F.B.I. Tool to Identify Extremists Is Criticized – The New York Times

2015/11/03 Leave a comment

Although understandable that the FBI would have a targeted approach with respect to Islamic-inspired extremism, the criticism is valid given that it ignores the elephant in the room: gun violence and white extremism:

The F.B.I. is about to introduce an interactive program it developed for teachers and students, aimed at training them to prevent young people from being drawn into violent extremism. But Muslim, Arab and other religious and civil rights leaders who were invited to preview the program have raised strong objections, saying it focuses almost entirely on Islamic extremism, which they say has not been a factor in the epidemic of school shootings and attacks in the United States.

The program, according to those who saw it at F.B.I. headquarters, called “Don’t Be a Puppet,” leads the viewer through a series of games and tips intended to teach how to identify someone who may be falling prey to radical extremists. With each successful answer, scissors cut a puppet’s string, until the puppet is free.

In the campaign against terrorists such as the Islamic State, law enforcement agencies have been stepping up efforts to identify those susceptible to recruitment. The agencies have enlisted the cooperation and advice of religious and community leaders. But the controversy over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new online tool is one more indication that there is no consensus on who should be involved in detecting and reporting suspects, and where to draw the line between prevention and racial or religious profiling.

“The F.B.I. is developing a website designed to provide awareness about the dangers of violent extremist predators on the Internet,” a spokeswoman for the agency said late Sunday, “with input from students, educators and community leaders.”

The F.B.I. had told the community organizations that the program would be available online as soon as Monday. The organizations’ leaders spoke to a reporter only after learning that the F.B.I. was likely to proceed despite their concern that the program would stigmatize Arab and Muslim students, who are already susceptible to bullying.

“Teachers in classrooms should not become an extension of law enforcement,” said Arjun S. Sethi, an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Mr. Sethi, who specializes in counterterrorism and law enforcement, was invited by the F.B.I. to give feedback on the program.

“The program is based on flawed theories of radicalization, namely that individuals radicalize in the exact same way and it’s entirely discernible,” he said. “But it’s not, and the F.B.I. is basically asking teachers and students to suss these things out.”

He said the F.B.I.’s program amounted to “misplaced priorities.”

“The greatest threat facing American schoolchildren today is gun violence,” he said. “It’s not Muslim extremism.”

Teachers do not always have the training or judgment to identify extremists, said several religious leaders who mentioned the Muslim student in Texas who was detained and handcuffed after taking a clock he built to school.

Source: F.B.I. Tool to Identify Extremists Is Criticized – The New York Times

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Top bureaucrats met to resist partisanship imposed on public service #cdnpoli

2015/11/03 Leave a comment

Encouraging sign that senior levels appear not to have remained in denial mode (the change in government makes this all the more pertinent as the incoming government and the public service need to establish trust):

As a new Liberal government takes the reins this week, Canada’s top bureaucrats are looking for ways to purge partisan politics from the shell-shocked public service.

The highest echelon of the bureaucracy met in the spring, before the election was called, to discuss ways to insulate public servants from intense pressure to be “promiscuously partisan” instead of neutral in carrying out the government’s agenda.

The May 13 meeting of deputy ministers was asked by Canada’s top civil servant to consider how Canada’s Westminster parliamentary system needs to be “re-set and if medium-term planning could provide the opportunity.”

The group was provided with one paper for backgrounding — dating from 2010, by the late scholar Peter Aucoin — describing how partisanship has damaged Westminster systems in Canada, Britain and Australia.

The new reality “is characterized by integration of governance and campaigning, partisan-political staff as a third force in public administration, politicization of appointments to the senior public service, and expectation that public servants should be promiscuously partisan,” says a summary provided for the meeting by the Privy Council Office, the central organ of government .

The group was urged to consider how the damaged system could be fixed “during periods of transition and government formation.”

One proposal called for clarifying the job description of Canada’s top public servant, the clerk of the Privy Council.

‘Confusion and mistrust’

“Without a set of guidelines to clearly determine which of the clerk’s roles should be given primacy in situations where duties may conflict, confusion and mistrust can arise during periods of government formation.”

Meeting documents, some heavily censored, were obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act. They represent a candid acknowledgment by the bureaucracy that partisan politics have radically changed the nature of their work, especially under the Harper government.

