U.S. Has Highest Share of Foreign-Born Since 1910, With More Coming From Asia

2018/09/14 Leave a comment

Significant shift.

Extent to which it may change the tenor of US immigration debates, largely over illegal and undocumented immigration from Mexico and Central America unclear:

The foreign-born population in the United States has reached its highest share since 1910, according to government data released Thursday, and the new arrivals are more likely to come from Asia and to have college degrees than those who arrived in past decades.

The Census Bureau’s figures for 2017 confirm a major shift in who is coming to the United States. For years newcomers tended to be from Latin America, but a Brookings Institution analysis of that data shows that 41 percent of the people who said they arrived since 2010 came from Asia. Just 39 percent were from Latin America. About 45 percent were college educated, the analysis found, compared with about 30 percent of those who came between 2000 and 2009.

“This is quite different from what we had thought,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who conducted the analysis. “We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals that’s much less the case. People from Asia have overtaken people from Latin America.”

The new data was released as the nation’s changing demography has become a flash point in American politics. President Trump, and many Republicans, have sounded alarms about immigration and suggested the government needs to restrict both the number and types of people coming into the country.

The last historic peak in immigration to the United States came at the end of the 19th century, when large numbers of Europeans fled poverty and violence in their home countries. Some of the largest numbers came from Germany, Italy and Poland. That wave peaked around the turn of the century, when the total foreign-born population stood at nearly 15 percent. But after the passage of strict racial quotas in the 1920s, the foreign-born population fell sharply for decades in the middle of the 20th century. By 1970, the population was below 5 percent.

The passage of a more liberal immigration law in 1965, which ended ethnic quotas and prioritized family reunification, ushered in new demographics. And the changes have only accelerated in recent years.

For many years, Mexico was the single largest contributor of immigrants. But since 2010, the number of immigrants arriving from Mexico has declined, while those from China and India have surged. Since 2010, the increase in the number of people from Asia — 2.6 million — was more than double the 1.2 million who came from Latin America, Mr. Frey found.

The foreign-born population stood at 13.7 percent in 2017, or 44.5 million people, compared with 13.5 percent in 2016.

Some of the largest gains were in states with the smallest immigrant populations, suggesting that immigrants were spreading out in the country. New York and California, states with large immigrant populations, both had increases of less than six percent since 2010. But foreign-born populations rose by 20 percent in Tennessee, 13 percent in Ohio, 12 percent in South Carolina and 20 percent in Kentucky over the same period.

Emmanuel D’Souza, a nurse practitioner in Dayton, Ohio, who emigrated from India in 2004, said he has noticed a growing and thriving Indian population in his area.

“Now when you go to the grocery store at 5 or 6 in the evening, you see a lot of Indian people, buying vegetables after work,” said Mr. D’Souza.

He said he saw fewer Indian people when he bought his house in 2009 than he does today. Now he counted at least four temples and two mosques, and said there are two Indian specialty grocery stores. Mr. D’Souza, 41, who is Catholic, also sees Indians in church on Sundays.

The data also suggests a political pattern among states with large percentages of foreign-born residents. Of the 15 states with the highest concentration of immigrants, all but three — Florida, Texas and Arizona — voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Many of the states with low and moderate concentrations of foreign-born people voted for Mr. Trump, Mr. Frey found.

In those low-concentration states, foreign-born populations tended to be more educated than the native-born. In Ohio, for example, 43 percent of the foreign-born population is college educated, compared with just 27 percent of American-born Ohioans. About 43 percent of the foreign-born population is from Asia, far more than the 20 percent from Latin America.

The same can be true in states with large immigrant populations. About 15 percent of the population of Maryland last year was foreign-born. Of those people, 42 percent had college degrees, compared with 39 percent of American-born Marylanders.

Chao Wu, a data scientist in Columbia, Maryland, who came from China in 2003, said he had long known about Asian graduate students in the United States, because he had been one. But it wasn’t until he started running for a seat on his county’s board of education that he noticed the richness and variation in the population.

“I increased my outreach and I realized there was a big Asian-American business community, with restaurants and grocery stores,” he said. He said he recently helped organize a ceremony in his town with a sister city in China. A portion of Route 40 was renamed Korean Way.

But the rising levels of education are not lifting everyone. Asian-Americans are now the most economically divided racial or ethnic group in the country, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Income inequality among Asian-Americans nearly doubled from 1970 to 2016.

While people from Asia make up the largest share of recent newcomers, a majority of the country’s total foreign-born population is still from Latin America — 50 percent, compared to 31 percent from Asia.

North Dakota had the single largest percentage increase in foreign-born residents since 2010, Mr. Frey said, with the number going up by 87 percent. Dr. Fadel E. Nammour, a gastroenterologist in Fargo, N.D., who moved to the United States from Lebanon in 1996, said he has noticed more immigrant-owned restaurants since he moved to North Dakota in 2002. In recent years, the state has settled refugees from countries including Iraq, Somalia and Congo. In all, foreign-born people in North Dakota rose to 31,000 in 2017 from just 16,600 in 2010, Mr. Frey found.

“There is more diversity now,” Dr. Nammour said. “You can tell by food. There are Indian places that opened up. We have an African place now. Little things that are a little bit different.”

Source: Immigrants, Many from Asia, Reach Highest Share of U.S. Population Since 1910Immigrants, Many from Asia, Reach Highest Share of U.S. Population Since 1910The Census Bureau’s figures for 2017 confirm a major shift in who is coming to the United States.The new arrivals are more likely to come from Asia and to have college degrees than those who arrived in past decades.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Tata Immigration Case Could Shake IT Companies to ‘Very Core’

2018/09/14 Leave a comment

Similar to the 2013 controversy in Canada when RBC replaced some of its IT workers by temporary foreign workers (RBC replaces Canadian staff with foreign workers | CBC News – CBC.ca):

A class action accusing Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. of bias against U.S.-born workers could make big waves in the information technology staffing industry.

