Prime Minister Scott Morrison exposes Australia’s big immigration myth

2018/09/18 Leave a comment

Despite his anti-immigration reputation, many of the points he makes in this interview are sensible:

PRIME Minister Scott Morrison has taken aim at Australia’s obsession with population growth, saying it is a “fairly irrelevant statistic” and immigration policy is far more nuanced than many of us realise.

Population growth surged to the top of the political agenda in August as the number of people living in Australia passed 25 million, with prominent figures such as entrepreneur Dick Smith warning our “way of life” would be under threat unless immigration was drastically reduced.

In an exclusive interview with news.com.au, Mr Morrison struck a very different tone.

He identified a pervasive myth at the heart of the immigration debate — that permanent migrants from overseas are the biggest strain on Australia’s infrastructure.

He said temporary migration and natural population growth, caused by the people who already live here having children, were far more significant factors.

“I’ve never bought this idea that the permanent immigration intake is the thing fuelling population growth. Because it’s not borne out in the actual maths,” Mr Morrison said.

“When it comes to population growth at the moment, there are 10 extra people that have got on the bus. Just over four of them are temporary migrants. Just under four of them were born here, a natural increase. And only two of them are permanent migrants.”

A huge chunk of that — 38 per cent — came from the natural increase category. Among the rest, temporary migrants easily outnumbered permanent migrants.

Importantly, growth varied wildly in different parts of the country — a point Mr Morrison felt had often been lost in the national population debate.

“You have got to understand what the population impacts are, not just in terms of how much the national population is growing by. That’s a fairly irrelevant statistic,” Mr Morrison said.

“What matters is what is it growing at in Melbourne; in the western suburbs; in the eastern suburbs. What is it doing in southeast Queensland? What is it doing in Townsville? What is it doing in Perth?”

In some areas, he said, the combination of natural population growth and interstate migration “eclipses international migration a couple of times over”.

“I mean, what are they going to do — stop the Victorians, or stop the New South Welshmen?”

Meanwhile, smaller cities such as Adelaide were simply “crying out” for more immigration, not less.

“The idea of average population growth is about as helpful as average rainfall. It has the same practical meaning,” he said.

“You can have very low levels of population growth that are actually being quite unhelpful in terms of what’s happening in the economy, or social cohesion.

“You can have high levels of it, which if it’s all pretty much skills based and everybody’s in a job and it’s focused on regional areas, it can be quite suitably absorbed.”

The fundamental problem for the government is that most immigrants want to live in our biggest cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, and far fewer are interested in staying in regional areas.

The ABS statistics we cited earlier showed 165,000 migrants, or about two-thirds of last year’s net migration figure, went to those two cities.

There is only so much the government can do about it, beyond placing conditions on some temporary visas, or rewarding temporary migrants who move to regional areas. Mr Morrison signalled he was open to expanding on those initiatives.

But he certainly can’t dictate where permanent migrants get to live.

Source: Prime Minister Scott Morrison exposes Australia’s big immigration myth

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Machines Will Handle More Than Half of Workplace Tasks by 2025, WEF Report Says

2018/09/18 Leave a comment

Question is: what kind of jobs and will it truly be a “positive impact:”

Organizers of the Davos forum say in a new report that machines are increasingly moving in on jobs done by people, projecting that more than half of all workplace tasks will be carried out by machines by 2025.

The World Economic Forum also predicts the loss of some 75 million jobs worldwide by 2022, but also says 133 million new jobs will be created.

The WEF said Monday: “Despite bringing widespread disruption, the advent of machine, robots and algorithm could actually have a positive impact on human employment.”

The “Future of Jobs 2018” report, the second of its kind, is based on a survey of executives representing 15 million employees in 20 economies.

The WEF said challenges for employers include reskilling workers, enabling remote employment and building safety nets for workers.

Source: Machines Will Handle More Than Half of Workplace Tasks by 2025, a Report Says

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Trump administration draws fire for ‘misleading’ report linking terrorism, immigration

2018/09/15 Leave a comment

Yet another case of a misleading and wrong report by the Trump administration:

Eighteen former counterterrorism officials are urging the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to retract or correct a report that implies a link between terrorism and immigration, calling its findings ‘‘misleading’’ and counterproductive.

Released in January, the report says that 402 of the 549 people — almost 3 of every 4 — convicted of terrorism charges since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were foreign-born. That’s a data point that President Trump has highlighted as justification for his administration’s hard-line immigration policies — namely his desire to shift from a ‘‘random chain migration and lottery system, to one that is merit-based,’’ as he has tweeted.

