Migration to Europe Is Down Sharply. So Is It Still a ‘Crisis’? – The New York Times

2018/06/29 Leave a comment

Good updated data:

On the beaches of Greece, thousands of migrants landed every day. In the ports of Italy, thousands landed every week. Across the borders of Germany, Austria and Hungary, hundreds of thousands passed every month.

But that was in 2015.

Three years after the peak of Europe’s migration crisis, Greek beachesare comparatively calm. Since last August, the ports of Sicily have been fairly empty. And here on the remote island of Lampedusa — the southernmost point of Italy and once the front line of the crisis — the migrant detention center has been silent for long stretches. Visitors to the camp on Monday could hear only the sound of bird song.

“It’s the quietest it’s been since 2011,” said the island’s mayor, Salvatore Martello. “The number of arrivals has dramatically reduced.”

It is the paradox of Europe’s migration crisis: The actual number of arriving migrants is back to its pre-2015 level, even as the politics of migration continue to shake the Continent.

On Thursday, leaders of the European Union are gathering in Brussels for a fraught meeting on migration that could hasten the political demise of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and unravel the bloc’s efforts to form a coherent migration policy.

The precipitous drop in migrant arrivals doesn’t mean that Europe is without real challenges. Countries are still struggling to absorb the roughly 1.8 million sea arrivals since 2014. Public anxiety has risen in countries like Germany after high-profile assaults involving migrants, including the killing of a 19-year-old German student and the terrorist attack on a Christmas market that killed 12 people.

And leaders still have sharp disagreements about who should take responsibility for the newcomers — border states like Greece and Italy, where most migrants enter Europe; or wealthier countries like Germany, which many migrants subsequently attempt to reach.

But what is striking is how many leaders, particularly in far-right parties, continue to successfully create the impression that Europe is a continent under siege from migrants, even as the numbers paint a very different picture.29

“We have failed to defend ourselves against the migrant invasion,” Viktor Orban, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, said in a recent speech. He has made it a jailable offense for Hungarians to assist undocumented migrants.

Nor is Mr. Orban alone in taking a hard line. Since the start of the month, Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister, has closed Italy’s ports to charity-run rescue boats. Horst Seehofer, the German interior minister, has threatened to turn back refugees at his country’s southern border. And across the Atlantic, President Trump has claimed, wrongly, that migration led to a crime epidemic in Germany.

The tactics seem to have worked. Data released this month by the European Union showed that Europeans are more concerned about immigration than about any other social challenge. Mr. Salvini’s party is now leading in Italian polls, up 10 percentage points since an electionin March. Mr. Orban won re-election in April with an increased majority, after a campaign in which he focused almost exclusively on migration.

Even on Lampedusa, Mr. Martello won the mayoralty last year by promising to focus more on local issues than on burnishing the island’s international reputation as a place of sanctuary for migrants.

But the reality on the ground is that, despite the rhetoric, migration is back to pre-crisis levels — and has been for some time.

More than 850,000 asylum seekers arrived in Greece in 2015, with most of them eventually making their way to northern European countries like Germany. So far this year, little more than 13,000 have made the same journey. More than 150,000 people arrived in Italy in 2015; the number so far this year is less than 17,000. In 2016, when applications were at their highest, more than 62,000 people sought asylum in Germany, on average, every month. This year, that average has fallen to little more than 15,000 — the lowest since 2013.

On Lampedusa, more than 21,000 migrants landed in 2015. So far this year, the figure is less than 1,100. Only in Spain have arrival numbers risen, from more than 16,000 in all of 2015 to just over 17,000 so far in 2018. But the increase is still comparatively small — more people would arrive in a single week on the Greek island of Lesbos at the height of the crisis than are likely to arrive in Spain this year.

“It’s an invented crisis,” said Matteo Villa, a migration specialist at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. “The high flows of the last years have bolstered nationalist parties, who are now creating a crisis of their own in order to score cheap political points.”

Mr. Salvini and Mr. Orban have cultivated popular support by creating the impression that they are the only leaders willing to make the tough decisions needed to reduce migration. Yet the European establishment, under pressure from the likes of Mr. Orban and Mr. Salvini, has been quietly working for some time with the main gatekeepers along the migration trails to Europe, including with authoritarian regimes, to bring the numbers down.

In Italy, arrival numbers plummeted after Mr. Salvini’s predecessor controversially persuaded several militias to halt the smuggling industry in northern Libya, and to keep thousands of would-be migrants in dangerous conditions in makeshift Libyan detention centers.

“The measures implemented by the previous government, which Salvini was so critical of, have actually been effective,” said Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Center at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

At the same time, several European governments have made deportation agreements with Sudan, whose leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been charged with war crimes charges. A deal with Nigerhas helped a crackdown on smuggling in the Western Sahara. And most controversially, the German and Dutch governments brokered a European Union deal in 2016 with the authoritarian government of Turkey that led to an immediate and drastic drop in migration to Greece.

Lesbos, Greece, in 2015, and in March 2018. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times; Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

“The paradox is that, in this narrative that Merkel opened the E.U.’s borders, it was in fact Merkel, with the Dutch, who negotiated the most effective agreement on the borders of the E.U.,” said Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based research group that first proposed the deal, and that drafted early versions of it.

Now Europe’s challenge is largely about process: How to house asylum seekers waiting for decisions on their cases; how to integrate them into the economy and into society if their applications are approved; and how to deport them if not. These challenges remain as officials also have yet to fully address the squalid migrant camps of Greece, which house roughly half of the country’s 60,000 asylum seekers, or the underground economy of Italy, where many of the country’s 500,000 undocumented migrants are exploited.

