Closing the Canada-U.S. asylum border agreement loophole? Not so fast

2019/03/27 Leave a comment

Sean Rehaag of Osgoode Law School on the STCA and discussions regarding expanding it to cover non-official points of entry:

According to media reports, Bill Blair, Canada’s minister of border security, is attempting to close a loophole in the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA).

The agreement allows Canada to send asylum-seekers back to the United States without hearing their refugee claims (and allows the U.S. the same option for those going in the other direction). The loophole is that the STCA only applies to asylum-seekers who present themselves at official land ports-of-entry.

Since President Donald Trump was elected, around 40,000 asylum seekers have used this loophole by crossing into Canada from the U.S. at places other than official ports-of-entry. They are not trying to sneak into Canada undetected. Rather, they cross the border irregularly to avoid being turned away under the STCA and then approach Canadian authorities to make refugee claims.

The number of irregular border-crossers has declined recently, with fewer than 1,000 in January 2019. What’s more, while the overall number of refugee claims made in Canada has been higher than usual in the past two years, it is not far off historical norms.

Nonetheless, the additional 40,000 refugee claims have produced pressures on the refugee determination system and on provincial social programs. There has also been political pushback, with calls from the Conservative party for the government to stem the flow.

However, closing the STCA loophole is a complicated proposition.

Blair reportedly wants irregular border-crossers to be taken to official ports-of-entry and processed as if they had presented themselves there directly. In other words, the STCA would apply both at official ports-of-entry and elsewhere.

To make this work, the U.S. would need to agree, which is the first complication.

More asylum-seekers come to Canada

The purpose of the STCA from a Canadian perspective was to force the U.S. to take responsibility for asylum-seekers who travel to Canada via the United States. Canada had long wanted the STCA because the flow of asylum-seekers is asymmetrical. Far more asylum-seekers come to Canada from the U.S. than the reverse.

For the same reason, the United States has long refused to agree to the STCA. That only changed after 9-11, when Canada offered the U.S. greater border security integration in exchange for the STCA.

Canada now wants to expand the STCA, so the question is: What will Canada have to give the U.S. to get them to agree?

One might expect quite a lot, given that Trump has shown little interest in taking steps that would result in thousands of asylum-seekers who would otherwise go to Canada remaining in the U.S.

The need for a quid pro quo raises a second complication. The STCA is being challenged in Canadian courts by human rights organizations who say that the U.S. is not safe for refugees and that the STCA violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Given the anti-refugee policies of the Trump administration, there is a good chance that courts will strike down the STCA. By negotiating expansions to the STCA without waiting to see whether the regime is upheld, there is a real risk that anything Canada gives to the U.S. in exchange will be for naught.

A third complication: Even if Canada gets the U.S. to agree to expand the STCA, and even if the regime is upheld by the courts, the impact of any expansion is likely to be both counterproductive and dangerous.

A dangerous incentive

If asylum-seekers who are intercepted at irregular border crossings are returned to the U.S., this will create a strong incentive for such asylum-seekers to cross the border without being intercepted.

Currently, irregular border crossings are manageable and organized. Most occur in a single, well-monitored location in Québec. That crossing is not dangerous. Border officials and RCMP are present. Irregular border-crossers immediately enter into immigration and refugee processing, which includes health, criminality and security screening.

Other countries that have tried to stem flows of asylum-seekers by closing off safe and manageable routes have had a common experience. The flows do not stop but are instead diverted into more remote and hence more dangerous routes. Organized crime gets involved, bringing increased security risks and violence. The inevitable result is lost lives and decreased border security.

In the end, the political pressure on the government to be seen doing something on this file may outweigh these policy considerations. But politics lead to a fourth complication.

During the last federal election campaign, Justin Trudeau distinguished himself from former prime minister Stephen Harper partly through a more compassionate response to the Syrian refugee crisis and the death of Alan Kurdi — himself a tragic victim of cat-and-mouse games between smugglers and governments seeking to keep refugees at bay.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Prime Minister Trudeau further sought the moral high ground when, in response to the president’s anti-refugee policies, he famously tweeted Canadians will welcome those fleeing persecution.

There is no way to close the STCA loophole without the Liberal party turning its back on those progressive values, on the eve of a federal election campaign.

In this context, attempting to expand the STCA may not only be bad policy, it may also be bad politics.

Source: Closing the Canada-U.S. asylum border agreement loophole? Not so fast

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Previous housing data understated number of non-resident buyers in Vancouver and Toronto

2019/03/26 Leave a comment

The importance of good data and how it could have made a difference in public discussion and debate (not that the real estate industry is likely to change its position given its business interests). Particularly worrisome that a government agency, CMHC, got it so wrong in 2015 with a flawed methodology:

Not so long ago, real estate industry and government officials were doing their best to shut down concerns that skyrocketing housing prices in Vancouver and Toronto were related to non-resident buying.

As it turns out, they were very wrong.

“Basically, if we put every residential property unit that was built in the city of Vancouver from 2006 to 2017 into a single building, every tenth unit [and a bit more] would have been owned by somebody who doesn’t live in the country,” says Andy Yan, urban planner and director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program.

The CMHC condo survey of 2015, a busy year for the real estate market, maintained that foreign ownership of condos was low in metro Vancouver and metro Toronto, at 3.5 and 3.3 per cent respectively.

In 2016, Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation chief executive Evan Siddall told the Vancouver Board of Trade that blaming foreign buying was creating an “unhealthy tension” between “existing residents and newer arrivals.” Instead, he pointed to local investors, population growth and lack of supply as the big factors in Vancouver’s affordability crisis.

But the CMHC’s latest Housing Market Insight report, released last week, shows the previously released data were off by as much as two to three times the actual rate of non-resident participation in home ownership. Based upon the new study, the numbers are actually 11.2 for metro Vancouver and 7.6 for metro Toronto.

