Yakabuski: Le Canada, champion mondial d’immigration

2022/10/31 Leave a comment

Good observations on the contrast between Quebec and the rest of Canada:

Le ministre fédéral de l’Immigration, des Réfugiés et de la Citoyenneté, Sean Fraser, s’apprête à dévoiler de nouvelles cibles en matière d’immigration pour 2023, 2024 et 2025. Et tout indique que l’annonce que M. Fraser fera mardi prochain prévoira une nouvelle hausse du nombre de résidents permanents par rapport aux dernières cibles, celles-là annoncées il y a un an à peine. Alors que le Québec promet de plafonner ses seuils d’immigration autour de 50 000 nouveaux résidents permanents par année, le reste du Canada, lui, s’apprêterait à bientôt accueillir plus de huit fois ce nombre. Nul besoin d’être économiste ou démographe pour anticiper les conséquences à court et à long termes de ces positions discordantes.

Déjà, le Québec voit sa part d’immigrants fondre comme peau de chagrin d’année en année. Destination de 19,2 % des immigrants arrivés au Canada entre 2006 et 2011, le Québec n’accueillait plus que 15,3 % des immigrants entrés au pays entre 2016 et 2021. Les données provenant du dernier recensement publiées cette semaine par Statistique Canada témoignent de l’énorme transformation démographique que connaît le Canada anglais, et ce, même en dehors de ses plus grandes métropoles.

À Hamilton et à Winnipeg, deux villes ayant une population semblable à celle de Québec, la proportion d’immigrants s’élève maintenant à plus de 25 % ; dans la Vieille Capitale, à peine 6,7 % des résidents sont nés en dehors du Canada. Dans la ville de Saguenay, une proportion famélique de la population est issue de l’immigration, soit 1,3 %, alors qu’à Red Deer et à Lethbridge, des villes albertaines de tailles semblables, les proportions sont de 16,9 % et de 14,4 %, respectivement.

Les chiffres frappent encore davantage l’imagination lorsque l’on tient compte des enfants des immigrants. Dans la grande région de Toronto, par exemple, presque 80 % des résidents sont immigrants de première ou de deuxième générations, selon une analyse des données du recensement effectuée par le démographe Doug Norris, de la firme torontoise Environics. À Montréal, environ 46 % des résidents sont immigrants ou enfants d’immigrants. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’une proportion passablement élevée, c’est moins qu’à Vancouver (73 %), qu’à Calgary (55 %) ou qu’à Edmonton (50 %).

Selon les résultats d’un sondage publié cette semaine par Environics, et effectué pour le compte de L’Initiative du siècle, les Canadiens sont plus favorables que jamais à l’immigration. Ceci n’est pas surprenant ; plus de 40 % des Canadiens sont immigrants ou enfants d’immigrants. On peut s’attendre à ce que ces gens aient un parti pris en faveur de l’immigration.

Mais le consensus canadien en matière d’immigration s’étend bien au-delà des communautés culturelles du pays. « Alors même que le pays accueille plus de 400 000 nouveaux arrivants par année, sept Canadiens sur dix soutiennent les seuils actuels d’immigration — la plus forte majorité en 45 ans de sondages Environics, a fait remarquer Lisa Lalande, présidente de L’Initiative du siècle, un organisme qui prône une politique d’immigration ayant pour but d’augmenter la population canadienne à 100 millions de personnes en l’an 2100. Malgré la rhétorique chargée sur l’immigration durant la campagne électorale provinciale, les Québécois appuient tout autant l’accueil des immigrants et des réfugiés que les Canadiens ailleurs au pays. »

Or, le sondage d’Environics fut mené en septembre, alors que la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) promettait de maintenir les seuils d’immigration à 50 000 dans la province. Donc, l’expression « les seuils actuels d’immigration » n’a pas le même sens ici qu’ailleurs au Canada. Au Québec, ces seuils sont plutôt modestes ; dans le reste du Canada, ils sont très élevés.

Les 50 000 résidents permanents que le Québec s’engage à accueillir chaque année équivalent à environ 0,6 % de la population, et cette proportion est appelée à diminuer au fur et à mesure que la population augmentera. Les seuils d’immigration ailleurs au Canada s’élèvent à environ 1,2 % de la population par année, alors que cette population augmente à un rythme beaucoup plus rapide qu’au Québec. Au lieu de 400 000 nouveaux arrivants par an, c’est près de 500 000 immigrants que le reste du Canada pourrait bientôt en accueillir. Et des voix s’élèvent pour qu’Ottawa fasse preuve d’encore plus d’ambition en matière d’immigration.

« Bien que les chiffres absolus semblent élevés, ils doivent en fait être plus élevés encore en raison des défis démographiques du Canada, ont insisté pour dire l’ex-ministre libéral de l’Innovation, Navdeep Bains, et son ancien chef de cabinet, Elder Marques, dans un article publié la semaine dernière dans le National Post. Au début du XXe siècle, un Canada beaucoup plus petit accueillait autant d’immigrants que le Canada le fait aujourd’hui… Un Canada plus grand, plus riche et plus outillé nous attend si nous sommes prêts à faire le saut. »

Source: Le Canada, champion mondial d’immigration

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Japan has taken in hundreds of Ukrainians. The welcome for others has been less warm

2022/10/31 Leave a comment

Of note:

A dozen Ukrainian students sit in a classroom, studying basic Japanese to help them navigate life in a new country. Among them is Sergei Litvinov, a 29-year-old trained chef, who arrived in June. He says he’s been listening to Japanese rock music since his teen years.

Coming to Japan is “a dream come true,” he says with a laugh. “But I’m not happy, because it’s a terrible story in Ukraine.”

Litvinov is one of nearly 2,000 Ukrainians admitted to Japan on a temporary basis since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, according to Japan’s justice ministry.

The Ukrainians have been met with an outpouring of sympathy and hospitality in the country. “It was the first time I’ve gotten so many phone calls and emails from society, wanting to assist the refugees from Ukraine,” says Kazuko Fushimi, who handles public relations at the Tokyo-based Japan Association for Refugees.

But the warm welcome Japan has given the Ukrainians contrasts with how it has treated other foreigners fleeing conflict and persecution over the years, say human rights groups. Of 169 Afghans who fled to Japan after the Taliban took over in August 2021, 58 went back to Afghanistan “due to what they say was pressure and a lack of support from the Japanese Foreign Ministry,” Japan’s Kyodo news service reported last month.

For now, the Japanese government has given the Ukrainians residency and work permits lasting up to a year. But for those from other countries, it’s often a years-long struggle to attain similar benefits and privileges.