The European Union summit meeting that opens on Thursday is a reminder of how much the political landscape has shifted. Ms. Merkel, the German chancellor who was once the Continent’s unassailable leader, now needs to secure an agreement with other European leaders to stave off a political crisis at home.

Her rebellious Bavarian interior minister, Mr. Seehofer, has threatened to close Germany’s border with Austria to asylum seekers who have already registered elsewhere in Europe, usually in Greece or Italy. Ms. Merkel wants to avoid this, as it would most likely set off a domino effect of stricter border controls across the Continent. That would obstruct the movement not just of refugees but also of European Union citizens, endangering one of the bloc’s core values: free movement between member states.

Mr. Seehofer has agreed to wait while Ms. Merkel tries to negotiate at the summit meeting an improved asylum system for the European Union, but this seems a distant prospect, as no one can agree what that system should look like. Some leaders, like Mr. Orban in Hungary, say that Europe should simply protect its borders without worrying about the complexities of its asylum system.

The Keleti train station in central Budapest, Hungary, in 2015 and this month. Mauricio Lima for The New York Times; Akos Stiller for The New York Times

“If we defend our borders, the debate on the distribution of migrants becomes meaningless, as they won’t be able to enter,” he said in a speech this month.

Others, like Ms. Merkel, want to reduce migration but acknowledge it cannot be ended entirely unless Europe abandons the right to asylum that was enshrined in the international conventions that emerged in the aftermath of World War II.

To uphold this right while also curbing migration, officials in Brussels want to set up offshore hubs to process asylum applications in Africa, while some analysts argue it would be easier and cheaper to invest in more efficient asylum systems in Greece and Italy — and to secure more deportation agreements with the countries migrants are originally from.

Meanwhile, anti-immigrant leaders, if capitalizing on the migration issue, are hardly unified. Italy wants to scrap the Dublin regulations, which stipulate that asylum seekers must stay in the European Union country in which they first register, and distribute migrants throughout the bloc. But hard-liners like Mr. Orban, Mr. Seehofer and Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz of Austria refuse to share Italy and Greece’s burden.

“Their proposals are fundamentally contradictory,” Mr. Knaus said. “Salvini and the Italians want to get rid of Dublin and share everyone throughout Europe. The Bavarians want to push everyone back to Austria. And Kurz says that’s fine — we’ll then send them to Italy and Hungary.”

And far away on Lampedusa, this makes the debate seem less about the specifics of migration management, and more about the widening chasm between liberal and illiberal forces in Europe.

It is “an ideological war,” said Mr. Martello, the mayor. “Europe is divided into two main blocs: One is defending the borders, and the other is actually doing something about the situation.”

via Migration to Europe Is Down Sharply. So Is It Still a ‘Crisis’? – The New York Times

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How Does Immigration Drive the Success of the Radical Right in Europe? New Report Assesses the Record in Nordic Countries – MPI

2018/06/29 Leave a comment

Another relevant report from MPI:

Though elections in Austria, Germany and France in 2017 and recent electoral outcomes in Italy and Hungary have demonstrated the rising power of radical-right parties in Europe, the phenomenon is hardly new in most Nordic countries. Denmark, Finland and Norway have radical-right parties that trace their roots back to at least the 1970s. And more recently, the Sweden Democrats established themselves at the national level in 2010.

Even as the Sweden Democrats, Danish People’s Party, the Finns Party and Norway’s Progress Party have been a far cry from capturing a majority of the vote in recent elections, their rise has been accompanied by an observable shift in public attitudes toward migration. The result: a hardening of asylum and immigration policies over the last decade, especially since the European migration crisis began in 2015. Nordic governments have introduced—and in some cases loudly celebrated—policies to reduce family reunification, restrict access to refugee and other protected statuses and limit access to public assistance benefits for non-nationals.

A new report from the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration, The Growth of the Radical Right in Nordic Countries: Observations from the Past 20 Years, analyzes the rise and current dynamics of radical-right parties in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

In all four countries, immigration has become a core policy area for the radical right. But as author Anders Widfeldt notes, the electoral success of such parties cannot be tied neatly back to shifting levels of immigration or to public opinion of immigrants. A web of other factors—including how the parties are managed and the personalities of their leaders—are also at play.

“The marriage of a populist economic agenda that prioritizes welfare support for nationals in need with deep skepticism of immigration has proven to be a potent recipe for success, though the exact formula that parties adopt varies,” Widfeldt writes.

In responding to the radical right’s growth in popularity, mainstream political parties have taken three main approaches: co-opting radical-right policies in a bid to win over their opponents’ voters, accommodating the parties in government or isolating them by excluding them from governing coalitions. Yet, the author notes, there is little consistent evidence of which of these approaches (if any) are effective. And just as immigration is likely to remain high on the political agenda, radical-right parties are likely to continue to influence migration policy debates.

Read the report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/growth-radical-right-nordic-countries.

It is the second in a Transatlantic Council series, “The Future of Migration Policy in a Volatile Political Landscape.” As governments in Europe and North America grapple with growing skepticism about immigration and a rise in populism, the Council examined whether and how this new political reality has changed immigration policymaking.

Additional reports will be published over the summer and collected here: www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/transatlantic-council-migration/volatile-political-landscape.

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The Supreme Court Overturned a Ruling That Enabled Internment of Japanese-Americans During World War II

2018/06/28 Leave a comment

The one bit of good news in the SCOTUS travel ban ruling:

In Tuesday’s majority opinion upholding President Donald Trump’s travel ban, the Supreme Court also overturned a long-criticized decision that had upheld the constitutionality of Japanese-American internment during World War II.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had mentioned the 1944 case, Korematsu v. United States, in her dissent, arguing that the rationale behind the majority decision had “stark parallels” to Korematsu; in both cases, she argued, the government “invoked an ill-defined natiounal security threat to justify an exclusionary policy of sweeping proportion.”

