USA: Citizenship for Sale

2015/05/14 Leave a comment

On the US business immigration program. Similar issues as in the previous Canadian program:

Now let’s turn to the United States. Under the EB-5 visa program, foreigners can obtain a green card and then citizenship by making a small investment—$1 million, or $500,000 if it’s in an area with high unemployment—that will create or preserve 10 jobs for U.S. workers. Foreign investors can funnel their funds through “regional centers,” which are private organizations that finance commercial projects. These centers spare investors the trouble of figuring out for themselves whether an area suffers from high unemployment and whether a specific investment would generate the requisite 10 jobs.
The program is a mess. The government “is unable to demonstrate the benefits of foreign investment into the U.S. economy” under the program, in the words of the Inspector General of Homeland Security. Among other things, it’s almost impossible to figure out whether a specific investment generates jobs rather than reshuffles them from one place to another. There have also been examples of outright fraud and political cronyism. Part of the problem is a lack of documentation but the real problem is that the program is misconceived.
When we think about investment, the starting point is that investors don’t need citizenship or any other inducement to put money into a project when they will earn higher than the market rate of return. So given the risk and other opportunities, someone will invest $1 million or more in a mall complex or housing development if the expected return is, say, 10 or 15 percent. Many foreigners make such investments, and the vast majority of them make them not to obtain citizenship but to make money. In 2013, they ponied up $236 billion. Meanwhile, Americans invested another $2.5 trillion in the economy. At most $10 billion can be attributed to foreigners who seek visas, and probably a lot less.
The EB-5 program, then, just pumps up aggregate foreign investment in the United States by a few tenths of a percent per year. Given the size and liquidity of capital markets, the program has reduced the cost of capital by an infinitesimal amount, basically zero. A tiny reduction in the cost of capital might produce a tiny increase in the number of jobs, but most likely it will produce a tiny increase in profits for other investors or tiny reductions in price for consumers. It’s a bit like saying that you can immigrate to the United States if you buy a few cars from a domestic auto dealer at a price slightly higher than what the dealer is charging.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/05/eb_5_visa_program_for_immigrant_investors_this_path_to_citizenship_is_a.html 

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Fewer Americans Calling Themselves Christians, Survey Finds

2015/05/13 Leave a comment

Similar to Canadian numbers:

The share of Americans calling themselves Christians has dropped sharply in recent years, according to a new Pew Research Center survey — while the population of religiously unaffiliated adults has risen.
Though more Christians call America home than any other country, the percentage of American adults identifying as Christians has fallen from 78.4% in 2007 to about 70.6%. Meanwhile, over one in five (22.8%) say they are unaffiliated with any faith, a 6.7% percentage point jump since 2007.
Pew finds the Millennial generation is leading the decline in religious affiliation, though adults of all ages and across all demographic groups are steering away from Christianity. About 36% of Americans between 18 and 24 claim to be religiously unaffiliated, along with some 34% of Americans between 24 and 33.

http://time.com/3855277/american-christianity-poll-nones/

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A forgotten history: tracing the ties between B.C.’s First Nations and Chinese workers

2015/05/12 1 Comment

A fascinating piece on the early history of Chinese in Canada:

Before the railway, before British Columbia joined Confederation, many Chinese were already here. They were farming, mining and logging. They arrived by the hundreds starting in 1858 at the start of the gold rush, and Henry Yu, a professor of history at the University of B.C., says some arrived almost 200 years ago on what is now Vancouver Island. To succeed and survive, the Chinese forged relationships with the province’s First Nations who also faced extreme discrimination by the white colonists.

“The Chinese dealt in reciprocal ways with First Nations. They didn’t take, they asked. They brought gifts, they shared foods. They did relationship-building,” said Prof. Yu, who is now helping the provincial government on a project that will see a string of Chinese historic sites in the province officially preserved and recognized.

An estimated 15,000 Chinese men worked on the railway in B.C. in the 1880s. They were paid half the wages of the white workers, got no medical care and were typically assigned the most dangerous jobs. Once the work was complete, the European settlers sought to drive the Chinese workers out of the province with a race-based Head Tax. The Chinese were regarded as the temporary foreign workers of their time – with the last spike in place, they were no longer wanted here.

“There is a long history that has been distorted, deliberately suppressed, or erased,” said Prof. Yu.

The most concrete remnants of that history are found on the banks of the Fraser River. There, the Chinese built elaborate gold-mining operations among the First Nations communities. Sometimes, the men stayed and married into those communities.

