Australia: Being cruel to refugees doesn’t strengthen multiculturalism

2018/03/20 Leave a comment

I find Minns somewhat over the top. There is a correlation between confidence in immigration and border management, to deny this is counter to the Canadian experience.

This does not justify some of the anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric (and some of the Australian government’s initiatives) but denying any link and not taking border management seriously is another matter:

There are now dozens of statements from United Nation bodies, condemning Australia’s refugee policies as harsh, inhumane and detrimental to the health and safety of the refugees.

In the face of this criticism, over the last two years, the Australian government has developed a new rationale for this extremely harsh treatment. They now claim that the measures used against boat arrivals – mandatory detention, permanent exclusion and being sent (now for five years for some) to Nauru and Manus Island – are, paradoxically, the very things that reinforce public support for immigration and multiculturalism.

The Prime Minister’s website quotes him as saying that: “Strong borders allow the government to maintain public trust in community safety, respect for diversity and support for our immigration and humanitarian programs.”

His blog reiterates the message: “Strong borders are the foundation of our high-immigration multicultural success”. Peter Dutton made the same point in a speech in London last year.

In fact, government figures have shown few reservations about wading into Pauline Hanson’s territory when they have felt it is in their political interest to do so. In November 2016, Dutton claimed that Malcolm Fraser made a mistake in allowing Lebanese Muslims into the country – not fundamentally different to Hanson’s call in the election that year for a total ban on Muslim immigration. In the same year he said that “illiterate and innumerate” refugees would take Australian jobs or “languish” on the dole and Medicare. Hanson’s 1996 maiden speech said that “immigration must be halted in the short term so that our dole queues are not added to by, in many cases, unskilled migrants not fluent in the English language.”

Citizenship Minister Alan Tudge suggested earlier this month that mulitculturalism is at risk unless tougher English-language tests are introduced for potential migrants. He argued that those from a non-English-speaking background are often concentrated “in particular suburbs… with a considerable absence of English being spoken or understood.” Again, Hanson, speaking then of Asian migrants, said that “they have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.”

Last April Dutton introduced a bill to require permanent residents to wait four years, instead of one, to apply for citizenship. He plans to reintroduce it this year. It is another signal to the electorate that we should be suspicious and fearful of new arrivals. It is a move in the direction of Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives, who are opposed to multiculturalism and want to extend the waiting time for permanent residents before applying for citizenship to ten years.

Both Turnbull and Dutton raced to condemn Sudanese youth gangs in Melbourne in January. Although the Federal government has no jurisdiction over the matter and despite the fact that crime in Victoria was down nearly 5 per cent in the year to last September, Dutton claimed that people were afraid to go out to restaurants. Again, fear is stoked, insecurity deepened and small, easily identifiable, non-Anglo groups blamed. In this soil, it is inevitable that broader hostility to immigration will grow – something that Tony Abbott, ever the opportunist, has noticed and taken advantage of with his call for deep cuts to immigration.

The claim that our government is staunchly defending a tolerant multiculturalism by taking necessarily harsh action against asylum seekers is difficult to sustain.

The international record on such action and its effect on the broader society is also informative. When the years spent in squalid refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere finally became too much and exploded into large refugee flows into Europe in 2015 and 2016 some governments took brutal and exclusionary actions. Hungary sent troops to force refugees back from its border. Today its Prime Minister Viktor Orban rejects taking any refugees in coordination with other EU countries, calling them “Muslim invaders.”

The Polish Law and Justice Party fought and convincingly won the 2015 election on the basis that it would not accept even one Muslim refugee. In so doing it has legitimised racism and Islamophobia. As many as 60,000 took part in a march in Warsaw last November organised by a movement called “White Poland”. With banners such as “White Europe” and “Clean Blood” they outnumbered the official Independence Day celebrations.

In Austria, Sebastian Kurz became Chancellor late last year after campaigning on a hard anti-immigrant policy, including seizing money from asylum seekers to pay for the costs of their temporary accommodation. Now, he has joined in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Its leader, and now Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache has continued the attack, calling for asylum seekers to be shut up in conditions which some have described as chillingly reminiscent of concentration camps. The party’s General Secretary Herbert Kickl has spoken of plans to create “camps” for refugees “to keep them concentrated in one place”.

The evidence from Europe is consistent with our experience in Australia. Right-wing populism, anti-immigrant sentiment, suspicion of and hostility to people simply because they are Muslim, cannot be effectively challenged by cruelty towards refugees. On the contrary, such refugee policies legitimise the fears on which that brand of politics thrives. These policies not only harm the refugees, they also harm the society in which we live.

