Canada shouldn’t be smug looking at anti-immigrant sentiment of Brexit: Regg Cohn

2016/06/29 Leave a comment

Good piece by Regg Cohn on Canadian smugness:

People who prey on people’s fears and phobias about “the other” are nothing new in European or North American history. And Canada is not inoculated against that virus, however well we have resisted it of late.

Yes, we are good at both welcoming and integrating newcomers. We have resisted calls to decrease intakes of both immigrants and refugees. We make a virtue of diversity rather than rueing differences.

But we are only human. If Canadians persist in casting themselves as better than the rest of the world, ugly reality will soon set in. Remember the burqa debate in our last federal election campaign?

The splendid isolation we enjoy from our geographic perch far from poverty and conflict zones will not forever protect us from the upheavals that lie ahead. As we have seen in the Middle East, across Africa, and much of Asia, migrant movements are ever more volatile and overwhelming in an interconnected world.

If today our behaviour is better than that of our southern neighbours, whose presidential discourse demonizes Mexican migrants, it is largely because of where we sit — a safe distance from the frontier with Mexico, buffered by thousands of kilometres of American territory.

If our well-publicized impulse to resettle Syrian refugees is more orderly and dignified than what has beset Southern Europe’s barbed wire borders, it is because our roads and railways are not overrun by migrants clamouring for processing on our doorstep.

While it is tempting to disapprove of the debate in Britain, it is perhaps more prudent to ask why the anti-immigrant message was so well received in the first place.

The quick answer would be that it is human nature to fear the other. A more considered response might be that political leaders must be mindful of the limits of tolerance amid the changing rhythms of migration.

Who knows how Canadians would behave if geography did not insulate us from the human tide along the shores of the Mediterranean, or the porous border between Mexico and the U.S.

Consider a couple of recent Canadian responses:

When Mexicans surged to first place among refugee claimants to Canada a few years ago, the government of the day imposed visa restrictions to stem the flow. That 2009 decision is only now rescinded with the visit of Mexican President Henrique Pena Nieto to Canada this week.

And while we deride Trump for his anti-Mexico ravings, another populist politician by the name of Rob Ford campaigned against the boatloads of Tamil migrants turning up off the coast of B.C. a few years ago: “Take care of the (Canadian) people now before we start bringing in more.”

Ford’s brand of xenophobia was borne out by an Angus Reid poll showing 55 per cent of Ontarians would deport the Tamils even if their refugee claims proved legitimate — and he was elected mayor a few weeks later. Torontonians may dismiss Trump, but don’t forget Ford Nation.

Mindful of our well-documented history of ethnic intolerance and internment, let alone our recent inconstancy, Canadians dare not be smug. And our leaders cannot be complacent.

While appealing to our better natures, politicians must also be mindful of our worse natures, and practical realities, lest they get out too far ahead of themselves. The immigration and refugee challenges of today are only a taste of what lies ahead for Canada.

There but for the grace of demography go we. And geography.

Source: Canada shouldn’t be smug looking at anti-immigrant sentiment of Brexit: Cohn | Toronto Star

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What psychology reveals about the Brexit vote

2016/06/27 Leave a comment

One of the more interesting analysis of some of the forces at play (disclosure: Harell, the researcher, is on the same External Advisory Committee for the Canadian Index on Immigrant Integration as I am):

There are a lot of ways to try to make sense of the Brexit referendum—even as the shock waves continue to rumble across the globe—on policy, economic and messaging grounds. But there’s also a more personal, psychology-driven way to try to sort out why people vote as they do.

A new study sheds light on how attitudes toward immigration—one of the key aspects of the debate over the U.K. leaving the EU—fit in with someone’s general sense of control over life. The researchers found that anti-immigrant views were most common in those whose disposition leads them to feel like life is something that just happens to them, while people who feel like they can control things are more likely to be amenable to newcomers.

The paper, to be published in an upcoming issue of Political Psychology, surveyed 4,200 people in Canada, the U.S. and U.K., examining a personal trait known as “locus of control”—basically, the degree to which you feel like you, your country and other people are in control of circumstances, rather than being buffeted by random winds.

To measure locus of control in a personal context, researchers asked people to respond to the statements, “Many times I feel that I have little influence over the things that happen to me” and “When I make plans, I am almost certain that I can make them work.” It was measured in a societal context by asking, “How much control do you think that [your country] has over the immigrants who are able to enter the country?” And to measure how people perceived locus of control in immigrants, respondents chose from four explanations for why newcomers may experience financial hardship: because they are unlucky, because of laziness and lack of willpower, because of injustice in our society or because it’s an inevitable part of modern progress.

