How France’s diversity problem became a security problem

2015/11/20 Leave a comment

Konrad Yakabuski on the failure of France to integrate Muslim youth:

But eradicating the Islamic State, were it possible, would not end the alienation that has turned so many young French Muslims into violent jihadis. While the immediate imperative remains combating one particular brand of terrorism, Mr. Hollande’s efforts cannot end there. Unless Muslim youth can envision a future of semi-equal opportunity in France, one violent cause will simply replace another.

“A more nuanced response than total war is needed to deal with the underlying rage that fuels this confrontation. And that is almost impossible to imagine in the current atmosphere,” American University professor Gordon Adams wrote this week on the Foreign Policy website. “Islam has not been welcome in France, and the hostility of non-Islamic France is only growing.”

Source: Hollande faces the enemy from within – The Globe and Mail

Dana Wagner digs deeper:

Tidjane Thiam couldn’t get a job in France. Mr. Thiam is an Ivory Coast native who studied in France at the elite INSEAD business school. After failing to advance his career in France, he left for an offer in Britain, and in March became chief executive officer of Credit Suisse. The problem was not Mr. Thiam.

It’s unknown how many other visible minorities are unemployed or underemployed in France. The country doesn’t count. It’s against the law to collect data on race or ethnicity – liberté, egalité, fraternité.

But gender gets counted, as does disability. And in business, what gets counted gets done. Some French employers have found creative ways to count and improve work force diversity, using proxies such as names or home neighbourhoods. But in general, there is no counting, no target, no change.

The reluctance to count has made important subjects taboo. Ask a group of employers to a talk about immigrant and visible minority employment and few will show up. The very subject of race is an offensive topic of conversation. Affinity groups (Vietnamese professionals, Indian women, Algerian engineers) are considered insulting.

This summer, I met with staff of organizations that help disadvantaged young people get jobs. Most clients are poor and non-white. One manager I spoke with knows that the qualified young people he works with have worked twice as hard to get where they are. And still, hiring managers often express surprise at how well dressed they are, without the slightest awareness of how patronizing their comments are.

If this is what France’s educated, skilled visible minorities can expect, imagine what it’s like to be someone less privileged than that. Imagine knowing that you don’t stand a chance.

This is the undercurrent we will hear about in coming weeks: French people who don’t see themselves in France’s face or future. The integration problem has become a security problem that better intelligence will never solve.

 How France’s diversity problem became a security problem 

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , ,

France’s Real Crisis Is About More Than Just Refugees | TIME

2015/11/19 Leave a comment

More on the French integration challenges and how laïcité has not helped:

“France is a diverse open minded society, but France also as a collective country has a dark history that they have to acknowledge. But not it’s really just about looking at the past, but facing up to the past in order to claim a common future. That’s still missing in France,” says Amel Boubekeur, a researcher on European Islamic issues at Grenoble University. “I believe that it is something that the U.K. has dealt with much more successfully than France, though it wasn’t the same experience—it was a less violent one. “

France utterly rejected the notion that being French included women covering their heads. Enshrined in its laws is the concept of laicité, or secularization. France moved to protect its culture and in the years since has, for the most part, banned Muslim girls from wearing headscarves to school. To level the playing field, they also banned Christian and Jewish symbols, including yarmulkes. Almost every year since there have been French-Muslim protests to allow their girls to wear foulards to school. The protests ebbed and flowed with the news: after the invasion of Iraq they found new life and have only grown since.

But this enforced secularism isn’t unique to France. In 2009, Antwerp in Belgium moved to ban foulards in schools, a move that spread across Belgium, though not uniformly. At the same time, a new Islamist group, Sharia4Belgium, flourished by opposing the prohibitions on head scarves in the name of religious and civil liberties. The ban “was a major rally point for organizations like Sharia4Belgium,” says Guy Van Vlierden, editor of a blog on Belgian foreign fighters. “A lot of spontaneous action started for that. That has driven a lot of young people into the arms of terrorism, that’s very clear.”

Sharia4Belgium, like many French extremist recruiters and imams, preyed on the immigrants’ sense of not belonging—of unsuccessful assimilation—even when those immigrants were second or third generation. It was the sense of being robbed of their “roots” that set the Kouachi brothers down their destructive path toward Al-Qaeda, that would prove fatal for the employees of Charlie Hebdo.

