Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Of note and concern:

It’s a good thing that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is making an effort to reassure India’s diplomats in Canada that her government is taking the latest bloodcurdling threats against them seriously. A good thing, because Canada’s track record on keeping a lid on Khalistani extremism is abysmal, and the Indian government has little reason to trust Canada’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to do their jobs.

The latest threat comes in the form of a pro-Khalistan “Sikhs for Justice” poster advertising an upcoming rally at India’s Toronto consulate featuring photographs of Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and Toronto Consul General Apoorva Srivastava. The poster describes Verma and Srivastava as the “killers” of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia.

The poster comes only a few weeks after Canadian diplomats in India were scrambling with earnest disavowals following a parade in Brampton, Ont., that featured a float with mannequins in a grotesque replication of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.

The president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C., Nijjar was gunned down in the temple’s parking lot on June 18. He was closely associated with the Sikhs for Justice group, which has been organizing an international “referendum” on Sikh independence in an independent Khalistan (“land of the pure”) carved out of India’s Punjab state.

While Nijjar’s friends and associates deny his alleged terrorist affinities and claim CSIS had warned him to be careful, Indian police authorities say Nijjar led a group called the Khalistan Tiger Force and was a key figure in Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), the terror-listed entity in Canada that carried out the bombing of an Air India jetliner that fell into the sea off the coast of Ireland in 1985, killing all 329 on board. That atrocity was plotted and planned in Canada under the noses of the RCMP and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.

Nijjar was wanted in India on a variety of criminal charges going back to the bombing of a Hindu temple in the Punjabi city of Patiala in 2010. Punjab police had also issued an arrest warrant for Nijjar on dubious charges that he was plotting the murder of religious leaders, and on the unlikely claim that he was organizing a training camp for Khalistani militants in a rural area near Mission, B.C.

While Punjab’s police authorities are notoriously paranoid about the Khalistani movement, which is almost entirely a phenomenon of diaspora Sikh communities — especially in Canada — Indian authorities have good reason to be concerned about Canada’s determination to keep a lid on a recent upsurge in Khalistani violence.

Khalistani terrorism literally exploded onto the scene in India in the early 1980s, with Canada serving as haven for the separatist movement’s government-in-exile. Babbar Khalsa was perhaps the most bloodthirsty terror group that had holed up in the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar, Sikhism’s Vatican. The organization was commanded by the Air India atrocity mastermind Talwinder Singh Parmar from his home in Burnaby, B.C.

The Khalistani movement has undergone a revival in recent years, with Canada again providing a haven for several key figures wanted on terror-related charges in India. On Monday, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar drew attention to the Sikhs for Justice “Killers” poster that singled out Indian diplomats in Canada. “We have requested our partner countries like Canada, U.S., U.K. and Australia where sometimes Khalistani activities happen, not to give space to the Khalistanis. Because their radical, extremist thinking is neither good for us nor them nor our relations.”

Similar posters identifying Indian diplomats in the style of a “wanted” poster and describing Nijjar as a shaheed jathedar (martyred commander) have also turned up in San Francisco and Australia. Last Sunday, a fire was set outside India’s consular offices in San Francisco in an incident condemned by the U.S. State Department on Monday.

In March, during a severe clampdown on separatist agitation in Punjab, Indian embassies were the sites of sometimes violent protests in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Ottawa. The San Francisco consulate was subjected to an arson attack. The fence of the High Commission in London was scaled and an Indian flag was ripped down. In Washington, a journalist was allegedly assaulted, and in Ottawa, “grenades” that turned out to be just smoke bombs were thrown at the High Commission.

Surrey RCMP say they are exploring all leads related to Nijjar’s murder, which took the shape of a typical Surrey gangland hit job — two heavy-set masked men were spotted fleeing the scene and are believed to have absconded in a nearby getaway car. The local Integrated Homicide Investigation Team would not say whether a stolen car found torched a few kilometres away was part of the investigation, but it would be consistent with gangland murders in Metro Vancouver.

Nijjar was known to have been feuding with the former Khalistani militant Ripudaman Singh Malik, the multimillionaire implicated in Babbar Khalsa’s 1985 Air India bombing who was murdered in a hit job in July last year. Malik, who was acquitted on Air India charges, had made his peace with the Indian government and had his name removed from India’s visa blacklist as a result. Malik went on to express support for India’s authoritarian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is wildly unpopular among India’s Sikhs and has become notorious for his civil rights abuses and close relationships with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

The two men charged with first-degree murder in Malik’s shooting have lengthy criminal records and were well known to police agencies keeping tabs on Metro Vancouver’s organized-crime underworld.

While Nijjar’s murder exhibits fairly routine signs of a revenge killing, New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, who has publicly indulged in a conspiracy theory proposing an Indian intelligence-agency plot behind the Air India bombing, has asked Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to look into the case in light of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser’s identification of India as a source of foreign interference in Canada.

This is the sort of thing that gives the Indian government cause to distrust Ottawa’s seriousness in coming to terms with threats to India’s security that come from Canada. As recently as 2018, the convicted former Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Singh Atwal showed up in Trudeau’s entourage in the prime minister’s tour of India, which had already become a public-relations disaster owing to Trudeau’s weird wardrobe choices, and Modi snubbing him for several days before agreeing to meet with him.

The RCMP later conceded that Atwal’s background should have been brought to the prime minister’s attention. Atwal was convicted for his role as the triggerman in the attempted assassination of a visiting Punjabi cabinet minister on a Vancouver Island backroad in 1986. When the controversy blew up, Trudeau’s national security adviser at the time, Daniel Jean, insinuated that the whole affair had been orchestrated by India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.

Maybe Mélanie Joly’s sternly reassuring words about Canada’s duty under the Vienna Convention to protect foreign diplomats in Canada are the sign of a changed attitude in Ottawa. If so, that would be very good news.

Source: Terry Glavin: ‘Killers’ poster points to Canada’s failure to crack down on Khalistani extremism

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McWhorter: On Race and Academia

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Another advocate of class and adversity-based policies, sharing his personal experiences:

The Supreme Court last week outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. That practice was understandable and even necessary 60 years ago. The question I have asked for some time was precisely how long it would be required to continue. I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness.

But many good-faith people believed, and continue to believe, that it is a clear boon to society for universities to explicitly take race into account. The arguments for and against have been made often, sometimes by me, so here I’d like to do something a little bit different. As an academic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these experiences in interviews and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve never shared them in an article like this one. The responses I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s decision move me to venture it.

The culture that a policy helps put into place can be as important as the policy itself. And in my lifetime, racial preferences in academia — not merely when it comes to undergraduate admissions but also moving on to grad school and job applications and teaching careers — have been not only a set of formal and informal policies but also the grounds for a culture of perceptions and assumptions.

I grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia in the 1980s. As early as high school, I picked up — from remarks of my mother’s, who taught at a university, as well as comments in the air at my school — that Black kids didn’t have to achieve perfect grades and test scores in order to be accepted at top colleges. As a direct result, I satisfied myself with being an A- or B+ student, pursuing my nerdy hobbies instead of seeking the academic mountaintop. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t affect my future in the way that it might for my white peers.

I have no reason to think affirmative action played much of a role in the colleges I went to for undergraduate and graduate work, as neither was extremely selective at the time. In the latter case, I was told by a mentor, a Black man, that race had been the reason I wound up in the top 20 pile of applicants for graduate study in linguistics in the department where I got my Ph.D. I had minimal experience with linguistics proper, and my G.P.A. was very good but nowhere near perfect. (Those hobbies!) But I have always thought of that as racial preferences the way they should have been, merely additive around the margins. I’d done well on tests like the G.R.E., my grades in language courses were top level and I had written a senior thesis that made it clear I had a linguistics frame of mind.