Attitudes toward immigrants, in turn, were measured by people’s responses to four questions—two focused on economic concerns and two on cultural—including, “Immigrants take jobs away from other [Canadians]” and “[Canada’s] cultural life is enriched by immigrants to this country.”

The researchers found that people who feel like they run the show have more positive views of immigrants than those who have a weak sense of personal locus of control. But, conversely, people who assign locus of control to immigrants—that is, they believe immigrants are responsible for their lot in life—are more likely to hold anti-immigrant views. Allison Harell, associate professor of political science at Université du Québec à Montréal and lead author on the paper, believes that disconnect makes perfect sense. “When you feel like you can control things, it’s less threatening. Yes, things are changing, but I can help shape and react to what’s going on in the environment, so that makes it less scary,” she says. “Whereas when you’re attributing problems to the other person, if they’re responsible for it, then you can be harsher on them because it’s their fault.”

Harell and her co-authors conducted this research in 2012 and it will be published in the next few months, but she offers up a dark chuckle about how timely and relevant it is now. For months, the pro-Brexit campaign has been explicitly speaking to this anxiety with the refrain to “take back control” from the EU. Earlier this week, U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage refused to apologize for a controversial poster depicting a long line of dark-skinned migrants emblazoned with the text “Breaking Point.”

Across the pond, Donald Trump has discovered the same psychological pressure point. The drumbeats he’s been pounding—that ordinary Americans are getting a raw deal, their leaders are clueless or negligent and their country is being overrun by freeloading or outright violent outsiders—all boil down to notions of control, too. “People may have felt that way already, but it may have solidified some of that fear of this external threat, or this lack of control over what’s going on,” Harell says. “That’s clearly going to have an impact on how people feel about immigration and immigrants more generally.”

She sees significant differences between the three countries, too. Anti-immigrant sentiment was considerably higher in the U.K. (.64 on a scale from 0 to 1, where .50 would be an essentially neutral position) than in the U.S. or Canada (.50 and .49, respectively). Brits—and, to a lesser extent, Americans—are also much less likely to feel like their country is in control of immigration than Canadians. The measure for societal locus of control in the U.K. is just .27 (on a scale from 0—meaning complete lack of control—to 1—total control), while in the U.S. it is .37 and in Canada, .52. Harell believes this relative calm reflects the fact that Canada only shares a border with the U.S., and the points-based immigration system alleviates a lot of anxiety and resentment around jobs and the economy.

For the past few decades, a lot of political science research on public opinion has been very neck-up, focusing on the ways in which we process information and how that shapes our attitudes and preferences. But, increasingly, research in this area is looking more at the emotional, psychological and personality-driven reasons why we like what we like, reject what we don’t, and vote as we do.

“The fact that we react viscerally to something is important,” Harell says. “That helps explain immediate reactions and shifts in public opinions and polls where you see a spike right after an event. That might not be a well thought-out policy position change on the part of citizens; it might just be a real reaction to what’s going on.”

Source: What psychology reveals about the Brexit vote – Macleans.ca

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Douglas Todd: Ten ways to ease Metro Vancouver’s housing crisis

2016/06/27 Leave a comment

The two immigration-related suggestions by Todd. The first and second ones are easier than the third one, given mobility rights:

Press to end Quebec’s immigrant investor program

Even though the Conservatives stopped Canada’s egregious immigrant investor program in 2014, a form of it still exists in Quebec. But the vast majority of rich immigrants who buy their way into the country by modestly “investing” in Quebec never live in la Belle Province. Most move to Metro Vancouver.

 Combat money laundering, including the property transfer system

Canada’s naive honour system has failed to tax billions of dollars in trans-national property deals. Information sharing agreements between real estate officials, Revenue Canada and the immigration department are desperately needed to catch buyers and sellers who lie about whether they are residents of Canada for income tax purposes. UBC geographer David Ley says a host of money-laundering and tax-evasion schemes, including faking that a property is one’s primary residence, are  getting exposed in London and New York.

