Macron Suffers Surprise Setback Over Immigration in France

2023/12/13 Leave a comment

Of note (another country having difficulties passing immigration legislation):

President Emmanuel Macron of France suffered an unexpected setback on Monday as lawmakers brought his government’s immigration overhaul bill to a screeching halt, casting fresh doubts on his ability to get key legislation through Parliament.

The bill, which tries to strike a balance between cracking down on illegal immigration and extending work opportunities for migrants with needed skills, had been in the making for over a year. The government struggled to find a mix of measures that would pass muster in the lower house, the National Assembly, where Mr. Macron’s centrist party and its allies do not hold an absolute majority.

But those hopes were dashed on Monday when the lower house passed a motion to reject the bill without further discussion. The motion by the Green party, one of several left-wing opposition groups in Parliament, received 270 votes in favor and 265 against. Parliamentary debate that was expected to begin Monday and last two weeks was immediately cut short.

Immigration has long been a fixation of French politics. The bill would be the 29th immigration and asylum law in four decades in France, a country that is often described by politicians and commentators, particularly on the right, as fending off an out-of-control influx of migrants.

The rejection was a particularly stinging blow for Gérald Darmanin, Mr. Macron’s tough-talking interior minister, who had staked a lot of political capital on getting the bill passed without resorting to a constitutional tool known as the 49.3. The government used that tool, which allows certain bills to be passed without a vote, earlier this year to ram through Mr. Macron’s unpopular pension reform, a method that was ultimately successful but bruising.

Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, said after the vote that Mr. Macron’s centrist alliance had “forgotten” how to govern without the 49.3.

Source: Macron Suffers Surprise Setback Over Immigration in France

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Ottawa backs listing Black and LGBTQ workers under Canada’s workplace equity laws: source

2023/12/13 Leave a comment

Of note pending the official announcement. IMO, the addition of LGBTQ addresses the major gap in the Act as Black people are covered under visible minorities and desegregated data provides the needed granularity.

Will see the degree to which this is a priority for the government once legislation is tabled:

The federal government says it supports listing Black and LGBTQ people among groups facing systemic workplace barriers under the Employment Equity Act, CBC News has learned.

The Liberal government is backing the legislative change after a task force report recommended the move.

A source told CBC News earlier on Monday that Ottawa “broadly supports” that recommendation and others from a task force that reviewed the legislation. The government made an initial commitment Monday to modernize the act, the source said.

Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan and the task force chair, McGill University law professor Adelle Blackett, will present the committee’s findings outside the House of Commons foyer on Monday.

The stated purpose of the 1986 Employment Equity Act is to knock down employment barriers marginalized communities face. It identifies four groups that face additional barriers in the workplace: women, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities and members of visible minorities.

Decades after the law’s passage, it is “startling to see how unrepresentative some employment remains across Canada,” the report states.

The task force recommends that Black workers comprise a separate group under the Employment Equity Act, instead of falling under the label of “visible minority.” Statistics Canada says 1.5 million people in Canada reported being Black in 2021. The Black population accounts for 16 per cent of the racialized population and 4.3 per cent of the overall population.

“Many Canadians may only recently have learned that slavery existed in Canada,” reads a section of the task force’s report, obtained by CBC News before its release. “The case for a distinct Employment Equity Act category specifically for people of African descent is rooted in part in the legacies of slavery.

“The history of segregation — in service provision, housing, schooling and employment — is also not well known in Canada.”

The task force cites Census Canada data which shows that Black workers tend to be overqualified for their jobs, work in low-level occupations and earn less money compared to non-racialized Canadians of the third generation or later.

The task force also recommended that LGBTQ workers comprise a new group under the law. One million people in Canada identify as LGBTQ and they account for four per cent of the total population.

A ‘disturbingly recent history’ of persecution

The task force report says LGBTQ workers have endured a “disturbingly recent history” of persecution. They were demoted or forced to resign for engaging in same-sex relationships, says the report.

