Multiculturalism Is Not Dead

2015/02/02 Leave a comment

Rumours of the death of multiculturalism and related policies are exaggerated according to this recent European study:

Countries will create formal policies for citizenship and declare the issue resolved, but that does not mean citizenship is really possible. The authors found that, even in countries such as Denmark and Germany where multiculturalism was never formally adopted, some public policies were being developed to recognize minority communities and facilitate their participation in the labor market, educational systems and other key social sectors at local and national levels.  Europeans love to insist that Americans should just give amnesty to people who got into the United States illegally but they won’t even give citizenship to their legal residents.

In countries where some multiculturalism has formally been adopted, such as the UK and the Netherlands, the picture was more mixed but showed that newer approaches, such as civic integration – including citizenship education, naturalization ceremonies and language classes – also built on and developed multiculturalism rather than erasing it. National identities have been remade in light of it – players of Indian descent can even get on the British cricket team now.

Dr. Nasar Meer, a Reader in Comparative Social Policy and Citizenship at the University of Strathclyde, lead author of the paper, said, “As European societies have become more diverse, the task of developing an inclusive citizenship has become increasingly important. In recent years, however, there has been a backlash against multiculturalism as path to achieving this.

“The reasons for this include the way that, in some countries, multiculturalism is seen to have facilitated social fragmentation and entrenched social divisions, while for others, it has distracted attention away from socio-economic disparities or encouraged a moral hesitancy amongst ‘native’ populations. Some have even blamed it for incidents of international terrorism.”

Dr. Daniel Faas, of Trinity College Dublin’s Department of Sociology, a co-author of the research, said, “Legislations have become more inclusive of diversity, and the large anti-far right demonstrations highlight the solidarity with migrants, but also show that multiculturalism is a fragile concept there.”

Meer added, “Our study clearly shows that, where there have been advances in policies of multiculturalism, these have not been repealed uniformly, or on occasion not at all, but may equally have been supplemented by being ‘balanced out’ in, or thickened by, civic integrationist approaches.”

Reinforces the Kymlicka analysis of the ongoing multicultural integration policies being implemented.

Multiculturalism Is Not Dead.

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France: «une politique du peuplement» contre les ghettos

2015/01/24 Leave a comment

Direct words by French PM Valls on the lack of integration (not no-go-zones, but nevertheless highly problematic no (or limited) public service zones):

Le premier ministre a également justifié sa dénonciation deux jours plus tôt d’un «apartheid territorial, social, ethnique» qui se serait «imposé» en France: «L’erreur, la faute, c’est de ne pas avoir le courage de désigner cette situation, peu importe les mots».

Dix ans après les émeutes urbaines de 2005, le soutien dans certaines banlieues aux trois jihadistes français auteurs des attentats qui ont fait 17 morts du 7 au 9 janvier à Paris, a rappelé à la France la désespérance de ses quartiers populaires paupérisés.

Mais le chef du gouvernement socialiste, ovationné debout pour sa fermeté face à la menace terroriste dans une scène historique d’unanimité à l’Assemblée nationale le 13 janvier, essuie désormais les foudres de l’opposition de droite.

«Comparer la République à l’apartheid est une faute», a accusé mercredi soir l’ancien président Nicolas Sarkozy, patron du parti conservateur UMP. D’autres élus de son camp ont dénoncé une «insulte» au pays.

«Il ne faut pas penser à je ne sais quelle échéance», a rétorqué jeudi Manuel Valls, dans une pique à l’ambition de l’ex-chef de l’État (2007-2012) de regagner l’Élysée à la prochaine présidentielle de 2017.

Le premier ministre a reproché à l’ex-chef d’État de vouloir «briser l’esprit du 11 janvier», date de la marche monstre à Paris contre le terrorisme. «Moi, j’ai utilisé toujours les mêmes mots depuis dix ans, parce qu’ils disent la réalité», a-t-il ajouté.

«Ne plus faire semblant»

Longtemps élu d’Evry, banlieue populaire au sud de Paris, Manuel Valls avait déclenché une vive polémique en 2009 lorsque, filmé dans une brocante de la ville, il avait demandé en souriant qu’on y ajoute «quelques blancs, quelques white, quelques blancos».