But things got different later. When I was a grad student in linguistics going on the market for jobs, I was told that I needn’t worry whether I would get bids for tenure track positions because I was Black and would therefore be in great demand. Deep down, to me, it felt like I was on my way to being tokenized, which I was, especially given that my academic chops at the time did not justify my being hired for a top job at all.

I was hired straight out of my doctoral program for a tenure-track job at an Ivy League university in its august linguistics department. It became increasingly clear to me that my skin color was not just one more thing taken into account but the main reason for my hire. It surely didn’t hurt that, owing to the color of my skin, I could apparently be paid with special funds I was told the university had set aside for minority hires. But more to the point, I was vastly less qualified by any standard than the other three people who made it onto the list of finalists. Plus, I was brought on to represent a subfield within linguistics — sociolinguistics — that has never been my actual specialty. My interest then, as now, was in how languages change over time and what happens when they come together. My dissertation had made this quite clear.

At the time I was not very politicized, and I assumed that my race had merely been a background bonus to help me get hired. Only later did the reality become more apparent, when I learned just who else had been on that shortlist. (I will never forget how awkward it was when I met one of them — older than me, with more gravitas in the field — some years later. I sensed that we both knew what had happened and why.) I had been hired by white people who, quite innocently, thought they were doing the right thing by bringing a Black person onto the faculty. I bear them no malice; under the culture we were all living in, I would have done the same thing.

Around this time I gave some really good talks, and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. And in the meantime, I was hopelessly undercooked for the position I had been hired for. I was not utterly clueless, but I simply didn’t know enough yet — and especially not enough to be in a position to counsel graduate students.

 needed some years of postdoctoral study. They say you don’t really know it till you teach it, and that’s largely true: Having never actually taught a class, I needed to teach some. I needed to hang around linguistics for a longer time in general. There are formative experiences key to being a real linguist that I had not yet had, such as long-term work with speakers of my language of focus, Saramaccan.

The doctoral program I had been in had gone through a phase of allowing students perhaps too much leeway in deciding which courses to take. Many students took this as an occasion to sit at the feet of their mentors and drink in what they knew. But my natural orientation has always been autodidactic, and so I basically went off into a corner and focused like a laser on one issue that particularly interested me — how creole languages form — while developing only a passing acquaintance with linguistics beyond it. With undergrads, I could coast on stage presence, but grad students know the real thing when they see it — and when they don’t. I looked like a fool.

I didn’t like it. But because I am obsessive, I ultimately dedicated myself to boning up and then some. I read and read and read. I spoke closely with as many linguists as I could. I took up new interests within the field. I did intense study of my language of focus. I taught classes outside my comfort zone. That is, I became a normal academic.

But it all felt like a self-rescue operation, an effort to turn myself into a good hire after the fact. That backfilling of needed skills is a lot to ask of someone who also needs to do the forward-looking research necessary to get tenure.

Of course, not everyone endeavors this Sisyphean task, and the culture I refer to has a way of ensuring others don’t have to. There is a widespread cultural assumption in academia that Black people are valuable as much, if not more, for our sheer presence as for the rigor of what we actually do. Thus, it is unnecessary to subject us to top-level standards. This leads to things happening too often that are never written as explicit directives but are consonant with the general cultural agenda: people granted tenure with nothing approaching the publishing records of other candidates, or celebrated more for their sociopolitical orientations than for their research.

I had uncomfortable experiences on the other side of the process as well. In the 1990s, I was on some graduate admissions committees at the university where I then taught. It was apparent to me that, under the existing cultural directive to, as we have discussed, take race into account, Black and Latino applicants were expected to be much more readily accepted than others.

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program.

Perhaps all of this can be seen as collateral damage in view of a larger goal of Black people being included, acknowledged, given a chance — in academia and elsewhere. In the grand scheme of things, my feeling uncomfortable on a graduate admissions committee for a few years during the Clinton administration hardly qualifies as a national tragedy. But I will never shake the sentiment I felt on those committees, an unintended byproduct of what we could call academia’s racial preference culture: that it is somehow ungracious to expect as much of Black students — and future teachers — as we do of others.

That kind of assumption has been institutionalized within academic culture for a long time. It is, in my view, improper. It may have been a necessary compromise for a time, but it was never truly proper in terms of justice, stability or general social acceptance. Whatever impact the Supreme Court’s ruling has on college admissions, its effects on the academic culture of racial preference — which by its nature often depends less on formulas involving thousands of applicants than on individual decisions involving dozens — will take place far more slowly.

But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make.

Source: On Race and Academia

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U.S. maternal deaths keep rising. Here’s who is most at risk

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Likely similar variations in Canada although hopefully there has not been a comparable increase:

The number of people dying in the U.S. from pregnancy-related causes has more than doubled in the last 20 years, according to a new study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And while the study found mortality rates remain “unacceptably high among all racial and ethnic groups across the U.S.,” the worst outcomes were among Black women, Native American and Alaska Native people.

The study looks at state-by-state data from 2009 to 2019. Co-author Dr. Allison Bryant, an obstetrician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says maternal death rates in the U.S. just keep getting worse.

“And that is exacerbated in populations that have been historically underserved or for whom structural racism affects them greatly,” she says.

Maternal death rates have consistently been the highest among Black women, and those high rates more than doubled over the last twenty years. For Native American and Alaska Native people, the rates have tripled.

Dr. Gregory Roth, at the University of Washington, also co-authored the paper. He says efforts to stop pregnancy deaths have not only stalled in areas like the South, where the rates have typically been high. “We’re showing that they are worsening in places that are thought of as having better health,” he says.

Places like New York and New Jersey saw an increase in deaths among Black and Latina mothers. Wyoming and Montana saw more Asian mothers die. And while maternal mortality is lower for white women, it is also increasing in some parts of the country.

“We see that for white women, maternal mortality is also increasing throughout the South, in parts of New England and throughout parts of the Midwest and Northern Mountain States,” he says.

The steady increase in maternal mortality in the U.S. is in contrast to other high-income countries which have seen their much lower rates decline even further.

“There’s this crystal clear graph that’s been out there that’s very striking,” Bryant says. With countries like the Netherlands, Austria and Japan with a clear decrease. “And then there is the U.S. that is far above all of them and going in the opposite direction,” she says.

Most maternal deaths are deemed preventable by state review committees. Dr. Catherine Spong, at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says pregnancy-related deaths can be caused by different things. The biggest risk factors are conditions like cardiovascular disease, severe pre-eclampsia, maternal cardiac disease and hemorrhage, she says.

Continuing heart problems and mental health conditions can also contribute to the death of a new mother.

The researchers say doctors would have a better chance of dealing with these health conditions, if more women had access to healthcare after their babies were born.

About half the births in the U.S. are paid for by Medicaid and “the majority of the deaths are in the immediate postpartum period,” Roth says. “If you don’t have easy access to health care in this period, you’re at very high risk.”

For those who get their healthcare through Medicaid, medical coverage lasts at least two months after the birth of a child. Since 2021, states have had the option to extend that coverage for a year. So far, 36 states and Washington D.C. have done so. States like Alabama and Mississippi, which saw some of the highest maternal death increases, did not.

Source: U.S. maternal deaths keep rising. Here’s who is most at risk

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Matas: Canada urgently needs to release its Holocaust-related records 

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Agree:

The Canadian Access to Information system has broken down. The dysfunctional nature of the system is highlighted by the difficulty in accessing Holocaust records.

The Holocaust ended in 1945, more than 78 years ago. The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes, completed its work in 1986, almost 37 years ago. The Canadian effort to bring Nazi war criminals to justice has ended. The survivors are fast disappearing.