There are alternatives to the current Australian refugee policy which do not amount to open borders. We know this is the case, because, in this country, we implemented many of these alternatives for decades very successfully. Thousands of Canberrans plan to march on this Palm Sunday to call for our leaders to do so again.

via Being cruel to refugees doesn’t strengthen multiculturalism

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Social conservatives savour victory, thank immigrants: Konrad Yakabuski

2018/03/19 Leave a comment

Yakabuski picks up on the Pricker-Ibbitson theory in The Big Shift towards more conservative social policies as a result of more religious and socially conservative new Canadians.

The reality is more nuanced as new Canadians, like most voters, are not single issue candidates; after all, the Liberals won the vast majority of ridings in which visible minorities form the majority despite more liberal social views:

Canada has accepted about five million new immigrants in the past 25 years and they have irreversibly changed our political dynamics.

Twenty-five years ago, Quebec’s place within the Canadian federation was almost all we ever talked about. Today, the Quebec question has faded from the national agenda. All we seem to talk about now is diversity.

For most of us, this means ensuring that more women and minorities are represented in all spheres of Canadian life. We have branded ourselves as an immigrant nation that embraces people of all origins. “Diversity is our strength” has become our national motto, replacing A Mari Usque Ad Mare (from sea to sea) everywhere but on our country’s official coat of arms.

What our political elites have a hard time admitting, however, is that diversity is not a one-way street toward harmonious living – what the French call le vivre-ensemble – but a multilane expressway of competing and often colliding values, norms and ideas. Nowhere has this become as apparent as in the emergence of social conservatism as a political force in Canada.

Doug Ford’s election as the leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party would not have been possible without the mobilization of social conservatives. That a strident anti-abortion activist – Tanya Granic Allen – was even on the ballot was proof in itself that this is no longer your father’s PC Party. That Ms. Granic Allen captured almost as much first-ballot support as the centrist Caroline Mulroney, and that her supporters propelled Mr. Ford over the top on the final ballot, was especially sweet for social conservatives.

The latter are now celebrating their new-found political clout — in dozens of languages. Immigration has swelled the ranks of Canada’s social conservatives. Polls shows that Canadian-born voters are less religious than ever, even when they claim to belong to a particular faith. That is not true of immigrants, who often identify more with their religion than their country.

Immigrants have increasingly shaped our communities, our schools and our self-conception as a country. So, it was only a matter of time before they began shaping our politics, too. It is unlikely Ontarians would be debating the province’s new sex-education curriculum at all if only Canadian-born voters were concerned. Resistance to the new curriculum has been strongest among immigrant parents. Some even pulled their kids out of school in protest.

Ground zero for the anti-sex-ed movement is Thorncliffe Park, in Toronto’s inner suburbs, where 70 per cent of the population was born outside Canada and almost 60 per cent of residents speak neither English nor French at home. They’re far more likely to speak Urdu, Farsi and Tagalog.

Campaign Life Coalition, the anti-abortion activist group that has led the fight against Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s update to the sex-ed curriculum, publishes some of its literature in 10 languages. The group claims to have signed up 9,000 new PC Party members during the leadership race to support Ms. Granic Allen as their first choice and Mr. Ford as their second.

“New Canadians are extremely important to CLC. It is probably our fastest growth segment in terms of general supporters and activists,” CLC spokesman Jack Fonseca said in an e-mail. “I do believe that their mobilization could shift public policy momentum on life and family issues.”

Not all social conservatives are religious. Chinese immigrants, whom Mr. Fonseca said have accounted for “a lot of growth” in his group’s membership, are among those least likely to practise a religion. But for most social conservatives, religion is the motivating factor in their political mobilization.

More than half a million Muslims immigrated to Canada in the 20 years to 2011, according to Statistics Canada’s National Household Survey. The 2016 census showed that Canada accepted more than 150,000 immigrants from Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria— all Muslim-majority countries – between 2011 and 2016. Tens of thousands more came from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.

Almost 200,000 Filipino immigrants came to Canada in the five years to 2016, replenishing the pews of the country’s Catholic churches. As with most Canadian Muslims, these Filipino newcomers take their faith ultraseriously.

A 2016 Environics poll showed Canadian Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015. But that was likely a result of the uproar surrounding Conservative attempts to ban the niqab at citizenship ceremonies and the party’s pro-Israel foreign policy. The same poll found that, among Canadian Muslims, “religious identity and practice are important and growing, in contrast to the broader secularizing trend in Canada.”

How long can these two trends co-exist without colliding? Doug Ford’s leadership win may just have given us the answer.

via Social conservatives savour victory, thank immigrants – The Globe and Mail

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Liberals say immigration enforcement is racist, but the group most likely to benefit from it is black men

2018/03/19 Leave a comment

Not quite sure whether the studies cited represent a consensus view or not. Look forward to any comments by those more familiar with the various studies:

President Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton seemed to herald a new era for border security and immigration enforcement. But his polarizing and occasionally ignorant comments about immigrants have handed his adversaries a convenient pretext for stymying compromise on immigration reform: racism.

