Will see if this leads to curbing this citizenship for sale practice:
A blacklist of 21 countries whose so-called “golden passport” schemes threaten international efforts to combat tax evasion has been published by the west’s leading economic thinktank.
Three European countries – Malta, Monaco and Cyprus – are among those nations flagged as operating high-risk schemes that sell either residency or citizenship in a report released on Tuesday by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
In exchange for donations to a sovereign trust fund, or investments in property or government bonds, foreign nationals can become citizens of countries in which they have never lived. Other schemes, such as that operated by the UK, offer residency in exchange for sizable investments.
The programme operated by Malta is particularly popular because as a European member state its nationals, including those who buy citizenship, can live and work anywhere in the EU. The country has, since 2014, sold citizenship to more than 700 people, most of them from Russia, the former Soviet bloc, China and the Middle East.
But concern is growing among political leaders, law enforcement and intelligence agencies that the schemes are open to abuse by criminals and sanctions-busting business people.
Transparency International and Global Witness, in a joint report published last week, described how the EU had gained nearly 100,000 new residents and 6,000 new citizens in the past decade through poorly managed arrangements that were “shrouded in secrecy”.
Also on the OECD blacklist are a handful of Caribbean nations that pioneered the modern-day methods for the marketing of citizenship. These include Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, and St Kitts and Nevis, which has sold 16,000 passports since relaunching its programme in 2006.
After analysing residence and citizenship schemes operated by 100 countries, the OECD says it is naming those jurisdictions that attract investors by offering low personal tax rates on income from foreign financial assets, while also not requiring an individual to spend a significant amount of time in the country.
Second passports can be misused by those wishing to “hide assets held abroad”, according to the thinktank. Its flagship initiative is a framework for countries to cooperate in the fight against tax evasion by sharing information. Known as the Common Reporting Standard, the framework allows for details of bank accounts an individual might hold abroad to be sent to their home tax office.
The OECD believes the ease with which the wealthiest individuals can obtain another nationality is undermining information sharing. If a UK national declares themselves as Cypriot, for example, information about their offshore bank accounts could be shared with Cyprus instead of Britain’s HM Revenue and Customs.
“Schemes can potentially be abused to misrepresent an individual’s jurisdiction of tax residence,” the OECD warned.
The final names on the list are Bahrain, Colombia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Montserrat, Panama, Qatar, Seychelles, Turks and Caicos Islands, United Arab Emirates and Vanuatu.
Together with the results of the analysis, the OECD is also publishing practical guidance that will enable financial institutions to identify and prevent cases of avoidance through the use of such schemes, by making sure that foreign income is reported to the actual jurisdiction of residence.
Time to set the stage for a detailed analysis comparing decisions by judges from the previous administration to see if these fears are warranted:
Dorothea Lay was on track to become a member of the Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Her 25-year government career had prepared her for the post, as reflected in four letters of recommendation from academics and current and former officials. In December 2016, nine months after submitting her application, she was offered the job. But administrations changed, Jeff Sessions assumed the role of attorney general, and by early 2018, the offer was withdrawn.
Why?
That’s the question at the center of a complaint filed by Lay, an Idaho native, with the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative body. In a letter to Lay, 53, the Executive Office for Immigration Review said it rescinded her offer because “the needs of the agency have evolved,” even though the agency announced around the same time that it wanted to expand the size of the appeals board. The complaint suggests that political considerations may have been taken into account in reviewing Lay’s background, citing Lay’s letters of recommendation from people who “had liberal backgrounds or were perceived as having liberal backgrounds.”
The suspicion of politically based hiring has lingered among Democrats, who raised concerns in April and again in May. In the May letter, directed to Michael E. Horowitz, Democrats urged the inspector general of the Justice Department to investigate “allegations of politicized hiring practices,” citing cases in which offers for immigration judges and Board of Immigration Appeals positions had been delayed or withdrawn. (Lay’s attorney, Zachary Henige, is also representing two other people who claim their offers were withdrawn over political differences.) Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd responded to the Democrats’ allegations in a letter: “As stated in every immigration judge hiring announcement, the Department of Justice does not discriminate on the basis of political affiliation.”
The investigation into Lay’s complaint is ongoing, so it’s still not clear whether there were ulterior motives behind the withdrawal of her offer. But the case speaks to how DOJ can pick and choose who fills roles and in doing so, influence who’s at the helm of deciding immigration cases.This isn’t unique to this administration. The Justice Department has considerable leeway when appointing immigration judges—the immigration courts are part of its direct purview. The attorney general therefore has unique authority to overrule decisions and hire immigration judges. To that end, Sessions appears to be shaping the court by, at the very least, hiring former law enforcement officials as immigration judges.
“The more you bring people from the same background, the same set of experiences, the same perspective, the more you expose the court to criticism,” said Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “Those decisions will be more open to being questioned.”
Of the 140 judges hired since Donald Trump’s inauguration, more than half have past prosecutorial experience or some other government experience. The pace of hiring has also stepped up: In fiscal year 2017, the Justice Department hired 64 immigration judges, compared to 81 in fiscal year 2018—bringing the total of immigration judges to 395, according to data released by EOIR. Sessions’s hiring spree is not unusual—and it’s also not unwarranted: His predecessors brought on new immigration judges, and the immigration court backlog also continues to creep up, with the latest figure at more than 760, 000 pending cases. Of the newly hired immigration judges, at least half had received conditional offers during the Obama administration, said Kathryn Mattingly, assistant press secretary at EOIR, in an email.
It’s not just how many immigration judges are being brought on but where they’re being located. EOIR has hired immigration judges for two adjudication centers—in Falls Church, Virginia, and Fort Worth, Texas—where cases from around the country will be heard through video teleconferencing. Judges will be located at the centers, while attorneys and respondents will be in separate locations. According to Rob Barnes, a regional public information officer for EOIR, immigration judges at these centers will be evaluated like others. It’s likely then that thousands of immigration cases will be heard with respondents never seeing a judge face to face.
