British interior minister Rudd resigns after immigration scandal | Reuters

2018/05/01 Leave a comment

Taking one for the team. This happened when PM May was Home Secretary:

Britain’s interior minister resigned on Sunday after Prime Minister Theresa May’s government faced an outpouring of indignation over its treatment of some long-term Caribbean residents who were wrongly labeled illegal immigrants.

The loss of one of May’s closest allies is a blow as she navigates the final year of negotiations ahead of Britain’s exit from the European Union in March 2019. It also deprives the cabinet of one of its most outspoken pro-European members.

In a resignation letter to May, Amber Rudd said she had inadvertently misled a parliamentary committee last Wednesday by denying the government had targets for the deportation of illegal migrants. May accepted her resignation.

For two weeks, British ministers have been struggling to explain why some descendants of the so-called “Windrush generation”, invited to Britain to plug labor shortfalls between 1948 and 1971, had been denied basic rights.

The Windrush scandal overshadowed the Commonwealth summit in London and has raised questions about May’s six-year stint as interior minister before she became prime minister in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

“The Windrush scandal has rightly shone a light on an important issue for our country,” Rudd said in a resignation letter to May.

Rudd, who was appointed Home Secretary in 2016, said voters wanted those who had the right to reside in Britain to be treated fairly and humanely but also that illegal immigrants be removed.

May to blame?

The opposition Labour Party, which had repeatedly called on Rudd to resign, said May was responsible and should explain her own role in the government’s immigration policies.

“The architect of this crisis, Theresa May, must now step forward to give an immediate, full and honest account of how this inexcusable situation happened on her watch,” said Diane Abbott, Labour’s spokeswoman on interior affairs.

Abbott called on May to give a statement to the House of Commons explaining whether she knew that Rudd was misleading parliament about the deportation targets.

Facing questions over the Windrush scandal, Rudd, 54, told lawmakers on Wednesday that Britain did not have targets for the removal of immigrants, but was forced to clarify her words after leaked documents showed some targets did exist.

The Guardian newspaper on Sunday reported a letter from Rudd to May last year in which she stated an “ambitious but deliverable” aim for an increase in the enforced deportation of immigrants.

After repeated challenges to her testimony on the deportation of immigrants, Rudd telephoned May on Sunday and offered her resignation.

“I feel it is necessary to do so because I inadvertently misled the Home Affairs Select Committee over targets for removal of illegal immigrants,” Rudd told May.

With her Conservative Party split over Brexit, May will have to be careful to preserve the uneasy balance in the cabinet after the loss of such a senior pro-EU minister.

Possible contenders who could replace Rudd include Environment Secretary Michael Gove, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid, Northern Irish Secretary Karen Bradley and former Northern Irish Secretary James Brokenshire.

Windrush crisis

The government has apologized for the fiasco, promised citizenship and compensation to those affected, including to people who have lost their jobs, been threatened with deportation and denied benefits because of the errors.

But the controversy over policies which May is closely associated with has raised awkward questions about how the pursuit of lower immigration after Brexit sits alongside the desire to be an outward-looking global economy.

The immigrants are named after the Empire Windrush, one of the first ships to bring Caribbean migrants to Britain in 1948, when Commonwealth citizens were invited to fill labor shortages and help rebuild the economy after World War Two.

Almost half a million people left their homes in the West Indies to live in Britain between 1948 and 1970, according to Britain’s National Archives.

A week before local elections, May apologized to the black community on Thursday in a letter to The Voice, Britain’s national Afro-Caribbean newspaper.

“We have let you down and I am deeply sorry,” she said. “But apologies alone are not good enough. We must urgently right this historic wrong.”

The crisis has focused attention on May, who as interior minister set out to create a “really hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, imposing tough new requirements in 2012 for people to prove their legal status.

Rudd’s resignation comes four months after another close ally and her then most senior minister, Damian Green, was forced out of his job for lying about whether he knew pornography had been found on computers in his parliamentary office.

Anna Soubry, a Conservative lawmaker, predicted Rudd may one day return to a senior job in government.

“She is a woman of great courage and immense ability,” Soubry said. “If there is any justice she will soon return to the highest of office.”

via British interior minister Rudd resigns after immigration scandal | Reuters

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Newcomers find jobs, prosperity in Atlantic Canada — if they stay

2018/05/01 Leave a comment

Some good data and analysis in this article, which conform with the unemployment data I have looked at but not median income(slides below):

Immigrants who stay in Atlantic Canada have higher employment levels, higher wages and face less discrimination than immigrants to other parts of Canada, yet the region struggles to attract newcomers and has the lowest retention rates in Canada.

Atlantic Canada is engaged in a radical experiment in population management that has profound implications not just for this region, but for the country as a whole. The demographic bomb that threatens Canada is set to go off here first:

— Atlantic Canada has Canada’s lowest birth rate, highest median age and often sends more residents to other parts of Canada than it takes in.

— Francis McGuire, president of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, points out that there are more than 20,000 jobs unfilled in the region.

— Across Atlantic Canada, one in every five residents is already over the age of 65. That compares to a rate of one in six across Canada.

— Newfoundland and Labrador schools have lost a third of their students since 1996; more people have died than were born in the province for each of the last three years and the average age is almost three years older than the Canadian average of 41. The Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University predicts the provincial population will drop 10 per cent by 2036 and that some towns could see drops of 30 per cent or more.

