This international student with mental disorders took 9 years to get a degree and was refused a work permit. Here’s why he’s challenging Canada’s rules

2024/07/27 Leave a comment

While I feel for the person and his family, hard to see how he would be likely to contribute economically. Perhaps on H&C grounds. Immigration essentially is about discrimination, who gets in, who does not, and this strikes me as legitimate with respect to the PGWP:

Growing up in Nigeria, Izaka Jefferson Eugene-Akhere was bullied and called “fat kid,” “Michelin man” and “Big Show.”

Even his father and uncles would make fun of him and joked his breasts were so big that he needed a bra. People just thought he was lazy and attributed that to his binge-eating and binge-watching TV; no one recognized his mental disorders.

Eugene-Akhere would hide in his bedroom and skip classes, letting his grades slip, so he wouldn’t stand out any more than he had to due to his size.

In 2012, the then 18-year-old was hoping to start fresh in Canada when his parents enrolled him in Columbia International College, a private school in Hamilton, to continue his education. After finishing one year of high school here, he started his undergraduate study in business at York University, also as an international student.

But his anxiety and depression continued to haunt him. After twice having his studies suspended by York due to his poor attendance and grades, Eugene-Akhere finally graduated in June 2022. He subsequently applied for a postgraduation work permit, which was refused last November.

Despite his reluctance to attract attention, Eugene-Akhere has put himself in the spotlight by challenging the eligibility criteria of the postgraduation work permit. He claims that requiring an applicant to have studied full time discriminates against disabled students and violates their equality rights under the Charter.

To qualify for a postgraduation work permit, an international student must complete a study program from an authorized institution and maintain full-time student status during each semester, except for the final term, or unless they had taken an approved leave by the school of no more than 150 days.

Post-secondary international students with mental health challenges and disabilities are supposed to be accommodated by colleges and universities, which generally allow the students to go part-time to reduce their workload. 

In the past, individual immigration officials would consider the evidence to grant exemptions when assessing postgraduation work permit applications. Sometimes, a student would challenge a refusal in court and win.

However, in 2022, the landscape changed after the Federal Court ruled in two separate cases, those of a graduate from Jamaica who studied at George Brown College and another from India at St. Lawrence College. The court set precedents that immigration officers do not have the discretionary power to modify or waive any of the eligibility requirements for work permits.

“What makes this case different is rather than challenging the officer’s discretion to issue a (postgraduate work permit), we’re challenging the constitutionality of the policy itself,” said Andrew Koltun, co-counsel for Eugene-Akhere with Lou Janssen Dangzalan. They are helping him on a pro bono basis.

“If the policy is ironclad and the policy excludes students with disabilities unintentionally but still in effect, then the policy itself is unconstitutional. No other applicant at Federal Court has challenged the constitutionality of this policy.”

The Immigration Department said it cannot comment on this case because the matter is before the Federal Court.

Born and raised in Lagos, Eugene-Akhere had a middle-class upbringing; both his parents are bankers. His mother and father were barely home and he was cared for by his teenage aunts, a household steward and driver.

“Television and food were my true primary companions during my childhood,” recalled Eugene-Akhere, now 30, who asked not to be photographed for this story as he’s still struggling with mental illnesses related to his appearance.

He started getting ridiculed and bullied about his weight. It got worse after he finished Grade 6 and moved to a boarding school as he drifted further from his busy parents and three younger siblings.

“I felt unloved and that my parents probably thought of me as a failure and did not want to have anything to do with me,” said Eugene-Akhere, whose waist size reached 46 inches. He stands about five-foot-nine.

After spending a year in high school in Hamilton, he enrolled in York University’s business and society undergrad program. He says he would hear people murmuring about his weight and feel like an outcast. Soon, he stopped going to classes and struggled to meet assignment deadlines.

In 2014, York issued a one-year mandatory withdrawal for his poor grades and attendance. He returned a year later but relapsed and was “debarred” in 2017 for two years after his GPA fell below 4.0 out of 9.

In 2019, he reapplied and resumed his studies. He met an academic counsellor and was advised to take a part-time course load. When he finished his degree in 2022, he had had a part-time load in five of his 17 semesters attending the school.

“She would say, ‘You should take your courses little by little so you don’t overwhelm yourself,” said Eugene-Akhere, who didn’t know about the eligibility for the postgraduation work permit at that time.

“There’s always the apprehension for me to be in a crowd. So there was less of that for me.”