Left-leaning advocacy groups and a host of Democrats all too often shy away from the specifics of the debate and instead lean on cries of bigotry, resorting to claims like that of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has described Trump’s approach to immigration reform as an effort to “make America white again.”

Claims that immigration enforcement equals racism ignore the reality that the group most likely to benefit from a tougher approach to immigration enforcement is young black men, who often compete with recent immigrants for low-skilled jobs.

This dynamic played out recently at a large bakery in Chicago that supplies buns to McDonald’s. Some 800 immigrant laborers, most of them from Mexico, lost their jobs last year after an audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Cloverhill Bakery, owned by Aryzta, a big Swiss food conglomerate, had to hire new workers, 80% to 90% of whom are African American. According to the Chicago Sun Times, the new workers are paid $14 per hour, or $4 per hour more than the (illegal) immigrant workers.

In this case, and in many others, the beneficiaries of immigration enforcement were working-class blacks, who are often passed over for jobs by unscrupulous employers.

The labor force participation rate for adult black men has declined steadily since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ushered in a new era of mass immigration. In 1973, the rate was 79%. It is now at 68%, and the Bureau of Labor projects that it will decline to 61% by 2026.
The beneficiaries of immigration enforcement [are] working-class blacks, who are often passed over for jobs by unscrupulous employers.

In 2016, the Obama White House produced a 48-page report acknowledging that immigration does not help the labor force participation rate of the native-born. It concluded, however, that “immigration reform would raise the overall participation rate by bringing in new workers of prime working age.”
Although the report used the term “new workers,” Democrats may also be tempted by the prospect of new voters. But they should be aware that in courting one group, they risk losing others.

African Americans tend to be a reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party, but they have repeatedly indicated in public opinion surveys that they want significantly less immigration.

A recent Harvard-Harris poll found that African Americans favor reducing legal immigration more than any other demographic group: 85% want less than the million-plus we allow on an annual basis, and 54% opted for the most stringent choices offered — 250,000 immigrants per year or less, or none at all.

These attitudes are rational.

In a 2010 study on the social effects of immigration, the Cornell University professor Vernon Briggs concluded: “No racial or ethnic group has benefited less or been harmed more than the nation’s African American community.”

The Harvard economist George Borjas has found that, between 1980 and 2000, one-third of the decline in the employment among black male high school dropouts was attributable to immigration. He also reported “a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates.”

In a 2014 paper on neoliberal immigration policies and their effects on African Americans, the University of Notre Dame professor Stephen Steinberg argued that, thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, “African Americans found themselves in the proverbial position of being ‘last hired.'” Steinberg also noted that “immigrants have been cited as proof that African Americans lack the pluck and determination that have allowed millions of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean to pursue the American dream.”

The struggles of black men obviously cannot all be linked to immigration, but it’s clear that the status quo does not benefit them.

As elected leaders consider changing our immigration laws, the interests of America’s most vulnerable citizens shouldn’t be overlooked. The first step toward honest reform is for the Democratic Party to admit that while liberal immigration enforcement might help them win new voters, it also harms and disenfranchises their most loyal constituency.

via Liberals say immigration enforcement is racist, but the group most likely to benefit from it is black men

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She sees anti-immigration politicians as hypocrites, so she launched ‘resistance genealogy’

2018/03/15 Leave a comment

Useful reminder that even the “old stock” have ancestors who were immigrants, with a range of characters and behaviours, including non-law abiding. Whether or not reminding those of their immigration history will bring change, on the other hand, is hard to see.

While it is not fair or valid to compare yesterday’s requirements with today (i.e., language), the overall point that we are all immigrants, save for Indigenous peoples, provides context and hopefully, some humility:

On the morning after Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., broke a record for the longest filibuster in the history of the House of Representatives – an eight-hour defense of immigrants – a Baltimore amateur genealogist named Jennifer Mendelsohn sat in her home office and logged onto Ancestry.com to begin her own form of protest.

“Let’s see,” she said, typing in the name of a Republican congressman whose anti-immigrant comments had been controversial. “I was searching for him earlier and thought I might have found something.”

She made a few clicks, going deeper into the past of the anti-immigrant congressman. His family? Immigrants from Norway.

Mendelsohn, 49, is the creator of “Resistance Genealogy,” a term that has suddenly brought her a considerable amount of fame, to which she is still adjusting. And that is, essentially, a tweet-by-tweet exposé on hypocrisy, and a commentary on the stories America tells about itself.

Resistance Genealogy. The concept began several months ago, when Mendelsohn watched White House adviser Stephen Miller go on CNN and tell the anchor that immigrants should be required to speak English.

