CBC Ottawa Morning Interview on “Talking About Immigration”
2018/01/25 Leave a comment
My interview prior to the Riddell Forum on Political Management armchair panel on “Immigration Policy in an Era of Political Polarization” on January 23rd:
George F. Will: Choosing immigration criteria is a Sisyphean task – The Salt Lake Tribune
2018/01/24 Leave a comment
I have a bias for these kinds of pieces that remind us of historical immigration restrictions and anti-immigration attitudes:
In 1790, the finest mind in the First Congress, and of his generation, addressed in the House of Representatives the immigration issue: “It is no doubt very desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us.”
Perhaps today’s 115th Congress will resume the Sisyphean task of continuing one of America’s oldest debates, in which James Madison was an early participant: By what criteria should we decide who is worthy to come amongst us?
The antecedents of the pronouns “we” and “us” include the almost 80 million who are either immigrants — not excluding the more than 11 million undocumented ones — or their children. They might be amused to learn that in the only full-length book Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he worried that too many immigrants might be coming from Europe with monarchical principles “imbibed in their early youth,” ideas that might turn America into “a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”A century later, Theodore Roosevelt, who detested “milk-and-water cosmopolitanism,” saw virtue emerging from struggles between the “Anglo-Saxon” race and what Roosevelt’s friend and soulmate Rudyard Kipling called “lesser breeds without the law.” TR, who worried that the United States was becoming a “polyglot boarding house,” supported America’s first significant legislation restricting immigration, passed to exclude Chinese, because he thought Chinese laborers would depress American wages, and because he believed they would be “ruinous to the white race.”
In 1902, in the final volume of professor Woodrow Wilson’s widely-read book “A History of the American People,” he contrasted “the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe” — e.g., Norwegians — with southern and eastern Europeans who had “neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.” U.S. Army data gathered during World War I mobilization demonstrated, according to a Princeton psychologist, “the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups.”
Richard T. Ely, a leading progressive economist, spent most of his academic career at the University of Wisconsin, but first taught at Johns Hopkins, where one of his students was Woodrow Wilson. Ely celebrated the Army data for enabling the nation to inventory its human stock just as it does its livestock. In 1924, Congress legislated severe immigration restrictions, which excluded immigrants from an “Asiatic Barred Zone.”
For more on this unsavory subject, read “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era,” by Princeton economist Thomas C. Leonard. And “One Nation Undecided” by Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus at Yale Law School, who writes: “In what may be the cruelest single action in our immigration history, Congress defeated a bill in 1939 to rescue 20,000 children from Nazi Germany despite American families’ eagerness to sponsor them — on the ground that the children would exceed Germany’s quota!”
The next phase of America’s immigration debate, like the previous one, will generate the most heat about border security and whether those who are here illegally should stay.
The heat will be disproportionate.
The border was irrelevant to the 42 percent of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S., mostly at airports, with valid visas that they then overstayed. Spending on border security quadrupled in the 1990s, then tripled in the next decade. Now that net immigration of Mexicans has been negative for ten years, Americans eager to build a wall should not build it on the 1,984-mile U.S.-Mexico border but on the 541-mile Mexico-Guatemala border.
Fifty-eight percent of the more than 11 million — down from 12.2 million in 2007 — who are here illegally have been here at least 10 years; 31 percent are homeowners; 33 percent have children who, having been born here, are citizens. The nation would recoil from the police measures that would be necessary to extract these people from the communities into the fabric of which their lives are woven. They are not going home; they are home.
After 9/11, attitudes about immigration became entangled with policies about terrorism. So, as The Economist noted, “a mass murder committed by mostly Saudi terrorists resulted in an almost limitless amount of money being made available for the deportation of Mexican house-painters.”
This month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided 98 7-Eleven stores in 17 states, making 21 arrests, approximately one for every 4.5 stores. Rome was not built in a day and it would be unreasonable to expect the government to guarantee, in one fell swoop, that only American citizens will hold jobs dispensing Slurpees and Big Gulps.
via George F. Will: Choosing immigration criteria is a Sisyphean task – The Salt Lake Tribune
After one year of Trump, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sounds a lot different about immigration — and that might be a …
2018/01/24 Leave a comment
Change in tactics but not substance. Whether it will work…
Almost exactly one year ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stood in front of cheering employees vowing to “stand together” and “never compromise”in opposing the Trump administration’s travel ban.
On Friday, Pichai spoke out again in defense of immigration and of the benefits that immigrants bring to the US. But the India-born CEO, himself the perfect embodiment of the cause, seemed to have ditched his firebrand approach in favor of a a more diplomatic tone.
“It’s really important that we don’t make it a tech-versus-the-rest-of-the-country issue,” Pichai said on-stage, during a Q&A event in San Francisco organized by MSNBC, when asked about immigration by hosts Kara Swisher and Ari Melber.