Bill Chu, founder of the Canadians For Reconciliation Society, and Bill Paul, a member of the Lytton First Nation, look over the remains of a metal band used on wooden steam trunk on the banks of the Fraser River. (John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)

The Sto:lo people have their place names that mark this shared history. “Sxwóxwiymelh” is a place where a large number of Chinese railway workers died of the flu. They call the rolling hills opposite the mouth of the Coquihalla River “Lexwpopeleqwith’aim” – it means “always screech owls” but the word took on a dual meaning as a reference to the ghosts of Chinese workers who are said to haunt the area where many were killed during a blasting accident.

Mr. Chu is an accidental, amateur historian of British Columbia, drawn into the stories of the early Chinese railway workers and gold miners through his activism on behalf of Canada’s First Nations. He came to Canada from Hong Kong in 1974. As a newcomer, he knew nothing about the role of the Chinese in building this province.

“We are not all ‘new Canadians’ – we are as old as this province,” Mr. Chu said. Travelling up and down the Fraser Canyon, Mr. Chu has gathered stories of the Chinese railway workers kept by Sto:lo elders and others. He has visited many of the gold-mining operations that are still evident. “We are learning the history of this country from the mouths of its indigenous people,” he noted.

A forgotten history: tracing the ties between B.C.’s First Nations and Chinese workers – The Globe and Mail.

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Dad rules when sex ed collides with religion: Adams

2015/05/12 Leave a comment

Michael Adams on how patriarchy is a proxy for conservative views:

If conservative Protestants and mainline Protestants mark the high and low ends of the patriarchy spectrum, non-Christians (8.8 per cent of Canadians) are in the middle. On average, 30 per cent of these Canadians believe father must be master. For Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus, our sample is too small to analyze. Muslims, who now make up 3.2 per cent of the population, score high on deference to Dad (58 per cent) but they haven’t cornered the market on patriarchy: Canadian-born Muslims are outscored slightly by foreign-born conservative Protestants.

For the time being, Canada and its progressive social mores – a willingness to question dad, religious leaders, and tradition; and a willingness to respect individuals’ self-determination, sexual and otherwise – enjoy the assent of the majority. This majority includes the non-religious, members of mainline Christian denominations, substantial proportions of non-Christian religious groups, and even progressive members of more conservative religious groups (Christian and non-Christian).

The minority who feel stronger attachment to traditional authority will make their distress about this mainstream permissiveness known, as they have in Ontario. Whether their children will be persuaded by their parents or by the wider culture remains to be seen – but if trends in my generation of Catholics and in past waves of second-generation immigrants are any indication, most of those kids will give Dad a hug and then go their own way. Still, the year 2050 will likely find at least some of them marching in front of some legislature, protesting against the latest assault on religious patriarchy.

  Dad rules when ex ed collides with religion – The Globe and Mail.

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In Pam Geller’s World, Everybody Jihads – The Daily Beast

2015/05/12 Leave a comment

For those who want more background on Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s views on Islam:

This sordid episode is typical of the way Geller and her comrade-in-arms Spencer, co-founders of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, conduct their misnamed “anti-jihadist” battle. It is also a good example of why the two are no heroes for free speech. No, Geller did not “provoke” the terror attack in Garland, as a number of pundits (and even the New York Times editorial board) have deplorably suggested; her cartoon contest is not the moral equivalent of the attack, and she does not need to apologize for the exercise of her First Amendment rights or for the terrorists’ actions. She does, however, have to answer for a lengthy record of peddling anti-Muslim hysteria, targeting Muslims’ First Amendment right to worship, smearing innocent people as jihadists, and even excusing the slaughter of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia.  We cannot allow terrorists to curb our speech; but we also cannot allow them to turn hatemongers into heroes.

Whatever valid concerns Geller, Spencer, and their allies may raise about political Islamism wind up being eclipsed by the fact that they not only conflate Islamist radicalism with all Islam but make disturbingly little distinction between criticism of Islam and hostility toward Muslims.

In a contentious interview with CNN host Alisyn Camerota Monday, Geller indignantly denied that she paints Islam “with a broad brush,” declaring that she is “anti-jihad” and “anti-sharia.” But for the most part, she and Spencer make almost no secret that they regard radical Islam as indistinguishable from Islam itself.

Spencer, a prolific author who has a degree in religious studies and whose tone is more judicious than Geller’s, does not quite state outright that non-extremist Islam is impossible. Nonetheless, he calls Islamic reform “quixotic” and “virtually inconceivable,” and sweepingly describes the faith of “millions” of Muslim immigrants in the West as “absolutely incompatible with Western society.” When America’s first Muslim congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) chose to use a Quran in his swearing-in ceremony, Spencer flatly stated that “no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an.” His 2005 best-seller, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), has such chapter titles as “Islamic Law: Lie, Steal and Kill.”