The CMHC’s new Housing Market Insight report, in partnership with Statistics Canada, now reveals the extent of non-resident buying in Vancouver. The CMHC had begun releasing its Condominium Apartment Survey in 2014, after collecting information on non-resident ownership, in response to the affordability crisis. But the CMHC only had access to condo data and its methodology was limited. It partnered with Statistics Canada to form the Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP), to address the major gaps in data on housing. In 2017, as part of the federal budget, StatsCan got extra funding to delve deeper into offshore buying, which is when the data got more interesting – and far more accurate. It meant that instead of interviewing building managers about the number of foreign owners in the buildings – an obviously problematic method – the CMHC had data from Canada Revenue Agency and the provincial land titles office to verify tax residency.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation is the rate of non-resident participation in the buying of newly built condos across the region.

“Of the housing units owned by non-residents, 55 per cent are condos,” says Jordan Nanowski, senior CMHC analyst and co-author of the report.

Where non-resident ownership is concerned, metro Vancouver overshadowed Toronto by a wide margin. And new builds were a particular draw. Non-resident owners played a part in 19.2 per cent of Vancouver condos built between 2016 and 2017. In other words, almost 20 per cent of condos built that year had at least one non-resident on title. In Toronto, meanwhile, the number falls to a mere 9 per cent.

Mr. Yan dug deeper into the CHSP data, and came up with more numbers. Non-residents have participated in the ownership of a shocking 14 per cent of all housing types built in the city of Vancouver in the past decade (as in, at least one person who owns the property is a non-resident). For metro Vancouver, that rate is 11.2 per cent. For the city of Toronto, the rate is 8 per cent; metro Toronto is 5.2 per cent.

In Coquitlam, B.C., 20.8 per cent of new condos had at least one non-resident on title. In Surrey, B.C., the figure is 20.5 per cent of condos in that time period. Burnaby, B.C., is at 25.1 per cent. Richmond, B.C., has the highest percentage of all, at a whopping 25.8 per cent, he says.

“In Richmond, condos built between 2016 to 2017, we’re talking about 26 per cent have non-resident participation. That’s one in four.”

The numbers are big in the broader housing market picture as well, with 7.8 per cent of all single detached houses built in metro Vancouver from 2006 to 2017 owned by at least one non-resident purchaser. For condos, the numbers jumps to 18 per cent of all condos built in that time period.

“This is something that people have denied for so long,” Mr. Yan says. “It measures a form of foreign ownership that many have denied was happening, and in proportions that few could imagined.”

Mr. Nanowski says that non-resident participation tended to increase when density increased and prices increased. Across all age groups, non-residents tended to own more expensive homes. But a number that stood out for him was the higher prices of detached homes owned by non-residents in the city of Vancouver. Detached homes in the city owned by non-residents were, on average, assessed at $1.1-million more than those owned by residents. In Toronto, the difference of a detached house owned by resident and non-resident was only $89,000.

“Big difference,” Mr. Nanowski said. “Yes, non-resident premiums are largest in Vancouver and the prevalences are largest in Vancouver as well.”

Using new methodology, the crown corporation has revealed that many properties have a mix of resident and non-resident ownership. They analyzed this mix in the category of “non-resident participation,” meaning at least one owner on title was a non-resident. Put another way, at least one person on title is a non-tax resident, which means they do not have a principal tax residence in Canada. They earn their income and pay their income taxes elsewhere. This is a key difference from the CMHC’s previous methodology, which was to define “non-resident” ownership as a property that was owned entirely by non-residents, or majority-owned by non-residents.

The definition of a “non-resident” is someone whose principal residence is outside of Canada, irrespective of their nationality.

Also, these rates do not include pre-sale purchases, or what units were not owner-occupied and held as investments. The study authors did not provide data on the source countries of origin for non-resident owners.

“The summary of all this is the globalization of Canadian residential real estate,” Mr. Yan said, “and what are you going to do or not do about it, on a federal, provincial and local policy basis? This is about transparency, taxation and fairness, and how we build housing and for who, in our communities.”

Mr. Nanowski says the previous data they used weren’t flawed, but useful for following trends. The new data is much more comprehensive, he says.

“When we look at this data, we want to compare it to itself only, as a kind of cross section and not compare it to previous data. Because there is a change in methodology,” he says.

Josh Gordon, assistant professor at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University, says that the delay of such important data has likely been a setback. He points out that industry voices used the previously limited CMHC data to bolster their arguments that foreign buying was exaggerated. Prof. Gordon had questioned the CMHC’s reports at the time, and received some flak for it.

“Imagine in 2015 if we had a sense that non-resident buyers were buying 15 per cent or so of new condos. How would that have changed the nature of the debate? Would that not have indicated that there was an issue that needed addressing?,” Prof. Gordon asks.

“Those who wanted to push back against possible restrictions were able to use the ‘authority’ of the CMHC in the debate to good effect, and this delayed possible policy action. More accurate data would have helped build the case for policy restrictions, and that might have mitigated the sharp escalation of prices.”

Mr. Yan found it ironic that the report was released the same week as the City of Vancouver announced its annual homeless count was underway.

“Perversely, this week saw the release of measures on two drastically different ends of Vancouver’s housing situation. With the CMHC release, we see the numbers of homeowners who don’t live in the country, juxtaposed with Vancouver doing its homeless count of those who actually live here, but don’t have the benefit of a home.”

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UN Compact needs a substantive discussion, says ex-Harper aide

2019/03/26 2 Comments

Interesting the focus on the Global Compact but I understand that the panel’s discussion was more wide ranging. It is hard to argue against more discussion and debate over any issue, including the Global Compact (although I find the fears overblown).

However, the question arises whether a more open discussion of the Global Compact in the Citizenship and Immigration committee have assuaged fears over its actual and potential impact and altered some of the political posturing (virtue signalling) on both sides or not:

Canada needs to have a substantive policy debate about the UN Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, and how it will influence domestic law, said Rachel Curran, former Harper-era staffer, at a panel discussing Canada’s immigration policy.

Speaking at the Manning Networking Conference on Sunday, Ms. Curran recalled that, last year, when the Trudeau government announced it would sign the first-of-its-kind compact on migration, there was immediate backlash from the other side.

There’s been a lot of rhetoric, but not enough policy analysis, she said, attributing the lack of substantive debate prior to its adoption to the Trudeau government. “[It] does Canadians a real disservice,” Ms. Curran, who served as then-prime minister Stephen Harper’s director of policy, said in a post-panel interview.