A spokesman for Janice Charette, appointed clerk just last year, declined to respond to questions, including what actions were taken arising from the meeting. “We are not able to provide details of meetings of senior executives,” Raymond Rivet said in an email.

The so-called “creeping politicization” of the public service dates as far back as the 1970s, under Liberal governments, but the Harper administration has come under special criticism from some scholars.

Ralph Heintzman, a research professor at the University of Ottawa, has cited the example of a communications directive requiring bureaucrats to refer to the “Harper government” in news releases, rather than the government of Canada.

Other examples include a request last year that departments send retweets promoting a family-tax measure not yet passed by Parliament, including a hashtag with the Conservative slogan #StrongFamilies, and public servants working overtime to create promotional videos about child benefits, spots that prominently featured Pierre Poilievre, the employment minister.

“For anyone who cares about the condition of our federal public service, this is a very depressing story,” Heintzman wrote about the “Strong Families” tweets last April, a month before the deputy ministers’ meeting.

“It seems to confirm the widely reported slide of too many senior public service leaders from their traditional and proper role as non-partisan professionals to a new and improper role as partisan cheerleaders for the current political administration.”

Source: Top bureaucrats met to resist partisanship imposed on public service – Politics – CBC News

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Des Québécois haïssent la religion religieusement | Le Devoir

2015/11/03 2 Comments

Not surprising given the greater intolerance of religious symbols and more negative attitudes towards religion in Quebec in all polling I have seen. But the marked difference in attitude between Christianity and minority religions  stands out:

La Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse possède sur l’intolérance religieuse au Québec un document si inquiétant qu’elle n’a pas osé le rendre public lors de l’examen du projet de loi 59 (sur le discours haineux et sur l’incitation à la violence). Ni non plus pendant l’élection fédérale (où l’affaire du niqab a défrayé la chronique des semaines durant). Qu’avait donc trouvé cette enquête pour que le président de la CDPDJ, Me Jacques Frémont, ait été réticent à en publier alors les résultats ?

Le juriste s’en est expliqué, vendredi, à l’ouverture d’un symposium international de trois jours tenu à l’Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) sur l’islamophobie. L’enquête avait interrogé 1500 personnes de tous âges, hommes et femmes à travers la province, et nées au Québec ou à l’étranger. On ne leur demandait pas si le niqab les dérangeait, a dit Me Frémont, mais le portrait de la situation est très clair. « Au Québec, il y a des gens qui haïssent la religion religieusement. »

Les résultats complets seront diffusés prochainement. Déjà, les extraits rapportés samedi par la Gazette de Montréal sont qualifiés de « troublants » quant à la « tolérance religieuse ». Ainsi, pas moins de 43 % des gens interrogés trouveraient « suspect » quiconque exprime ouvertement sa religion. Et 45 % disaient avoir une perception négative de la religion. Cela nous dérangerait-il d’être servi par une femme portant un hidjab (à ne pas confondre avec un niqab) ? Pour près de la moitié (48,9 %), oui.

Par contre, si 5,5 % se disaient dérangés par le port d’une croix (chrétienne), 25 % l’étaient pour la kippa (juive), et 30,5 % pour le turban (sikh). La CDPDJ n’a pas reçu beaucoup de plaintes à la suite de controverses ou d’incidents lors des débats sur la charte des valeurs au Québec ou de l’affaire du niqab à l’élection du 19 octobre. Chaque année, 1500 plaintes sont portées pour discrimination. Depuis 2013, on en a enregistré seulement 64 en matière de religion, mais 65 % d’entre elles provenaient de musulmans.

Lors du débat sur la charte des valeurs, la Commission s’attendait à un déluge de plaintes, a raconté le président. Mais elle n’en a pas eu. « Les victimes choisissent de ne pas porter plainte, a-t-il dit, et c’est très inquiétant. » Elles préféreraient, croit-il, « se refermer sur elles-mêmes ». (Dans les cas de discours haineux ou d’incitation à la violence, la CDPDJ n’aurait pas à attendre des plaintes pour intervenir, un changement proposé qui soulève une forte opposition parmi les défenseurs de la liberté d’expression.)