Something in the statement rankled her, so Mendelsohn, a journalist whose genealogical research had been mostly contained to her own family tree, logged on to a few research databases, then responded with two sentences that were promptly retweeted 17,000 times:

“Stephen Miller favors immigrants who speak English. The 1910 census shows his own great-grandmother couldn’t,” Mendelsohn wrote. She included a PDF of the census document, which specified that Miller’s grandmother spoke only Yiddish.

A few weeks later, Mendelsohn read conservative commenter Tomi Lahren’s assertion that the country needed to punish the “illegal behavior” of undocumented immigrants. Mendelsohn took to her databases, landing on court documents for Lahren’s great-great-grandfather. He’d been born in Russia, and then immigrated to North Dakota, where he was indicted on a charge of forging his naturalization documents.

Mendelsohn went back to Twitter: “Law-abiding citizens like her great-great-grandfather, indicted by a grand jury for forging naturalization papers?” She went viral again.

She wasn’t trying to stir up trouble, she says, so much as she was trying to point out a truth about the history of America: Almost everyone came here from someone else, whether that migration happened one generation ago or six, whether the migration was a hopeful choice or a forced imprisonment. “Spending as much time as I do looking at these documents and looking at family trees – all of those stories go back to a boat.”

In Mendelsohn’s personal history, the boat in question carried her infant grandfather. His parents, a shoemaker and a housewife, boarded in Latvia and eventually settled in New York. Rosie Mendelsohn, Jennifer’s great-grandmother, birthed 10 children and saw all but one die in childhood. Rosie herself died at age 36 from tuberculosis, though when Mendelsohn managed to track down her grave online, the cemetery informed her regretfully that none of headstone’s writing was legible.

“When I think of the opportunities afforded to me over two generations, it’s nothing short of mind-boggling,” Mendelsohn says. “The fact that I can type something on my computer and hot food will come to my door. Or that in 10 minutes I can be at Johns Hopkins and have the best medical care in the world. I am the manifestation of everything (my ancestors) were hoping to do.”

On Mendelsohn’s long to-do list, she recently added: Buy Rosie Mendelsohn a proper headstone.

Partly because her own American story began with her infant grandfather, when Mendelsohn saw conservative Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, tweet, “We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies” – “It made me crazy.”

“Congressman,” she tweeted back, attaching papers in the public record from King’s ancestors: “here’s your 4-year-old grandmother arriving steerage class at Ellis Island, 1894.”

When Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson declared that the United States shouldn’t accept immigrants from “failing countries,” Mendelsohn dug up a narrative written by his great-great-grandfather, who said he’d left Switzerland because his prospects there were so limited.

King and Carlson never responded to her findings. Neither did Lahren or Miller. When The Washington Post reached out to all of them for comment, only Carlson called back: “The United States is a completely different country now,” he said. “The idea that (having) a relative who came 150 years ago means I have to have a specific view on immigration? It’s so dumb it’s hard to believe you have to respond to it.”

He continued: “There’s only one question that matters: What’s good for the country in 2018?”

Discussions about what’s good for the country have become a flash point: Debates about DACA were at the heart of the government shutdown, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency recently decided to remove the phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement. The new mission statement prioritized “protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”

“Part of what’s going on is this incredibly powerful mythologizing,” Mendelsohn says. “People are insisting that, oh, the immigrants of yore, they did everything right. That they came here legally, and walked to school uphill both ways, and learned English immediately. But that’s B.S.! … In 1751, Benjamin Franklin was complaining that the German immigrants in Pennsylvania would never learn to speak English.”

She wants people to interrogate their own histories. If people are unbothered by their own ancestors’ immigration, but opposed to it now – why? What deeper issues have come into play?

Something about her work has spoken to people – particularly to liberal armchair activists who have no political power, but who are looking for ways to apply their own bookish skills to the cause.

Mendelsohn has been contacted by television producers. Book editors. People wanting her to find their relatives. People wanting to know if they are her relatives. One local artist sent her an email, “I feel really inspired to create a visual project on the work you do”; another man asked whether she ever did “non-political, non-adversarial genealogical research,” which she took mean that he just basically wanted help locating distant cousins.

“This poor girl emailed me asking me for a job,” Mendelsohn says, scrolling past another email. “And I’m like, I don’t even have a job.”

Her genealogical research is all done in her spare time, squeezed in between paid freelance writing work and raising two children. Sometimes she’ll trace a famous family tree for hours and decide not to post anything. Her most successful tweets have been the ones laden with irony.

“So Dan,” she wrote in January to Dan Scavino, the White House director of social media who had recently tweeted that it was “time to end chain migration.” “Let’s say Victor Scavino arrives from Canelli, Italy in 1904, then brother Hector in 1905, brother Gildo in 1912, sister Esther in 1913, & sister Clotilde and their father Giuseppe in 1916, and they live together in NY. Do you think that would count as chain migration?”

