A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews: Stephens – The New York Times

2018/01/19 1 Comment

Good column and reminder:

Until his dying day, my dad’s Uncle Bern was a communist sympathizer. I remember him as an affable old man with a gracious wife who made a modest living selling antique lace. He probably wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Yet he found much to admire in the most murderous ideology of the 20th century, responsible for tens of millions of deaths from the killing fields of Cambodia to the gulags of Murmansk.

If you’re Jewish in America, chances are there’s at least one Uncle Bern somewhere in your family tree. As the scholar Ruth Wisse noted last year in Tablet magazine, Jewish intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s was largely defined by one’s stance toward one thing: The Party. Historians reckon that Jews accounted for nearly half the Communist Party’s total membership in those years, while many other Jews were close fellow travelers.

Most of these people, like my great-uncle, were deeply misguided idealists who otherwise led quiet and decent lives. A tiny handful of others — including atomic spies Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Harry Gold and Morton Sobell — betrayed America’s most important military secrets to Stalinist Russia and did incalculable damage to the country and the world.

Here’s a thought experiment: Would the United States have been better off if it had banned Jewish immigration sometime in the late 19th century, so that the immigrant parents of Rosenberg and Sobell had never set foot here? The question is worth asking, because so many of the same arguments made against African, Latin-American and Muslim immigrants today might have easily been applied to Jews just over a century ago.

Consider some of the parallels.

Crime? In 1908, the New York City police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, caused a public uproar (for which he later apologized) when he claimed that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The truth was closer to the opposite: Jewish crime rates, at about 16 percent, were considerably lower than their roughly 25 percent share of New York’s overall population. The same goes today, when, contrary to much Trumpian propaganda, incarceration rates for immigrants are nearly half what they are for native-born Americans.

Racial desirability? Just as Donald Trump wants more Norwegian immigrants and none from “s-hole countries,” the early 20th-century eugenicist, conservationist and immigration restrictionist Madison Grant was obsessed with protecting the “Nordic” races against those he termed “social discards” — including “the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew.”

Assimilation? This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked, in an interview with Fox News, “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?” That seems to be the general way of thinking in this administration.

Now compare that to a 1907 article in McClure’s magazine, titled “The Great Jewish Invasion,” which observed of Russian Jews, “no people have had a more inadequate preparation, educational and economic, for American citizenship.” Henry Adams, the great American patrician, wrote of “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish.” In 1914, Edward Alsworth Ross, the famous progressive sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, called Jews “moral cripples” whose “tribal spirit intensified by social isolation prompts them to rush to the rescue of the caught rascal of their own race.”

Subversion? During the campaign, Donald Trump said at a New Hampshire rally that Syrian refugees “could make the Trojan horse look like peanuts.” His campaign then infamously called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Similar charges have long been leveled at Jews. Henry Ford accused Jews of causing the First World War. A generation later, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh charged Jews with trying to inveigle the United States into war. Lindbergh was the leading champion in his day of “America First.” Still later, Jewish “neocons” somehow became the shadowy instigators of America’s wars in the Middle East.

O.K., you get the idea. And it’s worth acknowledging there are often kernels of anecdotal or statistical truth for nearly every ethnic stereotype. Jews were indeed overrepresented in radical political circles. Jewish gangsters — a.k.a. the “Kosher Nostra” — were nearly as notorious as their Irish and Italian peers in the early 20th century. There were Jewish students who rallied against the draft during the First World War, just as many more would rally against it over Vietnam.

Yet imagine if the United States had followed the advice of the immigration restrictionists in the late 19th century and banned Jewish immigrants, at least from Central Europe and Russia, on what they perceived to be some genetic inferiority. What, in terms of enterprise, genius, imagination, and philanthropy would have been lost to America as a country? And what, in terms of human tragedy, would have ultimately weighed on our conscience?

Today, American Jews are widely considered the model minority, so thoroughly assimilated that organizational Jewish energies are now largely devoted to protecting our religious and cultural distinctiveness. Someone might ask Jeff Sessions and other eternal bigots what makes an El Salvadoran, Iranian or Haitian any different.

via A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews – The New York Times

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Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

Interesting study comparing attitudes in New Mexico and Arizona:

Immigration policy in the US has grown increasingly contentious, seemingly pitting different communities and ideologies against each other. But a new study suggests that a large majority of Americans appreciate a welcoming policy toward immigrants. Only a specific minority—white conservatives—generally feels otherwise. And the effect isn’t limited to policy, as it influenced whether citizens felt welcome in the place that they lived.

The research, performed by a collaboration of US-based researchers, focused on New Mexico and Arizona. These states have similar demographics but radically different policies toward immigrants. Arizona has state policies that encourage police to check the immigration status of people they encounter; controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio ended up in trouble with the court system in part due to how aggressively he pursued this program. New Mexico, by contrast, will provide state IDs and tuition benefits to immigrants regardless of their documentation status.