A York University spokesperson declined to comment on this case but said the school offers a range of supports and services to international students, including immigration advising through licensed professionals. Accommodations include a modified course load, support with note-taking or peer assistance. 

It may also include a reduced course load while still maintaining full-time enrolment status to avoid negative impacts on the international student’s present and future immigration matters.

Upon his graduation, Eugene-Akhere said York referred him to his lawyers, who helped submit his postgraduation work permit application in September 2022 and recommended he get diagnosed, given the learning difficulties he described to them. 

A psychological assessment by the Bhatia Psychology Group concluded Eugene-Akhere suffered body dysmorphic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and dysthymia or persistent depressive disorder. Dysmorphic disorder is a mental health condition where a person is constantly anxious about flaws in their appearance.

The associated dysregulation, anxious distress, depressive mood and low self-esteem, it said, could contribute to his struggles with procrastination, worries about making a mistake, attending class and speaking in class, making eye contact with professors and peers, and concentration.

Despite the diagnosis, Eugene-Akhere’s postgraduation work permit application was refused in October and he appealed to the Federal Court.

“Mental health is invisible as a disability,” said Dangzalan. “It’s not in your face, so it’s very hard to spot.

“The postgraduation work permit program offers no accommodation. It’s structured in such a way that it only accepts the healthiest students with no conditions that interfere with their ability to study.”

Meanwhile, Eugene-Akhere is out of status in Canada and must rely on the financial support of his parents, who are struggling back home as the Nigerian currency has fallen to record lows amid surging inflation.

“My parents have invested over $200,000 in me, in Canada,” said Eugene-Akhere, who has been exercising in his free time and cut his waist size to 32 inches.

“I feel like I’m being punished because of my disabilities and my mental health issues. I would like to help my mom, my dad and siblings with bills.”

Source: This international student with mental disorders took 9 years to get a degree and was refused a work permit. Here’s why he’s challenging Canada’s rules

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Trudeau minister shoots down ‘false’ claims from Republican senators about Canada’s immigration program for Palestinians

2024/07/27 Leave a comment

Usual political posturing. But any terrorist incident of an immigrant or visitor to Canada in the USA would provoke stronger calls to tighten the border as the 2001 Ressam case showed:

U.S. Republican senators are making “categorically false” claims about Canada’s immigration program for Palestinians fleeing Gaza, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Thursday as he pushed back on claims from the senators that the measure puts American security at risk. 

They urged Mayorkas to take greater precautions at the Canada-U. S. border because of the program, which they allege would allow people with “potential” ties to Hamas — which the U.S. and Canada consider a terrorist group — easier access to the U.S. The senators did not provide any evidence of Gazans coming to Canada under the program and then entering the U.S.

The senators claim those coming into Canada on the temporary resident visa (TRV) program are given a “refugee travel document” which replaces their passport, and can be used to travel outside of Canada and into the U.S., while they wait to apply for Canadian citizenship.

That is “categorically false,” Miller said in a statement to the Star.

Those kind of documents are only provided to people assessed as refugees through a separate program, and people coming through the program for Palestinians receive temporary visas or temporary permits only valid for transit within Canada, he said.

“It is equally false to suggest that applicants are eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship,” Miller said. 

And — if those who come to Canada want to go to the U.S., it’s up to the U.S. whether they are let in, Miller pointed out. 

“Like all temporary residents, extended family members from Gaza would be subject to entry requirements and documentation when entering the United States as per their legislation and policies,” he said.

The detailed statement debunking the senators’ claims also noted that the security screening involved draws on all of Canada’s security partners — including the U.S.

“Security screenings are tailored to the reality of the location from which the applicant seeking entry to Canada is applying, including enhanced screening as warranted,” Miller said.

“Canada will continue to work with local authorities — at every level — to facilitate and advocate for the safe exit of extended family members while ensuring the safety of Canadians.”

To date, 189 people have arrived in Canada under the temporary special measures public policy put in place after the current war between Hamas and Israel began in October.

American worries about border security normally focus on that country’s southern boundary with Mexico and the immigration patterns there, but concerns over the Canada-U. S. line have bubbled up with increasing frequency in recent years. 

So far this year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has “encountered” more than 233 people on their terrorist watchlist at the U.S.-Canada border, saying that’s higher than in previous years. In 2023, according to U.S. data, there were 484 encounters, and in all of 2022, 313.

The numbers are significantly lower at the U.S.-Mexican border.

