PATEL: Don’t use Islam as excuse to carry out horrors of female genital mutilation

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Good column:

Earlier this week, a federal judge in the United States dismissed charges against two doctors and six others involved in the genital mutilation of nine girls at a suburban Detroit clinic.

While many are disappointed the case had to be dropped because of state-federal complications, what outraged me the most was that the accused in this case claimed female genital mutilation (FGM) was a ‘religious’ act and that it should, therefore, be above the law.

As a young Muslim woman, I am tired of hearing about medieval and regressive social behaviour that supposedly has some kind of religious justification; especially when it concerns my faith of Islam.

Muslim women like me are caught between Islamophobes who condemn Islam and every Muslim for anything that moves – and our own medieval zealots who use Islam to justify practices like FGM, forced marriages and domestic violence.

It should be clear to all that FGM has absolutely no basis in any of the Abrahamic religions – and there is no mention of it in the Quran. In fact, we find quite the opposite: That the Quran strongly condemns ‘mutilating the fair creation of God’ as being something inspired by the Devil himself.

But, despite this clear directive, FGM continues to persist in many countries around the world.

The UN estimates that around three million girls are mutilated every year – with a sizable portion of these being Muslim women and girls; (the others being mostly Christian or animist communities).

This is because some communities and individuals prefer to ignore their own revealed book and follow cultural dogmas disguised as religion instead.

These spurious ‘religious’ arguments are also buttressed by dozens of other oppressive reasons, as to why a community will persist with the abomination of FGM – such as poverty, patriarchy and culture. But the supposed religious justifications may, in fact, be the bedrock upon which all the other causes depend.

Debunk that and the other justifications may well fall away.

That’s why in my work with the international NGO, Islamic Relief Canada – we feel it is our duty to counter these cultural and pseudo-religious justifications.

This is done through, for example, our advocacy work to end FGM here in Canada and all around the world with our sister offices and partner organizations.

From our research here in Canada, we know that FGM is carried out in both Muslim and non-Muslim communities, and we have anecdotal evidence that children are being taken abroad and even across the border to the U.S. to be forcibly subjected to FGM procedures.

We also know that there is a lack of resources available to families who have undergone the trauma of FGM and are in need of education and support.

We welcome the Canadian government’s investment and commitment towards ending FGM, both overseas and here in Canada.

But we also recognize that more needs to be done to understand the extent and context of the problem in Canada, so that organizations like ours can work alongside other agencies and communities to build awareness of the extremely harmful effects of this totally anti-Islamic practice.

Reyhana Patel is the head of Communications at Islamic Relief Canada. She’s a former BBC journalist and former writer for The Huffington Post U.K. and The Independent newspaper in the U.K.

Source: PATEL: Don’t use Islam as excuse to carry out horrors of female genital mutilation

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Why Big Law Is Taking on Trump Over Immigration

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Corporate lawyers at Paul Weiss, a prestigious Manhattan law firm, often spend their days scouring the fine print of client documents and government regulations. But for the past few months, they have been on a different search.

In the firm’s Midtown offices, about 75 lawyers have been trying to find more than 400 parents who were separated from their families at the southern border this year and then deported without their children.

Paul Weiss, where partners charge more than $1,000 an hour and clients include the National Football League and Citigroup, is looking for these parents, pro bono, as part of a federal American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the Trump administration over its family separation policy.

Big Law — a nexus of power where partners are often plucked for top government posts — has emerged as a fierce, and perhaps unexpected, antagonist to President Trump’s immigration agenda. While pro bono work is nothing new, over the past two years, major law firms have become more vocal and visible in pushing back against the administration’s policies.

Top firms have a well-earned reputation as cautious defenders of the establishment, and immigration is generally considered a safe area for pro bono work because it rarely conflicts with corporate clients. Still, both supporters and critics of the president’s agenda have noticed that large firms have been behind several of the biggest court battles.

“What’s different here is that the firms are on a wholesale basis, and dramatically, challenging the behavior of the White House,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an expert in legal ethics.

Hogan Lovells, which has more than 2,500 lawyers and revenues that topped $2 billion last year, challenged the travel ban and is one of several firms opposing the administration’s plan to cut federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities.

Covington & Burling, a century-old Washington firm with clients such as Uber and JPMorgan Chase, has fought to preserve Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. WilmerHale, another prestigious Washington firm whose top clients include Facebook, represented Chicago in its own successful sanctuary cities case and filed a lawsuit to compel the administration to disclose data on family separations.

This month, Arnold & Porter, an international firm that has advised clients such as the World Bank, represented nonprofits in New York to block the administration’s plan to add a citizenship status question to the United States census.

“Major law firms have really stepped up,” said Becca Heller, the executive director of the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project.

Paul Weiss became involved in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit this summer, after the government revealed that among the more than 2,500 families separated at the border were hundreds of cases where parents had been sent home while their children stayed behind in the United States.