The central government has provided visas and work permits. Local governments have provided food, housing and living allowances.

Litvinov is one of a group of 70 Ukrainians sent to the port city of Yokohama – 17 miles from the Japanese capital Tokyo — where local authorities are providing for temporary accommodation, food and living expenses.

Significantly, Japan is not calling the Ukrainians refugees, but “evacuees.” That is because Tokyo expects them all to go home eventually.

Historically, Japan accepts very few refugees. Last year, it granted just 74 applicants refugee status — the highest number ever, but less than 1% of the total who applied, according to the Japan Association for Refugees.

Some in Japan see their country as mono-ethnic — not a nation of immigrants. But the idea is a matter of debate.

Human rights groups and refugee advocates say the system is deliberately designed to set a high bar for successful refugee applications. Refugees applying for asylum in Japan must demonstrate they face life-threatening persecution at home.

Heydar Safari Diman has been trying to do just that for more than 30 years, since fleeing from Iran to Japan, which he became interested in through watching TV dramas and movies, including the films of director Akira Kurosawa. He does not want to say exactly what persecution he faced in Iran, because he fears it could jeopardize family members still in the country.

But authorities have repeatedly rejected his bids for refugee status. They detained him for a total of more than four years without any explanation, he says, in what he calls hellish conditions.

“I like Japan and Japanese people, but I hate the ones in the detention center,” he says, speaking fluent Japanese. “How could they bully us like that? What did we do? We are refugees. I have no criminal record.”

In 2019, Safari Diman was one of about 100 detainees who went on hunger strikes to protest their detention. Safari Diman says he sank into deep depression and thought about ending his own life.

“You need a lot of courage to commit suicide. It’s very difficult to kill yourself in there. And I did not have that courage,” he says.

Tokyo-based attorney Chie Komai, who represents Safari Diman and others seeking to stay in Japan, took his case to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2019. She argued that her client’s detention was arbitrary because Japanese immigration authorities can detain foreigners indefinitely, without any judicial review.

The U.N. working group agreed with her. “They made it clear that the Japanese immigration detention system is in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

The Japanese government objected to the U.N. working group’s findings, saying they were “based on factual errors” and disputing that its detentions were arbitrary. But it did not dispute the details of Safari Diman’s case. He is now out on what is called “provisional release,” and has not been detained since the ruling.

Safari Diman, who’s subsisted in Japan on donations from friends and supporters, says he does not expect the sort of benefits the Ukrainians are getting.

“I’m not asking for Japanese taxpayers to support me,” he says. “If authorities recognize me as a refugee, I will work and pay taxes.”

Other cases have also fueled debate over Japan’s treatment of refugees. They include the death in an immigration detention center last year of 33-year-old Sri Lankan Ratnayake Liyanage Wishma Sandamali, detained for overstaying her visa.

Prosecutors dropped charges against immigration officials accused of responsibility for her death.

In another case, last month a Japanese court ordered the government to compensate the family of a 43-year-old Cameroonian man who died in an immigration detention center in 2014.

The public outcry over deaths in immigration detention centers appears to have prompted the government to drop controversial amendments to immigration laws. The amendments would have made it easier for the government to deportforeigners whose bids for refugee status had failed.

Japan’s government says it will extend financial assistance to the Ukrainians for an additional six months. The double standard is not lost on officials like Kazuhiro Suzuki, a Yokohama city official who is involved in running the program for Ukrainians.

“We’ve only been supporting the Ukrainian evacuees,” he says, observing the students from a corner of the classroom. “While the situation of refugees from other countries hasn’t changed.”

He adds: “Every day we keep working, but this discrepancy bothers us.”

Source: Japan has taken in hundreds of Ukrainians. The welcome for others has been less warm

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One in Five Canadians Is Now an Immigrant, and the Nation Approves

2022/10/31 Leave a comment

NYT on Canada being an exception:


Immigrants now make up a record portion of Canada’s population.

It’s bigger than the one that resulted from the aggressive promotion of European settlement on Indigenous land on the prairies during the early 20th century and bigger than the one that took place after World War II when a wave of immigrants reshaped urban Canada.

And according to polling data, most Canadians like it that way, though more tension over immigration could be on the horizon. At a time when immigration has become an increasingly divisive political issue in many Western countries, particularly the United States, indications are that most Canadians are welcoming newcomers even as their numbers rise.

“There is growing recognition that immigration is important in terms of the economy and that immigrants, the country kind of needs them,” Keith Neuman, a senior associate at the Environics Institute for Survey Research, a nonprofit polling firm, told me.

Census data released this week, revealed by Statistics Canada, said that immigrants made up 23 percent of Canada’s population this year, the highest proportion since Confederation in 1867.

If current patterns in immigration remain and Canada’s birthrate continues to be lower than what is necessary to maintain current population, the census agency estimates that immigrants may form 29 to 34 percent of the population 19 years from now.

To accompany the Statistics Canada announcement, the Environics Institute released a survey of Canadians’ attitude toward immigration. The survey, which dates back in various forms to the 1970s, found a record level of support: 69 percent of people it contacted disagreed when asked if Canada was taking in too many immigrants. Fifty-eight percent said they wanted more immigration to increase Canada’s population.

That positive view of immigration, the survey found, even extended to Quebec despite its adoption of a law banning the wearing of religious symbols by public employees and officials at work, a move that many have seen as targeting Muslim immigrants.

Mr. Neuman and Amyn B. Sajoo, a lecturer at Simon Fraser University School for International Studies who writes extensively about immigration and citizenship, shared some thoughts about the source of the country’s good will toward immigration.

Perhaps at the top of their lists is that geographic isolation from places experiencing high levels of emigration means that the country can be selective about who comes here. There has never been a period when most refugee claimants walked into the country, despite all of the attention once paid to asylum seekers coming into Quebec from New York State. On the whole, Canada chooses who can come.

Then 60 percent of the 431,645 immigrants who became permanent residents of Canada last year fell into the “economic” category. They qualify for that status by being either highly educated, willing and financially able to start a business, possessing a needed job skill or committing to make a substantial investment in an existing business in Canada.

“We filter who can come in as refugees and immigrants,” Dr. Sajoo said. “Therefore, the public has more confidence in the system.”

On top of that, Dr. Sajoo noted the strong approval for Canada’s official multiculturalism policy. In the Environics Institute survey, an overwhelming 90 percent of the respondents said that it was an important part of the Canadian identity.