Though the records in Canada of the Holocaust and its perpetrators are old, their release is urgent. We will soon no longer be able to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through the testimony of survivors – we will have to rely on the records. Yet, efforts to get the release of Holocaust-related records have gone nowhere.

Remembering the Holocaust means not just remembering the victims. It means also remembering their murderers. We need access to the report written by Alti Rodal for the Deschênes Commission, titled Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present. It was written to be public in its entirety, but has been released subject only to inexplicable extensive deletions. Part II of the Deschênes Commission report, addressing individual cases, has not been made public. And the hundreds of Nazi war crimes files originally held by the Department of Justice and Royal Canadian Mounted Police are inaccessible.

Canada is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The Alliance’s 2000 Stockholm Declaration commits the signatories to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the opening of archives in order to ensure that all documents bearing on the Holocaust are available to researchers.” The Alliance’s Monitoring Access to Archives Project recommended in 2017 that governmental archival institutions “release Holocaust related records, irrespective of any personal identifying information or national security classifications.” Yet, Canada is not respecting these commitments.

B’nai Brith Canada filed a request for Nazi war crimes related records in January, 2022, to Library and Archives Canada. A year and a half later, the institution has yet to provide a date by which the request would be processed.

In February, 2022, B’nai Brith Canada asked the Department of Justice for the files of all Nazi war crimes relating to people who died more than 20 years ago, the period after which privacy protection expires. The department replied that “it does not have the capabilities” to respond to the request.

B’nai Brith Canada then modified its request to ask for only those Nazi war crimes files of the people named by the Deschênes Commission, excluding cases that went to court, and persons not yet dead for 20 years. The Department of Justice responded in July, 2022, that it would take 1,285 days, that is to say more than three-and-a-half years, to answer the request

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, in its report dated June 20, made a number of welcome recommendations, one of which was the automatic release of historical documents that are more than 25 years old. The federal government has so many documents and so little staff and budget allocated to deal with them that the only way to make the access to information system work is to automatically release whole categories of records. Requiring consideration of each and every document to determine whether any one of a long list of exemptions to disclosure applies is a recipe for inaction.

Philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet, we cannot remember a past that remains hidden from us. To remember the past, we have to know the past.

Only through public access to Holocaust archives can we learn lessons from those archives. Learning lessons from the Holocaust is a legacy we can create for the victims, giving meaning to the senseless death of innocents. To learn those lessons, we need access to the archives.

David Matas is senior counsel to B’nai Brith Canada. He is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Monitoring Access to Archives Project.

Source: Canada urgently needs to release its Holocaust-related records

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Being HIV positive is no longer a death sentence. So why does Canada insist on sharing immigration applicants’ HIV status with their sponsors?

2023/07/06 Leave a comment

Of note:

When they found love in Mexico 10 years ago, one of the first things the Canadian man’s boyfriend confided in him was that he was HIV-positive.

But the medical condition was no longer seen as the health threat it had once been, and it wasn’t going to stop their budding relationship.

The couple maintained a long-distance romance for four years before the Mexican partner moved to Toronto in 2017 on a work permit.

It was when they started their spousal sponsorship application in 2020 that the couple learned of Canada’s automatic HIV-partner-disclosure policy.

It’s a policy that mandates an immigration applicant or refugee prove they have disclosed their medical condition to the person who is sponsoring them to Canada.

The couple say they found the formal process not only offensive but frustrating, as it delayed the processing of their file for an additional 18 months.

Finally, they were scheduled for the long-awaited brief interview in April to confirm, in person, that the sponsored partner’s HIV status had been disclosed.

“It’s not just a privacy issue. I also just feel incredibly stigmatized,” said the 55-year-old Canadian fashion designer, who asked not to be identified to protect his partner’s privacy.

“I don’t feel it’s anybody’s business, and I don’t feel it’s something that needs to be addressed for my partner.”

The so-called “automatic partner notification policy” has been in place since 2003 as a public health measure to stop the spread of the HIV virus, which, if untreated, can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome or AIDS, a disease that has killed millions.

However, modern medical treatment has transformed the virus into a manageable medical condition, and advocates say that, after two decades, the immigration department’s “out-of-date and discriminatory” policy should go.

In mid-June, three organizations wrote to Immigration Minister Sean Fraser and Marci Ien, the minister for women and gender equality and youth, demanding the policy be revoked and saying that it was discriminating against people with HIV and violating their right to equal treatment under the Canadian Charter.

“Not only does the Policy significantly extend the length of processing of immigration applications for people living with HIV, it also perpetuates myths and stereotypes that people with HIV are deceptive and are less worthy of intimate relationships,” the letter noted.

The signatories of the letter include the HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic of Ontario (HALCO), the HIV Legal Network, and the Coalition des organismes communautaires québécois de lutte contre le sida (COCQ-SIDA).

Michael Battista, their counsel, said the policy is discriminatory because only those applicants sponsored under the family and refugee classes are subject to the disclosure to partner policy.

Temporary residence visa applicants — visitors, international students, temporary foreign workers — and those applying for permanent residence under economic class are not under the same scrutiny even though they, too, could potentially be HIV positive.

“We let in HIV-positive foreign students, foreign workers. We don’t ever force them to reveal to their intimate partners that they’re HIV positive. Why are we singling out the family class and dependent refugees?” asked Battista.

“It’s not even serving the ends of its public health concern.”

The policy is unique to HIV-positive applicants. There is no similar mechanism for other health conditions.

Immigration applicants with active pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) and untreated syphilis can be found inadmissible to Canada, unless they are treated, on the grounds that their condition is a danger to public safety, according to the standards laid down by Health Canada.

However, unlike TB and untreated syphilis, immigration officials do not consider HIV a danger to public health.

When the original policy was implemented, it required consent of the HIV-positive applicant for immigration officials to contact their sponsor in Canada about their HIV status and assess whether the sponsor would withdraw their application.

To avoid the impression that the policy was prompting sponsors to withdraw their applications, the updated policy has, since 2016, given the HIV-positive applicant 60 days to provide proof they have informed their sponsor of their diagnosis or to withdraw their application. If the applicant takes no action, immigration officials will then inform the sponsor about their HIV status after 60 days have elapsed.

HIV-positive sponsorship applicants must also attend a compulsory interview that is not required of other sponsorship applicants.

Battista said immigration officials had not strictly adhered to the policy until about 18 months ago, when he started to see the processing times of the HIV positive clients’ cases “inexplicably lengthened.”

“The explanation we got was they were being put into the interview stream automatically. We tried to be proactive and provide evidence that the sponsor was advised of the HIV-positive health condition of the person being sponsored,” said Battista. “But they just didn’t budge.”

He said the policy perpetuates a stereotype that people with HIV are morally blameworthy and irresponsible in taking precautions to prevent the transmission of HIV.

On its website, the immigration department said the policy does not intend to “inflict unnecessary hardship” on applicants or sponsors.

“Rather, it is a measure that will protect the health and safety of the spouses and partners (residing in Canada) of applicants in the family and dependent refugee classes who test positive for HIV,” it noted.

While the change of language in the 2016 policy was an improvement, Avineet Cheema, staff lawyer at HALCO, said it still doesn’t reflect modern science.

“This is a policy that was implemented at a time when there wasn’t as much modern science advancements when it comes to HIV and suppressing viral loads and things like that,” said Cheema, who has seen cases in which an officer asked the sponsor why they’re comfortable marrying an HIV carrier.

“Being diagnosed with HIV is in no way a death sentence at this time. And it is very manageable with medications to the point that there isn’t even a real decrease in life expectancy.”

There are other sexually transmitted infections, said Cheema, and singling out HIV further stigmatizes those living with the virus.

