#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 1 December Update

2021/12/02 Leave a comment

The latest charts, compiled 1 December. Too early to assess the impact of omicron.

Canadians fully vaccinated 77.2 percent, compared to Japan 77.2 percent, UK 69.4 percent and USA 60 percent.

Vaccinations: Minor shifts: British Columbia ahead of Atlantic Canada, France ahead of Alberta and Japan, New York and California ahead of Prairies. China fully vaccinated 77 percent, India 32.8 percent, Nigeria 1.7 percent, Pakistan 23.2 percent, Philippines 33.6 percent.

Trendline Charts:

Infections: Recent trends of increased infections in Europe continues. Canadian provincial trends showing minimal change from last week, with some levelling off in West.

Deaths: G7 less Canada (driven mainly by USA) continue to increase, West still increasing more than other provinces.

Vaccinations: Ongoing convergence among provinces and G7 less Canada and narrowing gap with immigration source countries given China, and to a lessor extent, India, Pakistan and the Philippines continue to increase vaccinations. Nigeria remains a laggard.

Weekly

Infections: No relative change.

Deaths: No relative change

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Canada extends online study eligibility period for PGWP applicants

2021/12/01 Leave a comment

Hard to understand the logic of this beyond support for universities and helping to meet government immigration levels. Canadian experience was one of the selling points for PGWP, this change largely removes it:

Online study is not normally eligible for the Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP), but that has changed since the pandemic.

International students can now do 100% of their studies online from outside Canada, and still get a PGWP once the program is complete. Canada has extended the period that international students can study online until August 31, 2022, up from December 31, 2021. The measure was originally implemented in 2020, as part of a coronavirus-related measure to allow international students affected by the pandemic to still be eligible for the PGWP.

Study programs must be with an eligible Designated Learning Institution (DLI) and meet other PGWP requirements. The shortest length a program may be is eight months. The time spent studying outside Canada after August 31, 2022, and any time spent studying before you applied for a study permit does not count toward the length of a PGWP.

The length of your study period is important both for the PGWP eligibility, and also in determining how long your PGWP will be valid for. If your study program was more than eight months but less than two years, the PGWP’s validity matches the length of the study program. If it was more than two years, the PGWP may be up to three years in duration.

PGWP opens pathways to Canadian immigration

Having Canadian work and study experience can go a long way toward an immigration application. A Statistics Canada report says six in 10 international students (first-time study permit holders) who worked during or after their studies became permanent residents.

Certain economic-class immigration pathways like Express Entry, Quebec Experience Program (PEQ), and the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) all highly value Canadian work experience. Some programs even require it.

The Canadian Experience Class, for example, is an Express Entry-managed program that requires one year of Canadian work experience in a skilled occupation. The PEQ, is a popular pathway for French-speaking international student graduates in Quebec. Also, the PNP opens immigration pathways for people who are not eligible for Express Entry.

The PGWP is an open work permit, meaning you can use it to work for any employer, in any occupation in Canada. It is a one-time deal, and it cannot be renewed or extended.

However, if you do get it, you have the opportunity to work anywhere in Canada. Studies suggest that having both Canadian work and study experience can boost immigrants’ earning potential. For these reasons, the PGWP is a highly sought-after work permit, as it opens the doors to opportunities in Canada.

Source: Canada extends online study eligibility period for PGWP applicants

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Douglas Todd: Generous Canada now No. 1 country for foreign students

2021/11/30 Leave a comment

Of note, along with some of the factors, some justified, some more questionable that made Canada relatively more attractive than other destinations. Focus on increasing international students predates current government. Interesting comment by Chris Friesen regarding preference given to international students with respect to permanent residency. :

Canada has become the most popular country in the world for international students, says a survey conducted in more than 50 countries.

Two in five international students rate Canada as their first choice for higher education, according to IDP Connect’s fall poll of 3,600 study-visa holders. That’s more than double the proportion that picked the next highest-ranked nations — Britain, the U.S. or Australia.

A majority of students who choose Canada as their top option said a key reason was being allowed to work while studying, says IDP, as well as the relative affordability of tuition fees, given most of the country’s universities and colleges are subsidized by taxpayers.

The Canadian Bureau for International Education adds that 60 per cent of foreign students in Canada, more than half of whom come from India or China, want to apply to become permanent residents — an option not available in most countries.

Given the competition in the West for foreign students, some specialists are skeptical about Ottawa’s increasingly eye-catching efforts to appeal to the estimated six million students in the world who are going abroad for their educations.

Higher education experts question why Canada appears to be the only nation that has given foreign students social-assistance payments during COVID. They also ask about Canada’s unusual decision to allow students almost unlimited opportunities to work while ostensibly studying.

Canada’s foreign-student numbers have almost doubled since the Liberals were elected in 2015. Their numbers are returning to the 600,000 a year range despite COVID border restrictions. During the pandemic, many offshore students studied remotely, but most are physically back on Canadian campuses.