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the case was not relevant to the travel ban, but went ahead and wrote that it is now overturned.

“The dissent’s reference to Korematsu … affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution,’” he wrote.

Korematsu arose out of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order mandating that Japanese Americans leave their homes and jobs for internment camps. Over 117,000 Japanese were ultimately removed from their homes. Civil rights activist Fred Korematsu, who died in 2005, challenged his interment, but the Supreme Court ruled that his detention was a military necessity.

Parallels between Japanese interment and the Muslim ban had been highlighted before Tuesday’s ruling. Fred Korematsu’s daughter Karen, who now runs a civil liberties institute in his name, had filed a friend of the court briefing against the travel ban, and argued in aWashington Post op-ed last December that the policy “just as unfair” as Japanese internment.

“Korematsu is a reminder that while we may sometimes be afraid during times of crisis, fear should not prevail over our fundamental freedoms.,” she wrote at the time.

Both liberal and conservative justices have criticized the Korematsu decision in the past, but it was never formally overturned.

In 1995, liberal Justice Ginsburg wrote in a dissent that “a Korematsu-type classification … will never again survive scrutiny,” conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said in a speech that it was wrong but warned that it could happen again. “In times of war, the laws fall silent,” he said.

In the majority opinion Tuesday, Roberts quoted from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s famous dissent in Korematsu.

Jackson, who later served as a chief prosecutor for the U.S. in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, argued that the majority decision upholding internment would set a bad precedent.

He noted that a military order would eventually lapse, but a judicial opinion would validate racial discrimination by creating new principles to justify it.

“The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need,” he wrote.

After a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., during the 2016 campaign, Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, comparing it to Roosevelt’s executive order authorizing internment. In a later interview with TIME, he would not unequivocally repudiate the internment camps.

“I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer,” he said.

Recently, Trump Administration attorneys favorably invoked Hirabayashi v. United Statesin a legal briefing on a case involving Guantanamo Bay detainees, a World War II-era decision which was a basis for Korematsu.

Source: The Supreme Court Overturned a Ruling That Enabled Internment of Japanese-Americans During World War II

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Refugee claims process needs major overhaul, says report

2018/06/28 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see the degree to which the government adopts these recommendations or not. Yeates was former deputy minister at then Citizenship and Immigration Canada and knows the issues well:

Canada must overhaul its refugee claim system or create a new agency that reports to the immigration minister in order to streamline and expedite the asylum process, an independent review has concluded.

The 147-page report makes 64 recommendations — among them calls for a more aggressive approach and increased resources to tackle the backlog of refugee cases over two years.

Neil Yeates, a retired long-time senior civil servant in the federal and Saskatchewan provincial governments, led the government-commissioned review. He said Canada’s refugee determination system is now at a crossroads.

“Once again, it is dealing with a surge in claims that it is ill-equipped to manage, running the risk of creating a large backlog that, if not tackled promptly, may take years to bring to final resolution,” he wrote in his report.

Under the current system, various federal departments and agencies have a role in refugee intake, adjudication, removal or permanent residence approval, and the appeals process, but the Immigration and Refugee Board operates as an arm’s-length body making independent decisions.

The report recommends either maintaining that structure under an Asylum System Management Board, or shaking it up with major structural reforms under an integrated Refugee Protection Agency that reports directly to the immigration minister.

A spokesperson for the IRB told CBC News it has “significantly improved efficiencies at the Refugee Protection Division” and reported “an increase in refugee claim finalization by 40 per cent over the past year.”

The Canadian Council for Refugees said it’s “alarmed” by the proposals, arguing they could undermine the independence of the IRB. It called on the government to maintain the IRB as an independent quasi-judicial tribunal responsible for refugee determination.

“People’s lives hang on decisions on refugee claims,” said CCR president Claire Roque in a statement. “We are not talking about traffic violations, we are talking about a decision that may determine whether a person lives or dies. When we make such important decisions, we need to guarantee due process and the basic protections of an expert and independent tribunal.”

The CCR said the current system — created in the wake of a 1985 Supreme Court decision that found refugee claimants are entitled to charter rights and a fair hearing — is a regarded as a model around the world.

The CCR said any changes must be in line with the principles of fairness, respect for due process and compassion.

“The complex and painful realities of refugees cannot be adequately addressed through a process that focuses on systems and efficiencies,” the organization said in a release.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said the government is committed to upholding Canada’s “proud humanitarian tradition” of providing protection to those fleeing persecution while ensuring the asylum system is not abused.

“The findings in the final report will inform our review of Canada’s asylum system as we determine how best to maximize efficiency while ensuring that the system remains fair and continues to be in line with international standards,” said Mathieu Genest in an email.

“IRCC is studying the recommendations and will be consulting stakeholders, and provincial and territorial partners, on the findings over the course of the summer. It is premature to speculate on any changes that may be considered.”

Asylum over immigration

In his report, Yeates noted the growing trend of people using the asylum process instead of regular immigration channels.

“With the advent of human capital immigration models that place a high emphasis on education, language and skilled labour, asylum systems in countries like Canada risk becoming avenues of last resort for lower skilled economic migrants, who generally do not have access to other pathways to permanent residence,” the report reads.

Current approval rates for protection are about 65 per cent, so there are “ever present concerns” that the asylum system can be vulnerable to misuse, Yeates warned.

“When there are lengthy waiting times for an initial protection hearing there are further concerns that the asylum system may be abused to prolong temporary stays in Canada for healthcare, work permits, public schooling, direct access to Canadian citizenship for children born while in Canada and other benefits, all of which make future removal from Canada of many unsuccessful claimants difficult,” the report reads.

A series of reforms in 2012 aimed to expedite the claims process, but the system is still strained by spikes in asylum claims and resources stretched thin.