“Gosh, I love when you slap people with genealogy,” responded one of the 58,000 people who liked the tweet.

Lately, Mendelsohn has been trying to figure out whether to keep going. There aren’t a lot of surprises in this work – every line of inquiry ultimately leads back to the same place: a boat. “I don’t know whether the fact that all these stories end up looking the same is a reason not to do it or a reason to do it,” she says. The sameness of the stories is the through line of America.

“I look at my great-grandmother,” Mendelsohn says. “Literally, she got on a boat for me because she saw something here. How can I look at anyone else and say, sorry, but the door is closed?”

Recently, Mendelsohn was at a party when she learned she had at least one high-profile fan. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, also a guest, said he knew her work – his daughter had introduced him to Mendelsohn’s tweets, he told The Washington Post in an interview.

O’Malley and Mendelsohn talked for a bit, and he later sent an email: “It was an honor to meet you,” it said. “Keep writing. Your country needs you.” It was the best compliment she could have imagined.

Source: She sees anti-immigration politicians as hypocrites, so she launched ‘resistance genealogy’

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New immigration bureau set up to handle growing number of foreigners in China

2018/03/15 Leave a comment

Not surprising, part of the Ministry of Public Security:

The growing trend of people emigrating to and from China has prompted Beijing to set up a new agency to coordinate immigration policies and their implementation.

It comes as Beijing ramps up measures to attract more skilled foreigners to China for work – efforts that are often undermined by red tape, particularly the complicated visa application process.

Managed by the Ministry of Public Security, the new immigration bureau will be responsible for overseeing visas, repatriation of people found to be in the country illegally, and border control. It will also provide exit and entry services for Chinese nationals.

In addition, the Ministry of Science and Technology will take over the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, which handles employment of foreigners, under a government reshuffle plan tabled on Tuesday at the National People’s Congress.

“Along with the rise of China’s power, an increasing number of foreigners have come to work and live in this country, which means better immigration services are needed,” State Councillor Wang Yong told some 3,000 lawmakers at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The plan is expected to be endorsed by the NPC later this week.

There were more than 900,000 foreigners working on mainland China in 2016, according to official data, compared with only 10,000 in the 1980s.

China meanwhile granted permanent residency to 1,576 foreigners in 2016 – a 163 per cent jump from the previous year – under a “green card” scheme that began in 2004.

The number of Chinese going to live in other countries is also on the rise, going from 4.1 million in 1990 to 9.3 million in 2013, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

But moving to China for work is no easy task for foreigners. Applying to work in the country can be a lengthy and difficult process, with an employment visa and a residence permit required. Foreigners must also register with local police within 24 hours of arrival, and when moving to a new place.

Israeli Eli Beck, founder of EDB-China, which offers business development services between China and Israel, said he welcomed the move to set up a new immigration bureau.

“In the past when we applied for a work visa and residency permit, we used to wait in lines, file our applications and then go to other locations to file another document. It’s time-consuming and complicated,” Beck said.

He added that some of his colleagues had applied for a Chinese green card, but none were successful.

“The requirements are very strict and very demanding. I guess very few [foreign] people qualify for it,” Beck said.

An official at a Shanghai immigration checkpoint run by the public security ministry said his department would come under the new agency, with the aim of providing a one-stop service.

“In the future, various departments dealing with different immigration issues will come under the bureau’s umbrella. It will be more convenient – both for us government officials and for people who need immigration services,” said the official, who declined to be named.

“But I don’t think it will be easier for foreigners to get green cards because there’s no change to the rules there. Applicants will still have to put together all the same paperwork.”

Wang Huiyao, director of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a think tank in Beijing, said it was high time an immigration bureau was set up.

“With so many departments involved and a complicated application process, moving to China can be a real headache for foreigners and the bureaucracy has also put off international talent from coming here,” Wang said, adding that a central agency could provide a better service and more welcoming atmosphere.

Beijing-based lawyer Jiang Junlu, who specialises in labour issues and social security, said China needed to do more to lure skilled workers from overseas. He added that Beijing should also get tough on those who are in the country illegally and managing people with multiple nationalities, without elaborating.

Source: New immigration bureau set up to handle growing number of foreigners in China

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ICYMI: World’s youngest billionaire warns on Trump – BBC News

2018/03/14 Leave a comment

Impact of anti-immigration rhetoric and on the UK:

Anti-immigration rhetoric coming from the White House is deterring software developers from going to the US.

That’s according to the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, 27-year-old Irishman John Collison.

Stripe, the company he founded with his brother Patrick, provides the payments plumbing for hundreds of thousands of online businesses.
Collison said that his fast-growing business had noticed the difficulty in luring top talent to Silicon Valley.