Many of the big immigration issues remain unresolved, hot-button topics, including the travel ban, the fate of the so-called Dreamers, and the controversial visa system US corporations use to hire skilled foreign workers. Indeed, the deadlock over immigration policy in Congress helped trigger the federal government shutdown that began on Saturday.
There’s a lot at stake for Google, which recruits engineering talent from all over the world and which counts some Dreamers — immigrants who were brought into the US illegally by their parents but now have work visas — among its ranks.
Still, after a year of the Trump presidency, Pichai appears to have adapted to the political climate his company now operates in. Instead of “never compromise,” Pichai stressed the need for Google to play a “constructive” role in the immigration debate.
“We are very open to constructively reforming the H-1B process,” Pichai said, referring to the visas that allow US companies like Google to hire foreign workers.
This softening in tone may not be the capitulation it appears to be though.
Sure, as a publicly-owned company Google has a responsibility to its shareholders to get on with business and it would be silly to expect Google to go to the mat on any issue that doesn’t directly affect its bottom line.
But Pichai’s real message seemed to be that Silicon Valley needs to be smarter to win this battle.
“It’s up to us as tech companies to make the case as to why immigration is good for the country, not just for tech companies,” he said. “I think we have to do that better.”
Silicon Valley’s greatest strength has always been its ability to sell the world on its vision of the future.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates put a computer on every desk.
If Google can convince hundreds of millions of people to visit its website every day, then surely it should be able to convince citizens and politicians about the merits of a diverse society.
Pichai knows he has a good argument on his hand, and, like a good tech product, he just needs to figure out how to sell it.
Undocumented Irish Unexpectedly Caught In Trump’s Immigration Dragnet : NPR
2018/01/23 Leave a comment
Always interesting to see who gets caught when the net is cast so wide. While the Irish man caught is the focus of the story, the overall data is revealing:
The Trump administration has been aggressively deporting foreign nationals home around the globe, from Somalia to Slovakia. Though Mexicans, Central Americans and Haitians make up nine out of 10 people removed from the United States, year-end figures analyzed by NPR show that deportations to the rest of the world have jumped 24 percent.
Some are from formerly “recalcitrant” countries that used to reject U.S. deportees but have now agreed to take them home. These nations include Guinea, Cuba, Bangladesh, Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Moreover, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, are arresting more immigrants in the interior of the U.S. who have overstayed their visas.
A case in point — the unauthorized Irish in Boston.
“It’s really indiscriminate. ICE, in their aggressive tactics of detention, are going after the Irish as much as they’re going after any other nationality,” says Ronnie Millar, director of the Irish International Immigrant Center in Boston.
Sitting in the visiting room of the Suffolk County House of Corrections, Dylan O’Riordan, 19, wears a lemon-yellow jail jumpsuit and a bewildered expression on his pale face.
“I was aware how with Trump immigration was going to get a lot harder, but I didn’t pay as much mind to it as I should have, which was my first mistake,” he says.
O’Riordan was born in Galway, Ireland. Both of his parents had lived in Massachusetts before he was born and already had green cards. They brought Dylan from Ireland to the Boston area in 2010 on a visitor’s visa when he was 12 years old. He overstayed his 90-day visa, and began living his life like any other American teenager, though he was unauthorized.
At 19, he had a child with his girlfriend, Brenna, then dropped out of high school and went to work for his uncle’s roofing company. About four months ago, he and Brenna were shopping at a mall when they got into an argument. “It was nothing at all,” he says. “Some woman called the cops, said I was abusing my girlfriend.”
O’Riordan was arrested for domestic assault and battery, but Brenna refused to file charges. The county chose not to prosecute. O’Riordan had no prior criminal record, so the judge let him go.
Immigrants who overstay their visas are at a unique disadvantage compared to immigrants who illegally cross the border. When they apply for their visa, they waive their right to an immigration hearing if they end up staying after their visa expires.
O’Riordan’s lawyer, Tony Marino, points out that his client was brought here when he was a child, but ICE won’t budge.
“Their position has been, well, he waived whatever rights he had when he came,” says Marino. “Twelve year olds don’t waive rights! I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t wrap my head around it.”
The ICE office in Boston sent a statement to NPR: “Dylan O’Riordan … overstayed the terms of his admission by more than seven years. ICE deportation officers encountered him in Sept 2017 after he was arrested on local criminal charges. ICE served him with an administrative final order of removal.” He is scheduled to be put on a plane to Dublin later this week.
“You look American, you sound American.”