The case is one of seven asserting that IT staffing companies prefer foreign workers from South Asia over qualified Americans. All of the companies being sued are heavy users of H-1B guestworker visas, which go to skilled professionals in “specialty occupations.”

Should a court rule that Tata Consultancy’s and other consulting firms’ use of those visas violates anti-discrimination laws, it could force the companies to change their long-standing hiring and business models. If there aren’t enough U.S. workers to take the place of H-1B visa holders, as the companies say, that could force them out of business.

Daily Labor Report® is the premier resource that the nation’s foremost labor and employment professionals rely on for authoritative, analytical coverage of top labor and employment news.

Tata Consultancy is the second largest H-1B user, with 14,697 visa petitions approved in fiscal year 2017, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. By contrast, the company recruited about 3,000 U.S. workers last year, and 12,500 over the past five years, a spokesman told Bloomberg Law.

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a defendant in one of the other class actions, led the H-1B pack with 28,908 approved petitions last year.

The case against Tata Consultancy is one of “straightforward pattern and practice of discrimination that violates federal discrimination laws,” Daniel Kotchen of Kotchen & Low in Washington said in an email to Bloomberg Law. Kotchen’s firm is acting as lead or co-counsel in all seven class actions.

“Plaintiffs are confident in their case and look forward to trying the issues,” he said.

Outsourcing More Common

As more and more U.S. companies outsource their IT functions, that work has been absorbed by the overseas staffing companies, Allen Orr, second vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Bloomberg Law. It’s much cheaper for a company with a temporary IT project to contract it out than to hire an H-1B worker directly, he said.

IT staffing companies have high numbers of H-1B workers because the work that otherwise would’ve been spread out among their clients is concentrated in those organizations, said Orr, who practices with the Orr Immigration Law Firm in Washington.

A finding of discrimination could put those companies out of business, but that wouldn’t end the dominance of H-1B workers in the IT industry, he said. It just “shifts the market demand” back to direct hiring of H-1B workers, he said.

IT staffing companies’ use of the H-1B program has been under fire by various government officials since a pair of high-profile cases in 2015 in which U.S. tech workers at Southern California Edison and Walt Disney World were laid off and required to train their H-1B replacements. The H-1B workers were employees of the IT staffing companies that SCE and Disney contracted with in lieu of retaining their own IT departments.

The Trump administration also took aim at the specialty visa program with an April 2017 executive order requiring employers to prioritize hiring of U.S. workers.

Big Shakeup

The class action cases take aim at seven different companies, each with roots in India or Sri Lanka. They include: Koehler v. Infosys Techs. Ltd., E.D. Wis., No. 2:13-cv-00885; Buchanan v. Tata Consultancy Servs., Ltd., N.D. Cal., No. 4:15-cv-01696; Palmer v. Cognizant Tech. Solutions Corp., C.D. Cal., No. 2:17-cv-06848; Phillips v. Wipro, Ltd., S.D. Tex., No. 4:18-cv-00821; Sugg v. Virtusa, D.N.J., No. 3:18-cv-08036; Grant v. Tech Mahindra (Americas) Inc., D.N.D., No. 3:18-cv-00171; and Voll v. HCL Techs. Ltd., N.D. Cal., No. 5:18-cv-04943.

Wipro “will vigorously defend against these meritless allegations in court,” the company said in a statement provided to Bloomberg Law. It added that Wipro “is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity and provides all our employees with a work environment that is free from discrimination and harassment of any kind.”

“Tech Mahindra denies the allegations and is challenging the matter in court,” a company representative said in a statement provided to Bloomberg Law. “Tech Mahindra does not discriminate against any group or individual on the basis of race, creed, sex, sexual orientation, age or national origin,” the representative said.

“HCL is an equal opportunity employer and does not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on national origin, age, gender, color, religion, sexual orientation, pregnancy, disability etc.,” the company said in an email to Bloomberg Law. “We take great pride in our employment practices, including diversity at workplace.”

Representatives for the other IT staffing companies couldn’t be reached for comment about the national origin bias allegations.

A win for U.S. workers “would shake those corporations to the very core,” said David North, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports lower immigration levels.

The IT staffing industry in the U.S. is dominated by companies and workers from another part of the world, said North, who served as assistant for farm labor to the secretary of labor in the Johnson administration. “You cannot imagine a parallel situation to what we have with the Indian outsourcing companies,” he told Bloomberg Law.

A representative for NASSCOM, the trade association representing Indian IT services companies, declined to comment on the cases.

Tata Case Could Set Standard

The Tata Consultancy case is the furthest along, with a trial date set for Nov. 5 in federal district court in California. That makes it the most likely to set the standard for other cases to follow.

The judge presiding over the case last year refused to throw out the lawsuit and allowed it to go forward as a class action. Last month, she also rejected Tata Consultancy’s “hail-Mary effort” to restrict the workers’ remedy to just monetary damages.

That means the company could be subject to a court order requiring it to change its hiring and employment practices.

The company, however, denies the allegations.

“TCS is an equal opportunity employer, and as such, bases its employment decisions—including recruiting, hiring, promotions, retention, and discipline—on legitimate non-discriminatory business reasons without regards to race, national origin, color, religion, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law,” a Tata Consultancy spokesman said in a statement provided to Bloomberg Law.

The company believes the allegations are “baseless,” he said.

But Kotchen said the company “has a corporate preference to predominantly staff U.S. positions with South Asians, including visa holders from India.” As a result, employees who aren’t South Asian aren’t given work to do and are fired at “strikingly disproportionate rates,” he said.

