Clark: It’s too late for universities and colleges to complain about the foreign student cap

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Indeed. They and others should have seen this coming as it was untenable:

Canada’s universities and colleges sent an open letter to Immigration Minister Marc Miller this week about the cap he has imposed on new foreign students.

The gist was this: Please no, don’t do this yet, wait, hold on, we’re not ready, this is too sudden, can you give us a break?

Mr. Miller’s answer should be, in a word, no.

The warnings were ignored for too long – by the feds, by provincial governments especially in Ontario and British Columbia, and by colleges and universities. That left no option apart from ripping the Band-Aid off.

Source: It’s too late for universities and colleges to complain about the foreign student cap

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Prime Minister Trudeau failed to follow his own advice on temporary foreign workers

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Always easier in opposition than in government but valid reminder of how soon they forget once in government. Trudeau in 2014 had it right:

Massive growth in Canada’s non-permanent resident streams of immigration (including temporary foreign workers and international students) has led to growing calls on the Trudeau government to reform the system. Immigration Minister Marc Miller recently announced a two-year reduction to student visas. The government has so far been silent on possible reforms to the temporary foreign workers stream. 

One unlikely source of advice on such reforms might be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself. In 2014, the then-Liberal Party leader wrote a scathing op-ed in the Toronto Star that excoriated the Harper government for the growth of the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) under its administration and highlighted the need to “scale it back dramatically.”

He wrote: 

“As a result [of Harper-era policies], the number of short-term foreign workers in Canada has more than doubled, from 141,000 in 2005 to 338,000 in 2012. There were nearly as many temporary foreign workers admitted into the country in 2012 as there were permanent residents — 213,573 of the former compared to 257,887.

At this rate, by 2015, temporary worker entries will outnumber permanent resident entries.

This has all happened under the Conservatives’ watch, despite repeated warnings from the Liberal Party and from Canadians across the country about its impact on middle-class Canadians: it drives down wages and displaces Canadian workers.”

Fast forward a decade and the Trudeau government’s own record on the TFWP has failed to adhere to these sensible insights. 

The figure below displays the number of work permit holders at the end of 2022 through Canada’s two temporary labour migration streams—the TFWP and the International Mobility Program (IMP). The TFWP covers migration programs that require a Labour Market Impact Assessment to receive a work permit such as the live-in caregiver program and various agricultural programs. The IMP does not require labour market assessments and includes individuals working on visas related to trade agreements such as the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement, individuals on post-graduate work permits, and so on. 

Mr. Trudeau was correct in 2014 to observe that there was a more than doubling of the program under the Conservatives before a slight reduction owing to policy changes later that year that included a partial moratorium on new permits and visas.

Graphic credit: Janice Nelson.

Under Trudeau’s tenure as prime minister, however, the number of temporary work permits has grown dramatically—far outstripping those during the Harper government. In 2015, there were a little more than 310,000 temporary work permits. By 2022, the number had more than doubled to almost 800,000. Partial data from 2023 indicate that there was a further increase last year. 

One way to understand this massive increase in the number of temporary foreign workers is to use Trudeau’s own standard of the share relative to permanent residents. He warned in 2014 that the ratio was approaching 1:1. In 2022, there were roughly 440,000 permanent residents admitted into Canada compared to the almost 800,000 working on temporary visas.

This significant growth not only conflicts with Trudeau’s chief recommendation in his op-ed that the TFWP needed to be constrained but also his broader concerns about the risks of an over reliance on temporary foreign workers. 

He concluded: 

“It cuts to the heart of who we are as a country. I believe it is wrong for Canada to follow the path of countries who exploit large numbers of guest workers, who have no realistic prospect of citizenship. It is bad for our economy in that it depresses wages for all Canadians, but it’s even worse for our country. It puts pressure on our commitment to diversity, and creates more opportunities for division and rancour.

We can and must do better.”