The researchers reasoned that these states would provide a reasonable test as to how immigration policies align with the feelings of the public. So they surveyed nearly 2,000 residents of the two states, including immigrants, naturalized US citizens, and people born in the US, focusing on the states’ Caucasian and Hispanic populations.

The work used a phone-based survey that suggested that the state’s representatives were considering new immigration-focused legislation. Participants were randomly given a description of one of two types of legislation, either pro- or anti-immigrant (examples included English-only laws and bilingual state documents). Those surveyed were asked how they felt about the proposed legislation but were also asked questions about how they felt about the state—whether they felt at home there and whether they intended to move elsewhere. The intent was to get at whether immigration-focused policies in a state made people feel more or less at home.

Perhaps the clearest and most striking result is that the state where the participant resided didn’t have a significant effect on the main findings. That’s quite striking, given that state policy should in theory represent the desires of its citizens.

Beyond that, people responded to the proposals as you’d expect. Foreign-born Hispanics, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, viewed the immigrant-hostile legislation negatively and felt positively about the immigrant-friendly proposal. Hispanics born in the US were similar, but ideology seemed to creep in as an influence: conservatives were more likely to view the hostile legislation favorably. Liberal whites also strongly favored the pro-immigration proposal, while moderates were nearly evenly split. White conservatives, however, were the only group that on average favored an anti-immigration measure.

A nearly identical pattern emerged when the researchers analyzed how the proposals influenced people’s sense of being welcomed into the community. Foreign-born Hispanics uniformly felt more welcome when primed with immigrant-friendly proposals, as did liberal and moderate native-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic liberals. Conservative native-born Hispanics and moderate whites had a mixed response, while conservative Caucasians were the only group that clearly felt less welcome in their community when told that the legislature was considering a pro-immigration policy.

It’s not much of a surprise to see confirmation that policies that are hostile to a group make members of that group feel less welcome in their communities. In this case, the non-immigrant Hispanics surveyed shared a geographic origin and likely some culture with the people targeted, so it’s not much of a surprise that they felt less welcome as well. It would be useful to perform a similar experiment in New York City or Northern California, where there are more diverse groups of immigrants, to see if these feelings crossed cultural boundaries.

But there was at least one case in this study where the feelings clearly did cross cultural boundaries: liberal Caucasians felt more at home in their communities if they felt the communities welcomed immigrants.

White conservatives, however, were unique in this study in that they were the only group who felt that an immigrant-friendly community was hostile to them. While that might not be a problem in the more homogeneous areas of the country, this group is a shrinking minority—which may both explain the response and suggest that it will become an increasing issue going forward. Finding a way to moderate this sense of hostility may thus be essential to keeping US society functional in the face of demographic change.

Source: Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

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The lessons Canada should learn from Britain’s anti-immigrant politics: Julia Rampen

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

IMO, Rampen’s piece shows a limited understanding of Canada and Canadian federal politics. Given the large number of ridings in which immigrants form a significant number of voters, all major parties are essentially pro-immigration as I have argued elsewhere (The growing diversity within federal ridings), which essentially explains why Canada does not have an equivalent to UKIP in terms of popular support.

And she conflates anti-EU origin migration with immigration in general and overstates the importance of Rebel Media given the electoral realities (Sun Media is more representative of those with immigration-related concerns).

And while there are significant number of Canadians with concerns about number of immigrants (about one third), this group is not monolithic, ranging from those who are xenophobic to those who have legitimate concerns:

Nigel Farage, then the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), poses for photographers holding a British passport at the launch of the party’s open-top bus that will be touring the UK for the campaign to leave the European Union, ahead of the referendum, in London on May 20, 2016. (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images)

On Jan. 29, 2017, the newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump got to work and announced a ban on travel and migration from a number of Muslim-majority countries—and in the world’s airports, chaos ensued. Passengers who boarded planes confident of their U.S. itinerary found themselves blocked on landing. Protesters and human-rights lawyers gathered outside airports. Security officials, surprised as everyone else, floundered.

Justin Trudeau, though, was quick to respond. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he tweeted. “Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” To date, the tweet has been shared nearly 418,000 times.

It’s the kind of message that has helped Canada become a byword in the international community for a sensible, progressive attitude to immigration. In Britain, too—where 3.7 million European Union citizens spent 2017 waiting to hear whether they could continue to live in the country they had made their home, and where, after a rancorous Brexit vote that many saw as hinging on the issue of immigration, British Prime Minister Theresa May declared that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”—the message was received.

Yet not so long ago, Britain also celebrated diversity, and a U.S. president depicted his Kenyan father and Indonesian childhood as a modern version of the American Dream. Trudeau might declare, as he did in June, that “our differences make us strong,” but there are signs that not everyone agrees—signs that we missed in Britain, until the morning of Jun. 24, 2016, when the cost of missing them became impossible to ignore.