Foreign students make up about 20 per cent post-secondary students in Canada, which along with Australia and Britain, has the highest ratios in the world. In the U.S., foreign nationals on study visas account for only seven per cent of students. In the European Union, they’re just six per cent.

Ottawa, which now considers foreign students prime candidates for immigration, has gone the opposite direction of other countries during COVID and allowed study visa holders to apply for taxpayer-funded programs such as the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has also given international students almost unlimited access to full-time jobs, including for at least three years after graduation. And the Liberal government has made it possible for them to keep their long-term work opportunities even if they have not been in the country. In addition, unlike elsewhere, many provinces, such as B.C., offer almost-free medical coverage.

British Columbia, which normally has about 22 per cent of all of Canada’s foreign students, has the strongest concentration, focused mostly in Metro Vancouver where their presence affects the rental and housing markets. B.C. has four times as many foreign students per capita as Alberta.

The Vancouver campus of the University of B.C., similar to previous years, has almost 17,000 international students this fall, accounting for about one third of all graduate students and one quarter of undergrads. More than one third are from China and one fifth from India. The rest hail from scores of countries, particularly the U.S., Korea and Iran.

Simon Fraser University has almost 7,000 foreign students, 26 per cent of undergrads and 34 per cent of grad students. About two in five are from China and one in five from India, with smaller cohorts from Korea, Iran and Hong Kong. The proportion of foreign students at Capilano University and Vancouver Island University is lower.

In addition to the Liberal government boasting foreign students bring more than $21 billion a year into the economy, Canadian higher education specialist Alex Usher says the country’s post-secondary institutions now rely on foreign students for 45 per cent of fee revenue. That’s up from 15 per cent in the 2000s. Usher cautions against such a heavy reliance on foreign students.

When COVID first hit, both Australia and the U.S. brought in far more rules about foreign students than Canada; directing many back to their homelands.

The two English-language nations wanted to protect the health of residents and, unlike Canada, were not prepared to provide social-assistance, health benefits and jobs to foreign nationals while the domestic population struggled. As a result about 10 per cent of post-secondary staff and faculty in the U.S. and Australia was laid off.

Canada began allowing study-visa holders into the country in October 2020, despite the border being then shut to almost everyone except essential workers. But Australia only decided this week to welcome back more than 200,000 foreign students. There had been fears that many Asian students would opt to study in person in Canada and the U.S. rather than pay for online courses from Australia.

University of Sydney Prof. Salvatore Babones, who has studied international student policy in Canada and around the world, said this week: “I’m surprised Canada has extended welfare (CERB) benefits to international students. It’s a strange decision, since most such students must demonstrate the ability to support themselves financially before being granted a study visa.”

The international education specialist finds it “sad” that Canada has lifted the normal 20-hour-a-week cap on how much each foreign student is permitted to work. “The cap serves an important purpose: It ensures that students are in the country to study, not on an exploitive fake study program in order to get a work permit.”

While Canada’s unusually magnanimous benefits for foreign students might sound humane, Babones said, they in effect turn study visas into work visas, “that require recipients to pay ‘protection money’ to educational institutions in exchange for permission to work.”

Vancouver’s Chris Friesen, who chairs the umbrella body overseeing settlement services for immigrants and refugees in Canada, has said the Canadian public is in the dark about how policy has been changed to give preference to international students.

Ottawa, he said, should set up a royal commission to look into issues such as whether Canadians agree that foreign students, who tend to come from the “cream of the crop” in their homelands, should go to the front of the line for permanent residence status.

Source: Douglas Todd: Generous Canada now No. 1 country for foreign students

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Papademetriou: More Immigration Is Inevitable, But Overcoming Its Challenges Isn’t

2021/11/29 Leave a comment

Good overview of the issues and perspectives, but hard to see how USA can overcome the divisions and politics involved:

With the Census Bureau reporting a significant dip in total U.S. fertility rates—and a correspondingly lower population growth—in the past decade, the specter of demographic and economic “decline” seems to be preoccupying many commentators. Two groups have dominated the debate. First, prophets of doom who have legitimate concerns about increasing old-age dependency ratios (the ratio of the population sixty-five years and over to the population aged fifteen to sixty-four, multiplied by a hundred) but who are also worried about the size of the GDP—rather than the much more meaningful GDP per capita—and apparently equate population size with the ability to project global power. The second group is most pro-immigration advocates and activists who see in the data an opportunity for much larger immigration intakes. As the positions of the two groups dovetail nicely, the political argument for much more immigration appears to be irresistible.