— New Brunswick had an actual population decline in 2016 and has lost one fifth of its school-age children in the last two decades.

— In Nova Scotia, the resilient economy of Halifax is the only factor propping up the province’s population. Every region outside the provincial capital declined in the last census.

Immigration the solution

Many agree that a massive increase in immigration is an inescapable part of the solution. All four provincial governments have made boosting immigration a key priority and Ottawa has stepped in with Canada’s first regional immigration program: The Atlantic Immigration Pilot.

But deciding to transform your society with new blood is easier than actually doing it.

Only 18 per cent of the immigrants who landed in Prince Edward Island in 2011 were still there five years later. The rates are better in New Brunswick (52 per cent), Newfoundland and Labrador (56 per cent) and Nova Scotia (72 per cent), but they still fall far behind Ontario and Alberta, which kept 91 per cent of the immigrants who arrived in 2011, and British Columbia, which had a retention rate of 88 per cent over the same period.

Ottawa began shifting immigration responsibility to the provinces about 20 years ago.

The learning curve was steep. Initial programs in several provinces fell apart.

Now provincial recruiters target specific countries, make sure that potential newcomers know that Atlantic Canada is cold, rural and not particularly diverse, and they design immigration programs that encourage newcomers to settle.

How Canada’s Atlantic provinces are trying to attract – and keep – newcomers. Public Policy Forum, Author provided

The decision to come to Atlantic Canada and the decision to stay are two very different things.

Surveys show that immigrants leave the region in search of better jobs, but research suggests that’s not what they will find. In fact, immigrants in Atlantic Canada fare better economically than the average immigrant across Canada, and in some cases better than native-born Canadians.

Higher wages in Atlantic Canada

A profile of immigrant tax filers in Atlantic Canada published by Dalhousie University professors Yoko Yoshida and Howard Ramos found that immigrants to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland were more likely to be employed and earned higher wages than the average immigrant in Canada who landed at the same time. Immigrants to P.E.I. were below the Canadian average, as were spouses of primary applicants and refugees.

Professor Ather Akbari at Saint Mary’s University found that immigrants in Atlantic Canada actually earn more than Canadian-born workers with similar skills who live in Atlantic Canada, though that wage advantage has narrowed over the last decade.

Research also disputes the familiar assumption that urban areas are more welcoming than small towns.

Dalhousie University’s Ramos recently looked at actual experiences of discrimination based on ethnicity, race and language. Overall, the incidence of discrimination was far lower in rural areas than in big cities. Atlantic Canada came out particularly well, with very low rates of discrimination compared to Ontario, the Prairies and British Columbia.

To be sure, newcomers do encounter hate and discrimination in Atlantic Canada, as in any other place.

via Newcomers find jobs, prosperity in Atlantic Canada — if they stay

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Asylum seekers and commentary

2018/04/30 Leave a comment

Given the ongoing and continuing issue, this National Post basics article is helpful in understanding the trends although point 5 (government response) overstates the effectiveness of the government response even if there are no easy solutions:

The number of illegal border crossings is up significantly this year compared with the same period last year, so federal and law enforcement officials have been preparing for possibility of another spike as the weather warms up.

Departmental, RCMP and border officials provided a technical briefing this week on the plans they have developed as a result of lessons learned from pressures and concerns arising from last year’s spike in irregular migrants coming across the Canada-U.S. border.

Here’s what was learned:

1. The numbers are trending upward. Last year, RCMP intercepted a total of 20,493 people who crossed the border illegally. That means they did not present at an official port-of-entry and instead came across the border through unofficial paths to make a refugee claim in Canada. So far this year, 6,373 irregular migrants have arrived in Canada this way. That’s an increase of 128 per cent over the number who arrived in Canada between January and April 2017, which was 2,784.

2. Quebec is the hotspot. Of the 6,373 border crossers that have arrived so far in 2018, the majority — 5,609 — have done so in Quebec. However, about 40 per cent of say they are planning to settle elsewhere in Canada, mainly in Ontario. That’s why Quebec and the federal government are working on a plan to try to encourage asylum seekers away from highly saturated areas like Montreal and Toronto, in the hopes they might instead settle in outlying regions of the two provinces where labour shortages exist and migrants could find more employment opportunities.

3. Housing remains a question mark. Quebec has told the feds it will only open four temporary shelters for refugee claimants this year, with a total of 1,850 spaces. The province says it will not open Olympic Stadium or the nine other temporary shelters it operated last year for migrants because these were spaces not intended for accommodations, such as school gymnasiums. That’s why Ottawa is now working with Quebec and Ontario on processes that could be used to triage asylum seekers from the unofficial entry point in Lacolle to other shelters in those provinces.

4. Countries of origin are shifting. Last year, the majority of irregular migrants who arrived in Canada were Haitian, which is largely attributed to the Trump administration’s decision to lift the temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti living the U.S. This year, the majority of illegal migrants in Canada are Nigerians with U.S. travel visas. Other countries of origin this year include: Columbia, the United States and Pakistan.

5. Lessons have been learned. After last summer’s unexpected influx caused some major headaches, a national strategic plan has been put in place to respond to any future spikes. It was described by a senior official as “collaborative, flexible, scalable and phased.” It allows for increased resources to be brought into an area quickly, as needed. It is designed to move asylum seekers through the system in a timely manner while also ensuring all of Canada’s rules for refugee claimants are properly followed. That being said, Ottawa continues to try to get the message out that entering Canada between ports of entry is “not a free ticket” into Canada.

