Racial resentment is the biggest predictor of immigration attitudes, study finds

2018/07/12 Leave a comment

Not a surprising correlation:

White Americans’ negative attitudes toward immigrants are driven overwhelmingly by racial prejudices, not “economic anxiety,” according to a working paper by political scientist Steven V. Miller of Clemson University.

Immigration hard-liners, including President Trump, often frame their arguments with ostensibly race-neutral appeals to public safety or economic interest. As Trump said in July 2015, Mexicans are “taking our jobs. They’re taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us.” This has led many commentators to conclude that the attitudes driving Trump and his supporters on questions of immigration are primarily economic, rather than racial in nature.

Political scientists have subsequently tested this theory, at least as it applies to Trump support overall, and found it lacking — over and over and over again. But Miller’s paper is extremely useful because it removes the question from the specific context of 2016 and places it in a more general policy realm.

To do this, he draws on nationally representative survey data from the American National Election Studies and the Voter Study Group, two well-established surveys of voter attitudes and behavior. To measure views on immigration, the surveys ask respondents whether levels of immigration should be increased, decreased or left the same.

The surveys measure racial attitudes using a well-established battery of questions on “racial resentment.” Political scientists generally define this as something like “a moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as individualism and self-reliance.” It’s measured via agreement with statements like, “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites” and “Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

The surveys also include a number of ways to measure what’s come to be known as “economic anxiety”: evaluations about the country’s economic health, as well as respondents’ employment status and job market conditions in their communities, counties and states of residence.

Miller also controlled for a number of common economic and demographic variables, such as income, education, age, political party and gender. Respondents’ race wasn’t included as a control because the study looked at the views of only white respondents.

Miller essentially ran a number of statistical tests to determine how white Americans’ economic and racial attitudes correlated with their immigration beliefs: Does being unemployed make white voters more or less likely to support decreasing immigration? What about belief in the strength of the economy? As respondents’ racial resentments increase, what does that do to their views on immigration?

All told, the analyses were “unequivocal that racial resentment is reliably the largest and most precise predictor of attitudes toward immigration,” Miller found. As the chart above shows, “racial resentment has the largest magnitude effect” on the odds that a white respondent will express a preference for less legal immigration. The effect of racial resentment has “nearly six times” the impact as a belief that the economy has gotten worse on respondents’ propensity to favor less immigration.

The racial resentment questions ask only about attitudes toward black Americans. They don’t mention Hispanic immigrants at all. And yet, Miller found, white Americans’ attitudes toward blacks were a powerful predictor of how they felt about immigration. “The familiar racial resentment toward African-Americans is part of a bigger syndrome in which ethnicity/race filters perspectives toward policy, more broadly,” he writes.

Miller cautions that the paper is still in its early stages and has not been peer-reviewed. But his findings do comport with much of the prior research on racial resentment and Trump support, and it makes sense that those attitudes would spill over into more general policy areas as well.

In the end, this should come as no surprise — the empirical case for restricting immigration is a poor one. Studies have consistently shown no link between immigrants and crime, for instance, and the net effect of immigration, legal or otherwise, on the economy tends to be positive, particularly in the long run.

Moreover, a country with a falling fertility rate needs immigration to offset population decline, fill job vacancies and contribute to government coffers.

In the end, Miller writes, “an ounce of racial resentment is worth a pound of economic anxiety.”

Source: Racial resentment is the biggest predictor of immigration attitudes, study finds

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Italian Catholic priests go to war with Salvini over immigration

2018/07/11 Leave a comment

Noteworthy:

Gianfranco Formenton, a priest in Italy’s central Umbria region who has long preached against racism and in support of migrants, knows what it is like to clash with Matteo Salvini, the recently installed interior minister and leader of the far-right League party.

In response to the party’s xenophobic rhetoric in 2015 – the year more than a million migrants arrived in Europe and 150,000 landed on Italy’s southern shores – he put a sign up on the door of his church in San Martino di Trignano, a hamlet of the town of Spoleto, saying: “Racists are forbidden from entering. Go home!”

He immediately bore the wrath of Salvini, who wrote on Twitter: “Perhaps the priest prefers smugglers, slaveholders and terrorists? Pity Spoleto and this church if this man [calls himself] a priest.”

Fr Formenton is also believed to have been the target of intimidation by far-right sympathisers when his rectory and home were ransacked a few days after Luca Traini, a failed League candidate in a local ballot, injured six Africans in a shooting in the town of Macerata in early February.

As the Democratic party, the biggest left-wing force in Italy, appears cowed in the face of Salvini’s vitriolic immigration stance, fearing it will lose support, the interior minister’s strongest opponents are priests such as Formenton.

But they are struggling to convince parishioners to welcome migrants, amid mounting adulation of Salvini, a Catholic who reportedly attends mass.

“We have a population that wants blessings from the church, processions and religious rites, but every time Pope Francis recalls migrants or the poor, they no longer listen,” Formenton told the Guardian.

“There is an evil force of racism, and Salvini has contributed to this. He’s been a magician in cultivating hate and manipulating anger. People of all ages have become racist because of the climate we’re living in.”

Knowing that many of his backers are devout Catholics, Salvini has exploited religion to galvanise support. The 45-year-old once again brandished a rosary and swore on the gospel to be “loyal to his people” while addressing thousands of ecstatic voters at the League’s annual rally in Pontida, a town in the northern Lombardy region, last Sunday. His speech, during which he pledged to create a European-wide alliance against “mass immigration”, came a few days after Mario Delpini, the Archbishop of Milan, pleaded for more humanity among Christians.