The Department of Justice, which has defended the administration in court challenges, declined to comment.

Lawyers at the firms say they are trying to defend the rule of law, not oppose the Trump administration. But critics have been quick to point out that major law firms, like elite law schools, tend to lean left. Their lawyers disproportionately support Democratic candidates, contribution records show.

“I can virtually guarantee you that if Hillary Clinton had won the White House, you would not see these same law firms filing numerous lawsuits against her administration in the name of the rule of law,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.

Republican partners, Mr. von Spakovsky said, seldom find support for cases with a conservative bent.

Some firms filing suits are also home to vocal opponents of the Trump administration’s policies, such as Eric H. Holder Jr., a partner at Covington and the attorney general under former President Barack Obama.

On the for-profit side, however, some have represented members of the Trump administration and the president’s associates. Covington defended Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser. WilmerHale, the former firm of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was retained last year by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Mr. Trump.

More firms started turning their pro bono efforts toward immigration under Mr. Obama, when large numbers of unaccompanied minorsbegan streaming across the border, said Gary M. Wingens, the chairman of Lowenstein Sandler, a firm in New Jersey. “It was not viewed as particularly controversial or left-wing, bleeding-heart work,” he said.

But since Mr. Trump’s election, immigration has grown into a much more divisive and high-profile issue.

Major law firms have taken on sensitive cases before, notably when they provided pro bono representation to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Still, there are limits. “You don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize your corporate client,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School. During the 2008 housing crisis, for example, many major firms did not represent foreclosure victims because they represented banks.

Immigration does not generally present such conflicts, but tangling with the White House in a public way comes with its own risks. It can rankle clients, who are sensitive to their public image and might have cases before the government.

Several of Paul Weiss’s top clients declined to comment. A spokesman for Citigroup, Edward Skyler, said jokingly, “Given how valuable their time is, which we can attest to, it’s very admirable.”

Paul Weiss, among the firms known to lean left, has a reputation for public interest work, including the 2013 Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage. Brad S. Karp, its chairman since 2008, has recently emerged as an outspoken leader. Thirty-four firms signed onto an op-ed he wrote with Mr. Wingens in The New York Times this summer denouncing family separations.

To date, Paul Weiss lawyers have spent more than $2 million in billable hours on the A.C.L.U. project, the firm said. Paul Weiss is not litigating the case but was appointed by the court to help the nonprofit find and represent deported parents. Jeh C. Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security under Mr. Obama, is a partner at the firm but is not involved in the effort.

“We’re reuniting families destroyed by the administration,” Mr. Karp said in an interview.

Emily Goldberg, pro bono counsel at Paul Weiss, orchestrated the firm’s response to family separations.

In June, Ms. Goldberg received a list of about 175 separated children who had been sent to agencies in New York. Catholic Charities, the organization assigned to provide the children with legal representation, could not find their parents. Ms. Goldberg enlisted the help of lawyers at several major firms, and when they could not find a number of the parents, they concluded the parents had been deported. She contacted Dentons, an international firm with offices in Central America, and its employees started looking for parents there.

Weeks later, the government revealed the existence of the deported parents. The judge in the suit, Dana Sabraw, ordered the government to reunite these families but asked the A.C.L.U. to lead the effort. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U. national Immigrants’ Rights Project, turned to Paul Weiss, which became the head of a committeethat would work with three nonprofits to find the parents, he said.

“I think we did quickly realize that this was going to be an enormous task,” Mr. Gelernt said. The parents were in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil and Romania.

For more than three months, Paul Weiss associates have been searching for parents and making calls to ask parents if they want their child sent home or placed with a sponsor in the United States.

There have been obstacles, said Steven C. Herzog, a senior lawyer. Some parents are from rural areas and do not have phones. About a third speak indigenous languages.

A few families have promised to fax forms, only to disappear, revealing later that the nearest town with a fax machine was several hours away, said BJ Jensen, the pro bono associate co-leading the search.

When a family cannot be found, or disappears, the lawyers send an investigator with the nonprofit Justice in Motion to look for them. Eriberto Pop Can, an investigator in Guatemala, said he can often guess where parents might be from their indigenous last names such as Choc, Pop and Pec.

The first family he found lived in Cobán, a city in the central highlands. The family had not heard anything about their 7-year-old son in three months, he said.

The involvement of large law firms in immigration-related lawsuits has not gone unnoticed by supporters of tighter restrictions.

“They view the influx of asylum seekers as some kind of humanitarian project,” Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, said of the lawyers. “Whereas a regular American sees it as an affront to our legal system.”

As of this month, Paul Weiss lawyers have contacted all but a handful of the roughly 400 deported parents. The government has released the children of about 260, half to parents in their home countries, half to sponsors in the United States.

But the work may continue.