Across the board, there appears to be a preference for people who come from an enforcement background, according to biographies of newly hired immigration judges posted by the Justice Department. Of the 23 judges announced in August, more than half previously worked with the Department of Homeland Security, and of those remaining, most came from a law enforcement background. In September, EOIR announced 46 new immigration judges, two of which will serve in a supervisory role: 19 previously worked for ICE, 10 had served at DOJ or as a former local prosecutor, and seven had a background in military (one of whom previously served in Guantánamo). It’s not yet known how these judges will rule once they’re on the bench and whether their enforcement background will inform their decisions. But experts, attorneys, and current and former immigration judges have warned about hiring too many people from government before.
“It’s not that we’re saying [those] with law enforcement or military background are unqualified,” Tabaddor, the head of the immigration judges association, told me. “A diverse bench is what brings fairness and legitimacy to court. It’s very important for a court to be reflective of the people it serves and the community at large to gain legitimacy and respect.”
Mattingly, the EOIR spokeswoman, has provided a series of specific qualifications that all candidates for immigration judge must possess.
Previous administrations also pulled from within government, reasoning that candidates have already passed background checks and can therefore be hired more quickly. But that can present some challenges. It’s possible that having spent years fighting in court on behalf of the government, an individual might be biased, said Jeremy McKinney, an immigration lawyer in North Carolina. The American Immigration Lawyers Association, of which McKinney is a part of, and National Association of Immigration Judges, have called for the pool of immigration judges to also include people from private firms and academia.
Their concerns were backed up by Booz Allen Hamilton, which conducted a year-long study of the immigration court system at EOIR’s direction. The April 2017 study found that at least 41 percent of immigration judges previously worked in the Department of Homeland Security, and nearly 20 percent worked at other branches within the Justice Department. The report recommended broadening “hiring pools and outreach programs to increase diversity of experience among [immigration judges].” It’s not clear whether the Justice Department took the study into account in putting together its hiring plan in April 2017, the same month the study was presumably handed over.
The hiring of immigration judges has always been a contentious issue: complaints have been lodged about there not being enough career diversity; it often takes months to hire judges (though the Justice Department recently pushed the time it took down from an average of 742 days to about 266 days); and political affiliations have previously been weighed in selecting judges. In 2008, the Inspector General issued a report on the hiring practices of DOJ in selecting attorneys, immigration judges, and members of the Board of Immigration Appeals. The report concluded that hiring based on political or ideological affiliation is in violation of department policy.
The fear, as expressed by some Democrats, legal experts and immigration advocates, is that Sessions is improperly seeking out conservatives in order to to influence the tilt of the nation’s immigration courts and hire a large cadre of immigration judges who will likely far outlast his tenure.
“I think he’s trying to get a complacent judiciary: ‘Forget the title, you guys are really DOJ employees, you’re out there to carry out my policies,’” said Paul W. Schmidt, former chairman of EOIR’s Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2001 and a former immigration judge.
Beyond who the Justice Department decides to bring on board, the message Sessions sends down to judges can also heavily influence their decisions, as direct reports to the department, Schmidt and others argue.In September, for example, Sessions delivered remarks to a new class of immigration judges, the largest in history, according to the Justice Department, in which he pressed them to decide cases swiftly. “You have an obligation to decide cases efficiently and to keep our federal laws functioning effectively, fairly, and consistently,” he said. “As you take on this critically important role, I hope that you will be imaginative and inventive in order to manage a high-volume caseload. I do not apologize for expecting you to perform, at a high level, efficiently and effectively.”
The message was striking given who it’s intended for. “If he was speaking to attorneys, that’d be normal. He has the right to set prosecutorial policy,” McKinney said. “That doesn’t translate to immigration judges.” Judges—even when they are DOJ employees—are expected to be independent. By effectively telling them how to handle cases and how quickly, the Justice Department is infringing upon that independence, McKinney said.
And Sessions’s words weren’t just an expression of what he hopes judges will do either. As of October 1, the expectation to “efficiently and effectively” adjudicate cases is being enforced. Earlier this year, the Justice Department took the unprecedented step of rolling out quotas for judges. To receive a “satisfactory” performance evaluation, judges are required to clear at least 700 cases a year. According to the Justice Department, judges complete 678 cases a year on average now, meaning they will have to pick up the pace to remain in good standing.
This fall, DOJ expects to bring on at least 75 more immigration judges. Even if Sessions days as attorney general are numbered, as Trump has suggested, his selections will decide the fate of immigrants, for years to come.
Worth noting this more nuanced critique, both of the book as well as the review. More from an assimilationist rather than the more nuanced integration approach that allows for more varied identities within the context of national laws.
Will be interesting to see how this debate plays out among thoughtful conservative circles:
What does it mean to be an American? Who should get that privilege, and what benefits should it entail?
Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review, confronts these questions in his new and provocative book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. It’s a must-read for anyone with an interest in immigration policy, as a book that combines significant policy expertise with a clear and cogent argument. Even if (like me) you are ultimately skeptical of Salam’s approach, this book is well worth engaging.
As a conservative who favors a tighter immigration policy, Salam is superficially in sync with President Trump. But this book isn’t Trumpian. Far from embracing a resentful ethno-nationalism, Salam seems motivated above all by a sincere concern that we haven’t done enough to help disadvantaged Americans succeed. Slowing immigration is just one of his recommended steps towards the creation of a new “middle-class melting pot,” in which all American children (including undocumented immigrants) can have a secure future.
A successful melting pot, as Salam sees it, is just like a good stew. It won’t come out well unless we pay proper attention to the ingredients. As a second-generation Bengali American, Salam understands how high levels of immigration can actually hinder recently naturalized citizens in their efforts to join the cultural mainstream. When overall levels of immigration are low, the immigrants we do have will be highly motivated to adapt and assimilate. First-generation immigrants may have varied levels of success here, but their children will integrate more fully, quite possibly without much resistance from the surrounding culture. Small numbers of newcomers are likely to be perceived as an interesting curiosity more than a threat, so most people won’t object to befriending, employing, or even marrying them.
As immigration levels rise, however, the story changes. Large-scale migration has a far more significant impact on the economy and surrounding culture. Not everyone will welcome the changes. As tensions rise, newcomers may find it more comfortable to stick to neighborhoods dominated by co-ethnics, who speak familiar languages and retain familiar customs. Unsurprisingly, the range of available opportunities within these subcultures tends to be small, and residents are normally poorer than the population at large. That might seem acceptable to first-generation immigrants, who still feel on balance that they have bettered their lives by immigrating. The next generation will be less sanguine though, and their frustration, juxtaposed against the rising resentment of the surrounding population, is a recipe for ethnic conflict.
