Not an easy political debate to have in the current mass migrant context:
Fred Kuwornu, an Italian-Ghanaian director, has been waiting for years for this moment. In 2011, he made a documentary called 18 IUS SOLI. Screened at film festivals across the world, including Venice, it called for Italian citizenship to be made available to people born in Italy to foreign parents.
Now it’s more than cinema; the Italian Senate is debating this very possibility.
That’s if politics and the migrant crisis don’t get in the way.
Hundreds of thousands of people born in Italy to non-Italian parents could soon be eligible for citizenship if changes to the country’s nationality laws are passed.(www.ilprimatonazionale.it)
“The issue is very complex. I believe that today it is not possible to be just a citizen of the country your parents are from or where you were born,” Kuwornu tells Equal Times.
Currently, Italian citizenship is largely based on jus sanguinis which relates to having Italian ancestry.
According to the current law, No.91 of 1992, children born in Italy to non-Italian parents must apply for Italian nationality between their 18th and 19th birthdays. They can only apply if they have lived in Italy continuously for their whole life. Even in a country notorious for its lengthy bureaucratic practices, the process is particularly long and complicated.
The new ‘tempered’ law would base citizenship on the principle of jus soli (or the right to citizenship based on one’s place of birth) or on cultural participation (at least five years of education after the age of 12 in Italy) – jus culturae.
In accordance with jus soli, children born in Italy to non-EU citizens (one of whom has to have a resident’s permit) will be eligible for Italian citizenship.
A November 2015 report from the Ministry of Public Education revealed that there are more than 805,000 young people of school age born in Italy to foreign parents, although it is not clear whether all of these students would be eligible for citizenship under the new rules.
“The tempered jus soli seemed to be the best compromise. I do, however, hope that this law will be approved quickly,” says Kuwornu, whose documentary promoted legislative change through community screenings, discussions and cultural initiatives.
It may yet be some time before the law is passed, however. The Chamber of Deputies approved it on 13 October 2015 with 310 votes in favour, 66 votes against and 83 abstentions, but it still awaits a vote in the Senate, where lawmakers held a hearing on the subject on 30 March 2016.
Anti-immigrant sentiment
What complicates the process are elections – for the mayor of Rome on 5 June and other administrative balloting – amidst a certain amount of hostility towards the new law.
Against the backdrop of the migrant crisis, populist politicians across Europe have helped to stir anti-immigrant sentiment. In Italy, the Lega Nord (Northern League) has drawn thousands of protesters in their demonstrations against immigration.
Supporters fear that failure to passed the jus soli law now could add years of second-class citizenship for many second-generation immigrant youth.
The new law has also been criticised by pro-immigration groups that see it as less-inclusive compared to the ambitious 2011 campaign ‘I’m Italy too’ (L’ Italia sono Anch’ io), supported by many Italian associations.
An alternative positive example, albeit small-scale:
The news from Israel is often bad: attacks on Jews by young Palestinians and reprisals by Israeli forces. Expanding settlements in the West Bank. Escalating fear and hostility. Plummeting prospects for peace.
But a group of dedicated educators is working to bring the two sides together — not at the bargaining table, but in the school room.
“We’re giving hope where leaders have failed,” says Mohamad Marzouk, director of the community department for the bilingual and bicultural Hand in Hand schools.
“Fear and mistrust develops over years when people are separated,” he says. “A kindergarten child goes to an Arabic or Hebrew school and never experiences the existence of children on the other side. This ignorance of the other creates mistrust and fear.”
Marzouk and Rebecca Bardach, Hand in Hand’s director of resource development and strategy, are in Toronto on a speaking tour.
“Hand in Hand is my Iron Dome against hatred,” says Bardach, referring to Israel’s missile defence system. “I can’t change what is happening politically, or the minds of people who hate each other. But I believe we can overcome that sense of helplessness with understanding.”
Hand in Hand, boasting some 1,320 Jewish and Arab Israeli students, and a lengthy waiting list, was founded in 1998 with one school in Jerusalem. It has now expanded to six, from Jaffa to the Galilee. Arab Israelis make up 20 per cent of Israel’s 8.5 million population and many identify as Palestinian Israelis.