Reduce or redirect immigration patterns

In regards to the big picture, Britain and other countries are reducing immigration rates. Studies, like that of UBC geographer Dan Hiebert, show well-off immigrants are a key driver of increases in urban house prices. Nine out of 10 immigrants to B.C. choose Metro Vancouver. Some countries have found ways to encourage immigrants to move to less populated regions.

Source: Douglas Todd: Ten ways to ease Metro Vancouver’s housing crisis | Vancouver Sun

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Feds won’t fight ‘sweetheart’ Quebec immigration program despite B.C. fallout | Vancouver Sun

2016/06/25 Leave a comment

Given the number of files the government has with the provinces and Quebec, not surprising that there is no desire to reopen the agreement. But the disparity is striking, although it would be helpful to have a comparative table for all provinces, comparing the per immigrant numbers over the past 10 years.

The abuse of investor immigrant programs, both the cancelled federal program and Quebec’s program, has been well documented:

The Trudeau government says it has no interest in challenging Quebec’s “sweetheart” immigration system, even though West Coast critics say two components of that province’s system effectively hurt B.C.

“I’m quite happy with the relationship that we currently enjoy with Quebec,” Immigration Minister John McCallum said in an interview after confirming that he won’t pursue changes.

Jason Kenney, considered a leading challenger for the Conservative Party leadership if he remains in federal politics, fumed when he was immigration minister about “fraud” in Quebec’s Immigrant Investor program.

That program lets wealthy foreigners effectively buy permanent residence status in Canada, but research has indicated that most settle outside Quebec and especially in B.C.

As a result, Quebec gets the financial benefits from the cash-for-visa program while, say critics, B.C. has to deal with both the positives and negatives associated with the arrival of wealthy migrants.

Benefits for B.C. include the stimulation of the economy with luxury purchases. But new arrivals — including the spouses and children of “astronauts” who work and pay taxes overseas — also use public education and health care services, plus they play a role in driving up real estate prices.

The federal government shut down its own investor program in 2014 due to public criticism and the widespread perception that the cost outweighed the benefits.

Kenney, who also complained about a “sweetheart” 1991 deal that gave Quebec a hugely disproportionate share of federal immigrant settlement dollars, was never able to convince cabinet colleagues and the bureaucracy to take on Quebec.

McCallum said he also has no interest in shutting down the investor program or taking steps that would require Quebec to keep rich immigrants in the province longer.

“It’s not something we can control even if we wanted to, because once you are a permanent resident the Constitution allows you to live wherever you want to live in Canada.”

He also said he will not try to renegotiate the 1991 Canada-Quebec immigration accord, agreed to at a time when the sovereignty movement was at its strongest.

It granted Quebec an annual grant starting at $75 million a year in immigrant and refugee resettlement money.
That $75 million would be worth about $117 million in today’s dollars. However, the generous escalator clause included in the 1991 deal has resulted in Quebec getting almost triple that post-inflation amount, or $345.1 million, in the 2015-16 fiscal year.

The formula, based on past immigrant intake as well as Canada’s economic growth figures, results in steady and sometimes dramatic increases.

The federal government was unable to provide comparative figures Thursday on how much it spends in provinces outside Quebec for immigration resettlement.  Prior to the former government’s decision to take over control of that work in 2012, the B.C. government was getting roughly $3,000 from Ottawa for each permanent resident arriving on an annual basis.

That compares with the $6,600-a-head subsidy going to Quebec.

Source: Feds won’t fight ‘sweetheart’ Quebec immigration program despite B.C. fallout | Vancouver Sun

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Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy

2016/06/18 Leave a comment

Always interesting to see just how sophisticated and strategic large corporations can be:

Inside Microsoft, however, some staffers have been known to cheekily refer to the Vancouver operation as “Ellis Island,” after the historic U.S. immigration entry station. What Microsoft really wants is to import far more foreign workers to its home base in Washington State than it can under the United States’ incredibly restrictive immigration rules. So it uses Vancouver as a staging post.

Foreign workers temporarily migrate to Canada and work for Microsoft here long enough to qualify for an intracompany transfer to the United States, a far less restrictive immigration process. That doesn’t apply to everyone at the Vancouver centre – most of the roughly 425 “core” employees are Canadian. But another 140 or so “rotational” workers are foreign nationals who will be moved after 18 months, presumably to the United States.