Critics accuse Spencer of cherry-picking and distortions. While these charges often come from sources with biases of their own, there is no doubt that his account of Islamic history is blatantly one-sided. Thus, he tries to rebut the “PC myth” that Jews in the Middle Ages fared better under Islamic rule than in Christian Europe by quoting from a 13th Century papal bull that affirmed the rights accorded to Jews—but fails to mention the many expulsions of Jewish communities from European countries and glosses over crusader massacres of Jews.

When Spencer writes about moderate Muslims, it is invariably to disparage them as deluded, insincere, or irrelevant. His targets include reformist Muslims who are strongly critical of radical Islamism and have themselves been accused of being Islamophobic shills: Jasser, self-styled “Muslim refusenik” Irshad Manji, Sufi Muslim convert Stephen Schwartz. They also include Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State: last October, a Spencer post on his site, JihadWatch, reported a Kurdish woman’s suicide bomb attack on ISIS troops in a besieged town under the jeering headline, “Kurdish Muslima carries out moderate jihad/martyrdom suicide attack against the Islamic State,” and sneered at the idea that “the foes of the Islamic State are all moderate.”

…

But treating Islam as a monolith, denying the possibility of reform, and demonizing Muslims en masse is not the answer. If Christianity and Judaism could transcend their scriptural and theological baggage once used to justify fanaticism and oppression, there is no reason to believe that Islam cannot do the same. Spencer has argued that Islamic reform has no theological foundation, but he ignores the work of such 20th Century thinkers as Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, who made the case for the abrogation of the Quran’s later, harsher texts by the earlier, more peaceful ones (rather than vice versa). Today, there are Muslim scholars who champion a revision of Islamic orthodoxy on everything from women’s rights to religious freedom. In 2004, over 2,500 Muslim academics from 23 countries signed a petition to the United Nations condemning “Sheikhs of terror” who use Islamic scriptures as justification for political violence.

This is why, while we must stand by Geller as a victim of an outrageous attack on fundamental speech rights, it would be a tragic mistake to treat her or Spencer as leaders in the fight against the radical ideology that has been called Islamism or Islamofascism.

In his 2011 response to their attacks, Jasser warned that “Geller’s and Spencer’s genre is headed in only one direction—declaring an ideological war against one-fourth of the world’s population and expecting to neutralize the Islamist threat by asking Muslims to renounce their faith.” It is, perhaps literally, a dead end.

In Pam Geller’s World, Everybody Jihads – The Daily Beast.

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How afraid should we be of Islamic State? 

2015/05/12 Leave a comment

Good piece by Mitch Potter in the Star regarding the over-blown hyping of the  threat and risks of ISIS:

Yet even here, some researchers doubt those risks match up with the warnings, given that the number of Canadians known to have joined ISIS is barely enough to mount a decent hockey game.

“The Islamic State is a threat to Canada — but it is wildly overblown,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow who co-directs a study of Canadian foreign fighters at the University of Waterloo.

“By our count, there are about 60 Canadians who went to fight, of which 15 are already dead. And not all are with the Islamic State — some are fighting for the Kurds, some are fighting for the Free Syrian Army, for nationalist reasons, not as global jihadists who would present a threat to Canada.”

A similar low-threat assessment for Europe emerged this week in a research paper for Holland’s Clingendael Institute of International Relations, which concluded that, “although concerns have run high following the recent attacks in Paris, the threat of violence carried out by foreign fighters to Europe, while present, is largely overstated.”

Co-author Daniel Byman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, goes further in his assessment, emphasizing that while Europe must provide “ongoing resources to security and intelligence services to keep the threat low,” it should also “avoid reactive policies such as systematic prosecution and imprisonment of returnees.

“Some returnees must be imprisoned immediately and others monitored, but governments should also channel resources towards community-led programs emphasizing the rehabilitation and reintegration of returned fighters,” Byman writes.

In the Canadian context, it is difficult to imagine the general public embracing such a nuanced approach when the government itself, with more than a little help from the media, is sounding the direst of warnings. But that too is addressed in the Clingendael recommendations, which urge governments to “take care not to overstate the threat of foreign fighters and take steps to reassure citizens that the risk is real but limited.”

To the University of Waterloo’s Amarasingam, that’s the missing piece in Ottawa’s approach to the problem: we get all the warnings, minus the reassurance.

“I understand what the government and CSIS and the RCMP are trying to do,” says Amarasingam. “They want to ensure that in the unlikely event that Canada ever experiences an attack like 9/11, it won’t tear apart the fabric of our society and have us turn on each other.