Dylan O’Riordan is not an isolated case. Irish visa overstayers have been swept up in the administration’s nationwide immigration dragnet. Under strict new rules, anyone here illegally is a target — whether they’re convicted of a crime or not. In 2017, ICE deported 34 undocumented Irish, up from 26 the year before. The numbers are tiny compared to the 128,765 Mexicans ejected from the country last year, but in Boston’s closeknit Irish community the wave of arrests is big news.
via Undocumented Irish Unexpectedly Caught In Trump’s Immigration Dragnet : NPR
Canada’s immigration lab: What the country can learn from PEI
2018/01/22 Leave a comment
Good long and balanced profile in the Globe on PEI’s immigration strategy, with many common characteristics elsewhere in Atlantic Canada. Retention will remain a challenge:
On a crisp, late-autumn morning, locals shuffle through the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, scooping up farm produce from the fertile countryside just a few minutes up the road, cuts of meat from local ranchers, fresh Prince Edward Island oysters (shucked while you wait) and an array of handmade crafts and preserves. The scene is familiar to anyone who’s visited the market during its 34-year history.
But as you head deeper in, the lilt of rural PEI accents is interspersed with less familiar sounds: Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic. A long line of market-goers waits at a stall serving foods from Africa. Young students carry on an animated conversation in Spanish in front of a Mexican food vendor. Other stalls serve Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern fare.
“It’s a different atmosphere altogether from what it was back 20 years ago,” said Ralph Younker of Younker’s Farm Fresh Produce. Mr. Younker has had a fruit-and-vegetable stall at the market for the past 28 years, and he has watched as a new wave of immigrants has transformed the popular Charlottetown attraction. “In the last two or three years, we’ve really noticed the influx.”
About 2,500 new immigrants landed in PEI in 2017; roughly 90 per cent of which have settled, for now, in Charlottetown. About the same number arrived in 2016. The province has also taken in about 800 non-permanent foreign residents in the past year .
While those numbers might not sound like a lot to people living in Canada’s big, immigrant-intensive hubs, such as Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, they’re a very big deal in a place the size of Charlottetown (population 36,000). The annual immigrant influx is equivalent to roughly 6 per cent of the city’s population – which, on a per capita basis, dwarfs the intake of municipalities elsewhere in the country….
via Canada’s immigration lab: What the country can learn from PEI – The Globe and Mail
Douglas Todd: Here’s how to end migration scams by the global rich in Canada
2018/01/22 Leave a comment
Todd continues his series of articles on immigration scams involving wealthy immigrants, including the issue of taxation, particularly those who ‘park’ their family in Canada while continuing to live and work in their country of origin.
I am currently analyzing citizenship take-up by immigration category and business immigrants (entrepreneurs, investors) have the largest gap between relatively low principal applicant naturalization (mainly men) and secondary applicants (their families):
Canada could crack down in many ways on the scams performed by “ghost immigrants” who avoid paying their share of Canadian taxes while driving up housing prices in Vancouver and Toronto.
Immigration and tax specialists are pressing Ottawa to adopt numerous proposals they believe would put an end to widespread illegitimate migration schemes, such as those employed by two rich families from China, whose tactics were exposed this month in B.C. Supreme Court.
The case of Fu versus Zhu revealed how the wealthy families, who had together bought three expensive homes on the west side of Vancouver, had been engaging in illicit plots involving Canadian real estate, tax avoidance and lying about their immigration status.
“The problem is that there is large-scale immigration of relatively wealthy people to Canada who are not contributing significantly, if at all, to the Canadian tax base,” said David Lesperance, a specialist in Canadian tax and immigration law.
“They have bid up the housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto. They are also receiving the benefits of Canadian permanent resident status, including excellent schooling, free medical care, security and (eventually, as citizens) an excellent visa-free passport.”
Noted Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland shares much of the unease of Lesperance – including frustration that Canadian authorities are not enforcing the country’s rules when would-be immigrants fail to declare their worldwide income, pretend to spend time in Canada and obscure the real owners of their properties.
The two specialists have appeared before politicians in Ottawa to offer their ideas on fighting such scams. They agree problems have been created by Canada welcoming so many investor families, in which the breadwinners often become “ghosts immigrants” with little connection to Canada other than engaging in property speculation.
A recent investigation by the South China Morning Post, for instance, found that more than 40 per cent of the breadwinners for recent millionaire migrant households in Canada appear to have left Canada, although some left family members behind. It’s a widespread phenomenon, said the newspaper, among rich Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants.
Lesperance and Kurland maintain their proposals would be especially helpful in dealing with the increasing number of trans-national “astronaut” migrants who use Canadian real-estate primarily as a place to park their capital and sometimes their offspring.
The specialists would especially target the rapidly growing number of would-be Canadians who are renouncing their permanent resident status, which some are using as a way to avoid paying taxes in Canada while still visiting often on 10-year visas.