Multiculturalism, Trudeau said in that June statement, “is at the heart of Canada’s heritage and identity.” This may be true, but when it comes to views on immigration, Canada is almost indistinguishable from a European country. A 2017 study by University of Toronto political scientist Michael Donnelly found that seven in ten Canadians would only accept “a few” or “some” poor immigrants, a view most similar to public opinion in France. Most people were willing to be generous to refugees, but only to the extent that British people were. While Canadians were generally positive about the impact of immigrants on the economy—and here, it’s worth noting Canada did not have as bad a financial crisis as many European countries—one in five would support stopping all immigration to the country.

So far, it has been possible for Canada’s political establishment to ignore this awkward squad on immigration. But this may say more about their opponents’ organizational skills than Canadian exceptionalism. “Both countries have large blocs of people who are genuinely upset about immigration alongside many who are quite comfortable with it,” Donnelly said in an interview with Maclean’s, when asked about the U.K. and Canada. “Perhaps the anti-immigrant group is a bit larger in the U.K. than in Canada, but I’d say the major difference is the lack of a British National Party, or the UK Independence Party, to attract and, to an extent, legitimize the fringe right, which is present in both countries.”

The British National Party—a far-right group that, at its high point in the mid-2000s, managed to elect some local councillors—is unlikely to keep Canadian liberals up at night. UKIP, however, is a different story. Under the leadership of the beer-swilling, hat-doffing Nigel Farage, the party charmed its way into TV studios and foxtrotted a fine line between respectable, if anti-European Union, political rhetoric, and far-right xenophobic dog whistles. By 2015, Farage had still not managed to get elected to the Westminster Parliament, but two Conservative MPs had defected to UKIP, immigration was a dirty word, and a rattled David Cameron, then the Conservative prime minister, promised a referendum on EU membership.

Defenders of Britain’s anti-immigration turn will point out that there is one stark difference to Canada: the free movement rules which allowed up to 190,000 EU citizens a year to come to the U.K. and indeed, admiration for Canada’s immigration system is shared by some British Eurosceptics, who say they are in favour of control rather than ending immigration per se. Still, immigration was an issue that united voters across party lines, and against their own party leadership. The Lincolnshire town of Boston—christened Britain’s “most Brexit town” because of the high Eurosceptic vote—experienced a 460-per-cent rise in immigration between 2004 and 2014.

British liberals who reject anti-immigration sentiment, yet accept that after Brexit it has to be taken seriously, often argue that this is because immigration has become a proxy for economic concerns. It is true that in the years between the financial crisis and Brexit, Britain’s Conservative-led government inflicted a series of cuts on public services. Between 2007 and 2015, the U.K. was the only advanced country to see wages shrink while the overall economy grew. For older residents of post-industrial provincial towns, far from the cosmopolitan splendours of London, it would not take a great leap of imagination to believe that there were too many people in the country willing to work for too little. Although at first glance Canada is not plagued with these problems, liberals might want to take note of the fact that in 2014, the country was ranked third worst for regional economic disparity among countries in the OECD. 

Yet there is another bulwark against anti-immigration sentiment in Canada, and this one is far easier to overcome. While the majority of British MPs were in favour of remaining in the EU, the two biggest-selling newspapers in the U.K., The Sun and The Daily Mail, backed Leave. This was no surprise, not least given the same papers had already successfully been blurring the lines between immigrants, refugees and criminals for years. In the spring of 2015, after roughly 1,600 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean in at the beginning of what would later be called “Europe’s refugee crisis,” Sun columnist Katie Hopkins wrote a piece entitled “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants.” The Daily Mail published a front page declaring: “MIGRANTS: HOW MANY MORE CAN WE TAKE?”

Hopkins, who also compared refugees to cockroaches, ultimately proved too much for mainstream British audiences after she called for a “final solution” in the wake of a domestic terror attack. But she quickly found a new job—with the Canadian-based Rebel Media, where she hosts her own website, Hopkins World. (Her discussion of “shithole countries” has already prompted one Canadian reader to lament the “Clown Prince” of the liberals, “Justin Mohammed Trudeau.”)

According to Ryan Scrivens, an academic at Concordia University who has spent six years studying far-right extremism, some Canadians are receptive to a “traditional” racist skinhead message. More common, though, is the trend of being drawn to the alt-right, which inhabits the same, ambiguous area as UKIP and columnists like Hopkins. “The alt-right is watered-down hate,” said Scrivens. “It’s the more mainstream, palatable, and acceptable form of hatred, which seems to resonate with more people.”

While Scrivens echoes Donnelly’s view that the far right struggles to co-operate in Canada, he does identify one issue they can unite behind: immigration. Here, the concerns resemble those in Europe, with the focus on refugees from Muslim countries. “With that comes a (mis)perception that, with an increase in Muslim immigrants, Sharia law will be imposed on Canadians and terrorists will sneak into the country and cause harm.”