In the very early moments of this year’s Republican race for the presidential nominee, one candidate suggested there could be the need for a wall between Canada and the U.S., citing those same statistics. 

During Donald Trump’s first term as president, there was acute tension between the White House and Canada over refugee policy. Though Trump once said he wished his country’s immigration system functioned more like Canada’s in terms of process, his broader anti-immigration rhetoric and policy changes — like travel bans from some countries — were seen as factors behind a surge of asylum seekers at the Canada-U.S. border, largely through unofficial border crossings. 

When asked whether there were concerns this could happen again, Miller’s office said they can’t speculate on future policies, nor comment during the campaign. 

Source: Trudeau minister shoots down ‘false’ claims from Republican senators about Canada’s immigration program for Palestinians

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Canada might struggle to rein in surge of temporary residents, Bank of Canada projects

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Sobering. See Ivison’s commentary after this article:

The Bank of Canada is projecting that the federal government could fall short of its goal to shrink temporary residents’ share of Canada’s population over the next three years.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced in March that Ottawa would attempt to reduce their share of the population from 6.2 per cent to five per cent by 2027.

But on Wednesday, the Bank of Canada predicted that the government would miss that target. The bank’s monetary policy report — released as part of its announcement to reduce interest rates — said that non-permanent residents’ (NPRs) share of the population has actually grown since the goal was set in March.

“NPRs represented 6.8% of the population at the beginning of April — much higher than at the time of the March announcement — and the share is expected to continue rising over the near term,” the report said.

“This suggests that it will take longer for planned policies to reduce NPR inflows to achieve the 5% target.”

The central bank report does note that there is “considerable uncertainty” about its projections.

“Details on how most temporary resident permit programs will be adjusted are not expected until later this year,” it says, adding that their scenario “will be revised as further measures are announced and more details on program changes become available.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said in a statement that the department will be including measures to address the influx of temporary residents in Canada in the upcoming immigration levels plan.

“The levels plan is expanding to include both temporary resident arrivals and permanent resident arrivals. It will be tabled in the fall following consultations with provincial and territorial counterparts and others as part of Canada’s annual levels planning,” the statement said.

Targets expected to be ironed out over summer

Miller met with his provincial and territorial counterparts earlier this spring, and the targets are expected to be ironed out over the summer.

The bank’s report comes as the government has been taking measures to temper the massive rise in people who migrate to Canada on a temporary basis to work or study.

Miller had also announced plans to scale back the number of international students by putting a two-year cap on new admissions in January.

Recent data from IRCC shows that there has been an increase in the number of student permits approved this year compared to 2023, which itself was a record year.

The government approved 216,620 student permits in the first five months of 2024, compared to 200,505 permits over the same period in 2023.

But the numbers for the cap on student visas wasn’t finalized until April, and the IRCC numbers may not yet reflect those changes.

Source: Canada might struggle to rein in surge of temporary residents, Bank of Canada projects

John Ivison: Trust the Liberals to fix immigration? The Bank of Canada doesn’t

…It is apparent that the Bank of Canada feels like it has to step in to clean up the federal government’s mess.

In its Monetary Policy Report, the bank said that NPRs will continue to rise in the near term and it will take longer than predicted to reduce inflows to achieve the five-per-cent target.

“Considerable uncertainty continues to surround the future path of net NPR flows,” it said.

If NPRs continue to leave Canada or become permanent residents at the rate observed since 2021, achieving the target would require reducing average annual gross NPR inflows by around 70 to 80 per cent across the temporary foreign worker program, the International Mobility Program and the asylum-seeker program, in addition to imposing a cap on the number of international students.

Mike Moffatt, an economist and senior director at the Smart Prosperity Institute, said the bank is clearly questioning the credibility of the federal commitment to the five-per-cent target.

“I think it’s fair. They’re basically saying the government isn’t going to do what they claim they’ll do. I don’t remember the last time I saw that from them,” he said.

It is a sign of how undisciplined immigration policy has become that the central bank feels it has to step out of its lane to admonish the government.

Source: John Ivison: Trust the Liberals to fix immigration? The Bank of Canada doesn’t

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Staff warned immigration minister about setting ‘significant precedent’ with Ukraine visa program

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Public service doing its job, providing “fearless advice” while loyally implementing questionable policy:

Federal immigration officials warned the government it risked undermining the temporary immigration system with the design of the emergency visa program for war-displaced Ukrainians, newly released court documents show.

Immigration Department staff raised the concern in a memo to Sean Fraser, immigration minister at the time, shortly after the program was announced.