«Arrêtons la langue de bois, arrêtons le politiquement correct, assumons la réalité», s’était-il défendu à l’époque en revendiquant déjà vouloir «casser» les «ghettos», «émanciper ces quartiers qui méritent de représenter demain l’avenir de ce pays».

Classé à la droite du Parti socialiste au pouvoir, le premier ministre a reçu jeudi le soutien d’un élu de banlieue parisienne issu de la gauche du parti Razzy Hamadi, souvent critique à son égard. Selon lui, M. Valls a employé le «mot fort» d’apartheid «parce que la situation est forte».

«Ca veut dire qu’il y a une ségrégation, ça veut dire qu’il y a une séparation, ça veut dire qu’il y a des quartiers où il n’y a pas la culture, où il n’y a pas le service public, plus la police (…) On ne peut plus faire semblant de ne pas voir le problème», a-t-il résumé.

France: «une politique du peuplement» contre les ghettos | Bertrand PINON, Marianne BARRIAUX | Europe.

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Minister Alexander helped bureaucrats avoid giving full details on visa wait times | Toronto Star

2015/01/12 1 Comment

While there is some validity to the concerns regarding officials about the workload, one has to question whether or not CIC’s computer systems cannot generate these kinds of reports relatively easily (it’s not as if officers are looking at the 16 million records individually, they are using the CIC databases to extract the information):

The emails have officials describing the “enormity of the request,” estimating it would involve some 16 million records.

The emails also say the team tasked with crunching these numbers had to keep putting it aside to work on “high-priority requests to respond to public discussion and interdepartmental analysis around the (temporary foreign workers) file.”

Relief came when an official wrote on May 2: “You can hold this work — MINO (minister’s office) has come back to advise ADMO (office of the assistant deputy minister for operations) that we will use the same response we provided to Q-359.”

That was an order paper question about processing times submitted by Liberal immigration critic John McCallum, which was almost identical to the part of the question from Blanchette-Lamothe officials were scrambling to answer in time.

The response Alexander provided in the Commons last May 12 — there was no accompanying paperwork — is nearly verbatim to the response Blanchette-Lamothe received in writing two days later, although it also refers to “an excessive number of taxpayer-funded man-hours.”

A spokesman for Alexander said that was appropriate.

“It was at the advice of the department that we took the chosen approach. The questions posed by both Mr. McCallum and Ms. Blanchette-Lamothe were detailed, multi-part questions which could not be answered within the prescribed time frame. The answer to this (order paper question) reflects the advice of (Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s) professional, non-partisan public servants,” Kevin Menard wrote in an emailed statement Friday.

Chris Alexander helped bureaucrats avoid giving full details on visa wait times | Toronto Star.

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Did Sweden Opening Its Borders Backfire?

2014/12/10 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis by a number of commentators on Sweden’s integration and political challenges in accepting so many refugees:

For much of modern Scandinavian history, immigration was rare. Those who did move to Stockholm or Oslo came from neighboring or other European countries—places with relatively similar cultural habits and understandings. Prior to the 1980s, for instance, Swedes often viewed the word “immigrant” as meaning Finns who had left the Soviet Union. …

In recent decades, Sweden has seen a large influx of immigrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and other non-Western countries. The Norface Research Programme on Migration finds that the children of uneducated, non-Western parents have considerably less success in school than their native counterparts in Sweden (and Denmark); once again, the gap is wider than that between native and non-Western immigrant students in the United States.

Worse, and unlike in the United States, things don’t improve over generations. Many immigrants have arrived too recently to trace their children’s trajectory, but the most recent poverty rates for children with a Turkish background born in Sweden are three times higher than they are for native children. Unemployment and poverty are much higher in the immigrant group.

“Poverty in Sweden has taken on an ethnic dimension,” Björn Halleröd, a sociology professor at the University of Gothenburg, told the Local, an English-language Swedish newspaper. Sweden remains egalitarian by international standards, but inequality grew by a third between 1985 and the late 2000s—faster than in any other OECD country.

Did Sweden Opening Its Borders Backfire? « The Dish.

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Reasons To Hope On Race – More residential mixing and marriage

2014/12/03 Leave a comment

PrintInteresting data and situating Ferguson in a broader context:

William H. Frey marks the slow, steady decline of segregation:

The average white resident, for example, lives in a far less diverse neighborhood—one that is more than three-quarters white—than residents of any other group. Nonetheless, the average white person today lives in a neighborhood that includes more minorities than was the case in 1980, when such neighborhoods were nearly 90 percent white. Moreover, the average member of each of the nation’s major minority groups lives in a neighborhood that is at least one-third white, and in the case of Asians, nearly one-half white.

