In Sweden, concern grows over anti-Muslim hate incidents

2024/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note and a reminder that hate is happening to both Jews and Muslims:

On the night of Tuesday, May 28, a car parked in front of the Skövde mosque, which opened in 2023, just outside the town between Gothenburg and Stockholm. The driver threw the corpse of a wild boar against the building, which is in a small wood, before driving off, unaware that the surveillance cameras installed by the Bosnian Islamic Association had filmed the action. “Unfortunately, we’re used to this sort of thing,” said Mirza Babovic, 66, an employee of the association. He reeled off incidents such as Islamophobic tags painted outside the former prayer hall, the remains of a pig dumped on the building site and the windows of a container smashed.

This time, Imam Smajo Sahat, who reported it, decided not to publicize the incident, “so as not to give publicity to its perpetrator, nor to give ideas to others.” He did not want to worry his followers either. But local journalists got wind of it and before long, the national media began to report it, “no doubt because it happened just a few days before the European elections,” said the imam, still dismayed by the violence of the discourse against Islam and Muslims during the campaign.

In November 2023, far-right leader Jimmie Akesson – whose Sweden Democrats party has been allied with the right-wing coalition government since October 2022 – declared that he wanted to destroy mosques, ban the construction of new buildings and wiretap Muslim religious communities in order to combat “Islamism.” His right-hand man, Richard Jomshof, president of the parliamentary legal affairs committee, followed suit, calling for a ban on all symbols of Islam in public spaces, which he likened to “the swastika.”

Shocking remarks

On social media, party officials have constantly denounced the “Islamization of Sweden,” claiming that “Swedes are on the verge of becoming a minority in their own country.” This rhetoric is not new. Back in 2009, a year before his party entered parliament, Akesson asserted that Muslims were “the biggest threat to Sweden.”

Source: In Sweden, concern grows over anti-Muslim hate incidents

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German Authorities Overwhelmed With Citizenship Requests Following Law Changes

2024/07/05 Leave a comment

Not surprising given likely pent up demand:

  • Germany Implemented new Citizenship Law in June 2024, offering an accelerated process of obtaining citizenship.
  • Following the new changes, Germany is experiencing an increase in requests for information for the citizenship process from internationals.
  • In some parts of Germany, all consultation appointments for those wishing to acquire citizenship are already booked up for the following eight months

Source: German Authorities Overwhelmed With Citizenship Requests Following Law Changes

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Finland to Apply Stricter Rules for Acquiring Citizenship From October 1

2024/07/05 Leave a comment

Of note:

  • Finland will apply stricter rules for acquiring citizenship, starting from October 1, 2024.
  • The Parliament of Finland approved a bill to extend the period of residence required for Finnish citizenship from five to eight years.
  • Through the new changes, only periods of residence with a residence permit would be considered when it comes to determining an applicant’s period of residence.

Source: Finland to Apply Stricter Rules for Acquiring Citizenship From October 1

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Babb: School boards shouldn’t rush into adopting anti-Palestinian racism strategies

2024/07/04 Leave a comment

Sensible but unlikely to be followed:

…People will also likely struggle to understand what differentiates anti-Palestinian racism from Islamophobia. For the average person, many forms of racism, including, for instance, antisemitism and Islamophobia, are already difficult to comprehend, let alone address. By adding anti-Palestinian racism into the mix, there is serious potential to further complicate the anti-racism landscape at a time when efforts to combat many forms of racism are struggling to achieve substantive results.

Going forward, senior decision makers – particularly those responsible for educating and protecting our children – need to start having more realistic and difficult discussions before moving toward knee-jerk initiatives that could threaten certain groups of people. Indeed, there are reasons why hundreds of concerned parents, educators and community leaders protested outside the building where the vote took place. They’re worried about the future of their children in Canada’s public-school system, and many are left feeling more vulnerable than they ever have before. One Jewish community leader recently told me that despite all of the things he has seen since Oct. 7, the situation in the schools is what has him the most worried.

If we’re going to focus on anti-Palestinian racism, it needs to be done right, and it needs to be done after all voices are heard and difficult discussions are had.

Source: School boards shouldn’t rush into adopting anti-Palestinian racism strategies

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Canadian Dream? High housing costs has two-in-five recent immigrants saying they may leave their province (or Canada)

2024/07/04 Leave a comment

Another sign that the value proposition for immigrants to Canada is weakening. How many will act on this deception remains unclear:

Canada’s immigration levels have reached record highs in recent years, but as more immigrants seek the Canadian dream from abroad, many who have arrived in recent years have discovered less of a dream and more of a nightmare.

New data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute finds recent trends that have seen Canadians concentrating in Alberta, moving south, or beyond Canada and the U.S., potentially increasing in coming years. Most likely among those to consider further relocation are recent arrivals. Consider that while three-in-10 Canadians (28%) say they’re giving serious consideration to leaving their province of residence due to housing affordability, this number rises to 39 per cent for those who have lived in the country for less than a decade.