“More than ever, Canadians are accepting the idea that we’re better off in a pluralist, democratic space,” he said. “That we’re not just an Anglo-French demographic.” The growing awareness of Indigenous issues since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Dr. Sajoo added, has also increased this sentiment.

While the Environics Institute survey found that Conservative voters make up the largest number of people who think there is too much immigration, Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, has focused on wooing immigrants and regularly reminds voters that his wife, Anaida, emigrated to Canada from Venezuela with her family at the age of 8.

But before Canadians become too self-satisfied about their openness to immigration, Dr. Sajoo said that one finding in the survey suggests the country is not fully immune to some of the political sentiment growing in other nations.

Respondents were almost evenly divided when asked if there are too many immigrants “not adopting Canadian values.” Forty-nine percent rejected that statement, 46 percent agreed with it.

“There is a flattering, fairy tale narrative that we’re wonderful and all is good,” Dr. Sajoo said. “But there is not at all enough attention to that 50/50 split on Canadian values,” he added, saying it “suggests that populism and populist rhetoric, supremacist rhetoric is coming across the border and also developing locally.” 

Source: One in Five Canadians Is Now an Immigrant, and the Nation Approves

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Yakabuski: We cannot take Canadians’ positive views on immigration for granted 

2022/10/29 Leave a comment

Rare mainstream media commentary questioning the current orthodoxy regarding increased immigration and public support. Have wondered for some time whether housing, healthcare and other pressures will lead to a tipping point but as the latest Environics survey, no sign yet:

Canadians are global outliers in holding almost unfailingly positive attitudes about immigration.

Across the world, particularly in countries that have seen large and sudden waves of migrants in recent years, public opinion has turned harshly negative toward newcomers. The opposite has happened here, even in Quebec. Despite big increases in the number of immigrants this country accepts annually, fewer and fewer Canadians think our immigration levels are too high.

That is the finding made by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, which has been polling Canadians on this issue since 1977. Back then, more than 60 per cent of respondents thought the country was accepting too many immigrants. Now, only 27 per cent feel that way.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Canada has had the luxury of selecting immigrants in an orderly fashion. We even “choose” most of our refugees based on applications made outside Canada. And the Canada-U.S. border is an oasis of calm compared to the U.S.-Mexico border, notwithstanding the steady stream of asylum seekers arriving via Roxham Road in Quebec in recent years.

There is another, perhaps even more salient, explanation for why Canadians are so bullish on immigration. Fully 44 per cent of us are first- or second-generation immigrants, according to 2021 census data compiled by Environics chief demographer Doug Norris.

In the Greater Toronto Area, the proportion of first- and second-generation newcomers is 79.6 per cent. In Vancouver, it is 72.5 per cent. Even in most of the country’s smaller urban centres, outside of Quebec, about half of residents are now immigrants or the children of immigrants.

You are much more likely to view immigration positively if you are an immigrant yourself or the child of one. Immigrants account for more – much more – of the population here than in any other developed country except for Australia. And the proportion is set to rise sharply – to as much as 34 per cent of Canada’s population in 2041, from 2021′s record level of 23 per cent, according to Statscan’s projections.

What’s not to like? Well, for a country that is already experiencing a severe housing-affordability crisis and a major infrastructure deficit, welcoming around 450,000 new permanent residents on an annual basis, on top of tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers and international students, involves significant challenges.

Unfortunately, there are few signs that policymakers in Ottawa have thought through how the country can accommodate this influx without further straining our already strained health-care and education systems. While immigration can offer a partial solution to severe shortages of nurses and teachers – if provinces move more rapidly to recognize their credentials – overall it creates more consumers than providers of health-care and education services.

In a study prepared last year for Quebec’s immigration ministry, economist Pierre Fortin threw cold water on the idea – advanced in 2016 by Ottawa’s Advisory Committee on Economic Growth – that higher immigration levels could help resolve intractable labour shortages that have only grown worse since then.

“Resorting to immigration can relieve worker shortages at the individual firm level, though the great administrative complexity and the long wait times often render this process ineffective; but, unfortunately, at the macroeconomic level, the [council’s] idea that immigration can reduce labour shortages because it increases the working-age population is nothing more than a big fallacy of composition,” Prof. Fortin wrote. “This idea is based on incomplete logic that ‘forgets’ that immigration ends up increasing the demand for labour and not only the supply of labour.”

Next week, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser is expected to announce Ottawa’s revised immigration targets for 2023, 2024 and 2025. That announcement needs to be followed by a more elaborate strategy than Canada has seen to date to enhance the country’s capacity to integrate ever-increasing numbers of newcomers. Otherwise, we are only asking for trouble down the road.

Canada has been spared the backlash against immigration experienced in other countries, in part because few politicians see any mileage in stoking resentment toward newcomers. That is likely to remain true as long as our multicultural suburbs continue to determine electoral outcomes. But no one should take it for granted.

With the country’s emergency rooms running beyond capacity, its housing shortage leaving too many people on the sidelines and its public infrastructure in a steady state of disrepair, it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes here toward immigration will always remain so positive.

Source: We cannot take Canadians’ positive views on immigration for granted

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Canadians widely support immigration levels, new poll finds, but services for newcomers tell a different story

2022/10/27 Leave a comment

Along with the Census release, comes the latest Focus Canada survey of Canadian attitudes to immigration that show remarkable strong and increasing support for immigration virtually across the board.

Governments, with the exception Quebec, business and other stakeholders have clearly been successful in their demographic and economic arguments and I have seen no other major surveys that contradict the overall picture.

As always, partisan differences, particularly between the CPC and the Liberals and NDP are are significant but a majority of Conservatives also disagree that immigration levels are too high (53 to 43 percent).

With respect to whether “Canada accepts too many immigrants from racial minority groups,” again the Conservatives agree more but with a majority disagreeing (56 to 36 percent). Interestingly, while Conservatives are supportive of accepting refugees from conflict zones (64 to 34 percent), particularly so when Ukraine and Afghanistan are mentioned (67 to 27 percent, while Liberals and NDP have 90 percent support). There is also increased overall disagreement with refugees not being “real” refugees but the partisan divide is stark with 53 percent of the Liberals and 30 percent of the Conservatives disagreeing with that statement.

Security and health risks are not perceived as problems but housing and over crowding are unprompted concerns.

Multiculturalism continues to be viewed as part of Canadian identity by two-thirds of those surveyed (95 percent of Liberals, 82 percent of Conservatives and 92 percent of NDP).:

Days ahead of the federal government’s release of its multiyear immigration targets, the latest results in an annual poll suggest Canadians support current immigration levels more than they have in nearly half a century.