To the cosmopolitan mind, this logic is thoroughly depressing. Is it fruitless even to try to encourage an ethos of tolerance? Is nativism simply imprinted onto the human soul?
Salam argues that people can be persuaded to tolerate differences, provided we don’t ask too much from them. In concert with most elite leftists, he wants to move toward a culture that’s highly educated, technologically advanced, and cosmopolitan in its embrace of a multi-ethnic population. But he thinks this will be achievable only if we manage immigration carefully, limiting our welcome to immigrants who seem well suited to rapid assimilation. In practice, that means saying “yes” to the educated and affluent, and “no” to the huddled masses.
I have argued before that citizenship has in our time become a kind of global caste system. In that context, Salam might be seen as a modern-day Lord Salisbury, prioritizing social stability and accepting that this can be preserved only in an exclusive society. It’s a strong argument, as even his detractors should acknowledge. If we want to secure certain goods for all American citizens (including decent health care, a quality education, and real inclusion in mainstream society), we’ll necessarily have to be choosy about who’s admitted to the club. Our resources aren’t infinite, and there’s a limit to how much diversity we can absorb while still maintaining a cohesive society.
Of course, caste systems have obvious moral shortcomings. Recognizing that, Salam includes a complete chapter on foreign aid, which he would like to increase as a kind of compensation for his less-generous immigration policy. This segment of the book is illuminating in many ways, and Salam has some interesting ideas. But he is noticeably loathe to acknowledge the limitations of foreign aid. Good intentions notwithstanding, America’s capacity to improve life across the globe is quite limited. That will become even more true if the Pax Americana continues to erode (which is not something Salam has in general been inclined to lament).
Two or three decades ago, things might have seemed different. At that time many people really believed that the planet could be moving toward an era of widespread peace, prosperity, and freedom. Today, that’s not looking like a strong bet. A sizable percentage of the world’s population lives under politically oppressive regimes, and that number seems if anything to be growing. If Western nations are unwilling to resettle refugees and migrants, the reality is that many will end up stuck in places where life is generally bad. Salam would prefer to see these unfortunates settled someplace else, so that we can focus our energies here on helping second- and third-generation immigrants, impoverished urban blacks, and the underemployed denizens of the Rust Belt. But of course, other developed nations are likewise struggling to persuade their citizens to be open to immigrants. Why should other societies be more generous, if we ourselves are willing to do almost nothing in this regard?
No matter what policy we adopt, Salam’s concerns about integration are surely worth considering. No one will benefit if we adopt a naively ideological immigration policy, without regard for the consequences. At the same time, his position is itself based in ideological commitments that some of us may question. In Salam’s mind, the quintessentially American society seems to be a kind of managed middle-class culture, in which carefully crafted government interventions help to keep class stratification in check. To me, that sounds more like a Scandinavian ideal, and I’m not sure how close we can get to it anyway. The United States is already a huge and wildly diverse nation, riven by deep religious and philosophical differences along with the ethnic and cultural ones. Technological advancement seems if anything to increase inequality further, none of which has much to do with immigration. We should still care about helping marginalized groups to flourish, insofar as we are able. But it might also be good to accept that Americans just don’t specialize in creating high-solidarity monocultures. Historically we’ve been better at negotiating a strained-but-usually-livable peace between more widely divergent groups, who are united at least in their commitment to building a life outside of the shadow of political oppression. Is this really the right moment to walk away from those commitments?
As the world becomes more and more interconnected, nationalists will increasingly struggle to justify the priority they want to place on citizenship as a moral category. This obviously represents a major shift in human perspective, which is worrisome; transformations of that magnitude have real potential to create instability. That is in itself an excellent reason to give due credit to nuanced anti-immigration arguments, such as Salam presents in this book. Over the longer run though, is an “America first” immigration policy sustainable? Will our children thank us for doubling down on a robustly egalitarian vision, which may just not fit the contours of our freedom-loving society? I’m inclined to doubt it. But read the book before you answer.
Potential future waves of asylum seekers via irregular arrival border points (e.g., Roxham Road):
The Trump administration has been eliminating the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, which has allowed more than 300,000 people from countries hit by war and natural disasters to legally stay in the U.S. for decades.
To end TPS protections for 98 percent of those recipients, the Department of Homeland Security has claimed that conditions in those countries are now suitable for thousands of their residents to return home.
A federal judge this month ordered a temporary halt to the administration’s actions – a ruling the Justice Department is appealing – leaving TPS holders facing an uncertain future as they weigh their options.
Here’s a look at the current conditions in the six countries that have lost their TPS status, listed in order of their deadlines for immigrants to leave the U.S. All TPS populations are estimates from the Congressional Research Service.
Sudan
TPS ends: November 2, 2018
TPS first granted: 1997
Reason for TPS designation: Civil war
Estimated number of TPS recipients: 1,040
TPS was first granted to Sudan as the country was being torn apart by a decades-long civil war. When the country officially split in two in 2011, the U.S. granted TPS status to the newly-created South Sudan as well.
In the years since, deadly fighting has continued throughout South Sudan. Based on that ongoing conflict, the Trump administration announced in September that TPS status would be extended for that country.
But Sudan was cut off, with the administration arguing that armed factions are largely honoring cease-fire agreements that have been brokered in recent years. In its justification for ending TPS, the administration said armed conflict “is limited to” two southern provinces and the western province of Darfur, which rose to international prominence in the early 2000s when hundreds of thousands were killed and millions forced to flee as refugees.
The United Nations Security Council paints a more dire picture. A December report on the Darfur region found that food insecurity remains at crisis levels, human rights abuses continue, and the region is being flooded by people fleeing violence in South Sudan, with 89,000 refugees arriving in Darfur in 2017, further hindering the region’s recovery efforts.
Muna Ndulo, a law professor and director of the Institute for African Development at Cornell University, said the safety of returning Sudanese will depend on what specific corner of the country they’re from. If they go to the capital city of Khartoum or northern provinces, they should be fine.