“It’s hard to show that there’s discriminatory intent,” especially when a company can’t be certain which employees it can hire in a given year, Orr said. For the past several years, demand for H-1B visas has outstripped supply, resulting in a lottery to determine which employers can access the visas.

Employers filed 190,098 applications this year for a total 85,000 H-1B visas.

Many employees of IT staffing companies also wind up getting green cards, a process that requires a labor market test, Orr said. “If U.S. workers had those qualifications, then they’d be filling those jobs,” he said.

‘Niche’ Discrimination ‘Gets Ignored’

The Justice Department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights section launched an initiative to combat discrimination against U.S. workers, but it only has jurisdiction to prosecute national origin claims against small companies.

“It’s hard for government officials to get their minds around the concept that maybe a minority is being discriminated for as opposed to against,” North said. On the political left you have the feeling that you shouldn’t attack a minority group, and on the right you have a reluctance to attack corporations, he said.

It’s a “niche situation” that often “gets ignored,” North said.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has jurisdiction over large companies, but it’s prohibited by law from confirming or denying the existence of specific discrimination charges, or from providing information about ongoing investigations, agency spokesman Joseph Olivares told Bloomberg Law.

He did point to an EEOC report finding that the tech industry in general employs a higher share of white, Asian, and male workers than the private sector in general.

Business Model

Sara Blackwell, a Florida-based attorney who represented former Disney tech workers in a lawsuit that was later dropped, said a class action win “would open the doors for a lot of these American workers.” She said “their opportunities are really small.”

But “unless you change the business model, this isn’t going to fix” the problem for many U.S. workers, Blackwell told Bloomberg Law.

Congress needs to change the law to have a meaningful impact on the practice, she said.

Source: Tata Immigration Case Could Shake IT Companies to ‘Very Core’

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Asylum-seeker surge at Quebec border choking Canada’s refugee system, data show

2018/09/13 2 Comments

Good in-depth analysis of the numbers:

The wait time for a refugee claim hearing in Canada increased more than a third over the past two years, to 19 months, as more than 30,000 asylum seekers arriving via unauthorized border crossings placed significant pressure on the system.

Overwhelmed by the number of migrants, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) has only managed to finalize 15 per cent of the 27,674 asylum claims made by people who illegally entered Quebec – where the majority of the crossings took place, mostly at a single location near St. Bernard-de-Lacolle – between February, 2017, and this June.

The resulting backlog has created a growing queue for any and all asylum seekers. Under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1985 Singh decision, all refugee claimants on Canadian soil are entitled to an oral hearing.

Asylum seekers who cross illegally at the U.S.-Canadian border eventually face the same questions as all other refugee claimants: Are they genuine refugees, fearing persecution in their home countries? Data from the IRB show that less than half of the claimants in finalized cases – 1,885 – have been accepted as legitimate refugees in Quebec, significantly lower than the proportion for all refugee cases in Canada.

Canada has only deported a small number of the nearly 30,000 asylum seekers who
illegally entered Quebec through unauthorized border crossings since last year, accord-
ing to statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency.

The majority of border crossers have entered Canada through Quebec, mostly at an
unauthorized port of entry in St. Bernard-de-Lacolle. While a breakdown of adjudicated
cases was not available for Quebec, national statistics paint a picture of a refugee deter-
mination system that has been slow to finalize asylum claims.

But a separate data set from the Canada Border Services Agency shows that only a handful of those who have been denied refugee status have been deported. The CBSA said it had removed just 157 people who entered Quebec through unofficial border crossings since April, 2017 – about one in every 200. It said another 582 are being processed for deportation.

Canada-wide, the CBSA said it has deported 398 of the 32,173 people who crossed into Canada illegally since April, 2017. Of those, 146 were sent back to the U.S., while the rest were deported to 53 other countries, including Haiti (53), Colombia (24), Turkey (19) and Iraq (15).

Refugee lawyer Lorne Waldman said the relatively low number of deportations is simply an indicator of the system.

“It doesn’t surprise me because it takes a while for cases to make their way through the system. So people who came a year ago, if the system works efficiently, they should be at the end of the system and subject to removal if their claims are rejected,” he said.

But the situation at the border has put pressure on Canada’s already-strained refugee determination system. The projected wait time for a refugee claim hearing is currently 19 months, up from 16 in September, 2017, and 14 in September, 2016 – just before the influx of asylum seekers.

Tens of thousands have flooded the Canada-U.S. border since last year. Initially, many of the border crossers were Haitians who had been living in the U.S. under a temporary protected status (TPS) they had been given after the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti. When the Trump administration announced its intention to end the TPS for Haitians, word spread among the community there that they could apply for refugee status in Canada if they headed north and found a way into the country.

But it wasn’t as simple as showing up at the border and claiming asylum. The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the U.S. requires both countries to refuse entry to asylum seekers who arrive at official border crossings, as both countries are considered safe for refugees. However, since the agreement applies only to people who arrive at official points of entry, asylum seekers can avoid being turned away by entering between official border crossings – a loophole thousands have taken advantage of.

This year brought a new wave of asylum seekers in St. Bernard-de-Lacolle: Nigerians travelling on valid U.S. visas. It’s not exactly clear why Nigerians choose to travel on U.S. visas instead of Canadian ones, but Mr. Waldman said the U.S. visa system is seen as more generous than Canada’s. Many of the Nigerian asylum seekers obtain visitor visas and use them to fly into the U.S. They then head north to the Quebec border, cross into Canada and apply for asylum.

Earlier this year, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen and senior government officials travelled to Nigeria to raise their visa concerns directly with U.S. officials there. Mr. Hussen said the Nigerian government also pledged to discourage its citizens from claiming asylum in Canada after crossing between official points of entry along the U.S. border.