IRB spokeswoman Anna Pape said claims intake has been exceeding operational capacity by an average of 2,300 cases per month for the last year, creating a growing backlog. As of May 31, 2018, there were about 57,235 pending cases.

She said the IRB has taken steps to improve efficiency, and the number refugee claims finalized increased by about 40 per cent in 2017-18 compared to the previous year.

The IRB is currently funded to finalize approximately 24,000 claims per year.

“The IRB continues to explore new and innovative ways to improve efficiency, with the objective of improving the timeliness of decisions,” Pape said.

Given the current caseload and existing resources, the projected wait time for claims for refugee protection before the IRB has increased to approximately 20 months.

The report recommends stronger financial controls and tracking of overall system spending rather than incremental funding. It estimates that, following the reforms, the federal government has spent an average of $216 million a year on processing claims, social supports such as health care and legal costs. That figure does not include costs for the Federal Court and downstream provincial costs.

The report also recommends that:

  • the minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship table an annual report in Parliament on the system as a whole;

  • the federal government develop an annual plan and budget based on forecasted intake and targets, with tracked expenditures, and establish an external advisory committee of experts;

  • Ottawa streamline the hearings process, using plain language on forms and making better use of technology;

  • the federal government integrate permanent residence processing of non-accompanying spouses/dependents into the asylum intake process to minimize repetitive processes;

  • government prioritize removals as soon as a removal order comes into effect;

  • specialized staff be tasked with asylum intake at major points of entry, and;

  • Ottawa establish a rapid-response contingency workforce to handle increased claim volumes.

Source: Refugee claims process needs major overhaul, says report

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Trump’s Travel Ban Puts America’s Brain Drain in Hyperdrive

2018/06/28 Leave a comment

While the headline overstates, there will be an ongoing and longer-term impact:

On Monday, for the first time ever, Tara Yasseri was turned down for a U.S. visa to attend the prestigious International Conference on Computational Social Science at Northwestern University.

Why? Because, he said, he’s Iranian.

A senior research fellow in computational social science at the University of Oxford, Yasseri’s work on big data and election predictions has brought him around the world, including to the U.S. just this past March. But American politics finally got in the way. He said that a consulate officer explained to him that President Donald Trump’s so-called travel ban had made his requests to get to the campus in Evanston, Illinois, more complicated than usual.

“I appreciated his honesty,” Yasseri told The Daily Beast. “To be honest, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve always been granted a [single-entry] visa.”

Stories of upended travel, aborted education plans, and stymied research projects are becoming more common in the world of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and academia. And they may soon become even more so.

On Tuesday, just one day after Yasseri’s visa request was denied, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Hawaii that the president’s travel ban—in place even while under legal challenge—was, indeed, constitutional. The decision meant the policy will remain in place. And it left academics and scientists fearful that the United States may witness a drain of intellectual talent in the coming years.

Handed down by a 5-4 majority, the ruling prohibits citizens from seven countries—Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen—from entering the country due to the “national security threat” they supposedly pose.

Scotus Ruling Will Embolden Trump to Expand the Ban

Critics had argued that the policy was fundamentally racist as it was built on the foundation of Trump’s campaign pledge to stop all Muslims from entering the United States. But over the course of his presidency, Trump narrowed down the policy, including by adding two non-Muslim majority countries to the list.

That proved enough to negate the constitutional concern. But those in the STEM fields say that the practical impact of the ban will be the same as the original incarnation.

“We’re deterring people from coming here,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Pratt School of Engineering at Stanford University. “America is now considered hostile to foreigners. Before they can even want to come, they’re turned away.”

The ripple effects of that hostility could be profound, Wadhwa predicted. In the 2012 paper he co-authored, titled “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now,” Wadhwa noted that more than a quarter of American engineering and technology startups were founded by immigrants and that in Silicon Valley, nearly half of startups are immigrant-founded. When it came to patents, more than 60 percent of filings were done by immigrants; over 40 percent of international patent applications on behalf of the American government included an author who wasn’t an American citizen.

The travel ban could fundamentally change the American economy by drying up that source of innovation.

“With this brain drain happening, we’re arming our competitors in China and South America with the greatest threat to American security,” said Wadhwa. In particular, there’s the fact that “we’ve been training the smartest students from China and sending them back home,” he said. “China is catching up to America in artificial intelligence and gene editing and robotics. We never thought China would be able to compete with the U.S. but China is on par with the U.S. right now.”

Even before the Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday, the effects of the ban were become evident in a variety of fields. Dr. Atul Grover, the executive vice president of Association of American Medical Colleges, said that over the preceding year, there had been about a 22 percent drop in the number of people requesting a student visa from the seven countries on the president’s list.

“For a one year difference that is pretty significant,” Grover said.

But, he added, the actual impact is likely to be even more severe. He expected prospective medical students from countries not on the current list to balk at applying to schools in the United States out of fear that their nations may be added by Trump at a later date. In addition, students with spouses from countries currently under the ban would have to weigh the possibility of splitting up their family if they choose to study in the United States.

“We are already looking at a physician shortage,” Grover said. “While we have increased the number of graduates from U.S. medical schools, we are still reliant on international graduates to serve people, particularly in underserved areas. That will be harder and harder to fill these positions if we have fewer applicants. Or it may be that these applicants are as qualified as they are in the past. We’ve had our choice of the best and the brightest in the past. But now, people might look elsewhere.”

Under the travel ban, individuals from the seven targeted countries can still apply for, and be granted, student and exchange visas. But the incentives for requesting each are greatly diminished. Progress in STEM fields take an immense amount of work and time, from producing the research, to building a company, to seeking investment of capital. If a ban or the threat of deportation holds, that incentive to stay in the country is diminished.