“But if they’re from Darfur, they have nowhere to go,” Ndulo said. “The situation there is still very precarious. And my assumption would be that most of these (TPS holders) would be from that conflict area.”
Nicaragua
TPS ends: January 5, 2019
TPS first granted: 1999
Estimated number of TPS recipients: 2,550
Reason for TPS: Hurricane Mitch
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights estimates that since April, at least 322 people have been killed in the violence, and hundreds more have been arrested. The White House even issued a round of sanctions in July against three Nicaraguan officials, accusing them of human rights abuses, and suspended the sale of any U.S. vehicles or equipment “that Ortega’s security forces might misuse.”
That nationwide dysfunction has sent the country’s economy, which was meager but had been one of the most stable in the region, into a free-fall. That combination makes Nicaragua a dangerous place for anybody to return to, according to Geoff Thale, vice president of the Washington Office on Latin America.
Thale recently spoke with a group of Nicaraguan priests who have been using churches and other buildings to hide protesters who have become targets of the regime. Thale said those are the very same priests who would help returning Nicaraguans safely reintragrate into society. But now, with the country beset by so much chaos: “They’re a little busy with other things.”
Nepal
TPS ends: June 24, 2019
TPS first granted: 2015
Estimated number of TPS recipients: 8,950
Reason for TPS: Earthquake
Sitting atop the Himalayas, Nepal was rocked in 2015 by a magnitude-7.8 earthquake that led to an avalanche on Mt. Everest and a major aftershock weeks later. The combination left nearly 9,000 dead and millions displaced.
The Nepalese government, with the help of more than $4 billion in international aid that has been pledged by donors, has taken many strides to rebuild the country, but conditions remain far from normal.
More than 270,000 homes have been rebuilt, but more than 800,000 are still listed as undergoing reconstruction from the quake, according to a May update from Nepal’s National Reconstruction Authority, a government task force created to oversee rebuilding.
The country has rebuilt more than 3,800 schools, about half of the agency’s target of 7,500. The country has only rebuilt 49% of its medical facilities, 21% of its security buildings, 18% of its drinking water systems, and 13% of its cultural heritage sites, which form the basis of much of the country’s tourism industry.
Prabha Deuja, president of the Virginia-based America Nepal Society, visited the region in January and said she saw construction efforts all around. But she said the country’s isolated location, and it’s limited government resources, has made it difficult to complete reconstruction and prepare Nepal for an influx of new residents.
“This is a third-world country. We have to get sand and supplies from different countries,” she said. If TPS holders had to return, “I can’t tell you what they will do. The job market, where they’re staying, it’s a really gray area.”
Haiti
TPS ends: July 22, 2019
TPS first granted: 2010
Estimated population: 46,000
Reason for TPS: Earthquake
Rioting in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince grew so intense in July that the U.S. sent in the Marines to secure U.S. interests there, according to CNN.
That unrest forced the nation’s prime minister to resign, just the latest step in a seemingly never-ending series of calamities plaguing the country.
Frank Mora, director of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University, said all of those ensuing problems have exacerbated Haiti’s earthquake recovery and cannot be treated as separate, individual crises. “Haiti is still living with the consequences of the earthquake,” he said.
Throwing tens of thousands more Haitians back to the island right now, Mora said, will only strain the government’s limited resources and endanger the Haitians who will be returning to a country with problems at every turn. The majority live in South Florida and New York.
“They’ll have to face the constant political uncertainty, the energy crisis, the food distribution challenges that still exist,” Mora said. “If there’s any country in the Western Hemisphere where these people will be going into a near humanitarian disaster, it would be to Haiti.”
El Salvador
TPS ends: Sept. 9, 2019
TPS first granted: 1991
Estimated number of TPS recipients: 195,000
Reason for TPS: Earthquake
Using any metric, El Salvador is considered one of the most dangerous, deadly countries on the planet.
In 2016, the Central American nation was deemed the murder capital of the world with a homicide rate of 104 people per 100,000, the highest for any country in nearly 20 years, according to data from the World Bank. The homicide rate reportedly fell in 2017, but crime remains so rampant that only 12% of Salvadorans believed that drop, according to InSight Crime.
In July, the U.S. State Department issued a Level 3 Travel Warning (on a scale of 1 – 4) urging Americans to reconsider traveling to El Salvador. “Violent crime, such as murder, assault, rape, and armed robbery, is common,” the advisory read.
Yet that is where the Trump administration has decided to send the largest group of TPS recipients, nearly 200,000 of them.
Mora said the situation only becomes worse as the U.S. continues deporting gang members from the U.S. back to El Salvador, bolstering the ranks of the gangs and drug cartels that control so many aspects of day-to-day life.
“That situation is difficult for people who live in El Salvador, who’ve been living that situation day in and day out,” Mora said. “So you take someone who has lived in Miami or New York, and you’re going to throw them into that situation. No one has the tools to prepare themselves for that.”
Honduras
TPS ends: Jan. 5, 2020
TPS first granted: 1999
Estimated number of TPS recipients: 57,000
Reason for TPS: Hurricane Mitch
The homicide rate in Honduras dropped significantly in 2017, down to 42.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, the country’s lowest in a decade. But the country remains one of the most dangerous and politically unstable in the hemisphere.
The re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernandez to a second term in November led to violent protests that were met by intense government crackdowns.
Thale says the country remains in the grip of drug cartels who use kidnappings as a standard way to generate income. He said that makes any returning Honduran a “walking invitation for extortion.”
He said gangs will undoubtedly know who is returning to their neighborhoods, and will target people who are returning with cash after selling off their homes, cars, businesses and other goods before leaving the U.S. So how, Thale wondered, could anyone think that Honduras is in a position to successfully, and peacefully, welcome an influx of 57,000 people.
Contrast between the local integration approach of a small Italian town in southern Italy and the “separation” approach of the current Italian government:
The alleyways of the Italian town of Riace are adorned with dozens of murals that show its long-standing relationship with migration.
But the country’s new populist government is threatening a project locals say successfully integrated hundreds of refugees and migrants into the town of just over 2,000 people.