Europe is a society still grappling with its minority groups, even thousands of years later; just look at the Catalonian and Scottish pushes for independence. It’s also a continent of ancient, beautiful cultures that are fighting to survive within the bigger entity of the European Union; many of the things that make a nation a nation have been subsumed: currency, borders, even to some degree, military action. One means of resistance for France is to protect, at all costs, what makes French people French at a time when its cultural traditions seem under threat — both from the top, with the economic necessity of the European Union, and from the bottom, with the waves of immigrants, and the foulards in the schools. In an increasingly existential crisis, France is attempting to assimilate by force: no foulards, expel radical imams, speak French not Arabic, learn the Marseillaise. But the more they win, the more they lose.

“There has to be some nurturing otherwise people feel like second class citizens, when they’re only invited to speak out against terrorism but say nothing else,” says Boubekeur. “They will say: ‘I have other opinions, other voices and I have the right to express opinions that aren’t loyal to France if I want to do so.’ When you can’t speak to the mainstream, you withdraw from the mainstream.” Culture wars have no winners.

Source: France’s Real Crisis Is About More Than Just Refugees | TIME

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

There’s ‘diversity,’ then there’s ‘super-diversity,’ Burnaby style

2015/11/02 Leave a comment

Good in-depth article on diversity in British Columbia:

One of the most authentic ways to measure the intensity of ethnic diversity is to test the chances that two people, chosen at random from a certain area, will be of a different ethnic background.

Which is exactly what Sun data journalist Chad Skelton did: He’s given each part of Metro Vancouver a “diversity index.”

Burnaby prevails. There is a 73 per cent chance two randomly chosen people from Burnaby will be of a different ethnicity.

In Richmond, the chances of two random people being of a different ethnicity goes down to 68 per cent, which is the same diversity index rate for the city of Vancouver.

Sprawling Surrey, with its strong South Asian population, comes in next on Metro Vancouver’s diversity index, at 67 per cent. Coquitlam’s rate is 64 per cent. New Westminster comes in at 55 per cent on the diversity index. North and West Vancouver, Port Moody, Delta and Port Coquitlam all settle in at about 48 per cent.

Even though some people think of Richmond as the most “diverse” city in Canada because its population is 62 per cent foreign-born, its diversity index is not as intense as that of Burnaby because Richmond is dominated by two major ethnic groups, Chinese and whites.

Burnaby is different. It has a wide range of ethnic groups. And they’re spread more evenly, with none dominating.

While Burnaby has a significant number of whites and ethnic Chinese, it also contains solid portions of Filipinos, South Asians (mostly Indians and Pakistanis), South Koreans, West Asians (mostly Iranians), followed by smaller groups of Vietnamese, Malaysians, Africans, Japanese, Latin Americans and Arabs.

The Sun’s diversity index shows Burnaby has two of the five most intensely diverse neighbourhoods in Metro Vancouver.

In the GTA, Mississauga would be the closest equivalent in terms of the greater mix of groups compared to Markham (largely Chinese Canadian) and Brampton (largely Indo-Canadian).

Source: There’s ‘diversity,’ then there’s ‘super-diversity,’ Burnaby style

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Helping immigrant nurses a ‘win-win’ for Canada: Study

2015/11/02 Leave a comment

An example where more effective foreign credential recognition and related bridging programs can help:

As baby boomers age, Canada faces a looming health-care crunch that will be exacerbated by a projected shortage of tens of thousands of nurses.

That makes it more important than ever for Canada to help foreign-trained nurses qualify to practice here, according to a Conference Board of Canada study.

Each dollar invested by Ottawa and provincial governments in helping registered nurses acquire Canadian licences generates $9 in future income tax revenue — a nine-fold return, according to the study — not to mention their contributions to the care of the country’s rapidly aging population.

With seniors outnumbering children for the first time ever, according to new Statistics Canada figures, and a projected shortage of 60,000 nurses by 2022, investing in bridging programs makes immense sense, experts say.

“This is a win-win for Canada and the internationally educated nurses (IEN),” said Michael Bloom, the conference board’s vice-president in charge of industry and business strategy. “The concept of investing in career bridging programs is good and sound. It yields returns.”

According to the study, more than half of immigrants with health professional backgrounds have trouble getting their foreign credentials recognized in Canada, compared to just 40 per cent in other regulated professions.

In 2011, only 54 per cent of foreign-born and educated nurses had a job that matched their education in Ontario, with unemployment rates among foreign-trained registered nurses at 6 per cent and 8.3 per cent among registered practical nurses.