“They want to plant the seed of possibility in our consciousness to prepare us. But when you raise those warnings — when you say ‘We’re not a multicultural haven immune from this; we are at risk’ — you also need to temper that message and provide the context that the risk of that kind of attack on the streets of Toronto is actually quite low.

“That’s a key piece that Canadians aren’t getting. And the consequence is that the fear is ramped up out of proportion to the actual risk.”

via How afraid should we be of Islamic State? | Toronto Star.

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A half-century of progress and black America’s still burning: Saunders

2015/05/11 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders on the endemic problem of racism and studies that show the impact of deprived neighbourhoods on outcomes:

The answer is found in the cities and towns where these explosions of violence and deprivation are taking place: Once an institution (a city, a police force, a school system, an economy) is set up to create a racial divide, it will continue to do so, regardless who’s running it, unless there’s a dramatic intervention.

Too many Americans don’t see these institutions, but only their victims, who then get blamed for the outcomes: It has become popular again on the North American right to claim, in pseudo-scholarly language, that “that’s just how they are” – that African-American culture, or families, must be to blame (even though culture and family structures are always consequences, not causes, of larger ills).

This view has been decisively disproven this month in a vast and expensive study by economists Raj Chetty, Lawrence Katz and their colleagues at Harvard University, in which thousands of randomly selected low-income (mainly black) families were given vouchers in the nineties to move out of deprived neighbourhoods (and thousands more stayed put as control groups).

The results, a generation later, found that poor, crime-addled families prone to intergenerational poverty and broken homes become, within a generation of leaving their context, prosperous, educated and marriage-prone families, with outcomes similar to those of average Americans.

The Obama administration has attempted the sort of big interventions (such as the ones of the sixties and nineties) that are needed turn around this trajectory of inequality. The post-2008 stimulus and the “Obamacare” medicare system have stopped the rise in inequality and poverty. But many large urban-policy and education programs have been blocked by a recalcitrant U.S. Congress. It might take flames from the cities, as it did 50 years ago, to provoke a change.

A half-century of progress and black America’s still burning – The Globe and Mail.

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Meet Robert Shillman, the Tech Mogul Who Funds Pamela Geller’s Anti-Islam Push

2015/05/11 Leave a comment

Only in America. If the same vitriol was directed to Christians or Jews, Shillman might not be so certain of his free speech justification:

Shillman said he remains a director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, whose Jihad Watch website helped organize the cartoon event in a Dallas suburb with activist Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks what it describes as extremist groups, has called the Freedom Center’s founder, the right-wing commentator David Horowitz, “the godfather of the anti-Muslim Movement.” The Freedom Center says it “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values.”

The SPLC also calls Geller’s AFDI a hate group because of the way it talks about and depicts Muslims.

Horowitz, in an email, called Shillman “an American hero” who is entirely transparent in his agenda. Horowitz also said the SPLC couldn’t produce one statement of his own that was anti-Muslim.

Geller did not return messages seeking comment.

…As founder of Natick, Massachusetts-based Cognex, which makes machine vision products that help automate manufacturing, Shillman says he is more outspoken than a typical U.S. corporate leader. “Most CEOs are hired guns and their future depends on what their boards think of them. I don’t give a f—-.”

The Freedom Center, whose P.O. Box address is in Sherman Oaks, California, runs several blogs and websites, including the online FrontPage Magazine and Jihad Watch. Shillman has funded four fellowships for journalists who have have worked on the FrontPage, which is the center’s online journal for news and political commentary. He declined to comment when asked if he helped pay for the cartoon contest.

Meet Robert Shillman, the Tech Mogul Who Funds Pamela Geller’s Anti-Islam Push – News – Forward.com.

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Backward Bill Passed, but Vietnamese-Canadians Move Forward – New Canadian Media

2015/05/11 1 Comment

The contrary view to the Government’s support for one section of the Vietnamese Canadian community, by Dai Trang Nguyen:

Bill S-219 does not add anything good to the community, and it will continue to divide it. How backward that the bill still has a we-were-victims mentality rather than focusing on moving forward. Furthermore, this bill is an obstacle for Canadians who work in sectors or are interested in promoting Canada’s Global Markets Action Plan, International Education Strategy, or aid effectiveness agenda in Vietnam.

Let’s put Bill S-219 in an international context. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the US normalized relations with Vietnam in 1995. In 2015, the US is ready to build a better relationship with the government of Vietnam. A recent US policy prohibits the flying of the old Saigon flag and singing the old national anthem on federal property.