Source: Des Québécois haïssent la religion religieusement | Le Devoir

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Lawyer in niqab case says Canada must confront anti-Muslim sentiment

2015/11/02 1 Comment

Good profile of Lorne Waldman, the lawyer for Zunera Ishaq (and a number of other immigration and refugee cases that went against the Conservative government):

For Mr. Waldman, who unexpectedly found himself and his clients at the centre of the election, the e-mail itself was a tipping point: Even though the niqab controversy ended with the victory of Justin Trudeau, who opposed the ban, an undercurrent of anti-Muslim feeling remains, and needs to be confronted.

“I see the seeds of a huge problem that we in Canada have been able to avoid for many years – some of the worst aspects of the anti-immigrant sentiment that’s existed in Europe,” he said in an interview. “And we avoided it for a long time because we had responsible leaders who didn’t try to stir the pot. All we need is another election where someone else chooses to use these types of wedge issues.”

If it was a very good election for the Liberals, it was a strangely eventful one for Mr. Waldman, even by his own busy standards. He represented Zunera Ishaq, a Pakistani immigrant who successfully fought a Conservative ban on wearing a niqab during the citizenship oath. The niqab became a major election issue. He also represented a Canadian-born convicted terrorist facing the loss of his citizenship; the government’s fight against terrorism was another big election issue. And he was a spokesman for a national refugee lawyers’ group on the Syrian refugee crisis – a third key issue – urging that the government speed up the process by emphasizing the reunification of families.

“I’ve never had an experience like this,” said the 63-year-old father of three, who runs an 11-lawyer firm that includes his daughter. “I’ve done lots of high-profile cases but my God …”

The end of the election may have brought him a respite. Getting tough on refugee claimants perceived to be taking advantage of Canada’s laws and social supports was, like crime and terrorism, a major focus for the Conservatives. Last year, Mr. Waldman won a case against the government’s cuts to refugee health care; a Federal Court judge called them “cruel and unusual treatment.” Shortly after the election, the government’s appeal was adjourned. He doesn’t expect the Liberal government to fight the Federal Court ruling.

… Many of his friends, acquaintances and fellow lawyers also opposed his stand on the niqab. Even his sister and mentor, Ontario Family Court Judge Geraldine Waldman, who died of brain cancer on the same day he received the e-mail, disagreed with his stand.

“The last real conversation I had with her about anything political was about the niqab. She was a diehard feminist. She opened the first all-female law practice in Ontario in the seventies with Harriet Sachs, Lynn King and Mary Cornish. She couldn’t get around the niqab.”

Standing up for the niqab surprised even him.

“It was a bit strange, to be honest, to defend the right of a woman to wear the niqab. It’s not one of the things to have high on my list of rights that I would defend. But it had nothing to do with the niqab. It was defending the right of Canadians to express themselves as they saw fit. It was also opposing an abuse of power by the minister who clearly was acting illegally when he issued this policy statement.” (Both the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal pointed to the wording of the Citizenship Act, which says only cabinet can make changes to the citizenship ceremony. Mr. Kenney had simply issued a directive banning the niqab.)

Mr. Waldman comes from a refugee background – two grandparents came to Canada to escape Russian pogroms in the early 1900s. He says he became a refugee lawyer in response to the Jewish experience with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, which he called “my defining thing.”

“We have pictures at home of all my mother’s uncles and aunts. On my mother’s side there were at least 12 or 13 uncles and aunts. They all had kids and the kids were married, and so we’re talking about probably 80 or 90 people – three survived.”

Source: Lawyer in niqab case says Canada must confront anti-Muslim sentiment – The Globe and Mail

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There’s ‘diversity,’ then there’s ‘super-diversity,’ Burnaby style

2015/11/02 Leave a comment

Good in-depth article on diversity in British Columbia:

One of the most authentic ways to measure the intensity of ethnic diversity is to test the chances that two people, chosen at random from a certain area, will be of a different ethnic background.

Which is exactly what Sun data journalist Chad Skelton did: He’s given each part of Metro Vancouver a “diversity index.”

Burnaby prevails. There is a 73 per cent chance two randomly chosen people from Burnaby will be of a different ethnicity.

In Richmond, the chances of two random people being of a different ethnicity goes down to 68 per cent, which is the same diversity index rate for the city of Vancouver.

Sprawling Surrey, with its strong South Asian population, comes in next on Metro Vancouver’s diversity index, at 67 per cent. Coquitlam’s rate is 64 per cent. New Westminster comes in at 55 per cent on the diversity index. North and West Vancouver, Port Moody, Delta and Port Coquitlam all settle in at about 48 per cent.