Source: Helping immigrant nurses a ‘win-win’ for Canada: Study | Toronto Star

Filed under Immigration, Integration Tagged with , ,

Why Are Immigrants More Likely to Concentrate in Certain Industries? – The Atlantic

2015/10/07 Leave a comment

Interesting case studies of the importance and impact of bonding capital within immigrant communities (enclaves) and link to occupations:

In the U.S. one might notice a curious concentration when it comes to jobs—certain ethnicities dominate certain industries. Greek immigrants are more likely to run restaurants than immigrants from other countries, and Koreans more likely to run dry-cleaning shops. Yemeni immigrants are 75 times more likely than immigrants of other ethnicities to own grocery stores, and Gujarati-speaking Indians are 108 times more likely to run motels.

Specialization among ethnic minorities, immigrant or not, isn’t new: It’s happened with Jewish merchants during Medieval times and with the Chinese in the laundry industry in 1920s California. Why does it happen so often? A recent report from the National Bureau of Economic Research attempts to explain this phenomenon.

William R. Kerr and Martin Mandorff, the paper’s authors, found that the social insulation of immigrant communities plays a big role in creating business pipelines into industries where previous generations have already found success. The trend is most common among groups that have tight-knit networks and in industries that lend themselves to self-employment. A variable that decreases the likelihood of ethnic concentration is when an job requires extensive licensing, certification, or education within the U.S, since many immigrants will have difficulty getting those bonafides.

The authors find that the way that immigrants socialize is especially relevant to the heavy concentration of immigrant-owned businesses in very specific industries. Immigrants often cluster, both geographically and socially, with those who are similar to them. Many arrive and stay with family or friends, and still others choose to move to a community with familiar customs and language. Staying within the same communities—and marrying within them—is most common among groups that are small and less assimilated.

This proximity can have important ramifications when it comes to how and where these groups find employment. Socializing—everything from religious to recreational activities—involves hanging out with people from a similar country or region. This can result in a transfer of jobs and skills to new immigrants that make them more likely to continue working in a certain industry, be it driving a taxi or cooking in a restaurant.

And the effects of that can multiply when played off the predisposition toward entrepreneurship that exists among specific immigrant groups. For instance, 45 percent of Korean men are self-employed compared to 15 percent of the male immigrant population overall. This tendency toward self-employment means that not only are owners are willing and able to hire fellow immigrants for their businesses, but also that there’s the ability to create an intergenerational trajectory, where owners are able to pass their business down to their children and grandchildren, continuing the job-clustering effect.

These same social connections can provide a sort of informal mentorship. In their research, the economists found that in 17 out of 25 case studies of immigrant groups, the industries where ethnic groups displayed the greatest concentration of entrepreneurship were also the industries where they displayed the greatest concentration of overall employment. That’s because the clustering around specific industries isn’t just helpful for finding work—it’s helpful for learning how to buy and run your own business as well. The relationships forged in these tight knit communities are especially helpful for existing and aspiring entrepreneurs, who can pick up important tips on starting and maintaining a business from those in the community who have navigated challenges like taxes, startup capital, and inspections. And when it comes to self employment, such advice and support is critical, and may give some groups a huge advantage.

Source: Why Are Immigrants More Likely to Concentrate in Certain Industries? – The Atlantic

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Citizenship leads immigrants to integrate, not the other way around: Swiss Study

2015/10/07 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of Swiss citizenship and the link to political integration:

When they surveyed these immigrants a decade later, they found that those whose applications were only just approved had significantly higher political integration than those who had only just failed. These people had increased political knowledge, were more likely to feel that they had a political voice, and were more likely to participate in politics through actions like voting, contacting politicians, or donating to political parties. This was consistent even for immigrants from different countries.

Because the survey was conducted in 2011-2014, which was a decade or more since the last citizenship votes in Switzerland, the researchers suggest that the results are picking up on genuine, long-term changes. It’s possible that immigrants might have a spike in their political participation after a successful application, but a temporary change is unlikely to have continued for a decade or more, they argue.

One important question to consider is whether the process in Switzerland has some characteristics that are likely to be different from other countries. For instance, perhaps something about gaining citizenship as a result of a vote by other citizens is really the catalyst for political participation rather than the citizenship itself. It’s possible that an immigrant who receives a positive vote on such a personally important matter might place more trust in the system and engage with it more than an immigrant who receives a negative vote.

Another potential objection to this study is that the researchers are wrong to assume that borderline cases are really all that similar. For the experiment to work, it has to be assumed that immigrants whose applications just failed by a hair’s breadth, and those who just passed, are the same in all important respects. When the researchers looked at characteristics like education levels, country of origin, or how long they’d lived in Switzerland, they did look the same. However, it could be the case that there were important details the researchers missed that actually made all the difference in political integration.

Given that social and political integration of immigrants is often something that policies explicitly aim to encourage, this is important information. Although a natural experiment like this would be difficult to find in other countries, future research will need to confirm whether the same effect seems to be consistent in different countries with different immigration procedures.