Source: What you need to know about the ongoing influx of asylum seekers in Canada 

Good commentary by Ibbitson, highlighting that this is one of the three key political challenges facing the government (the other two being NAFTA and pipelines):

A third challenge is emerging, on the border. Last year, more than 20,000 people crossed from the United States into Canada by avoiding regular crossing points. Thanks to a legal loophole, by committing this illegal act, they stood a better chance of being accepted as refugees than if they showed up at a proper crossing. Mr. Trudeau may have worsened the situation when he tweeted in January, 2017: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” It seemed like an open invitation to those fleeing the deportation efforts of the Trump administration.

If the past three months are any indication, the number of illegal crossers could more than double this year, beyond 40,000, putting the entire immigration and refugee system at risk. We could have more people flooding across the border illegally than arrive legally each year from the Philippines, Canada’s largest source country of immigrants. If the Liberals can’t find a way to stem this flow, voters will punish them.

Source: Trudeau must win three fights, or he could lose to Stephen Harper 2.0  

Australia PM makes the point effectively:

“So we know what works and what doesn’t. Migration programs, a multicultural society, need to have a commitment, an understanding and the trust of the people, that the government, their government, is determining who comes to the country,” he said.

“So being in control of your borders is absolutely critical. I think that is a fundamental foundation of our success as a multicultural society, as a migration nation as people often describe us.

“You have to exert your sovereign right to control your own borders.” 

Source: Border control is key to successful multiculturalism: Malcolm Turnbull 

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The political debate over migrants hasn’t turned ugly yet – but it could

2018/04/28 Leave a comment

Good piece by Aaron Wherry:

The Liberals want the Conservatives to watch their words. The Conservatives want a plan. They’re both right.

The debate over what to do about the asylum seekers crossing our southern border — revived this week after the Quebec government worried aloud about its ability to deal with a possible surge of arrivals this summer — is serious, tawdry and dangerous.

On Wednesday, for instance, Conservatives celebrated when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged in the Commons that crossing the border between official points of entry could be called “illegal.”

(The government typically refers to “irregular” border crossings. The Conservatives insist on calling them “illegal.”)

NDP MP Jenny Kwan later stood on a point of order to argue that, according to a strict reading of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the people crossing the border at places like Roxham Road in Quebec aren’t committing a crime.

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel accused the NDP of quibbling over “semantics,” but the adjective “illegal” is obviously meaningful to the Official Opposition. And when applied to human beings with families and children who might have excellent reasons for fleeing their home country, “illegal” is at least a fraught term.

Playing politics

The Conservatives, who describe the ongoing border crossings as a “crisis,” would like the government to table a plan for resolving the situation. They went as far as tabling a motion in the House this week calling on the Liberals to do so.

But — in the classic style of opposition motions — the request for a plan was buried in text that would have had the government acknowledge its “failure to address the crisis” and “admit the Prime Minister’s irresponsibility of tweeting #WelcometoCanada to those seeking to enter Canada through illegal means.”

 

And so Liberal MPs declined to support the motion in a vote on Tuesday, and so Conservative MP Ted Falk stood in the House on Wednesday and lamented the prime minister’s refusal “to even commit to a plan.”

The Conservatives also charge that the irregular arrivals are “queue jumpers,” a description the government rejects.

The Liberals argue the Conservative and NDP proposals — respectively, to declare the entire border to be an official port of entry, or to unilaterally suspend Canada’s border agreement with the United States — are both irredeemably flawed. And the situation is certainly complicated, legally and practically.

But writing down and publishing a detailed plan could still be useful.

In the meantime, each side is warning the other about where all this might be headed.

‘The flames of fear and division’

“I recommend that my colleague choose his words carefully, because false information and incendiary rhetoric only fan the flames of fear and division,” Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Tuesday, scolding Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus.

“I’m worried that the dialogue in Canada is going to switch from ‘how we do immigration’ to ‘if we do immigration,’ ” Rempel told CBC radio’s As It Happens that same day.

On Wednesday, Trudeau said it was “completely irresponsible of the Conservatives to arouse fears and concerns about our immigration system and refugees.”

But Rempel contends that it’s the Liberals who could be inciting division.

“As someone who supports compassionate, planned, orderly migration, and sees it as a key to sustaining the Canadian economy over time when done properly, legally, and safely, I worry that by abdicating the responsibility to do this, it is actually the Liberal Party that is creating divisiveness in the country,” she told the House this week.

More than 6,000 people have crossed the Quebec border seeking asylum so far in 2018 and officials expect the surge to continue with the onset of warmer weather 7:34

Trudeau’s tweet and Trump’s edicts

Canada takes pride these days in not being the sort of place where such divisiveness dominates. But you don’t need to look far here to see how large-scale, unplanned immigration can trigger something ugly and destructive.

In the United States, migration has helped to inspire a nativist litany of grievances that is warping American politics. In Europe, it has helped to birth a new era of nationalism. All sides should be aware of the forces at play here.

However much the prime minister’s tweet on January 28, 2017 acted as a beacon to those seeking refuge, policy decisions in the United States are no doubt giving people good reasons to flee.

But that American approach isn’t likely to change soon. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that 9,000 Nepalese immigrants will have to leave by June 2019. And even if Trudeau had never hashtagged a message of welcome to the world, the federal government would still bear the responsibility for managing the border.