In an exclusive interview with the BBC, the Limerick man said he feared the same may prove true for the UK because of Brexit.

“People are less willing to move to the US,” Collison said. “They don’t even want to enter the visa process because of the perceived political climate here and how welcoming it is to immigrants and I think the perception (of the UK) will also make it harder to recruit in the UK”

He said the stakes were high as it ultimately risked the UK’s ability to produce a vibrant and successful technology sector.

‘The brightest and the best’

Collison has accepted there is no going back but says the government should be a sending a clear message that international talent was welcome in the UK.

“What’s done is done but what I think we can now affect is the perception of the UK as an attractive place to live, work and do business, ” he said.

“It’s something we are screwing up in the US and I think there is a very clear opportunity to send a message that the UK is a good place to emigrate to.”

Collison’s frustration is compounded by the fact that these perceived forces of deterrence fly in the opposite direction to the way the world of commerce and technology are evolving.

He says: “There is a juxtaposition between an outward, global, technology and export-based economy on the one hand and the anti-immigrant signals from the US and Brexit.”

The UK government insists that it understands the need to lure the “brightest and best” from around the world – it recently doubled the number of visas available for exceptionally talented individuals from outside the EU who show promise in technology, science, art and creative industries from 1,000 to 2,000.

But the long-term position of EU nationals who arrive after Brexit is less clear.

Stripe is has just signed a deal with Amazon

That is perhaps one reason why Collison and his older brother are betting big on Dublin as their European headquarters.

“There are a few reasons. First, it’s in the European Union, second, it’s a real international melting pot with the skills we need and third it’s a nice vibrant city to live in – there’s more of a craic (more fun) in Dublin.”

via World’s youngest billionaire warns on Trump – BBC News

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2018 Trudeau Report Card – iAffairs Canada

2018/03/14 Leave a comment

I was one of those interviewed with respect to fulfilling immigration related commitments (A-).

Carleton University’s Canadian Foreign Policy Journal(CFPJ), the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) and iAffairs Canada have released their evaluation of the Trudeau government’s foreign policy agenda. Remaining consistent with last year’s rating, the report card gives the Trudeau government a B- overall.

This third edition of the CFPJ Report Card covers everything from defence and diplomacy to foreign aid, refugees and immigration. Its purpose is to evaluate the government’s performance in crucial areas of foreign policy and to identify any gaps between the rhetoric of electoral showmanship and the harsh realities of policy implementation.

“The government’s actions and rhetoric have been inconsistent, at time contradictory and mostly focused on messaging and advancing the Liberal brand than fixing real problems,” notes David Carment who led the Report. “Overall, what is missing is a cohesive and coherent foreign policy, one that matches the government’s progressive rhetoric with its actions,” suggest the Report’s contributors. The authors also highlight some of the present administration’s key successes, such as its commitment “to what is perhaps the largest reorganization of the Canadian security and intelligence community since 1984,” and, in regard to its response to NAFTA renegotiation, its ability to assemble “a strong team of negotiators with bipartisan support.”

Despite these successes, the authors conclude that “At the midpoint between the Liberals’ ascent to power and the next federal election, substance must meet style if the Liberals hope to remain true to their promise of distinguishing themselves from the previous government.”

via 2018 Trudeau Report Card – iAffairs Canada

To view the full foreign policy report card click here.

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Douglas Todd: Aboriginals and whites leaving Metro Vancouver

2018/03/13 Leave a comment

Kind of interesting that some of the debate is now focussing on white enclaves as much as ethnic enclaves:

Aboriginals and whites are leaving Metro Vancouver for other regions of B.C., particularly to live in the Fraser Valley, Vancouver Island and the Okanagan, according to Statistics Canada.

A net total of 9,345 whites and 460 Indigenous people left Metro for other parts of the province in the one-year period ending July, 2016, according to newly released Statistics Canada data.

Two other demographic groups that are tending to say goodbye to Metro Vancouver are those who are born in Canada and those between ages 55 and 65.

It’s been more than two decades since Metro Vancouver has experienced so many residents depart for other regions of the province, according to data provided by Patrick Charbonneau, a senior analyst at Statistics Canada.

Out-migration trends similar to Metro Vancouver have also occurred in Toronto and Montreal. In all three cities, said Charbonneau, “there were more non-visible minorities (i.e. whites) leaving those regions for elsewhere in the province than the opposite.”

While Metro Vancouver is generally losing people to the rest of B.C., Statistics Canada reports that Victoria and Kelowna have become the only cities in Canada that are growing because of inter-provincial migration.

Meanwhile, people of colour (which StatsCan refer to as “visible minorities”), are generally not moving out of Metro Vancouver to other parts of the province. They are, however, arriving in the city in large numbers through immigration.

