Marshall Project: How We Reported on Rhetoric About Immigrants in the 2024 Election

2024/11/22 Leave a comment

This is really good data based journalism. Far more sophisticated than I did when looking at ethnic media in the 2019 election. Definitely for the data nerds but others could benefit from knowing how they did it:

….For example, Trump has referred to unauthorized immigrants as criminals at least 575 times, as snakes that bite at least 35 times, as coming from prisons, jails and mental institutions at least 560 times and as causing crime in sanctuary cities at least 185 times. He has described the construction of a wall on America’s southern border as essential to public safety at least 675 times, and has argued at least 50 times that mass deportations are acceptable because President Dwight Eisenhower did it. We found all of these claims to be either entirely false or, at the very least, highly misleading….

Source: How We Reported on Rhetoric About Immigrants in the 2024 Election

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A Rush to the Exits: It’s Not Just Immigration, Canada Has an Emigration Crisis

2024/11/21 Leave a comment

Covers the various data sources and issues. And of course, the issue of outflows has been increasingly prominent in Statistics Canada and work by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship and the Conference Board of Canada (Economic immigrants hand-picked by the federal government are leading a growing exodus of newcomers from Canada):

…Canada, as every schoolchild learns, has thousands of kilometres of undefended border. There are places where people cross officially, at roads and airports. Some people think of these border crossings as gates. But they are not gates. They are revolving doors. A lot of people go through them, in both directions, every year.

When digesting the economic data, it becomes obvious that the flow of people out of the country is following the flow of money. People want better incomes, better prospects. It seems like stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious must be stated. The ones leaving Canada for the U.S. are the ones in a position to do so: the ones with globally marketable skills, independent incomes or inherited wealth, who can easily start anew elsewhere. And the ones who have decent incomes are usually the ones who have the brains as well. Canada is losing its best and brightest. Instead of easing, Canada’s brain drain is almost certain to intensify. Whoever holds office in Ottawa over the next decade will be hearing about it; let’s hope they do something about it.

On Harvard University’s Economic Complexity Index – a measure of an economy’s productive capacity – Romania jumped from 39th in the world in 2000 to 19th, just behind France. Canada is facing ever-greater competition from nations on the rebound just as it enters the second decade of serious economic deterioration.

Political leaders often tout Canada as a land of immigrants. In 2021, more than 8.3 million people, or 23 percent of the population, were immigrants, the highest proportion since Confederation. Never mentioned is that there could be as many as 5 million Canadians living abroad – one-eighth of the Canadian population. The inflated but often-insincere rhetoric about immigration, emanating from Liberal and NDP politicians in Ottawa and from much of mainstream media, has simply ignored the whole question of outflow from Canada, of how we have lost so many of our best and brightest – and, without major economic, fiscal and governance reforms, will keep right on doing so….

Source: A Rush to the Exits: It’s Not Just Immigration, Canada Has an Emigration Crisis

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Clark: Trudeau’s only mistake in admitting a mistake is not doing it sooner

2024/11/20 Leave a comment

Making the mistake, of course, is more serious than the timing of admitting that the government made the mistake in the first place:

…Mr. Trudeau spent a portion of the video shifting blame onto business lobbies screaming for foreign workers to reduce labour shortages – with a clip of Mr. Ford doing the same – and “bad actors” and colleges charging rich fees to booming numbers of foreign students. All that’s true, but it was the federal government’s job to control the numbers, and they didn’t. But Mr. Trudeau now concedes that.

Mr. Arnold said he wouldn’t advise the Prime Minister to make a speech about 10 mistakes. But this is a specific case.

“There’s a place for a politician to admit they haven’t gotten things right,” he said. “Because then it makes the solution feel like real change.”

Mr. Arnold noted that’s not the kind of thing the Liberals will put into their television ad campaigns. This is an attempt to shield against damage.

But the Liberals want voters to hear about it. The video includes news clips emphasizing what a big course change the government has just made on immigration – playing it up, not down. Mr. Trudeau needs Canadians to know about it, even if it means admitting a mistake.