This will impact both those here and those seeking to come. According to data provided by the Institute of International Education, there were 25,751 students from the seven banned countries who studied in the United States during the 2016-17 calendar year. Advocates expect that number to diminish and those students to look abroad for career opportunities.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice reported that the number of visas issued by the to students from Iran, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia in the first three months of this year was just 298. “This is less than a quarter of the volume needed to be on track for 2016 student visa levels,” the last full year before the ban took effect, Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissenting opinion.

Educators, likewise, will face diminished incentives to work at, or even collaborate with, U.S. institutions. In Yasseri’s case, the inability to attend the conference at Northwestern was a major professional setback, depriving him the opportunity to present groundbreaking research, network with others in the field, and participate in a conference that he helped coordinate and plan.

It’s one of the reasons why Yasseri—who is set to become a British citizen by the end of the year—said he has never entertained the United States as a potential research destination. He left for Europe 12 years ago from Iran, and while many of his friends went to the America, he found the single entry visas students had to deal with cumbersome. “If they left the country, they had to reapply for a visa,” he pointed out. “I didn’t want to be trapped in a single country.”

So Yasseri went around that. He earned his Ph.D. in Germany and is conducting research in the United Kingdom. With a British passport, he thinks traveling to the United States might become easier, and he might even look into doing a sabbatical in the U.S.

But settling in America permanently remains out of the question.

“Even if I got a visa, my family would not be able to visit,” Yasseri said.

Source: Trump’s Travel Ban Puts America’s Brain Drain in Hyperdrive

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Scrapping Safe Third Country deal may not lead to huge influx of asylum seekers

2018/06/27 Leave a comment

Contrasting views by two experts: Peter Showler, former head of the IRB, and Benn Proctor of the Canada Institute of the Wilson Centre, but more a difference in degree:

The Trump administration’s crackdown on asylum seekers has renewed calls by critics to scrap or suspend the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA); arguing that the U.S. is no longer a hospitable destination for refugee claimants.

But that raises the question about whether more asylum seekers would then come into Canada.

“The answer is that it’s speculative and no one knows,” said Peter Showler, former chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) of Canada.

But, he adds: “I don’t think there’s a reasonable assumption that there would be a significant increase.”

Under the STCA, a person must make their refugee claim in the first, so-called “safe country” they reach. The premise of the deal was that since Canada and the U.S. share similar values, both are safe countries for those seeking refugee status.

It means those who first arrive in the U.S. and then seek entry to Canada to make a refugee claim will likely be turned back. (There are a few exceptions, for example, if the claimant has a family member in Canada.)

Legal loophole

Yet thousands of asylum seekers have recently crossed into Canada thanks to a loophole in the STCA, which applies only to those who try to enter by train, at airports or at official land border crossings. It doesn’t apply if — as so many people have in Quebec, Manitoba and elsewhere — one just walks across the border at some unofficial, unguarded spot.

Some suggest that scrapping the STCA would lead to more asylum seekers coming to Canada, because, that way, they could go to any official port of entry without the risk of being sent back to the U.S. or facing, what can be at times, a dangerous journey to cross the border, depending on the season and terrain.

Last year, more than 20,000 asylum seekers crossed illegally into Canada, according to the Canada Border Services Agency. (CBSA)

​Trump has taken a hard stand against illegal immigrants, referring to them as “invaders.” His administration was slammed for the controversial policy of separating children from parents arrested for crossing illegally from Mexico. And on Monday, he said those caught crossing illegally should be immediately sent back without appearing before a judge.

His stance has sparked calls from human rights activists, refugee lawyers and Canadian politicians to scrap the STCA.

But Showler says there are approximately 11 million to 12 million illegal residents in the U.S. Many are fully aware of the relatively easy irregular or illegal ways to enter Canada, he said.

Yet despite Trump’s crackdown, there have not been huge increases of people crossing the border illegally, he said.

“That could have triggered a large movement toward Canada and it didn’t,” Showler said.

Many have established roots in the U.S., have been there for decades, have families, driver’s licences and Social Security cards and aren’t likely to come into Canada just because it would be easy, he said.

‘Moderate noticeable uptick’

In a report released last year, Fleeing to Canada on Foot: Reviewing the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, program associate Benn Proctor of the Canada Institute of the Wilson Centre, a global affairs think tank, ​noted that the agreement has “significantly reduced” the costs to Canada from processing claimants by dissuading applicants to come to Canada.

For example, in 2005, the year after STCA took effect, the CBSA reported that the number of claims made at the border dropped 54 per cent, from 8,904 to 4,041.

Proctor found that during the 11 years after STCA was implemented, Canada has processed an annual average of 22,839 asylum claims, 23 per cent fewer than the annual average of 29,682 claims processed between 1989 and
2004.

The OECD estimates a cost of $14,000 per asylum seeker, meaning the STCA may have reduced Canadian spending on asylum seekers by $2 billion over a 10-year period, he wrote.

(Those are first-year, or start-up costs only, he noted, and very quickly drop to near zero once refugees develop language skills and job placements.)

Since his report, however, Proctor said he has revised his thinking that there would be a huge influx of asylum seekers coming to Canada if the STCA was scrapped.

He said he now takes into account that — with the spread of information about safer places to cross the border illegally — it has become much easier to cross at these unofficial spots.

He expects a “moderate noticeable uptick” in the number of asylum claims if the STCA were scrapped.

“I would still say you expect to see more asylum claims coming from the U.S. if the Safe Third Country Agreement was disbanded or suspended. But originally I thought you would expect to see a lot more.”The increase of asylum claims would put more pressure on resources and exacerbate the problems with backlogs, he said.