Several reasons are being offered for the exodus of whites, aboriginals and older people from Metro Vancouver. Some mayors say Metro Vancouver residents are seeking lower-cost housing outside the city. Others point to how retirement-age homeowners are cashing out on Metro Vancouver dwellings that have skyrocketed in price. And scholars point to demographic trends in which people of the same ethnicity often choose to live among each other.

“Across the Western world, white majorities, especially those with children, have a tendency to gravitate to neighbourhoods that are both relatively white and have limited ethnic change,” said Eric Kaufmann, a University of London, Birkbeck, professor, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver by parents of mixed ethnicity.

“This is true in the U.S., Canada and Britain. In diverse London, England, for instance, around 600,000 white Britons left the city in the 2000s, while 1.6 million non-white British arrived. Ethnic own-group attraction, rather than white flight or economic forces, best explains the pattern,” said Kaufmann, an often-cited specialist on global migration patterns.

Through extensive research, Kaufmann and his colleagues have found that diverse cities, like Metro Vancouver, “tend to lose white populations at a faster rate, while less diverse cities gain them, or lose whites at a slower rate.” His findings could explain one of the reasons Victoria and Kelowna, which have far less ethnic diversity than Metro Vancouver, are growing as a result of inter-provincial migration.

Figures from the 2016 Canadian census show that whites recently became a minority in the metropolises of Toronto and Metro Vancouver. The relatively small Aboriginal population of Metro Vancouver is also declining proportionally.

In the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, the ethnic Chinese population has expanded in a few decades by more than 80,000, while the white population has declined by more than 30,000.

A Postmedia series showed that Metro Vancouver is developing distinct ethnic enclaves. Ethnic Chinese now predominate in large sections of Richmond and South Asians make up three-quarters of many neighbourhoods in north Surrey. Meanwhile, whites tend to make up large majorities in suburbs such as White Rock, North Vancouver and Langley.

Despite significant inter-provincial migration trends, immigration from outside the country is changing the ethnic face of Metro Vancouver and Canada’s largest cities the most quickly.

The cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are projected to have fewer people of European origin, according to StatsCan. More than 60 per cent of all immigrants to Canada have moved to these three major cities, and more than four of five of all recent immigrants come from Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa.

Metro Vancouver took in 142,000 new immigrants between 2011 and 2016 — and about 85 per cent of those immigrants were people of colour. Many choose to live in ethnic enclaves.

Working with political scientist Gareth Harris, Kaufmann has tracked “white withdrawal” in Britain and Canada, monitoring how whites tend to “unconsciously” move out of neighbourhoods when a large influx of non-white immigrants moves in.

In their book, Changing Places: Mapping the White British Response to Ethnic Change, Kaufmann and Harris don’t use the American term, “white flight,” to describe this pattern because they don’t think it is normally fuelled by racism or xenophobia.

“White conservatives and liberals, racists and cosmopolitans, all move to relatively white areas at similar rates,” Kaufmann and Harris say in Changing Places, published by Demos, which describes itself as “Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank.”

Comparing Metro Vancouver to Toronto and Montreal, Statistics Canada data reveals that in the one-year period ending July, 2016, Greater Toronto, had a net loss of 22,555 whites to other areas of Ontario, which was more than it lost of people of colour (5,265).

Montreal had a net gain of people of colour from other areas of the province of Quebec, while experiencing a net loss of 7,075 whites.

 

Source: Aboriginals and whites leaving Metro Vancouver

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

ICYMI: Federal Court asked to spare former clients of immigration consultant fraudster | Toronto Star

2018/03/13 Leave a comment

Well, it was misrepresentation, whether committed directly by the person or through an intermediary:

Former clients of an unlicensed consultant convicted in one of Canada’s biggest immigration scams have asked the court to spare them from being removed from Canada for “misrepresentation.”

In a proposed class action application filed with the Federal Court last week, Chao Yuan Lin and Xiang Zhou — two of Xun “Sunny” Wang’s former clients — said evidence at the man’s criminal trial indicated “Wang or his staff committed immigration fraud and not their clients.”

Wang, owner of New Can Consulting in British Columbia, was found guilty of immigration fraud in 2015 for filing fraudulent immigration applications for hundreds of clients, and was sentenced to seven years in prison. Last year, three of his former staff were also convicted of immigration fraud and were sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Wang’s services included helping clients apply for citizenship and renew what’s known as a permanent resident, or PR, card, a document required of non-citizen immigrants to enter Canada by commercial vehicle.

Wang falsified documents to make his clients appear to have met the residency requirement when they were physically out of the country in order to renew their PR card.