“Can they go to mass each Sunday and ignore the drama that is happening in front of their eyes?” said Delpini.

In the few days since Salvini’s speech, more than 200 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean.

Pope Francis also spoke out after Salvini, who is also deputy prime minister, blocked the Aquarius, a rescue ship with more than 600 people on board, from docking in Italy in June. “I encourage those who bring them aid and hope that the international community will act in a united and efficient fashion to prevent the causes of forced migration,” the pontiff said.

At the same time, Salvini has been nurturing a relationship with US Cardinal Richard Burke, a fierce critic of Pope Francis and supporter of Donald Trump, as he strives to build consensus from within the church.

Cosimo Scordato, a priest at Saint Francesco church in Ballarò, a neighbourhood of Palermo and home to many migrants recently arrived in Sicily, compared Salvini’s use of religious imagery to that deployed by Mafia bosses.

“Holding a rosary in front of thousands of supporters reminds me of Mafia bosses holding the Bible,” Fr Scordato, who has been subjected to intimidation by the Mafia, told the Guardian.

“Mobsters believe themselves to be sort-of spokesmen of Christian values, they feel protected by the church and want to show people they have God on their side.”

Scordato said he recently wrote a letter to Salvini encouraging him to see migrants as an opportunity in a country with a low birth rate and ageing population. He got no reply.

Fr Enzo Volpe, a Salesian priest in Palermo, said Christians have “forgotten about the Good Samaritan, who healed and took care of the poor”.

“Young Italians are moving to the US and England in search of work and opportunities,” he added. “What if these countries had stopped Italians at the border like Italy is doing with Africans? What’s the difference? Is it because Africans are black?”

Fr Luigi Ciotti, one of the most popular priests in Italy, organised a protest this weekend, which invites people to wear a red T-shirt – the same colour worn by three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi when his drowned body washed up on a beach in Turkey in 2015.

“Red also means to stop,” he said. “And we need to stop now, stop and reflect and look inside ourselves. We need to question our hearts and conscience: what are we becoming?”

Earlier this week Fr Alex Zanotelli, a member of the Comboni missionaries in Verona, urged journalists to report on the tragedies in Africa and raise more awareness among Italians about the plight of migrants, who are now perceived by many as “parasites” and “invaders”.

“If Italians don’t know what’s going on in Africa, they cannot understand why so many people are fleeing their lands and risking their lives,” he said.

But with the Democratic party failing to voice a strong opposition, the onus rests on the priests to wrestle against Salvini.

“The party is divided and doesn’t know how to counteract Salvini, and on which issues,” said Mattia Diletti, a politics professor at Sapienza University in Rome. “Due to people being so connected to him and the immigration issue, there is a fear that [opposing him] could be damaging.”

Source: Italian Catholic priests go to war with Salvini over immigration

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , ,

ICYMI: Anne Frank’s Family Was Thwarted by United States Immigration Rules, New Research Shows

2018/07/11 Leave a comment

Not that surprising (Canada was no more welcoming):

Attempts by Anne Frank’s father to escape the Nazis in Europe and travel to the United States were complicated by tight American restrictions on immigration at the time, one of a series of roadblocks that narrowed the Frank family’s options and thrust them into hiding, according to a new report released on Friday.

The research, conducted jointly by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdamand the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, details the challenges faced by the Frank family and thousands of others looking to escape Europe as Nazi Germany gained strength and anti-refugee sentiment swept the United States.

Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was never outright denied an immigration visa, the report concludes, but “bureaucracy, war and time” thwarted his efforts.

In order to obtain a visa, Mr. Frank would have had to gather copies of family birth certificates, military records and proof of a paid ticket to America, among other documents, and be interviewed at the consulate.

In one instance, an application that Mr. Frank said he submitted in 1938 languished in an American consulate in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, amid a swell of similar applications and was lost in a bombing raid in 1940. Mr. Frank wrote to a friend that the extensive papers he had gathered as part of a visa application “have been destroyed there.”

In 1941, as Mr. Frank was again attempting to navigate the matrix of paperwork and sponsors necessary to immigrate, the United States government imposed a stricter review of applications for visas, grew suspicious of possible spies and saboteurs among Jewish refugees, and banned applicants with relatives in German-occupied countries.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned at the time that Jewish refugees could be “spying under compulsion,” and the report states that “national security took precedence over humanitarian concerns.”

Mr. Frank had sought help from an influential friend, Nathan Straus Jr., who was the head of the United States Housing Authority, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s and the son of a Macy’s co-owner. Despite Mr. Straus’s connections, Mr. Frank wrote to him that “all their efforts would be useless” given the immigration climate, the report states.

“We wanted to learn more about the process in itself and what documentation an applicant (e.g. Otto Frank) had to produce,” said Gertjan Broek, a researcher with the Anne Frank House who worked on the latest findings. “In the report, we point out how complex and tedious the process was and how the bombing of the Rotterdam consulate disrupted things.”

The report was released 76 years after the Frank family went into hiding on July 6, 1942. Researchers drew on dozens of pages of correspondence between Mr. Frank and friends, much of which was first made public in 2007, as well as records involving United States immigration policy.

Anne Frank’s diaries describing her time in hiding gave a voice to millions who died at the hands of the Nazis. She was eventually discovered and she died in a concentration camp in 1945, when she was 15.

Mr. Frank was the only member of the immediate family to survive the concentration camps.

News about the Frank family continues to captivate the public, despite challenges in educating younger generations about the Holocaust.

“She has allowed millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions of people, to identify with persecution at the worst level,” said Richard Breitman, a professor emeritus at American University who has written about the family’s attempts to immigrate to the United States. “Any time there is a glimmer of new information, it’s a big story.”