The security wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories — Israel’s “separation barrier” — is physically and psychologically divisive, says Bardach. But the two separate language streams of the Israeli school system are a “huge contributing factor” to mutual misunderstanding between Jews and Arab Israelis.
“Children aren’t growing up learning about differences, what we have in common and building common ground,” she says. Parents must make a choice that cuts their children off from one or the other group.
Not so in Hand in Hand schools, where children are taught by Hebrew and Arabic-speaking teachers.
They partner with children who speak the other language, and study together. They also learn the missing links in mainstream curriculums — the other’s religion, culture, food, daily life and history. Elements that allow them to see their counterparts as fellow humans rather than enemies.
Outside the classroom they play together at sports, picnic together and celebrate each other’s holidays.
They and their parents have weathered nearly two decades of anger, violence, war and political outbursts in the world around them, including a 2014 firebombing of the Jerusalem school by Jewish extremists.
That brought even more support for Hand in Hand, from the media, thousands of demonstrators, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat.
The traumatic event shook parents and children. But they were helped through it by the school’s tradition of unflinching dialogue on the events around them, however painful. It held true even in the past two years, when Jewish parents were afraid to drive on main roads for fear of being attacked, and Palestinian parents feared gangs of extremists who targeted Arabs for beatings.
The success of the Hand in Hand community has led to expansion, but on a shoestring. Its $9 million-a-year budget is financed by the Israeli government and private donations. Scholarships are available, but fees are $1,200 a year. “Not easy to afford” in Israel, Bardach admits.
One reason why Mr. Obama’s Taliban-termination received hardly more attention than his other acts on Monday is because people increasingly feel like it doesn’t. The Taliban appointed another leader, its third. Al-Qaeda has sprung back to life. Some have likened decapitation policies to Whac-a-Mole games: Bash a bad guy, and another one springs up.
Boss-offing is not a mysterious topic: In recent years, an entire science of decapitation analysis has sprung up.
The most influential number-crunching was conducted in 2009 by Jenna Jordan, a researcher at the University of Chicago (she is now at Georgia Tech). She analyzed 298 incidents of “leadership targeting” over six decades and looked at their impact on the organizations whose leaders were the recipients of these abrupt terminations.
Her results were far from encouraging. Her data showed that decapitation, on average, “does not increase the likelihood of organizational collapse beyond a baseline rate of collapse for groups over time.”
In fact, the extremist groups most likely to fall apart (that is, to stop being able to commit attacks and wage war) are actually those whose leaders have not been killed: Hitting the head honcho actually seems to help groups keep fighting longer – perhaps because it rather literally injects some fresh blood into the organization.
More recent analyses have questioned these findings. Certain groups have indeed self-imploded following the untimely demise of their figurehead: Peru’s Shining Path faded into irrelevance after its leader Abimael Guzman was captured; Italy’s Red Brigades did not outlast its founding leaders; the capture of Abdullah Ocalan disempowered Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party for a decade.
In a big-data study last year, Bryan Price of the U.S. Military Academy analyzed 207 terrorist groups from 1970 to 2008, but instead of looking at their effectiveness, he examined their longevity.
He found that taking out the executives “significantly increases the mortality rate of terrorist groups, even after controlling for other factors” – but it often takes longer than we’d like. Counterterrorism, he concluded, is a long game. He also found that the groups most likely to implode after things blow up in the head office are nationalists. Groups that see themselves as religious, he found, are more tolerant of bloodbaths at the top. Of 53 religious groups, only 19 have ended – 16 of them after their boss was wiped out. But of the 34 such terrorist groups still in existence (including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State), 20 have endured a decapitation strike.
There are other good reasons to knock off the kingpins: Inspiring morale in your troops, hurting jihadi recruitment by looking all-powerful, sowing moments of chaos that can be exploited. But there’s no reason to think they’ll make the fight any easier, or the world less bloody.
Great data visualization and Canadian version would be comparable, although the post 1960s mix would be somewhat different:
It’s easy now to assume that Mexico has always been among the main sources of immigration to America. But as this wonderful chart by Natalia Bronshtein shows, that’s not even close to true.
(Natalia Bronshtein)
Bronshtein pulled 200 years of government data to put together the visualization. There’s an interactive version on her website: you can hover over any color, at any point, and see the exact number of immigrants who became residents from that country in that decade.