When asked why the Conservative party itself hasn’t had the policy conversation, Ms. Curran said she doesn’t think political parties have the appropriate resources to do a detailed policy analysis.

“When a party is in opposition, in particular, its capacity to do policy work and policy analysis is eroded quite significantly,” she said.

She would like to see the Opposition Leader’s Office and the Conservative Party to do some more digging, but the primary responsibility lies with the government, she said, as it has more resources.

“The opposition party, its primary role is to oppose the government, right? They don’t have a policy shop, or a host of policy analysts or experts who are on call to answer those questions,” she said after the panel.

Ms. Curran spoke alongside Tim Uppal, a former Harper-era minister of state for democratic reform, and later multiculturalism, and Eric Duhaime, Quebec radio host and commentator. The panel, centred on a discussion about Canada’s immigration and refugee policies, including the arrival of irregular migrants and the contention that conservatives are anti-immigration, was moderated by Andrew Lawton, an unsuccessful Progressive Conservative candidate in last year’s Ontario elections. The annual Manning conference is organized by the Manning Centre, headed by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, and brings together conservatives to discuss and debate political issues.

The rhetoric around the UN migration compact has deemed those opposed to it as racist, said Ms. Curran, and given that Conservatives won’t want to talk about “issues around racism for the entire campaign,” they probably won’t bring it up.

“But again, that does a real disservice to Canadians who want to know what’s in it,” she said.

In response to a question about how Canada should address the UN Global Compact, Ms. Curran said during the panel that the point of these international agreements is to influence international law, and eventually, domestic policy. Canada should figure out, for example, if it would have an impact on how it responds to the issue of irregular migrants from the U.S.

“There’s never been really, I think, a truly honest and detailed discussion about what’s in the compact and how it’s intended to influence our domestic law over time,” she said.

The compact is not a legally binding document and is grounded in state sovereignty, responsibility sharing, non-discrimination, and human rights. It aims to foster a collaborative approach among the 160 signatory nations in their response to the leveraging the benefits of migration and addressing the challenges. While Canada was among the 160 countries that signed the agreement in December, the U.S did not.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer (Regina-Qu’Appelle, Sask.) opposed the signing in December, saying it would give foreign entities influence over Canada’s migration system and would erode nations’ sovereignty. “We don’t need a global compact that binds Canada to provisions that are agreed to at the United Nations. We can do that already. … By signing onto this compact, our sovereignty to make those decisions ourselves will be eroded,” Mr. Scheer told reporters in December. Mr. Scheer’s statement on the issue drew criticism from Chris Alexander, an ex-Harper minister of immigration, who said that the compact is “not a legally binding treaty” and that has “no impact on our sovereignty.”

Some demonstrators in the United We Roll rally also expressed their opposition to the compact. Mr. Scheer netted further criticism for speaking at the rally, which was attended by Faith Goldy, a white supremacist and former Rebel Media personality.

Mr. Uppal agreed during the panel with Ms. Curran’s suggestion that it sets a direction, and added he’s happy that Mr. Scheer opposed its signing.

Mr. Duhaime, for his part, said during the panel that, Canada needs to close its borders in all places other than designated ports of entry.

“We cannot welcome people by asking them to break the law,” he said, adding the government should negotiate with Washington so that, no matter what, no one can cross at non-official points of entry.

All three panellists said they supported a fair, compassionate, and orderly migration system, suggesting that anti-immigrant rhetoric gains traction only when the file is mishandled by the government, but there is still strong support for immigration in Canada. Canada takes in about 300,000 immigrants annually, but the numbers are expected to rise to 340,000 by 2021.

Irregular migration issue also discussed

On the issue of irregular migration, the three panellists said the Liberal government has failed to get a handle on it.

Policy decisions by U.S. President Donald Trump have led refugee claimants in the U.S. to seek refugee status in Canada in fear that their claims will be denied. Under the Third Safety Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S., those who cross at official ports of entry in Canada from will be forced to turn back. That has led refugee claimants to cross the border at non-designated entry points, where they are apprehended by the RCMP, and are able to file their claims.

International refugee agreements mean the government must allow those on Canadian soil to make claims, regardless of how they got across the border.

Quebec and Manitoba, in particular, have had to contend with the arrival of refugee claimants more so than other provinces, according to numbers from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. In 2017, there were 20,593 RCMP interceptions that resulted in asylum claims. About 18,000 were in Quebec, while about 1,000 were in Manitoba. In 2018, that total number dropped to 19,419 claims, with roughly 18,500 in Quebec,  and some 400 in Manitoba.

So far this calendar year, the RCMP has intercepted 1,696 refugee claimants, with about 1,670 in Quebec and two in Manitoba.

The Liberals have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the issue since early 2017. Budget 2019 budget proposed another $1.18-billion over five years, with the aim of strengthening the border. Some $55-million for year after was proposed.

“In recent years, elevated numbers of asylum seekers, including those that have crossed into Canada irregularly, have challenged the fairness and effectiveness of Canada’s asylum system,” according to the budget.

Some $450-million of the money is earmarked for the Immigration Canada, while $382-million will go to Canada Border Services Agency, and $208-million is for the Immigration and Refugee Board, which reviews claims.s

Mr. Duhaime said the current backlog of claims is unsustainable and is “going nowhere,” and a new government should better secure the borders.

“It’s not fair for those people; it’s not fair for those who entered legally; and it’s not fair for taxpayers,” he said.

Refugee advocates have disputed the notion that there’s a queue for making a refugee claim.

Ms. Curran said that a new government should work with other countries to stop the flow in the first place, but also to work at speeding up the claims process. The hearings  can take years and are likely to be appealed.

People know how long the process takes and use it to their advantage, Ms. Curran said, so speeding up the process could create a disincentive for those trying to game the system.

Source: UN Compact needs a substantive discussion, says ex-Harper aide

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Supreme Court Rules Against Immigration Rights In Detention Case

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

Unfortunate. Should be a limit:

In a blow to immigrant rights, the Supreme Court voted Tuesday in favor of detaining immigrants with criminal records indefinitely pending deportation hearings, even if their cases were adjudicated years before.