One year on from his tweet, Trudeau does not face an obvious ideological opponent on immigration, at least so long as Andrew Scheer, focussed on a message of inclusion, leads the Conservatives; Kellie Leitch, who brought anti-immigration ideas to the Tories’ leadership campaign, now faces a nomination challenge for her seat from within her own party in 2019. But the lesson from Europe and the U.S. is that anti-immigration movements do not come from within the establishment. Sites like Rebel Media have seized on the implications of Trudeau’s “Welcome to Canada” message, calling the movement of people from U.S. to Canada since Trump took power a “border invasion.” Leitch and movements like Canada First continue to depict welcoming refugees and Canadian values as incompatible, and despite her loss, a poll during the Conservative leadership campaign found that a majority of Canadians supported some form of values test.

With his personal popularity ratings slipping, and the influence of online media growing, Trudeau needs to beware an insurrection from below. Otherwise, he may be surprised about how quickly a country’s reputation can change.

Source: The lessons Canada should learn from Britain’s anti-immigrant politics

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Foreign spouses hit snags with ‘streamlined’ sponsorship program

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

As happens with so much reporting, the focus is on the personal anecdotes with minimal evidence as to the degree that the problems are widespread (20 cases flagged by the Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants (CAPIC) compares to January-June 2017 numbers of some 32,000 – number includes children). This does not, of course, some of the apparent slip ups in processing as described in the article and the consequent hardship on applicants:

The federal government’s streamlined spousal-sponsorship program was supposed to fast-track the immigration process for the foreign-born husbands and wives of Canadians.

But for a Swedish woman living in Ottawa, the process has been anything but smooth, with her application being sent back not once, but twice. Her immigration lawyer blames government error. Each time, Alexandra Dickenson’s application went back to the bottom of the pile.

“It’s just ridiculous,” said Dickenson.

In 2011, Dickenson married professional hockey player Lou Dickenson who had spent a decade playing in Europe. They had two children and decided to move to Canada when Lou hung up his skates and retired. In September 2016 they arrived in Ottawa to start the next chapter of their life.

Their children had no problems with their immigration paperwork. But for Alexandra, it’s been another story.

In one case, an officer with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) wrote that Dickenson didn’t include her birth certificate and passport photos in the application. However, her immigration lawyer who compiled the documents, says that’s not true. The returned application contains proof — the birth certificates and photos — remain clipped inside, said her lawyer.

“You should look through the whole application before you send it back,” said Dickenson.

It’s a problem that her lawyer, Kristen Dunbar Tobin, says she’s seeing more often since the government announced in December 2016 it was speeding up the processing time for spousal sponsorships — capping it at 12 months. The average wait time before that was two years. The changes were supposed to streamline the process to make it simpler for families.

‘This wasn’t happening before’

Tobin says her office dealt with multiple cases last year in which IRCC sent back applications erroneously.

The government said documents were missing that were actually there, according to Tobin. She knows because she made copies of the application packages before sending them in. And because, when those same packages were returned by IRCC, the “missing” documents were still there.

That said, in some cases, other key documents were not returned, she said.

“This wasn’t happening before,” said Tobin. “Ever since the processing times changed, something that was supposed to be easier and faster, got more difficult actually. Families are being lost in the process.”

Tobin first sent Dickenson’s application in January 2017. Both times it was sent back — over errors her lawyer said didn’t exist — it meant up to three months of delay. They had to start from scratch to re-apply.

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on Dickenson’s visitor status that was only valid for half a year after entering Canada. It had expired by the time her second application was returned.

‘You want to start working’

For more than 10 months, Dickenson couldn’t work and her family had to live off one paycheque.

“You want to start working,” said Dickenson. “It’s hard not to know what your future looks like.”

It was only after Tobin complained to the government that it gave Dickenson a work visa in November 2017. But she’s still waiting for permanent residency and expects it’s likely to take longer than the government’s self-imposed one-year deadline since she’s already behind in the process.

The family is living in limbo while they wait.

It’s “definitely a frustrating process,” said Dickenson. “Something’s got to change. It feels like something’s wrong.”

Alexandra Dickenson, a Swedish woman living in Ottawa, says the government erroneously returned her spousal sponsorship application twice, forcing her to re-apply all over again. 0:32

Push to submit applications online

The CEO of the Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants (CAPIC), Dory Jade, says he received up to 20 complaints this past fall about IRCC and “missing” documents.

CAPIC complained to the government and says, in some cases, work permits for spouses were expedited. But the delays remain for permanent residency.

“You are in a pending situation,” he said. “The longer this pending situation remains the more stressed, the more unstable situation you are in.”

Jade says he’s been pushing the government for two years to create an online application system for spousal sponsorships to help eliminate mistakes like this. Other types of applications are accepted online.

“Either you upload the right documents in the right box or you can’t click submit,” said Jade. “This makes it very difficult to submit an incomplete application.”