The A.C.L.U. plans to use the lawyers’s case notes to try to show Judge Sabraw that a number of families were coerced into signing deportation orders, even though they faced danger at home, Mr. Gelernt said. If the judge agrees, those families should be allowed to come back to the United States and apply for asylum, he said.

“That’s our hope,” Mr. Herzog said. “It’s not just our hope,” he added. “It’s our job.”

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Supporters of public faith in Canada are young, educated, Liberal, and ‘quite dug in’: pollster

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Interesting findings but note the methodology used is not random selection, and thus likely cannot be considered a reliable reflection of the population:

Proponents of religious faith in public life in Canada tend to be younger, more highly educated, and more likely to have voted Liberal, according to a new survey.

The counter-intuitive discovery puts the lie to the common impression that support for public religiosity in areas like health care, social services and education is driven by evangelical church goers and deeply observant, older, conservative “holy rollers,” said Angus Reid, chairman of Angus Reid Institute.

“What we find is exactly the opposite,” Reid said.

He said there is a “mythology” on the political left that says declining church attendance goes hand in hand with support for what he calls “uber-secularization” of society, or the “extinguishment of faith and religion from any portion of the public square.”

Not so, according to the report, Faith in the Public Square, done in partnership with Cardus, which describes itself as a non-partisan, faith-based think tank and registered charity dedicated to promoting a flourishing society.”

“The largest segment of Canadian society (at 37%), quite independent of whether they have any religious views or not, sees an important role for religious and faith groups across many dimensions of Canadian society. They strongly support religious freedom. They see religious and faith groups playing an important role in health, in social services, social justice issues. They believe that faith and religion are critical for the formation of citizenship and strong values,” Reid said in an interview. “There is a very significant segment that is alive and well and quite dug in, in many respects, on this question.”

When asked about how faith operates in their own lives, Canadians tend to break down roughly like this: 20% are atheist, 20% are religiously committed, 30% are privately faithful, and 30% are spiritually uncertain.

But the pie chart looks different when the emphasis shifts to the role faith should play in public life, this survey suggests. It found that there are more proponents of faith in the public square (at 37%) than there are opponents (32%) or those who are uncertain (32%).

The survey describes these groups using what it calls a Public Faith Index, based on responses to 17 questions.

Public faith is a topic of frequent and intense public debate, from niqabs and religious symbols in the public services in Quebec, to the funding of religious schools and the appropriateness of Christian prayers at local council meetings. In the past, it has coloured political debate on everything from abortion access to whether Canada should participate in war.

This survey sought to measure opinion on, for example, whether faith is good for citizenship, whether the tenets of various faiths should be taught in high schools, and whether politicians ought to be conversant in the basics of the various religions in Canada.

It found, for example, that 38% of Canadians thought religious and faith communities were making a positive contribution to health care, while 15% felt the contribution was negative. There were similar results for social justice causes, such as poverty and overseas development. But in social services, fully 51% thought the contribution was positive, and just 11% felt it was negative. In education, the numbers were more evenly split, 28% positive and 25% negative.

It also found deep divisions between the three segments. For example, 93% of public faith proponents agree that religious and faith communities strengthen Canadian values such as equality and human rights. But 81% of public faith opponents disagree with this proposition.

In education, a solid majority, 57%, of opponents thought the beliefs of the world’s major religions should not be taught public high schools, while 36% thought just the basics should be taught.

Another curious finding is that fully 25% of public faith proponents say they have never read a religious text.

A key caveat to the general conclusion about a strong segment of young, educated, Liberal proponents of public faith is the province of Quebec. For example, if you exclude Quebec, the percentage of Canadians who are proponents of public faith rises to 42%.

“Quebec, on any issue associated with religion or faith, is a totally distinct society,” Reid said.

The survey of 2,200 Canadians was conducted in early November, via the Angus Reid Forum, an online community in which people can participate in surveys in exchange for reward points and prizes. Because they were not randomly selected, a true margin of error cannot be calculated, but a randomized poll of similar size would have a margin of error of 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Source: Supporters of public faith in Canada are young, educated, Liberal, and ‘quite dug in’: pollster

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USA: Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Always a challenge how to present data and trends in a manner that will not inflame debate. Even when presented with appropriate nuance, the risk remains.

Struggled a bit with this in my recent article, Hospital stats show birth tourism rising in major cities, and judging by the reaction on Twitter, appears I got the balance right, although of course there were critiques by those on the left and right:

The graphic was splashy by the Census Bureau’s standards and it showed an unmistakable moment in America’s future: the year 2044, when white Americans were projected to fall below half the population and lose their majority status.

The presentation of the data disturbed Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director, who saw it while looking through a government report. The graphic made demographic change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing, he thought, and could provoke a political backlash.

So after the report’s release three years ago, he organized a meeting with Katherine Wallman, at the time the chief statistician for the United States.