The court’s 5-4 ruling overturns the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which limited federal officials to denying bail only if they take immigrants without U.S. citizenship into custody immediately after their release from criminal custody, CNN reports.

In the case brought before the Supreme Court, a group of mostly green card holders said they should be entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge to prove they do not pose a flight risk and are not a danger to the community, NBC News reports.

The five conservative justices voting for the decision argued the U.S. government has limited resources to detain all convicted immigrants immediately after release, so they should be allowed to detain them without bail months or years later.

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

“It runs the gravest risk of depriving those whom the government has detained of one of the oldest and most important of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms: the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law,” Breyer said. He added that the “greater importance of the case lies in the power” afforded to the government.

Under federal immigration law, immigrants with criminal records facing deportation proceedings are subject to mandatory detention, and can be held indefinitely without a bond hearing, even after completing their sentences.

The American Civil Liberties Union responded to the ruling on Twitter and said the government’s interpretation of the statute “has resulted in gross violations of due process for thousands.”

Source: Supreme Court Rules Against Immigration Rights In Detention Case

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Québec évoque un nouvel accompagnement pour mieux intégrer les immigrants

2019/03/25 Leave a comment

While Quebec reduces the number of immigrants, it also invests in integration programs (reducing the gap between the federal government’s block grant to Quebec and Quebec’s actual expenditures):

Le Québec étant aux prises avec des pénuries de main-d’oeuvre à divers degrés dans plusieurs secteurs et régions, le budget du gouvernement Legault a évoqué jeudi un nouveau « parcours d’accompagnement personnalisé » pour les immigrants de même que des moyens supplémentaires annuels de 146 millions au ministère de l’Immigration, de la Diversité et de l’Inclusion. Les détails du parcours seront annoncés plus tard.

Les sommes destinées à l’immigrationreprésentent une hausse de 42 % du budget du ministère, a fait remarquer le Syndicat de professionnelles et professionnels du gouvernement du Québec (SPGQ). Il s’agit ni plus ni moins que d’une « bouffée d’air frais », a déclaré son président, Richard Perron. Sur cinq ans, les nouvelles sommes totalisent 730 millions.

Les efforts visant une meilleure intégration au marché du travail incluront notamment une amélioration des services à la francisation, a indiqué le ministre des Finances, Eric Girard. Mais dans l’ensemble, les nouvelles façons de faire de Québec toucheront plusieurs aspects de l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants, notamment la planification, la prospection, le recrutement international et la sélection. Le budget mentionne également un soutien aux collectivités qui accueillent des immigrants et aux entreprises.

Le gouvernement Legault a confirmé en décembre 2018 qu’il comptait réduire de 53 000 à 40 000 le seuil annuel d’immigration, ce qui avait déçu le milieu des affaires, notamment le Conseil du patronat, qui décrit ces travailleurs comme un bassin « essentiel » pour combler les besoins de main-d’oeuvre de la prochaine décennie.

Le Québec est « ouvert aux immigrants », a dit M. Girard dans son discours, ajoutant que « cette immigration doit cependant répondre aux besoins de main-d’oeuvre existants dans toutes les régions du Québec ».

Source: Québec évoque un nouvel accompagnement pour mieux intégrer les immigrants

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Chris Selley: Look who’s talking tough on border security now

2019/03/22 Leave a comment

We will see if the US administration is really willing to accept such a change to the STCA given their overall anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. Why would the US do this favour for Canada as there is nothing in it for them?

But Selley’s observations of the change in tone and focus are valid:

The federal Liberals have always bristled at the suggestion that tens of thousands of “irregular” border crossers from the United States might constitute a problem. The system, they insist, works just fine. “This process is working to keep us safe,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told The Canadian Press before Christmas, and he accused the Conservatives of deliberately trying to frighten Canadians into believing otherwise. “It’s always easier to try and scare people than to allay fears in a time of anxiety,” he said. In January, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen accused the Conservatives of planning “to militarize the border,” which is certainly not an example of trying to scare people rather than allaying their fears.

One of the ideas the Conservatives have long supported is “closing the loophole” in the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) that allows “irregular” arrivals — those who cross between official border posts — to claim asylum. (There’s no point blaming them: If they tried to arrive “regularly,” they would be turned back.) The idea has long been dismissed as unworkable, if not unconstitutional.

But wouldn’t you know it, in an interview with The Globe and Mail this week, Border Security Minister Bill Blair said he was in negotiations with Washington on precisely this point.

“If, for example, there was an agreement of the United States to accept back those people that are crossing at the end of Roxham Road (in Champlain, N.Y.), then Canadian officials … could theoretically take them back to a regular point of entry … and give effect to (the STCA) regulations at that place,” Blair said — i.e., would-be asylum-seekers actually apprehended crossing the border would be sent back.

It’s not clear why the Americans would agree to this: If thousands of non-citizens want to decamp and take their chances in Canada’s refugee determination system, one suspects President Donald Trump would be most inclined to let them. But it’s intriguing enough the Canadian government now wants to be seen pursuing the idea.

“Closing the loophole” might be difficult to negotiate, but unlike everything else the Liberals have tried, it would almost certainly accomplish the goal they can never quite admit to having: To keep these people away. The most resourceful and desperate migrants would try to sneak across the border and claim asylum inland, once it couldn’t be proven how they arrived — a dangerous and potentially deadly undertaking and an invitation to human smugglers, Liberals would argue if they were in opposition. But that’s infinitely more complex an undertaking than packing your suitcases, bundling up the kids and clambering over the border into a waiting RCMP car. The vast majority of people would be dissuaded.

It’s clear enough heading into the election campaign that the Liberals want to be seen fighting irregular border crossers rather than managing them as the legitimate asylum-seekers they always insisted they were.

The federal budget’s section on border security, meanwhile, is altogether extraordinary. It claims that “elevated numbers of asylum seekers, including those that have crossed into Canada irregularly, have challenged the fairness and effectiveness of Canada’s asylum system.” It proposes to target “individuals who cross Canadian borders irregularly and try to exploit Canada’s immigration system.” It moots “legislative amendments … to better manage, discourage and prevent irregular migration.”