Source: Trudeau’s only mistake in admitting a mistake is not doing it sooner

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New survey finds Canadians are feeling anxious about immigration

2024/11/20 Leave a comment

Would be nice if CBC would indicate in the article who carried out the survey but the findings make intuitive sense and largely track other surveys on the general questions (checked, online survey by Probe Research, no margin of error cannot be assigned):

Canadians are feeling increasingly uneasy about immigration and its role in generating “economic strain,” according to a new survey conducted by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Among other things, the survey found that many Canadians believe too much attention is being focused on newcomers and refugees, and that asylum seekers receive too many benefits.

The survey landed two weeks after Ottawa announced dramatic changes to its projected immigration numbers. On Sunday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also said in an online video that he should have acted more quickly to address problems with the immigration system.

The survey heard from 2,500 Canadians in both 2023 and 2024. This year, it found that a majority — 56 per cent — said they believe refugees and asylum seekers “receive too many benefits.” The report calls that a “significant increase” over the 49 per cent who said the same thing in 2023.

The survey also reported a “significant decrease” in the number of Canadians who believe immigration makes the country better — from 52 per cent in 2023 down to 44 per cent this year.

The 2024 survey also found that 41 per cent of Canadians believe there’s “too much attention focused on the rights of newcomers.”

“Among responses received in open-ended inquiries, there was a notable increase between 2023 and 2024 in sentiments that correlate immigration with economic strain in Canada,” the report said.

The CEO of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Isha Khan, told CBC News that “perceptions” about immigration are changing and the matter needs more study.

“That’s a point we really need to dig into,” Khan said. “We need to understand where those perceptions are coming from and how they impact our collective work.”

Immigration was only one aspect of the survey, entitled 2024 Foresights for Human Rights.

While just 11 per cent of respondents cited access to affordable housing as a top human rights issue, nearly 60 per cent said that right to housing had weakened over the last decade.

The report said that two in three respondents reported feeling optimistic about protecting human rights in Canada, particularly Indigenous rights and gender equity. Just one in three felt the same about human rights abroad….

Source: New survey finds Canadians are feeling anxious about immigration

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Regg Cohn | Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau are talking to the wrong audience about Donald Trump

2024/11/20 Leave a comment

Focus on where we have a shared interest in irregular cross border arrivals:

…Rather than focusing solely on the northward flow of migrants into Canada, however, the federal government should be thinking hard about how to stop the southward flow into America which is much higher. After all, that’s what has grabbed the attention of the incoming U.S. border czar, Tom Homan, who happens to be from upstate New York, near the Ontario border.

He called the Canada-U.S. border an “extreme national security vulnerability,” predicting “tough conversations” with Ottawa. “There has to be an understanding from Canada that they can’t be a gateway to terrorists coming into the United States.”

While Canadians obsess about the notorious Roxham Road path into Canada, it turns out that borders are in the eye of the beholder — and very much a two-way street.

Ford and Trudeau are right to turn their minds to Trump. But the test of their tactics isn’t how persuasive-sounding they seem when speaking to Canadians, but how effective they are in winning over the Americans in difficult negotiations ahead.

So far, both are following their re-election playbooks. But both will be judged by Canadian voters on how they play their hands with the Americans, not how they sound on the domestic campaign trail.

Source: Opinion | Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau are talking to the wrong audience about Donald Trump

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Kelly McParland: Of the long list of Liberal blunders, immigration takes the cake

2024/11/20 Leave a comment

Reasonable assessment:

Canada stands out amid the fray, however. For decades, Canadians expressed a pride approaching smugness in the high levels of support for ever-rising immigration quotas and the civility of the welcome offered newcomers. There was widespread agreement that immigration brought with it growth, energy, new ideas, broad experience and an array of benefits in food, music, style, the arts and other cultural attractions.

No more. The Trudeau government now sees electoral advantage  — or more likely necessity — in hot-footing it to the front of the deportation parade, as if it weren’t responsible for the policies that produced the parade in the first place. In a sharp reversal of previous positions,  Immigration Minister Marc Miller proclaimed last week in Vancouver that whatever it was Ottawa thought its border policies were achieving was no longer operative.

“It’s clear that the age of unlimited supply of cheap foreign labour is over, and I think that is a good thing,” he announced.

“Bringing the numbers down, I think, is very important to making sure that we aren’t simply chasing short-term gain for a lot of long-term pain.”

Short-term gain is precisely what the Liberal approach to immigration has been all about. Annual admissions have almost doubled since 2015. The government saw it as a way to secure reliable votes from grateful newcomers, provide abundant low-wage labour, fill schools with foreign students paying high tuitions, and support Liberals’ eagerness to portray themselves as caring, tolerant and good-hearted.