But critics dubious of the report’s conclusions have said it relies on irrelevant and in some cases flawed data.

Failure to correct the document is likely to undermine counterterrorism efforts by fueling misperceptions about the nature of radicalization and stoking societal divisions around immigration, according to a letter released Thursday by the former government officials, including former National Counterterrorism Center directors Nicholas Rasmussen and Matthew Olsen, former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., and former acting assistant attorney general for national security Mary McCord.

‘‘Overall,’’ their letter says, ‘‘the report appears designed to give the misleading impression that immigrants — and even their citizen family members — are responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks that have occurred in the United States.’’

The report was written to comply with an executive order Trump issued in March 2017 banning citizens from six predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Katie Waldman, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said the agency is ‘‘focused on anticipating terrorist trends and movements and, more importantly, blocking all terrorist pathways into the United States.’’

She said ‘‘as recently as last month, US authorities arrested an Iraqi refugee in California — wanted for murder in Iraq — who is alleged to have been a member of both [the Islamic State] and Al Qaeda. We cannot let dangerous individuals slip through the cracks and exploit our refugee program.’’

The former counterterrorism officials’ letter was written in support of an appeal to be filed Thursday by several advocacy groups that sued the two agencies in federal court in Oakland and Boston. The organizations are seeking a retraction or correction under a little-known law, the Information Quality Act.

The courts stayed the lawsuits when the agencies answered the plaintiffs, with the Justice Department saying in July that the plaintiffs’ charge that the report perpetuates a biased narrative is ‘‘a subjective conclusion’’ based on their interpretation of the report.

The DHS in August said the plaintiffs did not ‘‘specifically challenge the accuracy of the data’’ but rather requested that it be retracted to ‘‘correct the misimpression’’ that it supposedly created.

Critics say the conviction data should not include roughly 100 foreign-born individuals detained overseas and extradited to the United States to be tried for alleged crimes committed abroad.

Moreover, said Ben Berwick, an attorney for Protect Democracy, according to data provided by the Justice Department under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, at least 189 of the individuals included in the total of 549 convicted were caught up in an international-terrorism investigation but not charged with an offense directly related to terrorism. It is unclear how many of these people were born overseas or in the United States, he said.

‘‘This is a government report claiming to make factual assertions,’’ he said, ‘‘and it’s really clear that the data is questionable and the use of the data is questionable.’’

The key issue with the report, said Joshua Geltzer, a former National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism, is it emphasizes a person’s place of birth as a ‘‘meaningful predictor’’ of terrorist activity rather than understanding the radicalization process.

‘‘There are US citizens born and bred here who unfortunately radicalize, too,’’ said Geltzer, now at Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

The report says that 147 individuals convicted of international-terrorism charges were US citizens by birth. But much of it details cases involving people born overseas who entered the United States through the immigration process or as refugees.

The former officials’ letter said the report plays into terrorists’ hands, noting that ‘‘one particularly common way for terrorists to attempt to weaken their stronger adversaries is to sow discord and prod them into turning on themselves.’’ Echoing language used in the debate over how to deter Russian interference in US democracy, the letter said that ‘‘cultivating resilience against terrorism thus relies in part on ensuring that the public accurately understands the real nature of the terrorist threat.’’

The real drivers of terrorism are disaffection, a lack of belonging, ‘‘a grandiose desire to be part of something seen as ‘bigger,’ and a gradual numbing to the humanness of potential victims,’’ the letter said.

‘‘The Trump administration wants to blame the immigration system for things that happened 15 to 20 years after people flowed through the system,’’ Geltzer said. ‘‘That’s a radicalization problem. Not an immigration problem.’’

Source: Trump administration draws fire for ‘misleading’ report linking terrorism, immigration

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PEI scraps business immigration program criticized for oversight problems

2018/09/15 Leave a comment

Overdue. Now for Quebec to do the same, given that large numbers end up in British Columbia, using Quebec as a back door:

Prince Edward Island is scrapping a controversial business immigration program which prompted federal investigations alleging hundreds of applicants never settled on the Island.

The provincial government said Wednesday it will no longer accept applications from immigrants looking to set up a business on the Island in the entrepreneur stream of the Provincial Nominee Program.

The immigration program has faced criticism for granting permanent residency status — a coveted step towards full citizenship — before businesses were set up and people actually moved to P.E.I.