“Unfortunately, the perception of too many (wealthy) immigrants is that cheats are not sought after or detected” by Canadian tax or border officials, said Lesperance. To eliminate the problem of ‘ghost immigrants,’ the Canadian Revenue Agency must change this perception.”
Both experts emphasize how important it is for the CRA to do far more tax audits of investors, domestic and offshore, who buy up numerous properties. Authorities should particularly focus, they say, on the dubious techniques accountants have cooked up for avoiding paying taxes on their capital gains.
In the complex world of immigration law, perhaps the most radical idea for reform comes from Lesperance, who says it would reduce foreign speculation in Canadian real estate and curtail the tax evasion illustrated by clothing manufacturing mogul Quoqing Fu in the B.C. Supreme Court case.
The judge mocked Fu’s testimony after learning he had told the CRA his worldwide income, which is subject to taxes in Canada, was just $97.11.
Instead of authorities trying in vain to determine whether would-be immigrants are physically present in Canada, Lesperance recommends rating them mostly on whether they pay significant income taxes in Canada — regardless of which country in which they spend most of their time.
There is not much wrong with rich people travelling the world to work, invest and run businesses, argues Lesperance, who is based in Europe. Many would be satisfied, he says, to hold two passports while still paying their share of taxes on their global incomes to Canada, in return for “a stable and safe place for their global operations” and their children.
Canada is losing out on these entrepreneurial newcomers, he says, because its immigration policy focuses on migrants having a sustained “physical presence” in the country. The major resistance to this idea, Lesperance said, comes from those who believe newcomers “must rub elbows at Tim Horton’s to become Canadianized.”
The trouble with Canada’s current residency-based approach to immigration, said Lesperance, is that it often doesn’t work and “we get people like the Fu family abusing the tax system, but we scare away the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.”
Even though Kurland strongly believes Canada needs to stop exploitation of the country by high-net-worth tax-avoiding newcomers who speculate in real estate, the Vancouver immigration lawyer continues to believe there is value in immigrants integrating into the country by “rubbing shoulders” with Canadians.
Kurland, author of the Lexbase newsletter, also worries that, unless wealthy would-be immigrants who are not often present in the country simply write Canada a big cheque in exchange for citizenship, too many would have their accountants find ways to hide their riches in a trust fund.
Alternatively, one of Kurland’s more innovative recommendations is for the federal government “to very visibly invite Chinese tax collectors to Vancouver,” a move which would dramatically remind cheaters to submit to the rigours of Canada’s tax and security treaties with China, which is launching its own crackdown.
Kurland also believes that, in this new era “in which global computer systems can carefully track individuals’ travel,” it is fast becoming easier and less costly for Canadian authorities to catch people who are not following the country’s immigration and tax rules.
Ultimately, however, like Lesperance, Kurland believes the following is the most important thing that will lead to a clampdown on migration scams in Canada involving false tax claims and real-estate speculation:
“It’s a pure question of political will.”
Source: Douglas Todd: Here’s how to end migration scams by the global rich in Canada
It’s hard out there for an immigrant; lemon lawyers make it harder | TheHill
2018/01/22 Leave a comment
Welcome any comments from Canadian immigration lawyers on the extent this is a comparable issue in Canada:
It’s hard out there for an immigrant. President Trump routinely demagogues the nation’s undocumented population. Attorney General Jeff Sessions now leads an enforcement campaign centered around making life so unpleasant for undocumented immigrants that they decide to leave the country instead of facing the abuse.
In these times, immigrants need to be able to find help they can trust. Sadly, they also need to watch out when they call up a lawyer.
Our self-regulating legal profession does many things well, but we often struggle to police our own ranks. We each learned this lesson while representing immigrants on a pro bono basis while in private practice.
Like many lawyers, we gave our immigrant clients the same level of dedication and diligence as our paying work. Sadly, when we walked into immigration court, we often saw seemingly unprepared and unimpressive lawyering.
As law professors, we have seen similar problems with some immigration lawyers. We stay in touch with our driven, idealistic graduates. Some of them land at immigration firms. One individual worried about how to extricate himself from an unethical firm.
The managing partner would file baseless asylum claims and then task his young associate with defending them in immigration court. It forced a hard choice on a young lawyer: his ethics or his income.
Most immigration lawyers zealously represent their clients and help them achieve better outcomes than they would without representation. Research convincingly shows that representation usually improves an immigrant’s chances in our Byzantine immigration system.
One study found that represented immigrants are five times more likely to apply for relief and five times more likely to get it. But there simply are not enough good immigration lawyers to go around. So, some immigrants get lemons: lawyers who can actually make their chances worse.
While the research on immigration lawyers shows how much most of them help their clients, it also confirms the real problems within the immigration law bar that we’ve seen with our own eyes.
