Saudi Arabia presses Florida man to give up US citizenship over critical tweets, family says

2025/01/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

Saudi Arabia has forced a Florida retiree to try to renounce his American citizenship after jailing him over social media posts critical of the kingdom’s crown prince, according to the man’s son.

The retiree, 74-year-old Saad Almadi, is one of at least four dual Saudi-American nationals who accuse Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s government of pressuring them to give up their U.S. citizenship, a U.S.-based Middle East human rights group said.

The alleged tactic by a key strategic partner of the U.S., which has not been previously reported, tracks with similar efforts to silence even mild criticism, including the threat of imprisonment and exit bans like the one that has kept Almadi from returning to the U.S. after being released from more than a year in a Saudi prison.

“There are Saudi princes that come to the U.S. for routine medical checkups, so why can’t an American citizen return home for his health?” Ibrahim Almadi said of his father.

“It’s all because we don’t want to upset our ally’s feelings,” he said in an interview from Washington. “If this were Russia, Iran or North Korea, he would’ve been declared wrongfully detained months ago.”

The Saudi Embassy in Washington acknowledged receiving a request for comment on the allegations but did not otherwise respond. The Saudi government doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. It regularly rejects criticism of its actions, saying they are part of a multiyear crackdown on corruption, terrorism and other security threats.

The plight of the elder Almadi and others could complicate U.S. efforts to turn the page on tensions arising from the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi….

Source: Saudi Arabia presses Florida man to give up US citizenship over critical tweets, family says


















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Beijing is harassing diasporas in Canada – and victims need better protection

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

Not new but better documentated:

…But for many diaspora communities in Canada, threats from Beijing are not new. Canadians of Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Tibetan and Uyghur heritage have long raised alarms about foreign interference – and our responses should take their needs into account.

To better understand the experiences of diaspora communities targeted by the Chinese government, Digital Public Square, in collaboration with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy’s China Governance Lab and Abacus Data, fielded a national survey last June. In particular, we wanted to better understand the scale of transnational repression targeting these communities. Transnational repression is when governments reach across borders to silence diasporas and exiles, including through threats, abductions and – at the most extreme level – assassinations.

The survey found that 14 per cent of people in Canada who identify as having Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Tibetan or Uyghur heritage – one in seven – have experienced threats from a foreign government or know someone who has. Respondents who personally experienced such threats cited online harassment, physical threats, threatening phone calls and harassment of family members as the most common forms.

Understandably, those who have experienced transnational repression feel less safe in Canada. Seventy-nine per cent of respondents agreed that “Canada is a safe and secure place for people like me,” but only 43 per cent of those who personally experienced threats agreed. This suggests that victims are not getting the support they need.

Investigating and raising awareness about the problem are necessary first steps but are not sufficient to make affected communities feel more secure. Our survey found that 68 per cent of ethnically Chinese respondents were worried that reports on foreign interference would lead to more anti-Asian racism. Without measures offering tangible support to affected communities, raising the alarm of Chinese government interference risks heightening feelings of insecurity among those at the greatest risk….

Alexander Chipman Koty is a project lead at Digital Public Square.

Source: Beijing is harassing diasporas in Canada – and victims need better protection

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Thousands of caregivers’ status at risk as immigration programs stall 

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

Another example of poor management:

Thousands of caregivers from overseas may need to leave the country or risk staying here illegally as Ottawa delays the rollout of a new pathway to permanent residency for nannies and home support workers.

Since 2019, the Home Child Care Provider and the Home Support Worker pilot programs have brought caregivers and support workers to Canada from overseas on temporary work permits, allowing them the ability to apply for permanent residency.

But those programs ended in June, when the federal government announced it would introduce new pilot programs that have yet to be launched.

In a statement to The Globe and Mail, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the department needed time to reduce the number of existing permanent residence applications through the old pilot programs before launching the new ones. The statement from early December also said that full eligibility criteria and details on how to apply for the programs will be available in the “coming months.”…

Source: Thousands of caregivers’ status at risk as immigration programs stall 


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NP View: Canada’s welfare state crumbles under the strain of irresponsible immigration

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

Forgets that Canada was able to manage relatively high levels of immigration until the Liberals were seduced by Barton, the Century Initiative and others, along with provincial government, business and education pressures for more….:

…In Canada, 2024 may eventually be remembered as the year of Milton Friedman’s revenge. Late in his life, the American sage of free markets said on a couple of different occasions that immigration was good, and the mass immigration to the New World of the early 20th century was especially good, but that radically open borders are incompatible with large contemporary welfare states. This may strike many as an uncontroversial claim, but Friedman has never been totally forgiven by radical open-borders libertarians who otherwise venerate him.