Microsoft has been brazen about using Vancouver as a U.S. immigration back door. Then-chief executive Steve Ballmer said in 2007, when the company returned to Vancouver: “We opened a lab because we were having trouble getting visas for the best and the brightest.” Deputy general counsel Karen Jones told Bloomberg in 2014 that the restrictive U.S. rules “clearly did not meet our needs,” leaving the company about 750 foreign hires short of its desired U.S. intake. “We have to look to other places.” Expanding to Vancouver wasn’t “purely for immigration purposes,” she said, “but immigration is a factor.” Mr. Smith acknowledged “the more open immigration system of Canada does play a vital role in our ability to invest in a big way in the future of this kind of centre in B.C.”

More surprising is that our government thinks it’s smart for Canada to become a way station for U.S.-bound global talent (Microsoft isn’t the only U.S. company to do this) and has made it even easier for Microsoft to build Ellis Island Northwest.

In April, 2015, the federal Immigration Department, at the B.C. government’s request, exempted the Microsoft centre from undergoing onerous “labour market impact assessments” (LMIA) when seeking approval for inbound foreign employees, shaving months off the immigration process. Such exemptions are allowed under federal-provincial immigration deals for major projects that result in big investments and don’t displace local workers, among other criteria. Mr. Smith acknowledged the exemption was an “important” consideration in Microsoft’s decision where to locate the centre.

This would be easier to stomach if Microsoft was importing talent to remain in Canada or if the company placed leadership of key products or projects here (other than existing game studios, the new engineers will report to businesses managed elsewhere, such as Skype).

It would be more acceptable if the exemption was available to all tech companies. Canada is awash in fast-growing tech firms eager to import top talent from around the world. But they have to wait six to 12 months as a result of the prolonged immigration process, which submits fast-growing tech firms to the same drawn-out LMIA process as abusers of the temporary foreign-worker program. That is ridiculously long given that they are in a global race for highly coveted engineering and executive talent. Microsoft, a U.S. company hiring foreign workers to ultimately work in the United States, gets to skip all that.

This exemption places the needs of a foreign multinational above Canadian companies, which ultimately puts Canada at an economic disadvantage. “We need to correct these failed policies that unfairly advantage foreign multinationals and instead focus on growing our domestic scale-ups,” said Benjamin Bergen, executive director of the Council of Canadian Innovators, which represents Canada’s top emerging tech companies. “At the very least, Canadian tech companies should enjoy the same benefits and access to talent as foreign branch plants do here in Canada.”

An exemption for Microsoft is dubious policy, as is championing investments by foreign tech companies here that would likely melt away if the U.S. government simply freed up more visas for foreign workers. It makes us look like a branch-plant economy. So do the PM’s attempts to appear innovative by courting foreign tech giants Google, Ubisoft and Facebook, while ignoring Canada’s emerging homegrown tech companies. Don’t think he hasn’t been invited to visit them, too.

Source: Microsoft reminds us that Canada is still a branch-plant economy – The Globe and Mail

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Why kicking me out of the country is bad for Canada’s economy

2016/06/17 Leave a comment

One personal account of the impact of Express Entry by an international student, Murad Hemmed:

As of June 16, 2017, I will no longer be welcome in Canada. On that date, my Post-Graduate Work Permit expires, and I have to leave the country. There’s no telling when—if—I’ll be able to return.

I arrived in Toronto on September 12, 2010. As a precocious (read: full of himself) teenager, I thought I was headed for the Ivy League. Then reality set in: I couldn’t afford a U.S. education. Luckily, the self-styled “Harvard of the North” accepted me, so to the University of Toronto I came. It helped that I had an aunt in the city who generously agreed to put me up for the duration of my degree. (A decision I’m sure I gave her cause to regret, with my tendency to return home in the wee hours and my litre-a-week ice cream habit.) Once here, though, Toronto quickly became home. I have a job, an apartment and relationships here. Bombay, the city of my birth, is a place I haven’t called home in years. India, the country of my citizenship, holds no special place in my heart.

Until quite recently, it would have been relatively simple for me to stay. But changes to Canada’s immigration policies that took effect last year have made the path to becoming a permanent resident much more difficult for international students. It’s a sucker punch for the thousands of young people who have bought into Canada’s “nation of immigrants” tag line, who hope that their personal and financial commitment to this country will be recognized and rewarded. It makes little sense to court bright foreign talent to enrol in Canada’s universities, educate them and allow them to integrate, only to uproot them and send them away. But this isn’t just a sob story; it’s an economic issue.