“I said ‘I’m really worried about this,’” said Dr. Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. He added, “Statistics are powerful. They are a description of who we are as a country. If you say majority-minority, that becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”

In a nation preoccupied by race, the moment when white Americans will make up less than half the country’s population has become an object of fascination.

For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.

But many academics have grown increasingly uneasy with the public fixation. They point to recent research demonstrating the data’s power to shape perceptions. Some are questioning the assumptions the Census Bureau is making about race, and whether projecting the American population even makes sense at a time of rapid demographic change when the categories themselves seem to be shifting.

Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, spotted the risk immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she knew that group size was a marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller could feel threatened. At first she thought the topic of a declining white majority was too obvious to study.

But she did, together with a colleague, Maureen Craig, a social psychologist at New York University, and they have been talking about the results ever since. Their findings, first published in 2014, showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about the racial shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial minorities than those who were not. They were also more likely to support restrictive immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose status and face discrimination in the future.

Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University, remembered being stunned when she saw the research.

“It was like, ‘Oh wow, these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she said.

Beyond concerns about the data’s repercussions, some researchers are also questioning whether the Census Bureau’s projections provide a true picture. At issue, they say, is whom the government counts as white.

In the Census Bureau’s projections, people of mixed race or ethnicity have been counted mostly as minority, demographers say. This has had the effect of understating the size of the white population, they say, because many Americans with one white parent may identify as white or partly white. On their census forms, Americans can choose more than one race and whether they are of Hispanic origin.

Among Asians and Hispanics, more than a quarter marry outside their race, according to the Pew Research Center. For American-born Asians, the share is nearly double that. It means that mixed-race people may be a small group now — around 7 percent of the population, according to Pew — but will steadily grow. Are those children white? Are they minority? Are they both? What about the grandchildren?

“The question really for us as a society is there are all these people who look white, act white, marry white and live white, so what does white even mean anymore?” Dr. Waters said. “We are in a really interesting time, an indeterminate time, when we are not policing the boundary very strongly.”

The Census Bureau has long produced projections of the American population, but they were rarely the topic of talk shows or newspaper headlines.

Then, in August 2008 at the height of Barack Obama’s campaign for president, the bureau projected that non-Hispanic whites would drop below half the population by 2042, far earlier than expected. (The projections, which change with birth, death and migration rates, have also placed the shift in 2050 and in 2044.)

“That’s what really lit the fuse,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, referring to the 2008 projection. “People went crazy.”

It was not just white nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. He said it was hard to interest them in his work on ways to make the change seem less threatening to fearful white Americans — for instance by emphasizing the good that could come from immigration.

“It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”

Dr. Myers and a colleague later found that presenting the data differently could produce a much less anxious reaction. In work published this spring, they found that the negative effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people through intermarriage.

It is unclear exactly when the idea of a majority-minority crossover first appeared, but several experts said it may have surfaced in connection with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Ms. Wallman, the chief statistician for the United States from 1992 to 2017, who helped develop the first governmentwide standard for data on race and ethnicity that came into use in the late 1970s, said she did not like having to categorize by race, but that the government had to for oversight.

“I wish we didn’t have to ask,” she said. “But to me, that’s the rock and the hard place.”

Race is difficult to count because, unlike income or employment, it is a social category that shifts with changes in culture, immigration, and ideas about genetics. So who counts as white has changed over time. In the 1910s and 1920s, the last time immigrants were such a large share of the American population, there were furious arguments over how to categorize newcomers from Europe.

But eventually, the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe came to be considered white.

That is because race is about power, not biology, said Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University.

“The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness,” said Dr. King, author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial difference. The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans, he said — the long-term legacy of slavery.

To Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, the Census Bureau’s projections seemed stuck in an outdated classification system. The bureau assigns a nonwhite label to most people who are reported as having both white and minority ancestry, he said. He likened this to the one-drop rule, a 19th-century system of racial classification in which having even one African ancestor meant you were black.

“The census data is distorting the on-the-ground realities of ethnicity and race,” Dr. Alba said. “There might never be a majority-minority society; it’s unclear.”

Asked for a response to Dr. Alba’s critique, a Census Bureau spokesman said in an email that “we constantly consult with stakeholders, and scholars, including Richard Alba and other federal agencies to improve our techniques, methodologies, and testing of population projections.”

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, argued that the Census Bureau was doing the best that it could at a time whensociety was changing quickly. He was skeptical that today’s Asians and Hispanics were analogous to the white ethnic Americans of the 20th century, and believed that a less conservative count would not do much to change the bigger picture. Besides, it is not the job of academics to protect people from demographic change, he said.

“Irrespective of the year, or the turning point, the message needs to come out about what the actual facts are,” Mr. Frey said. “We are becoming a much more racially diverse society among our young generation.”