As a result, it is rather hard to find any discussion of the Friedman dilemma that isn’t sharply critical. Bryan Caplan, a great admirer of Friedman and an important libertarian economist, for example, attributes Friedman’s warnings to senile “paranoia” and bad math.

We Canadians have all lived through a year in which the carrying capacity of a model welfare state was tested to its political limit, and beyond, by poorly controlled immigration. For a half-century, very high immigration levels, levels without much parallel anywhere else in the world, were a distinguishing core part of the Canadian political philosophy. We thought of ourselves as filling in a vast empty map and pursuing diversity as an end in itself, while being administratively careful to choose the most promising immigrants.

This has all transformed very suddenly, and is a major factor in the crisis now devouring the Liberal Party of Canada. In 2024, the public began to hear warnings from labour and bank economists that governments had lost control of fundamental immigration parameters, and the state lost the ability even to count resident non-citizens accurately in real time. Under pressure from the COVID pandemic, Liberals had opened the door to an unprecedented (even for Canada) flood of low-wage guest workers, asylum seekers and international students who were hypothetically supposed to be self-supporting.

These choices have had obvious first-order effects on semi-official safety-valve parts of our welfare state, like emergency shelters and food banks. They have put crazy pressure on housing construction, which remains constipated by heavy regulation, and have increased demand for health care, which is shielded from ever-suspicious “market forces” and thus cannot react to population growth in the way that shoe stores do.

They have also coincided with a period of stagnant labour productivity, disconcerting urban decay and grotesque reversals in per capita GDP — something that open-border advocates wouldn’t predict, didn’t predict and can’t really explain. We have behaved in the 2020s exactly like a welfare state that was determined to test Friedman’s principle, and we found it to be true.

Of course, if we could put a Friedman clone in charge of our country, or for that matter Bryan Caplan, we would be sure to end up with a more nimble and adaptable economy with less of a necessity for limiting newcomers. Canada is a country that tries to combine plenty of economic nationalism with sky-high immigration. This was always a curious and expensive mixture of ideals. After a decade of a Liberal government proclaiming our “post-national” character, and being openly hostile to cultural nationalism and historical traditions, it is beginning to seem like plain madness.

Source: NP View: Canada’s welfare state crumbles under the strain of irresponsible immigration

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DuVal: Enough With the Land Acknowledgments

2025/01/07 Leave a comment

One USA perspective. Sympathetic as they seem largely performative:

…My colleague Amanda Cobb-Greetham, the founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla., and a citizen of the Chickasaw nation, told me that instead of lengthy discussions about whether and how to write land acknowledgments, institutions should engage in active and meaningful relationships with the Native nations that are now or were on the lands those institutions occupy. Florida State University and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have established such a relationship, which started with the tribe’s involvement in designing the mascot’s regalia but now extends to other partnerships, including creating a Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.

Cities, counties and states could share jurisdiction of some of their lands and projects to tribes and work as partners. The Covid-19 virus hit reservations particularly hard in the early months of the pandemic, but because in the past few decades many tribes took over the management of their public health systems from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, many tribal governments ultimately had better outcomes than neighboring non-Native-majority counties. Tribes already partner with the federal government in areas such as land and resource management, marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and cleaning up Superfund sites. Rather than mourn the past through land acknowledgments, institutions should expand these more practical efforts and work with modern Native nations as true partners.

Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author, most recently, of “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.”

Source: Enough With the Land Acknowledgments

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Stockman: Diversity Can Be the Superpower’s Superpower

2025/01/06 Leave a comment

Good reminder:

…The Biden administration’s decision to draw on talent from different walks of life, rather than the well-connected few, has served America well.

The incoming Trump administration is taking shape, stocked with combatants in the bitter offensive against D.E.I. — championing choices whose main qualifications for running a major government agency or representing America abroad seem to be willingness to lie about an election, Trump family ties and looking good on television.