The problem was caused by trying to solve another one. In January 2015, the previous Conservative government implemented a new permanent residency system, called Express Entry, to speed up processing times and prioritize economic immigration. Businesses would be able to hire foreigners with special, in-demand skills without replacing Canadian workers. As part of the overhaul, the government also took a separate program commonly used by international students to gain residency and lumped it in with the Express Entry process. Now, applicants like me are up against everyone else who wants to immigrate to this country.

I’m currently putting together an application for permanent residency. I’m collecting documents, consulting lawyers and comparing notes with friends who are doing the same. Come June, I’ll create a profile for myself in Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s online Express Entry database. Then I’ll wait to be chosen, either by Ontario or in one of the monthly draws from the Express Entry pool. Under the current system, my qualifications and skills are converted into points—the more I have, the better my chances. I score the maximum for being young and for my excellent English. My degree earns me a few more, but there are no extra points for earning it in Canada. Add it all up, and I have fewer than 450 points, the lowest the bar for entry has ever dropped. I’d get an extra 600 points if I qualified for a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), a document showing my employer can’t find a Canadian to do my job. That’s a requirement engineers and software developers can often meet; journalists, not so much.

Look: Canada can probably do without me, personally. But I’m not the only young person facing this predicament, and losing potentially thousands of international students each year isn’t good for the country or its companies. According to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, 51% of international students plan to apply for permanent residency. We’re Canadian-educated, so our degrees and qualifications need no translation. We’re culturally integrated and linguistically compatible. We’ve paid hundreds of thousands into the public purse in the form of frankly ridiculous international tuition fees, and we have acclimatized to Canadian winters. We know that coffee is spelled “Tim Hortons” and that poutine is a superfood.

Consider the country’s demographics, too. “Canada has a shortage of talented 20-somethings in all areas,” says Mike Moffatt, an assistant professor in the Business, Economics and Public Policy group at Ivey Business School at Western University. “We need people who are going to be working for the next 30 to 40 years, paying into CPP [and] creating economic growth to allow the baby boomers to have the full pensions they’re expecting.” The demographics issue is particularly acute in mid-size cities like London and Windsor, Ont., which have trouble retaining young people and desperately need 20- and 30-somethings to start families and lift the local economy.

We’re also incredibly valuable to our employers. Vancouver tech startup Mobify has hired a number of international students. Some don’t meet the LMIA requirements because they work in non-technical fields. “But they’re highly valuable to us, because they’re already here and they have that knowledge and skill base,” says Tanya Kensington, the company’s senior director of people and culture. The spouse of one Mobify employee recently had to go back to school to allow the couple to stay in the country.

Ontario has its own program for international students with job offers, which allows applicants to potentially skip the LMIA requirement. But Toronto lawyer Stephen Green says employer approvals aren’t being processed fast enough. “If you go to the website, they say you get an answer in 90 days,” he says. “You don’t! So [they’re] giving out misinformation, and suddenly everyone’s freaking out. And we’re losing amazing people.” In any case, the allocation for that scheme fills out rapidly—Ontario stopped accepting most classes of applications on May 9 this year.

The new federal Liberal government seems to be aware of the issue. On March 14, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship John McCallum signalled that making it easier for international students to gain residency would be part of a broader review of the Express Entry system. “I believe international students are among the most fertile source of new immigrants for Canada,” he told reporters, saying he wanted federal-provincial talks on the matter. Ideally—from my own selfish perspective—that would mean a quota or a program specifically for international students. The government could also follow the advice of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which recently recommended that applicants be awarded points for earning a Canadian post-secondary degree. Whatever form the changes take, the immigration lawyers I’ve spoken to—both as a journalist and as a client looking at my options—have suggested they are likely to come within a year.

In the meantime, it’s possible that I could obtain permanent residency under the current system, if the bar falls low enough. But for now, I’m filling out my forms, resigned to the fact that I may well have to book a plane ticket to Mumbai in the coming months. One-way.

Source: Why kicking me out of the country is bad for Canada’s economy

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Are Immigrants Prone to Crime and Terrorism? – The Atlantic

2016/06/17 Leave a comment

The evidence and linkages between crime and social exclusion:

But in terms of both crime and terrorism, immigrants are not the problem Trump says they are.