The IRB has finalized just 4,181 asylum claims made by border crossers in Quebec between February, 2017, and June of this year (more current data were unavailable), of which only 45 per cent – 1,885 – were accepted. Another 1,614 claims were rejected, and 682 were abandoned or withdrawn.

That number of accepted claims is significantly lower than the Canada-wide acceptance rate for all refugee claims. As of June, the IRB had approved 7,831 of 13,687 – 57 per cent – of all processed asylum cases made since Dec. 15, 2012, including claims made by asylum seekers who crossed illegally into Canada. Another 55,567 claims were still pending. A small number of refugee claims made before 2012, when the refugee determination system underwent significant changes, are documented separately.

As a part of the 2018 federal budget, the government invested $72-million in the IRB, which will be used to hire 64 new decision-makers in an effort to improve processing times.

Montreal refugee lawyer Mitchell Goldberg said he is optimistic processing times will start to decrease as the government dedicates more resources to the matter.

The deportation process can take even longer, especially if an asylum seeker chooses to exhaust all their appeal options – a source of concern for the Conservative opposition.

“It’s completely unreasonable for our asylum system to be backlogged for years and then for us to not have a functioning system to remove people who don’t have a legal reason to be in Canada,” said Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel.

However, NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan said the former Conservative government, in which Ms. Rempel served as a cabinet minister, is also to blame for the delays at the IRB.

“There’s been pressure on the system for many, many years, from the Conservatives to the Liberals. Successive governments have not resourced the IRB accordingly so that they can get the job done,” Ms. Kwan said.

Asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be heard have had to find accommodation, with thousands heading to Toronto, where the city has paid to house them in hotel rooms, dormitories and shelters for the homeless. Ottawa has pledged $50-million to defray the costs incurred by the provinces, with Quebec receiving $36-million, Ontario $11-million and Manitoba $3-million. But Toronto and Ontario have been pressing the federal government to pay much more, with the provincial Progressive Conservative government demanding a reimbursement of $200-million.

Mr. Waldman also said the government must do more to address the IRB delays, as the long wait times serve as a “magnet” for illegitimate asylum claimants who know they can potentially spend years in Canada while their cases linger in the system.

Source: Asylum-seeker surge at Quebec border choking Canada’s refugee system, data show

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By campaigning to cut immigration, Quebec’s opposition parties are playing politics with their province’s future

2018/09/12 Leave a comment

Great piece by Chantal Hébert, pointing out the sweetheart deal that Quebec has with respect to funding for immigrant integration and how it compares with federal funding to other provinces.

The numbers tell the story. Last time I looked, the federal government transferred $345 million to Quebec (2016-17 budget). While comparisons are inexact, the 2015-16 Rapport annuel de gestion of Quebec’s Ministère de l’immigration, de la diversité et de l’inclusion indicates about $97 million in direct program spending for language training (francisation) and integration services (65 percent of the total budget of about $150 million). 

Quite a gap!

Among Canada’s larger provinces, none is greying faster than Quebec. For the first time in its modern history, the province is struggling with labour shortages. To varying degrees all its regions including Montreal are affected.

Those shortages are projected to become more acute as the last of the baby boomers retire over the coming decade. Attracting workers from other provinces —as Alberta, Ontario or British Columbia routinely do — is less than an optimal solution. There is not in the rest of Canada a big supply of skilled workers readily able to function in French.

Why then are the province’s two main opposition parties campaigning on a promise to cut down on immigration?

If elected to power on Oct. 1, the currently leading Coalition Avenir Québec would reduce the number of immigrants coming to the province by 20 per cent as of its first year in office.

A CAQ government would also force newcomers, who do not after three years meet a government-set level of proficiency in French, to leave Quebec.

For its part, the Parti Québécois would limit admission to applicants who are already fluent in French. At this point, less than half of Quebec’s annual immigration intake falls in that category.

Under either plan, the number of immigrants admitted to the province would decline significantly.

By virtue of a longstanding federal-provincial agreement, Quebec selects all its immigrants except for those who apply for refugee status from inside Canada or who qualify under the family reunification program. But the citizenship process itself remains a federal responsibility and the national norms set by Ottawa apply in all provinces.

Quebec awards more points to applicants who are already fluent in French; it also proactively tries to woe them.

If there were a neglected pool of would-be immigrants — with the language skills the PQ considers essential — somewhere in the world, the province would have already found it.

On its face, the CAQ’s proposal to expel from Quebec those who fail to meet its language requirements is unconstitutional. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right of permanent residents to move from one province to another as they see fit.

But even if it did not, the proposition that the federal government — regardless of the party in power — should undertake to remove immigrants from Quebec to forcibly settle them elsewhere in Canada or, alternatively, to send them back to their country of origin would be dead on arrival on Parliament Hill.

Indeed, if CAQ Leader François Legault does become premier this fall, he might want to question the wisdom of shining a spotlight on the Quebec/Canada immigration accord, especially in a federal election year.

The agreement was last renegotiated in the immediate aftermath of the demise of the Meech Lake Accord — at a time when then-prime minister Brian Mulroney was desperate to blunt the impact of the failure of his constitutional bid in Quebec. It can be amended but not terminated by the federal government.

There is a reason why no Quebec government — including the PQ-led ones — has wanted to reopen the deal. It is one of the most advantageous federal-provincial agreements ever struck in the history of the federation.

It includes an escalator clause that ensures the funds Ottawa transfers to Quebec for immigration purposes do not decrease from year to year.

After more than two decades, there is a significant gap between the money Quebec receives per capita for integration purposes versus the funds transferred to the other provinces. That gap is larger than the extra costs involved in offering French-language training services. One would think no Quebec government would go out of its way to highlight this.