The poll, conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, found 69 per cent of those surveyed were in support of current levels of immigration, compared with just 35 per cent in 1977.

Since the Justin Trudeau government came to power in 2015, annual immigration numbers have soared from less than 300,000 a year to a target of almost 450,000 in 2023. This week, Ottawa will announce immigration targets for the years ahead, including a breakdown of numbers between different immigration streams: economic, family sponsorship and humanitarian, which includes refugees.

“Canada needs more immigrants to increase its population.”

But even with broad public support, the country’s ambitious immigration targets only tell half the story. Immigrants still face many difficulties once they arrive in Canada, including a housing crisis, rising food costs owing to inflation and an underfunded settlement sector to help them find work and access services such as health care and education.

“We’ve pretty much reached a consensus,” said Keith Neuman, a senior associate at the Environics Institute: Not only is immigration good for the economy, it is a vital part of it. “The outstanding issues are about integration,” he said.

An overwhelming majority of those surveyed – 85 per cent – agreed that immigration has a positive impact on the country’s economy, a statement that proved controversial just three decades ago (when only 56 per cent said they agreed).

Environics partnered on this poll with the Century Initiative, a charitable organization that has campaigned for strong immigration levels in Canada. The poll was conducted by phone with 2,000 Canadians between Sept. 6 and Sept. 30. A sample of this size drawn from the population produces results accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points in 19 out of 20 samples.

When asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement “There are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values,” 46 per cent agreed, compared to 72 per cent in 1993.

(In the case of this question and others in the poll with a negative bias, pollsters sometimes phrase statements in a provocative way because that can generate stronger responses, Mr. Neuman said. They also want to preserve the wording of the statements over the decades so they can more accurately track how attitudes may have shifted over time.)

But an external evaluation of how successfully an immigrant has integrated – which may be largely based on how fluently they speak one of Canada’s official languages – might lack a nuanced understanding of the myriad challenges immigrants face after they arrive, said Neda Maghbouleh, Canada Research Chair in Migration, Race and Identity, who runs a refugee research project at the University of Toronto-Mississauga.

Prof. Maghbouleh said the greatest challenge to successful integration among the population she’s studied is housing and how there simply isn’t enough to accommodate all who are arriving in Canada, no matter what stream they’re coming in on.

“Without proper integration, any economic gains are flimsy or short-lived,” she said.

“For the families that are in our study, their urgent situations are pretty much always about housing, about getting evicted. It’s about a family member or someone in their network losing their housing and then having to join into an already overcrowded environment,” she said.

The settlement sector – meant to help immigrants with housing, but also with everything from language training to résumé writing to registering their children for school – has also faced significant strains.

A 2021 report from the Association for Canadian Studies that surveyed workers at settlement agencies found that the field is in turmoil. While record numbers of immigrants are arriving in Canada, the programs designed to help them adjust to their new homes and thrive are not consistently funded, and there is high turnover of workers because their wages aren’t competitive.

In Nova Scotia, the rate of retention for immigrants has been increasing, and currently sits at 71 per cent, meaning those who arrive in the province are finding work and settling into the region, rather than decamping for other parts of the country, as has long been the trend. But having that many more immigrants stay in Nova Scotia means front-line staff are feeling the strain.

Jennifer Watts, chief executive officer of Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia, says the biggest challenge her organization faces is development and support for staff.

Another issue Ms. Watts and the ACS report noted is that as the federal government’s targets for different streams of immigrants shifts, so does the funding for different programs, which can make long-term planning difficult.

From 2018 to 2021, the number of permanent residents arriving in Nova Scotia increased 51 per cent, but the funding from the federal government to ISANS in that same period only increased 7 per cent.

“When the country as a whole is committing to higher immigration levels, leaders at that level who are making that decision need to say, ‘This is going to take a significant amount of money to help people settle and move quickly into the labour market and succeed,’ ” Ms. Watts said.

Source: Canadians widely support immigration levels, new poll finds, but services for newcomers tell a different story

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Immigrants make up the largest share of the population in over 150 years and continue to shape who we are as Canadians

2022/10/27 Leave a comment

Highlights from StatsCan on the 2021 Census (starting to work though the data tables for further analysis):

Almost one in four people (23.0%) counted during the 2021 Census are or have been a landed immigrant or permanent resident in Canada. This was the highest proportion since Confederation, topping the previous record of 22.3% in 1921, and the largest proportion among G7 countries.

Just over 1.3 million new immigrants settled permanently in Canada from 2016 to 2021, the highest number of recent immigrants recorded in a Canadian census.

The share of recent immigrants settling in Atlantic Canada almost tripled in 15 years, rising from 1.2% in 2006 to 3.5% in 2021.

Over half of recent immigrants living in Canada were admitted under the economic category. Of these 748,120 economic immigrants, just over one-third (34.5%) were selected through skilled worker programs and another one-third (33.6%) through the Provincial Nominee Program.

The proportion of immigrants who first came to Canada temporarily on work or study permits or as asylum claimants before being admitted as permanent residents was especially high among recent immigrants who settled since 2016 (36.6%).

Asia, including the Middle East, remained the continent of birth for most recent immigrants (62.0%).

Almost one in five recent immigrants (18.6%) were born in India, making it the leading country of birth for recent immigration to Canada.

In contrast, the share of recent immigrants from Europe continued to decline, falling from 61.6% in 1971 to 10.1% in 2021.

The vast majority (92.7%) of recent immigrants are able to conduct a conversation in either English or French.

The share of second-generation Canadians (children of immigrants) younger than 15 years with at least one foreign-born parent rose from 26.7% in 2011 to 31.5% in 2021.

Source: Immigrants make up the largest share of the population in over 150 years and continue to shape who we are as Canadians

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HESA: That Fifth Estate Episode [international students]

2022/10/27 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the abuse of international students by private vocational colleges in the GTA that are in public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements with non-GTA public colleges and the need for greater regulation:

Many of you will have seen the Fifth Estate episode that aired two weeks ago, about international students in Canadian institutions and how many of them think – sometimes not without reason – they have been sold a bill of goods with respect to the quality of the education they receive.  If you haven’t already watched it, it’s here and you may want to give it a gander before continuing with this blog.

Finished?  Good.  Then I’ll begin.