This is the same government that has sworn blind no one is jumping any queue, that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the system no matter whence they arrive, that the system is working perfectly — all repudiated in a single paragraph.

It adds up to a $1.18 billion commitment over five years. And the proposals are vague enough that Finance Minister Bill Morneau doesn’t seem to understand what they entail: “If someone comes across the border (and) claims asylum, we want to make sure we process that quickly so they either are moved back to where they came from, if it’s inappropriate, or in the case where they are legitimately seeking asylum, we deal with them in a compassionate and rapid way,” he told reporters on Tuesday. That’s baffling. How do you decide what’s an “appropriate” or “legitimate” claim without adjudicating the damn thing?

Nevertheless, it’s clear enough heading into the election campaign that the Liberals want to be seen fighting irregular border crossers rather than managing them as the legitimate asylum-seekers they always insisted they were. The way to do the latter would be to spend scads more money hiring scads more people than they already have to adjudicate asylum claims as normal — only much, much quicker. That was what refugee advocates argued for nearly 20 years ago, when hundreds of people headed north for fear of a post-9/11 immigration crackdown. Refugee advocates lost the argument; the STCA, ratified under Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government, put an end to the northbound queues at border crossings; and most everyone in Canada instantly forgot those people ever existed.

A significant political headache had been expertly healed. It’s both telling and appropriate, as Trudeau’s government rapidly abandons its touchy-feely schtick, that the Liberals would land again on a “get tough” approach at the border.

Source: Chris Selley: Look who’s talking tough on border security now

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Canada set to begin collecting data on travellers leaving country

2019/03/21 Leave a comment

Long overdue for the reasons listed in the article as well as other benefits:  better data on immigrant retention and compliance with residency requirements for medicare:

Ottawa will soon start collecting data on every person leaving Canada by land and air in a bid to identify and track anyone from potential terrorists to snowbirds who lie about their residency to claim government benefits.

The new measures, expected to take effect later this year, aim to strengthen border security, enforce residency requirements for permanent residents and pinpoint those who fail to leave the country as required.

It is not known how many visitors who’ve overstayed their welcome, failed asylum seekers and criminals the new “exit” system will catch, but both Employment and Social Development Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency, which will have access to the data, are expected to nab many Canadians who are outside of the country and ineligible to receive further benefit payments.

The estimated savings for the government in employment insurance and old age security over 10 years could add up to $206 million, plus another $151 million in family and child tax credits and other benefits, according to an analysis of the proposed changes to the Customs Act published Saturday.

The Canadian Snowbird Association has been following the exit control changes closely and warns its 100,000 members against breaking U.S. immigration law by overstaying beyond the six-month limit and risking the loss of their federal benefits such as old age security and guaranteed income supplements.

“The move between the U.S. and Canada is inevitable and we are reminding our members to be mindful of the limitation on their time travelling abroad,” said Evan Rachkovsky, the association’s spokesperson.

Canada Border Services Agency does not currently collect exit information from commercial air carriers on travellers and only has access to U.S. records of foreign nationals and Canadian permanent residents arriving from Canada at land ports of entry.

The new reporting scheme — a final phase of what’s known as the “Entry/Exit Initiative,” similar to programs in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe — will allow Canadian officials to track the 97 per cent of all outbound travellers who leave the country by land and air. The effort will ultimately be expanded to travel by rail and sea. Officials will start collecting land exit data this summer, followed by air-travel data within 12 months.

“The government cannot easily determine who is inside or outside the country at any given time, which adversely impacts Canada’s ability to manage the border and support pressing and substantial public policy objectives related to national security, law enforcement and federal program integrity,” the border agency said in its 35-page report published in the Canada Gazette.

“By implementing a new regulatory framework that prescribes the source, time, manner and circumstance related to the collection of information, the CBSA would have access to reliable, timely and accurate information that could be effectively safeguarded and managed.”

Immigration policy analyst and lawyer Richard Kurland said this marks a shift to a “continuum tracking” system, where people’s movements are going to be monitored by the government.

“People do not know, generally, that by consenting to Canada, they also consent to having their personal information donated to other countries, such as the U.S.A., due to the many information-sharing agreements between Canada and other countries,” said Kurland.

“Canadians cannot fix information that goes to other countries, and it is a real issue. You may be wrongly netted by the system. Mistakes are going to happen, and there is no oversight, monitoring, or control over the system.”

Right now, commercial air carriers are required to provide Canadian border officials with advance information that identifies air travellers and flight crew arriving on international flights. Officials rely on passengers to provide the information on customs declaration cards or electronically via the primary inspection kiosk, with travellers self-declaring the date they originally left Canada.

The proposed exit control measures will operate similarly with Canadian officials collecting basic biographic information — name, nationality, date of birth, gender and time and place of departure — from airlines on all passengers leaving Canada, in the form of electronic passenger manifests.

Canada already receives information from the U.S. on departures of foreign nationals and permanent residents at land ports of entry. The new rules will expand to include records of Canadian citizens entering the U.S. by land.

The federal auditor general’s office has in the past highlighted a number of security concerns stemming from the absence of reliable exit data, the border agency report says.

“In recent years, the Government of Canada has seen a number of individuals travelling to foreign destinations to engage in terrorist activities,” the report says.

“These individuals often pose a danger to countries in which they operate and may become a direct threat to Canadians upon their return to Canada through acquiring combat experience and training and potentially establishing terrorist networks and recruitment capabilities,” the report adds.

Ottawa said the exit data will help officials:

  • Identify outbound movement of known high-risk travellers;
  • Track visitors who overstay their visa and remain in Canada illegally;
  • Verify travel dates to assess applicable duties, tax exemptions and benefits for returning residents;
  • And check if permanent residents returning to Canada have fulfilled their physical residence requirement to maintain their status or qualify for citizenship.

Data collection on air travellers is expected to take longer to implement because it requires commercial air carriers to register, test and certify that they meet the government-specific IT requirements. The whole scheme is expected to cost about $110 million, with almost $80 million assumed by the federal government and the rest by the commercial air industry. Airlines failing to provide the information will face fines.