And it may well be. Unsurprisingly, both sides have their usual blinders firmly in place and frequently rely on hyperbole. But are their arguments based on sound analyses? And are they politically viable? As is typically the case with complex matters, the deep divisions about immigration intake (approximately two-thirds of whom are family members), and particularly the manner in which certain immigrants enter (illegally and increasingly by crashing the southern border), the political viability of increasing immigration substantially appears questionable. This political reality will persist at least until we reestablish legality and order at our borders, reform our immigration system to align much better—and more clearly—with our economic needs, and reach out to include the millions of U.S. workers who are not in the labor force. Investing in the education and training of such typically “forgotten” and marginalized potential workers, most of whom are traditional and immigrant-origin minorities and women, and assisting them to find their way into the active workforce, is an imperative not only to maintaining a just society but also to the long-term economic health and stability of the nation. It is also a prerequisite to giving the government the “license” to admit more immigrants without fueling greater divisions and the intolerance that such divisions generate.

Looking at the demography/immigration nexus more closely, the most sensible policy position is that those who worry about the size of the U.S. population first and foremost, need not worry so much. It is perfectly reasonable for policymakers, however, to be thinking harder about how to address persistent lower fertility because of its longer-term effects on faster aging populations, the fact that fewer people will be contributing to retirement support systems while progressively more will be gaining access to them, and, in the out years, about “negative demographic momentum,” whereby ever smaller numbers of women in child-bearing ages have fewer children—the citizen workers that will keep the economy humming and the broader society healthy.

But while size may matter, there are many things that matter much more. The first tier items include a well-educated workforce that invests in lifelong learning and public policies that encourage them to do so; a private sector that prizes both formal and informal (tacit) skills and experience and rewards workers for continuing to invest in themselves; gradually tweaking social policies to extend working lives, and hence delay the age that formal retirement begins—so that there is less anxiety about worker shortages; and, of course, much better health care systems that create the conditions for extending people’s working and post-retirement lives.

Easy? Not really but these are the types of initiatives that are at the heart of dynamic economies, long-term competitiveness, the liquidity of our retirement system, and healthier lives for older workers and retirees. After all, if most Americans are living longer and healthier lives, working lives must also be extended.

And what about immigration policy? If it were possible to set aside, at least temporarily, the political arguments of the extremists who advocate for far more or far less immigration, there is no escaping the reality that all high-income countries will increase immigration flows in the future. And “traditional” immigration countries, such as the United States, Canada, or Australia, will probably lead the way—as they do already. The policy (and political) questions then become how many and in which legal categories.

The “how many” is devilishly complex to answer. If we are to really fix our immigration system, and the broader issues that ail our country, the answer to that question is not a single number: it is rather a “target” that responds to the needs of the economy, addresses the reasonable expectations of U.S. citizens and green card holders to reunify with their closest relatives, and is broadly consistent with our humanitarian obligations.

Among these three classic migration streams, the one that appears most straightforward is the economic/labor market one. Yet, responding to the needs of the economy is not as clear-cut as it may seem. Greater openings to skilled and highly skilled and talented immigrants is a no-brainer. And few can disagree with such policies as long as employers play by the rules (in terms of wages, working conditions, appropriate advancement opportunities, minimizing the displacement of local workers, or “preferring” foreign workers over domestic ones) and robust training, education, and job placement opportunities for all workers are in place. Yet the understandable bias toward the high-end of the skills’ continuum will not be enough to address labor market realities, which range from skills and geographic mismatches to the imperative of addressing the unmet labor needs in several areas along the continuum of skills. Among them are many middle-skills (think of the health and elderly care sectors) and sectors that have long been abandoned by domestic workers (think of labor-intensive and perishable crops agriculture, herding or the dairy sector, and personal services of many types, among others).

But even these realities are contested terrain for many—which makes the near-consensus about the importance of greater openness to such workers, melt away the closer one gets to the bottom third of the labor market, where tenure is more tenuous, wages lower, working conditions more difficult, even dangerous, and less protected—in law (the non-applicability of the Fair Labor Standards Act in agriculture) and in fact (when it comes to the enforcement of applicable labor laws)—and the power disparity between worker and employer is most pronounced. These are issues that must be addressed, as is the balance between permanent immigration and properly and fairly administered temporary work visas.

None of this is easy. But at the end of the day, the essence of successful leadership is about demonstrating both courage and wisdom and thus creating political space for doing the difficult things that must be done. If leaders are not willing to make tough choices that hew closer to the national interest and resist the loudest voices at the extremes of both parties, they should make room for those who will.

Source: More Immigration Is Inevitable, But Overcoming Its Challenges Isn’t

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Canada committed to 40,000 Afghan refugees. 3,500 have made it. A piece of paper stands in the way

2021/11/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

In August, Naik Arbabzada was thrilled when she managed to quickly put together a private group of acquaintances to sponsor her elder sister’s family to Canada from Tajikistan, where the Afghans have sought refuge.

The Edmonton group quickly raised $60,000 in cash, with one person donating $8,000 worth of dental services for her sister, brother-in-law and six children.

But then they hit a snag because the family has not been able to secure the so-called “refugee status determination” paper, a document they need from the Tajikistan government to be recognized as refugees in need of resettlement.