Liberals can point to the emissaries they have dispatched to dissuade would-be travellers, but such efforts will be discounted if the rate of crossings doesn’t decline. The Trudeau government can point to the funding and resources it has committed to dealing with the new arrivals, but ultimately the Trudeau Liberals may find they have little room now to quibble with the premier of Quebec, or to suggest that it’s the province that should be doing more to accommodate asylum seekers.

If social services in Quebec are noticeably stretched, if immigration procedures bog down, if community tensions rise, Ottawa will be blamed.

Of course, all of this — the number of people crossing the border, the processing and integration of those people while they’re here, the language being used to talk about them — are ripe for political exploitation.

Responsible critics have a duty to avoid overstating the danger here. Responsible governments have a responsibility to limit the grounds for concern.

Source: The political debate over migrants hasn’t turned ugly yet – but it could

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Short videos for the Borders in Globalization Canada-EU project

2018/04/26 Leave a comment

As part of the EU-Canada Borders in Globalization project, I did these 3 short videos responding to the following questions:

What can Canada learn from the way how Europe deals with the irregular migration

Immigration, Multiculturalism: What works and doesn’t work in Canada

Challenges for the traditional concept of borders

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Better Immigration Policies Would Help U.S. Tech Companies

2018/04/03 Leave a comment

Another American commentator effectively states a Canadian advantage:

Donald Trump recently declared that $60 billion in new tariffs against China would help U.S. technology companies preserve their intellectual property. Trade experts doubt compelling Americans to pay more for products imported from China will solve any problems. However, if the Trump administration wants to help U.S. tech companies, the solution isn’t to impose tariffs on Chinese imports but to enact better immigration policies.

For a U.S. technology company – and, really, almost any company today – the most important input is human capital. When companies make decisions on where to invest resources, the ability to hire a sufficient number of qualified workers in that location is paramount.

Restrictive immigration policies encourage U.S. companies to place more resources – and people – in foreign countries. Moreover, many U.S. companies contract out information technology and other services to focus on their core line of business. Burdensome policies, such as the Trump administration’s new third-party placement requirements, encourage more of those services to be delivered from outside the United States.

“Today, 81 percent of the full-time graduate students at U.S. universities in electrical engineering and 79 percent in computer science are international students,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. In other words, when U.S. companies recruit on college campuses they hire U.S. students, of course, but also find the vast majority of the graduate students in many key technical fields are foreign nationals who cannot work in America unless U.S. immigration rules are reasonable.

H-1B status is typically the only way a high-skilled foreign national or international student graduating from a U.S. university can work long-term in the United States. The wait for employment-based green cards often stretches to years, making them impractical to use for hiring most people. That means despite its limitations, H-1B visas are the key way U.S. companies employ high-skilled foreigners. Companies can transfer certain employees to the U.S. but they must have worked abroad for at least a year and gaining approvals even for those types of visas has become more difficult.

The first week of April is when employers file for H-1Bs – even though the start date for the professionals will not be until October, the beginning of the next fiscal year. This will be the 16thconsecutive year the supply of H-1Bs runs out, both the 65,000-annual limit and the additional 20,000 reserved for international students from U.S. graduate schools.

The reason H-1B visas run out each year is simple: The small annual limit of 65,000 (for an economy with over 160 million workers) was set back in 1990. Since then the World Wide Web, social media, smartphones, 3-D printing, and advances in biotech and other fields have fueled the demand for high-skilled technical labor. Most H-1B visa holders have earned a master’s degree or higher.

Trump administration officials have said America should shift to a “merit-based” immigration system but that is code for eliminating most family-sponsored immigration categories and reducing legal immigration, not admitting more high-skilled foreign nationals. In fact, since many family-sponsored individuals possess high levels of education, preventing them from immigrating to the United States would result in the admission of fewer highly educated immigrants.

When asked, immigration attorneys cannot name any policies the Trump administration has established or proposed to make it easier for high-skilled foreign nationals to work in or immigrate to the United States – and can talk for hours about all the new measures that have made life more difficult for immigrants and employers.

If the Trump administration wanted to make U.S. high tech companies more competitive in global markets, then here are the immigration policies it should enact:

First, on the legislative front, the administration should support H.R. 392, which eliminates the per-country limit that contributes to high-skilled immigrants from India waiting potentially decades to receive permanent residence. Congress should also raise the annual limit on employment-based green cards and add exemptions for individual with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and the dependents of employer-sponsored immigrants. The annual limit on H-1B visas should be raised substantially to reflect the demand for high-skilled labor in today’s modern economy.

Second, the administration should stop trying to repeal the worthwhile regulation that allows many spouses of H-1B visa holders to work in the United States. This 2015 regulation helps retain skilled workers and provides greater dignity to spouses, many of whom are well-educated women born in India. Immigration officials should also halt plans to eliminate or make unduly burdensome the ability of international students to work after graduation for 12 months on Optional Practical Training (OPT) or an additional 24 months for individuals in a STEM field. Another problematic administration policy is its plan to rescind a regulation that allows international entrepreneurs to remain in the U.S. after starting new job-creating businesses.