Others say they are not sugarcoating statistics, but showing that the numbers have many interpretations, and that white-versus-everyone-else is only one. It not only reduces the American patchwork to a crude, divisive political formula, they say, but perhaps more important — with the categories in flux — it might not even be true.

The Census Bureau released new projections this year in March filled with data about the country’s future. In the coming decades, adults 65 and older will outnumber children for the first time in the country’s history. The share of mixed-race children is set to double.

But there was no mention of a year when white Americans would fall below half the population.

When asked about the change, a spokesman for the Bureau said: “It was just us getting back to sticking to data.”

Source: Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers NervousThe moment when white Americans will make up less than half the population has become an object of fascination. Some researchers question whether the projections provide a true picture.

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Michelle Obama Explains What ‘Going High’ Really Means

2018/11/22 Leave a comment

Whether or not one likes Michelle Obama, her clarification of going high provides a useful guideline in how to engage and converse with others:

By now, Michelle Obama‘s famous phrase — “When they go low, we go high” — has become something of a slogan for exercising restraint in the face of frustration. First uttered by the former First Lady in 2016, it quickly caught on.

In an interview with The New York Times while promoting her popular new memoir Becoming, Obama took the time to unpack the meaning behind her words, expanding on what “going high” really means when you’re faced with a challenge.

“‘Going high’ doesn’t mean you don’t feel the hurt, or you’re not entitled to an emotion,” she explained. “It means that your response has to reflect the solution. It shouldn’t come from a place of anger or vengefulness. Barack and I had to figure that out. Anger may feel good in the moment, but it’s not going to move the ball forward.”

She continued: “For me, when you are a public figure in power, everything you do models what you want the country to do … Responding to a dog whistle with a dog whistle is the exact opposite of what you’d teach your child to do.”

When faced with a specific scenario, Obama tactfully maintained her diplomacy. “I wouldn’t even respond,” she said.

“I say: Let’s just do the work … I’d have to understand why you feel that way. I’d have to be your friend and get into your pain and hurt, your fears. And that takes time. That’s the work that needs to happen around kitchen tables and in our communities. When I say ‘go high,’ I’m not trying to win the argument. I’m trying to figure out how to understand you and how I can help you understand me.”

During her press tour and arena appearances to promote Becoming, Obama has shed light on everything from her feelings about Donald Trump to her marriage with Barack — still “going high” in her candid moments.

Source: Michelle Obama Explains What ‘Going High’ Really Means

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Federal Judge Rules U.S. Ban on Female Genital Mutilation Is Unconstitutional

2018/11/22 Leave a comment

Disturbing although the case seems to hinge on federal vs state authority. Will see if leads to an appeal (hopefully it will, but not sure how the current more conservative Supreme Court would rule):

In a historic ruling that strikes a chilling blow to women’s rights, a federal judge in Michigan declared unconstitutional the U.S. law against female genital mutilations (FGM), and dropped charges against two doctors for carrying out the procedure on underage girls.

U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman said Tuesday that Congress lacks the authority to outlaw the procedure, and insisted only states can make such a decision, the Detroit Free Press reports.

“As despicable as [FGM] may be,” Friedman said, Congress “overstepped its bounds” by banning the practice.

The trial was the first federal case to involve FGM, which is common religious practice in some cultures, but is internationally recognized as a human rights violation. The defendants, including three mothers, are all members of the Indian Muslim Dawoodi Bohra community.

Friedman dismissed the main charges against Jumana Nagarwala, a doctor who prosecutors said may have performed the procedure on up to 100 girls. Another doctor who allowed Nagarwala to use his clinic, that doctor’s wife and five others also saw their charges dropped. The doctors continue to face lengthy prison terms on conspiracy charges.

According to the court records, two of the mothers tricked their 7-year-olds into thinking they were going to Detroit for a girls’ trip. Instead, they had their genitals cut.

FGM typically involves cutting or even wholly removing the clitoris. The World Health Organization calls it “a violation of the human rights of girls and women” that “has no health benefits.”

In 2012, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution to ban the practice, which affects an estimated 200 million women and girls worldwide. It has also been outlawed in more than 30 countries, including the U.S., which passed a law in 1996 criminalizing FGM with a 5-year prison term.

Twenty-seven states separately passed similar measures, including Michigan in 2017. But the defendants in this case are not retroactively subject to the new law.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in Detroit said the government would review the ruling before deciding whether to appeal.

Michigan State Senator Margaret O’Brien, who backed the state ban on FGM, said she was “appalled” by Tuesday’s ruling.

Yasmeen Hassan, executive global director for gender rights group Equality Now, warned the ruling sends the message to women and girls that “you are not important.”

Source: Federal Judge Rules U.S. Ban on Female Genital Mutilation Is Unconstitutional

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Wells Fargo boosted by multicultural strength [loyalty of consumers]

2018/11/22 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Wells Fargo, the financial services provider, has found that multicultural consumers have remained more supportive of its brand than the general market following a testing period for the company.