Canada’s newcomers tend to be urbanites with skills to quickly engage in the economy, and housing affordability challenges in these urban spaces is perhaps compounding their uncertainty. In Toronto and Vancouver, the long-term risk would be one of losing the workforce required to keep the city cores humming. In Downtown Toronto, 44 per cent say they consider leaving, with 22 per cent saying this is a strong current consideration. Similar numbers also say this in the surrounding 905 area code. In Metro Vancouver, one-in-three (33%) aren’t sure if that region is a long-term home.  

More Key Findings:

  • Two-in-five renters (38%) are considering moving away from their province, compared to 28 per cent of homeowners with a mortgage and 16 per cent of homeowners without one.
  • The most common destination for those who consider relocating is another province in Canada. Nearly half say this (45%) with Alberta the top choice (18%). That said, one-quarter say they would leave for another country beyond the U.S. (27%) and 15 per cent would head south to that latter nation.
  • Alberta is the primary potential beneficiary of emigrants from B.C., with 35 per cent saying they would travel one province east if they were to leave. In Ontario, the largest group say they would move abroad beyond the U.S. (26%), while Alberta ties for second (17%) with Canada’s southern neighbor (17%).

Source: Canadian Dream? High housing costs has two-in-five recent immigrants saying they may leave their province (or Canada)

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Ottawa considering buying hotels to house growing number of asylum seekers

2024/07/04 Leave a comment

Sigh. Recognition of reality or abandoning efforts to reduce the numbers or speed up the claim processes:

Ottawa is considering buying hotels to house the growing number of asylum seekers and to cut the cost of block-booking hotel rooms to accommodate them, Immigration Minister Marc Miller says.

The federal government has in the last few years taken out long leases on hotels to help provinces house thousands of refugee claimants. This year, Ottawa has been footing the bill for approximately 4,000 hotel rooms for 7,300 asylum seekers, many of whom have transferred from provincial shelters and churches, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

In a recent interview, Mr. Miller said the government is looking at a more sustainable and affordable way to house people claiming refugee status, including buying hotels and converting them.

One model being considered could involve installing federal and provincial officials in the converted hotels to provide front-line services to asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be heard, he added.

Despite efforts to “stabilize” the number of asylum claimants, “these numbers aren’t going down drastically anytime soon,” Mr. Miller said….

Source: Ottawa considering buying hotels to house growing number of asylum seekers

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FINLAYSON: Trudeau’s immigration policy supercharging housing demand

2024/07/04 Leave a comment

Yet more commentary on the link between immigration and housing, and the time lags involved in expanding the latter:

According to a recent Statistics Canada report, Canada’s population has just hit the level it was previously expected to reach in 2028. That startling finding underscores the extraordinary growth of the country’s population since the pandemic, driven by record inflows of permanent and “temporary” immigrants.

A rapidly expanding population can bring benefits, notably by stimulating overall economic activity and providing additional workers. But it’s not an alloyed good. The number of Canadian residents is increasing faster than economic output (gross domestic product), which has translated into an unprecedented series of per-person Gross Domestic Product declines over the last several quarters. Productivity is stagnant as newcomers struggle to find their way in the economy and job market. In addition, a significant share of new immigrants don’t seek or obtain employment, dampening immigration’s contribution to the growth of economic output.

Meanwhile, unusually brisk population growth is putting considerable strain on public services and infrastructure, in part because the federal government did essentially nothing to plan or prepare for the dramatic surge in immigration that its own policies sanctioned. The “downstream” challenge of managing the pressures flowing from turbo-charged immigration falls mainly to provinces and municipalities, not far away Ottawa.

All of this has implications for the hottest issue in Canadian politics today — housing affordability and supply. Like the rest of us, newcomers need a place to live. Immigration is the predominant source of incremental housing demand in much of the country, particularly big cities. Demand for housing also comes from the existing Canadian population, as young adults establish separate households, marriages dissolve, and people move to other communities or neighbourhoods for work, education or retirement.

Unfortunately, homebuilding has been running far behind what’s necessary to accommodate immigration, let alone meet the demand from household formation among current residents. In 1972, when the population stood at 22 million, roughly 220,000 new homes were added to the Canadian housing stock. In 2023, with a population of 40 million, housing starts were only a little higher than half a century ago.

This brings us to the Trudeau government’s multi-faceted housing plan, rolled out over the past year and finalized with great fanfare in the 2024 federal budget. The government has pledged to somehow build 3.9 million new homes by 2031 — just seven years from now. This is equivalent to 550,000 housing starts per year. It’s an aspirational target, but also a patently unrealistic one.

The federal government has little control over what happens in the towns, cities and provinces where most of the policy and regulatory decisions affecting homebuilding and community development are made. Moreover, the Canadian construction sector doesn’t have the spare human resources or organizational capacity to quickly double housing starts.

Even today, the construction sector’s “job vacancy rate” is higher than the all-industry average.

The year 2021 marked a record for Canadian housing starts at 270,000. Starts fell over 2022-23, amid higher interest rates.

This year, RBC Economics projects housing starts of 251,000, rising to 273,000 in 2025. To put it mildly, these figures are inconsistent with Ottawa’s ambitious plan to deliver 550,000 new homes per year.

We’ll likely see more and faster homebuilding over the next few years, as governments at all levels direct more money and

political attention to housing. But a doubling of housing starts simply won’t occur within the Trudeau government’s politically manufactured timeline. One thing seems certain — Canada’s housing “crisis” will continue to fester.

Jock Finlayson is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute

Source: FINLAYSON: Trudeau’s immigration policy supercharging housing demand

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France: Citizenship, equality, jus soli: Republican principles cannot be betrayed

2024/07/04 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

You can’t equate a “political adversary and an enemy of the Republic”: This demand was clearly carried out by Albane Branlant, a candidate for Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, who could have stood in the second round of the parliamentary elections but withdrew in favor of the left-wing candidate François Ruffin to help beat the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) in their Somme district. Far from being rhetorical, this demand is an imperative.

In contrast to this resolute and consistent defense of the “republican front” against the far right, the procrastination of leaders of the outgoing governing coalition and, worse still, the blindness of the part of the members of the right-wing Les Républicains who have not allied with the RN, reflect a loss of fundamental political bearings. The situation in France, which in a few days’ time risks being led by the heirs of a long anti-republican political history, calls for a painful but essential review of the hierarchy of priorities. At the top of the hierarchy is the defense of the principles inherited from the French Revolution.

In this respect, the RN’s plans to discriminate against dual nationals, roll back the right to citizenship for people born in France, and create a “national priority” are far less acceptable than any of the other policy platforms submitted to the electorate.

Unconstitutional discrimination

The promise to ban dual-nationals from certain civil servant jobs revives the far right’s long-standing obsession with the “false French,” which, from Charles Maurras’s Action Française monarchist movement to the Vichy regime, fueled hatred of Jews, calling them “unassimilable” and pushing for measures to “denaturalize” them. Today, it targets French people of Muslim culture or religion, accused of being “French on paper” but of dubious allegiance.

Insulting and absurd from an economic, cultural, security and diplomatic point of view, the hunt for dual nationals also amounts to unconstitutional discrimination between French citizens. In the RN’s arsenal, it adds to the astonishing plan to completely abandon jus soli, the right to citizenship for any person born in France, running against the principle of integration by birth through the socialization in France of children of foreigners. This principle has been enshrined in the Constitution or in French law since 1791, and not even Vichy wanted to call it into question. As for the “national priority,” it relies on self-proclaimed “common sense” to attack the constitutional principles of equality and solidarity.

Wind of revolt

What the RN’s first two projects have in common is that they would weaken France’s sovereignty by confining large segments of its population to foreign nationalities. All three measures, by multiplying attacks on the egalitarian and fraternal foundations of our society – in other words, on the republican promise – would provoke anger, resentment and violence. All the while opening up an immediate conflict with the Constitutional Council, whose current president, Laurent Fabius, appointed for nine years by President François Hollande in February 2016, has demonstrated his vigilance on this matter.

If constitutional and historical references appear to carry little weight in the face of the strong wind of revolt represented by the RN’s score in the first round of the elections, political leaders deciding on withdrawals for the second round who ignore or neglect them will bear a heavy responsibility: That of having sold out centuries of republican accomplishments in hazardous electoral bargaining.

Source: Citizenship, equality, jus soli: Republican principles cannot be betrayed

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Adams and Parkin: Canadians don’t need to worry about identity politics

2024/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful reminder:

On Canada Day, there is nothing wrong with focusing on what we have in common. But in doing so, we can celebrate the fact that what brings us (and keeps us) together is a respect for the things that sometimes make us different. That is the paradox, and the beauty, of what we call national unity.

Michael Adams is the founder and president of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. Andrew Parkin is the Institute’s executive director.

Source: Canadians don’t need to worry about identity politics

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Lederman: How attitudes to immigration have evolved in The Globe through the generations

2024/07/03 Leave a comment

Good historical overview, highlighting how the Globe overall reflected public attitudes of the time:

….As The Globe marks its 180th anniversary, questions around immigration continue to populate its pages. Who gets in, who doesn’t. On what criteria. Deafening in its absence for many years: discussion of who was displaced by settlers as Canada formed and evolved. From the Chinese head tax to Roxham Road, a trip through the pages of The Globe offers the real story in black and white. Canada – if it opened its gates at all – has often been inhospitable, even hostile, to newcomers….

Source: How attitudes to immigration have evolved in The Globe through the generations

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