Under the program, the applicants provide the Island government with a $200,000 refundable deposit, and commit to invest $150,000 and manage a firm.

A spokesman for the Office of Immigration says in 2016-17 over half of all the 269 applicants who had “completed their agreements” forfeited their deposit and never opened a business, raising $18 million for the small province.

In addition, last year The Canadian Press reported on how three international students were asked by owners of businesses created under the program to return a portion of their wages to the business immigrants. In one case, a student said he was fired when he refused, and in two other cases, the students said they agreed to give back a portion of their income in cash.

Progressive Conservative Leader James Aylward said Wednesday the program bred public distrust and should have been cancelled years ago.

“It never passed the sniff test,” he said in an interview.

“Our retention rate was dismal … The government raked tens of millions of dollars from defaulted deposits.”

The province had said it was conducting a review into the program, shortly after a series of investigations by the Canada Border Services Agency became public.

The Canadian Press also recently reported on a search warrant application by the agency that alleged hundreds of people gained permanent residency in Canada by using local addresses where they didn’t live, using the PNP entrepreneur stream.

An investigator alleged 462 applicants to the provincial nominee program used Charlottetown homes belonging to two Chinese immigrants over the past four years as “addresses of convenience.”

The investigator also said she suspected the immigrants didn’t come to the Island and settle, contrary to the requirements of the provincial program.

Those allegations, which have not been proven in court, came two months after two Charlottetown hoteliers were charged with aiding in immigration fraud, with the CBSA alleging 566 immigrants used the addresses of the siblings’ hotel and home.

The siblings have pleaded not guilty to immigration fraud charges, and their lawyer, Lee Cohen, has said there will be discussion with prosecutors about the sworn statements provided by the two accused.

Cohen says he’s suggested “the possibility that the statements were not voluntarily given” in the case.

Chris Palmer, the province’s minister of Economic Development, said in an interview that he wasn’t forced by the federal government to shut down the program, despite the high-profile investigations.

“The feds didn’t intervene and tell us to do this, no,” he said.

Rather, he said it was due to his department’s disappointment with its results in retaining immigrants on the Island.

“We weren’t satisfied with it as our rates of retention weren’t as high as we wanted them to be,” he said.

However, Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer based in Vancouver, said he sees a relationship between Ottawa’s probes and the shutdown of the program.

“Trials involving the P.E.I. program start soon, so no surprise to see the P.E.I. government shutting down the program before all is revealed,” he wrote in an email.

Kurland has long argued the Island’s system should mirror British Columbia’s program, which approves a business project first, makes the person spend two years on a work permit to ensure business success, and then requires the applicant to live near the business at least nine months a year.

“Only after that is done and the business is successful will the province hand over a ‘nomination certificate’ that lets the person apply for a permanent resident visa,” he wrote.

“P.E.I. had it backwards, handing over the ‘nomination certificate’ first. That’s not the way to go and the … design flaw gave rise to a lot of problems.”

“Keep the candy until the person lives up to their promises.”

The province is noting that the entrepreneur stream is only a small part of the total number of immigrants it nominates.

It will continue to have a program where it nominates immigrants for work permits, where they will only be granted permanent residency if they fulfil their commitments to set up a business.

It will also continue to nominate immigrants who fill the province’s labour needs.

The number of nominations accepted under the nominee stream currently totals about 150 people, which is about 15 per cent of the roughly 1,070 provincially sponsored immigrants expected to be nominated this year.

Source: PEI scraps business immigration program criticized for oversight problems

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In Sweden, Populist Nationalists Won on Policy, but Lost on Politics

2018/09/14 Leave a comment

Geert Wilders had a similar effect on Dutch politics, shifting the consensus to the right and anti-immigration.
If Bernier succeeds in creating a new party, and if that party gains some support, it could have a similar effect but, IMO, much smaller effect given Canadian demographic and political realities:
Never mind the headlines: Sunday’s election in Sweden was a major setback for the far right. The populist-nationalist Sweden Democrats may have seen their percentage of the vote increase from 13 percent in 2014 to just shy of 18 percent this year, but they and many experts anticipated a much higher share; some even predicted that they would become the largest party in the country. Such an outcome would have been in keeping with their history of rapid growth, of more than doubling their previous tally in every election since 1998. Instead, they posted unexpectedly meager gains, which will do little to strengthen their influence in a deadlocked parliament where all other parties, center-right as well as left, refuse to negotiate with them.And yet, this conclusion is the result of what some may consider a troubling bargain. In past contests, the Sweden Democrats’ keystone political cause of reducing immigration had been used to stigmatize the party. This year, multiple parties —including the center-left Social Democrats and center-right Moderates—included calls for reduction in their platform.