“That really targets the dignity of people who are living with HIV, because the Canadian government is essentially telling them, ‘You’re different. You are dangerous. Your health condition makes it so.’”

The policy, she added, disproportionately affects gay, trans, Black and other racialized people, due to the heightened impact of the HIV stigma.

The Canadian sponsor of the Mexican partner said they are committed and responsible adults, but were uncomfortable at their April interview at the immigration office in Niagara Falls.

“I felt there was homophobia hidden behind a mask of protocol,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair that they single out people with HIV. It’s not fair for my partner to have to go through that.”

In an email to the Star, the immigration department said it doesn’t collect data on the notifications issued, interviews conducted and sponsorship withdrawals recorded under the policy.

A department spokesperson said the policy is currently under review and that any modifications will be made to the public when it is completed.

Source: Being HIV positive is no longer a death sentence. So why does Canada insist on sharing immigration applicants’ HIV status with their sponsors?

Filed under LGBTQ, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

Of interest. Another example of using class-type criteria:

For the head of admissions at a medical school, Dr. Mark Henderson is pretty blunt when sizing up the profession.

“Mostly rich kids get to go to medical school,” he said.

In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D.

The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.

The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling last week against race-conscious admissions, the medical school offers a glimpse of how selective schools across the country might overhaul their admissions policies, as they look for alternative ways to achieve diversity without running afoul of the new law.

Last week, President Biden called adversity scores a “new standard” for achieving diversity.

Word has gotten out about the U.C. Davis scale. Dr. Henderson said that about 20 schools had recently requested more information. And there are other socioeconomic measurements, including Landscape, released in 2019 from the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SATs. That tool allows undergraduate admissions offices to assess the socioeconomic backgrounds of individual students.

But skeptics question whether such rankings — or any kind of socioeconomic affirmative action — will be enough to replace race-conscious affirmative action. And schools that use adversity scales may also find themselves wandering into legal quagmires, with conservative groups promising to fight programs that are simply stand-ins for race.

Over the years, medical schools have made some progress in diversifying their student bodies, with numbers ticking up. But just like undergraduate admissions, wealth and connections continue to play a determining role in who is accepted. More than half of medical students come from families in the top 20 percent of income, while only 4 percent come from those in the bottom 20 percent, according to data from the American Association of Medical Colleges.

There is also a family dynamic. Children of doctors are 24 timesmore likely to become doctors than their peers, according to the American Medical Association. It’s hard to know why the profession passes down from generation to generation, but the statistic drove the association to adopt a policy opposing legacy preferences in admissions.

“That’s a staggering economic gap between medical students and the general public,” said Dr. Henderson, who comes from a working-class upbringing and now serves as associate dean of admissions.

As a consequence, the number of Black doctors remains stubbornly low: About 6 percent of practicing doctors in the United States are Black, compared with 13.6 percent of the American population who identify as Black.

With the Supreme Court decision, “that number is likely to go down,” said Dr. James E.K. Hildreth, the president of Meharry Medical College, formed in 1876 in Nashville to train Black health care providers.

Leaders in medicine say training more Black and Hispanic doctors could help bridge the vast divides in American health care. Research shows that doctors from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are more likely to work in primary care or in locales where doctors are scarce.

And patients have better outcomes when treated by doctors from similar backgrounds, said Dr. Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, president of the American Medical Association.

The U.C. Davis scale has drawn attention because of its ability to bring in diverse students using what the schools says are “race-neutral” socioeconomic models.

In its most recent entering class of 133 students, 14 percent were Black and 30 percent were Hispanic. Nationally, 10 percent of medical school students were Black and 12 percent were Hispanic. A vast majority of the U.C. Davis class — 84 percent — comes from disadvantaged backgrounds, and 42 percent are the first in their family to go to college.

The overall acceptance rate has been less than 2 percent.

In the Davis scale, first used in 2012, eight categories establish an adversity score for each candidate. Factors include family income, whether applicants come from an underserved area, whether they help support their nuclear families and whether their parents went to college.

The higher an applicant rates on the disadvantage scale, the bigger the boost.

There is no set formula on how to balance the scale with the academic record, Dr. Henderson said, but a simulation of the system revealed that students from underrepresented groups grew to 15.3 percent from 10.7 percent. And the share of economically disadvantaged students tripled, to 14.5 percent of the class from 4.6 percent.

At the same time, scores from the MCAT, the standardized test for medical school applications, dropped only marginally.

Still, it’s not easy to persuade medical schools to upend admissions standards, particularly anything that undermines the value of test scores and grades. Dr. Henderson said he had received pushback from his own colleagues.

“Doctors say their kids got into medical school elsewhere, and they didn’t get in here,” he said.

As the children of doctors, he said, those applicants earned an S.E.D. score of zero.

A number of scholars, including Richard D. Kahlenberg, have promoted using class-conscious preferences, which they say could address racial inequities in education without fostering the resentment often prompted by racially based diversity plans.

And President Biden said on Thursday that his administration would develop a “new standard for colleges taking into account the adversity a student has overcome.”

“The kid who faced tougher challenges has demonstrated more grit, more determination,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House, “and that should be a factor that colleges should take into account in admissions.”

He might be talking about someone like Eleanor Adams, a member of the Choctaw Nation, who said that she did not think medical school was an option for her.

“I didn’t grow up with a lot of money,” she said.

But she found mentors who encouraged her, and today she is in her third year of medical school at U.C. Davis, which is in Sacramento. She plans to become an Indian Health Service doctor in Oklahoma — fulfilling one of the school’s goals, Dr. Henderson said, which is to train doctors who will return to their communities.

At schools in other states without affirmative action, such as the University of Michigan, admissions officials have complained that enrolling more socioeconomically disadvantaged students has not significantly increased the share of Black, Hispanic and Native American students.

“Those tools certainly have utility, but they fall short of accomplishing what a race-conscious admission practice does,” said Dr. Ehrenfeld of the American Medical Association.

The socioeconomic rankings could also be legally challenged. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in his majority opinion on affirmative action, wrote that colleges could consider how race had affected an applicant’s life. But he also warned against using proxies for race.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian activist group, has already sued a selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., for using economic factors as stand-ins for race in admissions.

Joshua P. Thompson, a lawyer for the foundation, said the legal questions surrounding these disadvantage indexes were complex.

“I think the devil is going to be in the details,” Mr. Thompson said. “The Supreme Court was pretty clear that what can’t be done directly can’t be done indirectly.”

Should it come to that, Dr. Henderson said that his school’s disadvantage scale would be defensible in court.

“Am I worried about it? Yes,” Dr. Henderson said of a lawsuit. “Is it going to stop me? No.”

Source: With End of Affirmative Action, a Push for a New Tool: Adversity Scores

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Review: The underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

In 1923, amid a wave of lynchings, Claude McKay wrote the sonnet “If We Must Die.” He was faced with a society structured by white supremacy and anti-Blackness, a society that wanted Blacks “to die like hogs/ hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.” Confronted with this uniquely American form of death, McKay proclaimed that “we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back.” For McKay, the nobility and humanity of Black people was forged in fighting the monsters of white supremacy.

A similar vision animates Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. For Lloyd, dignity is not something abstracted from a notion of “humanity.” It is wrested from the teeth of domination. It is asserted in the struggle against oppression. It is born the moment the slave seizes his master and throws him down. Perhaps most important for Lloyd, dignity is Black.

Much of Lloyd’s book is about looking at centers of ontological resistance to domination, such as Black love, Black family and Black magic.

Begun while he participated in protests in Ferguson, Mo., and continued in seminars and libraries, Lloyd’s book focuses on the words of generations of Black freedom fighters. To the struggle, he offers the contribution of a keen intellect articulating the underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter. While I disagree with aspects of his book, his core argument is a profound challenge to anyone who takes seriously the struggle for human dignity, antiracism and the work of dismantling white supremacy.

Lloyd’s philosophy depends on some fundamental claims. The first is that we must understand the “depths of anti-Blackness shading America” such that anti-Blackness “is at the center of everything, for everyone.” It is not an incidental, localized or past reality. It is reality. For Lloyd, philosophy is meant to help us understand reality and, more important, to resist and overthrow that reality. Resistance to domination is not on behalf of some antecedent given of human dignity that does not say anything about actual reality. Such abstracted claims about dignity (“all lives matter”) cannot resist anti-Black reality.

Instead, dignity is “something you do, a practice, a performance, a way of engaging the world…. It necessarily means struggle against domination.” The world is oppression; dignity is the refusal of the world. It is dying but fighting back. Black dignity is found in that fighting back. Since anti-Blackness is the primary form of domination, Black dignity is the primary form of enacted dignity.

Philosophers must begin from that fighting back in order to understand reality. Thus Lloyd places a great deal of importance on the distinction between the ontic and the ontological. Generally, these terms would refer to questions about the being of a specific object (ontic) and the being of beings (ontological). You might say the former is small-picture metaphysics and the latter is big-picture. For Lloyd, both have to do with the struggle against domination. The ontic struggle has to do with specific sites of struggle, a struggle against a particular center of domination. The ontological has to do with “struggle aimed at domination” itself. As with McKay’s poem, fighting is not only specific to instances. In asserting Black dignity, one fights the whole system of domination.

Much of Lloyd’s book is about looking at centers of ontological resistance to domination, such as Black love, Black family and Black magic. Each chapter leans into the claim that racism is not just personal or even systematic; it is the being of reality. According to Lloyd, multiculturalism, liberalism and the American project are to be discarded as expressions of that ontology. Since domination is reality, abolitionism is about abolishing everything.

It is here that some of the weaknesses of the book appear. First, Lloyd seems uninterested in Black voices that differ from his more radical approach, voices that show a majority of Black Americans want serious reform of the police and criminal justice system but do not want the abolishment of either. Those voices see arguments like those for defunding of the police as a form of political colonization by urban elites. What does Lloyd think of the majority of African Americans, who agree that “Black dignity” is a non-negotiable struggle and as a consequence want more and better policing? In his book, Black conservatives go unmentioned while establishment Black liberals are depicted as the purveyors of vacuous expressions of multiculturalism.

Perhaps these Black voices belong to those who are just “dreamers” or are trapped by respectability. But then what to make of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass or Rosa Parks? They wanted America to live up to its ideals, not abolish them. Lloyd doesn’t let these voices disturb his text. Rather, he states that “Black dignity is the philosophy of Black Americans.” But whose philosophy of Black dignity? Which vision of antiracism? For Lloyd, “One view is right, others might seem right but are wrong.” Ironically, this sentiment seems to feed into what Lloyd, in Compact magazine, has criticized as an antiracist cult that seeks to silence dialogue.

Lloyd argues we should center dignity discourse on Black dignity. He rightly recognizes other forms of intersecting oppression, but his account still centers on Black dignity as the first philosophy, such that “all philosophy must be routed through the Middle Passage” and understood in light of “domination’s chief paradigm, Blackness.” But shouldn’t we also center dignity on the Indigenous, the refugee, the unborn or the disabled? Lloyd is right that dignity is something struggled for. However, that struggle does not fabricate a dignity not already there; it brings to light the truth of dignity that is always already there.

If white supremacy is to be overcome, anti-Blackness cast down as sin and blasphemy, and Black dignity centered as fundamental reality, we will need books like Lloyd’s.Black dignity is an ethical, even ontological, preferential option for dignity. But if we hold this at the expense of intrinsic human dignity, then other voices and other ways of asserting dignity will be lost. This means we lose the grounding of natural law that Lloyd powerfully presents in his book Black Natural Law. The danger in losing this is that the struggle may devolve into centers of competing power with little orientation to a justice beyond power.

Making dignity entirely performative—and thus downplaying intrinsic dignity and natural law—is likely tied to how ontological Lloyd makes domination. Domination, as reality, is not a privation of a more original good but is instead the original and ultimate position and thus the position that is never overcome. “The object of ontological struggles is,” Lloyd tells us, “impossible to achieve.” More than 500 years of racial domination speak to the truth of this claim. But there are other stories of when people cast down domination. In this, I wish that Lloyd had been willing to be more than a philosopher by being a theologian. As King puts it: “the ringing cry of the Christian faith is that our God is able.” Believing domination can be overcome is not “a fantasy of domination itself,” as Lloyd puts it, but a conviction about God and humanity.

If white supremacy is to be overcome, anti-Blackness cast down as sin and blasphemy, and Black dignity centered as fundamental reality, we will need books like Lloyd’s. For all my criticisms, he does the work of philosophizing on behalf of Black dignity. He is right that dignity must be found and asserted in the struggle for dignity.

But there is a grace beyond assertion. Later in his life, Claude McKay converted to Catholicism, finding in it the only source of racial unity. He “turned to God for great strength to fight” while holding to “the Sacred Light.” We should, too. Starting from Black dignity and from the dignity of all who are oppressed, we may someday—by that sacred light and our efforts—find ourselves with human dignity, achieved.

Terence Sweeney is a professor in the honors program at Villanova University.

Source: Review: The underlying philosophy of Black Lives Matter

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Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful case study:

For decades, the question of affirmative action — whether colleges should consider race when deciding which students to admit — has been the subject of national debate.

And as the nation’s highest court has grown more conservative in recent years, court-watchers wondered if it would reverse decades-old precedents allowing affirmative action.

This week, it happened: The Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions practices at public and private universities and colleges.

Supreme Court justices ruled that the admissions policies at the University of North Carolina, one of the country’s oldest public universities, and Harvard University, the country’s oldest private university, violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

As college admissions offices prepare to tailor their policies to the Supreme Court ruling, California offers lessons on what may be in store for the rest of the country.

Here’s the upshot: A quarter-century after California banned race-based admissions at public universities, school officials say they haven’t been able to meet their diversity and equity goals — despite more than a half billion dollars spent on outreach and alternative admissions standards.

In an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in support of Harvard and UNC’s race-based admissions programs, University of California chancellors said that years of crafting alternative race-neutral policies have fallen short.

“Those programs have enabled UC to make significant gains in its system-wide diversity,” the brief said. “Yet despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.”

The shortfall is especially apparent at the system’s most selective schools, the university leaders said.

An affirmative action ban first caused a huge drop in diversity at top California universities

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, an affirmative action ban at public universities in the state. Before the ban, UC Berkeley and UCLA were roughly representative of the California high school graduate population who were eligible for enrollment at universities, according to Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University.

The ban first took effect with the incoming class of ’98. Subsequently, diversity plummeted at UC’s most competitive campuses. That year, enrollment among Black and Latino students at UCLA and UC Berkeley fell by 40%, according to a 2020 study by Bleemer. As a result of the ban, Bleemer found that Black and Latino students who might have gotten into those two top schools enrolled at less competitive campuses.

“Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities,” Bleemer told NPR. “But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place.”

Black and Latino students were also less likely to earn graduate degrees or enter lucrative STEM fields.

“If you follow them into the labor market, for the subsequent 15 or 20 years, they’re earning about 5% lower wages than they would have earned if they’d had access to more selective universities under affirmative action,” Bleemer said.

The ban has in fact acted as a deterrent to prospective Black and Latino students, Bleemer said. His study found that high-performing minority students were subsequently discouraged from applying to schools where minority students were underrepresented.

“Most do not want to attend a university where there’s not a critical mass of same race peers,” said Mitchell Chang, the associate vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. That’s because attending a school made less diverse by an affirmative action ban, “puts them at greater risk of being stereotyped and being isolated,” he said.

These findings “provide the first causal evidence that banning affirmative action exacerbates socioeconomic inequities,” Bleemer’s study said.

A learning curve

Faced with plummeting minority enrollment, admissions offices began a years-long effort to figure out ways to get their numbers back up.

Admissions offices pivoted to a more holistic approach, looking beyond grades and test scores. Starting in the early 2000s, the UC system implemented a couple of initiatives to increase diversity: The top-performing students graduating most high schools in the state were guaranteed admission to most of the eight UC undergraduate campuses. It also introduced a comprehensive review process to “evaluate students’ academic achievements in light of the opportunities available to them” – using an array of criteria including a student’s special skills and achievements, special circumstances and location of high school.

In 2020, the UC system eliminated standardized test scores as an admission requirement, nixing a factor that advocates say disadvantages underserved students.

However, the effort to boost diversity has come with a heavy price tag. Since Prop 209 took effect, UC has spent more than a half-billion dollars on outreach programs and application reviews to draw in a more diverse student body.

It’s taken 25 years of experimentation through race-neutral policies, for UC schools have begun to catch up to the racial diversity numbers lost in the wake of the affirmative action ban, says UCLA vice chancellor Chang.

“There was no magic bullet. Some things worked better than other things. And this is also work that doesn’t happen overnight,” Chang said.

Still, the California schools are unable to meet their diversity goals systemwide. Chang says his school is not where it wants to be. It still enrolls far fewer Black and Latino students than their share of California high school graduates — a problem it didn’t have before the affirmative action ban.

As with the UC system, experts think that across the country, similarly competitive universities will be most affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Gabrielle Starr, president of Pomona College, a small Southern California school that wasn’t subject to the state ban, fears the selective, private university will lose its racial diversity under the nationwide affirmative action ban.

Starr says that being able to consider race has allowed her school to ensure its ability to put together a diverse class.

“Having a campus that looks like the world in which our students will go onto live is really important just as a bedrock value,” she said.

Source: Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

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Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Interesting take. Welcome return to “class” as a differentiator, although there is intersectionality with race and identity:

Ever since President Bill Clinton advised “mend it, don’t end it,”affirmative action has had an uneasy place in the Democratic coalition, as omnipresent as the party’s allegiance to abortion rights and its promises to expand financial aid for higher education — but unpopular with much of the public.

Now, in striking down race-conscious college admissions, the Supreme Court has handed the Democrats a way to shift from a race-based discussion of preference to one tied more to class. The court’s decision could fuel broader outreach to the working-class voters who have drifted away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.

The question is, will the party pivot?

“This is a tremendous opportunity for Democrats to course-correct from identity-based issues,” said Ruy Teixeira, whose upcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” looks at the bleeding of working-class voters over the last decade. “As I like to say, class is back in session.”

Conservative voters have long been more animated by the Supreme Court’s composition than liberals have. But the last two sessions of a high court remade by Donald J. Trump may have flipped that dynamic. Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, energized Democratic voters have handed Republicans loss after loss in critical elections.

Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have actually deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters going into 2024. Several Republican presidential hopefuls had centered their campaigns on opposition to affirmative action. And the court’s granting of religious exemptions to people who oppose gay marriage, along with last year’s Dobbs decision, may take the sting out of some social issues for conservatives.

In that sense, the staunchly conservative new Supreme Court is doing the ugly political work for Democrats. Its decision last year to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion elevated an issue that for decades motivated religious conservatives more than it did secular liberals.

Friday’s decision to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan enraged progressive Democrats, who had pressed the president to take executive action on loan forgiveness. A coalition of Generation Z advocacy groups, including Gen-Z for Change and the climate-oriented Sunrise Movement, said on Friday that the court “has openly declared war on young people.”

But while the Supreme Court made retroactive higher education assistance far more difficult, it may have boosted the Democratic cause of financial aid, through expanded Pell grants and scholarships that do not saddle graduates with crushing debt burdens. Democrats have long pushed expanded grant programs and legislative loan-forgiveness programs for graduates who embark on low-paid public service careers. Those efforts will get a lift in the wake of the court’s decision.

The high court’s declaration that race-based admission to colleges and universities is unconstitutional infuriated key elements of the Democratic coalition — Black and Hispanic groups in particular, but also some Asian American and Pacific Islander groups who said conservatives had used a small number of Asian Americans as pawns to challenge affirmative action on behalf of whites.

“They were using the Asian community as a wedge,” said Representative Judy Chu, Democrat of California, after the decision was handed down on Thursday. “I stand with the unified community.”

But while they have expressed anger and disappointment over the conservative decisions, Democrats also acknowledge their inability to do much to restore affirmative action, student loan forgiveness and the right to an abortion in the foreseeable future, as long as the 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court holds.

“There’s a constitutional challenge in bringing it back,” said Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a longtime Democratic leader on the House education committee.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist pressing his party to expand its outreach to the working class, said adding a new emphasis on class consciousness to augment racial and ethnic awareness would fit well with Mr. Biden’s pitch that his legislative achievements have largely accrued to the benefit of workers.

Infrastructure spending, electric vehicles investment, broadband expansion and semiconductor manufacturing have promoted jobs — especially union jobs — all over the country but especially in rural and suburban areas, often in Republican states.

“By next year, Democrats will be able to say we’ve invested in red states, blue states, urban areas, rural areas,” he said. “We’re not like the Republicans. We’re for everybody.”

But bigotry, discrimination and the erosion of civil rights will remain central issues for Democrats, given the anger of the party base, Mr. Rosenberg said. The Supreme Court’s siding on Fridaywith a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages cannot be separated from the affirmative action, student loan and abortion decisions.

Mr. Teixeira said Democrats were not likely to see their new opportunities at first.

“If you want to solve some of the underlying problems of the party, this should be a gimme,” he said of pivoting from racial and ethnic identity to class. But, he added, “in the short term, the enormous pressure will be not to do that.”

Indeed, the initial Democratic response to the Supreme Court’s actions was not to elevate economic hardship as a key preference in college admissions. Instead, Democrats seemed focused on striking down other areas of privilege, especially the legacy admission preference given to the children and grandchildren of alumni of elite institutions.

“What we’re fighting for is equal opportunity,” said Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. “If they get rid of affirmative action and leave rampant legacy admissions, they’re making merit a slogan, not a reality.”

Republicans saw a political line of attack in the Democratic response to the court’s decision. Even before 1990, when a campaign ad by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina featured white hands crumpling a job rejection to denounce “racial quotas,” Republicans had used affirmative action to their political advantage.

Mr. Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” formulation came after a 1995 speech before California Democrats in which he said of affirmative action programs: “We do have to ask ourselves, ‘Are they all working? Are they all fair? Has there been any kind of reverse discrimination?’”

A June survey by the Pew Research Center found that more Americans disapprove than approve of colleges and universities’ using race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, and that Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters are largely unified in their opposition, while Democratic voters are split.

After Mr. Biden expressed his opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision, the campaign arm of the Senate Republicans issued a statement calling out three vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election in Republican states: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

“Democrats are doubling down on their racist agenda and want to pack the Supreme Court to get their way,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Will Democrats like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown denounce Joe Biden’s support of racial discrimination and state unequivocally that they oppose packing the court?”

The House Republican campaign arm called Democratic outrage “the great limousine liberal meltdown.”

But the Supreme Court has offered Democrats a way forward with many of its decisions — based on class. The affluent will always have access to abortions, by traveling to states where it remains legal, and to elite institutions of higher education, where they may have legacy pull and the means to pay tuition.

Those facing economic struggles are not so privileged. Applicants of color may have lost an edge in admissions, but poor and middle-class students and graduates of all races were dealt a blow when the court declared that the president did not have the authority to unilaterally forgive their student loans.

Representative Marilyn Strickland, Democrat of Washington, said her party now needs to recalibrate away from elite institutions like Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the high court’s case against affirmative action, and “respect all types of education and all types of opportunity,” mentioning union training programs, apprenticeships, trade schools and community colleges.

Mr. Scott agreed. “This is going to cause some heartburn,” he said, “but what we need to campaign on is that we’re opening opportunities for everybody.”

Source: Supreme Court Decisions on Education Could Offer Democrats an Opening

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Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Good overview of some of the issues:

Debbie Douglas was 10 when she came from Grenada to join her parents in Canada.

On her first day of school in 1973, her family had to fight with the principal, who wanted to put her back a year and have her take ESL because she spoke English with a Grenadian accent. In the end, she was allowed to attend Grade 5.

“But by the end of the first week on the playground, I got called the N-word, and it shook me to my core,” Douglas recalls. “And I looked around to see if anybody had heard and nobody said anything … In a school of 500, there were three Black kids and I don’t recall any other kids of colour.”

Despite a degree in economics from York University, her stepfather could only find a job as a financial planner. Her mother, a teacher back home, ended up working in a nursing home. 

But if you were to ask Douglas’s mother what her migration experience has been, Douglas says, she would say Canada has been very good to her family.

“My parents worked hard. We went to school. We now have a middle-class life. It’s a great migration story,” Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, told a forum about Canada’s immigration narrative this past May.

“Great” has never meant “easy” for newcomers arriving in this country. Douglas says the stories of immigrants’ struggles and sacrifice were just often not heard.

Yet Canada has long maintained its status as a destination to which newcomers aspire. The immigration story that’s told has, for decades, been one of perceived success — both from the perspective of those forging new lives here, and from the viewpoint of a country eager to grow.

Today, that national narrative appears to be under new strains that are threatening the social contract between Canada and its newcomers.

Canada’s population has just passed the 40-million mark, and it’s growing thanks to immigration. 

Immigration accounts for almost 100 per cent of the country’s labour-force growth and is projected to account for our entire population growth by 2032.

Governments and employers from coast to coast have been clamouring for more immigrants to fill jobs, expand the economy and revitalize an aging population. The more, the merrier, it seemed, even during economic recession of recent years.

Post-pandemic, Ottawa is set to bring in 465,000 new permanent residents this year, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025 to boost Canada’s economic recovery after COVID.

Amid this push, there have been critiques that immigrants are too often being reduced to numbers — to units meant to balance the equations of our economy. While it is clear our economy needs immigration, what is it that newcomers need of Canada to ensure they can settle and thrive here? Are those needs being met?

Meanwhile, the federal government’s plan to bring in a historic level of immigrants has been met with some reservations domestically, as Canadians struggle with stubbornly high inflation amid global economic uncertainty resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and volatile geopolitics.

There is a sense of scarcity emerging in Canada, despite the country’s seemingly great wealth — whether it manifests in the housing crisis, a strained health-care system, or in the lack of salary increases that keep up to inflation. 

While a national dialogue about Canada’s immigration strategy is overdue, some fear anti-immigrant or xenophobic backlash amid news, op-eds and social-media conversation that ties immigration to the strains already being felt.

One poll by Leger and the Association of Canadian Studies last November found almost half of the 1,537 respondents said they believe the current immigration plan would let in too many immigrants. Three out of four were concerned the levels would strain housing, health and social services.

“Canada is at a crossroads in terms of being able to continue to be a leader in immigration. It’s at a crossroads in its ability to provide the Canadian dream to those who move to the country,” says University of Western Ontario political sociologist Howard Ramos. 

“It’s at a crossroads in terms of the infrastructure that’s needed to support this population, and it’s at a crossroads potentially at having widespread support for immigration.”

How Canada got to 40 million

Canada’s immigration strategy has long been about nation-building to meet both the demographic and economic aspirations of the country.

In 1967, Canada introduced the “points system,” based on criteria such as education achievements and work experience, to select economic immigrants. It was one of a series of measures that have gradually moved the immigration system away from a past draped in racism and discrimination.

The point system shifted a system that favoured European immigrants and instead helped open the door to those from the Global South for permanent residence in this country. The 2021 Census found the share of recent immigrants from Europe continued to decline, falling from 61.6 per cent to just 10 per cent over the past five decades. 

Ottawa had turned the immigration tap on and off depending on the economic conditions, reducing intake during recession, until the late 1980s, when then prime minister Brian Mulroney decided to not only maintain but to increase Canada’s immigration level amid high inflation, high interest rates and high unemployment. 

“There are real people behind those numbers — people with real stories, real hopes and dreams, people who have chosen Canada as their new home,” Mulroney’s immigration minister, Barbara McDougall, said back in 1990 of a five-year plan to welcome more than 1.2 million immigrants.

The plan, too, was met with what today sound like familiar criticisms of the country’s ability to absorb the influx of people.

“We don’t think the federal government is taking its own financial responsibility seriously. The federal government is cutting back. They’re capping programs,” Bob Rae, then Ontario’s NDP premier, commented.

“They’re not transferring dollars to match the real cost, whether it’s training, whether it’s (teaching) English as a second language, whether it’s social services.”

Another big shift under Mulroney’s government was the focus on drafting well-heeled economic and skilled immigrants to Canada, which saw the ratio of permanent residents in family and refugee classes drop significantly from about 65 per cent in the mid-1980s to about 43 per cent in 1990s, and about 40 per cent now.

Mulroney’s measures severed Canada’s immigration intake from the boom-and-bust cycle of the economy. Successive governments have stuck to the same high-immigrant intake, regardless of how good or bad the economy was performing.

It has set Canada apart from other western countries, where immigration issues are often politicized. Coupled with the official multiculturalism policy introduced by the government of Pierre Trudeau in 1971 in response to Quebec’s growing nationalist movement, it has contributed to Canada’s image as a welcoming country to immigrants.

Public support for immigration has remained fairly high and Canada seemed to have fared well despite such economic challenges as the burst of the dot-com bubble from the late 1990s to mid-2000s, the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, and the economic downturn driven by the oil-price slump in the mid-2010s.

Observers, however, note the challenges and circumstances of those economic fluctuations were different than what we see today: there was enough housing stock in the 1990s and the impacts of the crashes in the financial, tech and oil markets since were sectoral, regional and temporary.

Canada’s infrastructure problem

Except in Quebec, which has full control over its newcomer targets and selection, immigration is a federal jurisdiction in Canada, planned in silo from other levels of governments that actually deliver health, education, transportation and other services. Yet the impacts of immigration are felt locally in schools, transits and hospitals. 

A lack of infrastructure investments and the rapid immigration growth have finally caught up with the country’s growth. “We spent decades not s upporting our communities,” says Douglas.

“We were not paying attention to building infrastructure. We were all under-resourcing things like community development and community amenities. We haven’t built adequate affordable housing.

“It’s now become a perfect storm. We have all these people and not enough of what is needed for everybody.”

While the majority of newcomers have historically settled in the big cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, a growing number are moving to smaller cities and towns that in some cases are not ready for the influx. The share of recent immigrants settling in the Big Three dropped from 62.5 per cent in 2011 to 53.4 per cent in 2021, with second-tier cities such as Ottawa-Gatineau, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, London and Halifax seeing significant growth.

“I don’t think it occurred to them that they need to build infrastructure to be able to welcome people in. It’s a lack of planning. It is a lack of funding,” Douglas says.

“We’ve raised these immigration numbers without paying attention to what it means, what it is that we didn’t have. We are already facing a crisis and we are bringing in more people without addressing the crisis.”

Canadian employers are champions for more economic immigrants. Half of employers surveyed told the Business Council of Canada they were in favour of raising the annual immigration targets — provided there are greater investments in the domestic workforce, as well as in child care, housing and public transportation.

Goldy Hyder, the council’s president and CEO, says many of the day-to-day challenges Canadians and immigrants face are in fact driven largely by labour shortages, whether it’s in health care, housing, or restaurants and retail.

Around the world, he says, countries build infrastructure to spur population — and economic — growth, but in Canada, he contends, it’s been vice-versa.

Hyder sees this moment as a crucial one for raising immigration targets and maintaining public support. “We are at a seminal moment in the life of this country, because we’re at a seminal moment in the life of the world right now,” he says.

Hyder says the country’s immigration policy shouldn’t be just about bringing in people, it should be part of a bigger workforce and industrial strategy to ensure skills of all Canadians and immigrants are fully utilized in the economy in order to maintain the public support for immigration.

“We need to plan better. We need to be more strategic in that plan. And we need to work together to do that: federal, provincial, municipal governments, regulatory bodies, professional bodies, business groups,” he says.

“Let’s address the anxieties that Canadians are facing. You don’t sweep them aside or under a rug. We must have honest discourse with Canadians, fact-based about what we’re trying to do to make their lives better.”

The tradeoffs that come with population growth

The case made for increased immigration is often an economic one. That said, research has generally found the economic benefits of immigration are close to neutral. That’s because when it comes to population growth, there are always tradeoffs.

While bringing in a large number of immigrants can spur population growth and drive demand for goods and services, it will also push up prices even as the government is trying to rein in out-of-control costs of living, warn some economists. 

When more workers are available, employers don’t have to compete and can offer lower wages. Further, just adding more people without investing into social and physical infrastructure such as housing and health care is going to strain the society’s resources and be counterproductive, economists say.

“For housing and health care, it takes a long time to catch up with the increased demand,” says Casey Warman, a professor in economics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, whose own family doctor is retiring. (He is now on a wait list seeking a new one, with 130,000 ahead of him.)

One of the main metrics of economic success has traditionally been a country’s overall GDP. Immigration and population growth can fuel the pool of labour and consumers and boost the overall GDP.

But there’s an emerging chorus of economists arguing that there is a better reflection of the standard of living and economic health in a country. That’s GDP per capita — productivity per person. The growth of Canada’s GDP per capita has been quite flat over the recent years, growing marginally from $50,750.48 in 2015 to $52,127.87 last year. Despite the recovery and high inflation amid the pandemic, it’s still below the $52,262.70 recorded in 2018.

Uncertainty about rapidly changing economic conditions, as well as the fast pace of technological adjustments, have also created uncertainty about what skills and labour will be in demand as the country moves forward.

“One big unknown now is how automation and especially AI is going to change the landscape for labour demand in the next five, 10 years … Is it going to decrease demand for labour?” Warman asks. 

How to adapt in the face of this uncertainty, and how immigration should be approached in light of it, is a conversation Canada needs to have, experts say.

Ivey Business School economics Prof. Mike Moffatt says that who Canada is bringing in matters as much as immigration levels, and what’s happening with the economy is nuanced.

Economic, family and humanitarian classes are the three main streams of permanent residents coming to Canada, and each group has different impacts on the economy, generally with those who come as skilled immigrants having the highest earnings and weathering economic downturns best.

The profiles of the incoming immigrants and their ability to integrate into the economy matter, says Moffatt. Bringing in foreign-trained doctors and nurses who can’t get licensed from stringent regulators, for example, won’t help address the health-care crisis.

Still, Moffatt says his critique of Canada’s immigration plan is less about the ambitious targeted numbers than the pace of the increases, as well as the short notice for provinces and cities in planning for the influx.

“Whether it be on education, immigration support programs, labour market programs, all of these things, there’s no time to adjust,” says Moffatt, senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute, a think tank with a stated goal of advancing solutions for a stronger, cleaner economy.

“I do think we can have robust increases in the targets. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, but let the provinces and cities know what you’re doing.

“There’s no collaboration. There’s no co-ordination. They are not working with the provinces and municipalities and the higher-education sector in order to come up with any kind of long-term thinking. It’s very short-term in nature.”

Should Canada cap international students and migrant workers?

Aside from questions about the immigration plan Canada has, there are also questions about the plan it doesn’t have.

The national immigration plan sets targets for the number of permanent residents accepted yearly, but leaves the door wide open for temporary residents. 

That has become a bigger issue over the years as Canada has increasingly shifted to a two-step system to select skilled immigrants who have studied and worked in Canada, bringing in more international students and temporary foreign workers than permanent residents.

According to Statistics Canada, there were close to a million (924,850) temporary residents in Canada in 2021, making up 2.5 per cent of the population.

The majority of them, including asylum-seekers, can legally work here; the remaining 8.7 per cent who don’t have work permits includes visitors such as parents and grandparents with the so-called super visa, who can stay for up to five years.

Temporary residents, who don’t have credit history for loans and mortgages in Canada, are more likely to be renters and public transit users (but eligible for some provincial health care), says Anne Michèle Meggs, who was the Quebec Immigration Ministry’s director of planning and accountability before her 2019 retirement.

“In the past, it wasn’t an issue, because we had a relatively small temporary migrant population, so we managed, even though we took the approach that we just bring them in and we don’t look after what happened to them afterwards,” says Meggs, whose book “Immigration to Quebec: How Can We Do Better” was recently published.

“That’s fine. That population wasn’t out of control. So that’s why we still successfully managed and it didn’t become a crisis.”

However, under tremendous pressure from post-secondary institutions to recruit international students, and from employers to quickly bring in foreign workers, she said the balance has tipped. To not set targets for temporary immigration is to get into trouble, Meggs warns.

“We want people to come and we want people to stay. You want things to be good for everybody, including immigrants and including children. And I think the objective has to be to make sure that everyone gets treated with dignity,” she says.

“Immigrants are not just sources of labour or sources of financing of institutions or spending money to increase our national GDP. These are people. We have to get back to talking about the immigrants and not just immigration.”

Canada ‘cannot afford to allow for polarization’

Canada immigration overall has been a success in terms of forging positive public attitudes toward immigration and the political participation by immigrants, says Andrew Griffith, a retired director general of the federal immigration department.

He feels Canada now has the maturity to have an honest and informed conversation about immigration without the fear of being labelled as racist and xenophobic. The focus of the discussion, he says, should be on Canada’s capacity to ensure a good quality of life for those who are already here and those who will be coming.

“It’s not about keeping the immigrants out. It’s more that if we’re going to do this, we have to do it right,” says Griffith. “We have to make sure we have the right infrastructure, the right housing policies and everything like that.”

Any immigration plan, Griffith says, should go beyond the intake levels but study the potential socio-economic impacts and include inputs from provincial and municipal governments.

Canada has grown to become a country of 40 million, and it has not always been smooth sailing.

But Canadians have worked hard to make immigration work for everyone and the success has come down to how the growth has been managed and how the public support for immigration has been maintained.

“We cannot afford to allow for polarization, populism and xenophobia to kick in here because it’s a very slippery slope,” says Hyder, whose family arrived in Calgary from India in 1974 when he was seven. “Other countries have seen it. It can go downhill very fast.

“Immigration is part of the arteries of our soul. It is who we are as a people.”

Source: Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

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