Even though some people think of Richmond as the most “diverse” city in Canada because its population is 62 per cent foreign-born, its diversity index is not as intense as that of Burnaby because Richmond is dominated by two major ethnic groups, Chinese and whites.

Burnaby is different. It has a wide range of ethnic groups. And they’re spread more evenly, with none dominating.

While Burnaby has a significant number of whites and ethnic Chinese, it also contains solid portions of Filipinos, South Asians (mostly Indians and Pakistanis), South Koreans, West Asians (mostly Iranians), followed by smaller groups of Vietnamese, Malaysians, Africans, Japanese, Latin Americans and Arabs.

The Sun’s diversity index shows Burnaby has two of the five most intensely diverse neighbourhoods in Metro Vancouver.

In the GTA, Mississauga would be the closest equivalent in terms of the greater mix of groups compared to Markham (largely Chinese Canadian) and Brampton (largely Indo-Canadian).

Source: There’s ‘diversity,’ then there’s ‘super-diversity,’ Burnaby style

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Helping immigrant nurses a ‘win-win’ for Canada: Study

2015/11/02 Leave a comment

An example where more effective foreign credential recognition and related bridging programs can help:

As baby boomers age, Canada faces a looming health-care crunch that will be exacerbated by a projected shortage of tens of thousands of nurses.

That makes it more important than ever for Canada to help foreign-trained nurses qualify to practice here, according to a Conference Board of Canada study.

Each dollar invested by Ottawa and provincial governments in helping registered nurses acquire Canadian licences generates $9 in future income tax revenue — a nine-fold return, according to the study — not to mention their contributions to the care of the country’s rapidly aging population.

With seniors outnumbering children for the first time ever, according to new Statistics Canada figures, and a projected shortage of 60,000 nurses by 2022, investing in bridging programs makes immense sense, experts say.

“This is a win-win for Canada and the internationally educated nurses (IEN),” said Michael Bloom, the conference board’s vice-president in charge of industry and business strategy. “The concept of investing in career bridging programs is good and sound. It yields returns.”

According to the study, more than half of immigrants with health professional backgrounds have trouble getting their foreign credentials recognized in Canada, compared to just 40 per cent in other regulated professions.

In 2011, only 54 per cent of foreign-born and educated nurses had a job that matched their education in Ontario, with unemployment rates among foreign-trained registered nurses at 6 per cent and 8.3 per cent among registered practical nurses.

Source: Helping immigrant nurses a ‘win-win’ for Canada: Study | Toronto Star

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Racist violence reveals Sweden’s xenophobic underbelly

2015/11/02 Leave a comment

Not much new in this account, which highlights Sweden’s integration challenges:

For thousands of refugees fleeing to Europe there is only one goal — to get to Sweden, a country known for its acceptance and tolerance of those escaping war and persecution.

But Sweden may not be as welcoming as they had hoped. A recent stabbing at a school in the small industrial city of Trollhattan, which killed a 20-year-old teacher and a 17-year-old student from Somalia, was described by police as an attack against “people with immigrant backgrounds.” There have also been 20 fires at refugee asylum centres.

The Scandinavian country has an underbelly of racism and xenophobia that could make life difficult for newcomers, says Daniel Poohl, managing director of Expo Foundation, an organization designed to shed light on racist ideas and organizations in Sweden.

Known for its civility and social cohesion, Sweden has seen an influx of immigrants, from the Balkans in the 1990s and more recently from Iraq and Afghanistan. But the latest wave of Syrian refugees — 190,000 are expected this year alone — has triggered an “agonizing” debate both politically and culturally, says Marie Demker, a professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg.

One outspoken anti-refugee and anti-immigrant group is the Swedish Democrats — a right-wing party that won 13 per cent of the vote in the September 2014 election. Now the third most powerful party in parliament, it is calling for a referendum on whether Sweden should close its borders to refugees and immigrants.

“Sweden is a country that is divided by the idea of us being a multicultural society,” says Poohl. Those who oppose the acceptance of refugees and immigrants are mobilizing and making their voices heard, he says.

Sweden is “very schizophrenic” when it comes to attitudes about racism and xenophobia, he says. “If you look at the majority of Swedes and their attitudes, Sweden stands out as an open and accepting country and people.” But, he adds, it is also clear people with “another skin colour” do not have the same opportunities.