Study after study after study bears out mostly the last part of his remarks: Immigrants largely commit crimes at a lower rate than the local-born population. Those numbers are true even of the children of immigrants. Writing in the Oxford Handbook of Crime and Criminal Justice, Sandra M. Bucerius, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, noted:

“Second-generation immigrants typically have higher crime rates than first-generation immigrants. In the US context, however, most second-generation immigrants continue to enjoy lower crime rates than the native-born population. In stark contrast, research findings in European countries indicate that some second-generation immigrant groups have crime rates that drastically exceed those of the native-born population.”

I asked Bucerius about immigrants and crime (not terrorism), and she told me that though most studies do not differentiate among different immigrant groups, researchers do know there are some “immigrant groups in every Western country that we have data on that [are] more criminally involved than the average.”

“We also know,” she said, “that those groups always experience social, economic and/or political exclusion higher than the average. This does not imply that all immigrants who are socially excluded become criminals. Yet, exclusion and discrimination seem to be a risk factor.”

Bucerius points out that that while studies point broadly toward lower crime rates among immigrants and their children, these studies do not—and often cannot—speak to differences across different ethnic or religious groups. For instance, she says, there are no studies that compare crime rates among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

“What we can say is that—in some European countries— like Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, or France, we see a disproportionate number of second-generation immigrants involved in crime who are likely Muslim,” she said. “However, for these groups in particular, we need to take the very problematic history of guest-worker integration into account, and consider the highly problematic relationship between France and Algeria [and] forced secularism.”

Bucerius spent five years studying predominantly Muslim Turkish, Moroccan, and Albanian drug dealers in Germany, and the resulting book—Unwanted: Muslim Immigrants, Dignity and Drug Dealing—examines how different policies and exclusion practices cause and foster alienation among immigrants communities. For instance, she points out, most second-generation immigrants born in German in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s are not German citizens.

“They were born and raised in a country that they could never become citizens of, and constantly live with the fear of deportation,” she said.

Source: Are Immigrants Prone to Crime and Terrorism? – The Atlantic

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Inevitable: Alleged EB-5 Fraudster Already Has a Third Nation’s Citizenship | Center for Immigration Studies

2016/06/15 Leave a comment

David North on the use/abuse of the US EB-5 investor immigrant visa program:

It had to happen. One of the alleged fraudsters involved in an EB-5 scandal in the United States has also purchased an additional citizenship in another nation.

We reported a few days ago that Charles Liu and his wife, Lisa Wang, were exposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission as diverters of $18 million in EB-5 investments involving a cancer treatment center in Southern California. They sent the money to their own bank accounts and to three companies in China rather than building the medical center.

It now turns out that Liu, before the SEC’s move, had already purchased a citizenship from Grenada, the little ex-British island we invaded during the Reagan administration. They call their equivalent of our EB-5 program “citizenship by investment” (CBI); several other island nations have similar programs.

Irritatingly, neither the SEC complaint nor any of the press coverage describes, in this immigration-related case, the immigration status of Liu and Wang. SEC says he is a “resident of Laguna Niguel, California” as is she. The form that Liu used when applying for Homeland Security permission to run a regional center (the I-924) does not ask about the civil status of the person applying for the center. I would think it would be a perfectly legitimate question.

One Caribbean newspaper reported that the government of Grenada had said in the blandest of terms, following the SEC announcement: “Through our diplomatic channels, the Government of Grenada continues to monitor the situation, to communicate with all diplomatic and other sources, and continues to fully engage mutual cooperation with all the parties concerned.”

Another, earlier report said that Liu is already deeply embedded in that nation’s diplomatic channels as he is the commercial attaché in the little nation’s Beijing embassy. This is presumably a part-time, probably unpaid position, as the incumbent is, according to SEC, living in yet a third country, the United States.

There are no indications as of this writing that anything has gone wrong with the island investment.

So we have what appears to be a Chinese national who has already purchased one additional citizenship, and has secured what appears to be a diplomatic post from his new nation, putting together a company which will promote tourism in Grenada while simultaneously seeking to sell American green cards to Chinese investors by falsely promising to build a cancer treatment center in the United States.

Charles Liu is just one example of the interesting people who are attracted to our EB-5 program.

Source: Inevitable: Alleged EB-5 Fraudster Already Has a Third Nation’s Citizenship | Center for Immigration Studies

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ICYMI: How my book on immigration became the voice of Germany at the Venice Biennale

2016/06/14 Leave a comment

Good account by Doug Saunders on how art based upon his book Arrival City helps communicate the issues and challenges:

This put us at the centre of Europe’s most urgent and politically challenging crisis. In an architecture biennale that is often given over to the most abstruse and ephemeral of ideas and visions, we had been asked to create the least abstract pavilion of them all.