Once fully implemented, personal information collected under the Entry/Exit Initiative will be retained for up to 15 years, after which it will be purged — unless it is otherwise required to be retained under Canadian law.

Meghan McDermott, a staff counsel of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said Canadians should be concerned about the sharing of the personal data among government agencies and with foreign partners. “It’s a vast new collection of data … I don’t know what recourse we have and where to go,” when inaccurate personal information has to be corrected, she said.

Both the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the Security Intelligence Review Committee must constantly monitor the program and provide independent oversight to prevent abuse and breach of privacy and civil liberties, McDermott said.

Changes to the Customs Act received royal assent in December. The public has until mid-April to submit feedback.

Source: Canada set to begin collecting data on travellers leaving country

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Canada’s becoming a tech hub thanks to Donald Trump immigration policies

2019/03/21 Leave a comment

One of the rare benefits to Canada of the Trump administration:

US companies are going to keep hiring foreign tech workers, even as the Trump administration makes doing so more difficult. For a number of US companies that means expanding their operations in Canada, where hiring foreign nationals is much easier.

Demand for international workers remained high this year, according to a new Envoy Global survey of more than 400 US hiring professionals, who represent big and small US companies and have all had experience hiring foreign employees.

Some 80 percent of employers expect their foreign worker headcount to either increase or stay the same in 2019, according to Envoy, which helps US companies navigate immigration laws.

That tracks with US government immigration data, which shows a growing number of applicants for high-skilled tech visas, known as H-1Bs, despite stricter policies toward immigration. H-1B recipients are all backed by US companies that say they are in need of specialized labor that isn’t readily available in the US — which, in practice, includes a lot of tech workers.

Major US tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have all been advocating for quicker and more generous high-skilled immigration policies. To do so they’ve increased lobbying spending on immigration.

CompeteAmerica, a pro-immigration coalition of employers whose members include Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, wrote to Homeland Security last fall saying that Trump’s immigration policies were bad for business and their employees.

Business Roundtable, an association of top US CEOs that includes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and IBM’s Ginni Rometty, expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to Homeland Security last year.

“Due to a shortage of green cards for workers, many employees find themselves stuck in an immigration process lasting more than a decade. These employees must repeatedly renew their temporary work visas during this lengthy and difficult process,” the group wrote in August. “Out of fairness to these employees — and to avoid unnecessary costs and complications for American businesses — the US government should not change the rules in the middle of the process.”

So far, these efforts haven’t accomplished much.

Recent immigration data shows the US is issuing fewer total visas to these types of workers than in previous years. This is a result of an executive order Trump issued in 2017 to review the H-1B process and make good on his pledge to “Hire American.”

It’s also made the whole process of sourcing these workers much more difficult, which in turn makes the hiring process more expensive. Some 60 percent of applications required additional paperwork in the last quarter of 2018, twice as much as two years earlier.

For the most part, the reason US companies are hiring international tech labor is because there aren’t enough skilled Americans to do that work.

This is a systemic problem that has its roots in a lack of pertinent science, or STEM, education. Indeed, the number of STEM job openings outpaces the number of unemployed STEM workers, according to a report by the New American Economy, a bipartisan business coalition launched by Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch. The organization found that 23 percent of all STEM workers in the US are immigrants.

Our loss is Canada’s gain

To get the tech talent they need, US companies are hiring outside the US, with Canada being a common choice.

Sixty-three percent of employers surveyed in the Envoy study are increasing their presence in Canada, either by sending more workers there or by hiring foreign nationals there, according to the Envoy survey. More than half of those did both. Another 65 percent of hiring professionals said Canada’s immigration policies are more favorable to US employers than US policies.

Of those surveyed, 38 percent are thinking about expanding to Canada, while 21 percent already have at least one office there.

And Canada has become a more obvious choice for foreign nationals in the first place.

Kollol Das, a former electronic engineer and gaming startup founder from India who now specializes in machine learning, was offered two high-skilled tech jobs last fall, one based in New York and one based in Toronto.

He immediately chose the latter.

The H-1B process in the US could have taken six months or longer, while the entire process in Canada — from being offered the position to moving to Toronto — took him less than two months. The visa portion of the process took about a week.

“The fact that the whole process is so long made it so that I didn’t even think further ahead,” said Das, who is currently a research lead at Sensibill, a Toronto-based financial services company that uses big data. Had the immigration process been the same? “Then I might have looked more at the kind of role I’d have in each place.”

Canada has weathered similar high-tech worker shortages to the US, but its response has been to welcome immigrants with relatively open arms. Its immigration minister announced last year that Canada would increase the number of immigrants it accepts each year by 40,000, for a total 350,000 in 2021.

Its Global Skills Strategy program — Canada’s equivalent to the H-1B — expedites the immigration process for high-skilled workers to just two weeks or less. Last year, the program brought in more than 12,000 workers, approving 95 percent of applicants. A quarter of those came from India and another quarter came from the US.

Such policies have been a boon for Canadian tech companies.

“I was a serial entrepreneur and I spent most of my career watching a brain drain from Canada,” said Yung Wu, the CEO of MaRS Discovery District, a tech-innovation hub based in Toronto that includes 1,300 entrepreneurial ventures. “This is the first time in my career I’ve seen a brain gain.”

As a result, Wu said MaRS companies saw a more than A 100 percent increase in jobs created in 2017 compared to 2016 — and a nearly 200 percent increase in revenue, for cumulative sales of $3.1 billion. “There’s a really strong correlation between talent and innovation,” Wu said.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Canada has become a major tech hub. Toronto ranked No. 4 last year on CBRE’s tech talent list. That put it just behind San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC, as a top location for tech workers. It also created more new jobs than those top three cities combined.

Another Canadian city, Ottawa, saw the fastest percentage growth in tech employment of any city in the US or Canada.

CBRE, a real estate firm, does this annual report precisely because the location of tech talent dictates so much of the economy — including where companies locate their offices and invest capital.

Immigrants are an integral part of that talent.

“Immigrants create jobs; they don’t take away jobs,” Wu said. “America’s loss right now is Canada’s gain.”