Instead, the rise in population is blamed for a housing crisis, college campuses have become puppy mills for overcharged students, tens of thousands of newcomers have seen their hopes of a permanent new life in Canada dashed, and Canada’s international reputation has been badly sullied. The number of students seeking asylum has grown from about 1,800 in 2018 to more than 12,500 in 2023. In the first nine months of this year, there had already been almost 14,000 requests. More than 1.2 million people granted temporary residency are being told to leave by next year in what would be an unprecedented outflow. The backlog in refugee claims has reached 260,000, creating a lineup so lengthy it allows claimants to spend additional years in the country awaiting their hearing.

A big problem with well-meaning, but ill-considered, social programs is that they bring the aim itself into disrepute when they go wrong. Eight years ago, when Justin Trudeau was keen on differentiating his views from a bellicose new U.S. president named Trump, he fired off a message obviously intended to reflect Canada’s superior righteousness.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he tweeted.

The day after Trump was voted back into the White House this month, all that had changed.

“Canadians quite rightly believe that it needs to be a decision of Canada and Canadians who comes to our country and who doesn’t,” asserted Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

“That is something that’s really important, it’s fundamental.”

Source: Kelly McParland: Of the long list of Liberal blunders, immigration takes the cake

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Trudeau says he could have acted faster on immigration changes, blames ‘bad actors’

2024/11/19 Leave a comment

Apart from the largely dodging responsibility by the PM, Conservative leader Poilievre comments of note:

….When reached for comment, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s spokesperson Sebastian Skamski referred The Canadian Press to an interview Mr. Poilievre did with CKNW 980’s The Jas Johal Show in Vancouver where Mr. Poilievre discussed immigration.

In that interview, Mr. Poilievre said much of his criticism of the current immigration system is coming from what Mr. Trudeau himself has said since enacting these recent changes.

“Now, he’s basically denouncing his entire immigration policy and expecting us to believe that he can fix the problems that he caused,” Mr. Poilievre said.

“The bottom line is we have to fix our immigration, get back to the best system in the world, the one that brought my wife here as a refugee legally and lawfully, the one that brought so many people here to pursue the Canadian promise and that’s what I’m going to do as prime minister.”

Mr. Poilievre has previously said he would tie immigration rates to available housing while considering other factors such as access to health care and jobs….

Source: Trudeau says he could have acted faster on immigration changes, blames ‘bad actors’

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Dispatch from the Front Lines: Peace, order and really bad governmenting [sic, immigration]

2024/11/19 Leave a comment

Hard to disagree “The upshot of all this is that Canada’s immigration system is no longer the prized coconut of old. Today, it’s more like a post-Halloween pumpkin — rotten all the way through.:”

…Eight years later, it is all in tatters. After letting in record numbers of immigrantspost-pandemic, the federal government has lost almost complete control of who comes into the country, and who stays. Unsurprisingly, for the first time in a quarter century, popular opinion has turned sharply against our still-high immigration levels. And a populist policy backlash is brewing in the form of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives or, worse, Donald Trump’s MAGA crazies. 

And so after nine years of smugly lecturing the world and their fellow Canadians about their superior virtue, it seems to be slowly dawning on the Liberals just how badly they have screwed things up. But as night follows day, as sunshine follows rain, as the Leafs lose in the first round of the playoffs, everything the Liberals do to fix the problem only makes things worse. 

In October, the government turned on a dime and realised that maybe their target of 500,000 newcomers per year for the next two years might be a bit more than the system could take. So they cut that figure by about a fifth, targeting 395,000 permanent residents in 2025, with that number dropping to 365,000 by 2027. 

This came after an announcement earlier in the year that Ottawa would be capping international student visas, which come with a highly prized post graduate work permit. While there was no guarantee this would lead to permanent residency, the promise that this would be the case was pretty much implicit. Come here and study, stick around and work, bring your family over and stay — that was the Canadian dream for hundreds of thousands of foreign students, encouraged ad nauseaum by federal politicians. But in September, Ottawa announced that it would not be renewing the work permits for current permit holders, with 200,000 of those set to expire by the end of 2025. 

Anyone think those 200,000 former students are going to just pack up and head home next year? Don’t make us ell oh ell. 