He expects the continuation of these trends:

Population shifts that are bringing Hispanics and Asians to previously whiter New Sun Belt and Heartland regions will most certainly continue to alter the neighborhood experiences of these groups by bringing them into more contact with whites. The nation’s blacks are moving onto a path that more closely follows that of other racial minorities and immigrant groups as more blacks move to more suburban and integrated communities. The broader migration patterns are moving in the direction of greater neighborhood racial integration, even if segregation is far from being eliminated.

Reasons To Hope On Race « The Dish.

The following chart on mixed marriages (the equivalent Canadian figures include common law relationships, with the total being 4.6 percent):

Print

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Why immigrant kids become homeless: study finds cultural clash with parents is the top reason

2014/11/27 Leave a comment

Interesting study:

One-third or 65,000 of Canada’s homeless population are youths, and of those, nearly one-quarter were born outside Canada. The study’s definition of homelessness include those staying outside, staying in a shelter or transitional housing, having no fixed address, “couch-surfing” or staying at a friend’s or family’s home.

“Age, gender, race and sexual orientation are among the multitude of factors that shape a young person’s experience of and pathway into homelessness,” says the report, Hidden in Our Midst: Homeless Newcomer Youth in Toronto.

“For newcomer youth, however, it is the juncture of these factors, in addition to the presence of language and cultural barriers, lack of status, personal ties and history in Canada that uniquely situate them amongst the most vulnerable of homeless youth.”

Through partnerships with community groups, researchers interviewed 74 homeless immigrant youth in Toronto — 45 per cent women, 55 per cent men — and surveyed service providers to get a better picture of their needs and support available.

Among the sample of participants, 36 per cent of the youth were from the Caribbean, followed by Africa 27 per cent, the Middle East 10 per cent and South America 9 per cent.

More than half were permanent residents, with 37 per cent being Canadian citizens, 27 per cent somewhere in the asylum process and 7 per cent here on visitor or student visas. Many started becoming homeless at age 17, and the average length of homelessness was 30 months.

More than a quarter of the youth reported previous experience of trauma, such as war and political unrest in their country of origin, while 45 per cent said they had suffered physical abuse and one-third sexual abuse.

Why immigrant kids become homeless: study finds cultural clash with parents is the top reason | Toronto Star.

And the follow-on piece:

Co-ordinated services urged to help young homeless immigrants

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Imagining the Settlement Agency of the Future

2014/11/15 Leave a comment

Interesting piece in New Canadian Media by Meyer Burnstein and Carl Nicholson on future models for settlement agencies:

Six potential business areas have been identified for the pilot studies. These include:

  1. Concierge service for employers, helping them to navigate the Express Entry system for processing skilled immigrants;

  2. Pre-arrival services for prospective immigrants helping them to facilitate their labour market insertion and settlement in Canada.

  3. Services aimed at public and private institutions implicated in refugee resettlement but lacking specialized knowledge, and assistance to private sponsorship groups to help with organization, fund raising and preparation;

  4. Support for immigrant entrepreneurs and agencies interested in economic development as well as succession planning for SME’s in smaller centres and remote areas;

  5. Services for international students and educational institutions to boost recruitment and student retention, especially in smaller centres;

  6. Services directed to businesses that recruit highly skilled temporary workers.

Imagining the Agency of the Future – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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Ottawa to cap number of foreign caregivers in Canada

2014/11/01 Leave a comment

Whenever the Government makes a Friday afternoon announcement, it suggests that does not believe that it has broad popular support for the policy of program change.

And when it delays announcing part of the package (in this case, pathway to permanent residency), it further suggests that they want to test the waters:

“Caregivers matter to Canada and have made enormous contributions to Canada’s economy, to our economic success, to the success of the Canadian families,” Alexander told a new conference about Canada’s 2015 immigration plan.

“What do these improvements mean to caregivers? They mean, first and foremost, faster processing, faster family reunification, less time away from loved ones . . . . Caregivers will have more pathways toward permanent residency and better tools to achieve success in Canadian labour market.”