Third, the Trump administration should cease what attorneys and businesses view as an assault on the ability of companies to employ high-skilled foreign nationals in the United States. Over the past year, these measures have included immigration adjudicators demanding employers comply with many more Requests for Evidence and denying more H-1B applications; the administration telling adjudicators not to “defer to prior determinations,” including approvals or findings of facts, when renewing  an H-1B or other high-skilled visa (making denials more likely); the administration’s travel bans against individuals from Muslim-majority countries; and the effort by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to battle against a common business practice whereby companies focus on core competencies and contract out other functions, sometimes resulting in workers performing some work on customer sites. (For a more complete list of administration actions look here and here.)

Already we can see a negative impact from administration policies. “The number of international students from India enrolled in graduate level programs in computer science and engineering declined by 21%, or 18,590 fewer graduate students, from 2016 to 2017,” a recent analysis of government data found. One plausible explanation for this drop is that highly educated foreign nationals no longer see America as the best place to build a career. And remember, unlike when a factory closes, U.S. companies don’t issue press releases every time they place more work in offices overseas in response to the U.S. government’s restrictions on immigration.

Observers believe administration policies directed against high-skilled foreign-born professionals and the companies that employ them are driven by a half-dozen or more appointees who share a common worldview. They have worked much of their careers to reduce the number of immigrants coming into the United States, regardless of skill level. Moreover, they possess little understanding of how labor markets function, particularly in today’s global economy, or simply ignore these realities.

There is not a fixed number of jobs in the United States. When immigrants fill jobs, they create more jobs through their consumer spending, investments and entrepreneurship. Their availability as workers can encourage additional investments.

If companies are not allowed to hire (or transfer) high-skilled foreign nationals in America, then these companies will hire and keep them outside the United States, taking many jobs and innovations with them to other countries. Pretending companies do not possess other options in the face of government restrictions is misguided.

For the good of the country, to set things on the right track on high-skilled immigration, there is a simple solution for Trump administration officials: Just do the opposite of everything they’ve done since taking office.

via Better Immigration Policies Would Help U.S. Tech Companies

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Canadian exceptionalism in attitudes toward immigration

2018/04/03 Leave a comment

More on Focus Canada 2018 findings from Michael Adams and Keith Neuman:

Xenophobic retrenchment has been evident in many societies lately. Anti-immigrant parties have made or consolidated gains in countries such as Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands and, most recently, Italy. Resentment of immigration helped to motivate at least some British voters who supported Brexit. And of course, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants to his country has been hostile — whether they come from Mexico, Muslim-majority countries or African countries.

Many commentators have speculated that Canada may take a similar turn. Certainly, Canada is not immune to bigotry. In addition to forms of discrimination that reveal themselves in economic data and survey findings, this country experienced a singularly violent attack on Canadian Muslims last year: a hate-motivated mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque that killed six people.

Are Canadians souring on their country’s traditionally high levels of immigration? Are they becoming more likely to support political candidates who channel ethnic and nationalist resentments? Are immigrants themselves souring on life in Canada?

Remarkably, recent survey findings suggest the opposite. New research by the Environics Instituteindicates two important and hopeful findings. First, Canadian attitudes toward immigrants remain open and positive. This pattern, which has been in evidence since the early 1990s, has not reversed in recent years. Second, Canada stands out internationally in the happiness that immigrants themselves report, and in the general public’s positive attitudes toward their foreign-born compatriots. (One driver of these mutually positive feelings may be that around 4 in 10 Canadians are themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants — meaning that immigrants’ attitudes are public attitudes to a significant extent.)

In spite of high and growing levels of immigration into Canada (around 300,000 in 2017), 6 in 10 Canadians recently  surveyed by Environics disagree that immigration levels are too high, compared with 35 percent who agree. Eighty percent believe the economic impact of immigration is positive, a conviction that goes a long way in explaining the success of the Canadian model.

Attitudes toward the legitimacy of refugee claims has grown more positive than they have been in the past three decades. More Canadians disagree (45 percent) than agree (38 percent) with the statement: “Most people claiming to be refugees and not real refugees” — and that disagreement has more than tripled since 1987.

Canadians do express concern about the speed with which they think immigrants adopt “Canadian values.” Today half of us (51 percent) do not think immigrants adopt Canadian values quickly enough, but rather than surging in recent years, the proportion of Canadians who hold this attitude has actually declined from 72 percent in 1993. Such concern is now at the lowest level in the 25 years over which this survey question has been put to Canadians.

Canadians stand out internationally in the way they think about immigration and diversity in their society.

Gallup’s Migrant Acceptance Index is a composite score for a society’s openness toward immigrants, made up of responses to three questions about whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that immigrants live in their country, become their neighbours, and marry a close relative. The survey covered 140 countries, and Canada ranked fourth overall in its acceptance of migrants. Among those in the OECD, Canada ranks third and the United States ranks tenth, while major European countries like Germany, the UK, Italy and France are farther down the list, followed by those in Eastern Europe.

What about immigrants themselves? Do they feel at ease in Canada? The just-released 2018 World Happiness Report finds Canadian immigrants’ assessment of their “subjective well-being” is among the most positive in the world: ranking seventh out of those of 156 countries. Immigrants’ happiness in Canada is fairly consistent regardless of where they’ve come from and where they’ve settled in Canada. Their self-reported well-being is also more similar to that of other Canadians than it is to people in their countries of origin.

The World Happiness Report’s authors note that newcomers tend to arrive in their new societies full of optimism, but in societies that prove unwelcoming, happiness declines over time, meaning that settled migrants end up less happy than new arrivals. Among more accepting countries, newcomers’ optimism is affirmed by experience, and happiness remains high among settled migrants. The data show this is clearly the case in Canada.