But taken as a whole, the chart tells a very clear story: there are two laws that totally transformed immigration to the United States.
The first, the National Origins Act of 1924 (a capstone on a series of anti-immigration bills passed in the few years before that), set very strict quotas on immigration to America from any country — and especially strict quotas on any country that wasn’t in western or northern Europe. (Immigration from Asia was, for the most part, simply banned.) That’s the bottleneck you see in the graph.
The second, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, demolished the old quota system. But instead of just turning the clock back to the dawn of the 20th century, the 1965 law created a completely different era of immigration to the US from all over the world — and especially from Latin America and Asia. None of the colors that are dominant on this chart up until the 1920s are dominant from the 1970s onward. Once large-scale immigration to the US was restored, the face of it looked totally different.
There will still be need for coordination and heads-up. But most public servants have the sense of what is appropriate and what it not:
The Liberal government has scrapped the elaborate system Conservatives were using to organize central message control within the government, replacing it with… nothing, according to the Privy Council Office.
It’s not just the scientists who’ve been unmuzzled. Anyone in the government who wants to organize a public event, or speak at one — and anyone who wants to talk to journalists — is affected by this change in policy.
The PCO, which acts as a support to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet, confirmed the shift this week.
Under this government, it is no longer using documents called “Message Event Proposals,” which came into practice under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, to vet events and media requests across the federal government. The documents “have not been replaced with something new,” said spokesperson Raymond Rivet.
“The PCO’s new communications process looks like another positive step,” said Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.
The union represents about 57,000 government scientists and other professionals, mainly at the federal level of government. It has been one of the most vocal advocates for the government “unmuzzling” its scientists.
Though she said there’s clear support for science from the Liberal government, Daviau warned that policies and directives are always at the whim of the government of the day, noting a “chill” under Harper.
“A lot of work needs to happen so that science is never silenced again by a federal government. What we need now is to safeguard it from future attacks and ensure we are consistent across government departments,” Daviau said.
Despite the shift at PCO, Rivet noted some departments might still use Message Event Proposals or similar products internally.
“Departments and ministers are responsible for their own communications, though co-ordination remains important,” said Olivier Duchesneau, a spokesperson for Trudeau. Some inquiries are still flagged to the PCO when more than one agency or department is involved, Rivet added.
Duchesneau said the government is basing its communications on the concept of “government by cabinet,” though he didn’t comment specifically on the scrapped Harper-era system.
Interesting reflections on ‘roots’ by Christy Wampole:
A desire for roots and rootedness may be acquiring a new importance in the new global tangle, where certainties are hard to come by. But I wonder sometimes if this root-oriented thinking actually causes many of the problems whose solutions we can’t seem to find. Think of your own roots and how much of your identity relies on them. How many things that trouble or anger you relate in some way, if only peripherally, to this rootedness? If you were to suddenly discover that you were mistaken about your roots, would you trade in your Lederhosen for a kilt? How negotiable is your sense of self? How much do your roots determine your actions? What if you’d been born with someone else’s roots, say, those of your enemy?
Each person will have different answers to these questions. And yet there is something universal about rootedness as well. All people seek a context into which they may enfold themselves. If we truly are wired for connectedness, we’ve gotten our wish in a sense; our unprecedented system of networks has shrunk the globe and at least offered the possibility for new kinds of continuity and growth. But it remains to be seen how this connectivity will be reconciled with individual identities, with old brands of embeddedness, and with nostalgia for the first garden.
Good piece on ‘Roots’ and how a reboot needs to reflect the current era:
As the great literary and cultural critic Leslie Fiedler noted time and again, Americans only valorize the Other when we know he or she is thoroughly vanquished; The Last of the Mohicans could only be written after the Indians were thoroughly contained in or effectively banished from upstate New York. At the same time that white ethnics were transforming their downscale heritages into sources of pride (Polish Power, anyone?), black Americans in the post-Civil Rights era were doing the same thing: finding a source of cultural power in a history of exclusion and oppression.
Prior to Roots, Haley was best-known as the amanuensis of Malcolm X, compiling an “autobiography” based on interviews conducted between 1963 and Malcolm’s assassination in 1965. In What Was Literature?: Class Culture and Mass Society (1982), Fiedler writes that Roots was for Haley a natural extension of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which combined elements of Booker T. Washington’s gospel of segregationist self-sufficiency and the confrontational politics of the Black Power movement into a message of militant uplift.