Broadly speaking, the story is one of supply meeting demand.  In Punjab (this story is all about Punjabi students, there might as well not be any other types in Canada so far as this story is concerned), there are a lot of poor families who want their sons and daughters to go abroad to make a new life.  In Canada, there are several post-secondary institutions who a) can provide a pathway to permanent residency if a student graduates from a 2-year program and b) are willing to expand spots almost to infinity to accommodate students wanting to take advantage of this path.   The usual televisual suspects give some facetime to presenter Mark Kelly are students, often despondent from parental pressure and homesickness, immigration consultants eager to play whistleblower, and teachers recounting students falling asleep in class, exhausted from trying to combine work and study.  But there’s also some not-so -usual suspects: where this piece breaks some new ground is showing how the whole recruitment operation works in Punjab. Specifically, the report uses through some hidden camera work finding agents giving out flagrantly incorrect and, in some cases, illegal advice.  (It’s not entirely clear whether these agents are contracted to specific Canadian institutions or not).

So, there is some important reporting in this show.  But there’s also some weird stuff, too.  For instance, near the beginning of the show, a health counsellor in Brampton claims that there are 50-60 suicides a year among Pubjabi students in Brampton alone.  You’d think this would be the actual center of the story, right?  Mass death in a Toronto suburb?  But no, the statement just hangs there, unverified, un-followed up (presumably the local coroner would be able to verify).  Bizarre.

What I found most baffling about the show was the producer’sdecision to insinuate that this was a true depiction of the international student market across Canada, when pretty clearly it is just a depiction of what is happening in Ontario colleges, and more specifically, in the private vocational colleges in the GTA that are in public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements with non-GTA public colleges.  That’s not to say this stuff is absent elsewhere (it’s not), but if you’re a follower of this blog, you’ll be aware of what an outlier Ontario colleges are.  But for some reason The Fifth Estate chose to just glide over this distinction.

In fact, even though the report focused on a handful of egregious cases in the GTA, it seemed incapable of consistent reporting on the details: yes, Alpha and Hanson Colleges are private career colleges, but the programs the international students are attending belong nominally to a pair of public colleges (St. Lawrence and Cambrian Colleges, respectively).  The show seems to be under the impression that it was the private institutions which made the deals to sign up 10x the number of students that the institution could physically hold.  But that’s not true: it is the public colleges that are responsible for this.  And by missing that distinction, it completely let the leadership of these public institutions off the hook. 

Another thing the show misses completely: all these schools are acting in defiance of Ministry Policy with respect to these PPP campuses.  Read the policy and you’ll quickly realize that the number of specific protocols being breached are more numerous than the ones being observed.  But the most egregious violation is that international enrolment at partnership colleges is not supposed to amount to more than twice the number of international students on the “home” campus.  Yet not even one of these public colleges with PPPs in the GTA are obeying this limit.  All of them are massively overenrolled in relation to the policy.  And yet consecutive Minister of Colleges and Universities have simply failed to enforce the policy.  Why?  Your guess is as good as mine, but with hundreds of millions of dollars involved, you’d think it’s something that both opposition parties and media would take more seriously.  Or rather, I understand why Ontario opposition parties are not taking it seriously because they’re currently in shambles, but how could The Fifth Estate miss it?  Indeed, why choose to make the federal immigration minister the focus of its winding-up hard-question interview when it is clear, and I mean CRYSTAL FREAKING PEPSI CLEAR, that the key failure is one of provincial policy?

The answer, I suspect, is that The Fifth Estate is one of those CBC shows with a “national mandate”.  And so, while this story was fundamentally about certain PPP arrangements in Greater Toronto which are not especially representative of the rest of the country, they had to make out like it was a national story. And heck, it isn’t even representative of actual Toronto colleges.  If I were Humber College, I’d be  furious about Mark Kelly using the Lakeshore campus as a backdrop for the intro to a show talking about a set of atrocious events, PRECISELY NONE OF WHICH were associated with Humber.  I mean, really.

(Also, for some reason, the show does a drive-by smearing of Waterloo-based recruitment aggregator ApplyBoard, mainly because it does not differentiate between dodgy agents using ApplyBoard as a platform to submit their students’ documents and agents actually working for ApplyBoard.  But – full disclosure – HESA is working with ApplyBoard on a project at the moment, so take that observation with whatever-sized grain of salt you wish).

To be clear: whatever its failings, the show gets two big things right.  First, there are some really nasty things happening in the PPP colleges around Toronto.  Some of us have been warning about the reputational danger these institutions pose for quite awhile, and it’s long past time both the federal and provincial governments got their act together and regulated international education and international recruitment as if quality mattered (that they do not do so already is a complete disgrace).  Second, there is an ethical element to recruitment that a lot of institutions have missed: what might be acceptable in terms of recruitment tactics when dealing with rich international students whose family wealth makes high international fees easily affordable (as is the case with a lot of East Asian students who have come to Canada) and who are likely to return to their home countries later, are much less acceptable when applied with poor international students (mainly from Punjab) whose families are mortgaging everything in order for a shot at getting their kids Canadian citizenship.  These are important points that need to be front and center in the policy debate, and good on them for doing so.

But at the same time: boy howdy, the show missed a lot and unjustly left the impression that the bad apples were representative of the whole.  Maybe that’s just how media works: but if so, that’s all the more reason the federal and provincial governments should take regulation of the international student sector more seriously than they currently do.

Source: That Fifth Estate Episode

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Will a former refugee’s trip to see his dying father cost him his status in Canada?

2022/10/26 Leave a comment

Understand the personal pain but it does undermine his claim to refugee status as it does with others who return to the country they fled. Hard to have it both ways:

When Medhi Ghamoshi Ramandi was finally granted asylum in Canada in 2019, one of the first things he did was leave the country.

The Iranian man wanted to see his wife and two children, whom he had not seen for six years since his escape from that country’s regime.

Aware of the safety risks of returning to his homeland, he got a refugee travel document from Canada and flew his family to Armenia, where he rented a place for three months so they could try to make up for some of their time lost.

“We had not seen each other for six years and we reunited in Armenia,” recalls Ramandi. “We did a lot of sightseeing there. We had very good memories of the first weeks there. I felt alive again.”

But then came the news of his father being diagnosed with an acute form of colon cancer.

“We didn’t think my father would last six months. There were photos of him with his stomach torn open and stuff like that,” says Ramandi. “My father was pleading, ‘Please come back so I can see you one last time.’ That’s what made me decide to go back.”

Unable to travel to his homeland with his refugee travel document, Ramandi took a chance to apply for an Iranian passport in Armenia and crossed a land border into Iran, at 2 a.m., hoping he wouldn’t be flagged.

Once inside the country, he says, he holed up in his parents’ house before sneaking into the hospital late at night and staying at his father’s bedside till the morning for fear of being spotted and reported to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.