Indeed, count us amongst the ranks of the completely unsurprised when it was reported this week that so far this year, 14,000 people here on international student visas had filed refugee claims between January 1 and September 1 of this year. It was already a record, surpassing the 12,000 asylum claims filed in 2023. And the final 2024 number will be almost an order of magnitude higher than the 1,800 such claims that were filed in 2018. 

Immigration minister Marc Miller was quick to denounce these as largely false claims, filed in bad faith by students advised to do so by unscrupulous consultants. Well, maybe. But hey, if they are false claims, the feds can always just deny them and send these fraudsters home, no?

Well, no. Because in addition to losing control of the immigration system, Ottawa has also lost control of the refugee claimant system. As the Globe writes in an excellent editorial this weekend, when the Liberals came to power in 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants was a hair under 10,000 claims. Today, there are well over a quarter of a million (!!!) pending cases, and the IRB is losing ground every day, not gaining. The wait for a refugee hearing is now in the ballpark of four years, during which claimants are entitled to both work and study. And on the off chance Ottawa denies your claim four years from now, what are the odds you will actually get put on a plane and sent home? Almost zilch. The result is a vicious cycle where the more claims that are made, the longer they will take to be processed, which raises the incentive for making a claim, and so on. 

The upshot of all this is that Canada’s immigration system is no longer the prized coconut of old. Today, it’s more like a post-Halloween pumpkin — rotten all the way through.  

It’s not clear what is to be done about this, short of simply closing the border for a few years until we get things under control. One possibility would be for Canada to declare something like immigration bankruptcy: Every non citizen in the country on a certain date, regardless of the status as a student, immigrant, or refugee claimant, gets permanent residency. After that, visa requests and refugee claims get processed as they come in under a new set of hard and transparent rules.

More than likely, though, the Liberals will keep muddling along, making the problem worse and worse and worse as they continue to play whack a mole with each new unintended side effect of their ad hoc policy making. You can be sure the Trump people are paying close attention….

Source: Dispatch from the Front Lines: Peace, order and really bad governmenting

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Angus Reid: Great Expectations or Bleak House? Most Canadians are happy, but life outlooks have worsened over past decade

2024/11/18 Leave a comment

Interesting insight but intuitively makes sense:

Notably, there does appear to be a correlation between one’s time in Canada and levels of satisfaction, which also relates to ethnicity. White Canadians and those born in Canada are more likely to say they’re happy overall. Those who have been in Canada for two decades or less are close to twice as likely as others to say they’re not happy at all:

Income plays a significant role in happiness, with those in the lowest income group twice as likely as those in the highest to say that they’re “not happy at all”. Half of this lower income group are happy (50%), while half are not (47%). Seven-in-10 (69%) in the highest income group say they’re happy, more than twice as many as say they are not (29%)…

Source: Great Expectations or Bleak House? Most Canadians are happy, but life outlooks have worsened over past decade

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Ham: Canada’s immigration crackdown could make for a more willing partner in Trump

2024/11/18 Leave a comment

Perhaps but would not count on it. More likely that it will make it easier for a Conservative government as the Liberals will no longer be able to play the xenophobia card.:

…However, recent immigration crackdowns in Canada could move the close allies even closer, making for a more robust and bountiful relationship during Trump’s second four-year term. Recent moves by Ottawa on immigration could be the North Star that guides and even informs a nascent framework, still in the developmental stages, by an incoming administration bent on taking a hardline approach to the challenging issue.

Canada has turned away nearly 4,000 people per month(opens in a new tab) on average in 2024, a 20 per cent  increase over the 3,271 average in 2023. Moreover, immigration officials have refused more visitor visa applications per month than it has accepted.

In fact, in July of 2024, Ottawa turned away 5,853 foreign travellers; the most rejections since January 2019. Data also shows a sharp decline in approved visitor visas(opens in a new tab) as well as study and work permits, which had previously reached record highs in 2022 and 2023. With such an about face on immigration shown by Canada, the incoming Trump administration should be a more welcome and willing partner towards its northern neighbour. ..

Eric Ham is a bestselling author and former congressional staffer in the U.S. Congress. He served as a contributor to TheHill.com and The Washington Diplomat. He resides in Washington, DC.

Source: Canada’s immigration crackdown could make for a more willing partner in Trump

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