Yet Fiedler notes that Roots, despite Haley’s attempt to write a “final Happy Ending” in which African Americans become professors and government functionaries and world-famous authors, replicates the same irresolvable racial tensions that fueled earlier novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (which became the basis on D.W. Griffith’s execrable The Birth of a Nation), and Gone With The Wind. “Scenes of rape and flagellation are as essential to [Haley’s] vision as to that of Mrs. Stowe or Thomas Dixon, or Margaret Mitchell, though his victims are, of course, always black,” writes Fiedler.
Though the brutalization of his ancestors, especially at the hands of slave owners, means that Haley is himself part white, he cannot acknowledge that part of his ancestry. Try as he might, Fiedler argues, Haley doesn’t offer a way out of an unbridgeable gap between the races. Instead, he describes the lurid, racist fantasies from the victims’ point of view.
History Channel
That of course is no small accomplishment and the fact that Roots—the book and the miniseries—made black history visible to white America en masse explains its success. White ethnics especially, who often clashed with blacks in the restricted neighborhoods to which both were remanded by zoning and custom, could understand a far deeper and long-suffering oppression lived out in the golden streets of America.
So here we are now, in the 21st century, eight years into the presidency of a mixed-race president, in a country where the percentage of foreign-born residents is rapidly approaching figures last seen in the 1910s and ’20s. On a profound level, we are more at peace with one another than ever before. For 20 years, the Census has included a “multiracial” category to accommodate basic reality and support for interracial marriage approaches 100 percent (even same-sex marriage, unthinkable even just a generation ago, pulls 60 percent or more approval, with the number bumping each year).
Yet in a commencement speech at Howard University, Barack Obama observed that even as things have markedly improved for African Americans since he himself graduated college, his “election did not create a post-racial society.” To be sure, there is much work to be done. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts and the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites. The rise of Donald Trump is fueled in no small part by grievances among poor whites who are the one group in America whose lifespans are actually shrinking. Black protestors, especially on college campuses, are at times more inflamed than the Black Panthers ever were — despite objectively better conditions compared to 45 years ago in terms of opportunities.
We have stuck in a dialectical conversation where the horrors of our racial past have been represented poignantly and memorably. What we need now is work that shows how most Americans—black, white, and every other type—have moved beyond to a world that, while replete with problems, allows us to be kinder and better to one another.
Worth noting, and there is a difference what words intellectuals and writers may use and those that governments may use:
However, Rushdie has contended, that, ““If everybody engaged in acts of Islamic terrorism says that they’re doing it in the name of Islam, who are we to say they’re not? I mean now of course what they mean by Islam might well not be what most Muslims mean by Islam. But it’s still a form of Islam and it’s a form of Islam that’s become unbelievably powerful in the last 25 and 30 years.
He goes on to talk about ‘this liberal spirit of appeasement’, ‘of political correctness’.
He explains that it is true that several Muslims in America and Western Europe are actively discriminated against, putting them in a position of economic disadvantage and one needs to talk about ending discrimination. However, he adds, religious ideas held by them necessarily doesn’t become legitimate because they belong to economically or racially disadvantaged people in countries like America.
He adds that when free speech is shut down, minority communities are the ones who suffer the most. So they should actively promote the need to let free speech remain truly ‘free’ and if some criticism of their own religious ideas have to faced in the process, so be it. “It comes with the territory,” says Rushdie.
“Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims, you know. Whether it’s the Taliban in Afghanistan or, you know, the Ayatollahs in Iran or wherever it might be. But to say that this is not Islam is to misname the problem. The problem is that there’s been a mutation in Islam, which has become unusually virulent and powerful. And it needs to be dealt with, but in order to deal with it we have to first call it by its true name,” he says.
Over the past months, as many of you know, I have been doing a series of articles on the 2015 election, Cabinet and other senior appointments, along with baseline data for the public service, Governor in Council and judicial appointments by which to measure the government’s implementation of its diversity and inclusion commitments.
I have integrated and updated these in mini-book form, available as a free download from:
I hope you find this compilation and the reference data it provides of interest and use.
The description is below.