After all, the 2016 Biennale’s theme, selected by the acclaimed architect Alejandro Aravena, is “Reporting from the Front”: He wanted exhibitions to focus on the architecture of “the margins,” not the pricey mega-structures that tend to dominate architecture fairs.

The stuff in this pavilion is really happening. And there is real money on the table. Germany is in the midst of an enormously controversial and difficult process of settling around a million refugees who’ve fled the conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere – almost half the refugees arriving in Europe – and housing them in dozens of cities.

For the many thousands of people who have passed through our pavilion during the past two weeks, it has been a break from capital-A architecture and a swift plunge into the most turbulent debate in Europe’s modern history. ( Kirsten Bucher)

This has resulted in Berlin’s federal administration spending unprecedented sums on new buildings for this process: Shortly after the committee she sits on chose our “arrival city” exhibition in January, Ms. Hendricks announced that her government will fund the construction of 300,000 to 400,000 new units of social housing each year (for both refugees and established Germans), year after year, for the foreseeable future.

No other government in the Western world is spending this kind of money on housing – and it has been decades since any government has deployed architectural solutions to social problems on this scale. When finished, it will be the equivalent of having created a second Berlin, largely with public funds.

So Europe’s largest demographic and social crisis has suddenly become an architectural and urban-planning crisis: There is an urgent need to learn from the best lessons of the past seven decades of public-housing construction – and, more importantly, to avoid the many design failures of that period, the horrid “projects” and council flats and plattenbau districts, some of which led directly to impoverished and isolated immigrant districts prone to crime and extremism.

A core component of our pavilion is a database, available online, which documents more than 400 refugee-housing projects currently under way in Germany (many are intended to be turned into social or student housing once the refugee emergency abates). Some of them are awful. Some are ingenious. After standing in a room surrounded by these examples, the notion that architectural design has large-scale social consequences becomes far less abstract: These designs, for better or worse, will affect the lives and outcomes of families, communities and cities for generations.

Open to the elements and the passing crowds, the pavilion becomes an informal, improvised place, a teeming marketplace not just of ideas but of real-life things(Kirsten Bucher)

Other rooms, and the pavilion’s main chamber, are devoted to the “eight theses of the arrival city” we developed in a series of meetings in Frankfurt. These, distilled from my research conclusions, are emblazoned on the walls and illustrated with case studies of districts and projects in European cities:

The arrival city is a city within a city. The arrival city is a network of immigrants. The arrival city is affordable. The arrival city is close to business. The arrival city is informal. The arrival city is self-built. The arrival city is on the ground floor. The arrival city needs the best schools.

For the many thousands of people who have passed through our pavilion during the past two weeks, it has been a break from capital-A architecture and a swift plunge into the most turbulent debate in Europe’s modern history. Some, like Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, have lingered to take notes. Some have started arguments, sketched designs or told us they suddenly see their city’s kebab-shop district very differently. Others have just hung out, had a bite and soaked up the simultaneous sense of comfort and unfamiliarity – in the process, experiencing a small version of the sort of place we’re chronicling here.

Source: How my book on immigration became the voice of Germany at the Venice Biennale – The Globe and Mail

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Malta PM says decisions on citizenship by investment schemes should not be taken by politicians

2016/06/10 Leave a comment

This is the flagship model used by advocates of investor and citizenship immigration programs in Canada. Does not change the fundamental question of the morality and ethics of buying citizenship, and that this is largely driven by the business interests of consultants, rather than broader ones:

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat underlined the benefits of the Citizenship by Investment programme for the Maltese economy when he addressed the Investment Migration Forum 2016 in Geneva this afternoon.

The forum is being hosted by the Investment Migration Council, a worldwide association for investor immigration and citizenship-by-investment, grouping the leading stakeholders in the field and giving the industry a voice.

Dr Muscat said the global industry linked to citizenship by investment would grow when criteria for such schemes were known and decisions were taken by technical people and not politicians.

He said that it was on this basis that Malta successfully launched its programme, which was now yielding great benefits for the economy.

He said that despite controversies, Malta’s scheme still remained the only one approved by the European Commission.

Source: PM says decisions on citizenship by investment schemes should not be taken by politicians – timesofmalta.com

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

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