For Trump, Jews Are Proving to Be a Very Useful Tool

2026/09/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

…As the categories of majority and minority now shift and blur, Americans find themselves returning, almost obsessively, to Jews: a group that doesn’t fit easily into racial binaries, that troubles the boundaries between religion and ethnicity, whose members are not people of color but whose claim to whiteness was always suspect in the eyes of white supremacists, and who have diasporic ties to a polarizing nation-state.

This ambiguity has also created ideological blind spots. Centrist liberals were late to recognize the seriousness of antisemitism in American life. They likewise missed its potency as a political weapon for the populist right and the combustibility of the Palestine question in American politics. Progressives have failed to grapple with antisemitism among their own ranks. And now a conservative administration intent on undoing civil rights law has turned that ambiguity to its own advantage.

The civil rights revolution was never finished. Now its contradictions have returned, sharper than ever. They won’t end with antisemitism, because debates about Jews are never just about Jews. They are the seismographs of a society’s deeper tremors: its fears of difference, its contested visions of nationhood.

As Americans, we can build a legal framework that is more than a cynical tool with which to punish one’s enemies and also better than what preceded it — something capacious enough to protect all minorities, principled enough to command legitimacy and resilient enough to resist political manipulation. We can do it if we stop treating civil rights as a cudgel and start treating them once again as a covenant. Covenants are not merely inherited; they are renewed. This one must be renewed not for the America that was, but for the America that we are becoming.

Prof. Loeffler is the author of “Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America.”

Source: For Trump, Jews Are Proving to Be a Very Useful Tool

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Trump administration Tagged with ,

Beyond tariffs: 5 worrying ways Trump could escalate his trade war with Canada

2026/09/17 Leave a comment

Interesting detailed analysis. Not sure even the Trump administration would go that far, but labour mobility implications for cross border services etc are something to watch out for:

…Tariffs may be the easy part

None of these scenarios is inevitable.

Some would almost certainly face legal challenges. Others would run against the spirit, and in some cases the letter, of longstanding bilateral agreements. Several would impose serious costs on American companies, workers, and consumers, as well as Canadians.

But that is different from saying the tools do not exist.

For decades, Canada has tended to think about its exposure to the U.S. mainly through trade: how much it exports south, how vulnerable particular sectors are to tariffs, and how quickly it can diversify into other markets. That remains important. But the deeper relationship rests on much more than the movement of goods.

It depends on easy movement of people, trusted border administration, coordinated tax rules, privileged access to American technology, and physical infrastructure that both countries have spent decades integrating.

Those arrangements are usually treated as the background architecture of the relationship. In an even more serious confrontation, they can also become leverage.

And even these five possibilities do not exhaust Washington’s arsenal. At the far end of the escalation ladder sit the president’s emergency economic powers, which can be used to restrict financial transactions and block foreign property under U.S. jurisdiction after a qualifying national emergency is declared. Authorities of this kind sit at the heart of much of the U.S. sanctions machinery used against adversaries such as Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Applying anything comparable to Canada would represent a rupture far beyond today’s trade dispute.

The more realistic lesson is simpler.

Canada’s vulnerability is not only that it trades heavily with the U.S. It is that decades of successful integration have embedded Canadian prosperity inside systems that Washington helps administer.

Those systems make both countries richer in normal times.

In a confrontation, they can also become pressure points.

If the trade war keeps escalating, tariffs may eventually prove to have been the easy part.

Pouya Daneshpajooh is an Editorial Intern at The Hub and a Master of Global Affairs student at the University of Toronto’s Munk School.

Source: Beyond tariffs: 5 worrying ways Trump could escalate his trade war with Canada

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Trump’s Census Overhaul Would Exclude Some Immigrants and Remove Questions on Race

2026/09/11 Leave a comment

Not surprising. The Harper government’s replacement of the Census in 2011 by the National Household Survey represented a similar tendency to reduce data-based discussions on equality and equity in addition to a general ideology against what it viewed of government intrusiveness:

The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed to no longer count immigrants without green cards in the 2030 census or ask about race and ethnicity, part of an overhaul that would redefine who counts as a U.S. resident in the eyes of the federal government.