Researchers studying asylum cases found that the bottom 10 percent of immigration lawyers actually reduced the chance of relief so much that the applicant would have been better off without a lawyer.
Notably, the study controlled for the wildly unpredictable outcomes in asylum cases — some judges grant 95 percent of applications, and others deny 95 percent — a different problem that also must be addressed.
Immigrants face a dilemma: How do they avoid the lemons? They have no way of knowing whether they have hired one of the many good lawyers, or one of the lousy few. One group of researchers explained that “immigrants are simply in a terrible position to evaluate the claims made by lawyers and are often naïve about what lawyers can and cannot do for them.”
George Akerlof won a Nobel prize for showing how “asymmetric information” causes market failures. When sellers know more than buyers, buyers don’t know who to trust, and everyone suffers. Just like a few dishonest used car dealers make everyone mistrust used cars, a few bad immigration lawyers make people mistrust all of them.
Although measuring lawyer quality is difficult task, the immigration law bar has a serious quality control problem. One survey of judges by Richard Posner and Albert Yoon found that of all practice areas surveyed, “immigration was the area in which the quality of representation was lowest.”
Another survey of New York immigration court judges found that about half of the lawyers they saw provided either inadequate or grossly inadequate representation, and the worst lawyers actually make their clients worse off.
There are two ways to address this problem. Lawyers can and should police their own ranks by reporting unfit lawyers. But no one likes a tattletale. When one of us published concerns about this problem in the Wall Street Journal, the American Immigration Lawyers Association called it “fake news.”
Just like the “blue wall of silence” encourages good police officers to defend bad ones, good lawyers are reluctant to criticize bad ones.
We think reducing information asymmetry might also help. Immigrants deserve to know how often lawyers succeed. Immigration courts collect information about every case filed by every immigration lawyer. A public database providing that information to immigrants would help them find good lawyers and avoid bad ones. This would give immigrants a tool to distinguish between the reprobates and the righteous.
Of course, this isn’t a perfect solution. Statistics cannot tell the entire story. We trust immigrants to use the information intelligently. A lawyer winning only 20 percent of cases before a judge who denies 95 percent of all claims deserves a medal.
A lawyer winning 60 percent of petitions when most win 90 percent should be avoided. Great lawyers taking tough cases may show middling statistics. Despite this, immigrants should have information that might help them steer away from lousy lemon lawyers.
Whether we pursue this solution to the lemon problem or another, we must do more to deal with the bad apples in our midst. Far too often, professional self-regulatory organizations behave like cartels.
Although we see the problem as most pronounced in the immigration law bar, similar problems exist with criminal defense and other practice areas. We should make more information available to let immigrants themselves improve quality by making informed decisions about who to hire.
via It’s hard out there for an immigrant; lemon lawyers make it harder | TheHill
The Left’s Immigration Radicalism | commentary
2018/01/20 Leave a comment
While I disagree with some of Rothman’s assertions, I agree with his conclusion regarding the need to end the” insufferable generalities about immigrants bandied about by opinions makers on both the left and the right.” Canada also has its share of “insufferable generalities:”
Observers on the right must have been confused by the controversy that erupted following Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent appearance on Fox News. What he advocated sounds at first glance like common sense.
“When we admit people to our country, we should be like Canada,” Sessions said. “What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills, and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” Based on these comments, you could be forgiven for thinking a plague of unskilled illegal immigrants had descended upon the United States. Rest easy; a combination of increased border enforcement and a tightening labor market—trends that predate the Trump administration—resulted in a decline in the low-skilled illegal immigrant population.
The statistics are beside the point. The attorney general is packaging unsavory preconceptions about immigrants in a marketable pitch to centrists based on meritocratic assumptions. The fact is that Jeff Sessions is not qualified to determine who will or will not be a “successful” immigrant to the United States.
Sessions’s vision of a meritocratic immigration regime assumes that success is beyond the reach of under-educated immigrants—a judgment based only on his own preconceptions. That’s not just immodest but antithetical to conservatism, a philosophy which, at root, recognizes that the billions of daily interactions and events that we call the economy routinely frustrate those bold enough to issue predictions about its trajectory. Sessions’s vision of a meritocratic immigration system really isn’t that meritocratic at all; not if it is based on his presumptions about who should and who should not have the chance to prove their worth.
There is truth in the notion that under-educated, low-skilled immigrants are no benefit to some Americans, but not because they are unlikely to be successful. Precisely the opposite; they are more likely to be successful, shutting low-skilled Americans out of the market. Those on the left who revel in the condition of the native-born Americans displaced by this phenomenon shouldn’t laugh too loudly. Whether they recognize it or not, they are the mirror image of the right’s hardliners. What’s more, they are helping fuel the polarization that led to the ascension of an administration that ran explicitly on a restrictive approach to immigration.