According to a press release, the removal of the live-in requirement is expected to result in greater opportunities for Canadians in caregiver occupations and an increase in wages for caregivers hired from abroad if employers demonstrate that there are no Canadians available for the job.

Liza Draman of the Caregivers Action Centre said the Toronto advocacy group’s 1,000-plus members are concerned about what is to come on Nov. 30 when Alexander is scheduled to announce further changes affecting the path to permanent residency for foreign caregivers.

“The only thing that is good about Friday’s announcement is the end to the live-in requirement,” said Draman, a former live-in caregiver from the Philippines. “If the minister is serious about improving the condition for the caregivers, he should grant them status upon arrival.”

Alexander said the department will issue permanent resident status to 30,000 eligible caregivers in 2015 in an attempt to reduce the backlog.

The old live-in caregiver program will be replaced by two new streams — child-care providers and caregivers for those with high medical needs. Both new programs will each take in 2,750 applications a year.

Ethel Tungohan, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta who studies temporary foreign workers, said she is anxious to find out the government’s plan for the nannies’ access to permanent residency.

“What’s going to happen after the 30,000 caregivers are granted permanent status next year?” Tungohan asked. “That’s a big question.”

Will be interesting to watch how commentary in the broader and the Filipino community develops following this phase 1 announcement.

Ottawa to cap number of foreign caregivers in Canada | Toronto Star.

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Literacy Class Visited by Manitoba Minister of Multiculturalism and Literacy

2014/10/21 Leave a comment

Practical illustration of settlement services and general literacy training in Manitoba:

[Minister of Multiculturalism and Literacy, Flor] Marcelino continues to be inspired by all the success stories that come out of the English and Literacy classes.

“We have 85 or so robust, working, active learning and literacy centres that are truly, truly helping the communities where ever they are. They have transformed so many people’s lives and have opened many doors and offered people many opportunities. And for that were very thankful to all the teachers and administrators and also the students who believe in themselves and in pursuing goals for themselves and their families – and the results are encouraging, amazing and inspiring!”

Marcelino will finish visiting the centres in the Pembina Valley and the South Eastman, then the Winnipeg area in December or January. She promises to work hard in obtaining more support for literacy and learning centres during her term.

Executive Director of South Eastman English and Literacy Services, Jireh Saladaga-Medina, says this non-profit, charitable organization provides free classes for Canadian citizens and landed immigrant adults improve their English speaking, listening, reading and writing skills, as well as free literacy classes for those who want to upgrade their reading, writing, math and basic computer skills. Free child care is provided. To contact Jireh at South Eastman English and Literacy Services, call 204-326-4225.

Eastman Immigrant Services helps newcomers to settle in Manitoba. Services include: reception and orientation, employment counselling and special events. For more information on settlement services phone 204-346-6609.

Literacy Class Visited by Minister of Multiculturalism and Literacy – Local News – Local News – SteinbachOnline.com.

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Don’t make the mistake of migrating to Canada, it’s a fool’s paradise – Newseastwest: Indian diaspora, Bollywood

2014/10/20 4 Comments

A bad experience, not unique. But balanced against better opportunities for one’s children is likely the calculation of many:

My advice to people who are itching to migrate to Canada to give a better future to their children is this: Think hard before you take any decision and don’t fool yourself by painting a rosy picture in your head. You may end up working in factories, call centers, security agencies, Tim Horton’s or packing factories. You will lose your savings. Your will lose your morale and self-esteem. Tensions will destroy your marital and family life. Finally, if you are lucky enough, you may get an entry-level job and then pay someone else’s mortgage while living in their basement as you dream of buying your own little nest.

And buying your little nest in a hurry with your saved money could be your worst mistake, for God forbid if you are laid off, as it happened to my dear friend, who will pay the mortgage? Your house dream will collapse and you will be buried under it.

And if you do get a job – which most probably you won’t enjoy doing, but you will do it anyways to survive and pay the mortgage – you will end up wasting the prime of your life paying back the mortgage. It is not worth it, believe me.

Our struggle for survival continues to this day. We don’t know when we will wind up this fruitless venture and head back to India. This is the story of many immigrants to Canada.

Don’t make the mistake of migrating to Canada, it’s a fool’s paradise – Newseastwest: Indian diaspora, Bollywood.

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