Working site on citizenship and multiculturalism issues.
2024/07/31 Leave a comment
My podcast with Phil Gurski discussing C-71 and its possible impact on citizenship policy, security and operations
Source: Canada is immigrant friendly, but does it consider the national security angle?
2024/07/30 Leave a comment
Of note and very likely (employment equity excerpt):
…Mr. Poilievre said he wanted to live in a country where people pay lower taxes and are burdened by fewer rules, but also where they “have freedom of speech, where they’re judged on their merits, not their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., where parents have ultimate authority over what their kids learn about sexuality and gender, where we go after criminals not after hunters and sport shooters, where we rebuild our military to have strong standing in the world.”
The Liberal agenda of promoting diversity within the public service – gone. Protections for gender-diverse youth – gone. Efforts to combat discrimination in the criminal justice system – gone.
Pretty much every major element of the Liberal environmental, social and justice agenda – gone….
But there is a reason the Conservatives are so far ahead in the polls. Things don’t feel right. Even the most fervent supporter of open immigration (and I am one) is alarmed by the out-of-control flood of people coming into the country. Inflation and high interest rates have lowered the standard of living for millions of people. The regulatory environment has become far too complex. And the Liberals have failed to persuade most of us that they get all this and are working to fix it….
Source: Pierre Poilievre makes his case for dismantling what the Trudeau government has built
2024/07/30 Leave a comment
Hard to see the government agreeing pending approval as refugees for the primary applicant and the difficulties of removals of those refused:
For many refugee claimants, being granted protection in Canada can take 18 months. It can be much longer to reunite with the spouses and children they left behind.
And these family reunifications are bound to take even longer in the near future with the number of claimants — and accepted cases — surging, while an annual quota limits how many of the “protected persons” and their immediate family members abroad can transition to be permanent residents.
With the federal government freezing the permanent immigration levels this year through 2026, both the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Council for Refugees are demanding a public policy from Ottawa to let the overseas dependants of protected persons come on a temporary resident permit, to ease their prolonged separation.
“So at least you’re waiting in Canada for the finalization of your permanent residence,” said Gauri Sreenivasan, the refugee council’s co-executive director.
“Canada has already said your family is eligible. We just have this really slow process to wait for the paper. So we’re saying, ‘Issue them a temporary resident permit so that they can wait in Canada, surrounded by their parents and the kids can go to school.’”
Asylum seekers on the rise
The annual number of people seeking asylum in Canada has grown significantly since 2021 when international borders fully reopened after the pandemic, from 24,127 to 137,947 in 2023. In the first three months of this year, 46,693 claimants were reported.
With more cases being processed, the number of positive decisions has also grown, from 30,290 in 2021 to 37,222 in 2023. Between January and March this year, the refugee board already granted protection to 11,082 people. There are about 186,000 claims pending in the system.
Yet, the permanent residence quotas allotted each year for protected persons and families are not catching up. In 2021, there were 23,500 permanent resident spots assigned to them, but the number of people granted asylum surpassed that by 6,790. Last year, there were 25,000 spots resulting in a 12,222 shortfall. The queue just keeps growing. (Note: the number of people granted asylum includes the principal applicants and their family members in Canada only.)
According to the Immigration Department’s website, it currently takes 24 months for the principal applicant (the person granted protection status) and 50 months for their overseas dependants to obtain permanent residence in Canada. That’s on top of the average 18 months it takes the refugee board to adjudicate the applicants’ cases.
“You leave your family behind with the hope of being able to get protection and then bring them here,” said Gabriela Ramo, chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration law section. “That’s not an uncommon experience.
“This is about the quota. There’s only so many spots and you’ve got a huge pool.”
The majority of people granted asylum, already vetted during that process, do ultimately become permanent residents, advocates say, and the delay in reuniting with their families creates further hardship and delays their settlement.
“You can’t fully integrate in Canada when you’re worried about your family on the other side of the world and you’re in a state of limbo,” said Ramo. “Everything in your life is suspended.”
‘I was missing them so much’
Former refugee Verene Mukabera knows that feeling well; it took her a total of four years before her husband and daughter joined her in Canada.
The Rwandan woman was seven months pregnant when she arrived alone in 2006. She had to care for her baby on her own for four years while working to support herself and her family abroad.
“I was crying all the time for no reasons. I got irritated and depressed easily,” recalled Mukabera, who needed mental health counselling. “I was missing them so much. Even after I got the protected person status, I couldn’t go see them. Money was an issue and I couldn’t go back.”
Her daughter joined her in Canada when she was nine, four years after Mukabera had left.
“I felt like a stranger to my daughter. That’s the hardest thing,” said the 50-year-old woman, who works as a personal support worker in Gatineau, Que.
Since Mukabera had already been here for several years, she was the breadwinner in the household, and the role change between her and her husband became a source of tension. “Our family relationship suffered. It took us a few years to start over as a family again.”
Pilot project launched
The Immigration Department said all permanent residence applicants must undergo medical and security clearances, and dependants are required to have their immigration history and status examined. Officials have launched a pilot to centralize and streamline the processing of dependants abroad within Canada rather than through visa posts in other countries.
“Timely adjustment of immigration status and family reunification remains one of the objectives of Canada’s asylum system,” said the department, adding that temporary resident permits are already available on a case-by-case basis.
The refugee council’s Sreenivasan said many protected persons are compelled to go before the Federal Court for orders to push immigration officials to fast-track their permanent residence applications, which bring unnecessary legal costs.
