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

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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

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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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Conford: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

2024/01/08 Leave a comment

One of the best commentaries I have seen, thoughtful and balanced:

… For years, the right-wing in Israel – and Hamas in their way – have promulgated the notion that the peace process was an illusion, a mirage. But what events have shown is that the delusion, the Fata Morgana, was that there could ever be normality without finding a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the issue. Polls back in 1993 – before a cruel wave of Hamas suicide bombings and the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin undermined belief in the possibility – had support for a peace treaty among both Palestinians and Israelis running above 65 per cent.

Since then, the far right in Israel and Hamas have shared the same goal: to put a halt to any possibility of the peaceful division of the land into mutually recognized stable states of Israel and Palestine. Even in the past few weeks, Mr. Netanyahu has boasted how he has stopped a Palestinian state from coming into existence in the past and how he will also in the future, arguing that the Hamas attack shows why he is right to do so.

It is exactly this thinking which has brought us to where we are now.

The sole way to escape the cycle of violence is to clearheadedly renounce all the maximalist and eliminationist fantasies and the dehumanizing caricatures that have led, and will continue to lead, to the horrifying shedding of the blood of thousands of men, women and children….

M.G. Conford is the writer and director of the documentaries Through The Eyes Of Enemies, Not On Any Map, and Fragments of Jerusalem. He is an associate professor of film at Toronto Metropolitan University

Source: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

Filed under Antisemitism, foreign policy, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Ukraine-Russia war: Putin #citizenship decree violates children’s rights, Ukraine says – BBC

2024/01/08 Leave a comment

Of note and yes it does:

Ukraine has condemned a decree signed by President Putin making it possible to confer Russian citizenship on Ukrainian children moved to Russia.

Last March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Putin over Russia’s policy of forced child deportations.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry called the decree illegal.

However, Russia insists it is moving the children out of harm’s way.

On 4 January Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a citizenship decree expediting Russian citizenship to foreigners and stateless people.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry singled out the passage saying that orphaned Ukrainian children or those deprived of parental guardianship can be fast-tracked to Russian citizenship by way of a presidential decision, or after a request by the institution holding them.

The decree states that a citizenship application for such a child can be submitted by their legal guardian or the head of a Russian organisation responsible for the child.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry sees this as Russia’s attempt to solve its own demographic crisis, describing it as a violation of Ukrainian and international laws and children’s rights.

The decree is yet more evidence of Russia’s policy of forced assimilation of Ukrainian children, and crimes against Ukraine in general, the ministry added.

Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, says Moscow is granting citizenship to the children so that they are not regarded as Ukrainians who have been transferred to Russia.

The Ukrainian authorities have identified over 19,000 Ukrainian children who have been deported to Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Only 387 children have been brought back so far, according to the Ukrainian national database Children of war.

In November 2023, the BBC’s Panorama TV programme revealed that a political ally of Mr Putin adopted a child seized from a Ukrainian children’s home.

Sergey Mironov, the 70-year-old leader of a Russian political party, is named on the adoption record of a two-year-old girl who was taken in 2022 by a woman he is now married to, according to documents seen by Panorama.

In March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr Putin for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. The ICC said he was responsible for for unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.

Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, was hit with the same charges. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said children could not be “treated as spoils of war” and that it was possible Putin could stand trial.

Source: Ukraine-Russia war: Putin citizenship decree violates children’s rights, Ukraine says – BBC

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House: How Mass Immigration Hurts Black Americans – The Daily Beast

2024/01/08 Leave a comment

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

…First, the CBC [Congressional Black Congress] should push for inclusive standards for Black labor in skilled industries that attract disproportionate concentrations of immigrant workers. It might propose language that mirrors President Biden’s March 2022 executive order 14005 stating that the “Future is Made in All of America by All of America’s Workers.”

The CBC might offer similar language in the upcoming debates on immigration legislation—specifically, to prioritize the hiring and training of underrepresented American workers in civil construction. It would reinforce the equity provisions established by Congress in the infrastructure and clean energy laws.

The construction and manufacturing industries will receive a jump-start from the $500 billion Inflation Reduction Act, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and complementary investments from private companies. It will pay to reconstruct highways, bridges and tunnels, weatherize public buildings, install electric charging stations, construct electric battery plants and electric vehicle factories, and develop wind and solar power plants.

The projects will require the hiring and training of thousands of skilled workers, many without college degrees. Yet, Black labor historically has been excluded in civil construction. Today, as a consequence, the racial demographic in the construction industry is 60 percent white, 30 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent Black American, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In addition, sanctuary cities like New York are receiving large allocations of federal infrastructure funds. The city’s construction industry employed 374,000 people in 2020—and 53 percent were immigrants. By contrast, the unemployment rate of Black male workers was higher than any other ethnic group.

Second, the CBC should propose that sanctuary cities seeking bailouts from Washington be required to give the local population first dibs on facilities and services. The failure of authorities in such cities to prioritize their native underserved populations creates a dynamic of “taking from Peter to feed Paul” that is abhorrent.

Congress should require sanctuary cities to prioritize the local population for provisions such as homeless shelters, affordable housing units, emergency room and mental health services, education outreach, legal services, and food programs, among others. The populations from the border should have access to older facilities, if room is available.

Third, the CBC should call on the Biden administration to raise seed money for a reparations fund with the same urgency it has done for immigrants. Harris is campaigning on her success in raising $4 billion to help migrating immigrants in Central America. Why not utilize her fundraising prowess towards a development bank for the descendants of slavery and Jim Crow?

Finally, the CBC should demand that immigrants be required to learn about America’s struggle against racism and colorism. The colorism system of subtle discrimination based on fair complexions can be deeply rooted in the culture and practices of people from countries with colonial pasts. Black Americans should not be expected to endure the petty slights of color hierarchy with every new surge of immigration.

In closing, the CBC has an urgent responsibility to defend the needs of Black labor in the pending debates on border security and immigration reform. It would seem to be in the interest of both parties to hear them out.

Roger House is an associate professor of American studies at Emerson College in Boston. His commentary on Black politics and cultural history have been published in leading venues. He is the author of Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy and South End Shout: Boston’s Forgotten Music Scene in the Jazz Age…

Source: How Mass Immigration Hurts Black Americans – The Daily Beast

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