“We’re very good at opening the first door for people, but very good at closing the next doors.”

According to a recent UN report, the rising level of racist violence and “Afrophobic” hate crimes is triggering “an extensive social problem” in Sweden, where 16 per cent of the population is foreign-born.

“There continues to be a general Swedish self-perception of being a tolerant and humane society, which makes it difficult to accept that there could be structural and institutional racism faced by people of African descent,” the report says.

Source: Racist violence reveals Sweden’s xenophobic underbelly | Toronto Star

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How South Korea’s Growing Multiculturalism Could Complicate Unification

2015/11/02 Leave a comment

Likely some parallels with pre-unification Germany situation:

Recent population numbers show nothing short of a demographic transformation underway. Moon writes, “Currently, more than three out of one hundred residents in Korea hail from foreign countries, a spectacular change from 1990, when less than 50,000 foreigners, comprising 0.1 percent of the nation’s population, lived in Korea.” Projections underscore the transformation currently taking place. “By 2020, [foreigners] are expected to constitute about five percent of the total population and 10 percent by 2030, a level comparable to the proportion of immigrants and multi-ethnic populations in some Europeans societies today.” (emphasis added)

Those not of Korean lineage include migrant workers and marriage migrants. According to numbers cited by Moon, migrant workers total more than 500,000, including about 65,000 undocumented workers, and marriage migrants (predominantly female) number around 300,000.

Ethnic Koreans include mainly Chinese-Koreans (more than 450,000) and to a much lesser extent North Korean defectors (approx. 28,000). While most Chinese-Koreans are migrant workers on a temporary sojourn, North Koreans are granted citizenship upon arrival, as per the constitution, and, save for a handful of extraordinary cases of re-defection, all stay in South Korea for good. In the event of national reunification, which would presumably mean a precipitous increase in the number of South Korean citizens (by about 25 million), there would arise an interesting and challenging “problem.”

In the section on political implications for inter-Korean relations, Moon makes the following observation:

“Any process of peninsular unification must be based on the fact that South Korea is now a multi-ethnic and multi-national society whose democracy must expand and protect equal citizenship and human rights for all New Koreans. Yet such a premise would face opposition from North Koreans, given the decades-long extreme ethnonationalism and xenophobia officially propagated by Pyongyang. It is conceivable that race-based conflicts might poison the inherently complicated contestation over power and resources that any unification process would entail.”

The transformative effects demographic changes are having in South Korea are completely absent in North Korea; transnational laborers and foreign brides are not migrating to North Korea. Further, there is a significant difference with regards to the type of nationalism propagated in each country. Ethnic nationalism is present in both North and South Korea, but seems to be waning significantly in the South.

The volume Multicultural Korea?, edited by John Lie, makes clear that, while the recognition of South Korea as an ethnically heterogeneous society would have been unthinkable a generation ago, there is no denying it now. Both government and civil society have recognized (in discourse and in policy) that the face of Korea has changed. Additionally, the protest energy from the 1980s minjung movement, a counter-state ethnic nationalist movement, seems to have carried over into NGO and activist work in the migrant laborer and migrant bride space, thus effecting new top-down and bottom-up discourses of national inclusiveness.

Source: How South Korea’s Growing Multiculturalism Could Complicate Unification | The Diplomat

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Why the Conservative ethnic outreach strategy fell apart: Cardozo

2015/10/31 Leave a comment

Andrew Cardozo on the reasons the Conservative ethnic outreach strategy failed:

It was that they assumed the ethnic voters were too stupid to hear the Liberal promise and could be easily scared by hot button words.

After years of visiting thousands of parades, temples, gurdwaras and the occasional mosque, and chasing around with foreign leaders like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Filipino President Benign Aquino and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the 416, the 905, the 604—all those “heavily ethnic” ridings went Liberal.  How could they?

The first pillar of the Conservative ethnic policy was in part that they identified the more conservative elements within each of the communities, no matter how large or small, and in doing so not only expanded their base, but deepened the conservativism of the party.  They were able to attract the many traditional-minded Christians from various countries in addition to conservative elements of others from China, India and all the non-Christian religious groups.