“The Government of Canada has acknowledged and apologized for the fact that throughout the Cold War Era, from the 1950s through to the early 1990s in Canada, federal government employees faced a systematic campaign literally to purge them from the federal public service,” the report says.

The task force also is proposing replacing the terms “Aboriginal Peoples” and “members of visible minorities” with “Indigenous Peoples” and “racialized people” in the legislation.

The senior government source told CBC News that the “first step” the government will undertake is further consultation with affected communities, unions and employers on how best to implement the task force recommendations. Then, the Liberals will introduce legislation.

The task force report notes that women remain a group facing barriers that require removal. But it cites claims that progress with workplace equity has tended to benefit white women more than Indigenous or other racialized women.

“Early employment equity implementation has tended to focus on including women as a category without paying sufficient attention to diversity within the category of women,” the report says. “The need to approach the category of women in a disaggregated and intersectional manner was stated poignantly by many of the stakeholders who appeared before our task force.”

Ottawa announced the employment equity task force review in 2021. Its 12 members consulted Canadians, employer and worker organizations, civil society groups, experts and public sector representatives on modernizing the employment equity legislation that applies to all federally regulated workplaces.

More than 1.3 million people are employed in federally regulated industries and workplaces — about six per cent of Canada’s workforce.

Among other recommendations, the task force says parliamentary employees and public sector workers who operate abroad should be covered by the Equity Act.

Penalties too low, report says

Since the murder of George Floyd in U.S. police custody in 2020, the use of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) training and practices has increased in workplaces. But the report said EDI should not eliminate the need for robust legislation.

“Voluntary measures alone will not work to bring equity to Canadian workplaces,” it said.

The report says that penalties for violating the act are too low and are rarely levied.

“Our task force was informed that only four employers have ever received a notice of assessment of a monetary penalty,” the report says. “We learned that the last penalty was issued in 1991, which is also when the largest penalty was issued — $3,000.00.

“Someone needs to be making sure that reasonable progress is actually occurring, with a view to achieving and sustaining employment equity that is properly resourced and effectively structured to avoid incentivizing non-compliance. Employment equity must not be sacrificed to wishful thinking.”

The task force calls on the federal government to establish an independent equity commissioner who would report to Parliament.

The commissioner would take over tasks from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, whose “tiny” employment equity division can’t keep up with the oversight work, the report says.

The commissioner should have a separate budget, guaranteed in legislation, that reflects the number of employers in federally regulated sectors.

“It is time to break out of the idea that equity work should be done on a nickel and a dime,” the report says. “If we are committed to championing employment equity in this global moment of rising intolerance, if we understand how critical substantive equality is to our workplaces, our economy as a whole and our identity as Canadians, we must show it.”

Source: Ottawa backs listing Black and LGBTQ workers under Canada’s workplace equity laws: source

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Ex-BoC boss David Dodge: We need economic strategy focused on investment, not consumption

2023/12/12 Leave a comment

As always, thoughtful analysis, expressed clearly and without ambiguity, nailing the main failing of the government’s immigration approach in terms of improving productivity:

When I ask Mr. Dodge if Canadian businesses habitually rely too heavily on hiring when they need to increase their capacity, rather than investing in more machinery, equipment and technology, he concurs. What’s more, he believes Ottawa’s pursuit of historically high immigration levels is exacerbating this problem – “filling every hole that’s there, rather than allowing the market to work.”

That not only provides a disincentive to invest and innovate, he suggests, but it props up our least-productive companies.

“The last thing we want is a bunch of low-productivity businesses hanging on because we provide them cheap labour. That’s not the way we’re going to raise national income.”

Source: Ex-BoC boss David Dodge: We need economic strategy focused on investment, not consumption

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Clark: Population growth is the housing issue politicians can’t keep ducking

2023/12/12 Leave a comment

Indeed:

All of that is not a reason for Canada to turn its back on immigration, and its many benefits. The problem was an abject failure to plan.

But it does mean that in the short term, there is a policy lever governments can pull now to cool the housing market. That is temporarily slowing the growth of temporary residents – capping the number of new students and new temporary workers. That could prevent another year of high rent increases on new leases.