But then to look to common sense for the rationale of the PQ and the CAQ’s immigration proposals is to look in the wrong place.

By casting immigration as a threat to Quebec’s francophone identity, the CAQ and the PQ are playing to an audience of swing nationalist voters who could make or break their respective hopes on Oct. 1.

In this spirit, at mid-campaign Legault is casting his immigration platform as a firewall designed to prevent a French-language Quebec from disappearing within two or three generations.

There are no statistics to support the CAQ leader’s doomsday scenario. Quebec requires all immigrant children to be schooled in French until the end of high school. Even if their parents never managed to master the language, they would.

Were a future Quebec government to deliberately decrease its immigration intake even as the other provinces go the other way, it would be at a cost not only to its economy but also to its demographical weight and its influence in the federation.

Source: By campaigning to cut immigration, Quebec’s opposition parties are playing politics with their province’s future

Filed under Immigration, Integration Tagged with , , ,

Douglas Todd: Indo-Canadians in uproar over surge of foreign students

2018/09/11 Leave a comment

Another interesting profile by Douglas Todd of some of the tensions and debates within one of the ethnic communities:

The Indo-Canadian community is in turmoil over a recent surge in foreign students from India, whose presence is feeding community tensions amid allegations of financial exploitation, an Indian brain drain, exam cheating, mistreatment of young women, employer abuse, drug dealing and the “stealing” of South Asians’ jobs.

The number of international students from India in Canada has jumped by roughly five times in the past few years, after the federal government in 2012 bucked the trend of other Western nations and made it easier for international students to work and to go to the front of the immigration queue.

In the past it was mostly well-off Indian families who sent their children to Canada to study. But now tens of thousands of low-income Indians, including farming families, are stretching their meagre finances to get their children into the Canadian education system, job market and family immigration stream.

South Asian media outlets in Canada and India are buzzing with articles and commentary on the changes, often revolving around debate on whether the 130,000 foreign students from India, mostly from the Punjab region, are being victimized by the system or exploiting it. Canada’s South Asian population numbers more than 500,000, mostly in Metro Vancouver and Greater Toronto.

Indian education officials, especially in the Punjab, are complaining about losing students to Canada. They’re also alleging many of the foreign students are being exploited by unscrupulous immigration agents and English-language trainers in India, as well as by money-hungry colleges and universities, landlords and South Asian business owners in Canada.

Meanwhile, Indo-Canadians concentrated in Greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver have been holding public meetings to complain about how many students from India are skipping classes to work longer hours in Canada than they are permitted, leading to the Times of India running the headline: “Indo-Canadians say international students ’stealing their jobs.’”

Desi Today, an Indo-Canadian magazine, said in an editorial “There has been a simmering reaction of anger and protest by the Indo-Canadian community, especially of Surrey, against these students.

“There are YouTube videos made by Indo-Canadians displaying the behaviour of the students (and) their unhygienic lifestyle, criticizing them for their focus on earning money instead of studies. A few are leaving studies altogether to enter into illicit activities, like drug trading,” said Desi Today.

Balraj Kahlon, of Guru Nanak’s Free Kitchen, a Surrey organization that helps low-income individuals, told Postmedia News his members were discovering that “many students from India are under financial stress and there is a problem of labour exploitation, and sexual exploitation of young women.” Some Indians students are alleged to be working 16 hours a day, when their Canadian study permit allows only 20 hours a week.

The number of Indian foreign students at Surrey’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University has skyrocketed in the past couple of years, while Langara College’s cohort of Indian foreign students has catapulted 40 times in just three years. Many students from India are also attending small private colleges in Canada, which some critics dismiss as “one-room” fake diploma-and-immigration factories.

Langara College sociology instructor Gagun Chhina said Canadian institutions can’t handle the extraordinary influx of foreign students, who are flocking here because of Ottawa’s simplified process for obtaining permanent resident status. Students from India make up the second largest cohort of international students in Canada, after those from China.

Chhina said Indian foreign students are struggling to balance study with long hours on their jobs, which many need to survive in costly Vancouver and Toronto. Some are sending money home to their Indian parents, many of whom hope their sons and daughters will sponsor them to come to Canada to work temporarily or immigrate.

Indian foreign students have unfortunately become big business in both India and Canada, say the critics, and some of those enterprises are illicit.

A radio station in the Punjab, SBS, reported that English-language schools have been fined for charging students $15,000 for phoney passing marks in English tests, so they can get into Canada. Punjabi officials have ordered a crackdown on immigration consultants, some of whom take large sums and make false promises to manoeuvre young people into Canadians schools. India’s Tribune newspaper also maintains Canada’s “relaxed immigration policy” is draining tens of thousands of young people and their low-income families’ hard-earned money out of the Punjab.

Things are so strained among some South Asians in Canada that fights have broken out between domestic and foreign students in Ontario colleges.

“This is the talk of the town in the Punjabi community. The newspapers and radio shows all talk about it,” Balraj Deol, editor of the Khabarnama Punjabi Weekly, told Postmedia.

While many Indo-Canadian landlords and business owners are financially exploiting and abusing foreign students from India, Deol said the other side of the phenomenon is that Indian foreign students who break the rules by working long hours are adding to large “underground” ethnic economies in Ontario and B.C.

Said Deol: “People are angry at this poor immigration policy in Canada.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Indo-Canadians in uproar over surge of foreign students

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Labour board slams department over handling of closure of Vegreville centre

2018/09/11 Leave a comment

To note:

A federal labour board ruling has upended the way Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada handled the relocation of more than 150 workers when it closed its Vegreville processing centre and moved the jobs to Edmonton.

The Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board decided that the department breached the employees’ collective agreement when it refused to offer departure benefits, such as buyouts and education allowances, to employees whose jobs were moved 100 kilometres west.