After 12 days in Iran with his dying father, the 50-year-old returned to Toronto on Sept. 23, 2019, via Armenia. 

He was immediately stopped and held for an investigation by the Canada Border Services Agency.

His offence was possessing a passport from the same regime that he had run away from and “reavailing” himself to Iran. 

To the Canadian authorities, that suggested he no longer required Canada’s protection and that he could be stripped of his refugee status.

“I had to go and see my father. He was dying,” said a sobbing Ramandi, whose application for permanent residence has been suspended since 2019 while officials are investigating whether to refer him to the refugee board and have his protected status ended.

It is a process known as cessation. The number of new cessation applications against individuals who have been granted asylum in Canada — many of them already permanent residents, sometimes for years — rose to 399 in 2021 from just 137 in 2013. The then-Conservative government, looking to crack down on bogus refugees, changed the law to not only go after former refugees’ protected status but also their permanent residence.

Those who return to their country of origin or simply apply for or renew their old passports, even just to visit a third country, can be pursued by Canadian border officials and lose both their refugee status and permanent residence, and ultimately face deportation.

“Technology is improving, so people’s movements are easier to track,” says immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo. “There is a backlog that has now slowly moved through the system and there are investigations going on. 

“We’re seeing now an apex of cases.”

As of the end of June, there were 572 cessation applications before the Immigration and Refugee Board, down from a backlog of 781 cases in 2020.

Under the immigration law, Canada can take away someone’s protected status if they have:

  • “Voluntarily reavailed” themselves of the protection of their country of nationality;
  • Reacquired their nationality, as in obtaining or renewing a passport from the country of persecution;
  • “Re-established” in that country; or
  • When the reasons for which the person sought refugee protection no longer exist.

Lawyer Justin Jian-Yi Toh said investigations in cessation proceedings are often triggered when individuals are flagged by border agents upon returning from their country of origin or when they are found to have travelled back from a third country with a passport issued from the state they fled. 

Many are also caught when they are asked to provide detailed travel records to fulfil the physical residence requirement for the renewal of their residence cards or citizenship applications.

“Of course, for the average person, they don’t think about all that stuff when they get a passport,” said Toh. “They think, ‘I need a passport to travel. A passport is a travelling licence.’ That’s it.”

In the eyes of Canadian officials, when that happens, it means the refugee traveller has restored relations with their country of origin and no longer needs Canada’s protection.

“Then you see a situation where, for example, people get refugee status in Canada,” said Toh, “but then their parents get very sick and they say to themselves, ‘I’m in danger in this country, but this is my mom, and this is my dad. Maybe I can pop in and see them one last time without people noticing. I’m there and then get out quickly.”

How a court ruling could change things

The refugee board has allowed the majority of the cessation requests referred to it by the border agency, with an acceptance rate above 80 per cent. In 2020, it reached an all-time high, at 95 per cent.

But both Bellissimo and Toh hope that the rising trend will be blunted by a Federal Court of Appeal decision earlier this year that found each cessation proceeding should be “fact-dependent” and should not be applied in “a mechanistic or rote manner.”

The case, represented by the two lawyers, involved Maria Camila Galindo Camayo, who came to Canada for asylum with her mother and brothers from Colombia when she was 12 and who was granted protection in Canada in 2010 as a minor dependent.

After she became a permanent resident in 2012, she was found to have obtained and renewed her Colombian passport, and visited her homeland five times as a teen and adult to visit and care for her father, who suffers from mental illness and recurrent cancer, and to attend a humanitarian mission to aid children in poverty. She also used the passport to travel to Cuba, the United States and Mexico.

When in Colombia, concerned for her own safety, she hired professional armed guards, travelled in multiple cars, taking different routes, and remained inside family members’ homes as much as possible, she told the refugee board.

In 2017, border agents referred Camayo to the refugee board, which took away her protected status and permanent residence in 2019, despite her arguments that she was unaware of the cessation laws and their consequences.

Although on paper Camayo met the three key elements in assessing someone’s return to a country of persecution — voluntary, intentional and actual physical visit — the Federal Court overruled the refugee board decision, saying that the conclusion was unreasonable.

In dismissing the government’s appeal, the Federal Court of Appeal said the test for cessation should not be applied in “a mechanistic or rote manner” and it provided detailed guidance to assist the refugee board in assessing individual nuances leading to someone reavailing themselves to the country that they once feared.

“The focus throughout the analysis should be on whether the refugee’s conduct — and the inferences that can be drawn from it — can reliably indicate that the refugee intended to waive the protection of the country of asylum,” the appeal court said in sending the case back to the refugee board for redetermination.

‘My father was dying of cancer’

Ramandi said no one ever advised him not to use an Iranian passport or about the potential consequences. He said he tried to keep a low profile when sneaking back into Iran because he worried about his safety. The visit to Tehran wasn’t even part of his plan as he only learned about his father’s hospitalization toward the end of his three-month trip in Armenia.

“My father was dying of cancer. … The immigration issue didn’t even cross my mind,” said Ramandi, a Protestant Christian, who fled religious persecution in Iran and arrived in Canada in 2013 with the help of smugglers.

Still distraught from leaving his father and family behind, he said he was terrified when he was stopped by the border agents at Toronto’s Pearson airport.

“I told them about seeing my family in Armenia and about my father in Iran. I told them everything about the trip,” Ramandi, a baker, said through an interpreter. “I had no idea about the immigration implications.”

His father died a few months after his visit and Ramandi has not travelled or seen his wife, son, 18, and daughter, 14, while his permanent residence application is on hold.

“I came here when I was 41 and I’m now 50. It’s been almost 10 years and I’ve only been able to spend three months with my family in Armenia,” said Ramandi. “It’s so hard. I don’t have any direction for my life anymore.”

Immigration lawyer Richard Wazana said those with “ceased” status are also barred from appeals and risk assessments before removals for a year and are only eligible for humanitarian considerations if there are children involved and their interests are affected, or if there’s a serious mental or medical health issue.

The law, he said, has caused a lot of misery for these former refugees, few understanding that their protected status can be taken away even after they become permanent residents.

“Many people don’t apply for citizenship because they’re under the mistaken impression that permanent residency is, as it sounds, permanent. Unfortunately, it’s far from it,” he said. “Really, no one is safe until they obtain citizenship.”

Wazana has a client who fled political persecution in Libya and returned to see family only after the authoritarian regime of Moammar Gadhafi fell and it was safe for him to visit. Even though Canada has deferred all removals to Libya due to the volatile political situation there, the border agency pursued cessation of the man’s permanent resident status.