Source: Prime Minister Trudeau failed to follow his own advice on temporary foreign workers

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Cuenco: Canada’s immigration backlash is far from populist

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Useful distinction although over emphasizes important of Laurentian elite as this general view is common to all regions:

As the United States and Texas state governments clash over the Mexican border, a very different kind of immigration crisis is taking place elsewhere in North America. Unlike in the divided US, Canada is supposed to be one of the world’s most solidly pro-immigration societies. More than just another self-satisfied Justin Trudeau facade, this attitude has been attested to by historically high levels of public support.

However, an unfolding shift in public sentiment may now change that. Amid a housing crunch and soaring costs of living, Canadians are turning against the prospect of welcoming more immigrants. And the Trudeau government has slowly started to bend under this pressure.

But unlike the rest of the West, Canadians are not advancing this argument via populist rabblerousers or angry mass protests. Instead, Canada’s turnaround is being led by cadres of respectable, credentialed and, for the most part, small-l liberal experts and commentators, who are making the case for immigration reduction in terms that are academic and utilitarian, rather than emotive and atavistic. And, while there has been a rise in populism in recent years, within the Conservative Party and elsewhere, these forces have been unable or unwilling to capitalise on anti-immigration sentiment.

This unique set of circumstances has led to a distinct form of restrictionism, a “polite backlash”, with stereotypically Canadian characteristics. Being driven by educated elites, it plays out in the rarefied spaces of establishment opinion, where opposition to Ottawa’s temporary migrant policies (which has seen more explosive growth than the permanent stream) has materialised.

For instance, the editorial pages of the newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, have recently featured pleas for “aggressive action to reduce the number of temporary migrants”, along with warnings that businesses “should not be subsidised through the import of cheap labour”. Similar sentiments were heard in the CBC’s nightly news program, which hosted a debate on the question: “Housing crisis vs. immigration: Is it time to slow things down?” Twitter, meanwhile, abounds with commentary by housing experts calling for Ottawa to “substantially reduce the number of visas for both international students and [foreign workers]”. A respected former Bank of Canada governor likewise criticised the fixation on juicing up growth through immigration, which retarded productivity: “On a per-person basis, the economy has been shrinking.”

These objections to the status quo amount to what the Globe describes as “practical concerns about the current pace of immigration, not ideological opposition” to immigration itself, which most (if not all) of these thought leaders continue to support in principle. We are seeing that rare thing: a pragmatic, context-driven response among segments of Canada’s expert class that also matches recent shifts in public opinion.

Because data from the country’s major polling firms, collected over the last few months, all show overwhelming support for cutting immigration numbers as a response to cost-of-living challenges: “68% agree — Canada should put a cap on international students until the demand for affordable housing eases” (Ipsos-Reid); “An increasing proportion of Canadians [61%] want Canada to accept fewer immigrants in 2024” (Nanos Research); “Canadians… believe that immigrants are contributing to the housing crisis (75%) and putting pressure on the health care system (73%)” (Leger). This convergence of views across large swathes of Canadian society has proved unignorable.

Last week, Trudeau’s minister for immigration, Marc Miller, announced cuts to the country’s intake of international students, which has seen exorbitant growth in the last year, and now accounts for a staggering 1 million people, or 2.5% of Canada’s population. (To put the figure in perspective: this means that Canada is hosting almost as many international students as US institution, despite the US population being roughly nine times bigger.) This comes after Statistics Canada figures revealed that “as many as 1 in 5 study permit holders in Canada are not actually studying at the institutions to which they have been accepted”, demonstrating how education has become a back door to the job market.

The new policy will see international undergraduate visas capped at 360,000 in 2024, a one-third reduction from last year, and a rationing of these visas among the provinces, along with changes to the “Post-Graduate Work Program”, widely regarded as a pathway to permanent residency for students. Beyond policy details, this volte-face amounts to an admission of a longstanding truth: the existing system has served as a cash cow for tuition-hungry schools and rent-hungry landlords, as well as a source of cheap labour for employers. The new changes are expected to offer some temporary relief to runaway rents prices (though economists disagree by how much).