IRCC did not make anyone available for an interview and has yet to comment on lawyer concerns over applications being erroneously returned.

The department did however say that IRCC has no immediate plans to accept spousal sponsorship applications online.

In a statement to CBC News, IRCC says that despite spousal applications being submitted via hard copy, it has been working to improve the process.

“That’s why we made updates to the new checklists and guides in June 2017,” IRCC wrote. “With the changes introduced to the application kit in December 2016 and June 2017, the Department has received fewer incomplete applications than when the old kit was being used. These changes demonstrate our ongoing commitment to enhancing client service.”

Source: Foreign spouses hit snags with ‘streamlined’ sponsorship program

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UK’s Falling Immigration Is a Boon for May, But Not for Business

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

Not surprising given Brexit and the related uncertainty:

Net immigration to the U.K. is likely to fall to 180,000 in 2018, the closest the government has come to meeting its longstanding target of a reduction to the “tens of thousands.”

That’s the forecast on Tuesday from the Institute of Directors. The decline by at least 50,000 is good news, on the face of it, for Prime Minister Theresa May, who failed to get anywhere close to the goal during her six years in charge of immigration policy as home secretary and, latterly, 18 months as premier.

But business doesn’t see it the same way.

Small and medium-sized ones in particular, “will find it more difficult to recruit the people they need for our economy to prosper, resulting in a labor market tightening,” the institute said. “Some firms will feel pressure to raise wages but others will struggle to cope and will consequently stagnate or downsize.”

That’s hardly the picture of a vibrant economy that May’s seeking to project as Britain negotiates its departure from the European Union. But for May, meeting the target — which dates back to 2010 — is one of the keys to delivering on the verdict of the Brexit referendum in 2016.

Her Conservatives have stuck doggedly to their immigration target even as net migration soared as high as 336,000 in the year through the end of June 2016. Since the referendum, quantities have been falling, a combination of EU workers feeling less welcome and less secure, and net immigration for the year through June 2017 was 230,000.

Source: UK’s Falling Immigration Is a Boon for May, But Not for Business

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Memo to Donald Trump: Canadian immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries are thriving: Arvind Magesan

2018/01/17 Leave a comment

Good analysis by Magesan (my ongoing analysis of census data has similar results):

Defenders of Donald Trump say his “shithole countries” remark regarding people from Africa, Haiti and other nations was just Trump being Trump — the president may have used salty language, but it’s really just his way of saying the United States should have a merit-based immigration system like Canada’s.

A generous interpretation of Trump’s comments are that immigrants from certain so-called “shithole” countries—African nations, Haiti and El Salvador—are not typically highly skilled or economically self-reliant, and if admitted would need to depend on the state.

In fact, Trump apologists—and the president himself—might be surprised by what the economic data says about immigrants who come to Canada from the “shithole” countries.

John Fredericks, who was Trump’s campaign chair in Virginia, told CNN that immigrants from those countries “come into the United States and they do nothing to increase the prosperity of the American worker. They lower wages or go on welfare and extend our entitlement system …. Australia and Canada have a merit-based system. You know why they do that? Because they want to bring people into their country who are going to enhance the prosperity of their citizens.”

Trump himself tweeted a similar sentiment.

The conclusion we are expected to make, it seems, is that if the United States was to adopt a purely merit-based system, immigrants would not come from these countries—they would come from countries like Norway, and immigrants from these Norway-like countries would not put pressure on blue-collar U.S. workers because they would be highly skilled and, more importantly, they wouldn’t be a drain on the system because they would be economically self-reliant.

A merit-based system

Canada offers an opportunity to take a look at this hypothesis because our points-based immigration system screens immigrants on merit to a large degree. So when we screen immigrants on merit, who do we let in and how do they do?

The first thing to note is that Canada admits many immigrants from the “shithole” countries.

Data from the 2016 census shows over the last five years there have been more than twice as many immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean (which includes Haiti and El Salvador) than there were from the U.S. There were also more immigrants from the African continent than from the U.S. and North and Western Europe combined.

Clearly a merit-based system does not mean we only admit people from the “Norways” of the world—and in fact, the census data shows only 230 people immigrated from Norway over the five-year period.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/vLx64/2/

The next question is how do these immigrants fare?

To look more closely at this, I used individual 2011 Canadian census data (detailed 2016 data isn’t yet available) to look at three groups: Canadians whose families have been here for three generations or longer; immigrants from the “Norways” of the world (Northern and Western Europe, including the U.K., Germany, and Scandinavia) and immigrants from Trump’s “shithole” countries (Central America, the Caribbean, Africa).

I looked at the skill levels of the different groups, as measured by their education level, and then at their economic self-sufficiency: employment, wages and how much they receive in transfers and employment benefits from the government.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7ATin/2/

Let’s start with skill level.