The board gave the department and Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) 60 days to deal with the ruling or it will impose a remedy. The government can also seek a judicial review to overturn the decision.

The ruling offers the possibility of buyouts, re-training, pension penalty waivers and other benefits for the 30 employees who couldn’t make the move and found themselves jobless.

The ruling, however, won’t affect the government’s decision to close the immigration processing centre, one of Vegreville’s largest employers. It closed for good week ago after nearly 25 years in operation. The new centre at Edmonton’s Canada Place opened this week.

“What is missed is that in small rural communities this was about more than closing an office. It was more like a close-knit family than a workplace. Many people came and worked there for a long time,” said Michelle Henderson, a vice president at the Canada Employment and Immigration Union.

“I am so thrilled with this decision… “But it opens a can of worms because I am not sure what will happen. I don’t want to speak to what people will do but it opens up options that people have said ‘will be life-changing for me’.”

A big question when the government and PSAC sit down to negotiate is whether employees, who believing they had no other option but to move, will have the right to departure benefits. Say someone decided to move ‘under duress’ or opted for the move because they are too young to retire without facing pension penalties. Are they entitled to departure benefits?

How about those people who did move to Edmonton, a pricier place to live, but got caught in the collateral damage of a plummeting housing market caused by the shuttering of largest employer in a town of 5,000 people? Henderson is moving and she has been unable to sell her home.

The centre opened in 1994. The decision to put the centre in Vegreville was made by the Conservative government that was defeated in 1993. The office location was roundly criticized at the time as a parting political gift to Don Mazankowski, the local MP and a Mulroney era heavyweight.

It instantly became the major employer and Henderson said the centre was considered the most productive of the country’s four processing centres. With a workforce of 280 people, the centre processed temporary and permanent residency applications, work permits, visitor records and study permits, while also backing up other centres across the country.

The decision to close the centre came out of the blue for the town and employees. A huge campaign was mounted to protest the decision; dig into the business case as to why and come up with compromises to save the jobs. In a separate move, PSAC filed a policy grievance with the labour board.

The workload of processing visa and permanent residents has increased with Canada’s growing immigration.

The government argued it was too difficult to recruit workers with the needed analytical and bilingual skills in Vegreville. With the lease for the centre expiring, the government decided to move the operation to Edmonton where it could also add another shift. It offered 159 permanent employees a job in Edmonton and gave them six months to decide.

The union proposed the department keep a satellite office for those who couldn’t move or let them telework. The department rejected both.

According to PSAC, about 105 decided to relocate; 28 resigned, retired or left. Of the 30 or more who decided not to move, some had farms; others were caring for elderly parents; some had spouses who couldn’t relocate or they had small children and couldn’t get the day care to cover the commute into the city.

The union argued the employees were effectively declared surplus and entitled to departure benefits under the Workforce Adjustment Agreement enshrined in their collective agreements. The directive governs how employees are managed when they lose their jobs whether to downsizing, relocation or privatization.

The department, however, argued it had made a ‘reasonable job offer” which meant they were not entitled to buyouts and other departure benefits.

The union, however, maintained that turning around and offering the move to Edmonton to those who had already turned down the move was not a real job offer.

It also pointed to a new clause that was negotiated in the last round of bargaining which required departments to offer departure benefits for all ‘workforce adjustment’ situations that affected more than five employees.

In the end, adjudicator Bryan Gray accepted the union’s argument and said language of the new clause is “clear and unambiguous.” He said those given the option to move or face layoff were in a situation that could lead to “their services no longer being required because of workforce adjustment situation” which triggers an obligation to offer departure benefits for those who volunteer to leave.

In fact, PSAC will be demanding changes in the upcoming round of bargaining on how ‘reasonable job offers” are used in relocating work.

Union officials have argued they have never seen a department as inflexible on its ‘take it or leave’ job offer.

The government has managed major downsizing of the public service under the Chretien and Harper. Those who aren’t offered guaranteed job offers had three options: a buyout based on years of service to a maximum of 52 weeks; education or training allowance up to $15,000 or go on a priority list for another job in the public service. (That’s not really an option in Vegreville where the only other federal jobs are the handful at the RCMP detachment and the post office.)

The Phoenix disaster highlighted one of the most publicized relocation of federal employees. The Harper government consolidated pay operations in Miramichi N.B. and moved all compensation advisers working in departments there.

All compensation advisers were offered jobs in Miramichi and those who refused -almost all of them – found other federal jobs or were offered buyouts and departure benefits.

It’s unclear how the board’s ruling will affect the cost which was originally estimated at $7.3 million if everyone relocated.

Source: Labour board slams department over handling of closure of Vegreville centre

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Germany Chases a Fix for Its $35 Billion Immigration Problem

2018/09/11 Leave a comment

The other side of Germany’s immigration issues:

Germany has an immigration problem, but it might not be what right-wing extremists think it is. Rather than too many foreigners in the country, economists fret there won’t be enough.

With baby boomers retiring and not enough young people joining the labor market, the country needs at least 400,000 people coming to work in Germany every year to maintain its competitiveness, according to the IAB Institute for Employment Research. A shortage of skilled workers means businesses won’t be able to produce as much as they could, holding back the economy by about 30 billion euros ($35 billion) a year, research by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research shows.

Labor Squeeze

Germany’s job market is expected to get tighter as older workers retire

https://www.bloomberg.com/toaster/v2/charts/8d8436331b5147f5a7393f075c6c757a.html?brand=politics&webTheme=politics&web=true&hideTitles=true (link to chart)

Source: German Federal Labor Agency

It’s a delicate issue for Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her open-door policy to refugees — more than 1 million asylum seekers came to the country since 2015 — helped foment social tensions and facilitated the emergence of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party. That puts pressure on her to respond to these concerns, while also helping businesses clamoring for more talent.