Mayor Domenico Lucano, the project’s figurehead, was placed under house arrest earlier this month on charges of involvement in organising “marriages of convenience” for asylum seekers.
On Saturday Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, ordered all migrants in Riace be transferred to refugee centres next week.
Mr Salvini hailed the arrest as proof that the country’s new government was serious about ending the “immigration business”.
“What will all the do-gooders who want to fill Italy with immigrants say now?” Mr Salvini wrote on Twitter.
Mr Lucano, who was also accused of skipping a tender process in order to award a waste-management contract to cooperatives with ties to migrants, spearheaded Citta Futura – Future City – in 1999.
For almost two decades the project welcomed migrants to the sparsely populated Calabrian town in a bid to boost jobs and development. Known as the Riace model, the programme led to abandoned houses being restored and craft workshops being reopened, providing work for locals and foreigners alike.
The project was lauded by many as a model of integration.
But Riace’s efforts risk being dismantled by Mr Salvini as it runs out of money due to the interior ministry’s block on funds.
As a result, Riace’s local government accumulated a debt of €2 million (Dh8.49mn).
Before his arrest, Mr Lucano – known as Mimmo – could be found on the steps of the Donna Rosa restaurant in the town’s central square.
“They are destroying the area. We risk everything being closed down, even the kindergarten,” he said. “We might have continued even without European funds as an independent self-sustaining project, but two years has been too long and we have accumulated too many debts.”
On Saturday protesters gathered outside Mr Lucano’s window to demand the release of their mayor, chanting “keep strong, continue fighting”. The mayor could be seen raising a fist in support.
The political differences between Mr Salvini’s anti-immigration, hard-right Lega Nord and left-leaning Mr Lucano has compounded the widening rift.
Riace’s residents claim Mr Salvini is purposefully sabotaging the project. In response they gathered in a collective hunger strike since July and shut down all of the workshops tasked with creating embroidery items, ceramics, kites and glass crafts. The sign “I, too, support Riace” can be seen hanging in many shop windows.
“The funding blockage is like having suffered a bereavement,” said grocery shop owner Mimma. “The migrants have taught us to live. When new ones arrive they feel immediately at home, and it is as if they have always lived here with us.”
Because of its location Italy is a gateway into northern Europe – but the country’s weak economy and inadequate help from the European Union has aided Mr Salvini’s propaganda about a so-called “invasion” of the country.
Although current and past governments increased their popularity by tapping into a widespread fear of foreigners, Riace often put itself forward to host new arrivals, especially those most in need.
Mohammed is a 64-year-old Iraqi of Palestinian origin. He fled Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and today has both a home and a monthly stipend of €260.
This may end if Mr Salvini succeeds in relocating Riace’s guests to a camp.
Bayram, a 65-year-old Kurd, arrived in 1998 from Turkey. He helped reconstruct hillside terracing and is currently working as a carpenter and driver.
“Whoever is blocking this model should see how Riace was twenty years ago,” says 29-year-old Antonio, who works as an assistant in Bayram’s carpentry shop.
“There was absolutely nothing and the only event was the annual patron saint festival. Young people were forced to emigrate, which I will probably have to do next year,” he says, sitting nervously amid other protesters.
Next year Mr Lucano’s second and last term will end. Meanwhile Mr Salvini is rallying to win local elections in the country’s south, despite his northern secessionist movement’s hostility towards them.
“In the past we were the ones who left for the cities in the north of Italy or for Australia, but now there are new people coming here, the new migrants,” says Raffaele, a local farmer who sells home-grown fruit.
Far from Italy’s growing isolationism, residents of Riace hope they can overturn Mr Salvini’s decision to relocate their guests. But the future remains unclear.
And as the children of immigrants chase each other on Riace’s football pitch, shouting at each other in the Calabrian dialect, they are oblivious to the fact they could soon lose everything their parents risked their lives for – and so are their Italian peers who, amid the south’s interminable afternoons, have, at last, found someone to play football with.
The new premier of Quebec has promised to reduce immigration to his province by 20 per cent, require newcomers to learn French in three years and restrict some public servants from wearing religious symbols.
Premier-designate Francois Legault won a majority on Oct. 1 in large part because he professed to be committed to better “integrating” newcomers into the francophone province. But so far Legault has not hinted at ending Quebec’s divisive immigrant-investor program, one of the world’s biggest wealth migration schemes.
The Quebec Immigrant Investor Program — which attracts nine out of 10 of its millionaire applicants from Asia, mostly China — does the opposite of integrating immigrants into a distinct culture. Only one in 10 of the well-to-do migrants who take advantage of Quebec’s investor program choose to live in that province.
Most of the roughly 5,000 migrants a year who exploit Quebec’s buy-a-passport program immediately move to Metro Vancouver and Toronto, where their foreign-sourced dollars pump up the cities’ already high-priced real estate. The decades-old Quebec Immigrant Investor Program is a cynical scheme that doesn’t do what it claims.
And it’s made possible because Quebec is the only Canadian province allowed to set its own immigration policies. (The country’s other premiers in 2016 asked Ottawa for the right to also establish their own immigration rules, but so far their plea has gone nowhere. That could be unfortunate.)
Everyone who signs up for Quebec’s investor program has to hand over an $800,000 interest-free, five-year loan to the government and sign a document citing their firm intention to make their home in Quebec. But only 10 per cent of the 58,000 people who used the program, and remain in Canada, live in the province.
Half of Quebec’s investor immigrants who remain in Canada (many just return to their homeland, with their second passport safely in hand) have set up in the Vancouver region, with most of the rest in Greater Toronto.
Despite Quebec politicians’ oft-professed dedication to Quebec culture, they have for decades shown no signs of caring about the millionaire migrants’ lack of loyalty. The bizarre unintended consequence is that, since Canada’s charter gives everyone mobility rights, the Quebec program has become a key contributor to the unaffordability that is devastating so many residents of Metro Vancouver and Toronto.
One of the many perplexing things about the program is that Quebec’s media, which is normally ruthless at exposing political deception, has almost entirely ignored the province’s farcical investor program since it was instituted in 1986.