The new research comes at a time when President Trump’s attempts to curb immigration have been likened to those in the World War II era. Mr. Trump has repeatedly sought to justify letting fewer people into the country by arguing that criminals and terrorists could be among the immigrants and refugees seeking to enter.

Mr. Breitman underscored those similarities, pointing to debates over immigration policy today and after Sept. 11. Mr. Breitman said that as Mr. Frank was trying to get to the United States, the country was instituting an “extreme cutback” on immigration.

“It wasn’t just extremists and wackos who believed that there was a serious threat to the security of the United States in 1940 that justified an immigration cutback,” Mr. Breitman said. “You can fill in the rest of it after 9/11 and today.”

Mr. Broek said the researchers did not intend to highlight parallels.

“The Anne Frank House researches into the life of Anne Frank and her family, to tell her story as accurate as possible,” Mr. Broek said. “The attempted immigration is a part of that story too.”

Filed under Holocaust, Immigration Tagged with ,

Access denied: Canada’s refusal rate for visitor visas soars – The Globe and Mail

2018/07/10 Leave a comment

Good in-depth reporting. Data indicates that Liberal government is not as soft on immigration and refugees as opposition would lead us to believe. Article would have benefitted, however, for a more balanced discussion regarding the risks of those over staying their visas or claiming asylum which largely drives visa policy (i.e., the benefits, not just the costs).

The different rates for countries suggest this is risk-based.

And like any system that has to make numerous decisions, it sometimes gets them wrong, either refusing people who should be let in, or letting in others that should not:

For a country that prides itself on its openness to the world, Canada makes its borders surprisingly impenetrable for millions of people who want to visit from abroad.

Last year alone, Canada refused entry to nearly 600,000 people who wanted to come for a short stay for tourism, school, business, academic conferences or simply to see their families. And the refusals have skyrocketed: The number has more than doubled since 2012, according to data obtained by The Globe and Mail.

The trend has huge implications for Canada’s relationship with the world, yet the issue is rarely debated. Entry decisions are left to mid-level bureaucrats, and little information is provided to applicants, even though the rising number of refusals and opaque application process can damage Canada’s reputation on the global stage.

Part of the trend is simply due to globalization. People are more mobile, formerly poor countries have more wealth and the number of entry-visa applications has soared in recent years, leading to a larger number of visitors.

But the data also suggest it is becoming tougher to get into Canada, and the odds against applicants are rising.

In 2012, the number of rejections was about 18 per cent of the total number of applications for Canadian visitor visas (excluding student visas). By last year, the refusal rate had increased to 26 per cent. And in the first three months of this year, the refusal rate had risen again to about 30 per cent. Similarly, the refusal rate for student visas has also increased, from 26 per cent in 2012 to a new rate of 33 per cent last year.

Statistics obtained by The Globe from the federal immigration department show that the highest refusal rates are clustered in Africa and the Middle East. Over the past two years, Canada rejected more than 75 per cent of visitor applications from countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.

Other countries are affected, too. About 200 delegates, including dozens of Chinese government officials, were denied visas to attend a recent conference of the World Guangdong Community Federation in Vancouver.

When scholars gathered at Queen’s University in early May for their annual African studies conference, the program had a dozen gaps. Twelve invited scholars from Africa were denied an entry visa or could not obtain one in time.

Organizers had to scramble to find replacements or combine sessions to make up for missing panelists. “It’s frustrating and disruptive, and it discourages people from coming next time,” said Belinda Dodson, a geographer and Africa migration expert based in Ottawa.

The intangible costs for Canada

The World Economic Forum, which conducts an annual study of travel and tourism competitiveness around the world, puts Canada’s visa requirements among the most complex and opaque in the world. In a 2017 survey that ranks 136 countries from best to worst when it comes to the difficulty of their visa rules, Canada placed a dismal 120th – a drop of 14 places from an earlier survey in 2013.

The process is about to become even more difficult. Beginning on July 31, visa applicants from Africa, Europe and the Middle East will be required to give their fingerprints at a foreign-based application centre. The rule will be imposed for Asians and Latin Americans at the end of December.

In most cases of denied visas, Canadian officials say they are not satisfied that the applicants would leave at the end of their visit. Officials can reject an application if they believe the applicant has not shown evidence of sufficient funds to pay for their stay, or has close family or financial connections to Canada and looser ties to their home country.

Denying visas to tourists or business investors costs the country millions of dollars in potential revenue. Canadian tourism promoters say the visa system is one of their biggest headaches.

The Tourism Industry Association of Canada, which estimates that tourism employs 1.7 million people in Canada, says the visa application process is “an area of significant concern.” It can be an “unnecessarily complex” barrier to visitors, it says.

“Canada continues to lag behind its competitors in terms of requirements, processing times and reciprocity programs,” the association said in a recent report. “Canada must find ways to ease or eliminate such access barriers for legitimate travellers.”

And there is a more intangible cost. When officials reject an application from a respected scholar or activist, it often leads to a flurry of negative publicity, undercutting Canada’s image as progressive on freedom and human rights, especially when the poorest countries seem to suffer the highest refusal rates.

“It casts Canada in a poor light, belying the government’s encouragement of transnational exchange of academic research,” Audrey Macklin, a law professor at the University of Toronto, said after many African and Asian scholars were denied visas to attend a recent conference she helped organize in Toronto.

“Participants denied visas lose – and we lose, too. It certainly damages Canada’s reputation abroad.”