Avoiding the issue – avoiding an unavoidable fact about the housing crisis – will only pile misery onto past failures.

Source: Population growth is the housing issue politicians can’t keep ducking

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Dispatch from the Front Line: We need an antidote, not more poison in a blue bottle

2023/12/12 Leave a comment

Good commentary from the Line (Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney). If you haven’t subscribed already, you may wish to consider doing so given the relevance and overall balance in their discussion of various issues:

No politician should need to be told this to have a bone-deep understanding of it. A politician’s personal feelings about any of these groups or events is irrelevant; they understand that once elected, they represent more than just themselves. These rituals are necessary to social cohesion. 

Likewise, no politician should need to be told the symbolism of not showing up for one of these groups. Of cleaving one religious minority from the herd. 

We cannot remove one without damaging the polity as a whole. This politician doesn’t show up for the Jews; the next one won’t show up for the Muslims. The one after that makes a public stink about Pride; the fourth scores points with his base by abstaining from Christian events, and so on. And so on. When politicians shirk their duty to represent the polity as whole, they instead become instruments of power for specific groups within that polity. 

Where does that lead us? 

When we lose a shared national identity that recognizes us primarily as individuals and citizens, what’s left is democratic tribalism. We revert to more ancient forms of identity — race and religion. Democracy becomes a matter of managing the interests of competing power blocs built on immutable characteristics like skin colour and on irresolvable sectarian divides. Absent a shared identity, it’s all just will to power, and the crass use of violence, bureaucracy, and capital to dominate other sub-groups. 

This is the outcome that white nationalists openly seek. They’ve done the math, and they believe that if white people understand themselves primarily as White People, then this majority tribe will begin to operate in the interests of a narrow ethnic identity rather than a shared national one. 

Ironically, this is also the outcome sought by many identitarian leftists as well, who seem to believe that will to power is an accurate reflection of our democracy right now. We at The Line disagree; friends, our politics gets so much worse if we continue down this path. This will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we allow it to be. 

Both the extreme right and the extreme left understand that cleaving Jews from the polity is an effective way to shatter the experiment of postmodern nationhood. Of course it’s the Jews. It’s always the Jews. A perpetual religious minority in all nations on earth save one, the Jews have served as scapegoats for internal grievance for centuries. 

This is why growing antisemitism is such an alarming signal of trouble historically. It’s a sign of a society that has fallen into a state of deep spiritual and moral confusion. That red warning light is blinking bright and fast on the Canadian dashboard right now. 

This is not the outcome that your Line editors want for ourselves or our children. We believe in liberal democracy; we believe in the story of Canada, and the ability of this concept of a nation to bind disparate peoples. You know us mostly through our work, but if you knew us personally as well, you’d know that we love and are loved by people of different ethnicities and faiths — something that may not have been possible a few generations ago, and for which we are deeply grateful is possible today. If we backslide, we might lose those gains, and our kids may have a harder time enjoying the kind of lives we both grew up thinking were normal.

It’s not too late to pull ourselves from this brink, as long as enough of us understand that we’re upon it. 

Source: Dispatch from the Front Line: We need an antidote, not more poison in a blue bottle

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Australia to halve immigration intake, toughen English test for students – BBC.com

2023/12/12 Leave a comment

Given that the Canadian immigration system is similarly broken – lack of integrated planning bt levels and impacts, ongoing service delivery issues, focus on pop growth rather than per capita GDP etc – Canada might wish to consider a more dramatic fundamental review and changes than announced to date:

The Australian government says it will halve the migration intake within two years in an attempt to fix the country’s “broken” immigration system.

It aims to slash the annual intake to 250,000 – roughly in line with pre-pandemic levels – by June 2025.

Visa rules for international students and low-skilled workers will also be tightened under the new plan.

Migration has climbed to record levels in Australia, adding pressure to housing and infrastructure woes.

But there remains a shortage of skilled workers, and the country struggles to attract them.