Forty per cent of Canadians who have been here for three generations or longer have at least some post-secondary education, and 18 per cent have a bachelor’s degree. By comparison, a much larger percentage of immigrants of either type (53 per cent) have some post-secondary, and 27 per cent of immigrants from “Shitholes” have a bachelor’s degree. So by this standard measure of skill, immigrants from “Shitholes” have a slightly higher skill level than do immigrants from “Norways,” and a much higher skill level on average than Canadians who have been here for generations.

What about self-sufficiency?

It is commonly argued that immigrants, particularly from poorer countries, are “expensive” because they receive a disproportionate amount of government transfers and unemployment benefits. The truth is, though Canadians who have been here for generations are more likely to be employed and earn (slightly) more on average than either immigrant group, immigrants from the “Shitholes” are far more likely to be employed than immigrants from the “Norways.”

Fewer transfer payments

Perhaps more interestingly, immigrants from the “Shitholes” receive fewer transfer payments from all levels of government than “Norwegian” immigrants.

Finally, looking at employment insurance benefits alone, Canadians who have been here for generations receive more than either group.

What can we say about these numbers?

Firstly, immigrants from the “Shithole” countries are not typically low skill and in principle, should not be putting pressure on employment or wages of blue-collar workers in Canada. Then why is this such a common perception?

It’s likely due to a different issue, that high-skilled immigrants are unable to get high-skill jobs for other reasons (discrimination in the labour market, an inability of employers to recognize or evaluate credentials, or even language issues) and then do end up competing with lower-skilled Canadian workers.

Secondly, immigrants from the “Shithole” countries are generally no more dependent on the state than other Canadians. Though they earn less than those from the “Norway” countries, they are more likely to be employed and they receive less total government transfer payments.

Many differences

As an economist, it’s important to state that we shouldn’t interpret these relationships between country of origin and economic outcomes as causal—workers from different countries are different for many reasons (demographics like age, as well as occupation, etc).

But that doesn’t at all affect the main point—Trump’s perception of the differences in the average immigrant from countries like Haiti and Norway is at the very least a consequence ignorance, or as many have suggested, racism.

One thing that can’t be rationalized by the raw numbers here: The course of history and the current plight of many of the “shithole” countries is at least partly a consequence of U.S. foreign policies, that the position of relative economic superiority of the U.S. is partly an outcome of these policies, and that this above all might imply a moral obligation on the part of the U.S. when deciding who to let in and from where.

via Memo to Donald Trump: Canadian immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries are thriving – Macleans.ca

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Douglas Todd: Explosive B.C. court case details seven migration scams

2018/01/17 Leave a comment

Another good article by Todd, covering the different scams uncovered by this case:

A shocking B.C. Supreme Court case that pitted two rich families from China against each other provides grim revelations about the kind of migration, tax, and real-estate scams regularly occurring in Metro Vancouver and beyond.

Immigration and tax lawyers are stunned that the Fu and Zhu families became embroiled in a lengthy civil suit over three multi-million dollar houses they purchased together in Vancouver, since their case provides evidence of their illicit schemes around real estate, tax avoidance and immigration.

“This case provides unusually candid insight into what those who would abuse our immigration and real-estate systems really think in their own words about their true motives for seeking access to Canada and our real estate,” said Vancouver immigration lawyer Sam Hyman.

David Lesperance, a Toronto-based immigration and tax lawyer, said: “The fact that two different parties … would choose to fully expose their transgressions in a public forum shows either blinding ignorance, or complacency about the ramifications of that exposure, given the longtime lack of enforcement of immigration and tax laws in Canada.”

While both specialists believe the Fu versus Zhu case justifies investigation by the Canadian Revenue Agency, the Canada Border Services Agency and other enforcement bodies, they say the dispute between the families indirectly illustrates the range of common, mostly unpunished migration and real-estate scams occurring in Canada.

Here are seven migration-related subterfuges the case exposes:

1. Not declaring full worldwide income to Canadian tax officials

Judge Susan Griffin scoffed at one family’s breadwinner, Guoqing Fu, for declaring to the Canadian Revenue Agency he had a worldwide income of only $97.11.

“This was an incredible assertion, given the fact he owns one of the top 10 textile manufacturing and distribution companies” in China’s biggest production zone, said Griffin.

The immigration specialists say it’s commonplace for wealthy foreign real-estate investors to falsely claim to tax authorities they earn much less than they do. It’s typically done in an attempt, they say, to avoid income taxes in Canada, and to make one’s family eligible for welfare and other taxpayer-financed subsidies.

But the Fu family may have gone too far, says Lesperance. “I think that clearly an investigation by Canada Revenue Agency is in order. (Depending on the results) the CRA could definitely ask the Crown to proceed with a criminal tax evasion charge, which could result in a 200-per-cent-of-tax-evaded penalty, plus up to five years imprisonment.”

2. Pretending to spend time in Canada to meet residency requirements

Chunquin Zhou referred to one of her Vancouver luxury houses as “immigration jail,” a term often adopted by well-off would-be migrants.