The sweeping measures would upend a process that helps determine the allotment of congressional seats, billions of dollars in federal funding and policies to address systemic disparities.

The proposed regulation, published online on Wednesday, would not count noncitizens without green cards in the 2030 census, a significant departure from the process stipulated by the Constitution to occur every 10 years. Historically, the census has asked Americans about their race and ethnicity and counted all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status.

The overhaul also would bar the U.S. census from asking Americans about their sexual orientation.

While the proposal is likely to face legal challenges, the changes would not only remove undocumented immigrants from the official population count used to determine congressional seats, but also immigrants who are in the United States legally and have yet to secure green cards or citizenship. As a result, areas with more immigrants, which tend to vote Democratic, could lose representation and federal funding….

Source: Trump’s Census Overhaul Would Exclude Some Immigrants and Remove Questions on Race

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Trump shares Christian group’s proposal allowing Canadian Jews facing antisemitism to flee to the U.S.

2026/09/04 1 Comment

Much as he prioritized white South African “refugees” compared to other groups:

As he finds new ways to poke Canada amid an ugly trade war, U.S. President Donald Trump has amplified a Christian group’s proposal to create a legal pathway into the United States for Canadian Jews facing antisemitism.

He shared on social media a news report about a letter written by the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL), which urges Trump to establish an expedited method of entry into the U.S. for Jewish Canadians “who are experiencing persecution or who credibly fear for their safety because they are Jewish.”

It points to “an alarming climate of harassment, intimidation, vandalism, threats, and violence” that Jewish Canadian families have faced since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, adding that “advocates working directly with these families report that more than 2,000 Jewish Canadians have expressed interest in relocating because of growing concerns for their safety.”

The letter continues: “Accordingly, we respectfully ask that you direct the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security to identify and implement lawful, secure, and appropriately expedited pathways for eligible Jewish Canadian nationals and their immediate family members who face persecution.”

“NACL founder and president Jason Rapert signed the letter, alongside state representatives and religious leaders, and it was sent to the U.S. president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and several U.S. senators and representatives on Thursday.

Trump shared a link to the report on Truth Social on Sunday evening, but did not comment on the contents.”

Source: Trump shares Christian group’s proposal allowing Canadian Jews facing antisemitism to flee to the U.S.

Filed under Antisemitism, Trump administration Tagged with ,

U.S. Sanctions Cut Off Aspiring Iranians From Tests Needed for Study Abroad

2026/09/03 1 Comment

Of note. Shooting themselves in the foot again:

President Trump’s latest sanctions against Iran have forced the cancellation of English proficiency and graduate exams that Iranians rely on to qualify for studying abroad, students and testing services say, penalizing Iranians who are eager to foster relationships with the outside world.

Among those organizations that canceled exams are the Educational Testing Service, which runs the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). They are two of the most widely used exams for students seeking admission to English-language graduate programs worldwide.

The Duolingo English Test, an online standardized exam increasingly used by students applying for undergraduate programs, has also suspended testing for anyone who is Iranian and cannot register as the citizen of another country.

Iranian students whose exams were canceled described a growing sense of despair. They said the sanctions were hurting the people who most want to pursue relations with an outside world so often closed off to them by Iran’s clerical rulers and decades of economic isolation….

Source: U.S. Sanctions Cut Off Aspiring Iranians From Tests Needed for Study Abroad

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LILLEY: Where was the outrage as Canadians renamed our own history?

2026/09/02 1 Comment

Although different in some ways when renaming comes from a foreign power, valid question nevertheless:

…My question for all the people screaming about the renaming of Lake Ontario is: where were they as we renamed schools, roads and more once named for Sir John A. Macdonald? Where were they as we removed our history by pulling down statues dedicated to our first prime minister?

Schools in Nova Scotia and Ontario had Sir John A.’s name dropped from them. Statues in Montreal, Kingston, Regina, Victoria and elsewhere were taken down.

In Saskatoon, John A. Macdonald Road was renamed miyo-wâhkôhtowin, a Cree word meaning “good relationships.” In Ottawa, a federally controlled road, the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, was renamed under the Trudeau government to Kichi Zībī Mīkan, an Algonquin phrase meaning Great River Road.