Source: Citizenship leads immigrants to integrate, not the other way around | Ars Technica

Filed under Citizenship, Integration Tagged with

Russell Smith: Asylum seekers are the stars of this Canadian arts initiative

2015/09/28 Leave a comment

MamalianInteresting initiative to encourage understanding and integration, using the arts:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how art has been interpreting the European refugee crisis. I was reminded after that of a Canadian artistic initiative currently happening in Germany that has direct contact with recent migrants. It is the work of the Toronto-originating theatre/social planning group called Mammalian Diving Reflex, directed by its creator, Darren O’Donnell.

The goal of this company is not to write plays and to put them on a stage, but to create social events that bring people together. They claim they aim to “trigger generosity and equity.” They do wacky things like getting children to give adults haircuts, but also deeply serious things like their current work in a small town in Germany, Hemsbach, near Mannheim.

There they have just finished a lengthy project centred around a reception centre for recent immigrants, designed to bring the newcomers and the German-born townspeople together, in an effort to find jobs for the immigrants.

O’Donnell himself stayed in the immigrant dormitory, with his co-worker Chozin Tenzin (also from Toronto), in a couple of beds that had been left vacant when some of the inmates were taken away by police. The town has about 80 recent asylum seekers staying in the holding centre, from everywhere from the Balkans to India. He then organized goofy events such as a cooking contest, for the refugees and for the German-born, in which participants were forced to use difficult ingredients from all over the world in their dishes.

The short-term goal was to facilitate interaction and understanding; the long-term goal is to leave a system of similar events in place, to continue after O’Donnell’s company leaves. (He calls this system the Hemsbach Protocol.)

O’Donnell likes in particular to work with teenagers, which he has been doing in the Ruhr region of Germany since 2013. It is only coincidentally that his work there became entangled with the refugee influx to Germany. His last project there, part of the Ruhrtriennale festival, near Dusseldorf, was called “Millionen! Millionen!” – a line from the Romantic poet Schiller’s Ode to Joy. (Yes, the one Beethoven used in his Ninth Symphony.) That poem is the European Union’s anthem and mantra, particularly for its now painfully relevant line, “Be embraced, you millions.”

The project was, like most of Mammalian Diving Reflex’s things, hard to define – social outing, urban planning, performance. In collaboration with a German theatre collective called Mit Ohne Alles, they got a bunch of teenagers of diverse immigrant backgrounds to go camping for a weekend, then take careful note of each interaction. Some talked deeply, some fell in love.

The performance, crafted afterwards, was a kind of barely-scripted play in which the teenagers recreated, for an audience, some of the interactions that had taken place over the weekend, with large images projected and everyone who had participated on the stage at once. The theme was “embracing.” Now that newer immigrants from the war-torn Middle East and Africa are showing up, such forced embracings will have a different edge and a different echo.

In theatre terms, this kind of practice is a kind of experimentalism called “post-dramatic,” an idea of the German critic Hans-Thies Lehmann. The primary intellectual influence on O’Donnell is the work of Nicolas Bourriaud, the art curator who wrote about “relational aesthetics,” the theory that stresses an artist’s role as catalyst for social interaction rather than centre of attention.

Source: Russell Smith: Asylum seekers are the stars of this Canadian arts initiative – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

ICYMI: Whose Neighborhood Is It? – The New York Times

2015/09/18 Leave a comment

Tom Edsall on some of the integration challenges in the US and the progress that has been made:

These suburban Detroit communities provide a case study in what has come to be called the “tipping point,” the point at which whites begin to leave a residential locale en masse as African-Americans or other minorities move in.

This phenomenon puzzled Thomas Schelling, a professor emeritus of economics at Harvard and a Nobel Laureate, who was struck by the lack of stable integrated communities. In 1971, he began work on a mathematical theory to explain the prevalence of racial segregation in a paper titled “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” published in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology.

Schelling’s famous thesis has been carefully summarized by Junfu Zhang, an economist at Clark University. Zhang writes:

Schelling’s most striking finding is that moderate preferences for same-color neighbors at the individual level can be amplified into complete residential segregation at the macro level. For example, if every agent requires at least half of her neighbors to be of the same color―a preference far from extreme―the final outcome, after a series of moves, is almost always complete segregation.
In other words, residential segregation can emerge even if initial preferences are very slight.

According to Schelling, Zhang writes,

“in an all-white neighborhood, some residents may be willing to tolerate a maximum of 5 percent black neighbors; others may tolerate 10 percent, 20 percent, and so on.