Without that piece of paper, Arbabzada, a medical student at the University of Alberta, said her sponsorship group can’t even put in an application.

“We are asking the federal government to treat the Afghan refugee crisis similar to the Syrian refugee crisis by waiving the requirement of the RSD, so it doesn’t hinder an applicant’s ability to put a sponsorship application forward,” said Arbabzada, 30, who resettled in Canada with her parents 20 years ago. 

(Her two older sisters were left behind in Afghanistan because they were married and couldn’t come along as dependants. One is still stuck in Kabul with her family.)

Canada has committed to welcoming 40,000 Afghan refugees through its special immigration measures and humanitarian resettlement program after the Taliban took over Kabul and returned to power in August. So far only 3,500 have made it here.

Ottawa has set a target to usher in a total of 59,500 refugees in 2021 but so far only 44,300 have been admitted, according to data confirmed by the immigration department.

The goal for this year’s intake of government-assisted refugees was 12,500, and 22,500 for those privately sponsored by churches and community groups such as Arbabzada’s family. As of Oct. 31, only 7,800 and 4,500 were admitted respectively. The rest of the 44,300 admitted so far were refugees who entered Canada and were then granted asylum.

Officials said Canada’s ability to process immigration applications has been greatly hindered since the onset of COVID-19 amid office lockdowns and travel restrictions here and abroad.

This week, Ottawa confirmed it has reopened the land border to irregular migrants from the U.S., giving them access to seek asylum in Canada, which had been sending these would-be refugees back south of the border since March 2020.

“As the public health situation improves and the border reopens, Canada has removed the temporary public health measures restricting the entry of asylum claimants and the agreement with the U.S. has come to an end,” said Alex Cohen, press secretary of Immigration Minister Sean Fraser.

“Canada remains committed to upholding our fair and compassionate refugee protection system, fulfilling our domestic and international legal obligations and protecting the health and safety of Canadians and those who wish to come here.”

While it’s good news that those travel restrictions have relaxed, Arbabzada said Fraser must also remove the red tape hindering ready Canadians from bringing in Afghans in crisis.

She said her sister’s family had no plan to move to Canada until June, when they were forced into hiding and had to flee the country after her brother-in-law was threaten by the Taliban because he was a contractor providing office supplies, furniture and non-perishable food items to foreign companies in Kabul.

However, since he didn’t work for the Canadian government, the family didn’t qualify for Ottawa’s special measures to resettle here, leaving private sponsorship the only option.

“It’s a shame that Canada is unable to meet its annual refugee target when you have individuals like my sister who are going to be very well supported and are waiting to start their lives in Canada,” said Arbabzada.

Members of her sponsorship group have reached out to the immigration department, urging the government to waive the refugee card requirement for Afghans.

In an email, a senior immigration official said removing the requirement, even temporarily, would result in a greater number of applications, which affects processing times and the timely resettlement of all privately sponsored refugees.

“There is a continuing need to manage intake of these applications in order to achieve acceptable processing times,” said the letter.

The official’s response upsets Tema Frank, a member of Arbabzada’s sponsorship group.

“The government is speaking out of both sides of their mouth,” said the Edmonton writer. 

“They’re trying to claim the glory for saying we’ll support all these Afghans. And yet when you’ve got Canadians who are ready to support them and make it happen, they’re putting this artificial blockade in the way.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/11/25/this-afghan-canadian-rallied-a-group-to-sponsor-her-sister-to-come-to-canada-a-piece-of-paper-stands-in-the-way.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=thestar_canada

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Saunders: The pandemic exposed Canada’s inefficient immigration system. It needs to be scrapped and rebuilt

2021/11/29 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

For a surgeon who had been risking his life in pandemic-hit Canadian hospitals performing organ transplants, the April 14 invitation was a welcome gift. Despite his highly sought-after, life-saving skills and the risks he was taking to do his job, he’d so far had no pathway to becoming Canadian.

Then Marco Mendicino, the immigration minister at the time, announcedthat Canada would give permanent residency, and thus eventually citizenship, to 90,000 immigrants, refugees and foreign students currently living here on temporary visas and mostly doing in-person jobs deemed “essential.”

It was one part of a broad goal, announced earlier this year, to meet an ambitious target of 401,000 new Canadians in 2021, despite then-closed borders, mainly by drawing on the huge number of people already living and working here.

It sounds good – but the pandemic months have taught us that Canada does not have the immigration system to deliver it.

Almost immediately after that announcement, those invitations collided with a bureaucracy – including a Byzantine and outdated set of federal and provincial immigration rules – that all but prevented those worthy goals from becoming realities.

The transplant doctor soon noticed. He had been slowly accumulating points under Canada’s main immigration system, known as Express Entry, which grants points for things such as education and language fluency and requires full-time work experience in Canada. (Surgeons are classified as self-employed, so have a harder time earning those points.)