She used the phrase in reference to what she considered the hardship inherent in Ottawa’s requirement that would-be immigrants physically spend two years out of five in Canada before obtaining citizenship.

The judge also found her son, Xiao Feng Fu, was “sophisticated in lying, including in scheming to deceive Canadians immigration authorities that he could maintain permanent residency status without spending the necessary days residing in Canada.”

The family members’ attempts to pretend they were living in Canada while spending time offshore echo a technique used in a widespread scam orchestrated up until 2015 by Richmond resident Xun Wang, who hauled in $10 million over eight years by producing altered Chinese passports and fraudulent identities for up to 1,200 clients.

3. Hiding real real-estate ownership

The Fu and Zhu families were well versed in how to avoid taxes on the sale of their houses by making false claims about the actual owners.

One common technique that wealthy foreign nationals use to avoid or evade paying capital gains tax in Canada is by putting dwellings in the names of children or spouses who appear to be permanent residents of Canada, and who appear, at least on paper, to occupy the houses.

4. Lack of regulation of real-estate agents

The son’s phoney claims about spending time in Canada were coordinated by the families’ realtor, identified only as “Mr. Gu.” The realtor assisted the son by helping provide false pay cheques, false employment records and false verbal claims about losing his permanent-resident card while in China.

“The new B.C. real estate regulator may want to invite Mr. Gu to a session over his behaviour,” said Hyman, referring to the way B.C.’s real-estate regulation was recently reformed following persistent complaints it was failing to discipline rogue realtors.

5. Illicitly laundering money out of China

The Fu versus Zhu case baldly highlights the two families’ efforts to break the laws of China, which is increasingly placing tighter restrictions on the amount of money it allows to leave the economic powerhouse.

The Fu family, to avoid detection, used their employees on 21 occasions to transfer lump sums just under China’s restriction against removing more than $50,000 US a year from the country.

The judge noted the parties acknowledged the steps were taken to evade China’s currency controls, as well as its restrictions on how many dwellings they could own.

The Fu and Zhu families’ efforts to illegally remove at least $1 million US from China corresponds to similar attempts made by Anita Wang and other families from China, who the B.C. Supreme Court found in early January illicitly laundered $750,000 to buy a property in Port Coquitlam.

6. Misusing provincial migration programs

The two families from China initially started their application process to move to and invest in Canada by going through the provincial nominee programs of Prince Edward Island and Manitoba, jurisdictions which lack the popularity of Metro Vancouver and Toronto for migrants.

Neither family showed any intention of settling in those provinces, since they immediately put all their efforts into investing in residential real estate on the west side of Vancouver.

7. Exploiting Canadian courts, with costly trials

Postmedia reporter Sam Cooper is among the journalists who are increasingly covering lengthy cases involving foreign nationals who use Canadian civil courts to solve their own trans-national legal wrangles.

But, as Hyman says, it costs Canadian taxpayers a great deal to provide the judges, buildings and legal staff to run the court system, even when the losing side sometimes has to contribute to opponents’ lawyers’ fees.

“The bitterest irony in all this is that those who would so brazenly thwart our laws with such perceived impunity, for personal gain, would turn to our taxpayer-funded legal system for recourse. Chutzpah doesn’t begin to describe the parties’ conduct,” said Hyman.

Despite the conclusion of the Fu versus Zhu civil case, Hyman noted the family members involved “appear to continue to have access to Canada.”

via Douglas Todd: Explosive B.C. court case details seven migration scams | Vancouver Sun

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Decision-maker slammed as ‘moral police’ for refusing immigration to HIV-positive man | Toronto Star

2018/01/16 Leave a comment

Understandable Federal Court decision given the comments by the decision-maker on the “morality” rather than possible medical burden:

The Federal Court has slammed an immigration tribunal adjudicator for acting as “moral police” in denying an HIV-positive man permission to reunite with his daughters in Canada, blaming him for contracting the virus from an affair.

In chastising Michael Sterlin, the decision-maker at the immigration appeal division (IAD) tribunal, the court said that how the 62-year-old immigration applicant got HIV had nothing to do with the sponsorship case. To protect the man’s privacy, he was only randomly identified by court as A.B.

“The circumstances under which Mr. A.B. contracted HIV are wholly irrelevant to the issue before the IAD, as are any issues related to the applicant’s father’s moral character,” said Justice Shirzad Ahmed in a recent decision to send the case back to the tribunal for a new assessment.

“The IAD appears to make judgments against Mr. A.B.’s moral character, and in doing so, the IAD acts as moral police.”

In 2009, one of A.B.’s two daughters — who are both Canadian citizens living in Ottawa — applied to sponsor him and his wife to come to Canada under family reunification.