——————-
Because it’s 2015 … Implementing Diversity and Inclusion
Canada’s 2015 election provided a sharp contrast between the social cohesion focus of the Conservative party and its use of identity politics, and the Liberal party’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion. This was not only reflected in policy and language but in candidate recruitment, with the Liberals having the largest number of visible minority candidates, although Conservative and NDP numbers also increased.
The overall voting shift to the Liberals was particularly strong among new Canadian voters, reflecting a mix of the overall shift to the Liberals in this election, perceived anti-immigrant bias and identity politics, and lack of support for Conservative restrictive citizenship and immigration policies.
In power, the Liberals implemented their diversity and inclusion commitment through the establishment of a Cabinet Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, Cabinet and Parliamentary Secretary appointments, Ministerial mandate letters and initial Senate appointments. They also set expectations for other senior appointments.
This short book provides data and related analysis with respect to the election results, political representation and leadership positions, and establishes the 2016 baseline for senior public servants, Governor in Council and judicial appointments by which to judge the Government’s implementation.
With over 40 charts and tables, Because it’s 2015 … is an invaluable reference for those interested in Canadian politics and diversity. iPad optimized.
The strengths and limitations of electronic translation tools:
Remember all those warnings that learning a second language would be a great asset in your future? It seems that years after your regrets about not paying attention and learning Spanish, technology has finally caught up and proven them wrong.
Tech company Waverly Labs is taking pre-orders for the kind of device you’d have seen in a space epic 30 years ago: a tiny smart earpiece, called “Pilot,” that real-time translates one language into another. Speak Spanish, hear English. Get it?
For decades, it’s been the work of science fiction to imagine a tiny earpiece translating someone’s words from another language to your own in real time. But in the last few years we’ve breached plenty of technological barriers to quick translation. Think of the dozens of languages available with Google’s translation tool, or the multiple apps that can translate signs, menus, and text in real time by using the camera on a smart device.
And all this without a live translator. This is just the latest in a series of technological advances in translation. The result: knowing the other language is unnecessary if you have the right tools.
For years it’s been a major boon in business to know a second language—and for the sake of relationships, it may still be. But it looks like in a few years you’ll be able to attend a German cocktail hour and know what’s being said, or make that trip to France and understand directions.
But the idea that a small earpiece and a couple of phone apps can turn that intimidating interaction into something casual (and that you can one day talk to Italian, Chinese, Indian, and Russian businesspeople without learning a word of their language) makes this hurdle a lot shorter.
That’s good news, especially for the U.S., because Americans aren’t great with second languages. About a quarter of Americans speak a second language conversationally, while the rest of the world’s polyglot numbers go above 50 percent.
It’s not a true closure to the gap though. There’s still interpersonal significance to the idea that you can speak to someone in their native language without some apparatus doing the heavy lifting—and if that person doesn’t speak your language, you can’t get by on one earpiece alone.
Furthermore, those same international businesspeople that you might envision working for or with want you to be fluent, not to buy an earpiece. There are countless studies and data points out there showing how much more valuable you are to a company as someone who can interact in two or more languages, and that’s not going to change within five or 10 years of a new Bluetooth earpiece hitting the market.
Still, it’s a lot less work than something like Rosetta Stone, because it doesn’t actually require you to learn anything—just to plug and play. And while multimillion dollar deals require fluency, those little emergency interactions on the street when you’re totally lost in a foreign city, or have your passport stolen, or don’t understand the taxi driver—those are all great occasions where technology can take over.
With the ubiquity of cellphones, particularly smartphones, increasing worldwide, it doesn’t look so touristy to hold up your phone to a sign to translate it. And tossing an earpiece in before jumping on a conference call might make your life a lot easier if there are non-English speakers speaking.
The final question then is one of perception: How bad does it look to let technology do the work? You would never write a formal business proposal and let Google do the translating work: it would lose grammar, craft, and it would miss idioms. Maybe then a few months or years of language study is good just so you don’t have one of those embarrassing misunderstandings where you tell someone they’re pregnant instead of smart.
Waverly Labs shows the Pilot smart earpiece as bridging the gap between an affectionate couple that experienced love at first sight, but never shared a common language. And as wonderful as the “thank god for technology” moment is, wouldn’t you rather be the kind of romantic that learns another person’s native tongue for them?