While the invitation was a gift, the rules all but prevented him from accepting it. His application – which had to be begun afresh, with no relationship to the existing paper trail of his Express Entry application – had to be personally submitted at a specific time on a weekday. This hours-long procedure on a newly created and deeply dysfunctional and crash-prone web portal was nearly impossible for a working surgeon. For some reason it forbade lawyers and immigration agents from helping, and reportedly barred applicants from working during the application process, which could drag on for months.

The long-standing rules also required him to submit the results of a fluency test in English or French. His language skills weren’t in doubt – you can’t be a high-level surgeon without them – but the testing centres had weeks-long delays, and the minister’s invitation had an hours-long application window.

Many people filed applications without the language test, hoping it could be added informally later. Months later, they found their claims were rejected without any communication from the department, and the whole system had to start again. It was an ordeal for a privileged surgeon; for the nurses and home-care workers for whom the program was intended, it was far worse.

“In 25 years of practice I have never seen the client service as poor as it is now,” says Barbara Jo Caruso, the surgeon’s immigration lawyer. “I think there is a fundamental disconnect right now. … The department needs to change the way front-line workers work, so they can be facilitative and solve problems by making a call. Otherwise they’re wasting enormous amounts of human resources doing the same things over and over.”

The major problem, says Andrew Griffith, a former director-general of Canada’s immigration department, is “not understanding the service needs of the target population.”

In essence, Ottawa is trying to force a growth-oriented policy through a haphazard, enormously complex and often uncommunicative set of provincial and federal bureaucracies that were constructed over the last five decades to restrict immigration and control numbers, and to administer a range of often contradictory immigration programs.

The result has been chaotic. Even though experienced front-line health workers ought to be the most desirable new Canadians, Ottawa was not able to come close to its target of 20,000 of them – after the deadline passed this summer, only 7,155 had reportedly been able to get their names on the list. Tens of thousands more simply could not manage to apply.

Other invitations suffered the opposite problem: The target of 40,000 student-visa holders who’ve completed their degrees was met in fewer than two days. Then a computer failure reportedly caused thousands more to be let into the system in a mess of false messaging and panicked confusion, so Ottawa had to give another 7,300 applicants admission.

Despite its high annual immigration targets (which will continue to rise), Canada has become notorious for its inability to turn people into immigrants and citizens without years of unnecessary delay and reams of procedures that can’t be navigated without a lawyer – even if you’re a nanny earning less than minimum wage. Ottawa currently says it has 1.8 million immigration applications stuck in the queue, many lost on the desks of an understaffed and overburdened public service.

A new Immigration Minister, Sean Fraser, was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a few weeks ago. He ought to have one job: to scrap and rebuild the entire system, reducing the off-putting hodgepodge of outdated programs and procedures with a single, understandable and sensible immigration pathway for all applicants that actually serves the country’s needs. If nothing else, the pandemic months have taught us that we need to start afresh.

Source: Opinion: The pandemic exposed Canada’s inefficient immigration system. It needs to be scrapped and rebuilt

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Canada’s immigration minister says he wants to look into ‘issue’ of discrimination and bias within department 

2021/11/26 Leave a comment

Immigration is essentially discriminatory in terms of who we select. The challenge is to ensure that the criteria are as objective and neutral as possible with respect to country of origin:

Canada’s immigration minister says he wants to look into the “issue” of discrimination and unconscious bias within the department tasked with triaging and approving immigration requests to Canada.

“Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve become aware of this issue, and it’s something that I personally want to look into,” Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told reporters Wednesday as he entered a Liberal caucus meeting.

“There’s no secret that over the course of Canada’s history, unconscious bias and systemic racism have been a shameful part of Canada’s history over different aspects of the government’s operations. One of the things that we want to do is make sure that … this kind of unconscious bias doesn’t discriminate against people who come from a particular part of the world.”

Fraser was responding to questions on a recent report in Montreal newspaper Le Devoir that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is increasingly refusing foreign student applications from francophone African countries to Quebec, whereas English-speaking applicants are increasingly approved.

Immigration lawyers quoted in the report stated that IRCC recently refused applications from nearly 100 per cent of students from Maghreb and Western African countries applying to study in Quebec.

Fraser says he’s certain that the department was not consciously discriminating against those countries, but he still wants to look into it to make sure no other factors than those set out in immigration legislation are being considered when assessing requests.

“I certainly don’t think that there’s been a decision actively to pick one country over another. I think there’s certain factors that IRCC officials assess when they’re trying to admit more newcomers to Canada,” Fraser said.

“But it would be silly if I were to stand here and say that in a department of 11,000 people, if you look at the different operations of IRCC, to say that there is no discrimination,” he added.

He also promised to look at ways to bring more, not less, French-speaking students into Canada.

“International students are one of the groups that successfully integrate more and more so than just about any other group of newcomers,” Fraser said. “That’s a good thing, not just for the newcomer to Canada, but for our economy as well.”