Angola’s most famous anti-corruption campaigner, Rafael Marques de Morais, and a prominent Bahraini human-rights activist, Maryam al-Khawaja, are among those who were recently denied visas to visit Canada, although the decisions were reversed. Both had been penalized in the visa process for criminal charges against them – even though they were charged by authoritarian regimes as a result of their human-rights work.

Scientists from around the world protested in 2013 when Canada denied a visa to Russian scholar Vladimir Kolossov, then president of the International Geographical Union (IGU), to attend an assembly of the International Social Science Council in Montreal. Visa officials said he had failed to give proof of his employment and financial resources, but the IGU said he had provided documentation of both. The geographical union called it an “arbitrary and unreasonable denial of free scientific exchange.

Applications on the rise

Requests for Canadian visas have surged to record numbers in recent years. Applications increased from about 1.3 million in 2012 to about 2.3 million last year. Many of the new applicants are tourists or business visitors from booming countries such as China and India who have more money to travel. But the surge has been accompanied by an even faster growing number of rejections.

The government insists it can handle the dramatic rise. “Updated technology allows the department to take advantage of capacity anywhere in our global network so that applications can be processed quickly,” Shannon Ker, a spokeswoman for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, said in response to questions from The Globe.

But errors can happen. Shuvai Mandigo, a 38-year-old Zimbabwean with eight years of experience in community development work, won a scholarship to study at the Coady International Institute in Nova Scotia – but was denied a Canadian student visa. Officials mistakenly told her she had applied in a different category.

She applied a second time, and was again denied. Officials decreed that she might try to stay illegally, even though she visited Canada twice before and returned home both times.

The decision “breaks my heart,” she said. “I was really hurt. Opportunities come once in a lifetime, and to think that the only opportunity I had to study in Canada – after so much effort by my Canadian friends and well-wishers – could not come to pass because someone just thought I will not come back to Zimbabwe after my stay is really unfair.”

The House of Commons standing committee on citizenship and immigration, in a report last year, recommended that Canada provide more detailed information to applicants to explain its visa denials. “It is possible to provide failed applicants with a more fulsome explanation, while maintaining fast processing,” the committee said.

The soaring number of visa applications could be leading to mistakes and arbitrary rejections in an overly hasty processing system. Rejections typically come in a terse and generic letter that provides no explanation of the specific reasons for the denial.

In many cases, Canadian civil servants have not made the decisions, because Canada has outsourced the job to private foreign firms in the countries where the applicants originate.

The Canadian branch of Amnesty International often invites foreign human-rights activists and civil society leaders to Canada for meetings and conferences. “Every time we are faced with this, we steel ourselves for what we know is going to be an arduous, fraught and highly unpredictable process,” said Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty’s office in Canada.

Foreign human-rights activists have suffered “blatantly discriminatory” visa delays and denials from the Canadian government for years, Mr. Neve said. They are forced to “jump through an immense number of hoops” to get the paperwork Canada demands.

When not all applicants are equal

The government denies any discrimination. “All applications from around the world are assessed equally against the same criteria,” Ms. Ker said.

But not every applicant is equal. One of the factors visa officers consider is the “economic and political stability of the home country,” according to Mathieu Genest, press secretary to Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen.

Mr. Neve expressed particular concern about the high refusal rates for visa applications from countries with serious records of human-rights violations, such as African and Middle Eastern countries. He said those applications require even more special attention to ensure people are not penalized because they’re from a certain country.

“If there’s a possibility here that people’s visa applications are being refused simply because they come from a country experiencing war or human-rights violations, that there’s an irreversible presumption that they’re not going to go home and their … application gets treated differently, that certainly is a concern.”

Annie Bunting, a social sciences professor and Africa expert at York University, said two of her Nigerian colleagues were recently denied visitor visas to travel to Toronto, where they were scheduled to present their research at a law and society conference. Their participation had been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), a federal research funding agency.

One of the scholars, Lawan Balami, a medical doctor and researcher, was planning to present research on women and girls kidnapped by Islamist radical group Boko Haram.

Umar Ahmad Umar was planning to present his research on access to justice for Nigerian victims of gender-based violence and child marriage. “He has a family in Nigeria, has full-time employment,” Ms. Bunting said. “He has travelled before. He’s fully funded. It’s an international conference with a letter of invitation from the conference, from me, and mention of the SSHRC grant – and that is not enough to get a visitor’s visa to come for a week.”

via Access denied: Canada’s refusal rate for visitor visas soars – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Douglas Todd: B.C.’s foreign-buyers tax is nothing special and not xenophobic

2018/07/09 Leave a comment

Agree:

It is hard to find a country that allows foreigners to freely buy its land. It is much easier to find countries that restrict foreigners’ purchases of property.

But that hasn’t stopped Chinese national Jing Li, assisted by some Canadian academics, from launching a lawsuit against the B.C. government’s 20 per cent tax on foreign buyers of residential properties.

Li, an international student who used her family’s money to buy a townhouse in Langley, argues the tax illegally discriminates against people on the basis of their national origin and has been stirred up by “unfair biases and stereotypes.” UBC academics Nathan Lauster and Henry Yu produced affidavits supporting Li’s argument the tax is xenophobic, especially towards Asians and specifically Chinese.

However, based on the logic of Li, Lauster, Yu and others who made their arguments last week before a B.C. Supreme Court judge, most countries of the world are xenophobic and perhaps racist — since most countries have a range of curbs on foreign buyers of property, with Li’s own populous country, China, throwing up some of the toughest controls.

Asian countries with restrictions on foreign buyers include the biggest: China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, plus Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Australia allows foreign nationals to buy only new dwellings, while New Zealand is developing a surtax.