“It can take up to six months before employees from non-EU countries get their visa,” said Michael Bueltmann, who runs the German operations of digital mapping company HERE Technologies. “This has a negative impact” on recruitment and complicates planning. The company employs 1,200 people in Germany, including programmers from Bangladesh and the Middle East, who lack certainty about their residency prospects.

To address these concerns, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who recently referred to migration as “the mother of all problems,” is finalizing a law aimed at helping skilled workers come to Germany, while also controlling the influx of low-skilled people who might take advantage of the country’s generous welfare system.

The refugee situation and immigration may be linked in the legislation, with the SPD — Merkel’s junior coalition partner — calling for refugees to be able to switch out of asylum status if they find a job. The so-called “lane change” proposal has been rejected by Merkel, setting up a potential showdown.

The final immigration bill is to be presented this fall, and critics are already concerned it won’t go far enough.

“The planned legislation is a first step, but not what Germany really needs,” said Wido Geis, a senior economist at the Cologne Institute. “A truly modernized German immigration law would need a restructured administration” that centralizes approval processes rather than relies on local authorities.

Source: Germany Chases a Fix for Its $35 Billion Immigration Problem

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Immigration: Legault se défend d’avoir envoyé un message de fermeture

2018/09/10 Leave a comment

Nuancing or spinning his earlier comments:

François Legault s’est défendu vendredi d’avoir envoyé un message de fermeture aux nouveaux arrivants lorsqu’il a affirmé que l’immigration pose un « risque » pour la survie du français. Il affirme au contraire que ses propositions aideront les immigrants à « avoir du plaisir à vivre au Québec. »

Le chef de la Coalition avenir Québec a provoqué de vives réactions, jeudi, lorsqu’il a dit craindre que « nos petits-enfants » ne parlent plus le français si le système d’immigration n’est pas réformé.

À ceux qui y voient un message de fermeture, M. Legault a assuré que c’est tout le contraire. En fait, a-t-il dit, les immigrants seront les premiers à profiter des réformes d’un éventuel gouvernement caquiste.

« Ce qu’on dit aux immigrants, c’est que si vous voulez avoir du plaisir à vivre au Québec, il faut vous intégrer, a dit M. Legault. Pour s’intégrer, il faut parler français. C’est bon pour le Québec, c’est bon pour les nouveaux arrivants. »

« Ce qu’on souhaite, c’est qu’ils soient des citoyens qui participent pleinement, d’abord à l’emploi, mais aussi en parlant avec les voisins la langue commune, le français », a-t-il ajouté.

Les positions de la CAQ ont souvent été critiquées à Montréal, où le parti n’a jamais fait élire un seul député. M. Legault a abordé le problème de front lors d’un point de presse dans la circonscription de Pointe-aux-Trembles aux côtés de sa candidate, la mairesse Chantal Rouleau.

La veille, cette dernière avait semblé contredire son chef en affirmant qu’elle n’a « pas peur » pour l’avenir du français au Québec. Vendredi, elle a assuré être sur la même longueur d’onde que M. Legault.

« L’inquiétude, elle sera pour les générations futures, a-t-elle expliqué. Si on n’agit pas maintenant, ça pourra être inquiétant plus tard. Mais c’est toujours l’histoire de la langue française au Québec : il faut toujours être vigilant. »

Cette dernière n’a cependant pas été en mesure de dire combien d’immigrants habitent sa circonscription. Il y en a 6200 selon le dossier socio-économique du Directeur général des élections, soit environ 12 % de la population.

Immigration économique

M. Legault propose de réduire à 40 000 le nombre d’immigrants qui arrivent au Québec chaque année, une baisse d’environ 20 %. Il souhaite aussi obtenir d’Ottawa le contrôle sur le programme de réunification familiale, par lequel environ 12 000 immigrants arrivent chaque année.

Ce programme fédéral permet à une personne déjà installée au Québec d’être réunie avec d’autres membres de sa famille en parrainant leur demande d’immigration. M. Legault lui reproche de n’imposer aucune exigence quant à l’apprentissage du français.

Or, même si le gouvernement Trudeau refuse de céder le contrôle du programme, un gouvernement caquiste restera ferme sur son objectif de réduction global. Quitte à réduire le nombre d’immigrants économiques qui sont sélectionnés par Québec.

« Ça pourrait être ça », a-t-il convenu.

Source: Immigration: Legault se défend d’avoir envoyé un message de fermeture

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Canadian border agency has deported 398 ‘illegal migrants’ out of 32,000

2018/09/10 Leave a comment

The latest numbers:

Nearly 400 people who crossed the U.S. border illegally for asylum in Canada have been deported since authorities began tracking irregular migration in April of last year.

That number is a small fraction of the 32,173 so-called “irregular migrants” who came through unguarded land borders from the United States during the period ending in late August. Most are still waiting for their asylum claims to be heard.

Of the 398 failed refugee claimants Canada has deported, 146 were sent back to the U.S., where 116 of them have citizenship, according to data provided to the Star by the Canada Border Services Agency. The rest were deported to 53 countries, with most sent to Haiti (53), Colombia (24), Turkey (19) or Iraq (15).

The deportees, 48 of whom were under the age of 17, included 238 males and 160 females, said the border enforcement agency.

“What happens is people come to the U.S., establish themselves and have children while they try to regularize their immigration status,” said Ottawa immigration lawyer Betsy Kane.

“The number of deportees captures these American-born children who accompanied their parents to Canada for asylum.”

The Canadian border agency said the decision on where an individual is deported depends on from where they came into Canada, their last permanent residence, their citizenship and country of birth. All deportees have seen their asylum claims rejected by the refugee board and exhausted all legal avenues of appeal and due process.

