USA: Citizenship for Sale

2015/05/14 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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Fewer Americans Calling Themselves Christians, Survey Finds

2015/05/13 Leave a comment

Similar to Canadian numbers:

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

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

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The New Progressive Agenda: A Return to Citizenship

2015/05/13 Leave a comment

Toni Morrison on the difference between citizens and taxpayers:

Remember when we used to be called “citizens”? There were levels of citizenship, certainly, but we were citizens nonetheless. “I am an American citizen” was our proud boast. Then, following World War II, the prosperous decades began, and we were called “consumers.” The American consumer wants; the American consumer needs — and consume we did. Items that were once luxuries became necessities, and, unlike our great-grandparents, we were ashamed to have only one pair of shoes or one Sunday dress. Being a consumer is not without pleasure or comfort. Yet now we are identified by a brand-new label, one that floods political speech, pundit themes, and media headlines: “taxpayer.” It seems that that definition is all we are.
The difference between understanding oneself as a citizen and understanding oneself as a taxpayer is not merely wide; it is antagonistic. A citizen thinks primarily about his or her community and is preoccupied with the safety of the neighborhood, the health of the elderly and disabled, the well-being of the young. A taxpayer thinks mostly about himself or herself, about who or what is taxing — that is to say “taking” — his hard-earned money to give to some undeserving body or some other distant, wasteful thing.
The Progressive Agenda seeks to return us to citizenship, the happily adult responsibility of being citizens to each other. It’s concerned with how to ensure a livable wage for all of us; how to improve schools in all our neighborhoods; how to protect working-class jobs and pensions from predators who rely on exploitation and selfish behavior; how to welcome the immigrant, the “huddled masses” we all (except for Native Americans and slaves) once were.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/toni-morrison/the-new-progressive-agenda-a-return-to-citizenship_b_7265416.html

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ATIP: “Effectively they are censoring that part of the past:” Michel Drapeau

2015/05/13 1 Comment

Not acceptable. A Government that has strongly supported the Monument for Victims of Communism, where secrecy was the norm and rewriting the past common practice, is essentially behaving in a similar fashion.

Does their paranoia know no ends?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is setting a dangerous precedent by retroactively exempting all long gun registry data from Canada’s access to information and privacy acts, say some of the country’s foremost experts on access to information.

Michel Drapeau, who quite literally wrote the book on Canada’s access law, said the provision buried in the government’s budget implementation bill is “undemocratic,” “high handed” and marks the first time to his knowledge that a Canadian government has tried to make an exemption to the access laws retroactive.

“I think it’s wrong, it’s very, very wrong,” Drapeau said. “There is a concept in law that laws, normally, that’s 99.999 per cent, never have any retroactive action. The past is the past.”

The precedent the government is setting by making the exemption to the access to information act retroactive could be used to eliminate all trace of other files, Drapeau said.

“There’s no limit – anything they want. I guess they could pass a law on whatever activities that this particular government might have done or may have been involved in. It could be the Libyan mission or the ISIL mission.”

“This information doesn’t belong to this government – it belongs to us people.”

The problem, Drapeau points out, is the purpose of the access to information law is to allow citizens and researchers to search past government documents.

“We shouldn’t go out and purge records because we changed our mind or we don’t believe in what it is. I find that wrong and I find it is like robbing part of our collective and national memory and to what purpose.”

“It’s definitely a bad precedent and an example of excessive government secrecy and it’s a very dangerous step backwards.”

“Effectively what they’ve done is they are censoring that part of the past,” he added.

ATIP: “Effectively they are censoring that part of the past:” Michel Drapeau

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

2015/05/12 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dad rules when sex ed collides with religion: Adams

2015/05/12 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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Nashville sets the U.S. bar for welcoming immigrants

2015/05/12 Leave a comment

Good profile on Nashville’s approach to increased diversity, a welcome antidote to so much of the political rhetoric about immigration in the US:

Nashville brands itself as one of America’s most welcoming cities, but had residents made a different choice during a referendum in 2009, it could have been known as something else.

“It was definitely a turning point,” says Tara Lentz, the program director at Conexión Américas, a non-profit organization that helps Latinos.

The referendum asked: should English be the one and only language of the city government, no translations allowed? Those against the idea said it was anti-immigrant and would tarnish the city’s reputation. They breathed a sigh of relief when a majority voted No.

“Nashville made a decision to become a welcoming city at that point,” said Lentz. “It would be crazy now in 2015 to think about Nashville having that kind of referendum — which is great to be able to say six years later.”

A lot of work was done in the last six years to ensure that immigrants not only feel welcome, but are integrated. People who work in immigrant services give credit to Mayor Karl Dean, who has overseen a host of new initiatives to help new arrivals navigate the school system, government services and community centres that offer English lessons.

In a recent interview in his office, Dean said the referendum was a “moment of clarity” about what direction the city was going to go in, and that Nashvillians chose to embrace diversity rather than reject it.

He said he’s personally put so much effort into integrating immigrants because, “It’s just the right thing to do.”

“I do think that great cities, cities that do well, are going to be diverse cities,” Dean says. “Those are the cities that are going to have the energy, the exchange of ideas, different people working together.”

The mayor acknowledged that not everyone agrees with his approach but he thinks there is a solid consensus that Nashville wants to “make people feel like they belong here.”

So, do they?

“No problems at all, everything was very good, very smooth,” said Kamal Hasan, who came to Nashville in 2000 to join the growing Kurdish community, and now owns a grocery store selling food from around the world.

Nashville sets the U.S. bar for welcoming immigrants – World – CBC News.

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

2015/05/12 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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How afraid should we be of Islamic State? 

2015/05/12 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015/05/11 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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