It’s not unreasonable to think that an accepting society and happy, optimistic immigrants create a virtuous cycle over time — with most people doing their best to be fair and friendly and to give others the benefit of the doubt. It’s worth noting that, as immigrants become more numerous — and, increasingly, spread beyond the traditional catchment areas of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal — the proportions of Canadians who report direct experiences with immigrants and various groups different from their own is on the rise. Generally speaking, personal experience with difference breeds good feeling (and probably helps to inoculate people against fear-mongering in the media or online).

Still, large majorities of Canadians acknowledge the reality of racism and discrimination. For instance, 84 percent of Canadians believe Canadian Muslims face discrimination often (50 percent) or occasionally (34 percent). Large majorities also believe immigrants from the Middle East, Indigenous people and Black people face discrimination at least occasionally. These findings indicate that most of us recognize there’s still much work to be done to live up to some of our rhetoric about diversity and inclusion, but acknowledgement of society’s shortcomings is a better place to start from than denial.

For now, it’s worth bearing in mind that, even amid gloomy headlines from both here and abroad, millions of people are quietly getting along in Canadian communities every day. Moreover, things can and do change for the better; people have a record of changing their minds in our imperfect country. According to a 2016 Environics survey, little more than 20 years ago only 35 percent of Canadians felt that two people of the same sex who live together should be regarded as being the same as a married couple. In 2016, the proportion was 73 percent.  (Some of this change is intergenerational: tolerant young people replacing older traditionalists. But many Canadians (including many older people) have changed their minds on same-sex marriage.

As some other societies retrench, Canadians — those born here and those born elsewhere — appear to be continuing their evolution toward greater mutual acceptance and greater acknowledgement of where their society falls short on equity. These recent findings suggest that Canada has a strong foundation from which to work toward a country where even more of us can report happiness, well-being and optimism for the future.

via Canadian exceptionalism in attitudes toward immigration

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ICYMI – Immigration: how much is too much? – BBC News

2018/04/02 Leave a comment

Some of the British debates:

Maybe it was intrusive use of big data. A mistrust of Eurocracy and foreign judges.

Maybe it depended on undeliverable promises and the big red bus. Perhaps it was the complacency of the remainers, and of intransigence in Brussels.

But there’s little doubt that none of these factors would have made much difference to the Brexit vote without the big issue that people on all sides tend to speak about nervously – immigration.

So when the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) speaks, it needs close attention. Amid all the claims, counter-claims, petty prejudices about Johnny Foreigner and justifiable concerns about jobs and wages, this is the outfit that feeds real hard evidence into government thinking – or so you would hope.

It was commissioned last July by the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, to take an in-depth and wide-ranging look at the UK’s continuing economic and demographic requirement to attract a continued flow of European Union immigrants after Brexiting.

This is to help shape the UK’s new immigration policy from 2021, though being commissioned by Ms Rudd it could also be seen as a helpful source of evidence to back up the soft Brexit end of Cabinet divisions on Brexit.

Hard-nosed

The interim report, published on Tuesday, is big on the opinion of business, acknowledging that the final report will have to balance that with other voices.

“What is best for an employer is not necessarily what is best for the resident population, which is the criterion the MAC uses when evaluating migration policy,” it states.

In general, but particularly in London and Scotland, business told the MAC that it likes to recruit from the biggest possible pool of labour. No surprise there.

They shared with the MAC employer concerns, with which we are becoming familiar, of being unable to staff businesses after the Brexit portcullis falls. Without access to migrant labour, firms may not grow, and some may disappear.

The committee seems to have listened carefully, agreeing that growth will be slowed, but without much sympathy for UK plc. The hard-nosed response is: if you’ve built your business model on migrant labour, you need to be prepared for when it isn’t there.

This is not just about Brexit, goes the argument: this is about trends towards migrant workers choosing to go elsewhere, if for instance, sterling isn’t so valuable to them.

Earnings in their home countries can be expected to rise over time, so they will eventually choose to make their money in their more prosperous homelands. What does migrant-dependent British business do then?

Reliable and flexible

The interim report also dips a toe into the controversial question of whether migrant workers depress wages.

They’ve got more work to do on that, says the MAC. But for now, they note very different stories for those born in older EU members (such as France and Germany), who on average earn 12% above the British-born average. They tend to do more highly skilled jobs.

Those born in the newer EU members (from the Baltic states to Bulgaria) are typically in lower skilled, lower-paid roles and paid 27% less than the British-born average (note: that is not for the same work).

The evidence is patchy, but suggests that average pay has not been much depressed by migrant workers. It may even have been enhanced among higher earners.

But among lower-paid workers, the financial crisis and long haul back to recovery offer a more compelling explanation for poor wage growth than competition from foreign workers.

What they’re clearer about is that employers are getting a higher level of skill and qualification for the same money that will buy an hour of native British worker’s time.

And that might help explain one of the headline findings – that employers like the work ethic, reliability and flexibility that they get from migrants. That’s hard to prove with hard evidence, but plausible.

When employers say they simply can’t get home-grown Brits to come and work at some jobs, the Committee has another unsympathetic response: of course they will – you just have to offer them enough pay to make it worthwhile. Employers seem unwilling to use wages as a lever to solve their labour and skill shortages.