All 32,173 irregular migrants have been declared inadmissable simply for crossing the Canadian border illegally, including six who failed the criminal checks, said border agency spokesperson Nicholas Dorion.

Queen’s University immigration law professor Sharry Aiken said she was not surprised by the low number of deportations as the majority of asylum claims by border-crossers are still to be determined by the refugee board. That board has long been underfunded and only recently got the money from Ottawa to hire additional decision-makers.

Of the 12,190 overall claims processed in the first six months of this year, 64 per cent were granted asylum.

“When removal orders become effective and are not enforced, it undermines the integrity of the system and the confidence in the system,” said Aiken. “But due process does take time with other legal remedies when a claim is refused. We shouldn’t say something must have gone awry because only 400 people have been removed.”

The latest refugee board statistics show it still had 55,567 new claims in the backlog by the end of June after 13,687 had been processed and finalized — 7,831 claims being accepted, 4,359 rejected, and the rest either abandoned or withdrawn. The backlog includes claimants from other countries who didn’t come through unguarded land borders via the U.S.

Source: Canadian border agency has deported 398 ‘illegal migrants’ out of 32,000

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Legault réduirait le nombre d’immigrants dès sa première année au pouvoir

2018/09/07 Leave a comment

Given increasing federal numbers, this would mean a relative decrease in Quebec population relative to the rest of Canada and thus decreased political importance over time:

Un éventuel gouvernement de la Coalition avenir Québec réduira dès la première année de son mandat le nombre d’immigrants de 20 %, a confirmé l’entourage de François Legault, mercredi. Une précision qui est survenue après qu’une candidate eut indiqué qu’il faut baisser ce seuil « graduellement ».

M. Legault a visité une production maraîchère en serre à Sainte-Clotilde-de-Châteauguay, en Montérégie. Sur les 250 employés de l’entreprise, 170 sont d’origine étrangère. Il s’agit pour la plupart de travailleurs étrangers temporaires.

Dans cette région agricole, l’immigration est un enjeu important, a convenu la candidate caquiste dans Huntington, Claire IsaBelle. Car plusieurs entreprises agricoles peinent à trouver des employés.

« On n’a pas cette pénurie de main-d’oeuvre quand on va chercher les étrangers, la population immigrante, la main-d’oeuvre immigrante, a expliqué Mme IsaBelle. Ils nous aident beaucoup. Il faut considérer qu’ils sont essentiels. »

Or, la CAQ propose de réduire de 50 000 à 40 000 le nombre d’immigrants admis chaque année au Québec. Questionnée à savoir si cette proposition est compatible avec les besoins des agriculteurs, la candidate a indiqué que la mesure n’entrera pas en vigueur immédiatement.

« On ne va probablement pas baisser à 40 000 tout de suite, la première année qu’on est au pouvoir, a indiqué Mme IsaBelle. On va baisser probablement graduellement. »

Contredite

Cette affirmation a été contredite quelques minutes plus tard par l’entourage de M. Legault. On a précisé aux journalistes que la baisse du nombre d’immigrants aura lieu dès 2019, première année complète d’un éventuel gouvernement caquiste.

Plus tôt dans la campagne, François Legault a argué que la réduction temporaire des seuils d’immigration permettrait d’améliorer l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants à la société québécoise. Il a fait valoir qu’environ le quart des immigrants quitte la province.

Cette prise de position lui a valu de vives critiques du Parti libéral, qui juge que la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre est le plus grave problème qui pèse sur l’économie québécoise.

Une « erreur massive », selon Couillard

Pour Philippe Couillard, promettre une baisse du seuil d’immigration est « une erreur massive ». « Pour cette seule raison, parce qu’il y en a d’autres, la CAQ ne devrait pas être autorisée par la population à former le gouvernement », a lancé le chef libéral, de passage à Sherbrooke.

Il a fait valoir que la promesse de M. Legault est « antiéconomique ». « Le problème économique le plus important au Québec, je ne l’invente pas, tout le monde nous le dit au Québec : la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre qualifiée, moins qualifiée. L’immigration fait partie de la solution. »

C’est d’autant plus nuisible pour l’économie selon lui que M. Legault serait forcé de diminuer le nombre de nouveaux arrivants de la catégorie de l’immigration économique (30 000 des 50 000 personnes que l’on accueille chaque année). C’est la seule catégorie sur laquelle le gouvernement du Québec exerce un contrôle. Le reste est sous la responsabilité du fédéral : il s’agit des réfugiés et des nouveaux arrivants issus de réunifications familiales. Pour M. Couillard, « François Legault a une méconnaissance des faits et des pratiques d’immigration ».

Le chef libéral reste évasif quand on lui demande ses intentions au sujet du seuil d’immigration. Il a d’abord dit vouloir le « maintenir » à 50 000, mais il a entrouvert la porte à une augmentation au cours d’un prochain mandat. « Ce pourrait être le même nombre, par exemple si on pense qu’on a besoin d’un an de plus pour bien stabiliser, voir l’impact de cela », a-t-il déclaré, laissant entendre qu’une hausse pourrait survenir par la suite.

Avant d’annoncer une intention, « je veux m’assurer que les efforts qu’on va déployer (en intégration et en francisation) soient au moins au niveau des personnes qui arrivent. Je pense qu’on est là maintenant ». Il souhaite également voir « comment les besoins de main-d’oeuvre évoluent ». Il a rappelé que le seuil d’immigration est proposé par le gouvernement et fait l’objet d’un débat parlementaire avant son adoption.

Source: http://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/elections-quebec-2018/201809/05/01-5195331-legault-reduirait-le-nombre-dimmigrants-des-sa-premiere-annee-au-pouvoir.php

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