Outgoing Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, a man with ambitions for higher office, exemplifies the blinkered radicalism of the left when it comes to immigration. This week, Gutierrez announced his opposition to the Trump administration’s desire to end “chain migration,” the practice by which American green card holders and U.S. citizens transfer their family members into the United States. Gutierrez insisted that American residency should be transferable to an immigrant’s siblings, parents, spouses, and children, regardless of whether or not they’ve demonstrated the capacity or interest to assimilate into American society. That’s not meritocracy; it’s charity.
Of course, there are those on the intellectual left for whom meritocracy is an illusion indulged only by those who don’t know the extent to which their successes are not their own. That’s the view of Linfield College English Professor Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, author of The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant, who claimed the “logic of meritocracy that is built on this racist assumption that everyone has had the same access and opportunities.” It’s the view of columnist Jo Littler, who insists that “meritocracy is a myth.” Western democracies like the U.S. and the U.K. are closed systems in which wealth and opportunities are reserved for those with connections to people with an abundance of wealth and opportunity. Meritocracy “is a smokescreen for inequality.”
What these successful opinion-makers have marketed as wisdom is really just blinding resentment. In the United States, in particular, there are no rigid class strata, and there most certainly isn’t any closed loop that guarantees the wealthy that status in perpetuity. “Citing tax scholar Robert Carroll’s examination of IRS records,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson observed, “Professor [Mark] Rank notes that the turnover among the super-rich (the top 400 taxpayers in any given year) is 98 percent over a decade—that is, just 2 percent of that elusive group remain there for ten years in a row. Among those earning more than $1 million a year, most earned that much for only one year of the nine-year period studied, and only 6 percent earned that much for the entire period.” Among those who found their way onto Forbes Magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans in 2016, a record 42 of them were immigrants from 21 different countries. Together, they have a combined net worth of over $250 billion.
Among liberals, however, this kind of old-school class envy is practically passé. What’s really in vogue isn’t resentment toward American capitalism but American culture. For many on the post-Marxist left, race and identity have supplanted wealth and power as the traits by which structural haves and have-nots can be identified and pitted against one another. For nearly two decades, liberal ideologues have debated whether assimilation into American society was possible or even desirable. Not only does assimilation represent the tacit acceptance of and submission to American racism, but it is the surrender of cultural heritage and traits that are superior to America’s heterogeneous soup of appropriated customs. “Assimilation, instead of bringing upward mobility, brings downward mobility,” Aviva Chomsky wrote in 2007. “It’s not lack of assimilation that keeps them marginalized—it’s assimilation itself.”
As the decades have shown, and as the literate left would likely concede, assimilation continued apace, and it has not yielded a racial hierarchy. A 2015 study conducted by Harvard sociologist Mary Waters for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that immigrants, particularly second-generation immigrants, are integrating into society faster than migrants of earlier generations. This is not without its setbacks; the strain on U.S. English language programs in schools and the evidence suggesting low-skilled migrants “appear to be filling low-skilled jobs that native-born Americans are not available or willing to take” increase social tensions. But assimilation is occurring, and all parties are richer for it.
America in the 1990s and 2000s experienced an immigration boom and, as historian Arthur Schlesinger said, “Mass migrations produce mass antagonisms.” Even though the undocumented and legal permanent-resident populations have leveled off since the collapse of the economy in 2008, America’s politics haven’t caught up with the trends. As the light and heat around immigration fade, so, too, should the insufferable generalities about immigrants bandied about by opinions makers on both the left and the right. At least, that would be ideal.
The moment pro-migrant politicians feared: Afghan boy kills ex-girlfriend, a German
2018/01/20 Leave a comment
Good in-depth article. Same pattern of reactions occurs elsewhere, and how it influences the overall political debates over immigration:
It happened between neatly stacked rows of shampoo and organic baby food: A teenage boy walked up to his ex-girlfriend in the local drugstore, pulled out a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade and stabbed her in the heart.
The death in Kandel, in southwestern Germany, on Dec. 27 has traumatized this sleepy town of barely 10,000 inhabitants, not just because both the suspect and the victim were just 15 years old and went to the local school, but also because the boy is an Afghan migrant and the girl was German.
From the moment Germany opened its doors to more than one million migrants two years ago, prominent episodes like the Berlin Christmas market attack and the New Year’s molestation and rapes in Cologne have stoked German insecurities.
But the case of the two teenagers, Abdul D. and Mia V., has struck a special nerve because the killing happened in such a quiet and provincial setting and the two people involved were so young. It became national news, was debated over dinner tables, on talk shows and on social media sites, and reinforced fears that Germany is becoming ever less safe.