Unveiling a new 10-year immigration strategy at a media briefing on Monday, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the migration system had been left “in tatters” by the previous government.

A review earlier this year found the system was “badly broken” – unnecessarily complex, slow and inefficient – and in need of “major reform”.

A record 510,000 people came to Australia in the year to June 2023, but the minister said her government would “bring numbers back under control” and reduce the annual migration intake by around 50%.

Among the new measures are tougher minimum English-language requirements for international students, and more scrutiny of those applying for a second visa – they must prove that any further study would advance their academic aspirations or their careers. There are some 650,000 foreign students in Australia, with many of them on their second visa, according to official data.

The visa pathways for migrants with “specialist” or “essential” skills – like highly-skilled tech workers or care workers – have also been improved to offer better prospects of permanent residency.

The new policies will attract more of the workers Australia needs and help reduce the risk of exploitation for those who live, work and study in the country, Ms O’Neil said.

Opposition migration spokesman Dan Tehan has said that the government was too slow to adjust migration policies designed to help Australia recover from the pandemic.

“The horse has bolted when it comes to migration and the government not only cannot catch it but cannot find it,” he said at the weekend.

The Labor government’s popularity has dwindled since its election last year, and in recent weeks it has been under pressure from some quarters to temporarily reduce migration to help ease Australia’s housing crisis.

However others, like the Business Council of Australia, have said migrants are being used as a scapegoat for a lack of investment in affordable housing and decades of poor housing policy.

Source: Australia to halve immigration intake, toughen English test for students – BBC.com

For a more in-depth but more gentle take:

The government says these changes are the “biggest reforms in a generation”. It’s been reported the reforms will “dramatically cut”“ the immigration intake. But don’t be fooled by the hyperbole.

Instead of thinking of the strategy as a complete overhaul, the reforms are a number of long overdue remedies dealing with migrant worker exploitation, misuse of international student visas and an overly complex and inefficient bureaucracy.

The intake cuts are overstated and will largely be the result of a natural evening out of migration patterns in the post-pandemic world. Even the Department of Immigration acknowledges the spike in arrivals is “temporary”, a phenomenon labelled as “the catch-up effect” by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. If the current circumstances are only transitory, one wonders why the government is so keen to cut numbers.

It is important to look at how the department plans to reform immigration policy.

The policy document is 100 pages with much detail on the minutiae of immigration procedures. The broad areas covered are revising temporary skilled migration, cracking down on alleged rorting of the international education system, replacing annual migration plans with longer-term forecasting and getting the states and territories, which bear most of the resettling costs, more involved.

Source: The government is bringing immigration back to ‘normal levels’ but cuts are not as dramatic as they seem – The Conversation

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COVID-19 Immigration Effects – October 2023 update

2023/12/12 Leave a comment

Regular monthly data update.

Highlights:

Percentage of former temporary residents transitioning to permanent residency partially bouncing back after September (from 32 to 39 percent, 2023 January to August average 65 percent). Year to date: 404,000 of which 212,000 are former temporary residents.

Temporary residents (IMP): Year to date 757,000 compared to 484,000 in comparable 2022 period

Temporary residents (TFWP): Year to date 172,000 compared to 124,000 in comparable 2022 period

Asylum claimants continue to grow significantly, reflecting easing of visa requirements and other factors: Year to date 117,000 compared to 70,000 in comparable 2022 period. Unclear whether visa exemption for Mexico will remain tenable given sharp increase and rumblings in US border states regarding increasing arrivals from Canada: Year to date 22,000 compared to 12,000 in comparable 2022 period.

The number of new citizens remains strong, largely driven by virtual ceremonies being the default option (almost 90 percent of new citizens participated in virtual ceremonies). Year to date: 317,000 largely the same as the comparable 2022 period. 

Highlights on slide 3.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with , ,

Dowd: The Ivy League Flunks Out

2023/12/11 Leave a comment

Good sharp commentary:

I was still kvelling about earning my Ivy League degree when the glow of that parchment dimmed.

On Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania put on a pathetic display on Capitol Hill when they were asked if calling for genocide against Jews counted as harassment.