There are also special constraints on foreign buyers in Mexico and even in the U.S. Many South American nations, including giant Brazil, limit foreign owners. So do many European countries.

While Li, to the applause of some Canadian property developers, has challenged the sovereignty of B.C. and Ontario (and Manitoba and Prince Edward Island) in bringing in restrictions on foreign buyers, most countries have no compunction in limiting foreign investors.

In China, the restrictions on foreign buyers of property are tricky, onerous, costly and always changing. For starters, foreigners might be shocked to find they can never actually own “dirt” in China, because the government maintains complete ownership of all land. Foreigners and citizens can only buy buildings.

Foreign nationals in China have had to prove they have been living in the country a year before they can buy property. It’s just one of hundreds of rules that countries around the world have to control foreign ownership.

A foreign national has had to meet numerous requirements to buy a dwelling in China, including proving they have been living in the country for at least a year. That is a residency requirement Canadian politicians never raise as even a possibility.

China, like most countries, makes no gesture toward a reciprocal arrangement with Canada or anywhere else.

And the laws vary abruptly by region in China. Foreigners who want to buy a house in Shanghai, for instance, have to prove they’re married. In Beijing, foreigners have to pay taxes for at least five years before officials allow them to buy a structure. And, even after that, a foreigner in Beijing can only buy one property, which has to be residential.

China’s regulations, designed to help its own citizens, go on and on.

Since, like most Asian countries, China also allows in extremely few immigrants, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen and then buy property in the country. The foreign-born portion of the population in most Asian countries is typically less than one per cent.

Many Muslim-majority countries also restrict foreign ownership. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation, foreigners can’t own land but can lease apartments (though not detached dwellings). Does that mean Indonesian officials are xenophobic, or simply protecting locals?

While the surtax in B.C. and Ontario applies equally to all foreign nationals, Turkey targets specific nations in the name of protection and political strategy. Turkey won’t allow people from neighbouring Russia or Greece to buy land in its popular border regions. Cubans and Nigerians are forbidden from buying anywhere in Turkey, which also places limitations on citizens of China and Denmark while allowing others more access.

European countries have various curbs. Denmark’s housing market is highly regulated; foreign nationals from outside Europe cannot buy real estate unless they prove they are permanent residents and will live full-time in the dwelling. Even European Union citizens cannot buy summer homes on Denmark’s sought-after coast. Britain has its own limits. And though large countries like France and Germany are fairly open, small Switzerland has erected more barriers than Denmark.

Even in North America, where free-market capitalism is said to reign supreme, both of our NAFTA partners have restrictions on foreign buyers.

The U.S. has subtle constraints on foreign ownership, including convoluted tax demands. A foreigner selling real estate in the U.S. must immediately send 10 per cent of the sale value to the Internal Revenue Service, where it’s held to pay capital gains. Foreigners also usually end up paying more death taxes on their U.S. properties than Americans.

Mexico simply doesn’t allow foreigners to directly buy the deed to properties in its so-called “restricted zone,” which covers everything within 100 kilometres of its coastline. Foreigners trying to snag properties in the restricted zone have to go through a knotty legal process.

All of which suggests the foreign-buyers tax in B.C. and Ontario — compared to the incredible range of restrictions around the world — is distinctly middle of the road.

And if critics deem the foreign-buyers tax to be xenophobic or racist, they must be ready to toss the same epithets at most of the world’s nations.

Source: Douglas Todd: B.C.’s foreign-buyers tax is nothing special and not xenophobic

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

A quiet change in US policy threatens immigrants who apply for a change in status

2018/07/09 1 Comment

Yet another example of US tightening of immigration, and removing some of the needed flexibilities for individuals and companies. It also suggests that the Trump administration is systematically going through the various policies in effect and making changes on both highly visible areas (detention) and more subtle but also impactful areas:

It went largely unremarked, just another bland procedural decision from a government agency. But a quiet policy change at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services last month is the next step toward a nationwide purge of non-citizens.

On June 28, USCIS announced that non-citizens who apply for a “benefit”–such as an extension or change of status, a green card, or citizenship—would be placed in deportation proceedings if that benefit is denied. For years, a criminal conviction has been required to be fast-tracked for deportation. Now, merely losing your petition for visa extension, being charged with a crime, or doing something DHS considers to be criminal (even if never arrested or charged) places you on the same fast-track.

Once in deportation proceedings, the non-citizen must prove she is eligible to stay in the United States. She will not be provided a lawyer; she may be detained, sometimes with no bond. There is no right to a speedy trial, nor trial by jury. Here are a few examples highlighting the full extent of the new rule.

Jack, a foreign student, files for an extension of his visa. He’s always been in status. He moves off campus, and properly files a change of address with USCIS (he even gets the receipt). Later, the agency sends a request for evidence to his old address anyway. Jack never receives it. USCIS denies the extension of status for failure to respond. Jack now faces deportation.

Maria is in the US on a fiancée visa and files for a green card. Her US citizen husband has a good job with health insurance. Before the green card interview, Maria is diagnosed with breast cancer. The officer finds out and denies Maria’s green card, saying she’s likely to become a public charge. Maria now faces deportation.

Sam is a software engineer. His employer sponsors him for a green card—but is then acquired by another firm. USCIS denies the petition, saying there is insufficient proof the new employer can continue the sponsorship in the shoes of the old employer. Sam now faces deportation.

Nancy is disabled and came to the US lawfully on a “medical visit” visa. Her doctors need her to stay for another 6 months of treatment. Once it finishes, she can return home, but leaving early will endanger her health. USCIS denies the extension request, saying doctors didn’t adequately explain the need for her to stay in lay terms. Nancy now faces deportation.