Nydia Sahagún, Well’s Fargo’s svp/segment marketing, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2018 Masters of Marketing Week.

And she reported that consumer perceptions among the multicultural audience proved to be robust even as Wells Fargo has dealt with various issues and controversies.

These include opening bank accounts without customers’ knowledge, illegally repossessing the cars of service members, wrongly fining thousands of mortgage holders, and charging some clients for auto insurance they did not need.

“What I would tell you is that, in the wake of this brand crisis, we’ve actually seen far less impact with multicultural consumers than we have with the general population,” said Sahagún. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: Wells Fargo draws on multicultural strength in brand recovery.)

And the company believes this resilience can be tracked back to its long-term efforts to build bonds with multicultural consumers. “What we attribute that to is really our commitment to diversity,” she added.

Its marketing initiatives range from making native-language ads in Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish right through to championing the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities.

Beyond communications, Wells Fargo has developed several practical initiatives, too, as shown by its financial support for the American Indian/Alaska Native Communities, and pledging funds to boost Hispanic home ownership.

“Our view of [engaging] diverse and multicultural consumers is that it’s not a nice to have; it’s actually a business imperative,” Sahagún said.

“And it’s been built into the fabric of who we are for a long time. So, we have many segments that we have dedicated resources [against] that we support, we cultivate, and grow. And not all of them are cultural segments.

“But they’re important – and strategically important – to the organisation.”

Source: Wells Fargo boosted by multicultural strength

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Election Commissioner asked to probe Conservative Party ties to Chinese-Canadian conservative groups

2018/11/21 Leave a comment

Valid question that should be asked of any similar efforts by non-profit organizations in favour of any political party. The Conservatives are particularly strong among Chinese Canadians:

Federal Elections Commissioner Yves Cote has been formally asked to investigate the relationship between the Conservative Party and 10 Chinese-Canadian conservative non-profit organizations for possible breaches of election laws.

The Liberal and NDP parties both sent letters to Mr. Cote’s office on Monday, saying an official probe is required to determine if there is collusion between the Conservatives and wealthy Toronto developer Ted Jiancheng Zhou and the non-profit groups he set up to help the party win support within the Chinese-Canadian community.

Mr. Zhou, a former Liberal donor who has condominium projects in Canada and China, set up Chinese-Canadian conservative groups in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as well as a national organization called the Federation of Chinese Canadian Conservatives (FCCC). The stated purpose of the FCCC is to assist the “Conservative Party to develop new members; disseminating ideas and policies of the Conservative Party; assisting the Conservative Party to educate and train candidates, party members and to develop volunteers.”

In his letter, NDP MP Nathan Cullen asked Mr. Cote to initiate a “formal investigation” to determine if Mr. Zhou and the Conservatives are co-ordinating their political activities “to circumvent contribution limits” in “potential contravention of election laws.”

Liberal MP Marco Mendicino wrote to Mr. Cote that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the Conservative Party of Canada and the FCCC are co-ordinating efforts to use the latter organization as a parallel political entity – akin to a Political Action Committee – which could violate the Canada Elections Act.”

The Elections Act says it is illegal for any outside or non-profit groups to be used as vehicles to evade the spending and contribution limits imposed on political parties. Canadian political financing rules restrict donations to parties or candidates to $1,575 a year and consider provisions of services or goods without charge to be non-monetary contributions subject to the same limits.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s office denied on Monday that Mr. Zhou’s organizations are involved in fundraising or helping his party to elect MPs in next year’s general election.

“The FCCC is playing no role for the Conservative Party of Canada or the Conservative Fund, no caucus members are involved in the FCCC,” communications director Brock Harrison said in an e-mail. “As far as Mr. Zhou is concerned, he does not have a role either in fundraising or organizing on the party’s behalf … He has organized the FCCC as an independent group of Chinese Canadians who want to promote conservative values in their community.”

Mr. Zhou has also denied any wrongdoing and insists he is not acting as an arm of the Conservative Party. He asserts he set up that network to promote small-c conservative causes within the Chinese-Canadian community.

The businessman made a maximum donation of $1,500 in June, 2016, to the Liberal Party and $400 in May, 2017, before switching his allegiance to the Conservatives. He said his organizations do not violate federal election laws and “we have no intention to fund raise for any candidate or the Conservative Party.”

But Canada’s former long-serving chief electoral officer told The Globe and Mail that an Elections Commission investigation is warranted into whether there was an attempt to skirt the contribution limits under the Canada Elections Act.

“It raises the questions about collusion and these are matters that should be looked at frankly in order to satisfy Canadians that the financial provisions of our status – which makes Canada a leader in this field – are being respected,” said Jean-Pierre Kingsley, who served as chief electoral officer from 1990-2007.