Yet perceptions are one thing, and statistics are another. Reported crimes have edged up over the past two years, but overall, violent crimes have been trending downward for a decade in Germany, which remains one of the safest countries in Europe.
Nevertheless, each crime involving a migrant or asylum-seeker has become a fresh occasion for national hand-wringing.
Something has shifted in Germany. Not so long ago, the logistical challenge and cost of integrating new migrants still dominated the public debate. These days, the growing unease with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policy has reached a new and febrile stage.
“I am scared,” said Jana Weigel, a 24-year-old dental assistant, as she lit a candle outside the DM drugstore where the killing took place.
Calls have multiplied for mandatory medical exams to determine the age of migrants claiming to be minors and for swifter deportations of those who — like the suspect — have been denied asylum.
A preliminary coalition agreement between Merkel’s conservatives and the more liberal Social Democrats announced Friday includes a cap of 220,000 refugees per year and strictly limits the number of family members allowed to join a refugee in Germany.
Even in proudly tolerant and left-voting Kandel, the mood on the street has hardened. Many here took the killing personally. Before Mia broke up with Abdul, he had been welcomed into her family, Weigel pointed out, much like the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been welcomed to Germany.
“It makes you think,” she said, “how many others will betray our hospitality.”
Weigel’s sense of insecurity was reinforced by a widely publicized study showing that the number of reported crimes in the state of Lower Saxony had risen by more than 10 percent over the past two years and that the increase could be attributed overwhelmingly to cases involving refugees.
Half of that increase is due to the fact that crimes involving migrants are twice as likely to be reported, the authors of the study said. Many of the people accused of crimes are young men under 30, a demographic that is most likely to commit crimes, even among Germans.
Less publicized was the other major finding of the report: Overall, violent crime, including murder and rape, remains well below its 2007 peak. The number of young offenders has decreased by half since then.
“The paradox is that Germany is still a very safe country, much safer than even a few years ago,” said Christian Pfeiffer, a criminologist and a co-author of the report, which was commissioned by the government and released last week. “But the perception is the opposite: People feel less safe. And when something like this murder happens, it confirms that feeling.”
Ask the Germans paying their respects at the ad hoc memorial for the girl who was killed — a sea of candles and messages and photos of her with friends — and they will reel off a list of crimes committed by migrants: A German woman who was raped by a Sudanese migrant in the nearby town of Speyer a few days earlier. Another woman who was raped and strangled by an Afghan in Freiburg just over a year ago.
Weigel, who has a 2-year-old daughter, no longer leaves the house after dark. Last month, a terrorist attack was narrowly foiled at an ice rink in nearby Karlsruhe, a 30-minute drive away.
“It feels like we’ve lost control,” Weigel said. “The state has lost control.”
Kandel is an orderly town of tastefully restored medieval houses and shops that close for lunch. It is also home to 125 refugees, most of them from Syria or Afghanistan.
Until Mia was killed, “there was never a problem,” said Günther Tielebörger, Kandel’s mayor. He represents the Social Democrats, long the strongest party in the town. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, received less than 10 percent of the vote in the last election.
Kandel has a long tradition of tolerance. Three centuries ago, it welcomed Huguenot refugees from France. Where other villages in the region built a wall inside their churches to keep Catholics and Protestants apart, Kandel ripped down its wall and shared the church. One of the best restaurants in town serving regional specialties like “pig’s stomach” is run by a Turk.
But this tolerance is now being tested.
Maja Mathias, 53, works in a local French bakery and has Turkish neighbors and a Croatian brother-in-law. “I have no problem with foreigners,” she said, standing behind a counter featuring freshly baked baguettes and pretzels. “But there is always the fear: What else is coming?”
Beyond fear, the killing has stirred other resentments.
“German retirees who have worked hard for 45 years get less than the refugees,” said Knoll Pede, 64, a town maintenance worker. He is no fan of President Donald Trump, he said, “but I wouldn’t mind our politicians to do a bit of ‘Germany First.’”
Such talk worries Tielebörger, the mayor. The benefits migrants receive are far less generous than Germans may believe, he said, and many of the migrants are barred from work until their asylum applications have been processed. But the optics matter.
“Germans feel neglected,” Tielebörger said.
“We need to wake up,” he said. Otherwise, he added, the left will lose votes to the right.
One of Tielebörger’s former colleagues in local government is Heiko Wildberg, a former member of the liberal pro-immigration Greens party. Wildberg is now a lawmaker for the nationalist AfD in Berlin. For him, Mia’s killing was a “turning point.”
“This is not Berlin or Cologne; we are in small-town Germany,” he said. “This murder shows that the reality of the migrant crisis has arrived in the German province.”
The AfD was quick off the mark, organizing a silent march through Kandel two days after the killing. The more extremist National Party of Germany followed suit.