Despite the recent public pushback against the surging temporary residents arriving to work and study in Canada, Sreenivasan cautioned that the circumstances of protected persons are totally different.
“They are not like temporary foreign workers or international students, who come and then can return home,” she said. “We should not think of refugees and their families as temporary residents. To me, the whole discussion of refugees is misplaced in that category.”
2024/07/30 Leave a comment
Good long read:
When Rihan Ismail returned to her family’s home in the heartland of her Yazidi community, she was sure she was coming back for good.
She had yearned for that moment throughout long years of captivity.
Islamic State militants had abducted then-adolescent Ismail as they rampaged through Iraq’s Sinjar district, killing and enslaving thousands from the Yazidi religious minority.
As they moved her from Iraq to Syria, she clung to what home meant to her: a childhood filled with laughter, a community so tight knit the neighbor’s house was like your own. After her captors took her to Turkey, she finally managed to get ahold of a phone, contact her family and plan a rescue.
“How could I leave again?” Ismail, 24, told The Associated Press last year, soon after returning to her village, Hardan.
Reality quickly set in.
The house where she lives with her brother, a police officer, and his wife and toddler, is one of the few still standing in the village. A school down the street houses displaced families who have nowhere else to go.
Her father and younger sister are still missing. In a cemetery on the village edge, three of her brothers are buried along with 13 other local men and boys killed by IS and discovered in a mass grave.
Ismail passes it every time she has an errand to a neighboring town.“You feel like you’re dying 1,000 deaths between here and there,” she said.
Deep connections persist for a homeland changed by horrors
A decade after the IS assault, members of the Yazidi community have been trickling back to their homes in Sinjar. But despite their homeland’s deep emotional and religious significance, many see no future there.
There’s no money to rebuild destroyed homes. Infrastructure is still wrecked. Multiple armed groups carve up the area.
And the landscape is haunted by horrific memories. In August 2014, militants stormed through Sinjar, determined to erase the tiny, insular religious group they considered heretics. They killed men and boys, sold women into sex slavery or forced them to convert and marry militants. Those who could, fled.
It has been seven years since IS was defeated in Iraq. But as of April 2024, only 43% of the more than 300,000 people displaced from Sinjar had returned, according to the International Migration Organization.
Some fear that if Yazidis don’t return, the community may lose its identity.
“Sinjar is the Yazidi center of gravity,” said Hadi Babasheikh, the brother and office manager of the late Yazidi spiritual leader who held the position during IS’ atrocities. “Without Sinjar, Yazidism would be like a cancer patient who’s dying.”
This strategically located remote corner of northwest Iraq near the Syrian border has been the Yazidis’ home for centuries. Villages are scattered across a semi-arid plain dotted with sheep, a cement factory and the occasional liquor store.
Rearing up from the flatland are the Sinjar Mountains, a long, narrow range considered sacred by the Yazidis. Legend says Noah’s ark settled on the mountain after the flood. Yazidis fled to the heights to escape IS, as they have done in past bouts of persecution.
In Sinjar town, the district center, soldiers lounge in front of small shops on the main street. A livestock market brings buyers and sellers from neighboring villages and beyond. Here and there, reconstruction crews work among piles of cinder blocks.
But in outlying areas, signs of the destruction — collapsed houses, abandoned fuel stations — remain everywhere. Water networks, health facilities and schools, and even religious shrines have not been rebuilt. Sinjar town’s main Sunni Muslim district remains a stretch of rubble; the occupants have not returned, facing hostility from their former Yazidi neighbors who view them as IS collaborators.
The central government in Baghdad and authorities in the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region have been wrestling over Sinjar, where each backed a rival local government for years.
That dispute is now playing out in a debate over the displacement camps in the Kurdish region housing many of those who fled Sinjar.
Camp closures loom, leaving Yazidis torn on whether to stay or go
Earlier this year, Baghdad ordered the camps to be closed by July 30 and offered payments of 4 million dinars (about $3,000) to occupants who leave.
Karim al-Nouri, deputy minister for the displaced, said this month that difficulties in returning to Sinjar “have been overcome” and that getting the displaced back is “an official, humanitarian and moral imperative.”
But Kurdish authorities say they won’t evict the camp residents.
Sinjar “is not suitable for human habitation,” said Khairi Bozani, an advisor to the Kurdish regional president, Nechirvan Barzani.
“The government is supposed to move people from a bad place to a good place and not vice versa.”
Khudeida Murad Ismail refuses to leave the camp in Dohuk, where he runs a makeshift store selling eggs, instant noodles, pacifiers and hair henna. Leaving would mean losing his livelihood, and the payout wouldn’t cover rebuilding his house, he said.
If the camps shut down, he said he would remain in the area, rent a home and look for other work.
He acknowledged that if many Yazidis stay away from Sinjar, other groups will likely populate their areas. That saddens him, he said, “but there’s nothing I can do.”
But the camp closure order and relocation payments have prompted an increase in returns.
On June 24, Barakat Khalil’s family of nine joined a convoy of trucks piled with mattresses, blankets and household goods, leaving the town in Dohuk that had been their home for nearly a decade.
They now live in a small, rented house in Sinjar town. They fixed its broken doors and windows and are gradually furnishing it, even planting geraniums.
Their old home, in a nearby village, is destroyed. A humanitarian organization removed the rubble, leaving nothing but the foundation, but couldn’t help them rebuild. Khalil had spent seven years building the house, gradually saving money from his work in construction.
“We stayed in it for two months and then they (IS militants) came and blew it up,” he said.