“Even using that passport from your home country to travel to a third country could potentially lead to a cessation application,” said Wazana. “My advice is just to forget about that passport, put it away and never use it again.”

Source: Will a former refugee’s trip to see his dying father cost him his status in Canada?

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with ,

Douglas Todd: Chinese travellers to Canada plunge. What does it mean?

2022/10/22 Leave a comment

Visitor visas from China have also plumeted, by close to 80 percent compared to pre-pandemic (January to August, 2022 compared to 2019):

Three years ago, 55 jumbo jets from China were touching down at Vancouver International Airport every week.

Now there are only eight flights a week from the world’s most-populous country.

There has been an almost similar plunge in the proportion of Chinese nationals applying for Canada’s 10-year visas. A related decline means fewer people from China are seeking student visas, and showing relatively modest interest in permanent-residence status.

China’s draconian pandemic lockdowns — which are more strict than anywhere in the world — have reduced travel in and out of the country, with the number of international air passengers across all of China’s airports falling from 74 million in 2019 to 1.5 million last year.

But that’s not the only reason for the decline.

With China’s Communist leaders poised this month to hand strongman Xi Jinping an almost unprecedented third five-year mandate, crackdowns are increasing on Chinese citizens, including through digital surveillance, censorship, arrest of dissenters, party infiltration of private businesses — and far less travel to other countries. Most observers believe obsessive control will be China’s new normal for a long time.

The drastic decline in the transnational mobility of the people of China feeds into the debate in the West over what it means to have far less engagement with China’s regime and its citizens, even while many are not necessarily tied to the authoritarian government.

In response to tighter controls in China, Canada has been shifting. While five years ago people from China made up the largest group of visitors and students, Indian nationals now comprise by far the largest group.

Two new books argue each side of the China engagement coin. In The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic Leadership, economist Fred Bergsten argues corporate engagement has been a success, despite tragic failures on the human rights front.

Bergsten belongs to the camp that champions the free global movement of money and humans, saying Western countries should continue to offer a warm reception to entrepreneurs, students, workers and visitors from China. It’s good for business.

However, another book, by Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg, titled Getting China Wrong, calls the West’s engagement with China a gamble that didn’t pay off. He says the challenge now is how to reduce ties to a threatening regime run on draconian Leninist principles.

Wherever one comes down on such arguments, the reality is the flow of people from China into the U.S., Canada and other Western countries has reduced dramatically.

Canada’s travel industry is among those hurting, especially in B.C. And that’s only partly because, as Destination B.C. official Kristen Learned says, visitors from China spent the most of any tourists: $2,021 each.

In 2019, more than 15,500 people were flying each week into Vancouver from China, now it’s just 2,600. That’s as airport officials say international flights from every other nation are almost back to pre-COVID levels.

Three years ago Canada brought in 712,000 visitors from China, who stayed an average of four weeks. Destination B.C. figures show 334,000 of them spent their days in B.C., which made them to the province’s second-largest international tourist market, after the U.S.

In 2019, travellers from China bought over $586 million worth of goods and services while on the West Coast, especially on hotels, luxury resorts and Airbnbs, as well as dining out while visiting relatives.

But by midsummer of this year, only 36,000 visitors from China had flown into Canada, with just 18,000 to B.C. That’s reflects a drastic overall rate of decline in three years of about 91 per cent.

Meanwhile, travellers into Canada from India, Britain and France are soaring.

Additional data reveal just a few years ago people from China were by far the biggest group applying for Canada’s popular 10-year visas.

Since the 10-year visa program began in 2014, allowing people to travel to the country for six months at a time as many times as they want, Chinese citizens have accounted for 3.2 million of the 13 million visas issued.

But a sharp drop in visa applications from China occurred even before the pandemic hit. At the same time, requests from India skyrocketed.

As a result, by midsummer of 2022 a relatively low number of people from China, 49,000, had applied this year for the 10-year visas. In the same period, applications from India skyrocketed to 355,000.

The highly valued multiple-entry visas are generally a benefit to Canada’s economy, say immigration lawyers. But they caution they can be abused by “shadow investors” in housing to avoid property and income taxes in Canada.

Educational relationships between China and Canada have also declined, although not as precipitously.

In 2017, study visa application rates from both China and India were equal — amounting to roughly 82,000 students a year from each giant nation, together accounting for almost half of all foreign students.

But in 2021, the second year of the pandemic, the numbers of Chinese international students seeking to come to Canada dropped to 56,000, while expanding from other countries — especially India, at 169,000.

The trend has continued into October of this year, with students from India accounting for 38 per cent of all study visa applicants and those from China just 11 per cent.

Meanwhile, the number of Chinese nationals gaining admission to Canada as permanent residents remains flat — at the rate of about 30,000 a year, compared to 127,000 from India.

The immigration path into Canada is not as strong an indicator of China’s internal politics as other measures — because anyone from China who becomes a Canadian citizen, technically, forgoes their Chinese citizenship and the ties that go with it.

What does it mean? As Xi tightens his hold on power, no one absolutely knows what’s on in his mind.

But even figures who advocate the unrestrained movement of financial and human capital realize Xi is dangerously bent on weakening democratic governments and further policing Chinese citizens in both his country and abroad.

This month, the pro-free-trade Economist magazine called on the West to continue to “welcome Chinese students, executives and scientists, rather than treat them as potential spies. Remember, always, that the beef should be with tyranny, not the Chinese people.”

That appears to sum up the federal government’s open approach, even while China’s autocrats are ensuring there will be fewer people-to-people connections between our two countries.

Source: Douglas Todd: Chinese travellers to Canada plunge. What does it mean?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

A Shrinking Town at the Center of France’s Culture Wars

2022/10/21 Leave a comment

Of interest and not declining rural populations of course not unique to France:

A shrinking town set among cow pastures in Brittany seems an unlikely setting for France’s soul searching over immigration and identity.

The main square is named after the date in 1944 that local resistance fighters were rounded up by Nazi soldiers, many never seen again. It offers a cafe run by a social club, a museum dedicated to the Brittany spaniel and a hefty serving of rural flight — forlorn empty buildings, their grills pulled down and windows shuttered, some for decades.

So when town council members heard of a program that could renovate the dilapidated buildings and fill much-needed jobs such as nurses’ aides and builders by bringing in skilled refugees, it seemed like a winning lottery ticket.

“It hit me like lightning,” said Laure-Line Inderbitzin, a deputy mayor. “It sees refugees not as charity, but an opportunity.”