Anna Pape, a spokeswoman for the IRB, said in an email that changes to the global environment have led to a “steady and significant increase in refugee claim referrals over the last few years” and resulted in a “growing backlog.”

As of April 30, 2018, there were more than 55,000 pending cases, and the projected wait time for claims for refugee protection before the board has increased to approximately 20 months, Pape said.

However, she said the IRB has improved its efficiency and that the number of refugee claims finalized has increased by approximately 40 per cent over the past year. She said the IRB projects to be able to finalize up to 2,500 refugee claims per month.

Source: Scrapping Safe Third Country deal may not lead to huge influx of asylum seekers

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Tim Cook speaks out at Fortune’s CEO Initiative on hot-button issues like immigration | TechCrunch

2018/06/27 Leave a comment

Immigration excerpt and their policy framework for intervening in public debates:

At Fortune’s CEO Initiative event today, Tim Cook shared his opinion on a number of contentious issues, including immigration, political news and smartphone addiction. Here are some highlights from his conversation with Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky.

On companies taking a stance on public policy and other politically charged issues, including the Trump administration’s separations of migrant families at United States-Mexico border, which Cook recently condemned as “inhumane”:

“Apple is about changing the world. It became clear to me some number of years ago that you don’t do that by staying quiet on things that matter. For us, that’s the driving issue,” he said.

Although there’s “no formula” dictating what Apple addresses publicly, Cook said the company considers “do we have a standing, do we have a right to talk about this issue?” For Apple, he said this means they “typically speak about education, privacy, about human rights, about immigration and the environment.”

When asked by Lashinsky why Apple has standing to speak about immigration and human rights, Cook replied that many immigrants work at Apple, including more than 300 people protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and “several thousand” employees on H1B visas.

“To me, too often in the case of immigration, people quickly get to numbers, but there are real people behind this, who have real feelings and they’re a core part of the United States, so we have significant standing there,” he added.

Cook also claimed that Apple doesn’t address politics directly as a company. “We stick to policy, how people are treated, what is immigration policy. We work with people from both parties or no party. Sometimes one party doesn’t like what we do, or the other one doesn’t, or both don’t.”

via Tim Cook speaks out at Fortune’s CEO Initiative on hot-button issues like immigration | TechCrunch

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Fact check: Trump strays from the truth again and again on immigration

2018/06/26 Leave a comment

No surprises but good summary:

President Trump is distorting the truth when it comes to the impact of his administration’s policy regarding separating children from their parents at the U.S. border.

He falsely suggests that a newly signed executive order will permanently solve the problem of separations by keeping families together when they are detained for illegally crossing the border and exaggerates the number of immigration judges available to process their claims while they’re held in custody. A growing backlog of claims could mean that people will be held longer in detention until their cases are heard.

Here’s a look at some of his statements and the reality behind them:

TRUMP: “And ultimately, we have to have a real border — not judges. Thousands and thousands of judges they want to hire. Who are these people? When we vet a single federal judge, it goes through a big process. Now we’re hiring thousands and thousands.… And it got so crazy that all of these thousands — we now have thousands of judges — border judges — thousands and thousands.” — remarks Tuesday to the National Federation of Independent Business.

TRUMP: “We shouldn’t be hiring judges by the thousands, as our ridiculous immigration laws demand, we should be changing our laws, building the Wall, hire Border Agents and Ice and not let people come into our country based on the legal phrase they are told to say as their password.” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: He’s incorrect about the U.S. having “thousands and thousands” of immigration judges and about thousands of additional judges being hired. The Justice Department’s immigration courts division has about 335 judges currently on staff nationwide, with the budget for 150 additional judges.

Dana Leigh Marks, past president of the National Association of Immigration Judges who also works in the Justice Department’s executive office for immigration review, said funding for immigration courts has increased modestly amid a growing backlog of cases. With a backlog of 700,000, each judge would have to take on more than 2,000 cases apiece to clear the docket.

The figures also don’t take into account a wave of expected retirements that would shrink the ranks of judges. A June 2017 Government Accountability Office report determined that 39% of the immigration judges are now eligible for retirement. Congressional investigators blamed the mounting caseload in part on the slow hiring of immigration judges and said the federal government needed to do a better job to address staffing needs.

TRUMP: “We’re keeping families together, and this will solve that problem.” — remarks Wednesday at signing of order to halt his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents when they are detained illegally crossing the U.S. border.

THE FACTS: It doesn’t solve the problem.

Trump’s executive order will continue his “zero tolerance” policy of criminally prosecuting all adults caught crossing the border illegally, and will now seek to keep families together in detention instead of separating them while their legal cases are heard by the courts.

But a 1997 landmark settlement known as the Flores agreement that generally bars the government from keeping children in immigration detention for more than 20 days remains in place. Trump is seeking to have the settlement overturned, but his Justice Department says the 20-day policy remains in effect until Congress or the courts take action to change that.

That means without further action from Congress or the courts, the Trump administration could be forced to again separate the immigrant children from their parents in three weeks.

TRUMP: “So here are just a few statistics on the human toll of illegal immigration. According to a 2011 government report, the arrests attached to the criminal alien population included an estimated 25,000 people for homicide, 42,000 for robbery, nearly 70,000 for sex offenses, and nearly 15,000 for kidnapping. In Texas alone, within the last seven years, more than a quarter-million criminal aliens have been arrested and charged with over 600,000 criminal offenses. You don’t hear that.”

THE FACTS: Trump is probably working from a 2011 U.S. Government Accountability Office report that looked at arrests, costs and incarcerations of immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally. The statistics he cites are accurate. He doesn’t note that about half of all of the 3 million arrests of the “criminal alien population” in the study were for immigration (529,859), drugs (504,043) or traffic (404,488). And some of the immigration arrests were related to civil violations, not criminal charges. The report didn’t distinguish between the two.