“Despite the mountain of evidence of Mr. Wang’s fraudulent activities committed against his clients and Canada Immigration, the respondent (public safety) minister decided to treat the clients of Mr. Wang as no less culpable and has been seeking to remove them from Canada by alleging that they committed misrepresentation,” said the court application represented by the lead claimants, Lin and Zhou.

The Immigration Department declined to comment on the class action application or reveal the number of Wang’s former clients whose immigration status is under review, as the matter is before the court.

In the court application, Lin claimed he was not aware of any suspicious or fraudulent activities of Wang, nor was he informed of any by the Canada Border Services Agency when he retained Wang to renew his PR card in 2013, a year after officials executed a warrant to search Wang’s office in Richmond, B.C.

 

According to the court submission, Lin was refused a travel document to return to Canada by Canadian officials in Beijing in 2014. He filed a successful appeal and obtained a new PR card in June 2016. Last month, however, the border agency told him he was inadmissible to Canada because he misrepresented himself on his PR card renewal, and he was referred to an admissibility hearing.

According to the submission, Zhou successfully renewed his PR card in 2010 through Wang’s company but was intercepted by border agents at the Vancouver International Airport a year later because he had failed to meet the minimum two-year residency requirement within a five-year period.

Zhou was issued a removal order but successfully appealed the decision, got his PR card renewed and sponsored his wife and child into Canada in 2013. Then last month, he too was informed by the border agency that he’s inadmissible to Canada for misrepresentation.

The court application asks that the permanent residents not have to go through the admissibility hearings for misrepresentation.

Both Lin and Zhou declined to comment.

Their lawyer, Lawrence Wong, said border officials identified about 2,000 of Wang’s clients during his criminal trial and hundreds of them had hired the unlicensed consultant for PR card renewal.

The court submission argues that misrepresentation in the PR card renewal does not imply his clients acquired their permanent resident status improperly and has nothing to do with the retention of the permanent status.

A PR card serves as proof of permanent resident status, but the status may remain without a valid card, the court application says.

“If the applicants made misrepresentation to renew their PR cards, then they should have their cards revoked or renewal applications denied. They should not lose their legally obtained PR status and be given a five-year ban from entering Canada,” the application says.

Another complaint the applicants have against the government, according to the application, was that their PR cards were successfully renewed by the Immigration Department but the public safety minister, who oversees the border enforcement agency, delayed “in shutting down the unlicensed and illegal activities of Mr. Wang” and “took it upon themselves to revisit the applicants’ cases.”

via Federal Court asked to spare former clients of immigration consultant fraudster | Toronto Star

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

ICYMI: Résidence permanente: des étudiants iraniens se plaignent des délais

2018/03/13 Leave a comment

Likely security-related delays:

Le gouvernement fédéral dit « comprendre la frustration » ressentie par plusieurs étudiants iraniens qui dénoncent le fait que le traitement de leurs demandes de résidence permanente prend jusqu’à deux fois plus de temps que la moyenne.

Mais, selon le député néodémocrate Thomas Mulcair, il est clair que les Iraniens sont victimes d’un traitement particulier. « Tout le monde comprend le besoin de faire une analyse de sécurité des dossiers, a dit M. Mulcair lors d’un point de presse vendredi. Mais il n’y a aucune raison que ce soit deux fois plus long pour les Iraniens. »

Selon l’avocat Vincent Valaï, qui représente 38 membres du Collectif des étudiants diplômés iraniens, la plupart d’entre eux attendent leur résidence depuis 28 mois. « Ils ont pourtant leur certificat de sélection du Québec et ce sont des diplômés dans des domaines de pointe, des gens dont le Québec et le Canada ont besoin, dit-il. Généralement, on attend 14 mois dans ce genre de cas. Ils ont droit à une réponse. »

Jeudi, après l’annonce du point de presse de MM. Mulcair et Valaï, le gouvernement aurait réglé 12 des 38 dossiers. « Ce déblocage renforce l’idée que c’est discrétionnaire et discriminatoire », pense le député.

À Ottawa, le bureau du ministre de la Sécurité publique (qui fait l’analyse de sécurité d’un dossier après qu’Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada l’a approuvé) reconnaît que certains cas sont plus longs que d’autres à traiter. « Cette situation nous a été soulignée l’année dernière par le député [libéral] Marc Miller », indique l’attaché de presse du ministre Ralph Goodale, Scott Bardsley.

Mais il mentionne que, si 80 % des dossiers québécois sont traités en 15 mois, « cela veut dire que c’est plus long pour 20 % des cas ». Il n’y a pas de délai prescrit pour l’évaluation des dossiers, dit M. Bardsley, parce qu’ils varient selon la complexité du dossier.

Le Canada et l’Iran n’ont plus de relations diplomatiques depuis 2012.

Source: Résidence permanente: des étudiants iraniens se plaignent des délais

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