It depends, they all said. Penn’s Elizabeth Magill offered a chilling bit of legalese. “It is a context-dependent decision,” she told Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from upstate New York. 

Not since Bill Clinton was asked about having sex with Monica Lewinsky and replied, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” has there been such parsing.

It’s hard to be on Stefanik’s side, given that she epitomizes the grotesque transformation of the Republican Party to an insane Trump cult, but she was right to pin down the prevaricating presidents.

Citing a Washington Free Beacon report, Stefanik noted in The Wall Street Journal that Harvard has cautioned undergraduates that “cisheterosexism” and “fatphobia” helped perpetuate violence and that “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as abuse.

When Stefanik asked Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying, Gay said it could, “depending on the context.”

I felt the same disgust with the Catholic Church sex scandal, seeing church leaders who were charged with teaching us right from wrong not knowing right from wrong. University presidents should also know right from wrong. As left-wing virulence toward Jews collides with right-wing virulence, these academics not only didn’t show off their brains, they didn’t show their hearts. (Magill resigned on Saturday.)

“I think the inability of these individuals to articulate a simple, straightforward answer to what should have been the easiest question in the world was mind-boggling,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “It’s like a hurricane of hate in the last few months. You ask yourself, how is this happening? Now we know.” He added, “The truth is that these presidents are not committed to free speech. They’re committed to favored speech. They selectively enforce the codes of conduct when it works for them or their friends in the faculty lounge.”

Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties, a humanistic journal, has an essay on antisemitism in the next issue, echoing Greenblatt with a complaint about the “selective empathy” that made kaffiyehs “cool.”

“I think this is still America,” Wieseltier said, “but what is so wounding and intolerable is how we went from spending four years intensely and rightly focusing on one class of victims in society, and now are prepared to make light of the troubles that another class of victims are experiencing.

“The culture on campuses is a culture of oppressors and oppressed. Israel is now Goliath and no longer David — though God knows it has mortal enemies capable of the most astonishing savagery. The Jews were long ago stricken from the rolls of the oppressed because they are seen as white and privileged. We are a culture which loves victims and worships victimization and gives great moral authority to victims, but we don’t treat all victims equally.”

The U.N. women’s rights agency and social justice groups grossly delayed condemning barbaric sexual attacks on women by Hamas during its Oct. 7 massacre.

Wieseltier also put blame on the authoritarian Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “One of the reasons for this war is the Israelis’ decades-long neglect and humiliation of the Palestinians,” he said. “They thought it would never come back and bite them. Netanyahu plays right into the left’s false analysis of Israel as a colonial settler state.”

As James Carville told Bill Maher: “How the hell am I still looking at Netanyahu’s stupid, crooked, ignorant, negligent face? This guy’s still in power after the greatest intelligence failure at least since 9/11?”

Roger Cohen wrote in The Times that Netanyahu let Hamas grow stronger while taking a “‘kick the can down the road’ approach” on a two-state solution. As the Palestinian issue vanished from the global agenda, Palestinian fury grew.

That is no excuse for what Hamas did on Oct. 7, but Oct. 7 is also no excuse for Israel’s relentless bombing in Gaza.

I think this is still America. But I don’t understand why I have to keep making the case on matters that should be self-evident.

Why should I have to make the case that a man who tried to overthrow the government should not be president again?

Why should I have to make the case that we can’t abandon Ukraine to the evil Vladimir Putin?

Why should I have to make the case that a young woman — whose life and future ability to bear children are at risk — should not be getting persecuted about an abortion by a shady Texas attorney general?

Why should I have to make the case that antisemitism is abhorrent?

Source: The Ivy League Flunks Out

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

The Hamas-Israel War Obliterated the Campus Microaggression – The Daily Beast

2023/12/11 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries from a free speech advocate following the disastrous testimony to congress by Ivy League university presidents:

…

A culture of free speech can lead to hurt feelings or a sense of unsafety. But it is not a “tool of the oppressor,” it is a righteous principle—like due process—that earns its strength by being applied to both the minority and majority, the popular and the unpopular, the righteous and the wrong.