The second pillar of the strategy was to play home-country politics.  All governments have done this, but the Conservatives took it to new heights—an extent to which it was becoming distasteful.  There will always be leaders in each community who will bask in the glow of a visiting head of state, but at a different level, members of the community are saying,  “No, Mr. Modi is not my Prime Minister, it’s you damn it.”

So on both these approaches, the Conservatives were smart enough to understand that they were not going to get the whole community but they could get the support of the more conservative segments of each community.  The sad part of it though was that they had no compunction about racing into a community and aggressively addressing issues on which there were divisions.  Unlike any other political party, they inserted their wedge politics that they use in the wider society, and have left those communities divided like never before. For example, you got a handful of demonstrators from the Jewish Defence League outside a fundraiser for a Jewish Liberal candidate in Toronto.

The third pillar of the strategy has been to play communities off each other, by resurrecting divisions from the old countries.  Taking a principled stand is what they said it was about.  They actively reached out to minority Christian communities from the South Indian and Middle East regions—people who left those countries to escape Islamic fundamentalism only to find that fundamentalism growing here, be they homegrown terrorist or the niqab and hijab.

But here is where the Liberals and New Democrats need to look deeply.  Just because the Conservatives were appearing to be overly bombastic, the other parties should not race to the complete opposite position.  There remains a need to counter radicalism within Canada and we do need to work towards gender equality in all communities.  While some women might cover by their own choice, others are certainly forced to.  So finding that balance should not be eschewed just because of the Conservative’s ugly approach.

In the end the Conservative approach was to focus on the conservative minded segments, cater to home-country politics, divide communities and scare them.  They will have earned the more hard-core conservative supporters for life, but by and large the strategy fell apart and even backfired, as they lost the vast majority in these communities to the Liberals’ positive campaign of hope and inclusiveness.

Source: Why the Conservative ethnic outreach strategy fell apart | hilltimes.com

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The [Texas] Border War on Birthright Citizenship | Rolling Stone

2015/10/31 Leave a comment

One of the nastier and meaner policies:

In 2013, an estimated 295,000 children were born in the U.S. who had at least one undocumented immigrant parent, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for eight-percent of all domestic births. And Texas is home to 1.65 million undocumented immigrants, nearly 15 percent of the national total. It is reasonable to assume that tens of thousands of children are born to undocumented immigrants in Texas every year, and that a great many of them now lack birth certificates. “These quasi-citizens, outcasts, will likely experience the harsh effects of being unable to prove their true status for many years to come,” reads the Mexican government’s amicus brief. “We are witnessing the creation of a vulnerable citizenry: undocumented citizens.”

Texas is an outlier in this regard, even among states that refuse to accept matrículas. In Arizona, parents can get a birth certificate for their children with a credible witness to attest to their identity and a notorized signature. In Arkansas, they can present a foreign passport without a U.S. visa. In Virginia, they can use a hospital birth letter. Even Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for harsher immigration restrictions, told the Austin-American Statesman that “the more I think of it, the more I come down against the Texas argument, reluctantly.”

No one supporting the plaintiffs has been able to point to a smoking gun that reveals the state had a pre-meditated anti-immigrant agenda. In 2010, when Arizona enacted its sweeping SB 1070 law targeting undocumented immigrants, the legislature declared “the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.” In other words, by cracking down on undocumented immigrants, the state hoped many would leave and fewer would come. But there has been no such declaration in Texas — the state describes its policy as “facially neutral and non-discriminatory.” Despite the fact that Texas politicians take apparent glee in talking tough on immigration and giving Washington the finger, no email has surfaced between state officials that reads, “Let’s squeeze ’em all out.” Even Harbury admits that — unlike in Arizona — the Texas policy grew in fits and starts. “It’s not like someone flipped a switch,” she says.

Still, the timing seems awfully suspicious. The decision to deny foreign passports that lacked a U.S. visa came on the heels of President Obama’s Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, a 2012 policy that lifted the threat of deportation for as many as 1.7 million undocumented immigrants. The increasing rejection of the matrícula as a valid ID coincided with the Central American immigration “surge” in 2013 and 2014. And what appeared to be a widening crackdown on the matrícula this year followed a Texas-led lawsuit filed last December to block President Obama’s new executive actions on immigration, one of which — the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) — offers immigration deferrals and work authorizations to the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens.

Source: The Border War on Birthright Citizenship | Rolling Stone

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