are concerned that some of these people may be unable to pay. Many experts in the field argue that public health insurance should extend to all people who are actually living in Canada (including those with a temporary visa or without status), at least for certain medical procedures, including childbirth. This is an ongoing debate.

Based on a fundamentally flawed analysis of the situation, the 5th Estate documentary concludes that it might be appropriate to change Canada’s laws in order to deny citizenship to babies born in Canada if the parents are neither citizens nor permanent residents. The documentary implies that this would affect only babies born to the tourists portrayed in the documentary.

In fact, it is very likely that the vast majority of these babies are born to international students, temporary foreign workers or people living in Canada without formal status. Many of the parents (notably international students) will apply for permanent residency in Canada, and eventually become citizens. Depriving their children of citizenship would be an extremely grave decision and a fundamental shift in Canadian values. It is unconscionable for the 5th Estate to present an inaccurate and misleading documentary in support of such a policy change.

I would respectfully urge you to take steps to ensure that appropriate retractions or corrections are issued concerning the 5thEstate’s documentary ‘Passport Babies’.

Janet Cleveland PhD

SHERPA Research Centre

University Institute with regard to Cultural Communities

CIUSSS Centre-Ouest de l’Ile de Montréal and McGill University

 

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Combat birth tourism by changing immigration law, B.C. mayor says

2020/01/09 Leave a comment

From twitter commentary, seems like he is a bit late to the discussion. But nothing is more frustrating to the public when each level of government points to the other rather than working more closely to assess and discuss the options (which of course, include doing nothing given the small provincial and national numbers):

Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie is calling on Ottawa to change immigration law to stop pregnant women travelling to Canada and giving birth to babies who are automatically granted citizenship.

The law says anyone born in Canada is automatically a Canadian citizen. According to the latest statistics, nearly 5,000 babies were born to non-residents in 2018-19.

A recent story by The Fifth Estate revealed that non-residents make up nearly a quarter of all births at the Richmond Hospital, which has led to complaints that birth tourists are compromising care for locals and putting strain on staff.

“People are abusing the system and we will pay a price right now with our medical system, but we’ll pay a bigger price in the long term with a number of people coming here who haven’t gone through any qualifications or procedures and they just come to our shores and will live in Canada,” said Brodie on The Early Edition on Tuesday.Brodie suggests changing federal law so that least one parent must be a Canadian citizen in order for a child to also become a citizen.

City ‘helpless’ to stop birth tourism: mayor

According to Brodie, the city has limited power to do anything about the issue because the medical system is the province’s jurisdiction and the federal government is in charge of the immigration system, which he said is the root of the problem.

All the city can do, said Brodie, is enforce short-term rental bylaws at so-called “birth houses,” where many of the women are known to stay, but often the women stay longer than a month and the city can only regulate rentals of 30 days or less.

“We are really helpless to do a lot about it. We can check a business licence if there is a business being run out of a home, but that’s about all,” said the mayor.

No federal action

He said Richmond has seen people abusing the system for years and, despite local members of Parliament raising the issue in Ottawa, there has been no federal response.

‘This is a law and this law can be changed and I don’t have any idea why they haven’t done it,” said Brodie. “The optimist in me says they simply haven’t gotten around to it.”The Early Edition requested an interview with Marco Mendicino, the newly appointed federal minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, but the minister was unavailable.

Source: Combat birth tourism by changing immigration law, B.C. mayor says

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Homeland Security to share citizenship data with Census Bureau

2020/01/08 Leave a comment

Not surprising and there will certainly be some data issues as flagged, one’s that the administration will of course dismiss given the intent is more to disenfranchise minority voters and reduce the population count of states with higher numbers of immigrants (legal and other):

The Department of Homeland Security is agreeing to share citizenship information with the U.S. Census Bureau as part of President Donald Trump’s order to collect data on who is a citizen following the Supreme Court’s rejection of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form.

Trump’s order is being challenged in federal court, but meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security two weeks ago announced the agreement in a report. It said the agency would share administrative records to help the Census Bureau determine the number of citizens and non-citizens in the U.S., as well as the number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

Information to be shared includes personally identifiable data, the Homeland Security document says. Federal law prohibits the Census Bureau from releasing personally identifiable data, and the bureau says in its fact-sheet on privacy, “Your answers can only be used to produce statistics — they cannot be used against you in any way.”

The Census Bureau has promised the data will be kept for no more than two years, and will then be destroyed, according to the agreement. The data will be used to help the Census Bureau create a model estimating the likelihood that each person in the U.S. is a citizen, non-citizen or an immigrant in the country without legal permission.