Where was the outrage over this by the people now furious about Donald Trump changing the name of Lake Ontario? Where was their national pride? Where was their demand that our history be respected?

What about when Egerton Ryerson had his statue torn down, his name taken off the university long associated with him over false claims of connections to residential schools?

Where was the outrage when Edward Cornwallis had his name and image stripped from our public spaces? When Justin Trudeau unilaterally took the name of Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, a Father of Confederation, off the building that housed the Prime Minister’s Office, why did these same people not step up and raise their voices?

Tearing down our own history

Here in Toronto, we recently renamed Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square on the false claim that Henry Dundas supported and extended slavery in the British Empire. Sankofa is a Ghanaian word, taken from the language of the people on the west coast of Africa who sold most of the slaves into the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

We have spent close to a decade stripping away our own history, being vandals to our own heritage, and most of the public has been silent….

Source: LILLEY: Where was the outrage as Canadians renamed our own history?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Trump administration Tagged with ,

Trump has ‘reached out’ to Apple about renaming Lake Ontario on its maps

2026/09/02 Leave a comment

No spine like Google (but unlike Mapquest):

U.S. President Donald Trump has contacted Apple about changing Lake Ontario’s name to “Lake America” on its maps app, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said on Monday.

In an ‌interview ⁠on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria program, Burgum said: “The president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure ​that we may be seeing that change ​coming up soon to Lake America.”

National Post has reached out to Apple for comment.

It comes after the “Lake America” label was adopted by Google Maps in the U.S. over the weekend. The company said in a post on its corporate website that the change was made after the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) had formally renamed the lake….

Source: Trump has ‘reached out’ to Apple about renaming Lake Ontario on its maps

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USA: HOW THE RIGHT COULD ACTUALLY END BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

2026/09/02 1 Comment

No doubt the administration and its supporters/enablers will continue to try:

….Administration officials were hardly coy about their plans. “We have to keep fighting,” Vice President Vance told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision.” A month later, the White House announced a second, narrower executive order purporting to restrict certain limited categories of people from birthright citizenship, such as children born to members of legally designated foreign terrorist groups.

The new order also appears largely unconstitutional, and is more a howl of frustration than a serious effort to pare back the Supreme Court’s ruling in Barbara. But it signals that MAGA’s assault on the Fourteenth Amendment is far from over. And the right already has a proven model for how to overturn a Supreme Court ruling, one more careful and systematic than a single executive order: the campaign against Roe v. Wade. The conservative movement never regarded Roe as the final word on abortion. The MAGA movement does not regard Trump v. Barbara as the final word on birthright citizenship….

Despite this history of opposition, Trump lacked any real legal foothold for his executive order—a precarious position to be in as the Supreme Court prepared to hear the case. Fortunately for Trump, a small group of right-leaning law professors busied themselves with the work of casting doubt on the question that judges in the lower courts—and, for more than 150 years, nearly every other expert—had found so clear. Some were up-front about their motivations. “My political predisposition was actually to think birthright citizenship is morally quite a complex issue and that the Trump position might be the right moral answer,” Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, explained in an interview on Moment of Truth, a podcast produced by a MAGA-aligned think tank. He co-wrote a New York Times op-ed in February 2025 and later published a law-review article. Both drew selectively from Anglo-American legal history to suggest that the words subject to the jurisdiction thereof might be read to mean “subject to America’s ‘social compact,’ ” whereby an individual gives up certain rights so that the state can guarantee others. People in the United States illegally haven’t entered into an “exchange of allegiance and protection,” Wurman argued, and therefore might not be guaranteed birthright citizenship for their children.

Scholarship proceeds through debate and contestation, but the convenient timing of this intervention and the patchiness of the historical work looked a great deal like an effort to sway the Court in Trump’s favor. Prior to Trump’s executive order, Wurman hadn’t published any academic work questioning the conventional understanding of birthright citizenship; he pressed forward with his op-ed, he said on the podcast, because he “wanted to move the Overton window.” Other scholars were appalled by his argument. Law, the CUNY professor, described the revisionist conclusions as “hogwash” that elide “mountains of scholarship on the other side.” Even fellow conservative originalists, who share Wurman’s approach to constitutional interpretation rooted in historical meaning, questioned his interpretation of subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Under common law and the public understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment at the time of the amendment’s drafting, they argued, subject to the jurisdiction thereof meant “subject to the law of”—which would include just about everyone on U.S. soil. “Aliens within the territory owe obedience to the law just like a natural-born citizen does,” the originalist law professor Keith Whittington wrote in a February 2026 paper. (Asked about his methodology, Wurman responded over email, “There is no single answer to the question of when sufficient historical data has been presented to make historical claims convincing.”)