Many countries have brought in similar investor schemes, but immigration lawyers say Quebec’s program remains the world’s easiest and most generous, since it asks so little of investors and they get a tremendous amount in return. As a popular website founded by immigration lawyer Colin Singer says: “Successful candidates get permanent residency, which offers access to Canada’s social support network and the right to live anywhere in the country.”
Will Quebec’s new premier, Francois Legault, cancel his province’s immigrant-investor program? He wants immigrants to better integrate. But only 10 per cent of the 58,000 investors who used the program and still remain in Canada actually reside in La Belle Province. Half end up in Metro Vancouver.
Why has the program not been cut? Why is it not on the agenda of the new Coalition Avenir Quebec government or even of most of the French and English-language media, where Quebec news this month has been dominated by Legault’s more symbolic intention to stop allowing judges, police officers, teachers and other key public servants to wear religious symbols?
Part of the explanation for the near-complete silence must be that the program serves the self-interest of Quebec’s business sector. The immigration website of Singer, a longtime booster of investor programs, boasts that the program has made it possible for Investment Quebec, a provincial government corporation, to provide $714 million to 4,737 businesses in Quebec from 2001-2016.
In other words, Quebec’s businesses get the migrants’ cash, but the province doesn’t get the immigrants. Nor does Quebec bear the cost of providing their families with education or other social programs. Is that what Quebeckers want? And is that acceptable to Legault, who came into power on his promise to help immigrants better integrate into the province of which he is so proud?
It gets worse. In a rare exception by Quebec’s media, Radio Canada journalists last month teamed up with the South China Morning Post’s Vancouver-based Ian Young and reported that fraud, forgery, money laundering and corruption is rife in the Quebec Immigrant Investor Program. Their investigative piece revealed that the trans-national subterfuge often begins with shady immigration lawyers in Hong Kong who mostly serve clients from China.
The influential Economist magazine last month published an extensive feature exploring the widespread corruption inherent in many immigrant investor programs, which often make it possible for so-called high-net-worth individuals to evade taxes and in many cases the law-enforcement officials trying to track dirty fortunes.
It’s hard to know what Legault and his party will do. As the co-founder of Air Transat and a gung-ho entrepreneur, he may hold his nose and convince himself that offshore millionaires’ handouts to Quebec businesses are needed to boost the economy. Or he could live up to his commitment to integration. On the surface, he seems a man of integrity, comfortable with adopting pragmatic policies from both the right and left. So British Columbians could end up pleasantly surprised.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented for Quebec’s premier to kill the province’s investor scheme, since they’re under attack around the globe. After all, the federal Conservatives cancelled Canada’s program in 2014, noting few investors paid significant income taxes in Canada and most didn’t want to permanently settle in the country anyways. Most rich investors are seeking a Canadian passport as an insurance policy in case things go sideways in their country of origin.
Deciding the future of the Quebec Immigrant Investor Program will be a profound test of Legault’s character. Will he hypocritically take millionaire migrants’ money and let them run to English-speaking regions of the country? Or will he stand up for his vision and the dignity of his beloved province?
During a 12-month period the U.S. Army discharged more than 500 immigrant enlistees who were promised a path to citizenship.
The enlistees were part of the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) recruiting program, which allows legal noncitizens to join the military in exchange for expedited U.S. citizenship.
The Defense Department has recruited more than 10,000 immigrants through MAVNI since 2009, the overwhelming majority in the Army, according to the Pentagon.
The program was started in 2008, when there was an urgent need for immigrants with medical and language skills. It was put on hold in 2016 after concerns of insufficient screening for immigrant recruits.
According to a list the Army submitted to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, 502 service members who enlisted under MAVNI program were discharged between July 2017 and July 2018.
Two court documents containing the list were unsealed this week following a request from the AP.
Pentagon spokeswoman Maj. Carla Gleason told The Hill on Friday that “there are no individuals being released from their contracts or separated from the military due to their immigration status.”
Of the discharged immigrants, more than 100 were told their entry-level performance and conduct was subpar and 48 were dismissed because of an adverse security screening. Others were dismissed for reasons ranging from personal problems to encounters with police.
The Pentagon has had its ups and downs with immigrant recruitment efforts since former President George W. Bush ordered “expedited naturalization” for immigrant soldiers after 9/11. The push was an effort to quickly grow the military, and in 2009 MAVNI became an official recruiting program.
Former President Obama later allowed enlistment for young immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, causing additional security clearances to be added to MAVNI.
The program was suspended in 2016 “after several classified assessments concluded that the program, as previously configured, was vulnerable to an unacceptable level of risk from insider threats such as espionage, terrorism, and other criminal activity,” according to the Pentagon.
The Trump Administration required new security screenings and longer enlistments that created a backlog, with some immigrants waiting more than a year to pass through the process.
Because of the long wait caused by new screenings, dozens of immigrant recruits already in the pipeline were discharged or had their contracts canceled. The ensuing complaints and lawsuits led the Army to halt the discharges and reinstate at least 36 recruits.
As of April there were 1,000 recruits in delayed entry or delayed training programs.
“Because of the Department’s desire to honor the commitments it has made to its MAVNI recruits, the Department is working diligently and with all deliberate speed to complete all background investigations for the MAVNI population,” Gleason said.
She added that “while the vetting process takes time, it is essential to national security.”
Army Secretary Mark Esper said last month that roughly 80 percent of MAVNI recruits who made it through screening were approved and enlisted.
He said the Army must “exercise due diligence, to make sure we understand who is coming into our ranks and just do that.
“The process is never quick enough, certainly for them, and for me as well,” Esper added.
Defense officials had planned to relaunch the MAVNI program in September after bolstering the vetting process, but Department of Homeland Security officials told the Pentagon that they would not be able to block the deportation of new immigrant recruits when their temporary visas expire, even if they signed a military contract.
Defense Secretary James Mattis backed the restart, telling reporters in August that “we need and want every qualified patriot willing to serve and able to serve.”
Le Québec réussit de mieux en mieux à garder ses travailleurs et aussi les immigrants qu’il accueille chaque année. Depuis trois ans, l’écart entre le nombre de personnes qui s’installent au Québec et celles qui le quittent vers d’autres provinces a presque diminué de moitié.