Reporters then asked the newly-minted minister if it was ironic that there would be issues of discrimination and conscious or unconscious bias in the department tasked with handling foreign immigration.

“I think there’s a big distinction between what should be and what is,” the minister responded. “I think we need to constantly be looking to make sure that the public has faith in the system.”

In a follow-up statement, Fraser’s press secretary noted that the minister intended to continue the work already launched by IRCC to “eradicate racism” within the department, including creating a task force dedicated to the task “full-time,” mandatory unconscious bias training for employees and executives and appointing an “anti-racism representative” within each sector of the department.

Earlier this year, IRCC published a report based on focus groups of its employees that revealed that there were multiple and repeated reports of racist incidents within the workplace.

“Experiences of racism at IRCC include microaggressions, biases in hiring and promotion as well as biases in the delivery of IRCCs programs, policies and client service,” reads a summary of the findings, which were first reported by CBC last month.

“In addition, employees paint a picture of an organization fraught with challenges at the level of workplace culture” and a “history of racism going unchecked.”

For example, the report notes that an IRCC team leader was said to have “loudly” declared that colonialism was “good” and that “if ‘the natives’ wanted the land they should have just stood up.

In another case, non-racialized employees and supervisors were notoriously known to refer to parts of the department employing a higher number of racialized employees as “the ghetto.”

Participants also noted “widespread” internal references to certain African nations as “the dirty 30.”

Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/canadas-immigration-minister-says-he-wants-to-look-into-issue-of-potential-discrimination-and-bias-within-department

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Germany to open up more to migrants under new coalition

2021/11/26 Leave a comment

Significant changes:

Germany’s incoming government plansto improve asylum seekers’ rights, facilitate immigration for skilled workers, and simplify the process of acquiring German nationality.

Immigration was a defining issue of Germany’s 2017 election campaign after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open the door to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in 2015.

Although it was not one of the main issues in this year’s election, it has moved up the political agenda again as thousands of migrants have tried to enter the European Union via Belarus in recent weeks.

A coalition deal agreed by the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats (FDP) said the new government planned to make Germany a more appealing destination for migrants, while making life easier for asylum seekers who are willing to integrate

The alliance also agreed to introduce a law to make multiple citizenship possible. Becoming a German citizen generally requires a person to give up any other passports, though there are exemptions, including for citizens of other EU countries.

“As a rule, naturalization should be possible after five years, with special integration achievements after three years,” the document said. That compares to eight years and six years respectively at the moment

‘GUEST WORKERS’

The new law will grant children born in Germany to foreign parents German citizenship if one of the parents has been legally residing in Germany for five years.

The law targets Germany’s ‘guest-worker’ generation of migrants, who came from southern Europe and Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s and contributed to the postwar “economic miracle”.

Some could not be naturalized even after living in Germany for decades due to language requirements or because they did not want to give up their original citizenship.

The wording of a controversial naturalization prerequisite of “living according to German life style” will be replaced with clearer criteria in the new law.

Keen to tackle a shortage of skilled workers that has held back economic recovery, Germany’s new government will improve access to study and apprenticeship for foreigners. Visa processing will also be simplified.

Asylum seekers with temporary status will be able to obtain more secure residency and bring in their families after four to six years if they integrate well.

Guenter Burkhardt, managing director of PRO ASYL refugee rights group, welcomed the deal but said more was needed to improve asylum seekers’ rights.

“Deportations to war and crisis areas are not clearly excluded,” he said.

Source: Germany to open up more to migrants under new coalition

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Yakabuski: Amid Quebec labour crunch, Legault spurns business demands for more immigrants

2021/11/25 Leave a comment

A natural experiment: as the rest of Canada increases immigration, Quebec adapts a more restrictive approach.

Will be interesting to contrast Quebec economic outcomes with those of the other provinces, particularly with respect to productivity and income, over the coming years:

Generations of Quebeckers were once forced to leave home for work, fleeing to Ontario or New England for a job, as their native province grappled with a chronic unemployment problem.

Until the turn of the century, Quebec’s jobless rate consistently exceeded the Canadian average by several percentage points. The spread with Ontario stood at as much as five points in the 1980s and never shrank below three points before 2000.

That was then. A falling birth rate, a fast-aging population and lower immigration levels than in the rest of Canada have since combined to make Quebec’s labour market the country’s second tightest after British Columbia.

Quebec’s unemployment rate stood at 5.6 per cent in October, compared with 7 per cent in Ontario and 6.7 per cent nationally. At 3.8 per cent, the unemployment rate in Quebec City was the lowest of any census metropolitan area in the country.

Premier François Legault considers this a nice problem to have.

“You have to admit it’s good news for [Quebec’s] 4.5 million workers because it puts upward pressure – and we’ve seen it for the past three years – on salaries,” the Premier said last week. “I’d rather have a lack of workers than a lack of jobs.”