Jen was abused by her spouse and files for protection under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). She suffers from severe chronic depression, and misses the deadline for a request for evidence, asking for a doctor’s report detailing the abuse. As a result, her petition is denied. Jen now faces deportation.

It’s not always easy to stay in status. Life happens. Deporting everyone who fails to dot every “i” and cross every “t” is shelling a peanut with a sledgehammer. Under the new USCIS policy change, the United States’ already unforgiving system will become draconian.

While the USCIS has always had some authority to initiate deportation proceedings, the last policy guidance on deportation, issued in November 2011, centered on criminals, fraud, and other negative eligibility indicators. That guidance has been canned. This new policy greatly expands the categories of “enforcement priority” to most of the people trying to navigate a byzantine immigration system.

It is becoming harder and harder to comply with the immigration law. Asylum law is being gutted. Immigration judges are being robbed of the little independence they had, and pressured to order removals. Families have been ripped apart to “send a message” for the “crime” of exercising their human and legal right to seek asylum. There is now a task force dedicated to taking citizenship away from people. Millions of Muslims are now legally banned from entry. The list of countries designated for Temporary Protected Status continues to shrink, and the Dreamers who grew up in this country remain in limbo.

https://www.theatlas.com/embed/r143e-kTz

It’s no coincidence that brown and black people bear the brunt of these attacks. This is the result of years of nativist, protectionist rhetoric peddled by groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA. Their work hasn’t been cheap: hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into this effort since the inception of FAIR in 1979. Born from white nationalism, such groups have beaten the drums of war against imaginary hordes of brown and black invaders for decades.

Immigration courts currently face a staggering backlog of over 700,000 cases, and the Trump administration has complained extensively about the bureaucracy required to deal with them. Paradoxically, USCIS will now pump in another stream of cases. This system is going to explode. When it does, the next step in the white nationalist agenda will be to replace it with a new version, stripped of the due process of law.

Source: A quiet change in US policy threatens immigrants who apply for a change in status

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Martin Regg Cohn: Canadians should beware Premier Doug Ford using ‘illegal’ refugee claimants as a wedge to drive us apart

2018/07/09 Leave a comment

Agree that wedge politics being played here, arguably by both sides, with the more corrosive discourse and approach by Ford. One thing to argue over funding – yes, the federal government is largely on the hook – but another to refuse participation in all three level of government coordination and cooperation:

One week in power, and Doug Ford’s government has declared war against Justin Trudeau.

By taking aim at asylum claimants who cross into Canada.

That was fast. Don’t shed a tear for the prime minister, who can presumably take care of himself — whether rebuffing a Ford missive or repelling a Donald Trump tirade.

But ask yourself what happens to the inevitable casualties of this conflict between Queen’s Park and Ottawa:

No, not just the people crossing the border to claim refugee status. Think about the rest of us, and what this does to us — the way we treat border crossers, and the way we treat each other.

This will test all of us, not just Ontario’s new premier and his federal counterpart.

The rise in migrants slipping across the border has already challenged our border security and police officers, who have comported themselves with Canadian decency and dignity. It is testing our refugee determination system, which (lest we forget) is burdened and bound by due process.

Now, the border-crossing story that landed in Quebec a year ago, and then crossed over into eastern Ontario, has landed hard on Toronto’s doorstep. Just in time for Ford’s new Progressive Conservative team to seize on it as a wedge issue that drives people apart.

Beware the wedge that exploits refugee claimants — for while many may indeed be economic migrants gaming the system, a good number might well be legitimate victims of persecution seeking sanctuary. You never know, until you know for sure (see: due process).

Yet Ford’s government is wagging its finger at “illegal border crossers” in official statements that misstate reality and incite hostility. It is an axiom of international law that desperate refugee claimants often cross borders by hook or by crook, but that doesn’t make them criminals (it’s precisely how both my parents escaped post-war Communist Europe).

Ontario’s new minister of children and social services, Lisa MacLeod, points an accusing finger at Trudeau for supposedly triggering a mass migration when he “tweeted out that everyone was welcome here, and as a result of that, we’ve had thousands of people cross the border illegally.”

Was this truly the tweet that launched a thousand ships? Or dispatched thousands of taxis to our border, there to disgorge their human cargo on our doorstep as per the PM’s precise GPS directions?

Were it so simple, Trudeau need only delete the troubling tweet. But he never offered directions to those unauthorized border pathways, nor invitations to cross over at leisure.

Yes, Trudeau and countless Canadians took turns humble-bragging and boasting about our supposed virtue in welcoming Syrian refugees after Stephen Harper’s Conservatives behaved churlishly and Barack Obama’s America acted ungenerously. But to draw a direct line between a Trudeau tweet and an imagined human stampede to the border is to elevate the prime minister’s Twitter feed to Trumpian influence.

Let’s be clear here. The migrant movement that began last summer emanated not from any misplaced magnanimity by the PM, but from fear of a looming Trump clampdown on Haitians still enjoying sanctuary in the U.S. after a 2010 earthquake.

It bears repeating that Canada had previously ended that sanctuary status — yes, faster than the Americans — and was systematically deporting Haitians who were here back to their homeland. Oblivious to that fact, thousands of Haitians crossed over into Canada, making up 85 per cent of migrants at the outset.

Under an existing bilateral agreement, the U.S. automatically takes back any refugee claimants who show up at our side of official border crossings. But by slipping over out of sight of those official crossings, migrants exploited a loophole by which the Americans wouldn’t take them back.