TRUMP: “I always hear that, ‘Oh, no, the population’s safer than the people that live in the country.’ You’ve heard that, fellas, right? You’ve heard that. I hear it so much, and I say, ‘Is that possible?’ The answer is it’s not true. You hear it’s like they’re better people than what we have, than our citizens. It’s not true.”

THE FACTS: Trump is questioning reports that those living in the country illegally commit fewer crimes than people in the population overall. He shouldn’t.

Several studies from social scientists and the libertarian think tank Cato Institute have shown that people here illegally are less likely to commit crime than U.S. citizens, and legal immigrants are even less likely to do so.

A March study by the journal Criminology found “undocumented immigration does not increase violence.”

The study, which looked at the years 1990 through 2014, argues that states with bigger shares of such people have lower crime rates.

A study last year by Robert Adelman, a sociology professor at University of Buffalo, analyzed 40 years of crime data in 200 metropolitan areas and found that immigrants helped lower crime. New York City, for example, has the nation’s largest population of immigrants living in the country illegally — about 500,000 — and last year had only 292 murders among a total population of 8.5 million people. A city murder rate is often used as a benchmark for overall crime because it’s difficult to fudge murder statistics.

And Ruben Rumbaut, a UC Irvine sociology professor, co-authored a recent study that noted crime rates fell sharply from 1990 to 2015 at a time when illegal immigration spiked.

Source: Fact check: Trump strays from the truth again and again on immigration

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Douglas Todd: Canadian officials battle dozens of migration scams

2018/06/26 Leave a comment

Good overview of the major scams. Thanks again to Richard Kurland for making the ATIP request:

Canadian immigration officials around the world face a wave of immigration scams.

Many of the schemes feature people claiming to be in marriages that turn out to be phoney. Others involve fraudulent letters about escorting Saudi Arabian princesses, counterfeit passports and forged job offers, or people pretending to be journalists.

An internal Global Affairs Department document shows Canadian consular and customs officials invited anti-fraud experts from European countries to a meeting to learn about the wide range of inventive scams that people are using to try to emigrate to Canada and other Western nations.

The federal email correspondence came to light in the same month that the federal NDP immigration critic, Jenny Kwan, criticized Canadian immigration officials for asking a couple “offensive and insulting” questions, which were aimed at determining if a Pakistani woman was in a bona fide marriage with her male sponsor, who had been in Canada for 13 years.

It was “completely inappropriate” for immigration officials to note the female applicant for Canadian permanent resident status is three years older than her spouse, said Kwan, the MP for Vancouver East. She called on Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen to look into what she calls a “systemic” problem with the way staff handle the popular spousal-sponsorship program.

However, a detailed email from a senior official at Global Affairs, which was obtained through an access to information request, indicates that fake marriages are among the most common fraudulent methods used to obtain permanent resident status in Canada.

The email, sent last year to about 50 Canadian officials after a meeting in Cairo, describes a common deception in which Arabic couples enter into so-called “Urfi marriages,” which are customary under Islamic law but not recognized by the Egyptian government. Urfi marriages are often for convenience, including to travel or migrate. In Sudan, meanwhile, many officials are giving out suspicious marriage documents to citizens of other African nations.

The widespread problem posed by fake marriages was confronted in 2013 by then-immigration minister Jason Kenney, who began a crackdown on “marriages of convenience,” which included a public video featuring real victims of marriage-migration scams. The federal Liberals continue to use videos to warn people against being abused by a marriage scheme, but the government has eased some rules for Canadian spouses sponsoring foreign nationals.

With Gallup pollsters finding that roughly 45 million people around the globe want to move to Canada, another growing scam has been emerging in India, where people are posting newspaper ads that seek “marriage” with a young person who has been accepted as one of this nation’s 500,000 international students.

The Global Affairs email shows that Canadian officials uncovered other creative schemes, one of which they called “the prince or princess scam.”

At their meeting in Cairo, they found seven cases of married Egyptian or Sudanese males “applying for a visitor visa to accompany a prince or princess of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on their visit to Canada. The applicants were to serve as personal maids, cooks, drivers or waiters.” The university-educated applicants provided fake letters, purportedly written on the letterhead of Saudi royal families.

A different ruse, says the Global Affairs email, is to apply to enter other countries as journalists. Another is for an applicant to buy a rundown house in a Western country, then claim they require a visa to work on it. In addition, corrupt officials in Africa, including clergy,  are issuing fake birth certificates. Forged passports and bank statements are also common. So is buying fake jobs. And a new approach is to present immigration officials with fraudulent invitation letters to pilot-training schools in Canada.

In response to Postmedia questions, Kwan acknowledged that marriage and other migration frauds exist, adding that “the overwhelming majority of interactions” that Canada’s immigration and border officials “have with people are done with a commendable level of expertise and professionalism.”

However, Kwan said an “inappropriate line of questioning can have serious impacts for genuine families.” The border official’s initial suggestion that the Pakistani couple did not appear “well matched,” in part because she was older, would not have been asked, Kwan said, of Prince Harry, 33, and his new wife, the Duchess of Sussex, 36.

Even though the Pakistani-Canadian husband’s sponsorship of a wife in Pakistan was approved, Kwan emphasized that border officials should never deal in “outdated stereotypes” about traditional foreign cultures. She wants immigration officials to take “cultural sensitivity training.”

Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who obtained the internal Global Affairs email under an access to information request for his newsletter, Lexbase, said it’s legitimate for the NDP’s immigration critic to “push back” as a check on the power of Canada’s visa officers.

But Kurland also recommends Kwan take what he called “the cure.” That is, Kurland suggested it would be beneficial if she learned more about the many kinds of “real cases” that Canadian anti-fraud units are dealing with in places such as Delhi or Beijing.