Now, “it’s a totally new life — we don’t know anybody here,” said Khalil’s 25-year-old daughter, Haifa Barakat. She’s the only family member who is working, in the pharmacy of the local hospital.
Although life in Sinjar is tolerable for now, she worries about security.
Tensions among various militias in Sinjar raise safety concerns
Different parts of the territory are patrolled by the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga forces, along with various militias that came to fight IS and never left.
Prominent among those is the Sinjar Resistance Units, or YBS, a Yazidi militia that is part of the primarily Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces.
Turkey regularly launches airstrikes against its members because it is aligned with the Kurdistan Workers Party’ or PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency in Turkey.
At the YBS headquarters near the Syrian border, the group’s then-acting commander, Khalid Rasho Qassim, also known as Abu Shadi, said in an interview last year that his group had fought IS when official forces fled.
“The young people are joining because they saw that we defended them,” he said.
Less than a week later, he was killed by a Turkish airstrike, the same fate his predecessor had met.
The presence of armed groups has also sometimes complicated rebuilding. In 2022, a damaged school in Sinjar was rehabilitated by a Japanese NGO called IVY, hoping to relieve overcrowding in the area’s few functional schools. Instead, Japanese officials complained that a militia took over the renovated facility.
When AP reporters visited the school last September, no classes were in session, but a few young men and women were in the entry hall, where bookshelves were stocked with revolutionary texts. Staff said the school director was not available.
IVY later said it was told that the building had been vacated. But when an AP team returned this month, it found the same young men who had been there before. They asked the journalists to leave.
This month, the Nineveh provincial council finally voted to appoint a single mayor for Sinjar, but disputes have held up his confirmation.
The would-be mayor, school administrator and community activist Saido al-Ahmady, said he hopes to push for the restoration of services so more displaced will return.
“Sinjar has always been the center of Yazidis and we will preserve it that way,” he said.
But many of those who have come back say they are thinking of leaving again.
In the village of Dugure, on a recent evening, children rode bicycles and women in traditional robes chatted at sunset in front of their houses.
“In the end we have to return” to Sinjar said Hadi Shammo, whose family left a camp last month. “This is part of our identity.”
But when prodded, Shammo acknowledged, “If I’d had a chance I would have left Iraq a long time ago.”
Rihan Ismail, who once spent her days dreaming of a return to Sinjar, now wants to get away.
“Even if you went somewhere else, you wouldn’t be able to forget. But at least every time you come or go you wouldn’t have to see your village destroyed like this,” she said.
A photo of her missing father gazed down from the wall. In the corner was a small replica of Lalish, the most holy Yazidi temple, and a snake, a sacred symbol of protection.
“You can’t forget what happened, but you have to find a way to live.”
She has now pinned her hopes on joining her mother and other relatives who have resettled in Canada.
Source: Ten years on, many Yazidis uprooted by Islamic State onslaught struggle to find stable homes
2024/07/30 Leave a comment
From mixed to biracial, as more and more people have blended or composite ethnic and racial origins:
In the wake of Joe Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, a great deal of attention has focused on whether America is ready for a Black female president. Unmentioned is a question of equal complexity: Why is Harris Black? Hear me out.
As she has proudly recounted, the vice president is the product of an interracial, intercultural marriage between a mother who emigrated from India and a father who emigrated from Jamaica. So in terms of her ancestry, she is as much South Asian as she is Black. By widespread convention, however, people refer to her not primarily as a South Asian presidential candidate, nor even a mixed-race candidate, but rather a Black candidate.
It’s not just Harris. Barack Obama, with one Black and one white parent, is called Black. Imagine how strange it would be if someone called him white. Imagine how strange it would be if he called himself white. Harris often mentions the South Asian half of her heritage, but in traditional American discourse, it feels off to categorize her as simply South Asian — like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling — and leave it there. Yet calling her just Black, as a kind of shorthand, feels right. Blackness is treated as blacking out, so to speak, whatever other race is involved. Most people default to this perspective — myself included.
This approach contradicts not just logic, but also itself. In contrast to the centuries-old “one-drop rule” that segregationists have invoked to describe the indelible ancestral stain of so-called Black blood, enlightened people are supposed to believe that race is purely a social construct, with no biological basis. If so, then why does having some Black forebears make you Black, regardless of the rest of the family tree?
People from other countries can find this perplexing. I’ve fielded questions from people from France to Japan about why Obama is considered Black, rather than both Black and white. The question always feels naïve to me at first, but if you imagine stepping outside our particular national framework, it’s the foreigner who is making sense and the American version that is weird.
A teacher from Russia I once had even genially but firmly insisted that I am not Black. Dark-skinned people she knew of, including a few rappers — they were really Black. Not me. My skin tone is brown but not chocolate.
My maternal grandfather was light enough that he could easily have passed for white. My mother was quite light-skinned, too. Yet I have never considered myself anything but Black, nor did my grandfather or my mother. To look at photos of the three of us and see three “Black” people makes perfect sense to me because I have never known anything else.
The conversation with my teacher took place in Russian, a language I spoke with the facility of a 2-year-old. Without access to the nuanced verbal machinery — the buzzwords and dutiful observations — we usually use, I had no way to explain the American way of seeing Blackness as the dominant heritage for any mixed-race people, because it makes no logical sense.
The novel and later musical “Show Boat” dramatized the tragic absurdity of the one-drop idea. The story begins in the Deep South in the 1800s, when laws banned miscegenation and classified people with one-eighth Black ancestry as “octoroons.” At one point a white man married to a woman of mixed race pricks her finger and drinks what comes out, announcing that the drop of Black blood he has inside of him legitimizes their marriage.