Yet the revisionist scholarship found a receptive audience among the conservative justices on the Court. During oral arguments in April, most of the justices seemed skeptical of, even hostile toward, Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s case against birthright citizenship. By the time the Court handed down its ruling at the end of June, however, only five—the three liberals, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett—found the executive order to be unconstitutional. Justice Clarence Thomas drew from what he termed a “groundswell of new scholarship” in his dissent. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, dissenting in part, likewise pointed to the debate on the question to suggest that “the constitutional issue is not straightforward.” He argued that Congress would need to rewrite existing law to create exceptions to birthright citizenship for “children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”…

Source: HOW THE RIGHT COULD ACTUALLY END BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship, Trump administration Tagged with ,

Trump administration moves to increase H-1B visa fee to more than $100,000

2026/08/28 4 Comments

Of note, more shooting themselves in the foot given their importance to the tech sector:

President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday released a proposed regulation to codify an unprecedented more than US$100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers that Trump first imposed last year but has been blocked by the courts. 

The fee first imposed by Trump in a temporary proclamation last year vastly raises the cost of the visas that are heavily relied on in the tech, education and research sectors. 

A federal judge in June ruled that the fee was illegal and blocked the Trump administration from collecting it. A Boston-based appeals court is reviewing that decision while a different court considers whether a judge in Washington, D.C., properly rejected a challenge to the fee by a major business group.

Trump’s 2025 proclamation imposing the fee expires in September, one year after it was issued, but directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to adopt regulations making it permanent. 

The proposed US$103,265 fee by DHS, posted online in the Federal Register on Monday to be formally published on Tuesday, kicks off a 30-day public comment period. …

Source: Trump administration moves to increase H-1B visa fee to more than $100,000

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ICYMI – Barutciski: The UNHCR is goading the U.S. into pulling its funding – and putting itself in existential risk

2026/08/28 Leave a comment

Of note:

Will be interesting to hear comments from refugee advocates on this suggestion:

…To avert a crippling U.S. funding freeze or a complete American withdrawalfrom the UNHCR executive committee, the agency must prove it can be reformed, and member states must broker a compromise. Canada can play a constructive role in finding a face-saving solution that maintains U.S. engagement. With the committee holding its annual general session in October, Canada – an influential member of UNHCR’s executive committee, as the sixth-largest donor in 2025 – has an opportunity to bring its middle-power strategy to life with a bold initiative to save one of the UN’s largest operational programs. 

The best way to prove UNHCR is reformable would be to split the deputy position into two distinct roles: one to oversee humanitarian operations and field execution, which Mr. Salih’s current choice could retain, and the other dedicated strictly to resource management and budgeting, which would go to Mr. Trump’s nominee. This would satisfy Washington’s oversight and audit concerns, and mirror structures already used in other UN bodies like UNICEF and the UN Population Fund. 

Rather than thumbing their noses at the White House, other major members of the executive committee should also admit they share American concerns about a misguided asylum system that is fuelling uncontrolled mass migration. This reality was highlighted in the recent Chisinau declaration, where all 46 members of the Council of Europe – including staunchly progressive Western European nations – agreed that the current asylum system must be reined in to be saved. This non-binding political text explores the self-inflicted dilemmas resulting from overly generous judicial decisions, implicitly acknowledging the Trump administration’s migration-related criticisms of Europe and indicating that Washington’s stance is far from isolated. U.S. pressure has already pushed Ottawa to tighten border controls and amend its asylum procedures. …

Source: The UNHCR is goading the U.S. into pulling its funding – and putting itself in existential risk

Filed under Immigration, Trump administration Tagged with ,

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