The ones with the lowest tolerance level will move out if the proportion of black residents exceeds 5 percent. If only blacks move in to fill the vacancies after the whites move out, then the proportion of blacks in the neighborhood may reach a level high enough to trigger the move-out of the next group of whites who are only slightly more tolerant than the early movers. This process may continue and eventually result in an all-black neighborhood.

Similarly, an all-black neighborhood may be tipped into an all-white neighborhood, and a mixed-race neighborhood can be tipped into a highly segregated one, depending on the tolerance.”

In the years since 1971, scholars have followed up on the Schelling argument with empirical studies.

Residential and public school integration remain an immense challenge. Affordable housing, one piece of the integrative process, got a boost from a favorable Supreme Court decision in June, Texas Department of Housing, that further empowers plaintiffs in housing discrimination cases. A second boost came from new HUD regulations issued in July requiring local governments “to take significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities.”

Government action has often been resisted but, over time, it has pulled millions of blacks into the mainstream of American life. From 1940 to 2014, the percentage of African-Americans ages 25 to 29 with high school degrees rose from 6.9 percent to 91.9 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of blacks with college degrees grew from 1.4 percent to 22.4 percent. From 1963 (a year before enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to 2015, the percentage of blacks employed in management, professional and related occupations more than tripled, from 8.7 percent to 29.5 percent.

Although progress toward racial and ethnic integration has been sporadic – frequently one step forward, two steps back – credible progress has been made over the last 75 years. We have not come to the end of the story, but there are grounds for optimism.

Source: Whose Neighborhood Is It? – The New York Times

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Financement supprimé: la Fédération canado-arabe perd en appel | National

2015/08/20 Leave a comment

And so it ends (as part of the Government’s defence, I had to submit an affidavit as part of the discovery process):

La Cour d’appel fédérale a rejeté la tentative de la Fédération canado-arabe de faire renverser une décision par laquelle son financement avait été supprimé en raison d’allégations voulant que le groupe soutienne les actions d’organisations terroristes.

Dans sa décision, la Cour d’appel a dit que la fédération ne pouvait réclamer «un devoir d’équité procédurale» de l’ancien ministre de l’Immigration Jason Kenney.

Le banc de trois juges a unanimement confirmé la décision de la Cour fédérale, à l’effet que M. Kenney avait suivi le protocole en décidant de ne pas renouveler le financement d’un programme d’apprentissage de langues pour les immigrants en 2009-2010.

Citoyenneté et Immigration a déclaré à la fédération en mars 2009 que certaines déclarations faites par ses responsables semblaient être antisémites et soutenir des groupes terroristes.

La lettre du ministère affirme que cela soulevait de sérieuses préoccupations au sujet de l’intégrité de la fédération et que cela avait miné la confiance du gouvernement envers l’organisme en tant que partenaire approprié pour offrir des services aux nouveaux arrivants.

La fédération avait plaidé en Cour fédérale que les déclarations en question avaient été faites par des personnes qui ne représentaient pas officiellement l’organisation et qu’elle ne les avait pas approuvées.

via Financement supprimé: la Fédération canado-arabe perd en appel | National.

Filed under Integration Tagged with ,

Statscan explains why private school students perform better

2015/04/02 Leave a comment

Not terribly surprising that socio-economic status and education-levels account for most of better performance of private schools but substantiated by the data:

The Statscan report, released Tuesday, says the reason for the higher performance of private school students is their socio-economic status, which includes a higher family income and higher-educated parents.

The study followed more than 7,142 students starting at the age of 15, looking at their scores on standardized tests and their completed educational qualifications by the age of 23.

“No differences in outcomes were attributable to school resources and practices,” the report concludes.

Marc Frenette, one of the two researchers who conducted the study, said the school resources analyzed include student-to-teacher ratio, computer resources available, teacher qualifications and number of teachers available to tutor students.

The study did not look at classroom-based factors, including teaching style, classroom lessons or extracurricular activities offered to students, Mr. Frenette said. It also did not consider the curriculum the schools teach.

Schools from Atlantic Canada were excluded because of a low number of private high schools in those provinces, Mr. Frenette said.

The higher socio-economic status of private school students and their peers accounts for half of the difference in the average score of standardized tests between private and public school students and “two-thirds of the difference in university graduation rates” between the two groups of students, according to the report.

Jim Power, principal of Upper Canada College, an all-boys private school in Toronto, said the selection process that private schools undertake means that their students are more motivated.

“Private schools, by definition, are selective. We’re fortunate. We take one out of three students who apply,” Mr. Power said.

Statscan explains why private school students perform better – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Integration Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →