‘A different perspective’: Justice Mahmud Jamal on minority rights, bilingualism and the Supreme Court Social Sharing

2022/06/07 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Settling into an imposing red leather armchair in a wood-panelled office in Ottawa, Justice Mahmud Jamal recalled his anxious first moments in this country as a 14-year-old immigrant.

“I remember the first day here very well. I was scared,” he told Radio-Canada in a recent interview, describing the path that took him to the nation’s highest court — first from Kenya to England, then to Edmonton in 1981 for high school.

“I was scared for a lot of reasons. I left all my friends. I left a culture where I had spent my whole life. But at the same time, it was an opportunity to start life again.”

Coming from a modest family that moved halfway around the world in search of a better life, Jamal rose through the ranks of the Canadian legal world after graduating from McGill University’s law school. He was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in July 2021.

It’s a position he hopes to use to protect the rights of minorities and other historically disadvantaged groups — something he wrote about when completing his application to sit on Canada’s top court.

Jamal is the first person of colour to be nominated to Canada’s top court. He’s also a member of a religious minority.

Jamal grew up Muslim in the Ismaili community before converting to the Baha’i faith like his wife, who is an Iranian refugee.

He told Radio-Canada that his personal experience is an asset for the court, just like the personal experiences of each of his fellow Supreme Court justices.

“If you are a woman, if you are a man, if you are even a member of a minority, you bring your experience to work. I have experiences as a member of a visible minority, of a religious minority, so it gives a different perspective,” he said.

Source: ‘A different perspective’: Justice Mahmud Jamal on minority rights, bilingualism and the Supreme Court Social Sharing

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Coates: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Condemnation and renaming are easy compared to addressing the substantive issues, where action is more needed, not to mention the regrettable lack of nuance in understanding history and context:

With the decision to rename itself Toronto Metropolitan University, the former Ryerson University — known briefly as “University X” — fumbled the opportunity to use public criticism of Egerton Ryerson as a learning opportunity, instead bowing to the passionate protests of activists who believe that condemning a handful of historical figures is one way to address generations of discrimination and paternalism. 

Attacking the reputation of Ryerson, one of the most effective educational reformers in Canadian history, requires a narrow reading of his career. Regardless, he is now a dead letter in Canadian public life, and efforts to expunge his name from schools, monuments and other public facilities will no doubt continue apace. 

The number one target in the country is now Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald — like Ryerson, singled out for his role in Indigenous residential schools. Across the country, statues in Macdonald’s honour have been removed or doused in red paint, and public bodies are having earnest discussions about removing his name from schools and other facilities. 

There is nothing wrong with calling out or re-examining the public memory of historical figures for their actions. However, reading history reductively, losing sight of context, and misreading personal responsibility do not help us to understand the past. 

Right now, for good reason, the country is focused on a specific policy — residential schools — with the belief that by removing the tributes to the architects of the school movement we can turn a page. This approach is seriously misguided. 

Residential school education was horrific, its multi-generational negative effects still not fully understood. A system purportedly designed to provide personal opportunity to Indigenous students was instead used to attack Indigenous cultures, undermine centuries-old languages, destroy Indigenous families, and assimilate Aboriginal peoples. Dealing with the long-term impact of the residential schools has rightly become a national priority. 

We must, however, remember that the residential school concept was not foisted on an unwilling nation by its government. Virtually all non-Indigenous Canadians of that time, led by the Christian churches and supported by non-Indigenous advocates for Indigenous peoples, favoured residential schools. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, many non-Indigenous Canadians still defended the schools as clearly being a “good thing” and a sign of the benevolent state. 

Most Canadians did not know — or did not want to know — what happened in the schools. They neither expected nor countenanced the violence and brutality, but encouraged teachers and principals to undermine Indigenous language and culture, believing this was in Indigenous people’s best interests.

In today’s efforts to assign accountability for wrongs of the past, the tendency to focus on individuals — whatever their roles in establishing the institutions — simply misses the point. It was racism and a nationwide sense of cultural superiority that backstopped all of Canada’s aggressive actions against Indigenous peoples. If dismantling a statue or renaming a school (or university) serves some, it also deflects attention from where responsibility properly rests: with society at large. 

Criticizing early promoters of residential schools misses the historical mark. 

With Ryerson’s name now removed from a campus, and Macdonald’s image being assailed across Canada, where next? There are thousands of targets, including the political leaders, government and church officials, and public supporters who expanded the residential school system, including its rapid acceleration after the Second World War. 

Let’s consider two potential targets, modern-era political leaders who espoused simple ideas of potentially destructive impact on Indigenous peoples. They wanted to eliminate the Indian Act and Indian status, break up the reserves, abandon treaties, and integrate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian mainstream. Their stated goal sounded honourable to some — producing “real” equality among all Canadians — and there had been consultations, of a sort, with Indigenous groups. 

The 1969 White Paper was one of the most aggressive Indigenous policy initiatives in Canadian history, designed to remove barriers between peoples and overcome decades of discrimination and state paternalism. The response from First Nations was ferocious. Indigenous leaders organized protests and demanded the federal government retract its policy. The government did so, to the dismay of many non-Indigenous Canadians who wanted to remove the “special status” afforded Indigenous peoples. The contemporary Indigenous rights movement in Canada owes a great deal to the reaction to this ill-conceived and assimilationist strategy. 

The Prime Minister was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His minister of Indian and Northern Affairs was future prime minister Jean Chrétien. They were the architects of the White Paper of 1969. Trudeau believed “no society can be built on historical might-have-beens,” and opposed Indigenous land claim negotiations, modern treaties, and the concept of historical redress. 

The Trudeau government’s much-touted “Just Society” had a blind spot when it came to Indigenous peoples. The government’s preference for state intervention and the inherent paternalism of federal policy in the 1960s and 70s arguably accelerated the decline of Indigenous language and culture, fostering a culture of welfare dependency in Indigenous communities. 

Would it be appropriate for critics of government policy to focus their anger on Trudeau and Chrétien, leading to more monument destruction and renaming? Absolutely not; we can use our time and effort much better. Besides, when faced with sustained Indigenous anger, the Liberal government backed down. Unlike residential schools, which had major effects across generations, the White Paper brought to the surface the core ideas and values of the government of the day.

The past is a complicated place. It should not be reduced to memes and social-media messages. Historical leaders are people, with personal foibles, living in and reflecting their places and times. Democracies hold leaders accountable during their political lives. Historians and the public determine their legacy. Attitudes toward the leaders and their actions change over time, as the debate about John A. Macdonald demonstrates. But these discussions should be handled with caution. 

The piecemeal and reactive redoing of historical nomenclature, however well meaning, produces distortions of history. This said, Canada is desperately overdue for a rethinking of the many people and events we memorialize. 

Names and monuments should not be fixed for all time. New Zealand, now also known as Aotearoa, and Australia have both ventured down this road, with considerable achievement. New Zealanders are increasingly comfortable with both Maori names and cultural references in public affairs; Australia’s newly elected prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was introduced on a stage where the Australian flag shared pride of place with the flags of Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders.

There is so much to recognize and celebrate in Indigenous cultures that Canada should get on with it. Indigenous peoples, cultures and knowledge need to be more prominently recognized across Canada. The same holds for women, minority groups, and events either poorly or inaccurately represented in our historical nomenclature. A cautious renaming process in Canada could actually produce the most thoughtful and comprehensive historical and cultural reuniting in the nation’s history. 

Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples requires thoughtful and engaged reflection. Changing the names of institutions and tearing down monuments might gratify some, but there is a better way. Toronto Metropolitan University will hardly provide a rallying cry for a nation seeking real healing with Indigenous peoples. 

If Canada is to find common ground with First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, the country must reverse the lens, begin to view history from Indigenous perspectives and listen respectfully to elders and knowledge keepers. 

This reckoning will take more than attacks on historical figures. The problem rests not with a few individuals but with the profound sense of racial superiority that animated public policy for generations, underpinning a suite of government initiatives that marginalized and overwhelmed Indigenous peoples. For all of our condemnation of historical decisions that are now seen as egregious and destructive, Canadians remain largely oblivious to the paternalism and discrimination toward Indigenous people that is part of our national reality.

Canada is, by international standards, a remarkably successful country, even if it is built significantly on the displacement and domination of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. They were sacrificed in the interests of the nation, with most non-Indigenous peoples truly believing that assimilation and cultural domination was the only legitimate path forward. This position, dangerously and tragically wrong, animated the government for a century and a half, to be replaced in our time by a more evolved but still paternalistic approach to Indigenous affairs. 

This country needs to devote a great deal of effort to improving relationships with Indigenous communities. To Canada’s collective good fortune, Indigenous peoples remain open to such discussions and to rebuilding Confederation, despite the painful destruction of the past. 

We can do much more than try to eliminate historical guilt by changing a few names and sloshing paint on some statues. Instead, the country needs to listen closely to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples and build a policy agenda inspired by Indigenous priorities, a deep understanding of the multi-generational impacts of racism, and a real commitment to lasting reconciliation. 

Ken Coates is a Distinguished Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan.

Source: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

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Brownstein: No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Good response and political assessment on the need for shared narratives for whites and visible minorities:

Ann Coulter, in so many words, thinks that I am responsible for the mass shooting in Buffalo in mid-May.

Not me alone. After the shooting, Coulter wrote a column dismissing the idea that Republican politicians and commentators had popularized the “Great Replacement” theory, a conspiracy theory that the young, white Buffalo shooter cited as a motivation before killing 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Instead, Coulter argued that the theory had been popularized by political analysts and Democratic operatives who have predicted that the nation’s changing demographics will benefit Democrats over time.

In particular, Coulter, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and others on the right have cited the work of journalists like me, the Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, and the electoral analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority, claiming that, by writing about demographic change and its electoral impact, we are responsible for seeding the idea that white Americans are being displaced. “If you don’t want people to be paranoid and angry, maybe you don’t write pieces like that and rub it right in their face,” Carlson, who has relentlessly touted replacement theory on his show, declared in a recent monologue.

It might go without saying that documenting demographic change is not the same as using it to incite and politically mobilize those who are fearful of it. It’s something like the difference between reporting a fire and setting one. But given how many right-wing racial provocateurs are trying to disavow the consequences of their “replacement” rhetoric, it apparently bears explaining how their incendiary language differs from the arguments of mainstream demographic and electoral analysts.

Let’s start with defining replacement theory. It’s a racist formulation that has migrated from France to far-right American circles to some officials and candidates in the GOP mainstream. In its purest version, the theory maintains that shadowy, left-wing elites—often identified as Jews—are deliberately working to undermine the political influence of native-born white citizens by promoting immigration and other policies that increase racial diversity. This conspiracy theory was the inspiration, if that’s the right word, for the neo-Nazis who chanted during their 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that “Jews will not replace us.”

Stripped of the overt anti-Semitism, replacement theory has become a constant talking point for Carlson. A growing number of Republican politicians, such as House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and the Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance, have incorporated versions of it into their rhetoric. It’s the most virulent iteration of the core message former President Donald Trump has imprinted onto his party: Republicans are your last line of defense against diverse, urban, secular, LGBTQ-friendly, “woke” Democrats, who are trying to uproot the nation from its traditions and transform it into something unrecognizable.

Undoubtedly, some Democrats over the years have argued that the party would benefit from higher levels of immigration. But this is the first point of difference between mainstream demographic analysis and replacement theory: No serious student of history or politics believes that a Democratic plot to import “more obedient voters from the Third World,” as Carlson puts it, has been the driving force behind U.S. immigration policy. Until the 1990s, most of the key decisions in modern immigration policy were bipartisan—from the passage of the landmark 1965 immigration-reform act to the amnesty for undocumented immigrants signed into law by President Ronald Reagan to the Republican-controlled Senate’s passage of comprehensive immigration reform in 2006, with unwavering support from President George W. Bush. A Democratic-led conspiracy that ensnared Reagan and Bush would be pretty impressive—if it weren’t so implausible.

Second, replacement theory pinpoints immigration policy, particularly the potential legalization of undocumented immigrants, as the key reason that white Americans are being “displaced.” But Frey, the Brookings demographer, has repeatedly documented that immigration is no longer the principal driver of the nation’s growing diversity. As he wrote in a 2020 paper, census “projections show that the U.S. will continue to become more racially diverse” no matter what level of future legal immigration the U.S. government authorizes. Diversity will grow somewhat faster under scenarios of high rather than low immigration, but diversity will increase regardless, Frey notes, because it is propelled mostly by another factor. Among those already living in the United States, people of color have higher birth rates than white people, who are much older on average. Even eliminating all immigration for the next four decades would not prevent the white share of the U.S. population from declining further, Frey’s analysis of the census data found.

A third big difference between replacement theory and analyses of demographic change revolves around the role that race plays in the changing balance of political power in America. Many on the right see racial change as the key threat to the Republican Party’s electoral prospects. But demographic analysts have never seen racial change as sufficient to tilt the electoral competition between the parties. White Americans still cast somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all votes (depending on the data source). That number has been steadily declining, at a rate of about two to three percentage points every four years. Even at that pace, it would be another seven or eight presidential elections—roughly until 2050—before minorities cast a majority of the vote.

No party can write off America’s white majority for that long. Instead, I and other analysts have long argued that Democrats have the opportunity to build a multiracial coalition composed of both the increasing minority population and groups within the white population that are most comfortable with a diversifying America: namely those who are college-educated, secular, urban, and younger, especially women in all of those cohorts. The combination of these white groups (many of which are growing) and the expanding minority population is what I have called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation.”

Even Democratic organizations that are focused on maximizing political participation among nonwhite voters recognize the centrality of building a multiracial coalition, on electoral as well as moral grounds. “First and foremost, multiracial democracy is inherently inclusive of white people,” says Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategist for Way to Win, which helps fund organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color. “I don’t imagine an America in which a winning coalition across the nation and in the key states we’re going to need to be winning … [is] without white people as part of the coalition.”

This leads to perhaps the most important divergence between replacement theory and theories of demographic change. Those on the right who push replacement theory tell their mostly white supporters that they are locked in a zero-sum competition with minorities and immigrants who are stealing what rightfully belongs to them: electoral power, economic opportunity, the cultural definition of what it means to be a legitimate American. “There’s always this underlying theft—they are taking these things by dishonest means; they are taking what is yours,” explains Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist who has become a leading critic of the party’s direction under Trump.

By contrast, I and other analysts have emphasized the interdependence of the white and nonwhite populations. Building on work from Frey, I’ve repeatedly written that America is being reshaped by two concurrent demographic revolutions: a youth population that is rapidly growing more racially diverse, and a senior population that is increasing in size as Baby Boomers retire but that will remain preponderantly white for decades. (The Baby Boom was about 80 percent white.) Although these shifts raise the prospect of increased political and social tension between what I called “the brown and the gray,” the two groups are bound together more than our politics often allows. A core reality of 21st-century America is that this senior population will depend on a largely nonwhite workforce to pay the taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, not to mention to provide the medical care those seniors need.

While the likes of Carlson and Coulter tell white Americans to fear that immigrants or people of color are replacing them politically, financial security for the “gray” is impossible without economic opportunity for the “brown.”

This isn’t to say that there is no political competition between older white Americans, who make up the core of the Republican coalition, and younger nonwhite Americans, who are more and more central to the Democratic coalition. In fact, a mistake that I and many other demographic and electoral analysts made over the past decade was to underestimate how big a coalition a candidate like Trump could mobilize in the name of protecting culturally conservative, white, Christian America.

For many years, I have argued that the diversification of the Democratic coalition wouldn’t always work to the party’s electoral advantage. As the party’s most culturally conservative components sheared off, I believed, Democrats would need to take more consistently liberal positions on social issues, which in turn would alienate more centrist voters from the party. That ideological re-sorting, I wrote in National Journal in 2013, would both “increase the pressure” on the Democratic Party “to maintain lopsided margins and high turnout among minorities and young people” and “make it tougher for [Democrats] to control Congress, at least until demographic change ripples through more states and House districts.” That prediction has held up.

At the same time, I stressed—and quoted experts from both parties who shared the view—that Republicans would face a growing long-term challenge in winning the White House if they could not improve their performance among minorities, young people, and college-educated and secular white voters. (The famous Republican National Committee “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential loss largely reached the same conclusion.) In one sense, that prediction held up too: Democrats won the popular vote in 2016 and 2020.

But, to a greater extent than I and others had forecast, Trump’s ability to win an Electoral College majority in 2016, and the fact that he came so close again in 2020, made clear that Republicans could seriously compete for the White House with what I have called their “coalition of restoration,” centered on the nonurban, non-college-educated, and Christian white voters who are most alienated by the changes remaking 21st-century America. The difficulty for the Democrats in holding the House, and especially the Senate, which favors smaller states that tend to elect Republicans, was even greater than I and others had expected.

Trump’s success among blue-collar white voters in key Rust Belt states was at least somewhat foreseeable. But his unique persona and message—a more open appeal to white racial resentments than any national figure since George Wallace, a bruising economic nationalism, and a sweeping condemnation of “elites”—generated even greater margins and larger turnout among his core supporters than I thought possible. And although some center-right suburban voters abandoned the GOP in the Trump era, many demographic analysts like me—along with the Never Trump movement—underestimated the number of Republican voters who would still vote for Trump or Trumpist GOP candidates as a way to block Democrats and advance other priorities, including tax cuts and conservative judicial appointments.

A new development in 2020 further solidified Trumpism’s hold on the GOP:Trump’s improved performance among Latino voters. That has convinced many Republicans that they can energize racially resentful white voters using nativist and racially coded messages, while still gaining ground among Latinos who are drawn mostly to the Republican economic agenda, as well as conservative views on some social issues such as abortion. This trend has proved an uncomfortable complication for the purveyors of replacement theory, who often portray Latinos as the invidious replacers. In a recent monologue, Carlson tried to square the circle by insisting that Democrats are still trying to displace white voters, but that they have miscalculated about the loyalties of Latino voters.

Due in part to the provocations of Carlson and others, the United States appears trapped in a cycle of increasing racial, generational, and partisan conflict that is escalating fears about the country’s fundamental cohesion. But imagine, Frey suggested to me, if instead of trying to convince older white Americans that younger nonwhite Americans are displacing them, political leaders from both parties emphasized the growing interdependence between these two groups. Ancona, of Way to Win, offers one version of what that message could sound like: “If we start telling a story that America is the richest country in the world, that there is enough pie for everyone, there is no need for ‘replacement.’ The whole construct is wrong. There should be enough for all of us to be free and to be healthy and to be living the life we want to live. There is a beauty in that story we could tell people, but it’s just not being told in a way that it needs to be.”

The refusal of many GOP leaders to condemn replacement theory even after the Buffalo shooting, and their determination to block greater law-enforcement scrutiny of violent white supremacists, underscores how far we are from that world. To me, the safest forecast about the years ahead is that the Republican Party and its allies in the media will only escalate their efforts to squeeze more votes from white Americans by heightening those voters’ fears of a changing country. I’d like to be wrong about that prediction, too, but I’m not optimistic that I will be.

Source: No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory

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Australia: Will the hateful army who bullied Yassmin Abdel-Magied come after Australia’s diverse new parliamentarians?

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Remains to be seen:

If the euphoria and back-patting over the federal election results are anything to go by, Australia is a vastly different country from the one Yassmin Abdel-Magied left five years ago.

A new cohort of confident, competent, successful and ethnically diverse parliamentarians are about to enter public life. They have been widely celebrated as a sign that the country is getting multiculturalism right.

I am sceptical of these good vibes. History teaches us to be worried about how they will be treated over the next few years.

If recent history is anything to go by, at least some of them will be in for a rough ride. The ones most likely to attract negative attention will be those who are unlucky enough to have the deadly combination of confidence and “difference” due to wearing a hijab, having dark skin or non-Anglo features.

Australia’s tall poppy syndrome goes into overdrive when it comes to people who aren’t white and have the audacity to criticise Australian racism

Australia’s tall poppy syndrome goes into overdrive when it comes to people who aren’t white and have the audacity to criticise Australian racism. Lest we forget, two years before Abdel-Magied was relentlessly abused and trolled for a six word Facebook post that sought to remind Australians of the plight of people affected by war and living in horrendous conditions at Manus and Nauru, Adam Goodes was subjected to appalling, career-ending bullying by footy fans in stadia across Australia.

Like Abdel-Magied, Goodes’ “mistake” was that he was both brilliant and uncompromising in his rejection of racism.

For both personalities, public vilification followed soaring success. Goodes had been Australian of the Year, and Abdel-Magied had a string of high-profile engagements including a television program on the ABC.

And yet, as Ketan Joshi has calculated, in the year following the Anzac Day post, over 200,000 words were written about her in the Australian media, with 97% of those words appearing in News Corp.

The pile-on included Peter Dutton who, from the lofty height of his position as immigration minister, welcomed her sacking by gloating “One down, many to go” and called for more ABC journalists to be fired.

Imagine that? How is it fair dinkum for a 26-year-old naturalised Australian citizen who posted on her personal Facebook account to be personally targeted by the minister for immigration?

The pile-on fuelled by wealthy and unhinged News Corp presenters created an environment in which Abdel-Magied endured real-life attacks. A pig’s head was dumped at the Islamic primary school she attended and posters were put up in a Sydney neighbourhood by a white nationalist group that racially stereotyped Abdel-Magied and journalist Waleed Aly – another overachieving brown migrant who has been the subject of sustained abuse.

Thankfully, the campaign to silence Abdel-Magied has not worked, just as the efforts to silence Goodes have not killed his spirit nor dimmed his capacity to be a positive influence on the lives of members of his community.

Still, their treatment creates a chilling effect. They are not alone of course. There is ongoing racial abuse hurled at other footy players, and racist commentary follows virtually every appearance of high-profile African Australian Nyadol Nyuon. Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi wrote in the Guardian last year that she has been called “a maggot, a cockroach, a whore and a cow”.

I haven’t copped it as bad, but each time I have appeared on Q+A the memory of Abdel-Magied’s treatment has loomed large. Indeed, before my first appearance I was warned they shouldn’t “Yassmin me”. Each time, I worried about appearing too strident lest I spark a frenzy based on a comment I didn’t see coming.

While nerves are part of the deal when you appear on television, being afraid to speak your mind is not. Being overly concerned about making factual observations about racism and sexism is a function of living in a society that has a track record of bullying Black people with a public profile. As Yumi Stynes found out, it can be easier to minimise and ignore racism, even when it is staring you in the face live on television. The consequences of calling it out, or even observing it, can be catastrophic.

This sort of silencing has the cumulative effect of diminishing the quality of the national conversation about racism. We should be able to have honest, mature discussions about racism. Instead, we are held hostage by the thin-skinned bullies at News Corp, the lily-livered bosses at the ABC and the worst instincts of their audiences.

To be sure, the record numbers of public representatives voted into office from non-European backgrounds is a cause for celebration. In a proud editorial, the West Australian noted that WA Labor senator Fatima Payman, who came to Australia as a refugee at the age of nine, represents “modern Australia, for now and the future”. The paper is right.

Unfortunately it is also the case that if Payman dares to point out systemic race-based obstacles that prevent the success of people from her communities, the army of hateful people who bullied Abdel-Magied will almost certainly come after her.

Diversity in parliament isn’t just about new faces, it’s also about accepting hard truths. The class of 2022 is inspiring because, against all odds, its members have made it into politics.

But if Australians want parliament itself to become a site of inspiration too, we will all need to move beyond the good stories and learn how to celebrate those who refuse to sugarcoat the truth.

If Abdel-Magied’s assured refusal to hang her head in shame for being herself teaches us anything, it is that there is no expiry date on the truth.

  • Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist and the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)

Source: Will the hateful army who bullied Yassmin Abdel-Magied come after Australia’s diverse new parliamentarians?

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Tsek’ene, Farsi, Punjabi, Tagalog: The push to diversify languages in schools [Vancouver and the lower mainland]

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Of note. Language demands change with time. When I was in high school in the 1970s, Latin was still offered and Russian was an option. Believe Latin classes ended sometime in the 1980s and of course Chinese has far eclipsed the former need for Russian (influenced by the Cold War).

Our kids went to Farsi Saturday morning classes when they were young, offered by the Ottawa Board of Education.

How this interest in “heritage” languages plays out with respect to second official language instruction remains to be seen:

Nine-year-old Armiti Atayi takes private Farsi classes, but would rather learn the language at her West Vancouver public school in a classroom with all her friends — something that may be possible one day, if the Education Ministry approves a new proposed Farsi curriculum.

“So when I go back for a vacation to Iran, I can read signs and read books and watch Persian TV, and cartoons,” said the Grade 3 Westcot Elementary student.

Her father, Omid Atayi, argued it is “long overdue” for Farsi to be offered in public schools given B.C.’s fast-growing Persian community.

“That would be a dream come true,” Atayi said. “We want our kids to be close to our culture, so establishing meaningful connection through language. … So they can read books, read poems, and write their own name. And a good example would be when they travelled back home (to Iran), they can communicate in an effective way with their relatives, or children their own age.”

If the Education Ministry accepts the new proposed Farsi curriculum developed and approved last month by the Coquitlam school board, it will become the ninth language, in addition to English and French, for which the province has official course guidelines. The others are French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Punjabi, Spanish and American Sign Language.

The province also has curriculum for 18 First Nations languages, and the Education Ministry said in an email that more are “in development.”

Three additional languages are offered in a tiny number of districts using “locally developed,” as opposed to ministry-approved, curriculum, such Russian in Prince George and the Comox Valley, Arabic in Victoria, and Croatian in Burnaby, although there is not always enough demand to run these courses every year.

Most of B.C.’s approved languages, with the exception of English, French and Spanish, are taught in only a small number of schools, where there is sufficient interest from students and enough qualified teachers.

During this 2021-22 school year, just 34,000 students took a secondary language that wasn’t English or French or who weren’t involved in an immersion programs, according to Education Ministry data provided to Postmedia. That is less than 10 per cent of B.C.’s 564,000 elementary and secondary students.

In B.C., all students must take a second language in Grades 5 to 8, unless they have so-called diverse needs, receive English-as-a-second-language services, or are in an immersion program. French is the default language if a district offers no alternatives, the ministry says. Second languages in high school are optional.

Nearly one third of B.C.’s 60 school districts didn’t offer a secondary language course beyond English or French in the 2021-22 calendar year. However, the ministry says courses run by districts fluctuate year by year based on enrolment.

The Vancouver school board, for example, ran second language instruction in French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and Italian this year, and in past years has also offered Korean, German, Russian and Punjabi. The VSB also operates French and Mandarin immersion programs.

After French, Spanish was the most popular secondary language, with more than 20,000 students enrolled in two thirds of boards across B.C. Punjabi as a second language, by comparison, was offered in just six districts and had just 2,125 students taking it this year.

About 11 of the 18 Indigenous languages were taught this year to a total of 1,515 students in a handful of schools, the vast majority of them in the north, on Vancouver Island or in the Interior. The most common were 233 students taking Kwak’wala in the Campbell River and Vancouver Island North districts, and 219 students studying Secwepemctsin in the Cariboo-Chilcotin and Kamloops-Thompson districts.

Chilliwack appears to the closest city to Metro Vancouver to offer an Indigenous language, with 106 students studying Halq’eméylem this year. The Vancouver school board said in an email, though, that it is working with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations with an aim to one day offer programs in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Skwxwú7mesh languages.

Statistics Canada says B.C. has the largest number of Indigenous languages, but they are spoken by an increasingly small number of people.

“I would love to see the province provide more support towards the revitalization of Indigenous languages within British Columbia, because it is the province that has the highest number of varied Indigenous languages and they are at risk,” said Rome Lavrencic, a New Westminster French teacher who has been on a B.C. Teachers’ Federation languages committee for 16 years.

Lavrencic said he recently met with officials from various universities and colleges who indicated there is renewed interest from students to learn Indigenous languages, but the challenge at the post-secondary level is the same in high schools: The classrooms need to be full, or it is not financially feasible to run the courses.

Another challenge to offer these programs is finding enough books and other teaching resources. While the federal government provides extra resources for French courses, Lavrencic said, “the minority languages, like Japanese, German, Mandarin and Punjabi, don’t get as much in terms of recognition and funding.”

Despite those shortcomings, B.C. should offer even more languages in its schools, such as Tagalog from the Philippines, argued Lavrencic, president of the BCTF’s Association of Teachers of Modern Languages.

“There’s so many different benefits from learning a foreign language,” added Wendy Yamazaki, a Japanese teacher in Delta who is treasurer of the BCTF language committee. “It just gives you that global perspective, that understanding of cultures and understanding of other people in different areas.”

In response to questions about whether B.C. will introduce more languages in public schools, the ministry said it is up to teachers and community groups to first develop new language curriculums that they would like to see taught. It is also up to districts to recruit the required teachers, but the ministry says it does provide some assistance.

Twelve years ago, Coquitlam started a Mandarin immersion program. Abby Chow was part of that inaugural group of students, and is now in it first graduating class.

Although her parents do not speak Mandarin, the Grade 12 student at Gleneagle Secondary School leaves the public school system able to speak it fluently.

“It will open a lot of doors if I want to study an international language or travel in Asia,” said Chow, who will attend the University of B.C. next year to study science and play on the golf team. “I’m super grateful.”

Coquitlam is one of a very small number of B.C. districts that offers Mandarin immersion and the program often has a waiting list, said Sophie Bergeron, Coquitlam’s language and culture coordinator.

“Mostly due to a shortage of teachers, we cannot expand our program, even though we have more demand than we have space for students,” she said, adding the same is true for its French immersion classes.

Her district became the first in B.C. to approve the new Farsi curriculum, which was developed by teachers from Coquitlam and Surrey, with help from a Simon Fraser University professor. It is now under review by the province, which will decide later this year whether it meets all requirements to become an authorized language course, the ministry’s email said.

Bergeron said Coquitlam doesn’t plan to offer Farsi courses in the near future, mainly because of a shortage of Persian teachers and timetable challenges. However, the district sponsored the curriculum in the hope that Farsi could one day be added to the list of languages that Grade 11 and 12 students can “challenge,” meaning if they speak the language fluently, they can write an exam and earn a high school credit.

“Hopefully a challenge exam will be developed so those students will at least have one way of having their (Farsi) language recognized for credits,” Bergeron said. “Maybe another district would be willing to go” with classes.

And that’s the exact outcome hoped for by Amir Bajehkian, who founded Farsi dar B.C. five years ago to lobby for his native language to be taught in schools. While he is grateful that Coquitlam sponsored the curriculum, he hopes classes will be offered on the North Shore, where B.C.’s largest Persian community lives.

“Our main focus is on North Vancouver and West Vancouver school districts,” he said, adding one of the key reasons is the number of readily available Farsi-speaking teachers there.

Bajehkian has spoken with the districts, and has asked them to consider offering Farsi courses in Handsworth and Carson Graham in North Vancouver, and West Vancouver Secondary and Sentinel in West Vancouver.

“I think this is a great move in the right direction,” said North Vancouver’s assistant superintendent, Chris Atkinson. “I think it’s important for students to see themselves represented in the curriculum. … It helps build a diverse culture in the schools.”

While he said Handsworth and Carson both have large Persian student populations, he cautioned there is a lot that needs to happen before students will be sitting in a Farsi classroom. Assuming the ministry approves the curriculum, high school principals must then decide if they have enough teachers and students, and then must find room in their timetables.

The earliest Farsi could be offered is September 2023, Atkinson said.

The West Vancouver district said it would examine the Farsi proposal in the coming year.

Bajehkian estimates there are as many as 90,000 Iranians and up to 30,000 Afghans in the Lower Mainland, and said those numbers are growing. And he is proud that the two communities came together to create and lobby for this curriculum.

“Having the Farsi speaking community, Iranians and Afghans, in Canada, and B.C. particularly, we’re getting to a point that we’re becoming more established. And, in my opinion, now is the time to preserve and protect our language for our kids and share it with our neighbours,” he said.

Source: Tsek’ene, Farsi, Punjabi, Tagalog: The push to diversify languages in schools 

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Milloy: Where is the progressive counter-narrative to Pierre Poilievre?

2022/06/04 Leave a comment

Important question:

As a member of the lefty chattering class, I am not sure what concerns me more — the rise of Pierre Poilievre or the inability of his progressive critics to develop a positive counter-narrative to his message.

The main criticism of Poilievre from those on the left seems to be that he is an angry “nut” with bad policies.  Although he may be popular in some circles, they would argue that it tends to be with the not-too-bright and ill-informed. Clever people from downtown Toronto, Ottawa or other urban centres have no time for him.

Labelling someone early in the game can work — just ask Michael Ignatieff — and maybe Poilievre is simply a crank who is just stirring up a small fringe minority.

Perhaps there is nothing to worry about.

I am not convinced.

From where I sit, it looks like Pierre Poilievre has touched a nerve. Canadians are angry, exhausted, divided, and looking for answers. Poilievre is providing them. He has developed a narrative about how he would address Canada’s problems that has caused many to sit up and take notice.

So, how is the other side responding?

Let’s start with one of Poilievre’s most high-profile promises. If he were prime minister, he would fire the governor of the Bank of Canada for his apparent role in fuelling inflation.

“Ridiculous,” say his critics. Not only does Poilievre not understand basic economics but look at what happened when John Diefenbaker tried to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada in 1961.

I have news for my progressive friends: When gas is two bucks a litre and grown children can’t afford to move out of their parents’ basement, ordinary Canadians aren’t interested in history lessons from the 1960s.

Then there is the issue of restoring freedom — the central theme of Poilievre’s campaign. Once again, the progressive crowd dismisses Poilievre as touting crazy conspiracy theories about big government.

But hold on a minute. I don’t care where you stand on vaccines, lockdowns, and masks. The last few years has seen an unprecedented intrusion in the lives of Canadians. Governments have regulated and curtailed our activities like never before, all in the name of public health.

Where are the limits? What is the progressive narrative about the need to balance personal freedom with the common good? Where is there even an acknowledgement from those on the left that the level of government control over our lives during the pandemic has been scary for some Canadians and they understand and respect that fact?

What about natural resource development and climate change?

Like all Conservative leadership candidates, Poilievre is anxious to cancel the carbon tax and dramatically increase oil and gas production in Canada.

What is the left’s counter-narrative?

Why has it been seemingly impossible for progressives to develop an easy-to-understand story that explains how we need to balance short-term support for oil and gas through actions like the purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and approval of Bay du Nord offshore oil project with a long-term commitment to fighting climate change?

How about defunding the CBC — a proposal that always produces cheers at any Conservative gathering?

Sure, enjoying Canada’s national network over a latte or a glass of chardonnay is a favourite pastime for of every small “l” liberal.  But is it just me, or has the CBC increasingly turned into a northern version of MSNBC? Shouldn’t we be concerned that a big chunk of the population doesn’t see their views represented on our taxpayer-funded network?

Could progressives not even acknowledge the concern and outline a way forward to improve our national broadcaster?

And yes, Poilievre appears to have an unhealthy obsession with cryptocurrency and its growing presence in the global economy.

But how do progressives propose to deal with this emerging phenomenon?

What about the whole style of political discourse these days?

Poilievre claims that Canada is governed by “a small group of ruling elites who claim to possess moral superiority and the burden of instructing the rest of us how to live our lives.”

Ouch!

Be honest all you lefties. Can you see how some people (maybe many people) might view progressives that way? What are you going to do about presenting a style of leadership that is open, prepared to listen and willing to engage?

I end this column where I began. Maybe Pierre Poilievre will ultimately go nowhere.

But be careful. Although I am generally uncomfortable with comparisons between Canadian politicians and Donald Trump, there is one point worth making: Love him or hate him, Trump entered the 2016 election campaign with a whole range of easy-to-understand solutions to the apparent ills facing the United States. The counter-narrative from the other side left much to be desired.

Let’s not make the same mistake here in Canada.

Source: Where is the progressive counter-narrative to Pierre Poilievre?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with ,

Newly released federal records reveal ‘darkest days’ of Chinese exclusion era

2022/06/03 Leave a comment

Part of our history:
Standing over a table at the Chinese Canadian Museum in Chinatown, Brandt Louie slowly and methodically sifts through the documents before him — occasionally bristling at what he sees.
The scanned, century-old documents were forms filled by bureaucrats as they interrogated and kept track of all existing Chinese in Canada after Ottawa imposed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1923, which banned immigration from China for almost a quarter of a century.
The nine documents Louie showed to a reporter Wednesday record the registration of Louie’s grandparents, his father and six uncles.

They are the first to be seen in a set that includes 56,000 similar documents for other Chinese in Canada at the time.

“We were quite excited because when we started to look through them, we realized that all the things we had heard about are now true,” said Louie, the 79-year-old B.C. businessman who is president and CEO of the H.Y. Louie Co. Ltd., which distributes to IGA stores, and the chairman of London Drugs.

Some of the records have small but important details such as the exact year his grandfather arrived, or that his grandmother was exempt from the head tax because she arrived in Canada as a “merchant’s wife.”

He said confirming oral history and buttressing stories didn’t carry much relevance for him before, but anti-Asian racism during the pandemic made him reconsider the value of doing this so they can be of value to the current and next generation.

He has been writing opinion pieces, promoting the Chinatown Storytelling Centre and a new exhibit, “Seeds to Success,” at the Chinese Canadian Museum in Chinatown that traces his family’s experience.

“When we heard these stories before, we used to merely assume they were stories of previous generations, that they didn’t apply to us,” said Louie.

For decades, the 56,000 forms have been stored at Library and Archives Canada, which was reluctant to make them accessible until Randall Wong, the first Chinese-Canadian lawyer to be appointed to a federal court, joined others in calling for them to be released.

Historian Catherine Clement is currently cataloguing the forms. She estimates the process will take a year and then they will be publicly available.

“What’s fascinating is that this is a snapshot of our community just before it enters its darkest days. And I always remind people, at the time this happened no one knew if this (Exclusion Act) law would come off the books, if things would change or get better. You couldn’t foresee it would last (until 1947).”

She notes that newspapers at the time give a sense of how the mass registration drive provoked fear and anxiety as much as the closing of immigration.

“There are headlines where we the community is afraid of the registration, afraid of how they’re going to be interrogated, of what’s going to happen to people if they don’t remember exactly what boat they came in,” said Clement.

Louie’s grandfather, Hok Yat Louie, who started the family’s legacy in Canada as a wholesale grocer, would have taken his family in for the process, submitting three photographs for each person. His form states he arrived in Victoria in 1898 while his grandmother, Young Shee, arrived in Vancouver in 1911. The forms for his father and six uncles list them as being born in Vancouver with two recorded as being 10- and 11-year-old schoolboys and the youngest a three-year-old child.

Each has “facial marks and physical peculiarities” listed, including the location and size of scars and moles, whether they are raised or small, by the left jaw or over the right eyebrow.

“It was really quite a classification,” said Louie, reading through the forms. “It’s almost as if (they) had to undergo a physical examination because how would you know where all these moles are?”

Louie remembers that even after the Exclusion Act was in place, his grandfather did go to China a few times as he was still in the business of importing sesame seeds, ginger and walnuts.

“If he wasn’t in the registry, he would have been denied entry. It was used to track people,” he said.

Clement, who is gathering the beige paper identity cards known as C.I. certificates issued by the government to people after they were registered in 1923, said that while families are finding and bringing some of these in, many have also been lost or damaged.

“Even though tens of thousands were issued, there are so few left. In some families, they didn’t recognize the value and so they threw them out. It was just grandma’s stuff. Or as soon as they got their citizenship (in later years), the first thing they did was to rip them up because of the symbolism.”

And Clement was able to manually go through and find the nine documents for the Louie family members because they had one beige paper card for Quan Louie, the uncle who was three-years-old when he was registered.

Source: Newly released federal records reveal ‘darkest days’ of Chinese exclusion era

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

2022/06/02 Leave a comment

Of note. Another ongoing issue, one not easy to resolve but one would hope to see some ongoing progress:

The federal auditor general says Canada’s prison service has not given offenders timely access to programs to help ease them back into society, including courses specific to women, Indigenous people and visible minorities.

Auditor general Karen Hogan found Black and Indigenous offenders experienced poorer outcomes than any other groups in the federal correctional system and faced greater barriers to a safe and gradual return to the outside world.

Hogan pointed out her office raised similar issues in audits in 2015, 2016 and 2017, yet the correctional service has done little to change the policies, practices, tools and approaches that produce these differing outcomes.

Hogan says disparities were present from the moment offenders entered federal institutions.

The process for selecting security classifications saw Indigenous and Black offenders assigned to maximum-security institutions at twice the rate of other groups of offenders.

They also remained in federal custody longer and at higher levels of security before their release.

The audit found that timely access to correctional programs continued to decline across all groups of offenders. Access to programming, which teaches crucial skills like problem solving and goal setting, worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of men serving sentences of two to four years who were released from April to December 2021, 94 per cent had not completed the correctional programs they needed before they were first eligible to apply for day parole.

“This is a barrier to serving the remainder of their sentences under supervision in the community,” the report says.

The prison service needs to find a different way to organize programming, because “that timely access is so critical to an offender’s successful path forward,” Hogan said Tuesday at a news conference.

Correctional service efforts to support greater equity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace also fell short, leaving persistent barriers unresolved, the report says.

Close to one-quarter of management and staff had not completed mandatory diversity training a year after the deadline.

In addition, the prison service had not established a plan to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of its offender populations, which has particular relevance for institutions with high numbers of Indigenous and Black offenders, the report says.

Hogan noted the correctional service has acknowledged systemic racism in the system, initiating an anti-racism framework to identify and remove systemic barriers.

The service has agreed to act on the auditor general’s recommendations to remedy the various issues she identified.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino stressed efforts toward “rooting out racism in all of its forms” by diversifying the prison service’s workforce, improving our training and collecting data to inform policies. “And we know we’ve got a long way to go.”

Mendicino noted he recently directed the correctional service head to create a new position of deputy commissioner for Indigenous corrections, saying it will ensure the overrepresentation of Indigenous offenders in the system, especially women, is addressed.

Source: Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

Filed under Aboriginal, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Dutrisac: Survivance et résignation [on the CAQ electoral strategy and immigration]

2022/06/01 Leave a comment

Of interest, particularly the contrast between the earlier inclusive vision of the first PQ government and how it has evolved to the defensive approach of the CAQ:

Il a été beaucoup question de fierté lors du congrès national de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ). François Legault a parlé des deux pôles de son gouvernement, la prospérité et la fierté. Le ministre André Lamontagne a aussi beaucoup parlé de fierté dans l’allocution finement rédigée qu’il a livrée samedi après-midi.

Ce type d’événements partisans baigne dans un enthousiasme parfois factice — il ne l’était aucunement cette fin de semaine —, qui se manifeste par les autocongratulations et le cheerleading, le simplisme des lignes de communication et un comportement moutonnier particulièrement exacerbé dans un parti composé de militants disciplinés, ou dociles, plutôt que chicaniers. À cet égard, la CAQ surpasse le Parti libéral du Québec.

Cet enthousiasme se percevait sur le plancher du centre des congrès de Drummondville : jamais depuis les libéraux de Robert Bourassa en 1985 un parti politique québécois n’a été en si bonne posture à l’orée d’élections générales, ce que la faiblesse de ses adversaires ne fait que souligner.

En campagne électorale il y a quatre ans, François Legault avait aussi parlé de fierté, en contraste avec un Philippe Couillard distant, qui semblait parfois douter du peuple québécois.

Après un premier mandat, les Québécois sont-ils plus fiers qu’en 2018, sont-ils plus prospères ? a lancé le chef caquiste, tout en donnant évidemment une réponse affirmative aux deux questions.

Sur le plan de la prospérité, son bilan est positif, surtout si on le compare à celui du gouvernement précédent, de l’austérité duquel nous nous souvenons amèrement. Malgré la pandémie, les finances publiques sont en ordre, la forte croissance économique a dépassé celle de nos voisins, le taux de chômage est au plus bas, la productivité est en hausse, l’écart de richesse avec l’Ontario s’est réduit, les salaires ont augmenté, bien que la poussée d’inflation, qu’on espère de courte durée, soit venue brouiller les cartes, et avec ça, le gouvernement caquiste a remis « de l’argent dans les poches des Québécois ».

Plus prospères et plus fiers, les Québécois devraient afficher une assurance à toute épreuve. Pas si vite : c’est compter sans le spectre de la « louisianisation » du Québec, brandi par François Legault, en lien avec une immigration qui s’intégrerait mal à notre société de langue française. Il y va de la « survie » de la nation québécoise, a fait valoir le chef caquiste.

Dès le début du prochain mandat, le gouvernement caquiste entend organiser un vaste sommet sur les perspectives démographiques du Québec et l’apport de l’immigration. L’événement permettrait d’informer la population sur cet enjeu crucial dans le but de bâtir un rapport de force face à Ottawa. Dimanche, François Legault a réitéré une demande à laquelle Justin Trudeau avait déjà répondu par un non catégorique, celle de rapatrier la responsabilité de la réunification familiale, qui compte pour près du quart des immigrants reçus, et il a ajouté la gestion des programmes visant les travailleurs temporaires et les étudiants étrangers.

Comme l’éventualité que le premier ministre du Canada acquiesce à cette revendication semble lointaine, voire utopique, un prochain gouvernement Legault devra s’atteler à reprendre concrètement la maîtrise de la situation avec les leviers dont il dispose, mais qu’il n’a pas pleinement utilisés.