Though these changes don’t go far enough for some (including this author), at the very least, it is a signal that Trudeau’s Liberals are willing to act on a problem they ignored for so long: it represents a meaningful, if modest, policy victory for the polite backlash and its arguments for numbers reduction.

Conversations among thought leaders, however, have so far been largely limited to the temporary resident stream. It will be a measure of the experts’ and the government’s determination to correct course once they start considering cuts to the permanent resident stream, currently set at roughly 1.5 million newcomers by 2026. This is one case where public opinion is ahead of them, since the polling data indicates that most Canadians also want these targets to be scaled back as well. In any event, it is important to understand the deeply entrenched nature of the status quo that prompted this polite backlash, for even Miller’s moderate reforms have invited a backlash of its own from the powerful interests whose income has been threatened by the announced cuts.

The outcry is loudest from higher-education institutions, especially in Ontario, the largest province and epicentre of the crisis. These institutions stand to lose the most as they have relied excessively on international tuitions to compensate for their chronically underfunded budgets. This in turn is the fault of the Tory provincial government of Doug Ford, which carried out the budget cuts and had been aware of this over-reliance on foreign students but nonetheless persisted in letting it fester. It also maintained a lax approach to the growth of dubious for-profit “strip mall colleges”, which attracted large shares of international students. Ford’s government, therefore, shares responsibility with Trudeau’s for the severity of the problem, with parties of the Right and the Left found equally complicit.

Meanwhile, the Century Initiative, an influential business-linked group that advocates for immigration maximalism, issued an anodyne statement on the cuts, appearing to assent to them but nonetheless arguing for the 1.5 million permanent resident targets to be retained — even though these are precisely the numbers that must be cut if Ottawa is serious about easing affordability. What is likely to follow is a protracted debate between two segments of expert opinion on the future of immigration, one that will largely take place within the bounds of elite discourse, confirming the closed nature of political decision-making in Canada. As John Ibbitson put it in his account of the country’s “Laurentian elite”: “On all of the great issues of the day, this Laurentian elite debated among themselves… But much of the debate was held behind closed doors: in faculty clubs, the hallways of legislatures, in dining rooms in [tony neighbourhoods like] Toronto’s Annex, Ottawa’s Glebe, Montreal’s Outremont.”

But the progress of this debate still begs the question: what happened to Canada’s populists, who ought to be challenging the elite conversation from outside the system? For some reason, they have counted themselves out of the immigration issue. Federal Tory leader Pierre Poilievre is a case in point: widely described as populist in style and outlook, he is Trudeau’s arch-foe. But he has avoided criticising the government’s immigration targets in any substantive way (a few recent vague comments about matching immigration numbers to housing construction notwithstanding). Even more strangely, he has sought to gain favour with the international students, meeting with themand trying to turn them against Trudeau, claiming they’d get a better deal under him. This is an incredibly naïve and dangerous proposition that will simply give the students false hope for a path to residency, when in fact such expectations should be lowered, not raised. This poor judgement on Poilievre’s part suggests he won’t be any more serious on immigration than Trudeau’s government.

Further to the Right, the People’s Party has, in the past, been incredibly vocal about the need to restrict immigration. But after failing to re-enter parliament multiple times, its leader Maxime Bernier has faded into obscurity. On the Left, the New Democratic Party, nominally the party of organised labour, has abdicated the issue as well, even though as recently as 2014 it led the charge to limit low-skill immigration in the name of defending working-class jobs and wages. Only in Quebec are restrictionist parties still prevalent, but this has more to do with its idiosyncratic language politics than with material economic factors.

A populist revolt over immigration is therefore unlikely in Canada. But the country might have won something better: the expert-driven push to control immigration, with its emphasis on policy over passion, may prove to be a more effective and rational approach to the challenge than the theatrical (but toothless) populisms of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders and the rest. Canadians should hope that it succeeds in restoring balance to the system eventually, because should the polite backlash fail to do the job, the next backlash will be anything but.

Source: Canada’s immigration backlash is far from populist

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Black-only swim times, Black-only lounges: The rise of race segregation on Canadian universities

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Sigh, hard to see how this will improve social integration and inclusion:

…While the idea of explicitly race-segregated spaces at Canadian universities would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, recent months have seen a wave of Black-only lounges, study spaces and events at Canadian post-secondary institutions.

The University of British Columbia recently cut the ribbon on a Black Student Space featuring showers, lockers and even a nap room.  To gain access, students must apply and affirm that they are one of the following: “Black African descent, African-American, African-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, and Afro-Indigenous.”

Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly Ryerson, opened a Black Student Lounge in 2022. The space is intended as a shelter from “the harms of institutional racism.” In multiple public statements, TMU has referred to itself as a hotbed of colonialist institutional oppression, and the lounge is intended as a place where students can “heal” and “recharge” from said oppression, and “promote Black flourishing.”

The University of Toronto maintains a distinctive office of Black Student Engagement that curates a series of Black-only frosh and orientation events. While there are university-sanctioned “engagement” programs for Latin American and Southeast Asian students, these are mostly limited to mentorship appointments and workshops.

And it’s not just U of T pursuing Black-only frosh events. As noted in a feature by VICE, as recently as 2015 Canada didn’t feature a single Black-only frosh. But after Ottawa universities debuted BLK Frosh that year, the practice soon became commonplace….

Source: Black-only swim times, Black-only lounges: The rise of race segregation on Canadian universities

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Le Devoir Éditorial | L’immigration et les petits calculs politiciens

2024/02/02 Leave a comment

Malheureusement:

Si les enjeux d’immigration présentent des défis planétaires de plus en plus aigus et compliqués, ces défis gagneraient indubitablement en clarté si les gouvernements de tout acabit évitaient d’en instrumentaliser les côtés sombres à des fins politiques et électorales. Prenons seulement l’actualité récente en Grande-Bretagne, en France et aux États-Unis. Trois pays dont les gouvernements embrument le débat et cultivent les méfiances xénophobes en cédant aux sirènes du populisme.

Au premier ministre britannique, Rishi Sunak, armé d’un slogan alarmiste (« Stop the boats »), revient la palme de la déshumanisation des migrants pour son projet de transfert de demandeurs d’asile vers le Rwanda. Fondé sur un accord signé avec l’autoritaire Paul Kagame il y a près de deux ans, le projet de loi adopté le 18 janvier dernier par la majorité conservatrice aux Communes vise à décourager les migrants de traverser la Manche — ils ont été environ 30 000 à le faire en 2023, au péril de leur vie. Sunak entend procéder bien que la Cour suprême britannique ait désavoué le projet en estimant que le Rwanda peut difficilement être considéré comme un « pays sûr ». 

Outre qu’il est loin d’être acquis que les expulsions ralentiraient les arrivées par « petits bateaux », les chiffres montrent noir sur blanc que la croisade de M. Sunak, qui est largement menotté par l’aile droite du parti, tient du délire. Le fait est qu’entre juin 2022 et juin 2023, la migration a été essentiellement légale au Royaume-Uni, répondant aux besoins urgents du marché de l’emploi, particulièrement en santé. Les migrants en situation irrégulière ont représenté 7,7 % de la totalité des  682 000 entrées. Qu’à cela ne tienne : à la traîne dans les sondages face aux travaillistes, M. Sunak n’a pas seulement décidé de faire de son « projet Rwanda » le socle de sa politique contre l’immigration clandestine, il compte aussi en faire l’un des ressorts principaux de sa stratégie de campagne aux législatives de janvier 2025.

En France, des mois de controverse autour de la nouvelle loi sur l’immigration ont obéi à de semblables petits calculs, permettant in fine à Marine Le Pen, cheffe du Rassemblement national, de crier à une « grande victoire idéologique » — du moins jusqu’à ce que le Conseil constitutionnel ne censure une grande partie de la législation la semaine dernière. C’est ainsi qu’en cheval de Troie, le concept de « préférence nationale », si cher à l’extrême droite, s’est imposé de façon inédite dans un texte législatif français, avec le soutien de la droite traditionnelle (Les Républicains) et de la majorité macroniste. Résultat : les Français auront vécu une saga où Emmanuel Macron aura moins cherché à penser une politique migratoire réformée avec clairvoyance, à l’abri des dérives, qu’à enregistrer un succès législatif à n’importe quel prix, lui dont la présidence ne va nulle part à six mois du rendez-vous des élections européennes.

Aux États-Unis, Donald Trump s’emploie ces temps-ci à saboter un projet d’accord migratoire entre sénateurs démocrates et républicains pour empêcher coûte que coûte que sa conclusion ne fasse bien paraître le président Joe Biden en cette année de scrutin présidentiel. Sur le fond, le projet repose pourtant sur des mesures étroitement punitives et tout à fait au goût des républicains. Seraient sensiblement élargis, en vertu de cette entente, les pouvoirs d’expulsion manu militari dont disposent les agents frontaliers. Dans l’espoir à courte vue de raplomber sa popularité, M. Biden se trouve ainsi à jouer le jeu de la droite dure anti-immigration. Il est d’autant plus piégé par cette dynamique que le clan trumpiste au Congrès lie l’augmentation de l’aide militaire à l’Ukraine, pièce maîtresse de sa politique étrangère, à l’adoption de mesures radicales de refoulement à la frontière mexico-américaine.

En Europe comme aux États-Unis, sur fond de stagnation législative, la « pression migratoire » ne diminue pas. Ils ont été 267 000 migrants à débarquer aux frontières méridionales de l’Union européenne l’année dernière et 2800 à se noyer en Méditerranée ; ils ont été 300 000 pendant le seul mois de décembre dernier à cogner à la porte des États-Unis. Des nombres records. Des années de politiques d’endiguement et d’externalisation des contrôles n’y ont rien changé, bien au contraire, de la même manière que la fermeture du chemin Roxham — c’était écrit dans le ciel — n’a rien réglé.

À prétendre qu’il y a des réponses simples à des problèmes compliqués ; à faire l’économie des faits et à laisser prospérer les faussetés ; à trop peu investir, en amont des mouvements de migration, dans le développement des pays du Sud ; à faire depuis toujours, aux États-Unis, l’impasse sur une réforme du système d’immigration, on se trouve trop souvent à laisser la réflexion autour des enjeux de géopolitique migratoire, d’une portée pourtant capitale sur la vie des sociétés partout dans le monde, à se conclure sur des décisions politiciennes prises à la petite semaine.

Source: Éditorial | L’immigration et les petits calculs politiciens

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Canadian colleges, universities warn of ‘long-lasting consequences’ from international student cap

2024/02/01 Leave a comment

Largely self-serving arguments:

Colleges and universities are urging the federal government to continue processing international study permits and modify the hard cap on students intake, warning of the “widespread and long-lasting consequences” this may cause.

“Faced with uncertainty, these students are likely to choose alternative destinations, posing a significant risk to Canada’s post-secondary sector and hindering our efforts to attract global talent for years to come,” Universities Canada and Colleges and Institutes Canada said in a joint letter to Immigration Minister Marc Miller on Tuesday.

“The policy’s impact extends far beyond institutions, affecting businesses and communities.”

Source: Canadian colleges, universities warn of ‘long-lasting consequences’ from international student cap

LInk to Universities Canada letter: Colleges and universities need sustainable investment, not unsustainable growth in international students

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McWhorter: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality

2024/02/01 Leave a comment

Always interesting, particularly his discussion of American Descendants of Slavery as legitimate distinction among African Americans (but not linked to anti-immigration activists):

In my last newsletter, I argued that it is unsuitably awkward for the word “plagiarism” to be applied both to the stealing of others’ ideas and the copying, perhaps accidentally, of boilerplate text without citing its source. To the extent that most would consider the former an egregious transgression and the latter more of a lazy misstep, English would benefit from using a different term for it.


It also bears mentioning that the way we use and process the word “plagiarism” teaches a couple of lessons about language and society more broadly. For one, the word can be taken as a reality check against a prominent idea concerning language. Put simply: Yes, specific vocabularies can channel the way that we think, but only to a limited extent.


The idea that language influences thought is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of its titular proponents, Benjamin Lee Whorf, noted for example that in the Hopi language, the word for the water that you drink is different from the word for water in nature, such as in a lake. To him, this difference suggested that the Hopi process reality differently from English speakers, and that more broadly:


Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.


Psychologists have since shown repeatedly that differences in how languages’ vocabularies label experience do condition very small differences in thought patterns. In Russian, for instance, there is not one word for blue, but two: one for darker blue and one for lighter blue. An experiment has shown that this does make Russians, when presented with a gradation from dark to light blue, a tiny bit more sensitive to the transition point between the two. Having explicit labels for the two shades alerts one a tad more precisely to the difference between them.


But again, these are very small differences in perception. No experiment has demonstrated that differences in language affect our minds so profoundly as to result in significantly different world views. It is culture — i.e., reality — that does that, not the specifics of how narrowly or broadly a word happens to apply.

Our prior discussion of the word “plagiarism” demonstrates this. Just as English having a single word for dark blue and light blue does not prevent us from telling the difference in color between a navy blazer and a robin’s egg, the fact that “plagiarism” covers both idea theft and careless cutting and pasting does not mean that we can’t tell the difference between the two. In fact, we process it quite readily, and our disagreements over that distinction drove much of the debate over plagiarism by the former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

Nonetheless, the past few years have seen an uptick in suggestions that we use new terms to refer to things and, especially, people, the intent being to refashion how we perceive them. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, an extensive set of suggestions is making the rounds among volunteers. One such suggestion is that volunteers say that people “have” a disability rather than that they “suffer” from it. A similar recommendation on a similar list (since taken down) from Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center emphasized person-first language to such a degree that one would have to refer to earthquake victims as people who have experienced an earthquake. In both cases, the idea is to avoid essentializing people as sufferers or victims.


The problem with terminology like this is that because the correspondence between words and reality is only ever approximate, these novel ways of speaking would not affect our understanding of the world. To say that someone “has” a disability hardly distracts us from the fact that the person, inherently, suffers because of it — this is baked into the very concept of disability whether we utter the verb or not. Similarly, saying that someone experienced an earthquake will never change our perception that a person whose home was reduced to rubble is a victim. (Never mind that it is unclear what the benefit would be if it actually did.)


Our discussion of “plagiarism” is also useful, however, in that it demonstrates that there are times when clarity makes the addition of a new word or phrase to our vocabulary useful. For example, there was a time just a few decades back when there were no established terms for “sexual harassment” or “date rape.” People typically understood “rape” and “sexual assault” to be violent attacks by strangers. What we now call date rape was often dismissed by society as “not the real thing.”


The idea was embedded in our language as well as our culture. Any fan of old plays and movies has seen women depicted as warning each other with a click of the tongue about men who are “all hands” or the like. One of the cringiest Broadway songs I know of is in the 1951 Phil Silvers vehicle “Top Banana,” when a woman sings a song, “I Fought Every Step of the Way,” about what we now know as date rape, but brushes it off as something she simply had to endure. It’s far better that we now have clear labels for what happened to that character. (In a cruel irony, the actress who sang the song, Rose Marie, saw it and her other numbers cut from the film version after she refused the producer’s advances.) The subsequent adoption of the terms “date rape” and “sexual harassment” obviously hasn’t made such acts go away. But it has facilitated their discussion, condemnation and prosecution.

A similar example is raised by the acronym ADOS, for American Descendants of Slavery. The movement bearing this name advocates making a distinction between Black people with ancestry within the United States and Black people with ancestry in the Caribbean and Africa but not the United States. Their proposition is that if the government should ever grant reparations for slavery, they should go only to ADOS, rather than to all Americans of African genetic descent. Although I am unenthusiastic about reparations as a concept, I agree with this game plan if they are ever granted, and feel that a new, non-acronym term distinguishing the native-descended subset could be useful — certainly better than on-the-fly hacks like “Black people from here,” “real Black people” and the like.


I should note that some of the ADOS idea’s most fervent supporters have fostered outright divisiveness between the two subsets of Black Americans and have been linked to anti-immigration activists. I cannot walk alongside them. However, if this divisive strain fades and what remains is an explicit term for Black Americans descended from slavery, it will be useful to any number of discussions. I dispute claims that all Black Americans must march under the same label because skin color means experiencing racism regardless of whether one’s roots are in Ghana or Gary, Ind. Racism is an unnecessarily gloomy and unconstructive keystone for a racial self-conception, especially in the 21st century.


The messiness of the term “plagiarism” that we discussed last week, then, shows us that to speak is to be ever aware not only of Webster’s-style definitions, but of the buzzing richness of context. And it also shows that at times it still can be useful to bolster that context by adding additional, helpful labels to our existing stockpile. There is, as always, a world in every word.

Source: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality

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Buruma: The growing threat of messianic politics

2024/02/01 Leave a comment

Leave it to others with more expertise to assess the validity of the reasons but agree with the threat as we see in so many places:

…The reason why so many democracies are now threatened by messianic politics is not because organized religion has gained in strength. In fact, I think the opposite is true. In most Western democracies, at least, church authority has almost entirely collapsed. This is true even in the U.S.: while most people still consider themselves to be believers in one faith or another, many American Christians, especially those who are drawn to Trump as a saviour, follow freelance preachers or spiritual entrepreneurs.

In many parts of Europe, where right-wing populism is on the rise, the erosion of church authority starting in the 1960s cast adrift people who used to go to church regularly and looked to their priests and pastors to tell them how to vote. Today, they are anxious and bewildered by demographic, political, social, sexual, and economic changes, and are seeking a saviour to lead them to a simpler, more certain, and more secure world. There are plenty of power-hungry demagogues more than willing to cater to this desire.

Source: The growing threat of messianic politics

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Shanes: Mythology behind anti-Semitism drives disconnect over support for Palestinians

2024/02/01 Leave a comment

Useful discussion of the various definitions of antisemitism and the distinctions between antisemitism and anti-Zionism:

…In recent years, the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has taken on renewed importance. Zionism has many factions but roughly refers to the modern political movement that argues Jews constitute a nation and have a right to self-determination in that land.

Some activists claim that anti-Zionism — ideological opposition to Zionism — is inherently anti-Semitic because they equate it with denying Jews the right to self-determination and therefore equality.

Others feel that there needs to be a clearer separation between the two, that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Zionist, and not all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic.

Zionism in practice has meant the achievement of a flourishing safe haven for Jews, but also led to dislocation or inequality for millions of Palestinians, including refugees, West Bank Palestinians who still live under military rule, and even Palestinian citizens of Israel, who face legal and social discrimination. Anti-Zionism opposes this, and critics argue that it should not be labeled anti-Semitic unless it taps into those anti-Semitic myths or otherwise calls for violence or inequality for Jews.

This debate is clearly evident in the competing definitions of anti-Semitism that have recently emerged. Three have gained particular prominence. The first was the so-called “working definition” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, published in 2016.

In response, an academic task force published the Nexus definition in 2021, followed by the Jerusalem Declaration that same year, the latter signed by hundreds of international scholars of anti-Semitism.

Remarkably, all three definitions tend to agree on the nature of anti-Semitism in most areas except the relationship of anti-Israel rhetoric to anti-Semitism. The IHRA’s definition, which is by design vague and open to interpretation, allows for a wider swath of anti-Israel activism to be labeled anti-Semitic than the others.

The Jerusalem Declaration, in contrast, understands rhetoric to have “crossed the line” only when it engages in anti-Semitic mythology, blames diaspora Jews for the actions of the Israeli state, or calls for the oppression of Jews in Israel. Thus, for example, IHRA defenders use that definition to label a call for binational democracy — meaning citizenship for West Bank Palestinians — to be anti-Semitic. Likewise, they label boycottseven of West Bank settlements that most of the world calls illegal to be anti-Semitic. The Jerusalem Declaration would not do so.

In other words, the key to identifying whether anti-Israel discourse has masked anti-Semitism is to see evidence of the anti-Semitic mythology. For example, if Israel is described as part of an international conspiracy, or if it holds the key to solving global problems, all three definitions agree this is anti-Semitic.

Equally, if Jews or Jewish institutions are held responsible for Israeli actions or are expected to take a stand one way or another regarding them, again all three definitions agree this “crosses the line” because it is based on the myth of a global Jewish conspiracy.

Critically, for many Jews in the diaspora, Zionism is not primarily a political argument about the state of Israel. For many Jews, it constitutes a generic sense of Jewish identity and pride, even a religious identity. In contrast, many protests against Israel and Zionism are focused not on ideology but on the actual state and its real or alleged actions.

This disconnect can lead to confusion if protests conflate Jews with Israel just because they are Zionist, which is anti-Semitic. On the other hand, Jews sometimes take protests against Israel in defense of Palestinian rights to be attacks on their Zionist identity and thus anti-Semitic, when they are not. There are certainly gray areas, but in general calls for Palestinian equality, I believe, are legitimate even when they upset Zionist identities.

In my view, anti-Semitism must be identified and fought, but so too must efforts to squash legitimate protest of Israel by conflating it with anti-Semitism. By understanding the mythology underlying anti-Semitism, hopefully both can be accomplished.

Joshua Shanes is a professor of Jewish studies at the College of Charleston.

Source: Mythology behind anti-Semitism drives disconnect over support for Palestinians

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

HESA: How bad is it going to get in Ontario? Really bad. 

2024/01/31 Leave a comment

Usual frank and insightful analysis:

This isn’t just cluelessness. The Ministry here isn’t even clueful with respect to understanding how to even get a clue in the first place. The cluetrain? It has left the shed but there’s nobody on board (ok I will stop now).

So, all of this is bad, certainly, but it’s arguably not as bad as Colleges Ontario’s 1326-word statement responding to the federal changes, which is a masterclass in failing to read the room. Go on, read it. Utterly self-centered, all about protecting their revenue schemes, no sense whatsoever that the whole reason this scenario is occurring is that they lost social license to keep bringing in more international students and that the public has serious (albeit not necessarily well-founded) views about the quality of PPPs and the quality assurance. Tone-deaf is putting it mildly.

(Of course, Colleges Ontario is a membership organization, and when it comes to membership organizations, they necessarily go with the lowest-common denominator. My guess is that there a few colleges that probably know this statement was a bad idea, but the ultras won out.)

(Also: I am taking bets on when the rest of the sector decides to throw Conestoga under the bus for ruining the international student thing for everyone else. Issuing acceptances for 34,000 study permit students in 2023 alone—in a city with under 400,000 students—was an absurd cash-grab with no thought as to impact on the local community. As soon as the distribution of spots starts, you know the other colleges are going to argue hard against Conestoga getting a share of 2024 visas based on its 2023 share. Should be amusing).

Meanwhile, Ontario universities had not issued a joint statement as of Sunday evening (when this blog was written) but as near as I can tell, the universities’ position is going to be “colleges created this problem, any balancing of student visa numbers should be done on their backs, not ours.” Which has a certain truth to it but is a long way from the full truth (within the university sector, you can expect Algoma will attract antagonists the way Conestoga does in the college sector, albeit on a more modest scale).

In other words, everything here in Ontario is a mess. It will be an interesting to compare Ontario’s…omnishambles…what British Columbia’s plan looks like. My understanding is that it will be published Monday (tomorrow for me, yesterday for you). I apologize in advance that due to extensive work commitments this week, I won’t be able to cover the BC announcement until next week. ‘til then: keep your eyes peeled. These files are moving fast.

Source: HESA: How bad is it going to get in Ontario? Really bad. 

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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