Quebec businesses do not see it that way, however. They describe an acute labour shortage – there are currently more than 220,000 job vacancies in the province – as the biggest obstacle to economic growth. The province’s manufacturers have foregone $18-billion in revenues in the past two years because they could not find enough workers to fill orders. Many businesses are closing for lack of employees.

Last week, five of Quebec’s main business groups joined with the Union des municipalités du Québec to demand Mr. Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government boost immigration levels to prevent the current labour shortage from getting even worse. In addition to working with the federal government to accelerate the application process for temporary foreign workers, the groups want the province to permanently boost the number of permanent residents it accepts each year and do more to get newcomers to settle outside the greater Montreal area to more remote regions where the worker shortage has reached crisis levels.

Karl Blackburn, the head of the province’s main employers’ group, le Conseil du patronat du Québec (CPQ), called the province’s labour shortage “an economic catastrophe,” and called on Finance Minister Eric Girard to introduce new measures to address the labour crunch in next week’s fall economic statement.

Mr. Legault, who was elected in 2018 on a signature promise to temporarily cut immigration levels, continues to push back against such demands. The Premier emphasized automation, job training and digitization last week while outlining his government’s strategy for easing the labour shortage and boosting productivity.

Mr. Legault has made closing the wealth gap between his province and Ontario – Quebec’s per-capita gross domestic product remains about 13 per cent lower – his government’s top economic priority. As a result, he has insisted that bringing in more immigrants, who typically start off making less than the average full-time salary of $56,000, would only make this task harder.

“Immigration might be part of the solution, but we have to realize that, at 50,000 [immigrants] a year, we have reached our capacity for integration,” Mr. Legault said. “If we want the next generations to continue speaking French, there is a limit to the number of immigrants we can accept.”

Under a decades-old agreement with Ottawa, Quebec establishes its own immigration targets and selects economic immigrants. The federal government is responsible for choosing newcomers who come to the province as refugees or under the family reunification program.

Mr. Legault’s government recently announced it would seek to bring in 70,000 immigrants in 2022. But the one-time boost would only to make up for a shortfall of newcomers experienced in 2020 and this year because of the pandemic. Despite the one-shot increase, Quebec will continue to receive far fewer immigrants relative to its population than Ontario, B.C. and Alberta.

To keep pace with the rest of the country, Quebec, which accounts for 22.5 per cent of the Canadian population, would need to increase the number of immigrants it accepts to 90,000 starting this year and increase the level annually after that.

In 2019, Quebec accepted only 40,565 immigrants, or 11.9 per cent of the 341,180 permanent residents admitted to Canada that year. Its share is set to rise temporarily to 17 per cent next year, but will fall below 12 per cent again starting in 2023 as Ottawa increases the national immigration target to 421,000.

Beyond the current labour crunch, the CAQ’s immigration policy will leave the province even less well equipped to face the budgetary pressures caused by an increasingly aging population. At 19.7 per cent, the proportion of Quebeckers over the age of 65 exceeded the national average of 18 per cent in 2020. Quebec also has fewer residents under the age of 20 than the rest of Canada, while the size of its working-aged population has been shrinking.

Mr. Legault, who is up for re-election in 2022, continues to portray immigration as a threat to Quebec’s distinct culture. But his policies are damaging his province’s economic prospects and reducing its political influence within Canada. How can that be good for Quebec’s cultural survival?

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-amid-quebec-labour-crunch-legault-spurns-business-demands-for-more/

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Human rights hearing on allegations of racial profiling of migrant workers caught in mass DNA sweep begins

2021/11/25 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario will hear Monday from migrant workers who allege they were racially targeted by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) as part of a DNA sweep in connection to a 2013 sexual assault investigation.

The 54 applicants argue that the indiscriminate manner in which the DNA sweep was conducted violated their rights under Ontario’s Human Rights Code.

The OPP swabbed 96 Black and brown migrant farm workers from mostly Caribbean countries working on at least five farms in Elgin County, in southwestern Ontario, in 2013 as officers searched for a suspect in a sexual assault.

But human rights lawyer Shane Martínez, who is representing the migrant workers pro bono, says most workers who were swabbed did not fit the physical description of the suspect except for the colour of their skin.

“Workers were West Indian, workers were black from Jamaica, workers with long dreadlocks, ones who were bald — one worker had gold teeth,” Martínez said. “They were as diverse a group as you could potentially imagine.”

“When they tried to provide explanations as to [where they were] and they provided alibis, the police completely disregarded those and wanted nothing more than to collect their DNA because of how they looked.”

The suspect, meanwhile, was described as between 5-10 and six feet tall, black, with no facial hair and a low voice that might have a Jamaican accent.

The sexual assault survivor told police her attacker was muscular and possibly in his mid-to-late 20s. She said she was confident the perpetrator was a migrant worker and believed she’d seen him near her home in rural southwestern Ontario.

‘I didn’t want to risk my livelihood’

Dwayne Henry recalls being asked to provide a DNA swab eight years ago.