Ce retour de la survivance, une posture qui fut l’apanage des Canadiens français après 1840, laisse perplexe. C’est une stratégie empreinte de résignation, un aveu d’impuissance politique. Et puis le mouvement nationaliste d’émancipation des années 1960 et suivantes, celui de René Lévesque, progressiste et tourné vers l’avenir, avait mis la hache dans cette survivance passéiste.

Il faudrait que François Legault nous dise si son nationalisme est essentiellement conservateur, essentialiste et défensif, ou s’il s’agit d’un nationalisme progressiste — existentialiste, pourrait-on dire —, qui parle d’avenir et s’appuie sur le pluralisme et le métissage qui caractérisent déjà la nation québécoise. Quand François Legault répète « c’est comme ça qu’on vit au Québec », une formule pour le moins maladroite, et qu’il en rajoute avec « c’est comme ça qu’on parle au Québec », on peut se demander où il s’en va avec ses skis. Le français est la langue commune certes, mais il se parle des centaines de langues au Québec, y compris des langues autochtones.

Le gouvernement Legault a déjà amélioré les choses en matière d’immigration, que ce soit en francisation et en soutien à l’intégration, et le chantier n’est pas terminé. Mais il devrait revenir à l’esprit de Gérald Godin : les immigrants pour la plupart veulent s’intégrer à la nation québécoise et contribuer à sa culture vivante et originale, dont nous pouvons nous enorgueillir. C’est ça aussi, être fier.

Source: Survivance et résignation

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Abbott – The truth is out: Britain’s immigration system is racist, and always has been. Now let’s fix it

2022/06/01 Leave a comment

By Labour MP Diane Abbott. Many of the historic examples cited are common to other immigration destination countries:

The unspoken rationale underlying British immigration policy since the second world war has always been about race. A new leaked Home Office document, which was never intended to be seen by the public, spells this out. The report, which was commissioned by the Home Office in the wake of the Windrush scandal, was leaked to the Guardian after repeated attempts by the government to suppress its publication. It has a stark conclusion: that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.

This was true whichever political party was in power. Who can forget the red mug marketed by the Labour party in 2015 emblazoned with the words “Controls on immigration”? The problem was not the mug, but the fact that cracking down on immigration was one of our election promises at all.

It was the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act that for the first time brought restrictions on the entry of Commonwealth citizens into the UK. Before this, there had been freedom of movement for all citizens of the United Kingdom and its colonies. Postwar Britain was suffering a labour shortage and so by the late 1940s, employers were recruiting directly from the Commonwealth. For instance the London Transport executive had recruitment drives in Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica.

But there were already murmurings of disapproval even then. The day the Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex in 1948, 11 Labour MPs sent a letter to the prime minister, Clement Attlee, asking for controls on immigration, stating that the British people “are blest with the absence of a colour racial problem. An influx of coloured people domiciled here is likely to impair the harmony, strength and cohesion of our public and social life and to cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned.”

In 1949, the Royal Commission on Population reported that “immigrants of good stock would be welcomed without reserve”. “Good stock” in this context might be assumed to mean white. In 1956, a ministerial committee was set up to investigate colonial migration – and whether it should be curbed. It argued that: “The principle that the United Kingdom should maintain an open door for British subjects grew up tacitly at a time when the coloured races of the Commonwealth were at a more primitive stage of development than now. There was no danger then of a coloured invasion of this country … In the meantime circumstances have changed …” The report continues: “We clearly cannot undertake to absorb … all the coloured immigrants who may wish to come here.”

With their fear of a “coloured invasion”, these MPs were foreshadowing what Margaret Thatcher would say more than 20 years later, when she referred to Britain being “swamped” by migrants. Pertinently, that 1956 report also said: “There is no doubt that even though a bill would in form be non-discriminatory, it would nevertheless be clear against whom the bill was really directed.”

In the decades to come, those of us campaigning against racist immigration legislation were never in any doubt against whom it was really directed. When that first Commonwealth immigrants bill made it to the House of Commons, in response to the increasing anti-immigrant clamour, the home secretary of the day, Rab Butler, nearly gave the game away in the debate on the legislation, saying in the Commons that the legislation would not be based “on colour prejudice alone”. In theory at least, it was not supposed to be based on colour prejudice at all. But that 1962 act put an end to freedom of movement, limited the immigration of Commonwealth passport holders and for the first time made the distinction between skilled and unskilled labour.

The Labour party opposed the legislation and promised to repeal it. But the small number of Labour MPs who actually voted against the bill in parliament suggested that that they were not as enthusiastically against it as they might have been. And the next Labour government did nothing to repeal it. Instead, it brought in another Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1968, rushed through parliament in just three days by the home secretary, Jim Callaghan, in response to media hysteria about the possibility of 200,000 Kenyan Asians with British passports coming to the UK as they fled Kenya’s Africanisation policy.

There must have been some concern in government that they did not want the legislation to look as crudely racist as it was. So they invented the concept of “patrials” – someone who had a parent or grandparent who was born in, or was a citizen of the UK. Nobody, however, was in any doubt that “patrial” was a euphemism for white.

By 1971, the Tories were in power and another immigration act brought in that year elaborated on the (completely bogus) legal concept of “patrials”, clamped down further on Commonwealth immigration and extended powers of deportation. It did allow Commonwealth migrants who had come to Britain before 1973 to remain in the UK indefinitely. But, crucially, it put the onus on those who had come to Britain to prove their right to stay. It was that requirement that had such catastrophic consequences for the Windrush generation whose cases were eventually brought to light in 2018.

Secret cabinet minutes of the time reveal that ministers knew that the decision to exempt “old” Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand and Australia from immigration controls would be criticised as being discriminatory in favour of the white Commonwealth. But the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, argued that it was “necessary and defensible” to curb Asian migration. The 1981 Nationality Act, the most fateful of the decade, would reverse an age-old convention that anyone born on British soil was British. Birth in Britain was no longer an automatic entitlement to citizenship.

From the 1970s onwards, Britain’s immigrant communities began to organise and campaign. One of the earliest cases was Rochdale housewife Anwar Ditta. Britain’s convoluted and increasingly draconian immigration laws meant she could not bring her three children over from Pakistan. She was not the first immigrant to suffer because of the rules, but she was the first to build a rainbow coalition of support. With no experience, she campaigned from 1976 to 1981 and won the right to bring her children to Britain.

This was one of a series of campaigns opposing Britain’s degrading practices meted out to immigrants such as “virginity tests”. Some of us would spend the coming decades writing about and marching against these rules, even when it meant campaigning against our own Labour government.

Source: The truth is out: Britain’s immigration system is racist, and always has been. Now let’s fix it

Filed under Immigration, Racism Tagged with ,

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