Source: Canada’s becoming a tech hub thanks to Donald Trump immigration policies

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Australia: Scott Morrison moves to insulate looming cut in immigration intake from Christchurch fallout

2019/03/20 Leave a comment

Interesting that no mainstream political party in Canada has talked about urban congestion as an immigration issue. Nor has it been prominent in questions ongoing increases immigration levels:

The Morrison government is clearing the ground for a major shift on immigration policy ahead of the April 2 budget by insisting the debate over congestion must not be “hijacked” by racial and religious fears in the wake of the New Zealand terror attack.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison slammed a growing “tribalism” in public life that distorted debate over issues like immigration and multiculturalism.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush has confirmed there was only one attacker in the mosque shootings

“The worst example being the despicable appropriation of concerns about immigration as a justification for a terrorist atrocity,” he said.

“Such views have rightly been denounced. But equally, so too must the imputation that the motivation for supporting moderated immigration levels is racial hatred.”

The government was preparing to release a new statement on congestion and population this week, ahead of a fall in permanent migration to be revealed in the budget, but held off after Friday’s assault on two mosques triggered a debate over far-right extremism.

Mr Morrison moved to separate the new migration policy from the political argument over extremism by saying a discussion about the annual migrant intake was not a debate about the value of migrants.

“It must not be appropriated as a proxy debate for racial, religious or ethnic sectarianism,” he said.

“Just because Australians are frustrated about traffic jams and population pressures encroaching on their quality of life, especially in this city, does not mean they are anti-migrant or racist.”

The budget is expected to show a fall in the annual intake of permanent migrants from about 190,000 to about 160,000, in line with Mr Morrison’s comments last year about making the growth more sustainable.

While the permanent intake does not include hundreds of thousands of overseas students and temporary workers, the official cut is likely to lead to a fall in projected tax revenue to be confirmed on budget day.

The government is also finalising measures to encourage migrants to work in regional areas after months of debate about sponsorship programs with regional councils.

Mr Morrison warned that the “mindless tribalism” of political debate could undermine practical work on migration and was fuelling a wider hatred in public life that could lead to immense costs.

“We cannot allow such legitimate policy debates to be hijacked like this,” he said in a speech to the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne.

“Managing our population growth is a practical policy challenge that needs answers – answers I will continue to outline as we approach the next election.”

He said this would include road and rail investments as well as setting the migration programme to meet the needs of the economy as well as the “capacity of our cities” and the needs of the regions.

The warning against an “us and them” debate triggered a swift response from Mr Morrison’s critics, who blamed him for fuelling anxiety about migrants and refugees.

“This is the same man who has built his career on scaremongering against people of colour and asylum seekers,” said Tim Lo Surdo, founder of activist group Democracy in Colour.

“Scott Morrison is a professional fear-monger whose desperate scapegoating of the Muslim community over many years has normalised the kind of hatred that was at the root of Friday’s terrorist attack. He has no moral footing to talk about a better standard of public debate.”

Labor frontbencher Ed Husic said Mr Morrison and other Liberals and Nationals shared responsibility for failing to speak up against racism in the past.

Mr Husic said he had been targeted by Liberal opponents who raised his Muslim faith against him during the 2004 election campaign and he did not see Mr Morrison, who was NSW Liberal Party director at the time, express any concerns at the tactics.

“I think there is a need for leadership in political and media circles to be exercised at the right point of time – not some time later when you’re trying to airbrush what’s gone on, but to deal with in the public space,” Mr Husic said.

“People should not be victims of terrorism or extremism regardless of what background or faith they are. We all have a responsibility to speak up and deal with it.”

Mr Morrison’s speech comes at a time of incendiary debate over the responsibility of conservative politicians and some parts of the media, such as conservative commentators at Sky News, for fuelling racial hatreds, even if the same politicians and media outlets express sorrow at the killings in Christchurch.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott dismissed the problem of Islamophobia less than two years ago, while Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was subject to strong criticism from the Muslim community for questioning the contribution of Lebanese Muslims to Australia.

Mr Morrison used his speech to announce $55 million in new funding to offer grants to mosques, churches, synagogues, Hindu temples and religious schools to protect against attacks.

The grants will range in size from $50,000 to $1.5 million and will be made available for safety measures such as closed-circuit television cameras, lighting, fencing, bollards, alarms, security systems and public address systems.

“When I say I believe in religious freedom – and I am one of its staunchest defenders in Parliament – I know it starts with the right to worship and meet safely without fear,” Mr Morrison said.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten also called for caution in public debate but focused his remarks on the media and, especially, the social media platforms that spread the live-streamed video of the first Christchurch attack.

“The traditional media – newspapers, radio stations, television – they have to exercise caution before they publish stories. Now with the new media, with the new social media platforms, we haven’t seen that same caution before something is published,” Mr Shorten said in Perth.

“And after the event, eventually, despicable, dangerous, vile, perverted things get taken down.

“That’s really shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.”

Mr Morrison pointed to a growing extremism in some debate as people interacted only with those they agreed with and showed no respect to those with whom they disagreed.

“As debate becomes more fierce, the retreat to tribalism is increasingly taking over, and for some, extremism takes hold,” he said. “This is true of the left and the right.”

Source: Scott Morrison moves to insulate looming cut in immigration intake from Christchurch fallout

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Trump and His Allies Have Lost the Public Debate Over Immigration

2019/03/20 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of longer-term polling data, where most of the change towards greater acceptance of immigration has occurred among Democrats and independent voters:

In 1979, John Tanton, a Michigan eye doctor and environmentalist, launched the modern nativist movement. He believed that population growth would slow down if poor people stayed in developing countries, where poverty and potentially starvation would keep growth in check, but that if they came to places like the United States in larger numbers, the planet would become more overcrowded. So he founded a group called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which aimed to stop nearly all immigration to the United States. It was initially seen for it what it was: a fringe group based on long-disproven ideas about the planet’s ability to support more people.

Forty years later, FAIR would seem to be in its heyday. At least three former FAIR employees, including its former executive director, have been hired for senior roles at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for legal immigration. And the White House has taken a more sharply anti-immigration stand than in any administration of the modern era.