Le phénomène coïncide avec le resserrement du marché du travail, analyse Hélène Bégin, l’économiste principale de Desjardins qui s’est penchée sur le solde migratoire du Québec. « II y a d’autres facteurs qui entrent en ligne de compte, mais en général, les gens se déplacent en fonction du taux de chômage », explique-t-elle lors d’un entretien avec La Presse.
Qu’ils viennent d’ailleurs ou qu’ils soient nés au Québec, les travailleurs qui ont entre 25 et 64 ans ont de moins en moins de raisons d’aller voir ailleurs.
L’écart entre le taux de chômage des immigrants et celui de la population née au Québec s’est rétréci. Le taux d’emploi des immigrants, soit la proportion des immigrants de 25 à 54 ans qui travaillent, était de 77,8 %, soit à peu près le même qu’en Ontario (78,4 %).
Avec l’étranger, le solde migratoire du Québec est largement positif depuis une quinzaine d’années, souligne l’économiste de Desjardins. Et ces immigrants restent de plus en plus au Québec. Cinq ans après leur arrivée, 84,3 % y sont encore, un taux de rétention qui ira en augmentant avec l’amélioration du marché du travail, prévoit-elle.
« Ça fait un bout de temps que les régions sont en concurrence pour recruter des immigrants et on est maintenant rendus au stade d’essayer de les garder. Et il semble qu’on réussit de mieux en mieux », constate Hélène Bégin.
D’AUTRES FACTEURS
La main-d’oeuvre québécoise, immigrante ou non, a aussi moins tendance à partir vers d’autres provinces, surtout vers l’Ontario, pour améliorer son sort. De ce côté, le solde migratoire du Québec a pratiquement toujours été déficitaire. Mais ce déficit se résorbe : il était de 11 000 personnes en 2017, presque deux fois moins qu’il y a trois ans.
« Le manque d’emplois disponibles dans certains secteurs incitait une partie de la main-d’oeuvre à se déplacer dans la province voisine. Cette époque est révolue, le taux de chômage des deux provinces est désormais semblable et avoisine 5,5 %. »
Ce sont surtout les 25 à 64 ans qui quittent la province et, en plus du marché du travail, d’autres facteurs peuvent influer sur leur décision. Le taux d’imposition, l’accès aux garderies et les programmes sociaux pèsent aussi dans la balance, souligne l’économiste de Desjardins. « Le coût de la vie, et surtout le prix des maisons, est aussi un facteur important. La maison de 300 000 $ au Québec peut coûter 1 million en Ontario », illustre-t-elle.
Le déficit migratoire avec l’Ontario devrait continuer à se résorber, avec un taux de chômage au Québec comparable à celui de l’Ontario et le vieillissement accéléré de la population du Québec.
« C’est une excellente nouvelle, mais ça reste insuffisant pour pourvoir les emplois disponibles actuellement dans le secteur privé », dit Hélène Bégin. D’autres mesures, comme la rétention des travailleurs âgés et des horaires de travail flexibles, sont nécessaires pour combler le déficit de main-d’oeuvre.
Le nombre de postes à pourvoir dans les entreprises du Québec a grimpé en flèche depuis deux ans. Il y aurait actuellement 109 600 emplois disponibles, selon la Fédération canadienne de l’entreprise indépendante.
Good background for the regional election results:
German support for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservatives is at an all-time low, and in few places is that more evident than Bavaria.
A booming economy and ever fewer migrants crossing the border into the wealthy alpine state haven’t eased a populist backlash against the Christian Social Union (CSU), which is the closest ally of Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats (CDU). The CSU has governed Bavaria for all but three years since 1946, most of the time with an absolute majority.
But its future is in doubt, with conservative Bavarian voters in the midst of a shift toward Alternative for Germany (AfD). Just 5 years old, the far-right party is currently the main opposition in the German parliament and is widely expected to win seats in the Bavarian legislature for the first time when regional elections are held on Sunday.
One of the Bavarian cities where AfD is especially popular is Ingolstadt, which is hardly a typical stronghold for the far-right faction that traditionally plays to Germany’s working class in the less affluent, formerly communist east.
Luxury cars abound on Ingolstadt’s cobblestone streets and the 137,000 residents of the medieval city, where carmaker Audi is headquartered, enjoy the highest per capitaincome in Germany. But as well off as people in Ingolstadt are, many there are nonetheless anxious about their future.
Enter the AfD, which excels at stoking such fears.
The party’s candidate in Ingolstadt is Johannes Kraus von Sande, 48, who embraces the same campaign line the AfD used to win 13 percent of the vote in last October’s national elections: Uncontrolled migration threatens the German identity, security and economy, and the mainstream political parties aren’t doing anything about it.
“As our campaign posters say: The AfD fulfills the promises the CSU makes. The CSU’s failure to keep promises has pretty much defined the whole history of that party,” Kraus von Sande said in an interview with NPR.
But what exactly the AfD plans to do to fulfill campaign promises — or to address the problems it raises — the candidate said is still being worked out.
“The city has changed a lot,” Kraus von Sande said, recalling how when he went to high school in Ingolstadt, everyone knew everyone else by name.
Now, the city and its lucrative job market is far bigger and more international. City officials in Ingolstadt, where the population has grown by more than a third in the past four decades, estimate at least two out of five residents are either immigrants or descended from immigrants. Many of those immigrants are Muslims, who until recently, thought of Ingolstadt as a welcoming place for adherents of their faith.
Kraus von Sande said he doesn’t have a problem with all Muslim immigrants: “We have the Turks and I must say they are strongly integrated in German society and some of them are critical of Islam.”
But he said the migrants coming from the Middle East and Africa since 2015 — when war and poverty, coupled with Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, led to well over a million new arrivals in Germany — are causing more problems.
He said the earlier arrivals he speaks to don’t want newcomers who don’t or can’t fit in or fail to contribute to the German economy. The law needs to change, and they are looking to AfD to help with that, Kraus von Sande said.
“That definitely needs to happen very fast.”
The 53-year-old CSU candidate for the Bavarian legislature from Ingolstadt – police chief Alfred Grob – also has concerns about more effectively managing asylum seekers who come to Germany and ensuring that newcomers integrate.