At least some immigrants, along with Mr. Musk and Mr. Krishnan, will have a place in the federal government under Mr. Trump. Even the person picked to run the civil rights division at the Justice Department, Harmeet Dhillon — who is expected to wage war on wokeness — is a Sikh born in India.

Even MAGA needs immigrants, it seems.

Source: Diversity Can Be the Superpower’s Superpower

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Keller: The MAGA fight over the future of American immigration, and the Canadian connection

2025/01/06 Leave a comment

More on the internal MAGA debates:

…However, as is par for the course with Mr. Trump, his words and his actions tend to work different sides of the street. According to an analysis by The New York Times, his businesses have rarely used the high-wage H1-B program. Instead, over the last 20 years, he has employed more than 1,000 foreign workers through the low-wage H-2 program, which brings temporary workers such as gardeners and housekeepers.

Mr. Trump’s business practices may be the opposite of what most voters want, but his words, and those of Mr. Musk, are closer to what Americans of all stripes say they would prefer.

Democratic and Republican voters are far apart on immigration, except on two crucial questions. A Pew Research Center poll released during the election found that 96 per cent of Trump voters were in favour of “improving security along the country’s borders,” but so were a whopping 80 per cent of Kamala Harris voters. The poll also found that 87 per cent of Harris voters favoured “admitting more high-skilled immigrants” – as did 71 per cent of Trump voters.

The Musk position – less illegal immigration, less immigration by people with high-school educations, but more immigration by the world’s brightest engineers, computer scientists and other skilled workers – is popular with voters. It also makes a lot of economic sense.

Source: The MAGA fight over the future of American immigration, and the Canadian connection


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Kansas once required voters to prove citizenship. That didn’t work out so well

2025/01/06 Leave a comment

Always helpful to consider and learn from earlier attempts:

Republicans made claims about illegal voting by noncitizens a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign messaging and plan to push legislation in the new Congress requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Yet there’s one place with a GOP supermajority where linking voting to citizenship appears to be a nonstarter: Kansas.

That’s because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go there again. Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory.

The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018.

Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rarerisks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator and now says states and the federal government shouldn’t touch it.

“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” said Schwab, a Republican. “It didn’t work out so well.”

Steven Fish, a 45-year-old warehouse worker in eastern Kansas, said he understands the motivation behind the law. In his thinking, the state was like a store owner who fears getting robbed and installs locks. But in 2014, after the birth of his now 11-year-old son inspired him to be “a little more responsible” and follow politics, he didn’t have an acceptable copy of his birth certificate to get registered to vote in Kansas.

“The locks didn’t work,” said Fish, one of nine Kansas residents who sued the state over the law. “You caught a bunch of people who didn’t do anything wrong.”

A small problem, but wide support for a fix

Kansas’ experience appeared to receive little if any attention outside the state as Republicans elsewhere pursued proof-of-citizenship requirements this year.

Arizona enacted a requirement this year, applying it to voting for state and local elections but not for Congress or president. The Republican-led U.S. House passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement in the summer and plans to bring back similar legislation after the GOP won control of the Senate in November.

In Ohio, the Republican secretary of state revised the form that poll workers use for voter eligibility challenges to require those not born in the U.S. to show naturalization papers to cast a regular ballot. A federal judge declined to block the practice days before the election.

Also, sizable majorities of voters in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and the presidential swing states of North Carolina and Wisconsin were inspired to amend their state constitutions’ provisions on voting even though the changes were only symbolic. Provisions that previously declared that all U.S. citizens could vote now say that only U.S. citizens can vote — a meaningless distinction with no practical effect on who is eligible.

To be clear, voters already must attest to being U.S. citizens when they register to vote and noncitizens can face fines, prison and deportation if they lie and are caught.

“There is nothing unconstitutional about ensuring that only American citizens can vote in American elections,” U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, of Texas, the leading sponsor of the congressional proposal, said in an email statement to The Associated Press.

Why the courts rejected the Kansas citizenship rule

After Kansas residents challenged their state’s law, both a federal judge and federal appeals court concluded that it violated a law limiting states to collecting only the minimum information needed to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. That’s an issue Congress could resolve.

The courts ruled that with “scant” evidence of an actual problem, Kansas couldn’t justify a law that kept hundreds of eligible citizens from registering for every noncitizen who was improperly registered. A federal judge concluded that the state’s evidence showed that only 39 noncitizens had registered to vote from 1999 through 2012 — an average of just three a year.