Since then, there has been a long and awkward debate about what to do to avoid turning a trickle into a tide.

Federal Conservatives have suggested we declare the entire border one big crossing — as if this would force the Americans to take back their asylum claimants. But Trudeau can no more demand that Trump do as we say on refugees than he can insist that the president undo the tariffs he slapped on our steel and aluminum.

Shall we stand our ground and instruct our police to point guns and draw bayonets at asylum-seekers to keep them on the American side? Or heave them back across the border, throwing their bags after them? Do we build a Trump-style wall across our undefended border and demand Mexico pay for it?

Not really so easy, except in the virtual reality of Twitter.

It’s perfectly fair for the provincial and municipal governments to demand that Ottawa come up with the money and plans to deal with the pressure points in local facilities — in Ontario as in Quebec. To his credit, Mayor John Tory has been pressing the case for Toronto’s needs without turning people against migrants in need.

Ford’s government could learn from the mayor’s approach, instead of delegitimizing asylum-seekers as illegal, and demonizing Ottawa for following a legal framework. On Thursday, when Trudeau met him at Queen’s Park, a statement from the premier’s office declared, provocatively:

“This mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government.”

In truth, there are no easy answers, just the certainty that public support can easily be turned against asylum-claimants if politicians want to press those buttons (see: Europe and America). All the more reason for all levels of government to start working together, rather than driving people apart.

Source: Martin Regg Cohn: Canadians should beware Premier Doug Ford using ‘illegal’ refugee claimants as a wedge to drive us apart

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Trump administration extends special immigration status for Yemen citizens in US

2018/07/07 Leave a comment

A rare sensible policy decision:

The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday announced the extension of a special immigration status for citizens of Yemen living in the United States.

About 1,250 Yemeni nationals are covered by the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, which allows citizens of countries that have undergone natural or man-made disasters to live and work in the U.S. The program protects foreign citizens who are already in the U.S., legally or illegally, when their home country is designated for protection after a disaster.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced the 18-month extension, the longest period TPS designations can be extended.

Yemen was first designated for TPS on Sept. 3, 2015, six months after a civil war started there.

The internal conflict has raged on since then, with Houthi rebels and forces loyal to President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi each controlling large swaths of the country on the Arabian Peninsula.

Neighboring Saudi Arabia has intervened in the war, as have the local branches of al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“After carefully reviewing conditions in Yemen with interagency partners, Secretary Nielsen determined that the ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions that support Yemen’s current designation for TPS continue to exist,” the department said in a statement Thursday.

The extension applies only to current Yemeni TPS beneficiaries.

Peniel Ibe, a policy fellow for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that works to protect immigrants, advocated for a new TPS designation for Yemen.

“It’s critical that the Trump administration not only extend but also redesignate TPS for Yemen, which continues to struggle with extreme violence and poverty,” Ibe said in a statement. “A redesignation of TPS would allow more recently arrived Yemeni nationals to apply for protection through TPS — people who are fleeing from a U.S.-backed war in Yemen.”

The Trump administration has ended TPS for a handful of countries, mostly in Latin America.

Those cancellations have left around 300,000 foreign citizens who had TPS, some for almost two decades, unsure of whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States past their new TPS end date.

Source: Trump administration extends special immigration status for Yemen citizens in US

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Canada’s future prosperity depends on opening — not closing — our borders

2018/07/06 Leave a comment

More support for the “big Canada” approach by Hugh Segal, Maureen Silcoff and Karen Chen who write in favour of the Century Initiative and against the Safe Third Country Agreement.

And like the Century Initiative, little acknowledgement of some of the realities involved, along with the standard affirmation that Canada is largely empty. True of course, except for the places that the vast majority of Canadians, both long-standing and newcomers live and will likely continue to do so:

Canadian immigration policy and Canadian sovereignty have a shared purpose, and that purpose has a front door. Growing the size of our population, across the second largest land mass in the world, has always been a priority.

Canadian immigration policy and Canadian sovereignty have a shared purpose, and that purpose has a front door.

Growing the size of our population, across the second largest land mass in the world, has always been a priority. Economic prosperity, national security, development and opportunity require a growing population. Trading and, when necessary, competing with our southern neighbour, and the rest of the world, with a population smaller than California’s is difficult.

The front door for that policy has and will always include our formal border crossings, and will include refugee claims.

Processing refugee claims through the front door concurs with our international duties under the 1951 Refugee Convention, when, following the Second World War, we committed to do our part and accept refugee claimants, and not treat them as illegal while their cases are being processed.

The number of refugee claimants who cross our southern border irregularly rose dramatically after President Donald Trump took office — some 9,481 so far this year.

Many have taken the unsanctioned path of Roxham Road, the street between Champlain, N.Y., and Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., thus avoiding official ports of entry. They do this because the U.S.-Canada Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) requires refugee claimants to seek protection in the first “safe” country they enter, with narrow exceptions. The agreement applies only at official ports of entry, so by entering somewhere other than the front door, they can access Canada’s refugee system.

Critics say irregular arrivals have the effect of bringing the administration of our borders into disrepute. People have questioned how we can allow such crossings under the rule of law, for it questions the notion of “order” found in the “peace, order and good government” clause of our constitution.

Once we relegate people to irregular means of arrival, which the STCA has done, we risk seeing them as an undesirable element that bypasses the front door. We speak of them in numbers, using words like surge and flood. We respond by bemoaning our lack of capacity, assuming ill intentions, accusing them of cutting the queue and breaking the rules.

There is a solution.

The STCA was Canada’s idea. Bordered by the Arctic, two oceans and the United States, Canada sought to further limit the number of refugees able to claim protection here.