He said it would be better for his city – and his political party — if the German government wasn’t operating a large refugee processing center for asylum seekers on the edge of Ingolstadt. That center, which housed about 1,400 migrants last year, was transformed in August into an “AnkER” center – a blend of the German words for arrival, decision and repatriation — and houses new arrivals who aren’t likely to qualify for asylum so they can be processed and deported more quickly.
But Grob criticized the AfD for capitalizing on fears rather than facts. Even though crime is up 11 percent in Ingolstadt, “the reality is that we have not had such a low crime rate for 20 years now,” Grob told NPR. “The other side is that refugees are proportionally over-represented in the crime statistics.”
He said that’s easy to explain: Most asylum seekers are young men, and as a demographic, they – no matter what their racial background – are more likely to commit crimes. Grob said many of the crimes by asylum seekers are happening at the transit center. He added that German voter backlash against the CSU and other mainstream parties is about a lot more than asylum seekers or the AfD. He called it “German angst.”
“People are afraid of a societal decline,” Grob explained. “We’re doing very well here. We feel so good that many think it can’t get any better and that in fact, it’s going to go down and maybe faster.”
A diesel emissions testing scandal and other problems at Audi have exacerbated such worries, he said. So have skyrocketing rents in the city. Older residents are also struggling with pensions that aren’t keeping up with the rising cost of living in Ingolstadt.
Another reason AfD is doing well in Ingolstadt is that it isn’t a university town, says Luzia Grasser, an editor in the Ingolstadt office of the daily Augsburger Allgemeine. “Ingolstadt has a relatively conservative voter class, so protest voters may not vote in the left milieu” compared to what’s happening in the rest of Germany, where the left-leaning, environmentally friendly Green Party has climbed to the number two spot in the latest opinion poll.
Much of the support for AfD in Ingolstadt comes from a large community of ethnic Germans from Russia who after the collapse of communism, immigrated to the region in the late 80s and early 90s. The candidates here say those immigrants were less likely to vote in Ingolstadt in the past, but are now worried about their jobs, unemployment benefits and pensions being gobbled up by newer immigrants — fears that AfD has seized on.
The far-right party has put up billboards around Ingolstadt warning of Muslim hordes stripping Bavaria of its Christian identity, pensions and benefits and fostering insecurity. One such billboard showing a white woman looking back in fear at two hooded men, and urging voters to cast their ballots for AfD to “protect our women and children,” stands across the street from a grocery store frequented by the many German Russians in the working class neighborhood of Piusviertel.
The neighborhood, with its apartment buildings, pristine parks and playgrounds, is home to many of Ingolstadt’s Turkish and Middle Eastern immigrants, who are reporting more harassment and abuse — especially of women wearing headscarves — since AfD began campaigning here. The community center there offers a wide range of programs to help residents seeking employment, integration into German society and culture and language. One of the volunteers is Yeser Saygili, who immigrated to Ingolstadt from Turkey a quarter century ago and speaks fluent German.
“I help a lot of immigrant women who are looking for jobs. One office looking for a cleaning woman recently asked me if the applicant wore a headscarf,” Saygili said. “I was, like, ‘Hello, how far have we regressed?’ In the end, she didn’t get the job.”
Saygili says she fears a far-right win in Bavaria on Sunday will only make things harder for Muslims in Ingolstadt. Political observers say it could also lead to a reshuffling or worse of Merkel’s cabinet, as her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, is co-leader of the CSU party and would feel pressured to resign following a poor election result.
When German organizers pulled together a demonstration in Berlin to support “an open and free society,” they had some ambitious goals. They expected roughly 40,000 people to pack the span from Berlin’s city center, from Alexanderplatz to the Victory Column, where they were holding their final rally of the day.
As it turns out, those expectations didn’t measure up to the real thing.
More than 240,000 people showed up for the march and rallies Saturday, according to the organizers behind the #unteilbar event (#indivisible in English). Local police told the BBC that the demonstrators numbered “in the low hundreds of thousands.”
Authorities shut down the 3-mile expanse where the demonstrators had gathered, and overhead photographs showed massive crowds on the tree-lined avenue.
“A dramatic political shift is taking place: racism and discrimination are becoming socially acceptable. What yesterday was considered unthinkable and unutterable has today become a reality. Humanity and human rights, religious freedom, and the rule of law are being openly attacked. This is an attack on all of us,” organizers wrote in their manifesto prior to the event.
Immigration-related excerpt of interest. And a new term for me, “satellite families:”
….However, if Kesselman was in power, he would consider a change to the NDP’s proposed speculation tax, which in part targets “satellite families” that own vacant dwellings in B.C.
Satellite families are those that typically maintain student children or spouses in B.C., but in which the breadwinners make most or all of their income outside the country, which means the family usually pays little or no Canadian income tax (which is designed to support the common good).
While understanding the B.C. government’s rationale for targeting satellite families, since some “own high-valued homes in B.C. while declaring little income for tax purposes,” Kesselman recognizes the surcharge will also affect some B.C. second-dwelling owners who have long paid taxes in the province.
“My first change would be to allow B.C. residents a credit of actual income taxes paid in B.C. against the speculation tax, rather than the $2,000 per year credit. And I might extend this option to taxes paid by other Canadians not resident in B.C.,” Kesselman said.
In the same vein, the public policy specialist finds the NDP’s surtax on homes valued over $3 million to be an “imperfect but justifiable measure, given the obstacles to implementing a better approach.”
Even though he believes it may be fairer to impose some kind of capital gains tax on profits made on B.C. homes, Kesselman admitted it would be a “political non-starter.” The surtax on expensive homes is “somewhat arbitrary,” he said, because it hits the homeowners regardless of their level of capital gain, how long they’ve owned the property, their current cash flow and their mortgage debt.
But at least the expensive-house surcharge captures often large and otherwise tax-free profits, Kesselman said, in effect supporting Arthur Pigou and the ethical notion that housing, indeed, needs to be treated as a public good.
“The surtax should also encourage some larger properties to be re-developed into denser housing, which is needed to address affordability,” Kesselman added, strengthening the case for Pigou’s principle. “An additional benefit of the surtax is to discourage foreign buyers from using high-valued B.C. homes as speculative piggybanks, in some instances using illicit funds.”
Multicultural Meanderings 