Dependency

A lot of this interim report is dedicated to examining the case for migration being encouraged into some parts of the UK more than others.

It highlights the huge differences between most of the country and London. The capital’s population is 37% foreign-born. Some 11% of the total are from EU countries.

The West Midlands has the next highest share, at one in eight, and for Scotland, it’s one in 12. For north-east England and Wales, it is one in 18.

The sector where Scotland has a relatively high reliance on foreign workers is in hospitality – that’s apart from London, which at 33% foreign, is three times as reliant..

This is where the Scottish government weighs in. It set out for the MAC a case that will be familiar to those who follow Holyrood’s rhetoric:

  • Scotland has more need of immigrants because its population would fall otherwise. All its recent population growth has come from immigration.
  • Scotland has a special long-term problem with having enough working age, tax-paying people to fund pensions and services for retirees (‘the dependency ratio’), and
  • Scotland has a particular need for migrants to counter the outflow of people from remoter communities.

Again, the hard evidence is examined, and the response is far from sympathetic. The Scottish government’s sense of exceptionalism takes a battering.

Work longer

It is concluded that:

  • Scotland doesn’t have more need of migrants to stop population decline. Other parts of the UK have similar challenges, including north-east England and Wales.
  • Following the trajectory of the dependency ratio for the next two decades, it rises for Scotland, but it doesn’t look significantly different to other parts of the UK. In Northern Ireland, it rises fastest. A much more effective way of addressing the problem, it is argued, is raising the pension age and having people work longer.
  • And the rural question? Why look to migrants to fill the gaps as people leave these areas? Why not address the reasons why people leave, and find ways to encourage residents to stay? (There’s no suggestion what these might be.)

“Migration is rarely the only policy available to deal with a problem and always needs to be compared with alternatives,” writes the MAC chairman, Sir Alan Manning.

The final report will have more to say on those alternative. It is set to have a very significant influence on the future shape of the British economy and of British society.

via Immigration: how much is too much? – BBC News

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Canada 150 research chairs draw scientists fleeing Trump, guns and Brexit – The Globe and Mail

2018/04/02 Leave a comment

Continues a series of anecdotes regarding the relative attractiveness of Canada:

The day after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, Alan Aspuru-Guzik, a prominent professor of chemistry at Harvard University, picked up the phone and called Canada.

For Dr. Aspuru-Guzik, who specializes in developing advanced materials for energy generation, the 2016 result was a signal to close up shop. Born in the United States and raised in Mexico, Dr. Aspuru-Guzik has family roots that trace back to Spain, Poland and Ukraine. It’s the kind of varied background, he said, that instills a predisposed wariness of political authoritarianism and economic instability. And the Trump presidency has put his instincts on high alert.

“Many of my colleagues have told me that they will leave the United States if things get worse,” Dr. Aspuru-Guzik said. “The difference is that I already think it’s worse.”

On Thursday, Dr. Aspuru-Guzik is set to be named one of 20 newly hired Canada 150 research chairs at a briefing in Ottawa. He plans to leave his position at Harvard this summer to take up a new role at the University of Toronto, where he will continue his research and aim to spin off startup companies from his scientific work.

“Great science is all about great people. So being able to attract someone of Alan’s calibre is a coup for this country,” said Alan Bernstein, director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in Toronto. It was Dr. Bernstein who was on the other end of the line when Dr. Aspuru-Guzik made his postelection call, setting the wheels in motion for his eventual move.

A total of 25 Canada 150 research chairs will be established at Canadian universities under the one-off program, supported with $117.6-million in federal funding. Four chairholders were already named late last year, including computer scientist Margo Seltzer who, like Dr. Aspuru-Guzik, is leaving a faculty post at Harvard to come to Canada.

“I think it speaks to what Canada is doing here in science,” federal Science Minister Kirsty Duncan said. “We’re in a global competition for talent.”

Several of the appointees who spoke to The Globe and Mail before Thursday’s announcement were enthusiastic about what they perceive to be a collaborative, pro-research culture in Canada. But many also expressed a sense of relief when speaking about what they were coming from.

The haul of prominent scientists attracted to the new chairs suggests that a predicted brain gain for Canada owing to reactionary politics in the United States and elsewhere is having an impact and that scientists are indeed voting with their feet.

For example, when asked what she would be giving up by leaving North Carolina’s Duke University to come to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Anita Layton, a biomathematician whose work relates to kidney function, summed it up in two words: gun violence.

Dr. Layton, who did her graduate work in Canada and whose parents live in Toronto, explained that her children, ages 14 and 10, have recently been in lockdown exercises at school to practise for an armed assault.

“This is their world … It’s normal life for them and I find it really sad,” she said.

Family considerations played a role in her move, but she added that Waterloo’s strong mathematics department offers just as many professional advantages as Duke, with the added benefit of $350,000 in funding tied to her research chair which ensures years of continuing support.

Funding stability was a key factor for Judith Mank, an expert in the genomics of diversity, who will be moving her laboratory from University College London to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Like that of a number of British-based researchers, Dr. Mank was thrown into turmoil by the outcome of the 2016 Brexit vote.

“I got really worried because all of our funding is from the European Union and we’re not sure if we’ll be able to access that,” she said.

At UBC, Dr. Mank will be supported by a $1-million funding tranche that goes with her top-tier Canada 150 chair.

The same amount has been allocated to the University of Saskatchewan for James Famiglietti, a hydrologist currently with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who will become the director of the university’s highly regarded Global Institute for Water Security.