Today, those who express different ideas about racial identity often encounter serious resistance. When Tiger Woods, the child of two mixed-race people, announced himself to be “Cablinasian” — as a combination of Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian — he was mocked as not knowing who he is. The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams encountered skepticism when he said he couldn’t see his blond, blue-eyed child as Black.
One objection I hear is that resisting calling yourself Black, or feeling the need to modify your Blackness with some other racial attributes, can give the impression that you are ashamed of who you are.
I do think people make this assumption too quickly, but given how Black people have been denigrated throughout American history, the assumption hardly comes out of nowhere — and I have seen for myself, among people I know, that it is sadly sometimes correct.
Another objection I hear is that however dark-skinned people see themselves, the world will process them as Black. Their complex genealogy will not protect them from the effects of prejudice, discrimination and even possibly police violence. And if so, better that they learn to be realists about it — starting with the racial category they use to identify themselves.
I find this concern genuine but unconvincing. For one thing, should we let other people’s inability to see us plain be the basis of our identity? That would let them win. You can be quite aware of the risk of police violence and yet resist a belief system that says Black blood determines who you are.
And besides, as is so often the case, it’s a matter of degree. My children’s mother is white. One child is about my shade; the other is what used to be called high yellow. In their New York City lives, white kids are the minority. So many of the kids they know are, like them, shades of brown, hybrids of various kinds, that my children have a bit of trouble understanding why I sometimes ask “what” one of their friends “is.” Despite their differences, they all watch “Stranger Things”; the girls, whatever they look like, are all into Sabrina Carpenter.
I know that not all kids live in contexts in which racial distinctions can be so easily shrugged off. But all signs indicate that my children are growing up in a world that’s very different from the one I grew up in. I experienced plenty of passing instances of racism, even as a student at fancy private schools. But it’s been a half century now. Experiences of the kind Harris has recounted, of suburban white kids whose parents told them not to play with her because she was Black, have been alien to my girls so far.
If someday they decide not to define themselves as Black, it will not be because they are ashamed or in some kind of denial. It will be because the world has changed, and we should be thankful for that.
American discourse is, happily, becoming more amenable to the idea that a person who is half Black can be two things rather than just one. It’s been a while now since people started speaking of themselves as biracial, a term that is used with much more pride than its predecessor, “mixed,” used to be. But Kamala Harris will still be commonly described as Black. The talk will be of her having a chance of being the second Black president, when that first one was actually half Black like her.
What is most important is that Harris, Obama and other people of mixed racial heritage can now get as far as they have. As for our habit of processing Blackness as foundational — much as Strom Thurmond did — it will be ever more absurd as the races mix further over the coming generations. On this custom, history will look upon us in puzzlement.
Source: We’re Asking the Wrong Question About Harris and Race
2024/07/30 Leave a comment
Realism. More for political profile than substantive:
The Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions(GANHRI) has decided to conduct a special review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC). A coalition of civil society organizations, including the Black Class Action Secretariat, Canadian Association of Public Employees, and others, requested the review.
As the international body that accredits national human rights institutions, GANHRI will evaluate the CHRC’s level of compliance with the United Nations’ Paris Principles that set minimum standards for national human rights institutions to uphold.
The review may draw attention to issues of racial discrimination at the CHRC and the coalition’s proposed reforms, but GANHRI’s record indicates that it will most likely decide that the CHRC is still complying with the Paris Principles at the highest level.A June 10 press conference by the coalition of organizations publicizing GANHRI’s decision to review the CHRC’s status.
Complaints of racism at the CHRC
Since 2020, the coalition has been raising concerns about racial discrimination in the CHRC’s workplace and how it fulfills its mandate of resolving complaints of discrimination against federally regulated entities.
Initially, the coalition pursued domestic avenues for change. There were union-based grievance processes for several Black and racialized CHRC employees and a comprehensive Senate Committee on Human Rights study. In 2023, both the Treasury Board Secretariat and Senate Committee found racial discrimination was an issue within the CHRC.
In response, the CHRC has been introducing a range of initiatives to address anti-Black racism, sexism and systemic discrimination. The coalition, however, wants the CHRC and Canadian government to pursue more sweeping reforms to the CHRC and its associated legislation. Key reforms would amend equity and non-discrimination legislation, and change the complaint procedure so individuals could directly access a tribunal, rather than go through the commission itself.
To generate international pressure for reforms, the coalition wants GANHRI to review the CHRC’s compliance with the Paris Principles, particularly the requirements for pluralism to reflect society and for promoting and protecting human rights without discrimination. It is hoping GANHRI will reassess the CHRC’s top-level accreditation status.
How reviews of national human rights institutions work
Ironically, and seemingly reflecting its high status, the CHRC prepared GANHRI’s guide to how its accreditation committee works.
GANHRI’s committee gives national human rights institutions grades based on their compliance with the Paris Principles: A for full compliance, and B for partial compliance. The committee also may give them recommendations on how to better adhere to the Paris Principles.
Having A-status allows a national human rights institution to participate in the work of the UN Human Rights Council and other UN mechanisms. A downgrade to B-status indicates compliance issues and revokes those privileges.
The committee normally reviews national human rights institutions every five years and just gave the CHRC A-status after its routine review in 2023.
Beyond this regular review cycle, civil society organizations can submit information to GANHRI if they feel an institution is not complying with the Paris Principles. GANHRI’s committee then decides whether to conduct a special review.