The anti-immigration position was normalized even as it was neutralized.

At the center of this drama is an unusually complicated political party. When compared to other nationalist forces in Europe, the Sweden Democrats appear relatively moderate. They expel members who make explicitly racist or anti-Semitic statements, claim to reject ethno-nationalism, endorse a pathway toward full civic and cultural membership for Sweden’s minorities, have shown little love for global strongmen such as Russian President Vladimir Putin or President Donald Trump, and are headed by Jimmie Åkesson—a blushing mother-in-law’s dream with gentle mannerisms. But if style and policy place the Sweden Democrats on the softer side of global anti-immigrant movements, their history does not: They were born in 1988 from the merger of a tax-populist party and a white-nationalist organization.

Despite the Sweden Democrats’ internal reform campaigns aimed at repelling radicalism, most Swedes were horrified when the party first entered parliament in 2010 with 5.7 percent of the vote. In their eyes, homegrown neo-Nazis had marched into government, thrashing a global reputation of exceptional tolerance and progressivism in the process. For existing parties, dialogue with the newcomers was out of the question: It was acquiescence to extremism. Moral consensus and political logic seemed to dictate the repudiation of the Sweden Democrats and all they stood for, first and foremost their agenda to restrict immigration. Commitment to Sweden’s generous refugee policy became dogma.It was a righteous stand, perhaps, but also a short-sighted one. Sizable minorities of Swedes since the late 1990s have wanted reductions in the number of immigrants admitted to the country as well as more emphasis on assimilation rather than multiculturalism. Those sentiments had no outlet in establishment politics, creating an opportunity for the Sweden Democrats. Scandal after scandal—including those revealing that its lower ranks included racist ideologues and anti-Semites—could not stop the party’s growth so long as it held the monopoly on immigration skepticism. Whether motivated by economics, cultural concerns, or racism, voters seeking cuts in immigration had only one option. That remained true even after the Sweden Democrats climbed to a 12.9 percent share of the vote in 2014.

But an unprecedented shift in Swedish politics came the following year. War, poverty, and political strife across North Africa and the Middle East sparked a massive wave of immigration to Europe, and Sweden was one of the prime destinations. By the end of 2015, Sweden had received upwards of 160,000 asylum seekers, more per capita than any other country in Europe.

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven initially said there was theoretically no limit to the number of immigrants Sweden could embrace. But it soon became clear that a limit had in fact been reached. Sweden’s schools, hospitals, and law enforcement could not handle such numbers. In late November 2015, the center-left government, headed by the Social Democrats and the Green Party, initiated restrictions on refugee immigration. And the center-right Moderate Party, whose leader just a year before had called on Swedes to “open their hearts” and allow large-scale immigration to continue, called for closed borders.

It was a U-turn on Swedish politics’ definitive issue. (American readers looking for a comparison might imagine the Democratic Party ending Social Security, or Republicans annulling the Second Amendment.) And its implicit message was bitter for the political establishment. The Sweden Democrats had been right: Refugee migration was destabilizing the country.

Forced by circumstance, with great reluctance and occasional pain—the Green Party leader sobbed as she announced cuts to refugee migration during a press conference—Sweden’s politicians moved toward a new political consensus. The country’s largest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, as well as the center-right Christian Democrats, adopted platforms calling for reduced immigration, and they carried those positions into elections this year.The parties differed on how much of a reduction they sought and how to achieve it. There was enough cross-party agreement, however, to make immigration a somewhat boring topic of debate in this year’s election. Immigration was just one subject among many, sharing space with youth unemployment, health care, and gender equality.

In a sense, then, the Sweden Democrats succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: Parties espousing restrictions to immigration received a combined three-quarters of the vote, and ideas once confined to the far right spread into the establishment. Yet if the Sweden Democrats won on policy, they lost their political cudgel. The far-right party will not have the opportunity to implement its long-desired reductions in immigration, or any other policy for that matter. Future border restrictions will be pursued by centrists, and in the eyes of many Swedes, this will mean more thoughtful and compassionate policy.

Source: In Sweden, Populist Nationalists Won on Policy, but Lost on Politics

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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.

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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

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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

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