Dr. Famiglietti is well known for his public appearances in the United States, particularly during California’s recent, prolonged drought and testimony before Congress. A specialist in remote sensing, he has expertise in gauging water resources from space, and the impact of climate change on those resources.

He said the real advantage he anticipates in coming to Canada is in being able to access parts of the world that are undergoing water stress but where U.S. federal employees are typically prohibited from visiting.

“The goal is to begin reaching out to the hottest of the hot spots for water scarcity around the world,” Dr. Famiglietti said.

Among the newly selected chairs are several Canadian researchers, including Katherine O’Brien, a global health vaccinologist who is heading to Dalhousie University after her 30 years at premier research facilities in the United States and around the world.

“It was the right time for me to come back,” she said, avoiding any discussion of U.S. politics.

But for Dr. Aspuru-Guzik, the motivation for his move is clear: “I believe that life is short and that I should live in a place that is consistent with my values.”

via Canada 150 research chairs draw scientists fleeing Trump, guns and Brexit – The Globe and Mail

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‘I’m not trying to be a doctor. I just want to cut men’s hair’

2018/03/29 Leave a comment

Seems excessive. Doubt that my local Italian Canadian barber who has been cutting hair for years needed such certification:

With a diploma and more than 15 years of experience as a barber in Iraq, Benjamin Gbo’s dream is to open his own shop in Toronto to support his family. But he can’t even cut anyone’s hair in a salon without a hairstylist licence in Ontario.

A native of Mosul, Gbo has made five failed attempts at the hairstylist exam mandated by the Ontario College of Trades, the professional regulatory body of 23 compulsory skilled trades in the province.

“There are too many rules that stop you from working as a hairstylist here. They test you on all these names of bacterial infections and medical terms that I have never heard of,” said the 43-year-old, who fled to Canada in 2008 and was granted asylum shortly after.

“I’m not trying to be a chemist or a doctor. I just want to cut men’s hair and shave their beard to make them look nice, and make a living.”

According to the regulatory body, there are approximately 35,000 certified hairstylists in the province. Each must pass the multiple-choice exam administered by the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development in their apprenticeship offices across Ontario.

All candidates write the same interprovincial exam, developed by licensed hairstylists across Canada to “reflect the training and on the job competencies of the occupation.” The college also enforces the legislation to ensure workers and employers are in compliance through education, warnings, notices of contravention and fines up to $5,000 for first offence and $10,000 for second offence.

Anyone who wants to become a hairstylist must study the Standard Textbook of Cosmetology published by Milady Publishing for the licensing exam, which contains 120 questions divided into eight parts: occupational skills; hair and scalp care; cutting; styling; chemically waving and relaxing hair; colour; wigs, hairpieces and extensions; sales and marketing. The passing score is 70 per cent. It doesn’t matter if someone like Gbo just wants to cut and shave men’s hair; they need to take the same exam.

Some immigrant hairstylists do go straight for the exam while others choose to do 3,020 hours of apprenticeship and 480 hours of in-school training in Ontario so they can practise and make a living as they prepare for the test.

Emilina Garzon finished a two-year college diploma in hairstyling as well as manicure and pedicure in Colombia and worked there for three years before being sponsored to Canada by her husband in 2010.

She started her apprenticeship in Toronto in 2015 and has taken a two-month full-time refresher course and tried some mock exams for practice.

“In Colombia, we also have classroom and practical training. We are tested on our skills,” said the 35-year-old Bogota native, as she did a buzz cut on a Bay St. client at a downtown barber shop. “This licensing exam is hard.”

The college does allow candidates to have an interpreter and dictionary at the exam, but Gbo said it doesn’t help when the interpreter has no knowledge of the technical and professional hairstyling terms in English and candidates’ mother tongue.

“You have to pay for the translator and they can’t translate the terms because they can’t be found in the dictionary,” said Gbo, who has paid more than $1,000 in exam fees and translator help. “I don’t do women’s hair, colour or perm. Why can’t they do the licensing like the driver’s licence with G1, G2 and G3 (classification)?”

San San Maw, owner of Ivan Hair Salon where Garzon is an apprentice, said she appreciates the regulator’s job is to protect consumers, but as an employer, she is more interested in the skills of her hairstylists than their scores in a multiple-choice exam.

“I had to fire three hairstylists. They all passed the exam and got their (licensing) certificates, but they didn’t know how to cut hair and my customers just walked out,” said Maw, a Burmese immigrant with a university degree in physics, who failed the licensing exam herself three times.

Starting Jan. 1 this year, new apprentices registered in the hairstylist apprenticeship program are required to complete a practical assessment as well as the written exam to obtain certification, said the regulator, but the first practical assessments won’t be available until early next year.

“The College of Trades recognizes that the profile of Ontario’s labour market is changing,” said the College’s CEO George Gritziotis.

“We are working to build partnerships with community groups, immigrant serving agencies, industry stakeholders, apprenticeship training organizations, and governments to undertake initiatives that provide these workers the supports and tools needed to ensure we are able to adequately assess their skills and prior work experience.”

The regulator said it does work with registrants to find solutions to ensure practitioners have the qualifications needed to safely and competently do the work and are successful in passing the exam, but “a fully trained hairstylist is expected to know the terms used in their profession.”

Source: ‘I’m not trying to be a doctor. I just want to cut men’s hair’

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