During the course of A.B.’s medical exam, a routine requirement in the immigration process, it was discovered that he is HIV-positive. In 2013, immigration officials informed the family that his health condition would cause “excessive demand” on Canadian health services and his sponsorship application would probably be denied.

Although the family was willing and able to cover the cost of A.B.’s anti-retroviral medications and requested humanitarian and compassionate relief, Immigration Canada refused the application in 2014. The family subsequently appealed to the tribunal.

Last year, the tribunal upheld the immigration decision, concluding that there were “insufficient humanitarian and compassionate considerations to grant special relief.”

 

A.B.’s two daughters had argued that they were the only children and had the responsibility to care for their parents, who would be ostracized in their native China and suffer discrimination and prejudice because of his HIV status.

“The reason why it is claimed the family will shun (the couple) is a perception that such patients have loose morals, in that a key way the virus is transmitted is by having sex,” Sterlin, the tribunal adjudicator, wrote in dismissing the family’s appeal.

“In fact, it turns out that the father did get the virus from having an affair. It is noteworthy, perhaps, that this did not come out until the panel directly asked the appellant why her father had the virus.

“If there is any antipathy, the panel finds, then it would most likely be against the father for risking a long-standing marriage by having an affair in his middle age or later,” continued Sterlin, who left the tribunal last June shortly after he rendered his decision on A.B.’s case.

“It is unfortunate that the father had an affair which led him to become HIV positive. However this was, again, a risk he took, which was unlikely but reasonably foreseeable, and it has unfortunately presented him with very significant problems.”

Wennie Lee, the family’s lawyer, said her clients were pleased that the court quashed the tribunal decision and ordered a new hearing into the request for humanitarian and compassionate relief.

“It is a significant court decision as it provides clear direction to the tribunal to truly apply compassion in deciding whether to exercise (the humanitarian and compassionate) relief,” she said.

“For my clients, in the Chinese culture, where personal and community connections are of paramount importance, social exclusion because of HIV status takes on added significance and importance.”

Lawyer Meagan Johnston for the HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario, one of two intervening parties in the court case, said people with the virus are a dominant group negatively affected by immigration’s “medical inadmissibility” policy that prevents them from immigrating.

In fact, immigration data shows 74 per cent of economic-class immigration applicants with HIV were found to be inadmissible to Canada in 2014 alone, she said, while 61 per cent of those with the virus were denied a work permit or study visa.

“It is repugnant that they are not given a fair chance and their HIV status and morality is used against them in their applications,” Johnston said. “That kind of attitudes against people with HIV is more common than what Canadians would like to admit.”

The immigration appeal tribunal declined to comment on the decision. Sterlin could not be reached for comment.

A spokesperson for the tribunal, which is part of the Immigration and Refugee Board, said the board does not have guidelines addressing cases involving person with HIV and AIDS specifically, but its procedures with respect to “vulnerable persons” speaks to the need to treat vulnerable individuals with “sensitivity and respect.”

via Decision-maker slammed as ‘moral police’ for refusing immigration to HIV-positive man | Toronto Star

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Trump’s ‘s—hole countries’ remark casts remarkable light on immigration policies: Shree Paradkar

2018/01/15 Leave a comment

Implications of Paradkar’s arguments is that essentially we should have a completely open door rather than managed immigration programs.

And rather than only commentary, some numbers with respect to the Haitians in Canada who were obliged to leave after the 2014 change, versus regularizing their status, would be helpful:

However, the outrage also reveals a society more eager to be scandalized by the President’s words than upset by government actions that harm those same lives for whom they are purporting to demand respect.

Trump’s words on Haiti are particularly galling, given what its citizens have endured and American and Canadian modern roles in undermining that nation’s democracy.

Trump pulled the plug on a humanitarian program that allowed some 60,000 Haitians to remain in the U.S. under special immigration status while their homeland recovered from devastating disasters.

Canada cancelled its own program of giving Haitians special status and began asking Haitians to pack their bags in 2014 under Stephen Harper. That cancellation was completed in 2016, under Justin Trudeau with little fanfare.

Yet, Trudeau is the good guy of the global immigration crisis. Remember that viral tweet that was so celebrated after Trump moved to ban immigrants from Muslim-majority countries? “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada”

Last year, poor Haitians who took Canadian goodness seriously, trying to cross unguarded points from the U.S. into Canada had the lowest acceptance rate — at 17 per cent — for asylum claimants between February and October.

Individual Canadians have been generous after the Haitian earthquake. More recently, Montrealers have been moved to help Haitian asylum seekers.

Still, the overall lack of indignation over the continued rejection of Haitians suggests a Canadian comfort with discriminatory attitudes so long as they’re not overt, Trump style.

via Trump’s ‘s—hole countries’ remark casts remarkable light on immigration policies | Toronto Star

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USA: Every immigration proposal in one chart | PBS

2018/01/15 Leave a comment

Great and helpful chart – click on link to access:

via Every immigration proposal in one chart | PBS NewsHour

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

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