Colleges can choose to do away with their overbroad speech codes and systems of discipline that lack due process or consider intent, nuance, and context. Or they can keep them, and defer to the feelings of the offended.

But what is clear is that you can’t have it both ways. For the authority to police speech to hold any legitimacy, it must be applied universally, and not excluded when the aggrieved are pro-Israel Jews. (Once again, there’s a word for that.)

I’ve argued this relentlessly over the years, but principled support for free speech is always under siege by the side that thinks the other has gone “too far”—so it’s worth repeating again: Do not demand fallible authorities to be the arbiters of acceptable discourse, because you will not always be favored by the authorities.

Many on the progressive left are shocked to find themselves and their allies labeled as unacceptably “problematic.” It’s a situation they could not previously conceive—but they should have. Real free speech advocates have been warning of this very situation the entire time.

The only way to ensure that your own ideas won’t be shut down when they are unpopular is to support—and demand—a culture of free speech, which does not include the right not to be offended.

Source: The Hamas-Israel War Obliterated the Campus Microaggression – The Daily Beast

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How mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis – The Spectator

2023/12/11 Leave a comment

Similar but harsher debate to that in Canada with of course UK particularities, particularly with respect to social housing:

…In England, to put this in context, it means that last year we only built around one-third of the homes that we now need to build because of immigration. We should be able to talk about this openly. We should be able to talk about how immigration is fuelling the housing crisis, driving up house prices and making many homes unaffordable for British families and British workers.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what researchers at the University of Oxford recently said:

‘ … there is some evidence that migration is likely to have increased house prices in the UK. For example, the Migration Advisory Committee (2018) found that a 1-percentage point increase in the UK’s population due to migration increased house prices by 1% … Their finding was broadly consistent with other modelling by the former MHCLG (2018) and the Office for Budget Responsibility (Auterson, 2014).’

In fact, there’s more evidence than people like to think. In Spain, for example, a recent study found that a 1-point increase in the rate of immigration increases average house sale prices by 3.3 per cent (as did this one). And, while in Britain, one (older) study suggested immigration lowers house prices, this was only because more affluent locals ended up selling their homes and leaving their communities altogether, no doubt alarmed at what was unfolding.

Record immigration has not only been driving up house prices; it’s also been pushing up rents in the private rental market, something that becomes immediately obvious to anybody who has had to attend a viewing with some two dozen other applicants.

The fact that, in 2022, net migration is estimated to have added at least half a million people to England’s already absurd rental market is something most pro-immigration lobbyists, MPs, academics, and columnists, who usually live in their own homes, made possible by privileged parents, are unlikely to ever encounter.

…Mass immigration is also piling enormous pressure on Britain’s social housing sector, which used to be reserved for impoverished British nationals who had been paying into the collective pot for years and who had long roots in their local communities.

Today, however, things are very different. Nationally, as the Migration Observatory points out, between 2019 and 2021, 16 per cent of UK-born people were living in social housing compared to 17 per cent of the foreign-born. That figure then climbs to 19 per cent among people born in Pakistan or elsewhere in South Asia, and then to a striking 30 per cent among the rising number of typically low-skilled migrants who were born in sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom have also been shown to be a net fiscal cost, rather than benefit, to the British economy.

In London, almost half (48 per cent) of all social housing is now occupied by households that are headed by somebody who was not born in Britain. The most common households are headed by somebody who was born in Africa (18.4 per cent), the Middle East and Asia (11.7 per cent), or elsewhere in Europe (8.7 per cent).

…All of which raises a number of important questions that you would ordinarily expect to be addressed and answered by our political leaders: Why are so many young British people, workers, and their families forced to pay half their monthly income if not more to live out in the periphery, in places like London’s Zone 4 or beyond, sitting on expensive, packed and dirty commuter trains while wondering why they and other Brits are having to subsidise newcomers, who are frequently economically inactive?

Source: How mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis – The Spectator

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