In 2013, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who had built a national reputation advocating tough immigration laws, described the possibility of voting by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally as a serious threat. He was elected attorney general in 2022 and still strongly backs the idea, arguing that federal court rulings in the Kansas case “almost certainly got it wrong.”

Kobach also said a key issue in the legal challenge — people being unable to fix problems with their registrations within a 90-day window — has probably been solved.

Source: Kansas once required voters to prove citizenship. That didn’t work out so well

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Jamie Sarkonak: Immigration needs to work for Canadians, not rule-breakers from abroad

2025/01/06 Leave a comment

Two minds on this decision. On the one hand, the judge was emphasizing the welfare of children, on the other hand, clearly fraudulent refugee case. And will the family be actually deported once the school year is over?

…Ministers have the power to step in and block deportations — I have no problem with that — but the government shouldn’t be obligated to carry out lengthy procedures designed to give those here illegally every shot at staying. In a country with supposedly fixed borders and social supports, it shouldn’t take this much state capacity to remove those who aren’t cleared to be here.

On the criminal front, it’s just as bad. Due to court precedent, Canadian judges are obligated to consider “immigration consequences” when sentencing non-citizen offenders. In some cases, it results in a sentence discount: nightclub gropers and drunken burglars from abroad have received lighter sentences under this rule to give them a greater shot at remaining in Canada.

There are plenty more legitimate refugees, and otherwise law-abiding non-citizen newcomers who are eager to adapt to Canadian life and get on the path to citizenship. Let state resources go to supporting them, and not people who abuse our rules to harm others and extend their already illegal stays.

Canadians deserve a system that works for them, not outsiders. Let that be a change that graces us in 2025.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Immigration needs to work for Canadians, not rule-breakers from abroad

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A Long Fight to Keep a Closer Eye on Madrasas Unravels in Pakistan

2025/01/06 Leave a comment

Not exactly great preparation for the future and progress:

They draw millions of poor Pakistani children with the simple promise of free education, meals and housing. For devout families, they offer Islamic learning rooted in ancient tradition.

But to the Pakistani government and Western counterterrorism officials, the religious seminaries known as madrasas also represent a potential threat. The institutions have long been accused of contributing to violence and radicalization, supplying recruits for the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other militant groups.

Now, Pakistan’s Islamic schools are at the center of an intense political clash — one that jeopardizes years of hard-won progress toward bringing the seminaries under the government’s regulatory umbrella.

The conflict goes back to 2019, when the government enacted a sweeping overhaul requiring madrasas to register with the Ministry of Education. The effort, meant to increase accountability for institutions that have historically operated with minimal state oversight, was strongly backed by Pakistan’s military but faced vehement resistance from Islamist political parties.

In October 2024, the largest of those parties, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, secured a deal with the government to end the registration requirement. Under the agreement, madrasas would be registered as they had been before 2019, under a colonial-era law governing charitable, scientific and educational groups. That law provides little oversight of curriculums, activities or funding.

In exchange, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam agreed to support unrelated constitutional amendments on judicial appointments that had set off a firestorm of controversy.

As the end of the year approached, however, the government had still not implemented the change. It cited concerns that reverting to the older system could undermine counterterrorism efforts, weaken oversight and breach international commitments to combat money laundering and terrorism financing.

The delay triggered threats of anti-government protests in Islamabad, the capital, adding to the government’s challenges amid frequent marches by supporters of Imran Khan, the ousted prime minister.

“We are firm on the agreed madrasa registration terms and will ensure they are upheld,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the chief of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, warned in Parliament last month. “If the government deviates, the decision won’t be made in Parliament, but on the streets.”

Late last week, the government finally approved the new registration provision, allowing madrasas to choose between modern oversight and the colonial-era framework. The move, in effect, discards the 2019 efforts to reform religious schools in favor of short-term political stability.

When Pakistan was created 77 years ago, madrasas numbered in the dozens. They gained prominence and grew significantly in the 1980s, when U.S. and Arab funding transformed them into recruitment hubs for Islamic volunteers to fight Soviet forces in neighboring Afghanistan. Today, there are about 30,000 madrasas in Pakistan…

Source: A Long Fight to Keep a Closer Eye on Madrasas Unravels in Pakistan

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