Among the information Homeland Security will provide is a person’s alien identification number, country of birth and date of naturalization or naturalization application. The department is awaiting word on whether it will be allowed to release information on asylum and refugee applicants, which typically is prohibited from being disclosed.

Because a person’s citizenship status can change often over time, the citizenship data provided by Homeland Security will likely be inaccurate, said Andrea Senteno, an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of the civil rights groups challenging Trump’s order in federal court in Maryland.

“The information out there over whether someone is a non-citizen or what type of immigrant status they may be is going to have a lot of holes in it,” Senteno said.

The Homeland Security document acknowledges risks that the Census Bureau will assign an inaccurate immigration status to someone, that people won’t be able to correct mistakes about themselves and that Homeland Security information will be linked inaccurately to data from other sources used by the Census Bureau.

“Linking records between datasets is not likely to be 100% accurate,” the Homeland Security document notes.

Trump ordered the Census Bureau to collect citizenship information through administrative records from federal agencies and the 50 states after the Supreme Court ruled against his administration last summer by deciding that a citizenship question wouldn’t be allowed on this spring’s 2020 Census questionnaire.

The administration had said the question was being added to aid in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters’ access to the ballot box. But Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal members in saying the administration’s current justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”

Opponents of the citizenship question had argued it would scare off immigrants, Hispanics and others from participating in the once-a-decade headcount. The 2020 Census will help determine how many congressional seats each state gets as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funds.

The federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s order to collect the citizenship data claims that the data gathering is motivated by “a racially discriminatory scheme” to reduce the political power of Latinos and increase the representation of non-Latino whites.

As part of the order, the U.S. Census Bureau has asked state drivers’ license bureaus for records, but so far only Nebraska has agreed to cooperate.

Gathering the citizenship data would give the states the option to design state and legislative districts using voter-age citizen numbers instead of the total population, Trump said in the order. The U.S. Constitution specifies that congressional districts should be based on how many people — not citizens — live there. But it’s murkier for many state legislative districts. Opponents fear that using just citizen figures would make legislative districts more Republican-leaning and less diverse.

“Whether that approach is permissible will be resolved when a state actually proposes a districting plan based on the voter-eligible population,” Trump’s order said. “But because eligibility to vote depends in part on citizenship, states could more effectively exercise this option with a more accurate and complete count of the citizen population.”

Source: Homeland Security to share citizenship data with Census Bureau

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US Citizenship Is More Important Than Ever

2020/01/07 Leave a comment

From Jamaican media but expect this advice is widespread:

Now more than ever it is important to become a US citizen. US citizenship offers many protections and advantages. The current Trump administration is focused on enforcement of immigration laws.   This means more and more non-citizens are vulnerable to being removed from the United States.   Being removed can well mean that you will never be able to return to the United States as a visitor or an immigrant.

If you are a legal permanent resident (LPR) you should consult with a qualified immigration attorney about becoming a US citizen.   Generally, to qualify for US citizenship you must be an LPR for five years or if you acquired LPR status through marriage to a US citizen, then three years. You must also be a person of good moral character, generally meant to mean you have not been convicted of a crime.  You do not owe Federal income taxes which are delinquent and unpaid.  You do not owe child support or alimony that is delinquent or unpaid.  You have not been outside the US for more than six months in a calendar year in any of the five- or three-years preceding application for citizenship.  You can read write and speak the English language and you can pass a US government history test.   If you are a male, you registered for Selective Service and you are attached to the principles of the US constitution.   Please note this brief summary of the eligibility requirements is not exhaustive but does cover important requirements.

Being a US citizen allows you the protection of being outside the US for an unlimited amount of time, without any consequences.  As a US citizen you can apply for and hold high paying jobs of national importance to the US.  Being a US citizen means you are not subject to removal from the US for any criminal convictions that occur after you obtain US citizenship, unless you committed the crime before you became a US citizen.   Being a US citizen also makes worldwide travel much easier as US citizens may travel to many counties without a visa.

Because the current Trump Administration is enforcement oriented before you decide to apply for US citizenship you must consult with a qualified immigration attorney and discuss your eligibility in confidence with an immigration attorney.  Do not apply for US citizenship without first having a consultation with a qualified immigration attorney.   I have represented many individuals who have become US citizens and would welcome the chance to consult with you and represent you.

Source: https://jamaicans.com/us-citizenship-is-more-important-than-ever/ 

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