Hailing from Jamaica, Henry says while he was nervous, he initially felt assured when the police approached him.

“We were scared, but knowing this was Canada, this was the first world, I thought I was doing something keeping with the law,” said Henry. “We know what police can do back in our country.”

Henry, who now lives in Stratford, Ont., said he was with his girlfriend at the time of the assault and had dreadlocks that did not match the suspect’s description. But he says that made no difference in the investigation.

Now that he’s a permanent resident, Henry says he could clearly see that both his employer and the police pressured him to comply.

“I think at that time they were taking advantage of us just because we were migrant workers,” said Henry. “We were scared that we were going to be sent back home. This is the place [where we are the] breadwinner for our family, you know?”

Henry says the investigation continues to follow him and his reputation, even back in his home country. That’s why he became part of the human rights claim.

“To this day, it still has a dent in my life.”

Samples didn’t match DNA from scene

Police would later tell an independent review into what happened in 2013 that due to the seasonal agricultural worker program, they felt they had to act fast to find the perpetrator before he left the country.

On Nov. 30, 2013, Henry Cooper, a migrant farm worker from Trinidad and Tobago was arrested after suspicions around his unwillingness to provide a DNA swab and conversations with his employer led to the OPP surveilling him in hopes of getting a discarded sample of his DNA.

He eventually pleaded guilty to sexual assault with a weapon, forcible confinement and uttering death threats and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

In 2016, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) released its report based on a complaint put forth by Justicia for Migrant Workers, a volunteer-run collective that advocates for the rights of migrant workers.

At least 11 other stakeholders made submissions to be considered during the review, including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

The report found that while the investigation failed to “recognize the particular vulnerabilities of the migrant worker community targeted by the DNA canvass,” it was not motivated by racial prejudice.

It also questioned whether the “consents obtained were truly informed and voluntary.”

In his report, Gerry McNeilly, the police review director at the time, recommended the OPP adopt a policy on canvassing for DNA that could also be used by other police services.

When asked if the OPP had implemented this recommendation — and the report’s six others, which included training for officers on DNA canvassing and communication surrounding the collection and destruction of DNA — OPP spokesperson Bill Dickson said it “reviewed [the report’s] contents and continues to address the recommendations that were made in the OIPRD review.”

When pressed about what that meant, he replied as follows: “Any further comment would be inappropriate in order to preserve the integrity of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario hearing.”

Martínez says despite acknowledgement of the OPP’s shortcomings, the independent police review did not match the standards of a human rights tribunal in determining racial discrimination — which is one of the reasons the workers moved ahead with their claim.

All of the officers interviewed by the independent police review director said they had told the migrant workers that their decision to participate in the DNA swabbing was voluntary — and that the decision would be kept confidential from their employers so as not to affect their job security.

But the report found the officers failed to do that.

After learning that a few workers had refused to do the DNA test, the main employer “made the decision that none of these men would be invited back to work for our company in the future unless they consented to take [the] test,” the report found.

Case delayed for years

The application to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario was filed in 2015.

While the COVID-19 pandemic created some delay in getting to a hearing, Martínez alleges the OPP also tried to have the case quashed.

Martínez says the OPP tried to have the application dismissed because it was filed two years after the DNA swab instead of within the typical one-year deadline.

But he said a pre-tribunal hearing found that the filing delay was “sustained in good faith” and it noted that the applicants are part of a vulnerable population.

A class-action lawsuit on behalf of anyone whose DNA was taken by the OPP in relation to these types of investigations has also been certified.

The lawsuit alleges the Centre of Forensic Sciences has retained DNA profiles in a database, even though the material gathered did not match that of the suspect in the criminal investigation.

Although the 2016 independent police review states that all of the migrant workers’ samples were destroyed in 2014, a spokesperson for Justicia for Migrant Workers says the workers don’t have faith the samples and their profiles are gone — and were never made aware their DNA profiles would be entered into a database.

“These are widespread issues of privacy, of privacy infringement, of racial injustice that I think all of us in the community need to be concerned [about],” said Chris Ramsaroop. This is a systemic practice and policing that’s flawed.”

Fighting for recognition

According to Justicia for Migrant Workers, the case is the first human rights hearing of its kind in Canada to examine allegations of systemic racial profiling and discrimination by the police of migrant farm workers.

“Many of the workers wanted to just basically put this incident past them, and there were other workers who were still fearful of repatriation,” Ramsaroop said. “But the fact that we had 54 of the 96 workers take part in this I think is phenomenal. This speaks to the level of outrage that exists within this community.”

Henry says he’s fighting for recognition, compensation and justice so that other people don’t have to go through something similar.

“We are taking a stand to protect the rights of migrant workers who are coming,” Henry said. “I’m doing this not just because of us; I’m doing this for other migrant workers also.”

Source: Human rights hearing on allegations of racial profiling of migrant workers caught in mass DNA sweep begins

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism, Racism

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