For example, Mr. Kingsley said, it would be collusion if non-profit or third-party organizations provided a list of volunteers to a political party or provided any other form of non-monetary benefit.

An official for the Commissioner of Canada Elections, which conducts investigations into electoral matters, says the agency can’t discuss a probe or confirm whether a particular incident is being investigated. However, Mr. Kingsley said a formal request from either MPs or the public usually triggers an investigation by the commissioner’s office.

The Liberals and the NDP also want Mr. Cote to investigate a Nov. 9 rally and dinner in Richmond Hill, Ont., that featured Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer and at least 10 other MPs and senators for the inauguration of Mr. Zhou’s FCCC. Tickets were priced at $70, or $100 for VIPs, an amount that would have collected between $45,500 and $65,000, depending on the mix of ticket sales. Food and rental space cost $35,750.

A video of the rally showed former Conservative MP Chungsen Leung, who is on the FCCC advisory board, urging the crowd to “volunteer or to donate to the Conservative Party,” and Ontario PC MPP Aris Babikian said: “Without your support, manpower and financial [help] we would not be able to do it. So let’s work together to bring Andrew Scheer as the next Prime Minister of Canada.”

Mr. Zhou said there was no money left over from the event. “We raised barely enough to pay for the event itself. All the money raised are used for the event expenses,” he said in an e-mail. Expenses incurred could still qualify as a non-monetary political contribution, according to Elections Canada.

Source:     Election Commissioner asked to probe Conservative Party ties to Chinese-Canadian conservative groups Robert Fife and Steven Chase November 19, 2018     

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Anti-Immigration Laws Have Negative Health Effects on Undocumented Youth

2018/11/21 Leave a comment

Not too surprising:

Anti-immigration laws, coupled with the repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), have negative public health implications for undocumented Latino immigrant youth, according to results presented at the American Public Health Association 2018 Annual Meeting and Expo, held November 10 to 14 in San Diego, California.

These negative effects on public health stem from limited access to education and include higher percentages of tobacco and alcohol use, higher rates of stress-induced chronic disease, and a decrease in the use of health and human services.

The researchers conducted 5 focus groups in San Mateo County, with 3 objectives: to better understand undocumented immigrants’ feelings around the fear of deportation, to identify strategies that can lessen negative effects, and to develop recommendations to help support undocumented immigrants. The researchers also conducted interviews with 6 key informants and 8 healthcare providers.

The researchers found that participants noted signs of depression and anxiety in children and young adults. Particularly, participants expressed concern for older children who once qualified for DACA: these children now reported feelings of hopelessness and lower self-esteem.

The results of the study indicated that undocumented immigrant children sometimes refuse to continue seeking an education, fearing deportation and threats against the Latino community.

To mitigate the negative effects of the political climate on this community, participants expressed a need to increase awareness about health implications, offer practical support systems, and pass local policies that protect all residents, including undocumented immigrants.

“The research highlights the need to study the impact of DACA and immigration enforcement in relation to stress levels, including mental health and chronic disease,” lead study author Mayra Diaz, MPH, from the San Mateo County Health System, Belmont, California, said. “It will be critical to look into areas of outreach for access to public, health, and social services.”

Source: Anti-Immigration Laws Have Negative Health Effects on Undocumented Youth

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Why immigration could be a high-risk, low-reward issue in the 2019 election

2018/11/20 Leave a comment

Eric Grenier’s take on the political implications of the latest Focus 2018 survey (Focus Canada Fall 2018 – FINAL REPORT, Focus Canada Fall 2018 – DETAILED DATA TABLES)

Though the political debate over immigration and border security has made a lot of noise in recent months, it might turn out to be a dud in the 2019 federal election — or it could blow up in the face of the party leader who risks making an issue of it.

A new survey by the Environics Institute shows that Canadians’ opinions on immigration and refugees have hardly budged from the generally upbeat views recorded by the polling firm over the last few years. A majority of Canadians (58 per cent) say they do not believe that immigration levels are too high, while 76 per cent say that the overall impact of immigration on the Canadian economy has been positive.

But the numbers suggest there’s still an audience for a political party demanding a reduction in immigration and greater efforts to ensure immigrants adopt “Canadian values” — both policies embraced by the new People’s Party launched by former Conservative leadership contender Maxime Bernier.

This could prove to be a point of vulnerability for Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives.

The Conservatives have been sharply critical of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration policies since the beginning of a surge in the number of asylum seekers crossing Canada’s borders illegally. But those criticisms have been limited to questions of fairness regarding those asylum seekers who try to enter Canada illegally, and claims that the government has no plans in place to adequately house, employ and integrate immigrants.

The Conservatives have been careful to state that they are pro-immigration and are not asking for a reduction in the annual intake.

But that puts the party at odds with many of its own supporters — who appear to be more in line with where Bernier’s party is positioning itself on the issue.