GANHRI’s committee decided to conduct the special review of the CHRC, planned for its next session in Fall 2024, after the coalition highlighted the Treasury Board Secretariat’s and Senate Committee’s recent findings of discrimination within the CHRC.
The impact of reviewing the CHRC
To increase public pressure for action from the CHRC and Canadian government, the coalition has widely publicized its request for, and GANHRI’s decision to conduct, the special review.
In its press conference, the coalition’s spokesperson saidGANHRI’s “landmark” decision puts Canada “among the ranks of nations like Russia, Iraq and Venezuela, who have faced a special review.” The coalition focused on states with weak human rights records to shame the CHRC, but national human rights institutions in states with stronger human rights records, like the United Kingdom, have also undergone special reviews.
The coalition also strongly emphasized how GANHRI could downgrade the CHRC’s status from A to B and, by extension, revoke key privileges. However, those familiar with GANHRI’s past practice will expect that it will maintain the CHRC’s top-level status.
The vast majority of GANHRI’s members (90 out of 118) have A-status. Also, with the example of the UK’s national human rights institution, two special reviews did not produce any downgrade in status.
The CHRC’s response to GANHRI’s committee could detail how it has undertaken various initiatives on the issues of concern. While those initiatives might be inadequate for the coalition, they will probably be adequate for the GANHRI committee to maintain the CHRC’s A-status.
Therefore, the coalition’s threats of a downgrade in status for the CHRC are unlikely to materialize. Still, the committee’s review may produce recommendations for improvements, which could more subtly assist the coalition’s advocacy.
Overall, the coalition’s turn to the international level has served its domestic agenda by drawing attention to issues of racial discrimination within the CHRC and the coalition’s desired reforms. However, GANHRI’s review will generate minimal international pressure for reforms if it maintains the CHRC’s top-level status as a national human rights institution, so the coalition will need to once again alter its advocacy strategy.
2024/07/29 Leave a comment
Follow-up to the earlier articles:
Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, recently reached a settlement in a religious discrimination case with former adjunct faculty member Erika López Prater. She was dismissed in 2022 for showing two historical Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammad in her global survey of art history class, which some students described as disrespectful and Islamophobic.
While many Muslims today believe it is inappropriate to depict Muhammad, it was not always so in the past. Moreover, debates about this subject within the Muslim community are ongoing. Within the academic world, this material is taught in a neutral and analytical way to help students – including those who embrace the Islamic faith – assess and understand historical evidence.
As an expert on Islamic representations of the Prophet Muhammad, I consider the recent labeling of such paintings as “hate speech” and “blasphemy” not only inaccurate but inflammatory. Such condemnations can pose a threat to individuals and works of art.
The Prophet Muhammad has been represented in Islamic paintings since the 13th century. Islamic art historians such as my colleagues and me, both Muslim and non-Muslim, study and teach these images regularly. They form part of the standard survey of Islamic art, which includes calligraphy, ornament and architecture.
Comparing prophetic images
The 14th- and 16th-century images López Prater selected depict Muhammad receiving the beginning of Quranic revelations from God through the angel Gabriel. In Islamic thought, it is at that moment that Muhammad became a divinely appointed prophet.
The 14th-century painting is part of a royal manuscript, the “Compendium of Chronicles,” written by Rashid al-Din. It is one of the earliest illustrated histories of the world. The manuscript includes numerous paintings, including a cycle of images depicting several key moments in the Prophet Muhammad’s life.
The one that was discussed in López Prater’s class appears in a section on the beginnings of Quranic revelation and Muhammad’s apostleship. The painting depicts the prophet with his facial features visible as the angel Gabriel approaches him to convey God’s divine word. The event is shown taking place outdoors in a rocky setting that matches the accompanying text’s description.
The second image, made in Ottoman lands in 1595-96, is part of a six-volume biography of the prophet. Over 800 paintings in this manuscript depict major moments in Muhammad’s life, from his birth to his death.
In that painting, Muhammad is seen raising his hands in prayer while standing on the Mountain of Light, known as Jabal al-Nur, near Mecca. His facial features are no longer visible; instead, they are hidden behind a facial veil.
The Ottoman artist chose to depict the prophet’s purity through the use of white fabrics, and his entire being as touched by the light of God via the large flaming nimbus that encircles his body. Jabal al-Nur is shown, as its name suggests, as a radiant elevation. Above it and beyond the clouds, rows of angels hover in praise.
Key study questions
These two paintings show that Islamic representations of Muhammad are neither static nor uniform. Rather, they evolved over the centuries. During the 14th century, artists depicted the prophet’s facial features, while later artists covered his face with a veil.
Islamic art historians ask their students to compare these two paintings while encouraging them to slow down, look carefully, train their eyes to detect pictorial elements, and infer meaning. They also ask students to consider the textual content and historical context accompanying the paintings.
The key question students are prompted to think about through the juxtaposition of these two Islamic paintings is this: Why did the facial veil and flaming nimbus develop as two key prophetic motifs in Islamic depictions of Muhammad between A.D. 1400 and 1600?
The images help a teacher guide a collective conversation that explores how the prophet was conceptualized in more metaphorical ways – as a veiled beauty and as radiant light – over the course of those two centuries in particular.
This prompts a larger exploration of the diversity of Islamic religious expressions, including those that are more Sufi, or spiritualized, in nature. These paintings therefore capture the richly textured mosaic of Muslim worlds over time.
This historically sensitive, pictorial side-by-side is known as a comparative analysis or “comparandum.” It is a key analytical method in art history, and it was used by López Prater in her classroom. Now more than ever, a rigorous study of such Islamic paintings proves necessary – and indeed vital – at a time of sharp debates over what is, or is not, Islamic.