“While the overwhelming majority of cases are genuine, we must be vigilant to prevent that small number of bad cases becoming a big number of bad cases. It is a difficult challenge that seasoned visa officers lose sleep over. The stakes are high (for would-be immigrants}. And for Canada.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Canadian officials battle dozens of migration scams

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Douglas Todd: Progressives wrestle with dilemma on migration

2018/06/23 Leave a comment

Good nuanced summary of the various research:

It’s called the “progressive’s dilemma,” a term popularized by two Canadian scholars of multiculturalism. It describes the way people with left-of-centre views often find themselves in a fix on the issue of migration.

They become ensnared by a 21st-century debate over whether a higher immigration rate weakens domestic support for social-welfare programs. Most scholars conclude it generally does: The main questions they’re now trying to answer are to what extent and why.

Since “progressives” tend to support both strong immigration and a generous social-safety net, they are put in a bind, say Canadian scholars Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka. It’s why Canadians are often in some denial about the correlation between in-migration and support for a welfare society.

Most Americans and Europeans do not shy away from the problem, however, even if they sometimes exaggerate it. The influential Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser maintain Western European countries have more generous welfare societies than the U.S. (and to some extent Canada) because their populations are more ethnically “homogeneous,” which makes it harder for European taxpayers to “demonize” the poor.

With the ratio of foreign-born residents expanding in many Western countries, a small army of researchers continue to test the theories of Alesina and Glaeser, to pin down where and when immigration might hurt popular support for such things as universal health care, unemployment insurance, social housing, maternity benefits and welfare.

It’s a distinctly First World problem, but not in a trivial sense.

The “progressive’s dilemma” only applies to advanced, democratic countries that welcome immigrants. Since most large or developing countries either don’t seek immigrants or don’t have significant social programs, there are relatively few nations in which progressives have to struggle with the trade-off.

It’s telling that one of the most important studies into whether immigration undermines support for a liberal safety net focuses on just 17 countries (including Canada), which University of California sociologist David Brady and Ryan Finnigan, of Berlin, chose because they are affluent, long-standing democracies.

Some First World progressives believe it’s best this topic, in the name of tolerance and diversity, not be publicly aired. But Finnigan and Brady (the latter is the author of Rich Democracies, Poor People), say that “of course it is reasonable to ask” whether immigration undermines public support for social programs.

“Immigration is changing labour markets, reconfiguring ethnic composition and altering the politics of affluent democracies,” Finnigan and Brady write. “In the past few decades, there has been rapid growth in immigration to affluent democracies. In recent years, there has seemingly been an even more rapid growth in concern for the political consequences of immigration to the welfare state.”

They see weaknesses in the theories of the Harvard economists, who basically maintain the U.S. has more stingy welfare policies because the country is more ethnically diverse than Western Europe and more prone to racial rivalry (partly because of a history of black slavery and undocumented migration from Hispanic countries).

Yet they maintain their findings “do not actually contradict” Alesina and Glaeser. Even though Finnigan and Brady found through their comprehensive study that rising immigration rates do not necessarily erode support for unemployment insurance and pensions, they did discover a conflict over job programs.

When a sample of residents of affluent nations were asked if they supported government programs that would “provide jobs for everyone who wants one,” there was significant resistance.

The authors believe that domestically born people often see immigrants as a “threat” and “competition” for limited jobs (and, to a lesser extent, for social housing and universal health care).

“Individuals with low education, those with low income, and the unemployed tend to be both anti-immigrant and pro-welfare,” say Finnigan and Brady, referring to the way policies that increase migration make some members of the host society feel more “instability, vulnerability and insecurity.”

The authors also point out a common fallacy: That North Americans often mis-label European political parties that want to lower immigration rates as “far-right.” The reality, they say, is many of Europe’s so-called extreme-right parties actually champion the left-wing values of a welfare society.

How foreign-born populations are growing in 17 affluent countries. (Source: David Brady, Ryan Finnigan)

What are the consequences of all this for Canada?

There is cause for concern, since the federal Liberals are increasing immigration rates at the same time immigrants are relying in greater numbers on social assistance than native-born Canadians, according to UBC economists Craig Riddell and David Green and Carleton University’s Christopher Worswick.

“Before 2000, social assistance receipt among immigrants was generally below that of the native-born (in Canada), but recently it has consistently been higher,” Riddell et al say in Policy Options.

“These trends imply that newly arrived immigrants are a net drag on government budgets: they pay less in taxes on average and make average or slightly above average use of government services and benefits. Second-generation immigrants do well, which may offset this net drag to some extent, but the initial impact of a large increase in immigration should be expected to be an increase in taxes, a decrease in services, an increase in deficits, or some combination of the three.”

The “progressive’s dilemma” is also exacerbated in places like Metro Vancouver, in part because the region is a popular destination for wealthy trans-national migrants, who some real-estate analysts, such as Richard Wozny, say are not paying their fair share of taxes. It’s led to the rise of domestic housing-affordability organizations, such as Housing Action for Local Taxpayers (HALT).

For his part, Banting acknowledges there is increasing danger the “progressive’s dilemma” could develop into a bigger predicament in Canada.

Canadians’ over-riding commitment to a “multicultural identity” has served as a kind of “cultural glue,” Banting said, thus forestalling broad antagonism to immigration based on fears it will reduce support for the country’s welfare policies (which, in terms of generosity, lie somewhere in between those in the U.S. and northern Europe).

“But past successes can never be taken for granted,” Banting says. “The slowing economic integration of newcomers has increased their need for support, and their average benefits now exceed those of the native-born. … As a result, we seem to be heading toward territory that has proven politically combustible elsewhere.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Progressives wrestle with dilemma on migration

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