But what town leaders saw as a chance for rejuvenation, others saw as evidence of a “great replacement” of native French people that has become a touchstone of anger and anxiety, particularly on the hard right.

In no time, tiny Callac, a town of just 2,200, was divided, the focus of national attention and the scene of competing protests for and against the plan. Today it sits at the intersection of complex issues that have bedeviled France for many years: how to deal with mounting numbers of migrants arriving in the country and how to breathe new life into withering towns, before it is too late.

As in many towns across France, Callac’s population has been in slow decline since the end of the Trente Glorieuses, the 30-year postwar growth stretch when living standards and wages rose. Today, around half the people who remain are retirees. The biggest employer is the nursing home.

A wander around downtown reveals dozens of empty storefronts, where florists, dry-cleaners and photo studios once stood. The town’s last dental office announced in July it was closing — the stress of continually turning new patients away, when her patient list topped 9,000, was too much for Françoise Méheut.

She stopped sleeping, she burst into tears over the dental chair and she turned to antidepressants before finally deciding to retire early.

“It’s a catastrophe,” Dr. Méheut said. “I have the impression of abandoning people.”

“I am selling, and no one is buying,” she added of her business. “If there was a dentist among the refugees, I would be thrilled.”

While many in town say there are no jobs, the council did a survey and found the opposite — 75 unfilled salaried jobs, from nursing assistants to contractors, despite the local 18 percent unemployment rate.

The council still hopes to carry out its plan in cooperation with the Merci Endowment Fund, an organization created by a wealthy Parisian family that had made its fortune in high-end children’s clothing and wanted to give back.

In 2016, the matriarch of the family volunteered to host an Afghan refugee in the family mansion near the Eiffel Tower. Her three sons, seeing the joy he brought to their mother’s life and the talents he offered, wanted to expand the idea broadly.

“The idea is to create a win-win situation,” said the eldest son, Benoit Cohen, a French filmmaker and author who wrote a book about the experience called “Mohammad, My Mother and Me.”

“They will help revitalize the village.”

The Merci project has proposed handpicking asylum seekers, recruiting for skills as well as a desire to live in the countryside. Then, the Cohens promise to develop a wraparound program to help them assimilate, with local French courses and apartments in refurbished buildings.

The plan also called for new community spaces and training programs for all — locals and refugees together — something that most excited Ms. Inderbitzin, the project’s local champion on the council and a teacher in the local middle school.

The town has more than 50 nonprofit clubs and associations, including one that runs the local cinema, and another that delivers food to hungry families in town.

“Social development for all — that’s in Callac’s genes,” said Ms. Inderbitzin. “It’s a virtuous circle. They could bring lots of energy, culture, youth.”

Not everyone is as excited at that prospect. A petition launched by three residents opposing the project has more than 10,000 signatures — many from far beyond Callac..

But even in town, some grumble about lack of consultation or transparency. They worry Callac will lose its Frenchness and will trade its small-town tranquillity for big-city problems. Others question the motives of a rich family in Paris meddling in their rural home.

“We aren’t lab rats. We aren’t here for them to experiment on,” said Danielle Le Men, a retired teacher in town who is starting a community group to stop the project, which she fears will bring “radical Islam” to the community.

Catching wind of the dispute, the right-wing anti-immigrant party Reconquest, run by the failed presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, organized a protest in September, warning the project would bring dangerous insecurity and complaining that it would introduce halal stores and girls in head scarves.

There was a time, she said, when she offered billiards and karaoke and kept the taps running late. But with the town’s youth departed, she recalibrated her closing time to match her remaining clientele’s schedule — 8 p.m.

“Why would we give jobs to outsiders?” she said. “We should help people here first.”

Standing on the street outside his small bar, which doubles as a cluttered antiques store, her neighbor, Paul Le Contellac, assessed the proposal from another angle.

His uncle married a refugee who had fled Spain with her family during the civil war and found shelter in this village. Later, when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, his grandmother harbored resistance fighters in her attic.

“This is a town that has always welcomed refugees,” said Mr. Le Contellac. “Callac is not ugly, but it’s not pretty either. It needs some new energy.”

While immigration may hold the potential to do that, the issue remains hotly contested, even while the migration crisis had been dampened by the pandemic.

Today, as the pandemic appears to wane, the numbers of asylum seekers arriving to France is climbing again, threatening to restore the issue’s volatility.

Since the height of the migration crisis several years ago, the government of President Emmanuel Macron has attempted to split the difference on its immigration policy.

On the one hand, it has aimed to deter asylum applicants by increasing police at the border and by cutting back some state services.

On the other, for those who are accepted as refugees, it has poured resources into French lessons and employment programs to ease their integration.

The government has also tried to disperse asylum seekers outside of Paris, where services are strained, housing is hard to find and large tent camps have sprung up.

Recently, Mr. Macron announced that he wanted to formalize the policy in a new immigration bill, sending asylum seekers from the dense urban centers, already plagued with social and economic problems, to the “rural areas, that are losing people.”

The plan is a lot like that being put in place already in Callac, which, paradoxically, has been receiving refugee families since 2015, about 40 people at present, with little or no notice, like many small French towns.

Mohammad Ebrahim heard the noise of the warring protests from his living room window, but had no idea what the commotion was about — certainly not about him, his wife and four children, who arrived a year ago.

Kurds who escaped Al Qaeda in Syria, they have felt nothing but welcome, flashing photos on their cellphones of community meals and celebrations they have been invited to. But the perks of village hospitality are offset by the logistics of living in the countryside without a car. Training, medical appointments, even regular French classes are all far away.

When he hears the plan to offer wraparound services and school in Callac, Mr. Ebrahim smiles broadly. “Then we could go to French class every day,” he said.

Callac may now prove to be a testing ground of whether a more structured approach can work and divisions be overcome.

“This became about French politics,” says Sylvie Lagrue, a local volunteer who drives refugees to doctor’s appointments and helps them set up their internet. “Now, everyone hopes this will quiet down, and we continue with the program.”

Though the project still has no official budget, timeline or target number of asylum seekers to be resettled, the town council nevertheless is tiptoeing ahead.

It recently bought a hulking abandoned stone school, rising like a ghost in the middle of town, and announced it planned to convert it into the “heart” of the project — with a refugee reception area, as well as a community nursery and a co-working space.

The Merci fund has already bought the building where the town’s last book store closed in August. It now plans to reopen the store for the community, while housing a first family of asylum seekers in the upstairs apartment.

“The beginning has to be slow,” Mr. Cohen said. “We have to see if it works. We don’t want to scare people.”

Source: A Shrinking Town at the Center of France’s Culture Wars

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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