That makes sense, if you believe that limiting the number of refugees is a benefit to Canada. While the selection of immigrants and the determination of refugee status are subject to different criteria, overall, the country needs more people.

Most of Canada, well beneath the more climactically difficult extreme parts north, is empty. We have room for new cities, expanding communities in every province. Bangladesh received the same number of asylum-seekers in one day as the total number who entered Canada last year.

Moreover, whatever our views on America’s present immigration policy, the STCA no longer serves the purposes of Canada’s overall immigration policy. Canada needs population growth at a much faster rate. From Diefenbaker in the 1950s, through the Pearson, Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien, Martin, Harper and Trudeau governments, Ottawa has raised the annual immigration levels, not enough, but consistently under both Liberal and Conservative governments.

A distinguished group of Canadians launched an organization in 2016 called the “Century Initiative” aimed at growing our population to one hundred million by the next century. Experts in investment, finance, economics and planning argued this number was essential to building prosperity and opportunity. Barring an increase in the birth rate, immigration policy is key to accomplishing this goal. Our economic capacity to compete with our American allies, and not be intimidated by capricious, illegal and unjustified tariffs, would be enhanced by a population 300 per cent larger.

Canada has a tradition of responding to groups of people who require protection. Since the 1950s, Canada has responded with an open heart and an open front door to waves of Hungarian, Vietnamese, Syrian and other refugees. Each inflow has made us economically and socially stronger.

Our need for growth and our humanitarian commitment have led to a coherent policy championed by parties of all political stripes. As Barbara McDougall, a former Immigration and foreign minister in the Mulroney cabinet, once said when confronted by an unexpected landing of Tamil asylum seekers on the East Coast, “we don’t turn back boats filled with people.”

Opening the front door has another benefit. It removes the stigma and spectacle of families pushing strollers and pulling suitcases down Roxham Road; it removes the risk of people losing fingers, toes and even their lives to cross clandestinely in harsh weather; and it removes the pressure on Quebec.

We should return to our long-held immigration, growth and humanitarian principles, for they remain intertwined. Suspend the STCA and open the front door.

Source: Canada’s future prosperity depends on opening — not closing — our borders

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

USA: As the debate rages over immigration detainers, data on their efficacy is sparse

2018/07/06 Leave a comment

Always a sign of possible problems or issues when governments do not release data:

The debate over sanctuary cities has raged in Massachusetts for more than three years, and has only intensified since President Trump took office, as the governor, state courts, and legislators grapple with when — and even whether — local law enforcement should detain immigrants the federal government wants to deport.

But amid the disagreement, the Trump administration has clamped down on releasing information about the administrative requests from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, called detainers, which are at the heart of the debate. It is unclear how many have been issued over the past 16 months, how many are honored or rejected, and how many lead to deportations.

A February 2017 memo by John Kelly, who was head of the Department of Homeland Security at the time, ordered ICE to provide the public with a weekly report listing the name of the jurisdiction, the suspect’s citizenship and immigration status, the arresting charge, and “an explanation concerning why the detainer or similar request for custody was not honored.”

Three weekly Declined Detainer Outcome Reports were issued before the report was “temporarily suspended” so ICE could “analyze and refine its reporting methodologies,” according to a statement on the agency’s website.

But since then, ICE has failed to resume releasing the reports. Agency officials did not respond to e-mails asking why.

The information that is available shows the requests are not refused as often as critics say, and overall, detainers contribute to a small number of deportations by ICE, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University that has issued a series of reports exploring the role detainers play in deportations.

According to the center’s reports, about 1 million people were deported during President Obama’s second term, but detainers were used in only about 7 percent of those deportations.

“It was just shocking that it was such a small portion,” said Susan Long, the research center’s codirector and a professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse University. “If you’re measuring the effectiveness of detainers by how often does ICE deport people who had a detainer, they’re not.”

And law enforcement agencies don’t refuse to honor detainer requests in high volume, the center’s reports show.

According to a report released on April 30, ICE issued more than 142,000 detainers nationwide, including 1,213 in Massachusetts, during the 2017 fiscal year ending in September 2017. But only about 5 percent of the detainers nationwide, and about 8 percent in Massachusetts, were recorded by ICE as “refused” by law enforcement agencies.

However, the report cautioned that “the accuracy of ICE records on refusals is questionable,” as the field used to track which agency refused to honor a detainer is not required to be filled out.

The state’s highest court ruled last summer that Massachusetts law enforcement officers don’t have the authority under state law to comply with ICE detainers. Since then, a flurry of state legislators and the governor have tried to pass legislation that would allow, but not force, local law enforcement to comply.

ICE has long said detainers are a valuable tool for deporting dangerous criminals, and the Trump administration has aggressively pushed for cooperation from cities and towns that have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” and generally do not honor detainers.

“And every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants and drug dealers, traffickers, and gang members back into our communities,” President Trump said in March at Manchester Community College in New Hampshire, where he took aim at Lawrence’s and Boston’s sanctuary policies.

Widespread usage of detainers by ICE began in the waning years of President George W. Bush’s administration and increased rapidly when Barack Obama took office, peaking at the end of his first term, according to the center, which regularly collected data on detainers under both administrations.

But tracking the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s use of detainers has been problematic, as ICE has been “surprisingly reticent to reveal how detainers now are actually being used,” according to the center, which filed a federal lawsuit last summer asking the court to compel ICE to release this information.

“We ought to be getting that information,” said state Representative James Lyons, a Republican from Andover.

….

Source: As the debate rages over immigration detainers, data on their efficacy is sparse

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →