What a recent court ruling on Canada’s Citizenship Act means for ‘lost Canadians’

2024/01/11 Leave a comment

Useful and reasonable analysis and we will see if the government chooses to appeal or not on the basis of the reasoning used:

In December 2023, Ontario’s Superior Court determined that what’s known as the “second-generation cut-off rule” in the federal Citizenship Act violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by discriminating on the basis of national origin and sex. 

The second-generation rule was adopted in 2009 under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. 

It limited Canadian citizenship to the first generation born abroad in an effort to create a clear and simple rule, and, according to Diane Finley, the minister of citizenship and immigration at the time, to “protect the value of Canadian citizenship by ensuring that our citizens have a real connection to this country.”

The concern with connection makes sense. Members of a political community — citizens — should have a relationship to that community. But what does connection mean, and how do we know when it exists? 

Secure claim to citizenship?

Canada, like many other countries in the world, uses birth as a proxy for connection. If you’re born in Canada or you’re born abroad to a parent who’s a Canadian citizen, you too are a citizen. 

In many cases, birth appears to offer a secure claim to citizenship since the facts of someone’s birth are generally unassailable. But as the second-generation cut-off rule demonstrates, governments can shift the legal meaning of those circumstances with significant repercussions.

The Bjorkquist et al. v. Attorney General of Canada case heard in Ontario in December involves seven families. Their children were born abroad and denied Canadian citizenship because their Canadian parent or parents were also born abroad. 

In each family, the parent has lived in Canada for many years, views Canada as their home and/or intends to return to Canada if they aren’t currently living here. The parents, all Canadian citizens, argued their inability to pass on their citizenship to their children, despite their connection to Canada, imposed second-class citizenship status upon them. The court agreed. 

Back when the law was changed, the House of Commons Committee on Citizenship and Immigration unanimously endorsed the second-generation cut-off. Effectively, the clause was the cost for passing a larger package of reforms to the Citizenship Act.

For several years, people known as the “lost Canadians” — those who have fallen through the cracks of complex citizenship law — had been advocating for changes that would address discriminatory provisions in the act. 

These people considered themselves Canadians, but had been denied citizenship because of their age, and/or the sex and marital status of their Canadian parent at the time of their birth. 

For example, prior to 2009, a child born abroad before Feb. 15, 1977, to a Canadian woman married to a non-Canadian would not be entitled to Canadian citizenship. The reform package removed the sex and wedlock status of the Canadian parent as conditions for citizenship for children born abroad after Jan. 1, 1947, when Canada’s first Citizenship Act came into force. 

Inconsistently enforced

Another challenge leading to those reforms was a requirement that second-generation children born abroad affirm their citizenship by the age of 28. They also had to demonstrate one year of residency in Canada immediately prior to applying or some other substantial connection to the country.

In practice, though, many Canadians born abroad were unaware of this provision, and it was inconsistently enforced.

Limiting citizenship to the first generation born abroad offered a simple, if blunt, solution to this problem. Parliamentarians were also assured that an expedited immigration sponsorship processwould address situations like those faced by the Bjorkquist et al.families. 

Unfortunately, that process has proven unreliable — so much so, in fact, that the judge in the Bjorkquist case described it as “error-riddled, highly discretionary, and inequitable in …application, and as such … unsatisfactory.”

It’s clear that the second-generation cut-off rule excludes children whose parents have a demonstrable connection to Canada, and who have a high likelihood of being connected to Canada as well. So how might that connection be established? 

Parliament is currently considering Bill S-245, that would amend the Citizenship Act. Its original draft proposed reinstating the second-generation affirmation and one-year residency requirement. 

It now includes an amendment requiring a more rigorous connection test, drawing from Canada’s requirements for permanent residency. The Canadian parent of a child born abroad would need to have lived in Canada for 1,095 days (three years) in total prior to the birth of their child. 

Relying on proxies

In this way, the Citizenship Act could address concerns about what Finley referred to as “endless generations living abroad”that spurred the creation of the second-generation cut-off rule in the first place. As well, Canadians would be able to pursue opportunities around the world while maintaining their connection to Canada.

Ultimately, what’s at issue is what’s considered the threshold for citizenship. Canada doesn’t require citizens or those claiming citizenship to pass civics tests or commit to substantive engagement in governing. Instead, it relies on proxies like birth, residency and time since they appear less vulnerable to political manipulation.

These proxies may be imperfect. Yet the Bjorkquist case suggests that when thoughtfully constructed, they can ensure Canadian citizenship is bestowed upon those whose attachment and contributions to Canada are real.

Source: What a recent court ruling on Canada’s Citizenship Act means for ‘lost Canadians’

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Steve Lafleur: It’s time to stop importing American debates, Canada. We’ve got our own country to run

2024/01/10 Leave a comment

Amen… Captures many of my pet peeves, reflecting a colonial mentality, although his comments on immigration oversimplify:

For the love of God, stop uncritically importing American political debates

Well, it’s here. 2024. U.S. election year. Which means that, regrettably, we’re going to be talking a lot more about Donald Trump—whether it’s because his legal troubles get the better of him, or he finds his way back into the White House. Maybe both. It’s almost too depressing to contemplate, but here we are. 

This has wide-ranging implications for Canada, and the world at large. The world will be watching—particularly America’s adversaries. Canada, Europe, and our allies need contingency plans in case America turns its back on the world.

I’m not here to talk about the geopolitical implications of letting Vladimir Putin walk through Europe, or the prospect of our closest ally potentially tearing itself apart over a geriatric nepo baby with a severe allergy to the law. I’m getting off track here.

Let’s try this again. Canadians will be rightly fixated on the American election. Who can blame us? But our cultural commonalities with the United States often make it tempting to uncritically import American debate. We’ll need to try even harder than usual to avoid that. No good comes of it. 

Canada is, in many respects, a collection of bi-national regional political cultures overlayed by a loose national culture. Vancouver is basically Seattle with Canadian characteristics, for instance. We often have as much in common with our regional neighbours south of the border as we do with Canadians on the other side of the country. 

With a population largely strewn across the American border, an economy oriented towards southern exports, and a media ecosystem filled with American content, it’s easy to forget that Canada is its own country with distinct challenges, opportunities, and history. There isn’t always an off-the-shelf American policy solution that we can just slap a maple leaf on.

This may seem painfully obvious, but Canadian politicians have a long history of seemingly forgetting which side of the border we’re on. And it’s not getting any better. Whether it’s Danielle Smith fawning over Ron DeSantis or Justin Trudeau conflating Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump, all indications are that our political class wants to keep cosplaying American politics. 

Canadians should demand better. We deserve our own policy debates focused on actual Canadian issues. It’s up to us to ask for it.

Take immigration, for instance. It’s hard to think of two immigration systems as different as Canada’s and the United States’. Canada has very high levels of legal immigration focused on highly skilled immigrants. Our biggest immigration problem is that we haven’t built enough houses to accommodate people. By contrast, America has relatively low levels of legal immigration, but a porous southern border that people cross through for a chance to pick crops or clean hotel rooms. 

Canada has high but selective immigration; America has low but chaotic immigration. It’s understandable that irregular crossing sucks up a lot of the political oxygen stateside, but it’s a relatively niche topic here. Frankly, temporary foreign workers are a bigger political challenge in Canada than illegal immigration (specifically, housing them). Different countries, different issues.

Let’s take another thorny example: diversity. Canada is a far more multicultural country than the United States. While large American cities like New York or even Houston have very diverse populations, there are vast swaths of the country that are largely white and Black, with a smattering of Latinos. This has an enormous impact on discussions of diversity—particularly when it comes to religion. If you encounter Muslims on a regular basis, it’s hard to fearmonger about them. There’s a reason why the “Muslim ban” happened in America, not Canada. 

The fact that diversity in Canada looks different than in the United States isn’t merely a statistical curiosity. It has implications for some of the cultural debates that are increasingly monopolizing our political discourse. 

Take the term BIPOC, for instance. It’s a term often used in American progressive circles that has managed to seep through the border. BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, People of Color—is a very specific American term. Note the order of the terms. Slavery was America’s greatest sin. Racial segregation persisted until the 1960s. Discrimination continues to this day. Of course, the historical treatment of American Indigenous People wasn’t much better. But sharing an acronym isn’t entirely unreasonable. 

In Canada, it’s not reasonable. The frequency, severity, and persistence of mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples is Canada’s most shameful legacy. Lumping Indigenous issues in with broader racial issues in Canada isn’t just silly, but insulting. Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples is one of the most important tasks facing the country. Indigenous issues deserve a more prominent role than the second letter of an acronym. 

Finally, there’s guns. A lot of them if you’re on the American side, but not so much here (unless you’re talking about farm rifles). Canada’s cities, contrary to the rhetoric, are much safer than American cities. The fact that we don’t have yahoos walking around with semi-automatic weapons probably helps. Nevertheless, firearms policy gets a surprising amount of oxygen on both sides of the political spectrum, even if it isn’t kitchen table talk. Conservatives take up gun rights issues to appease rural elements of their base, and Liberals use guns as a wedge issue. Despite the very different realities of firearms policy in Canada and America, sometimes it sounds like our politicians live a few hundred miles south. That isn’t to say there isn’t room for debate about firearms policy. But Canadian politicians should not make policy decisions based on American news stories, nor should they adopt gun rights rhetoric. Uncritically importing American gun debates isn’t going to make our policies smarter. It will almost certainly make them dumber.

Look, I’m not trying to dump on Americans here. For all its faults, America is one of the greatest countries on earth. They’ve led the peaceful post-war international order since the end of the Second World War. I desperately want America to continue doing so. But America is a unique country with a very different political, social, and historical context. Uncritically echoing American talking points doesn’t enrich our political discourse. Quite the opposite. We can, and should, think for ourselves. 

So, now that we’re in the backstretch of the white-knuckle ride to the 2024 election, Canadians need to be especially on guard against allowing the increasingly poisonous American political discourse to pollute our debates. By all means, tune in to the most bewildering show on earth. But, please, remember that we’re just viewers. We’ve got our own country to run. Let’s try to focus on that.

Steve Lafleur is a public policy analyst and columnist based in Toronto.

Source: Steve Lafleur: It’s time to stop importing American debates, Canada. We’ve got our own country to run

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Most Canadians support bringing in temporary foreign workers to fill jobs, says poll

2024/01/10 Leave a comment

Bit surprising that the housing impact, which factors into recent declines in support for current levels, has not impacted the support for temporary workers and students, which also has an impact:

Most Canadians support employers bringing in temporary foreign workers to fill jobs they can’t find Canadians to do, according to a poll for The Globe and Mail, despite growing numbers opposed to increased immigration.

The survey also found that more than eight in 10 Canadians feel that temporary foreign workers are important to the country’s economy.

And over two-thirds show support for temporary foreign workers who wish to remain in Canada becoming citizens, according to the Nanos Research poll.

The findings are released as a growing proportion of Canadians say they want the country to accept fewer immigrants in 2024 compared to 2023, with opposition to more immigration growing since September, according to other Nanos polling.

Nik Nanos, chairman of Nanos Research, said Canadians are increasingly against more immigration, but are more supportive of migrants coming to do specific jobs….

Source: Most Canadians support bringing in temporary foreign workers to fill jobs, says poll

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Migrant farm workers pay into EI, but can’t access it. Now they’re suing the federal government

2024/01/10 Leave a comment

Yet another possible class action suit. Another to watch:

Migrant agricultural workers in Canada pay into employment insurance (EI), but they are not able to access it when their contracts expire and they return to their home country.

They also have employment contracts that are tied to one employer, preventing them from changing their employer while they’re in Canada.

A proposed $500-million class action lawsuit is aiming to challenge those regulations.

“It’s an issue that has been around for some time now,” said Jody Brown, a partner at Goldblatt Partners LLP, the law firm that filed the statement of claim. “The time is now for workers to come forward and try and make a change to this program.”

Kevin Palmer and Andrel Peters, seasonal migrant workers from the Caribbean who worked for companies in Leamington, Ont., are the lead plaintiffs in the suit, filed last month at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto.

It was filed on behalf of workers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and the Temporary Foreign Workers Program-Agricultural Stream for the last 15 years.

“They’re seeking to bring a case not just on their own behalf, but on behalf of 10s of thousands of other workers who have been in a similar situation,” said Brown.

Class action lawsuits have to be certified by a judge in order to proceed. The allegations in the proposed lawsuit have not been proven in court.

A 2022 report from Statistics Canada stated that Canada is “increasingly reliant on TFWs to fill labour shortage gaps” and that the number of TFWs in Canada increased by 600 per cent from 2000 to 777,000 in 2021.

An advocate for migrant workers says the suit is important in the fight to get more rights for migrant workers.

“The feedback from workers has been quite positive,” said Chris Ramsaroop, an organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers. “The biggest concerns that they’ve got are around immigration and around employment insurance and that in their time of need, they can’t claim or access this benefit.”

In an emailed statement to CBC News, a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada says the government does not comment on ongoing cases or “an individual’s personal circumstances,” but said that it takes “its responsibilities with respect to the protection of temporary foreign workers very seriously and the safety and protection of workers is paramount…

Source: Migrant farm workers pay into EI, but can’t access it. Now they’re suing the federal government

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Les femmes et minorités, encore souvent des candidatures «poteaux» au Canada

2024/01/10 Leave a comment

Of note (my previous analyses have focused on growth in minority candidates and MPs but this reinforces other studies showing similar overall pattern):

….Le parcours de Nathanielle Morin fait partie des données compilées dans un article rédigé par des chercheurs de l’Université d’Ottawa à paraître dans la prochaine édition de la revue Electoral Studies, et consulté par Le Devoir.

L’analyse du parcours de 3966 candidats qui se sont présentés lors des trois dernières élections générales montre que les lesbiennes, les gais, les bisexuels, les transgenres ou les queers (LGBTQ+) autodéclarés et les femmes sont nettement surreprésentés (de 17 et de 6 points de pourcentage respectivement) dans les défaites écrasantes — celles dans lesquelles ils sont arrivés plus de 15 points derrière. Les candidats autochtones ou issus des minorités visibles sont aussi désavantagés, quoique d’une moins grande ampleur.

À la surprise des chercheurs, le Parti libéral ne fait pas meilleure figure que le Parti conservateur à ce chapitre : les candidats issus de minorités sont plus souvent nommés là où les deux formations s’attendent à perdre.

« On n’a pas trouvé de grandes différences entre les libéraux et les conservateurs, même si les libéraux ont tendance à souligner qu’ils ont la parité et la question de diversité plus à coeur que le Parti conservateur », souligne Valérie Lapointe, chercheuse postdoctorale en études politiques à l’Université d’Édimbourg et coautrice de l’étude.

En fait, ces deux partis présentent surtout des hommes hétérosexuels dans les circonscriptions réputées « prenables », une tendance aggravée par le fait que les députés sortants conservent généralement leur place comme candidats. À l’issue des dernières élections fédérales, la Chambre des communes était constituée à 69,5 % d’hommes….

Source: Les femmes et minorités, encore souvent des candidatures «poteaux» au Canada

Filed under gender, LGBTQ, Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with ,

‘Nil’ research done on impact of foreign students working unlimited hours: Report

2024/01/10 Leave a comment

Disheartening….

Access-to-information records showed that federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller allowed hundreds of thousands of foreign students to work unlimited hours without researching the impact on unemployed Canadians.

The minister said foreign students were not “taking jobs away from other people,” but never asked his department for data, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.

Both departments were asked under access-to-information requests to disclose “all research, studies, literature reviews or other data regarding the impact on the repeal of the 20-hour work cap on foreign students on labour markets, youth unemployment or hiring of Canadian post-secondary students.”

No data was found and Miller’s office did not comment.

“The information you are seeking does not exist,” said the Labour Department.

“Right now we have nil response on the information you are requesting,” the Department of Immigration said in statement.

On Dec. 7, the minister told reporters: “I don’t think students are taking jobs away from other people, given the labour shortages that are happening in Canada.”

Back then, he estimated 80% of the 807,000 foreign students in Canada — which is about 646,000 students — were working more than 20 hours weekly.

Previously, foreign students had been limited to a 20-hour work week, but then cabinet temporarily suspended the cap on Nov. 15, 2022, and Miller extended it past a Dec. 31 expiry to April 30.

“There’s labour shortages across the country,” said Miller. “It is costly to be a student in Canada. My focus primarily is to make sure that the public policy that we have in place is one that reflects the ability of the student to actually do what they’re supposed to be doing, which is study without bankrupting themselves.”

The Immigration Department estimated 500,000 foreign students were working under the cap in 2022 and that lifting it increased those numbers by 29%.

Source: ‘Nil’ research done on impact of foreign students working unlimited hours: Report

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Rubin: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Well worth reading:

…

Are Jews “indigenous” or settler colonialists in Palestine? They are both. The Jewish people originated in this land, and after two thousand years of exile, they developed an ideology and a political rather than purely religious movement of “return.” But their historical memory was not shared by the land’s inhabitants. The historical memory of the Jewish people did not create the right or capacity to confiscate or occupy a single dunam of land against the will of its possessors. The historical memory of one people, however tenacious, creates no right to rule over another.

Israeli Jews are settler colonialists with a historical memory of indigenous origin. This includes the Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries. They were indigenous to the region but not to Palestine, except in their own historical memory. That historical memory distinguishes Israel from other settler colonial states. So does the fact that the nation founded through settler colonialism has no “mother country” to which its members might return, as the French did from Algeria. Today’s settlers in the West Bank and the Golan Heights could indeed return—their “mother country” is Israel—but the same is not true of the citizens of Israel as a whole. They cannot return to the scenes of the Holocaust or to the Arab and Muslim states that expelled them. Great Britain, and then the United States, played the role of mother country by conquering the land, facilitating its settlement, and arming the settlers, but they have assumed no responsibility for the fate of Jewish refugees—whether from Hitler, from the persecution of Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s, or from a future conflagration in Palestine.

Instead, the Zionist movement and the Jewish state succeeded in building a new nation that is now indigenous to the land—though to what parts of the land, and with exactly what rights, is the core of the dispute over whether Israel is an apartheid settler state. The question “does Israel have the right to exist?” could have been meaningfully debated before the state existed, but now the only answer is, “Israel exists.” As a member of the United Nations, it has the right to continue to exist and to exercise the right to self-defense against other states. According to the UN charter, it also has the right to defend its territorial integrity, but implementation of that right requires defining the borders of the State of Israel. This depends on a peace settlement recognizing Palestinian national rights. Only such a settlement can establish Israel’s security as a state.

Genesis is not destiny. Documenting the historical fact that Israel came into existence in part through Zionism’s collaboration with colonialism does not mean that the only solution is a “decolonization” that would destroy the state and expel its inhabitants. What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another. It is impossible to rewind and rerun history. But it is possible, indeed necessary, to assure a future where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. Both peoples must be able to participate in choosing the government that rules them. Palestinians and Israelis must live either in two sovereign, equal states, or in one state as individuals with equal rights. The international consensus (excluding the government of Israel) in favor of the former—and the apparent impossibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing a common sole polity—make the former the apparent choice….

Barnett R. Rubin is Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation. His books include Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror (2013) and Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict (2002). His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

Source: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

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McWhorter: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Since Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, it has become an article of faith among some of her supporters and other observers that she was targeted, criticized and essentially driven from the job largely because of her race. The idea is that the people who questioned her abilities and academic integrity — be they Harvard donors who found fault with her leadership after Oct. 7 or conservative activists who led an inquiry into plagiarism in her scholarly work — were marked and even motivated by animus toward a Black woman attaining such a degree of power and influence.

The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Gay’s resignation as “an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.” Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote that the attacks against Gay “have been unrelenting & the biases unmasked.” Harvard’s Corporation, or governing board, noted the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol.” And Gay herself, writing in The Times last week, referred to “tired racial stereotypes about Black talent,” and described herself as an “ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety” due to her status as “a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution.”

But I don’t think the notion that racism was substantially to blame for Claudine Gay’s trouble holds up.

As both Gay and Harvard note, she received openly racist hate mail. This is repulsive. But however awful it must have been for Gay to endure their abuse, those people did not force her resignation.

Nor does it seem that Gay was ousted on the basis of her race in the aftermath of her Dec. 5 testimony before Congress on the topic of antisemitism on campus. Of three university presidents who attended, only one resigned under duress shortly after the hearing, and she — Liz Magill of Penn — was white.

No, the charge that ultimately led to Gay’s resignation was plagiarism, of which more than 40 alleged examples were ultimately unearthed. And plagiarism and related academic charges have of course also brought down white people at universities many times. Ward Churchill was fired from the University of Colorado for academic misconduct, including plagiarism, in 2007 in the wake of his controversially assailing people working in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” The president of the University of South Carolina, Robert Caslen, resigned thanks to a plagiarism episode in 2021. And the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, resigned due to questions of data manipulation just last July.

For many, the central issue seems to be that Gay’s plagiarism would not have been uncovered at all were it not for the efforts of conservative activists, which is true. The question then is whether the people who led the charge to oust Gay from her job — principal among them the right-wing anti-critical race theory crusader Christopher Rufo and the billionaire financier and Harvard donor Bill Ackman — were acting out of racial animus, or even an opposition to Black advancement.

And here things get slightly more complicated. Rufo and Ackman are unabashedly opposed to what both perceive as an ongoing leftward drift at elite universities such as Harvard. And both are opposed to the D.E.I. — or “diversity, equity and inclusion” — programs that are increasingly prominent on campuses, within corporations, and elsewhere. According to Ackman, D.E.I. is “not about diversity” but rather is “a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed.” Rufo and Ackman both believed that, in accordance with the precepts of D.E.I., Gay had been appointed as Harvard president more for her skin color than for her professional qualifications.

To analyze this position as mere racism, though, is hasty. No one is trading in “stereotypes” of Black talent by asking why Gay was elevated to the presidency of Harvard given her relatively modest academic dossier and administrative experience. It was reasonable to wonder whether Gay was appointed more because she is a Black woman than because of what she had accomplished, and whether this approach truly fosters social justice. There was a time when the word for this was tokenism, and there is a risk that it only fuels the stereotypes D.E.I. advocates so revile.

To put it succinctly: Opposing D.E.I., in part or in whole, does not make one racist. We can agree that the legacy of racism requires addressing and yet disagree about how best to do it. Of course in the pure sense, to be opposed to “diversity,” opposed to “equity” and opposed to “inclusion” would fairly be called racism. But it is coy to pretend these dictionary meanings are what D.E.I. refers to in modern practice, which is a more specific philosophy.

D.E.I. programs today often insist that we alter traditional conceptions of merit, “decenter” whiteness to the point of elevating nonwhiteness as a qualification in itself, conceive of people as groups in balkanized opposition, demand that all faculty members declare fealty to this modus operandi regardless of their field or personal opinions, and harbor a rigidly intolerant attitude toward dissent. The experience last year of Tabia Lee, a Black woman who was fired from supervising the D.E.I. program at De Anza College in California for refusing to adhere to such tenets, is sadly illustrative of the new climate. (Like Ackman, she believes that what he calls the “oppressor/oppressed framework” of D.E.I. contributes to campus antisemitism by defining Jews as “oppressors.”)

D.E.I. advocates may see their worldview and modus operandi as so wise and just that opposition can only come from racists and the otherwise morally compromised. But this is shortsighted. One can be very committed to the advancement of Black people while also seeing a certain ominous and prosecutorial groupthink in much of what has come to operate under the D.E.I. label. Not to mention an unwitting condescension to Black people.

Try this thought experiment: Harvard appoints “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo to become the new president of Harvard. She comes equipped with the strongest D.E.I. credentials imaginable, but with a very slender academic record. Do you imagine that conservative activists would sit back contentedly, merely because she’s white?

Or take a non-hypothetical example: After a successful tenure as the president of Smith College, Ruth Simmons became the first Black woman president of an Ivy League School when she took over Brown in 2001. Yet I am aware of no conservative crusade against her during her decade-plus in that office — despite the fact that she led a yearslong campuswide examination of the school’s role in the slave trade.

The idea that a menacing right-wing mob sits ever in wait to take down a Black woman who achieves a position of power is a gripping narrative. But its connection to reality is — blissfully — approximate at best. It is facile to dismiss opposition to modern D.E.I. as old-school bigotry in a new guise. The lessons from what happened to Professor Gay are many. But cops-and-robbers thinking about racial victims and perpetrators will help answer few of them.

Source: Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , , , ,

African Migration to the U.S. Soars as Europe Cracks Down – The New York Times

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Have seen some other similar commentary from Black Americans as well as tension between Black immigrants and African Americans:

The young men from Guinea had decided it was time to leave their impoverished homeland in West Africa. But instead of seeking a new life in Europe, where so many African migrants have settled, they set out for what has become a far safer bet of late: the United States.

“Getting into the United States is certain compared to European countries, and so I came,” said Sekuba Keita, 30, who was at a migrant center in San Diego on a recent afternoon after an odyssey that took him by plane to Turkey, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua, then by land to the Mexico-U.S. border.

Mr. Keita, who spoke in French, was at a cellphone charging station at the center among dozens more Africans, from Angola, Mauritania, Senegal and elsewhere, who had made the same calculus.

While migrants from African nations still represent a small share of the people crossing the southern border, their numbers have been surging, as smuggling networks in the Americas open new markets and capitalize on intensifying anti-immigrant sentiment in some corners of Europe.

Historically, the number of migrants from Africa’s 54 countries has been so low that U.S. authorities classified them as “other,” a category that has grown exponentially, driven recently, officials say, by fast-rising numbers from the continent.

According to government data obtained by The Times, the number of Africans apprehended at the southern border jumped to 58,462 in the fiscal year 2023 from 13,406 in 2022. The top African countries in 2023 were Mauritania, at 15,263; Senegal, at 13,526; and Angola and Guinea, which each had more than 4,000.

Nonprofits that work on the border said that the trend has continued, with the absolute number and share of migrants from Africa climbing in recent months as potential destinations in Europe narrow.

“You have countries that are less and less welcoming,” said Camille Le Coz, a senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute Europe. “When new routes open up, people are going to migrate because economic opportunities at home are insufficient.”

…

The African migrants continue through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico until they arrive at the southern U.S. border. Between January and September, nearly 28,000 Africans passed through Honduras, a sixfold increase over the corresponding period in 2022, according to the Honduran government. Guinea, Senegal and Mauritania are among the top 10 countries of those migrants; only a couple dozen people from each of those countries traveled through Honduras in 2020….

Source: African Migration to the U.S. Soars as Europe Cracks Down – The New York Times

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What’s behind the dramatic shift in Canadian public opinion about immigration levels?

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

One thing to note multiple factors involved in housing availability/affordability, another to largely dismiss the impact of immigration-driven population growth. Still in the denial stage…:

In June 2023, Canada’s population reached 40 million. For the first time in history, the population grew by more than a million (2.7 per cent) in a single year. Temporary and permanent migration accounted for 96 per cent of this population growth. 

Over the past few decades, Canadians have been more positive than negative in their attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. In 2019, Canada was ranked the most accepting country for immigrants (in a survey of 145 countries) on Gallup’s Migrant Acceptance Index. 

Over the last few years, Environics public opinion data also indicated Canadians felt very positively about immigrants and immigration levels. 

Something changed in 2023.

A million newcomers in two years

A few months after reaching this population milestone, the federal government released its new Immigration Levels Plan to welcome 485,000 permanent residents in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025 and 2026. 

This announcement came on the heels of an Environics public opinion survey revealing a significant increase in the number of Canadians who believe the country accepts too many immigrants. That marks a dramatic reversal from a year ago, when support for immigration levels stood at an all-time high. 

Canadians are still more likely to disagree (51 per cent) than agree (44 per cent) that immigration levels are too high, but the gap between these views has shrunk over the past year, from 42 percentage points to just seven. That’s the biggest one-year change in opinion on this question since it was first asked by Environics in 1977. 

Rising concerns about the number of arrivals are evident across Canada, but are most widely expressed in Ontario and British Columbia

Environics has been surveying Canadians about immigration on a regular basis since 1977. The latest survey of more than 2,000 Canadians was conducted in September 2023 in partnership with the Century Initiative, a non-profit lobbying and charity group.

The survey was conducted to ensure representation by region, age, gender and educational attainment.

Apart from rising public concerns about immigration levels, there has been no corresponding change in how Canadians feel about immigrants themselves in terms of how they’re integrating and what they contribute to Canadian society. 

The public is much more likely to say that newcomers make their own communities a better place than a worse one.

Housing crisis concerns

Importantly, the belief that immigration levels are too high is largely driven by perceptions that newcomers may be contributing to the housing crisis in terms of availability and affordability. 

As researchers who study attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, we believe it is critical to pay attention to this shift.

There is a large body of research examining how perceived threat/competition predicts attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. 

This research shows that negative attitudes toward immigrants can develop when situational factors — for example, housing shortages, inflationary pressures and a rise in anti-immigration ideologies — combine to create perceptions of group competition.

Perceived competition may be rooted in real or imagined national economic challenges, as well as beliefs about access to housing, employment and other resources.

In September 2023, when Environics conducted its latest survey, there was a lot of media coverage about the housing crisis, including the scapegoating of international students. It’s possible such coverage may have hardened some Canadians’ attitudes toward immigration levels.

In reality, Canada’s housing shortage was fuelled for decades by myriad factors, including municipal zoning laws, developers’ special interests and public policy on housing. As other scholars have argued, curbing migration is not a solution to this complex issue, nor is it moral. 

Attitudes towards immigrants may change

Policymakers and community leaders should pay close attention to public attitudes toward immigration levels as they strive to build a diversified and robust immigration system and create welcoming communities for immigrants. 

The latest research demonstrates the public still feels positively toward immigrants and their many contributions to communities and Canadian society. However, there seems to be growing concerns about Canada’s capacity to effectively resettle immigrants, in part due to concerns that newcomers may be contributing to the housing crisis. 

If Canadians continue to blame immigrants for the housing crisis, their attitudes toward immigrants themselves — as opposed to immigration levels — may harden. How Canadians feel about immigration levels may also impact the type and level of supports immigrants can access as they resettle, whether they experience discrimination in the housing and labour marketsand whether they’re warmly welcomed by their communities. 

Leah Hamilton, Vice Dean, Research & Community Relations, & Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Faculty of Business & Communication Studies, Mount Royal University

Source: What’s behind the dramatic shift in Canadian public opinion about immigration levels?

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