Meanwhile, the local benefits office in Kandel had to barricade its doors because its employees had received so many threats. “Accomplices,” anonymous messages called them.
Some here accuse the authorities of not having done enough to protect Mia. Abdul had stalked her online and in person and beaten up one of her classmates in a fit of jealousy.
On Dec. 15, her parents had reported him to the police. Twelve days later, as she was shopping with friends, he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife he had bought in a supermarket next door. She later died of her wounds.
After her father told the German tabloid Bild that her ex-boyfriend “was definitely not 15,” demands for medical exams to verify the claims of refugees who say they are minors have been revived.
The ethics commission of the body representing Germany’s doctors has said that such tests — which include X-rays of hand, collar and jaw bones as well as genital exams — violate “bodily integrity” and can be inaccurate by as much as two years.
They have nonetheless become a rallying cry at the highest level of politics.
“In all cases, where no official and real document is presented, we need to determine the age in another way, if needed through medical examinations,” said the conservative interior minister, Thomas de Maizière.
When Abdul arrived in Germany in April 2016, he said he was 14, and apparently none of the officials registering him raised serious doubts about his age. As part of the court case against him, a series of medical exams will now seek to confirm his age.
Austria, Sweden and the German state of Saarland are among the places conducting such exams regularly.
There is an incentive for migrants to be listed as under 18. Government benefits, access to German lessons and job opportunities are better for minors. In Saarland, more than a third of the migrants who were tested appeared to be over 18.
Most of the unaccompanied-minor migrants are integrating well, said Anne Spiegel, the integration minister for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, which includes Kandel. “They are attending school, learning German and signing up for apprenticeships,” she said.
Still, officials like Tielebörger, the mayor, say that every transgression by a migrant gets disproportionate attention, leading to the opposite impression.
There was another shocking homicide in Kandel in recent weeks, he pointed out. A man killed his wife and two children. That one did not make the national news.
“If the boy had been German,” Tielebörger said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Source: The moment pro-migrant politicians feared: Afghan boy kills ex-girlfriend, a German
StatsCan Study: The exit and survival patterns of immigrant entrepreneurs
2018/01/20 Leave a comment
Yet another interesting study by StatsCan:
In most developed countries, self-employment is more prevalent among immigrants than among native-born individuals. However, much less is known about the survival and longevity of immigrant-owned firms. A small body of international research suggests that immigrant-owned businesses have shorter durations of survival than businesses owned by the native born. There has been little evidence on whether or not this is the case in Canada. Information on business survival is relevant to business development policies and the measurement of the economic impacts of immigration.
A new Statistics Canada study examines the duration of business ownership among immigrant and Canadian-born individuals. The study finds that, on average, there was little difference in the duration of ownership between immigrant and Canadian-born owners of private incorporated companies.
The study uses data from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamic Database, including individual and corporate tax returns and immigrant landing files, and focuses on ownership of private incorporated companies that started between 2003 and 2009. Ownership was tracked for up to seven years after start-up. The analysis builds on previous research studies that examined the prevalence of business ownership among immigrant entrepreneurs and the industries in which they were found.
The new Statistics Canada study finds that the rate of business failure is highest in the initial years after start-up. Specifically, among all immigrant owners, 11.5% terminated ownership after one year in business, with this share declining to 3.9% after seven years in business. Overall, about 80% of all immigrant business owners were still in operation after two years and 56% were still in operation after seven. Exit rates from business ownership and the duration of ownership were about the same among Canadian-born owners of private incorporated firms.
Recent immigrants (that is, those in Canada for less than 10 years) had higher exit rates from ownership and shorter durations of ownership than did the Canadian-born or longer-term immigrants (that is, those in Canada for 10 or more years). While 51% of recent immigrant business owners were still in operation after seven years, this was the case for 57% of long-term immigrant business owners and 58% of Canadian-born business owners.
Among recent immigrants, business class immigrants had the highest exit rates and shortest duration of ownership. Among longer-term immigrants, exit rates and the duration of ownership varied little across immigrant admission categories.
A number of other factors were found to be associated with longer duration of business ownership among immigrant owners, including being 30 to 49 years of age; owning a business in the health sector; and being from Europe, Southeast Asia, India, or select English-speaking countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. Education was found to have only a small effect on exit rates and duration once the effects of other variables were taken into account.
Immigrant owners of private incorporated businesses in the health sector (for example, laboratories, nursing companies, doctors’ offices and chiropractic practices) had particularly long durations of ownership and exit rates that were only one-third of those observed among immigrant business owners in other sectors. Owners in real estate and leasing, food and accommodation, professional services and wholesale trade generally had the shortest duration of ownership.
via The Daily — Study: The exit and survival patterns of immigrant entrepreneurs
Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote
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Multicultural Meanderings 