To the opposite, Canada decided to be friendlier with the old Saigon group, at the risk of upsetting a partner of more than just trade, and the minister of defence has draped the old Saigon symbol around his shoulders at Vietnamese events.

April 30 as a dark day is the view of only a few thousand South Vietnamese who lost their power and privileges. On the other hand, April 30 is North-South reunification day for ordinary Vietnamese-Canadians, including many refugees who arrived in 1979-80 and over 100,000 economic immigrants who landed after 1981, who longed for peace and prosperity.

We agree that the experience of 60,000 boat people from Vietnam and the generosity of Canadian people in accepting them should be acknowledged as part of Canadian history. Refugees would want to remember the date when they are accepted and land in a safe place. The appropriate date of commemoration is July 27 when the first flight landed in Toronto in 1979, and the title should be along the line of an appreciation of Canada by Vietnamese refugees.

What would happen if fictitious governments that no longer exist–such as the old Saigon regime–continue to be recognized in Canadian legislation?

Canadians who are interested in freedom and democracy might want to take a look at our community. The few thousand South Vietnamese who fled in 1975 seek to impose their old Saigon political view on the refugees and immigrants who came later. All other voices are suppressed using threats of red-baiting. Members who are not outspoken about their anti-communist view or who have any contact with the government of Vietnam are singled out and labelled “communist.”

But because of Bill S-219, many members who have put up with this old group for so long, now for the first time in 40 years, have mobilized among themselves and become active in their political life.

On April 30, we will celebrate our own journey to freedom day as we understand it. We understand that even in a democratic country like Canada, the Senate can deny opposing views to be heard; that our community has been imposed a political view by a small group for 40 years.

But after 40 years, our journey has reached a critical point to achieve the freedom we look for. We will celebrate this day as the day when we feel free to have our own views, despite the Conservative government’s attempt to take the side of the old Saigon group with this vote-grabbing bill.

Backward Bill Passed, but Vietnamese-Canadians Move Forward – New Canadian Media.

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Islam in UK: Losing my religion | The Economist

2015/05/09 Leave a comment

Interesting trend even if the numbers are small as well as observation that many British Muslims have become more religious as a response to feeling that their faith is under attack:

Former Muslims’ reluctance to admit to their lack of faith rarely stems from a fear of violence, as in countries such as Sudan where laws make apostasy punishable by death. Rather the worry in Britain is about the social stigma, moral condemnation and ostracism that follows, says Simon Cottee of the University of Kent, who has written a book on the subject.

Many do not divulge their unbelief to their families, let alone the wider community. At events organised by the CEMB, some come straight from the mosque. Women say they continue to wear their veil at home to conceal their change of heart. Those who are openly godless often use the language of gay rights, talking about “coming out” to those close to them.

Despite such difficulties, the internet is making life easier. Muslims questioning their faith can talk to others online. The CEMB’s forum has over 4,000 users, says Marayam Namazie, the group’s founder. In the past would-be atheists had to sneak off to libraries to explore their doubts. Doing so online is easier and more discreet. Nonetheless the CEMB also offers guidance on concealing such activities, advising those with doubts to erase e-mails and search histories and to use a computer to which others do not have access.

Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester, says that he has heard of only a handful of cases of Muslims who have openly renounced their religion over the past 30 years. More common, he says, are those who abandon many of the practices of Islam—regular prayers, the dietary laws and dress codes, for example—but still identify as Muslims. This group, which is culturally but less spiritually committed to Islam, is getting larger, suggests Mr Mogra. Growing up in secular Britain leads people, especially the young, to drift away. But many grow out of their doubts, he reckons, and return, especially when they have children.

Religious leaders certainly try to draw them back into the fold. Sermons on Friday, when more backsliders may appear, are an opportunity to boost their faith. Ramadan is a chance to recharge the spiritual batteries of people who will only return again 11 months later for a top-up, says Mr Mogra. But a culture in which youngsters could express their uncertainties openly and discuss them with scholars would be good, he argues. “If, after that, they still have doubts, that’s up to them.”

The difficulty for Muslims with misgivings, at least in revealing them, is the politicisation of Islam. Many British Muslims have become more overtly religious as they perceive their faith to be under attack. Islam has become a greater part of their identity. That makes it harder for doubters to come out—and leaves them in a quandary. Some interviewed by Mr Cottee were wary of putting their testimonies online, anxious to avoid giving ammunition to those who would vilify Islam. Until Muslims feel more at ease in Britain and Britons more relaxed about Islam, the number coming out will be small.

Islam: Losing my religion | The Economist.

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