The memos outline the design of the Ukraine visa program, which allowed an unlimited number of Ukrainians and their family members to come to Canada to wait out the war.

The policy also waived the requirement for fleeing Ukrainians to promise to leave when their visa expires, against the advice of department staff.

“Waiving the need for a client to establish temporary intent would set a significant precedent that is not recommended, given that it would undermine a foundational component of the (temporary resident) legal framework,” staff said in the memo to Fraser, which was signed March 14, 2022.

Staff cautioned that waiving the requirement — the foundation of the temporary resident program — would set an “expectation that it could be done for other populations, not only those affected by conflict.”

The documents were disclosed as part of a proposed lawsuit against the federal government by three Afghan Canadians, who allege Canada discriminated against Afghan refugees by treating them differently than it did Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion.

The lawsuit hasn’t yet been certified by the court.

“The government knew that what they were doing was unfair,” said Nicholas Pope, one of the lawyers representing the Afghan Canadians.

“That’s just what we’re arguing in this case. That it’s unfair, it’s discriminatory, and there’s not a good reason why protections shouldn’t be applied to people who aren’t from Europe.”

Warnings over ‘second class’ permanent residents

The lawsuit was filed by Canadians who served as language and culture advisers to the Canadian government and NATO during the war in Afghanistan, but haven’t been allowed to bring family members in Afghanistan to safety.

Canada has approved some 962,600 emergency visas for Ukrainians since the 2022 Russian invasion, which allow people fleeing the conflict to work and study while the war rages.

The program was generally well received in Canada, where people opened their homes to Ukrainians and donated clothes, furniture and other essentials to help them settle during their stay.

Roughly 298,000 actually made the trip to Canada, though it’s unclear how many have stayed and how many have since applied for permanent residency.

The documents also warn the design of the program could disadvantage Ukrainians by effectively creating “second class” permanent residents, without access to settlement supports or equivalent status under the law.

The government has argued the emergency program for Ukrainians can’t be compared to the program for Afghan refugees, because people from Afghanistan are unlikely to be able to return home.

In the memo, though, staff say the key distinction between temporary programs and permanent ones is the requirement that visa holders declare their intention to leave.

The department officials described the Ukraine emergency visa program as “exceptional in nature.”

“It underscores Canada’s unique relationship with Ukraine, the extensive diaspora and family links, as well as the unique nature of the conflict as a significant land invasion adjacent to EU countries with generous immigration measures,” the memo reads.

“However, it risks setting a significant precedent, one which may result in future pressures on the government to take similar action for other emergencies.”

Two full pages of legal considerations outlined by the department were blacked out in the documents provided to the court.

Fraser ultimately agreed with the department’s recommendation not to publish the policy publicly, given the “unprecedented and exceptional nature” of the approach.

Pope seized on that point Tuesday.

“Why would you not publish a policy if you’re proud of it, and you think that it’s fair, and you think that it’s just and you think that it’s Charter compliant?” he asked.

“I think they really understood the problematic nature of this.”

The offices of Fraser, now housing minister, and the current immigration minister, Marc Miller, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The government has emphasized that the Ukrainian program is intended to be temporary, and has encouraged those without family ties to Canada to apply for permanent residency through traditional means if they hope to stay.

Since Fraser announced the visa program, the government has faced accusations of unfairly limiting temporary refuge to people attempting to flee conflicts in Sudan and the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In February, the Canadian Council for Refugees pointed out the disparity between the program for Ukrainians and the temporary refuge programs for Sudanese people.

“The crisis in Sudan is of catastrophic proportions,” the group wrote to Miller earlier this year.

“Given the scale of the crisis, the limit of 3,250 applications in the family-based humanitarian pathway is inadequate to the need. In contrast, Canada admitted an unlimited number of Ukrainians on temporary visas, and the pathway to permanent residence for Ukrainians is similarly without a cap.”

Source: Staff warned immigration minister about setting ‘significant precedent’ with Ukraine visa program

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U.S. Senators sound alarm over Canada’s acceptance of Gaza refugees

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Not totally surprising, given potential security risks:

Canada’s acceptance of Palestinian refugees from Gaza is setting off alarm bells south of the border.

In a letter Wednesday to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, United States Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) expressed concern over the program, which he warned could lead to an increased risk of allowing individuals with ties to terror groups easy access to the United States.

“On May 27, 2024, the Government of Canada announced its intent to increase the number of Gazans who will be allowed into their country under temporary special measures,” Rubio wrote in his letter, which was signed by five other Republican senators.

“We are deeply concerned and request heightened scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should any of them attempt to enter the United States at ports of entry as well as between ports of entry.”

Cosigning the letter were fellow senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mike Braun, Joni Ernst and Josh Hawley.

Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced a five-fold increase in the number of Gazan refugees let into Canada, upping the program’s cap to 5,000 people.

The government’s initial cap on Palestinian refugees was 1,000.

As well, Palestinian refugees will be able to apply for work and study permits without charge….

Source: U.S. Senators sound alarm over Canada’s acceptance of Gaza refugees

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USA: Noncitizens are less likely to participate in a census with citizenship question, study says

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Of note, the main impact being on those ineligible to have a social security number. Non-issue in Canada where the census has for many years included a citizenship question (with increased disaggregation):

Not Adding a citizenship question to the census reduces the participation of people who aren’t U.S. citizens, particularly those from Latin American countries, according to a new research paper that comes as Republicans in Congress are pushing to add such a question to the census form.

Noncitizens who pay taxes but are ineligible to have a Social Security number are less likely to fill out the census questionnaire or more likely to give incomplete answers on the form if there is a citizenship question, potentially exacerbating undercounts of some groups, according to the paper released this summer by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Kansas.

Other groups were less sensitive to the addition of a citizenship question, such as U.S.-born Hispanic residents and noncitizens who weren’t from Latin America, the study said.

The paper comes as Republican lawmakers in Congress push to require a citizenship question on the questionnaire for the once-a-decade census. Their aim is to exclude people who aren’t citizens from the count that helps determine political power and the distribution of federal funds in the United States. The 14th Amendment requires that all people are counted in the census, not just citizens.

In May, the GOP-led House passed a bill that would eliminate noncitizens from the tally gathered during a census and used to decide how many House seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. Separately, the House in coming weeks is to consider an appropriations bill containing similar language seeking to omit people in the country illegally from the count used to redraw political districts.

During debate earlier this month at a House appropriations committee meeting, Democratic U.S. Rep. Grace Meng of New York described the efforts to exclude people in the country illegally as “an extreme proposal” that would detract from the accuracy of the census.

“Pretending that noncitizens don’t live in our communities would only limit the crucial work of the Census Bureau and take resources away from areas that need them the most,” Meng said.

But Republican U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia argued that including people in the country illegally gives state and local governments an incentive to attract noncitizens so that they can have bigger populations and more political power.

“Every noncitizen that is included actually takes away from citizens’ ability to determine who their representatives are,” Clyde said.

The next national head count is in 2030.

Source: Noncitizens are less likely to participate in a census with citizenship question, study says

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Australia: A major multiculturalism review has recommended bold reforms. How far is the government prepared to go?

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Jakabowicz on the review:

A year ago, the government instigated an independent review of the national multicultural framework.

As more than half of Australia’s population is either born overseas or has one parent who was, this policy is important. It underpins how multiculturalism works in almost every part of life. It aims to ensure equity and inclusion for people from minority groups, and attempts to whittle away at structural racism.

Now the review report has been released. This comes against a backdrop of growing antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australia, as well as the fallout from the failed Voice to Parliament referendum and the vicious racism many communities experienced during the COVID crisis.

The report includes 29 recommendations for improving Australia’s multicultural society. The government has committed $100 million over the next four years to implement the recommendations, though it is still working through the details and timeline. Here’s what it found.

Some of the recommendations are symbolic and have appeared in every multicultural review over the past 50 years. But other recommendations are far more concrete.

Firstly, it suggests there be a federal Multicultural Commission (a proposal the Greens have had on the parliamentary agenda without Labor support for some years). This body would be empowered to provide leadership on multicultural issues, hold opponents of human rights to account, and promote close collaboration between stakeholders at all levels.

Secondly, the panel proposes breaking up the Department of Home Affairs. This would be an attempt to reverse the surveillance and punishment approach that many believe the department to have towards migrants, refugees and some ethnic groups.

Instead, it suggests a new-look, nation-building, Cabinet-level Department of Multicultural Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship.

And from a policy perspective, the report recommends:

  • better ways to protect people’s languages
  • a citizenship process that is less about learning cricket scores and more about appreciating diversity and the importance of mutual respect
  • diversifying our media sector so it more effectively reflects and involves our minority communities
  • and ensuring the arts and sports sectors are spaces for intercultural collaboration and cooperation.

Overall, the report shows how marginal multicultural affairs have become in government – these ideas would go a long way toward refocusing the government’s attention where it is needed.

Why was this review needed?

The review was tasked with assessing how effective Australia’s institutions, laws and policy settings are at supporting a multicultural nation, particularly one that’s changing rapidly. This included looking at the challenges of refugee and immigrant settlement and integration, as well as the impact of world events on Australia’s multicultural society.

There’s also an economic element. The review looked at how we can ensure the wide-ranging talents of Australia’s residents are fully harnessed for personal and broader societal benefit.

These questions point to the need to bring together political, economic, cultural and social priorities in our government programs and policies. They also recognise the deeper challenges of racism, social marginalisation and isolation, which are often compounded by other factors, such as age, gender, class, health and disability.

These are not new questions. What is new is the recommendation for a strategy to engage in a sustained and interconnected way with the causes and consequences of our current failures. It is very unusual for a government to ask a review to do this.

The findings also bring together the perspectives and insights that many advocates in this space have long championed, but which have been swept aside and neglected for over two decades.

Importantly, the report stresses that a national commitment to multiculturalism demands bipartisanship.

I made an argument for a research strategy element in the review in 2023, and was later commissioned to develop a paper on research and data for a multicultural Australia.

The panel has now recommended that a national multicultural research agenda be developed by the new Multicultural Commission, taking account of my recommendations.

What will the government do?

There is still a long row to hoe – none of the recommendations have been publicly accepted (nor dismissed) by the government, and as yet no specific resources have been committed (despite the $100 million commitment overall). Significant action, however, is likely over the coming months and in future budgets.

While it is unlikely Home Affairs will be broken up immediately, some major moves to upgrade the capacity of the public service to deliver on the government’s commitments are likely. The courage of the government to advance these priorities in the election will depend in part on public reactions to the report and its implementation, as well as the stance of the Opposition.

Will the panel’s extensive work improve cohesion, enable better community relations, and unleash the social and economic benefits of a more collaborative society? The first test will be in how a proposed Multicultural Commission would be structured, led and resourced. We may not have long to wait.

Source: A major multiculturalism review has recommended bold reforms. How far is the government prepared to go?

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Immigration Minister Marc Miller on international students, asylum seekers and life in the hotseat — plus an admission about one promise

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Good and interesting intv:

It was a day after his constituency office was found vandalized, with windows smashed and pink paint sprayed over, but that didn’t stop Immigration Minister Marc Miller from cracking jokes with the audience at a special citizenship ceremony in Toronto to mark Cirque du Soleil’s 40th anniversary.

“Anyone want to change their mind? You still have time,” Miller said jokingly at Friday’s event. “But I’m pretty sure no one is going to change your mind if I look at the smiles on your faces. This is a beautiful time for you.”

Miller personally welcomed 368 new citizens from 60 countries as they took their oaths of allegiance to Canada under the big tent of one of the world’s most famous circuits. 

Meeting proud immigrants who work hard to become Canadian and seeing the light in their eyes at events like this is a reminder for Miller of the value of Canadian citizenship — and the challenge the country faces today.

On the eve of his anniversary at the helm of the Immigration Department on July 26, the minister sat down with the Star to share the good, the bad and the ugly of this job in the past year, as well as what’s on his to-do list with the next federal election expected 15 months from now, in October 2025.

“Canadians are less tolerant of errors right now or of a system that lacks the rigour and discipline that it needs,” the Liberal minister said. “We’re not immune to social media and what people have seen in Europe, with large flow of irregular migration and the political systems that have leveraged that or weaponized that, and swept in typically right-wing governments.”

Miller said that on top of his mind is the rapid growth of refugee claimants in Canada since 2022, when international travel returned to normal after the pandemic.

The annual number of people who sought protection here was way above the pre-COVID level of 64,030 in 2019, reaching record 91,700 in 2022 and 143,580 in 2023. In the first five months of this year, already 77,725 claimants were reported. Some 186,000 claims are pending in the system.

Although most developed countries are also seeing a rise in asylum seekers as part of the growing global displacement, the minister believes this influx is what has contributed to the public perception that Canada has lost control of its border when they see refugees sleeping on the streets and staying in homeless shelters.

It’s important to bolster the integrity of the visa processing system, he said, given that many of the asylum seekers were temporary residents who came as visitors, students and workers.

“The system itself is undermined when we see flows that are coming in and not for the reasons that they were supposed to in the first place,” said Miller. “There are a number of measures that we are looking to take and will take, and hopefully announce in short order to further bolster that integrity, including in the international student area.”

He was frustrated that proposed reforms to streamline the refugee determination process were carved out from the recent federal budget bill under pressure by advocates. That means it will now take longer to push through those changes to address the refugee board’s unsustainable backlogs.

Two other issues are also on Miller’s priority list: Fixing the foreign worker program to crack down on fraud and passing legislative amendments to help Indigenous people travel seamlessly on their native lands across the Canada-U.S. border.

Miller said he’s working with Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault to make changes to the labour market impact assessment process to ensure only those employers faced with a real labour shortage are entitled to bring in foreign workers.

“LMIA fraud is a big concern,” he said. “You (workers) shouldn’t have to pay for it … These things do get shopped around and that’s not right. Enforcement is one aspect of it, but making sure that we disincentivize that in the first place is key, particularly where we see a constricting labour market.”

Miller was shuffled from his job as minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations to his current post amid rising borrowing rates and an affordability crisis that has seen the cost of housing and living spiralling — and changing public attitudes toward immigration and immigrants.

Earlier this year, he surprised observers by introducing caps to rein in the number of international students and temporary residents as well as measures to restrict access to work permits, despite objections from the post-secondary education sector and employers. While he’s happy with the trending numbers he is seeing so far, he reminds Canadians that it takes time to see the impact.

Miller said it pained him to try to properly explain the affordability challenges faced by all Canadians when making these changes.

“We can’t blame immigrants for absolutely everything relating to affordability,” he said. “At the same time, the pure volume of temporary migration that we’ve seen in the last few years does contribute to the economic argument.

“We can’t have an unbridled backdoor entry system into Canada under the guise of an international student program that has seen exponential increases in its volume. So that does need to come under control.”

That “lack of discipline” of the immigration system is what Miller calls “the bad.” “The ugly” is the scapegoating that’s targeted new immigrants.

Poll after poll has shown Canadians’ support for immigration is declining, and Miller said he understands people’s frustration with an imperfect system. Yet, there are reasons to be hopeful.

“You have perhaps some people with undertones and frustrations, but you don’t have a major party that is running its campaign against immigration,” he pointed out. “I think that is important. At the same time, I don’t think we can discount the fact that there will be parties in the next election” that might do that.

Miller said he will continue to work on improving client experience and digitalizing the department, but is less certain about delivering the promised regularization plan that would grant permanent residence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants toiling in Canada’s underground economy.

At best, he suggested, a smaller-scale plan may be possible for those in the construction and health-care sectors.

“Regularization, as I confess to you quite openly, has been a challenge we recognize, particularly in this political atmosphere, in the sense of where Canadians are,” he explained. “As ambitious as we are, with 15 months to go, we have to be realistic about what we can achieve.”

Miller, 51, has been an MP since 2015, representing a Montreal riding. He said being the immigration minister is a “difficult” job but he enjoys the work challenge, and said he’s planning to run in the next election.

When asked to confirm the rumour that he was not happy to take up the immigration minister’s job, Miller said that wasn’t true but he would have liked to finish “the unfinished job” at Indigenous Relations.

Source: Immigration Minister Marc Miller on international students, asylum seekers and life in the hotseat — plus an admission about one promise

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Austin Harper: The Emerging Bipartisan Wokeness

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Of interest:

…Underlying left-wing wokeness, even at its most performative and excessive, is a series of partial truths about American society: Even if die-hard progressives are wrong and anti-Black racism does not explain every problem in this country, it does explain quite a few of them. And 2020’s summer of reckoning did draw much-needed attention to entrenched and structurally reinforced racial inequalities in the United States, despite the movement quickly getting derailed by “elite capture”—the tendency of radical social movements to get co-opted by corporate and other rarefied interests.

As someone who became a professor in August 2020, at the incandescent height of progressive wokeness, I have watched higher education around the country become ever more outwardly progressive. But the social-justice rhetoric that now suffuses academia has done absolutely nothing to stop the relentless pace of gigification. More and more academics every year are employed as contingent laborers rather than as tenure-track professors. In fact, a good case can be made that wokeness greases the skids for this trend by allowing universities to appear like benevolent actors, hiring greater numbers of women and people of color, even as they pull the rug out from under labor by placing those new hires in adjunct roles.

It’s easy to argue that we should have known better, that the progressive ideas championed by CEOs and elite-university presidents were probably not that progressive after all, but the reckoning of 2020 happened for a reason. The Great Awokening was so galvanizing for so many precisely because it always had one foot in reality. The same can be said of conservative wokeness.

The right’s renewed focus on anti-white racism, its opportunistic seizing of the anti-Semitism debate, and the broader anti-DEI craze it has stirred up are also appealing to the masses precisely because they have some truth in them. For example, although it is not true that white men are unemployable in academia, the subject of a recent high-profile social-media culture-war battle, it is obviously the case that efforts to diversify the faculty at many universities mean that white candidates are viewed less favorably. The rise of racially themed cluster-hire initiatives—which allow universities to gerrymander diverse candidate pools by writing job ads for minority-majority subfields such as “decolonial theory”—are a way for academic institutions to skirt antidiscrimination laws. Likewise, although the right’s attempt to portray university students as hardened pro-Hamas, bike-lock-wielding terrorists is plainly ludicrous, it is just as plain that anti-Semitism within the progressive movement is real, however fringe these elements may be. If the ways the right characterizes these issues are often disingenuous and overexaggerated, they are not wholly fabricated either.

But as with left-wing wokeness, conservative wokeness preys on people moved by these legitimate issues to sell them on a hyperbolized politics. Woke conservatism leverages reasonable concerns about a range of issues—the plight of working-class white men, anti-Semitism, misandry, and the like—only to foment a hysteria that distracts from the fact that its principal champions are also the causes of many of the problems it allegedly seeks to solve. The primary threat to the job prospects of many working-class white men in America is not “reverse racism,” affirmative action, or pesky minorities, but accumulated decades of deindustrialization, market fundamentalism, and anti-union efforts that sent blue-collar jobs overseas and gutted the ones that remained. As for the loud warnings about left-wing anti-Semitism, the sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi has demonstrated that “liberals are consistently the least antisemitic ideological group in the US, and white liberals—the Americans most likely to embrace ‘woke’ ideology—are the least antisemitic people in the country by far.”

Wokeness is now the air we all breathe, a noxious miasma of bad faith, hysteria, and shameless opportunism that is animated by not ultimate principles but ultimate convenience. It has not peaked, and it is not peaking. Wokeness has become the status quo, a bipartisan lingua franca, the ruling style of American politics.

Tyler Austin Harper is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Source: THE EMERGING BIPARTISAN WOKENESS

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Geoff Russ: A future Conservative government must fight the culture war, not stand idly by 

2024/07/25 Leave a comment

Of note and likely reflects some of the thinking among conservatives given some of the excesses of the current government and elsewhere. Would prefer the term “correction” or “rebalancing” to “war:”

…There is much to be undone from the past ten largely unpleasant years. Canada Day fireworks celebrations are no longer hosted by the federally-funded Port of Vancouver, for example. The new lyrics that made “O Canada” gender-neutral are grammatically inaccurate, horrific to listen to and another example of this Liberal government’s love of making headlines without any worthy substance. If restoring the older lyrics is off the table, replacing the lazy “In all of us command” with a lyric befitting the style of the anthem, like “In all thy souls command,” would be a welcome correction.

Making “O Canada” sound nice again or once again funding fireworks celebrations on July 1st that are worthy of the country’s birthday would be great first steps, but we need much more than that. The Conservatives need a year-round, muscular cultural policy that is active, aggressive, and interventionist. This could start with a bold appointment of a Canadian heritage minister who is actually viewed as a senior member of the cabinet.

There will be major pushback from the usual suspects at university faculty lounges and in the opinion pages of newspapers like the Toronto Star, but the Conservatives and their supporters must stand their ground. This is not the 1980s anymore, when wokeness hadn’t yet reared its ugly head. Conservative attitudes toward the role of government and crafting national culture need to change.

If someone constantly strove to focus only on their past mistakes and embarrassments, they would lead a very miserable life, possibly even going insane. That is exactly what Canada has been inflicting on itself for nearly a decade, with the federal government’s full backing.

There are certainly more effective and creative ways to fight the culture war than those suggested here, but fighting back against post-nationalism or the “woke” vandalism of Canada is a task that only a Conservative government can undertake.

Given the current atmosphere of progressive politics, there should be no expectation that the Liberals or NDP will abandon post-nationalism. If the Conservatives will not fight the culture war with a will to win, they may as well just embrace post-nationalism themselves.

Source: Geoff Russ: A future Conservative government must fight the culture war, not stand idly by

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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