2024/07/29 Leave a comment
The impacts of the international student cap being felt:
…At Langara College, president Burns said in her message to faculty that while foreign student applications are down 79 per cent for the January term, they are also down nine per cent for the fall term, which begins in just six weeks.
Burns attributed the declines to several factors.
They include Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s promise in January to decrease the number of study visas it hands out by 35 per cent this year compared to last.
The B.C. government has also been making reforms — including instituting a new requirement that no more than 30 per cent of students at public post-secondary schools can be foreign students. There are 217,000 foreign students in the province’s post-secondary institutions.
This year both the federal and B.C. governments are expressing the need to temper the record volume of foreign students because of the impact on runaway housing costs, particularly rents, as well as on infrastructure and social services, such as health care.
On a national level, there are mixed signals about the pace at which foreign students are entering Canada.
Last year the country had about 1.1 million foreign students, a jump of three times from when Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015.
Despite Miller pledging to cap study visa approvals at 360,000 for this year, immigration department data shows it issued more study visas in the first five months of this year than it did in the first five months of last year, which broke records.
According to numbers from the immigration department, Canada has handed out 217,000 international study permits in the first five months of 2024. In the same period in 2023, 200,000 were handed out.
In B.C., however, study visa numbers are slightly reduced. In the first five months of 2024 the immigration department has issued 40,000 visas to those who say they will study in B.C. That’s down from about 45,000 in the same period last year.
In response to Postmedia’s questions, the immigration department said via email: “It is premature to claim the cap isn’t working.”
The ministry noted the cap doesn’t apply to students who apply to extend their studies from within the country, nor to those attending kindergarten-to-Grade 12 programs. It also said it expected visa approvals will go down in the months of August and September.
Andrew Griffith, a former immigration department director who now writes independently about migration, says he believes overall foreign student numbers will begin broadly declining soon.
A crucial government data table, he says, reveals that the volume of people around the world inquiring on the immigration department’s website about getting a Canadian study visa is down 26 per cent this year compared to last.
For instance, there were far fewer inquiries about obtaining a Canadian study visa in June of this year: 68,000 compared to 110,000 in June of 2023….
Source: Vancouver’s Langara College among those bracing for drastic plunge in foreign students
2024/07/29 Leave a comment
Of interest:
In his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has doubled down on bashing migrants crossing the southern border. They are criminals who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he says. The Republican National Convention was full of talk of surging “migrant crime,” even though such a rise does not exist.
The number of Americans who think the immigration level is too high has sharply risen since the last presidential contest in 2020, and as Americans move to the right on the issue, Trump plans to go much further than President Biden’s executive order in June, which closes the border when crossings surge. Trump has said he would build “vast holding facilities” — detention camps — to lock people up as their cases progress; end birthright citizenship, even though the Constitution protects it; and bring back a version of the travel ban from his first term, which barred visitors from several mostly Muslim countries. Another Trump promise, mass deportations, hasn’t been tried since the 1950s; now, polls show majority support for it, including among Latinos.
But there is one anti-immigration proposal on the right that Trump doesn’t talk about publicly. It’s a spin on “self-deportation.” The term — for provoking immigrants to leave of their own volition — has gone out of fashion but the idea continues to lurk. This time, instead of directly pressuring undocumented adults to flee, some immigration opponents are threatening access to school for their children. It’s a nuclear option — requiring the reversal of a Supreme Court ruling that has been a linchpin of educational rights for four decades — that some of Trump’s allies on the right are quietly building support for.
In February, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank that’s become central to mapping out policy objectives for the next Republican administration, recommended requiring public schools to collect data on immigration status when students enroll. Heritage also said schools should charge tuition for children who are undocumented or who have a parent who lacks legal status.
About 600,000 undocumented children live in the country, and another 4.5 million have a parent who is here illegally. To ensure that parents can send their children to school without fear of immigration agents, the Biden administration declared in 2021 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could take no actions of any kind at schools and other locations where young people gather, like universities and day care centers. It’s easy to see why schools are such a sensitive site of immigration enforcement. Barring children from the classroom punishes them for their parents’ decisions and disrupts families’ daily rhythm. Most searingly, perhaps, it undermines the hope of bettering the lives of the next generation — a reason for coming to the United States in the first place.
It has always been difficult to deter people from migrating to the United States, given instability in their home countries and the lure of economic opportunity at American businesses that depend on cheap labor. But there is a grim logic to the strategy of keeping children out of school in the United States — that if you go so far as to take away a right fundamental to the American dream, people will leave.
The Long Shadow of Prop. 187
During the 2012 presidential campaign, the Republican Mitt Romney was roundly mocked for saying that the solution for illegal immigration was to encourage people to “self-deport” rather than for the government to remove them. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, called the idea a “fantasy.” Trump, then the host of “The Apprentice,” called the notion “crazy” and claimed it cost Romney the Latino vote — and the election.
But the concept is an old one, dating back to at least the 19th century. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law to bar the entry of workers based on their nationality. For decades afterward, people in segregated Chinatowns lived in the shadows, shuttering businesses, ducking corrupt immigration officers and hiding from mobs. “From 1890 to 1920, a period of mass migration from all over the world, the Chinese population in the United States declined by more than 40 percent,” the historian Adam Goodman wrote in his journal article “The Long History of Self-Deportation.”
A century later, states introduced policies designed to motivate immigrants to move elsewhere. Proposition 187, a proposal to bar undocumented people from using social services, including public health care and education, went on the ballot in California in 1994. A satirical group, Hispanics Against Liberal Take Over, started calling for the self-deportation of all undocumented immigrants in joke ads during the campaign.Within days after Prop. 187 passed, a federal judge found the law unconstitutional and prevented it from going into effect. Nonetheless, researchers saw immediate, measurable impacts. One study showed that undocumented patients in California with tuberculosis were far more likely to delay seeking care. “Life as an undocumented immigrant is so delicate when it comes to interacting with public institutions,” said Tom K. Wong, a political science professor and founding director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego. “The chilling effects are broad.”
The results of Prop. 187 drew the interest of Kris Kobach, then a law professor who pushed for states to play a greater role in immigration enforcement. In 2008, Kobach published an influentialarticle titled “Attrition Through Enforcement” that praised a new Arizona law requiring employers to verify the legal status of workers. He argued that while most “garden-variety illegal aliens” could easily live and work in the United States, they began “self-deporting by the thousands” from Arizona. As a result, Kobach noted, costs dropped for Arizona public schools. He acknowledged that some people were moving to neighboring states but claimed that many returned to Mexico.
In 2011, Kobach became Kansas’ secretary of state. Because of his legal expertise, he was tapped to help write an Alabama bill with the harshest set of immigration restrictions in the country at the time. The law included a mandate that schools collect data on citizenship and immigration status when students enroll, as Heritage now proposes. The Monday after the Alabama bill passed, school officials reported, thousands of students didn’t attend school. Absentee rates remained high. Families fled the state. “It was like a disease,” the owner of a grocery store in Albertville toldNBC News. “Everyone was panicking and leaving.”
Kobach celebrated. “It’s self-deportation at no cost to the taxpayer,” he said.
Though other parts of Alabama’s law were enforced for a time, after only a few weeks, a federal appeals court blocked the provision that required schools to ask about students’ immigration status. This ruling rested on a Supreme Court decision from 1982, Plyler v. Doe, a high-water mark for judicial protection of civil rights. Plyler isn’t nearly as famous as Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that called for the desegregation of public schools. But in the current political landscape, Plyler is both increasingly significant and increasingly vulnerable.The case began in 1977, when Tyler Independent School District in Texas expelled dozens of undocumented children after the state cut funding for those students. Alfredo Lopez, who was 10 at the time, was one of the students sent home. His family joined four others who sued the state. They went to their first court hearing with their car packed, ready to flee if immigration agents forced them to do so.
But the families won in the lower courts. Texas appealed to the Supreme Court. At oral arguments, the state’s lawyer argued that by blocking funds for their education, Texas “prevents a substantial number of these children from coming in,” which would in turn save the state more money. In other words, the state could refuse to pay for school to create the conditions for self-deportation.
In a 5-to-4 decision, the court rejected Texas’ appeal based on the promise of equal protection in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. “Directing the onus of a parent’s misconduct against his children does not comport with fundamental conceptions of justice,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority. “Education has a fundamental role in maintaining the fabric of our society.”
‘The Times Are Different’
Today, there’s a clear path for challenging the precedents of a previous, more liberal era of the Supreme Court. Heritage spelled it out in February: If a state were to require schools to collect data on students’ immigration status or to charge tuition to immigrant families, “such legislation would draw a lawsuit from the left, which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision,” the Heritage document said.
The same tactic led to the end of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority could follow the script in Chief Justice Warren Burger’s dissent in Plyler in 1982: “Were it our business to set the nation’s social policy, I would agree without hesitation that it is senseless for an enlightened society to deprive any children — including illegal aliens — of an elementary education,” Chief Justice Burger wrote. “However, the Constitution does not constitute us as ‘Platonic guardians,’ nor does it vest in this court the authority to strike down laws because they do not meet our standards of desirable social policy, ‘wisdom’ or ‘common sense.’”
If the Supreme Court were to overturn Plyler and allow states to revoke access to public school for undocumented children, it would fall to legislatures to enact such policies. Many states have constitutions or laws that grant a right to public education, and some would not block children from going to school simply because it is cruel. That makes it far more likely that immigrants would move to one of those states rather than leave the country altogether. But that may be sufficient for some politicians.
When he ran for re-election two years ago, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, talked about mounting a challenge to Plyler v. Doe. “I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again, because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different,” he said on a conservative radio program, according to The Austin American-Statesman. A bill along those lines died in the Texas Legislature in 2023. But a proposal to end paying for the enrollment of undocumented children in public schools, posed to voters on the ballot for the Republican primary in Texas in March, had more than 87 percent support.
Heritage is trying to build support for its proposals by focusing on the cost of educating immigrant children. The organization says that enrolling the minors who crossed the border without authorization in 2023 would cost $2 billion a year. (Some of those minors work, despite child labor laws, and may not attend school.) Repeating that number at a House subcommittee hearing in June, Representative Aaron Bean, Republican of Florida, said that educating undocumented children was “wreaking havoc on our school systems across America.”
If such attacks succeed in a second Trump term, it will be a measure of how the political climate has shifted. In 2017, Stephen Miller, a hard-right immigration opponent and Trump adviser, pushed for the Education Department to issue a guidance memo telling states that in spite of Plyler, they could block immigrant children from attending public school, according to Bloomberg News.
Betsy DeVos, then the secretary of education, “would never consider” issuing such a memo, a spokesperson for the department said at the time. So Miller’s plan died. But DeVos, who resigned citing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, has little chance of serving in a second Trump term. Miller, however, is poised to play a prominent role. Last fall, the Trump campaign referred reporters’ questions about Trump’s second-term immigration agenda to Miller. He promised a “blitz” of restrictions that he expected to be challenged in court — the route to challenging Plyler.
Will the argument for self-deportation have more success in 2024 than it did when Mitt Romney suggested it? Alabama wound up watering down its 2011 restrictions in part because of an outcry from businesses about the loss of workers. Crops rotted in the field. Investment in the state stalled. Depriving children of education would unleash real effects, on them and their families, and over time perhaps on economic prosperity. It’s the kind of policy that all but the harshest immigration opponents might come to regret.
2024/07/29 Leave a comment
Of note:
Dans les années 1960, Dieu en a mangé toute une au Québec. Les hippies et leur révolution contre-culturelle basée sur une réinvention du concept de la Sainte Trinité autour des figures du sexe, de la drogue et du rock’n’roll ne furent pas les seuls responsables de ces bouleversements annoncés par la prophétie de Refus global.
Dans le tome V d’Histoire populaire du Québec, l’historien Jacques Lacoursière décrit avec acuité le contraste entre l’omniprésence de l’Église et son inexorable déclin. L’Église qui « semble partout est en fait nulle part », écrit-il en citant le professeur de l’Université de Montréal et membre du clergé Jacques Grand’Maison.
Le concile Vatican II ne ralentira pas la sécularisation du Québec. Pendant que les curés débattaient encore en 1970 afin de permettre la messe dominicale le samedi soir — ô révolution ! —, la société laïque attaquait par les voies législative et judiciaire l’édifice croulant du contrôle social par soutanes interposées.
Au diable les prescriptions sur le divorce, sur l’union libre, sur la contraception ou sur l’avortement ! Elles voleront toutes en éclats au cours des deux décennies suivantes. Le recul nous permet de constater que les premières lueurs de la laïcité furent indissociables des combats féministes pour se libérer d’un carcan social qui régentait la vie des femmes, de l’habillement jusqu’à la procréation.
Bien sûr, des intellectuels catholiques participèrent aux premières initiatives visant à rattacher Dieu à la modernité, sans parvenir à freiner un mouvement qui fera passer le religieux de la sphère publique à la vie privée. La transformation fut plus longue et moins radicale qu’il ne le semble à première vue. En effet, il faudra quand même attendre jusqu’en 2005 pour achever le projet de déconfessionnalisation des écoles et jusqu’en 2008 pour voir la création du cours Éthique et culture religieuse.
Dans Genèse de la société québécoise, paru en 1993, le sociologue Fernand Dumont constate, dans un bilan du siècle, l’érosion définitive de l’Église comme « organisme politique et instance de régulation des moeurs ». C’est l’un des plus merveilleux accomplissements de la marche permanente vers la laïcité. Ce n’est pas tant un legs de la Révolution tranquille qu’un long parcours d’affranchissement face aux dogmes et aux gardiens de la parole sacrée, qui ne cesseront jamais d’aspirer à la « revanche de Dieu », pour paraphraser le sublime essai de Gilles Kepel.
Pour en revenir à Dumont, celui-ci soulignait aussi dans son essai « le flottement de la culture collective » qui accompagne la laïcité. Dans une nation en constante recherche de ses repères, c’est sans doute la raison pour laquelle l’attachement nostalgique au catholicisme et à ses rituels (baptême, mariage) a persisté bien au-delà de la Révolution tranquille. Il en est de même pour l’adhésion à une « catho-laïcité », qui s’est plu à casser du sucre sur le dos des femmes voilées tout en se portant à la défense de la symbolique du crucifix à l’Assemblée nationale. Dieu merci, ce dernier a été remisé lors de la dernière offensive législative du gouvernement Legault.
Aujourd’hui, les Québécois se déclarent parmi les moins croyants et les moins pratiquants de tout le Canada, mais la ferveur religieuse suit également une tendance baissière dans les autres provinces. La ligne de fracture s’observe plutôt entre l’appui à la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État au Québec et sa diabolisation ailleurs au Canada.
Dans La laïcité du Québec au miroir de sa religiosité, les codirecteurs de l’ouvrage collectif, Jean-François Laniel et Jean-Philippe Perreault, soulignent les défis de penser le fait religieux au Québec alors qu’il semble en voie de glisser vers le statut de « corps étranger ou anachronique, en marge de la culture et de la société ». « La laïcité, dans sa volonté de neutraliser la religion, n’est pas neutre », formulent-ils.
C’est une autre façon d’envisager la Loi sur la laïcité. Celle-ci avait son utilité pour parachever l’oeuvre du rapport Bouchard-Taylor sur la crise des accommodements raisonnables, même si elle embrasse trop large en incluant le personnel enseignant. Avouons-le franchement, cette loi a autant à voir avec la marche vers la sécularisation que l’affirmation identitaire d’un groupe majoritaire entretenant une relation historique d’amour-haine avec le catholicisme. Un groupe qui projette désormais cette relation sur d’autres confessions qui n’avancent pas au même pas dans leur rapport évolutif au fait religieux.
Par l’un de ces paradoxes dont le Québec ne détient pas le monopole parmi les sociétés modernes, nous avons tué Dieu, mais nous ne sommes pas venus à bout de l’irrépressible besoin de croire, comme en atteste la montée en force de la spiritualité à base de tarots, de sorcellerie, de chakras ou de roches magiques. Nous aurions tort de penser que nous pourrons légiférer les croyances jusqu’à leur extinction, surtout pas dans une ère numérique où s’effacent les distinctions entre le public et le privé.
Click image for book purchase
Multicultural Meanderings 