But when it comes to swaying public opinion to its view that legal immigration should be all but eliminated, FAIR and its offshoots are farther from success than ever.

Twenty-five years ago, Democrats and Republicans felt the same way about immigrants: The Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of both parties agreed they were a burden. Immigration critics were confident that those numbers would increase as a backlash to rising immigration took hold among native-born Americans. Instead, the opposite happened. By the time Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, the share of Democrats and independents who said immigrants strengthen America had nearly doubled, while Republican opinion on the question had barely budged.

And under Trump, anti-immigrant sentiment has fallen even further as the president’s rhetoric about immigrants alienates large swaths of the public. According to a Pew poll from January, 55 percent of Republicans—8 percent fewer than in May 2015—and a record-low 13 percent of Democrats believe that immigrants burden the United States by taking jobs, housing, and health care from native-born Americans. And according to Gallup surveys, 67 percent of Americans now say immigration should be increased or kept at its present level, the highest number since Gallup began asking the question in 1965.

The United States is in the midst of a two-decade-long shift in favor of immigration, and it is only accelerating under Trump. For all the nativist movement’s efforts over the decades to rein in immigration, the chances of preserving a white majority are effectively gone.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/eSlIS/1/

Unlike most environmentalists of his era, Tanton believed ending the era of international migration was essential to stopping population growth and preserving the planet. Frustrated that environmentalists were treating immigration control as taboo, Tanton launched FAIR. His anti-population-growth crusade attracted few followers, but he quickly discovered that tapping into resentment of Latino immigrants held far more potential. So did Dan Stein, who became FAIR’s press secretary in 1982 and has served as its president since 2003. In 1994, as part of an oral history series FAIR was conducting, Stein told Tanton, “What produces the income is evidence of an enemy seeking to produce hostile forces and hostile consequences.”

At the time, it looked like FAIR might succeed. Opposition to immigration was rising in the early nineties amid a dramatic increase in legal immigration from Asia and Latin America, as well as high levels of unauthorized immigration from Mexico. In 1994, voters in California overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187 to bar undocumented immigrants from using government services. Frank Sharry, the founder of the pro-immigration group America’s Voice, expected huge cuts to legal immigration after Republicans regained control of Congress in 1995. A Gallup poll that year showed that only 7 percent of Americans favored more immigration and 65 percent wanted cuts, up from 42 percent in the late seventies.

Stein called for slashing legal immigration from more than 700,000 green cards per year to about 100,000, hoping that Americans would realize that “we don’t need immigration as a country anymore.” When Congress rejected measures to cut legal immigration in 1996, he said the country was getting “madder and madder.”

The mid-nineties ended up being the peak of the immigration backlash. Stein didn’t seem to notice. Speaking at an event organized by Pat Buchanan, Stein said “we are about to see a tsunami” against immigration and, as conservatives tried to ban same-sex marriage, predicted that it “will be about the hottest topic in politics once we get gay marriage taken care of.” Congress did take up immigration legislation under George W. Bush. But it was a bipartisan bill that gave undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, and FAIR fought successfully to kill it. And when the Senate finally passed an immigration bill in 2013, it was again one that paved the way to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and FAIR lobbied fiercely to prevent it from passing in the House.

FAIR has known for decades that it needs to do more than just block legislation to succeed. Under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which removed country-specific caps on immigration designed to favor Northern Europeans and made it easier for immigrants to bring relatives to the United States, legal immigration has risen steadily, to levels not seen since the early 20th century. Tanton noted in 1989 that the post-1965 rise in immigration would “go on forever, until the situation gets so bad that finally the Congress is forced to react.” But he was wrong about how Congress—and the American public—would react.

Since 1994, the share of Republicans who tell Pew that immigrants strengthen the country has barely moved from about 30 percent; among Democrats, it has spiked from 31 percent to 80 percent. Even among white voters without a college degree—Trump’s core base of support—just one in four told Quinnipiac last year that they favored cutting legal immigration. Republicans without a college degree are now less likely to support cutting legal immigration than the average Democrat was 13 years ago.

Last year, nearly two-thirds of respondents, including 67 percent of independents, told the Public Religion Research Institute that it would be mostly a positive thing for the United States to become a majority-nonwhite country by 2045. PRRI has been asking Americans since 2013 whether they would prefer to deport undocumented immigrants or give them a path to citizenship. The responses have not changed much over the years. “It’s kind of remarkable, really,” says PRRI founder and chief executive officer Robert P. Jones. “Usually, we see some movement”—particularly when there’s a “a big bully pulpit, scaring an entire political party toward a more negative anti-immigrant stance.” And with Americans under 40 much more supportive of immigration than the overall population, the future looks bleak for FAIR.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/FEcQ4/1/

Last year, the Republican-controlled Senate voted on a series of immigration bills. A Trump-endorsed bill to reduce legal immigration by roughly 40 percent got just 39 votes. A measure opposed by the president to fund a border wall in exchange for protections for some undocumented immigrants received 54. Neither became law, but the more progressive bill came a lot closer.

In the absence of legislative success, FAIR’s former staffers and allies in the Trump administration are turning to executive action. Trump has cut refugee admissions to record lows. USCIS, the legal immigration agency, has adopted a long list of policies that make it harder to come to the United States legally, although so far, the number of green cards issued each year is still in line with where it was under Obama. USCIS is in the process of implementing new regulations to dramatically expand a section of immigration law that blocks people from entering the country if they are likely to rely on government assistance, such as food stamps or Medicaid. The rule, which is not yet finalized, could cut legal immigration by hundreds of thousands of people per year by denying green cards to the relatives of working-class immigrants. But unlike legislation, the rule could be overturned by a future administration. Twenty-two Democratic senators—including five of the six running for president—sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security in October, requesting that it withdraw the rule.

Asked about FAIR’s record under Trump, Sharry, of America’s Voice, responded with glee. Republicans, he noted, controlled Congress for two years and had the most nativist president in modern history. “And on his signature issues of a border wall and cuts to legal immigration, they got zilch, nada, zero,” he said. “That is an abject failure.”

Source: Trump and His Allies Have Lost the Public Debate Over Immigration

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