Overall, immigration isn’t a top-of-mind issue for voters, according to the Environics Institute poll. Only five per cent of Canadians — and just six per cent of Conservative voters — cite immigration and refugees as the most important issues facing Canadians today. That’s up only one point since April 2017.

Over the same time, the percentage of Canadians who list the environment and climate change as the most important issue has jumped five points to 10 per cent, second only to economic issues.

Health care, the government’s record, social issues and unemployment also scored higher than immigration in the Environics Institute’s research.

Few votes to win in Quebec on immigration

Immigration ranked low on the priority list in Quebec, where the bulk of asylum seekers have crossed into Canada and where a provincial election was just waged, in part, over the issue of immigration.

Only seven per cent of Quebecers listed it as their top issue. On immigration levels, the legitimacy of refugee claims and immigrants’ impacts on the economy, opinions in Quebec were in line with those in the country as a whole.

This suggests those seeing a hard line on immigration as a winning formula in Quebec are drawing the wrong lessons from the Coalition Avenir Québec’s win in the October provincial election. The CAQ promised to reduce the province’s immigration intake and do more to integrate those who arrive. But the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard was unpopular long before immigration popped up as an issue in the campaign — and CAQ Leader François Legault’s clumsy handling of the file nearly cost him his victory.

Conservative, PPC voters on the same page

The starkest divisions in Canadians’ views on immigration are found not between regions, age groups or education levels, but between supporters of the major parties themselves. While Liberals and New Democrats generally view immigration in the same positive light, Conservative voters see things very differently — though they are no longer alone on that side of the spectrum.

The Environics Institute poll surveyed a small sample of just 63 People’s Party of Canada supporters, so the margin of error on the PPC numbers is high. But the difference between Liberal and NDP supporters on the one hand and Conservative and PPC supporters on the other (and the strong similarity between the views expressed by the last two groups) is so marked that the results are still meaningful.

Just 22 per cent of Liberals and 24 per cent of New Democrats think Canada takes in too many immigrants. But 52 per cent of Conservatives and 47 per cent of PPC supporters think so.

Meanwhile, 58 per cent of Conservatives and 55 per cent of Bernier’s supporters think most refugee claims are illegitimate. Just 30 per cent of Liberals and 32 per cent of New Democrats agree.

And 73 per cent of PPC voters and 70 per cent of Conservatives think too many immigrants are failing to adopt “Canadian values,” compared to 38 per cent of Liberals and 40 per cent of New Democrats.

Perhaps most stark are the responses Environics heard when it asked whether immigrants make the country better or worse. While 62 per cent of Liberals say immigrants make the country better and just six per cent think they make it worse, Conservatives and People’s Party supporters were split three ways.

Among Conservatives, 28 per cent said immigrants make the country better, 31 per cent said worse and 32 per cent said they make no difference. For the People’s Party, those numbers were 32, 34 and 31 per cent, respectively.

This suggests Scheer could be vulnerable on immigration if it flares up as an issue during the 2019 federal election campaign. The Conservative Party might find itself out of step with its own supporters. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem — these voters were not going to head over to the Liberals or NDP — but Bernier’s People’s Party will be an option on the ballot that didn’t exist before.

One thing that does separate Conservative voters from People’s Party supporters is U.S. President Donald Trump. Only 13 per cent of Canadians approve of the president and Conservatives say they disapprove of Trump by a margin of two-to-one. PPC voters are split down the middle on Trump — which perhaps explains why Bernier hasn’t shied away from adopting a “Canada first” message in recent speeches.

Immigrants key to a Liberal victory in 2019

But while immigration might not turn out to be the central issue of the next federal election, immigrants themselves could play a key role.

The poll suggests that if the Liberals win next year, immigrants could be an important factor in that victory. Among voters born in Canada, the Conservatives led the Liberals by two points in the poll. But among voters born elsewhere, the Liberals held a 16-point lead. That’s what makes the difference between a neck-and-neck race and an environment that favours the re-election of Trudeau’s government.

But the poll also suggests that there’s very little difference between how Canadians born in this country and those born outside of it see immigration. In other words, however a party drafts its immigration platform, the degree to which that platform appeals to voters won’t depend on how long those voters and their families have been living here.

One noticeable difference in opinion emerged on the question of whether immigrants make Canada better or worse. By a margin of 54 to 15 per cent, immigrants said that immigration made Canada a better place. Among people who were at least third-generation Canadians, however, the margin was 40 to 19 per cent.

That suggests immigrants are (understandably) sensitive to questions about the value they bring to their new home. Policies that advocate for better integration, or lower intake targets, may not repel immigrants any more than they would non-immigrants. But the perception that a party is anti-immigrant could cause it some real trouble.

In short, immigration looks like delicate balancing act for any party wading into the debate without a positive story to tell.

Source: Why immigration could be a high-risk, low-reward issue in the 2019 election

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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