Focus Canada: Public support for immigration falls sharply amid affordability concerns

2023/10/31 Leave a comment

Yet another poll showing a decline in support for current high levels of immigration over the past year given the impact on housing, in particular.

Public support for immigration has fallen sharply over the past year as Canadians increasingly tie affordability and housing concerns to a historic influx of newcomers, according to survey results published on Monday.

Forty-four per cent of Canadians think immigration levels are too high, up from 27 per cent last year, according to a survey conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research, in partnership with the Century Initiative, an organization that advocates for Canada’s population to hit 100 million by 2100. This was the largest change in sentiment between surveys that Environics has observed in four-plus decades of polling on the topic.

Just a year ago, public support for immigration was stronger than ever, Environics found. But since then, Canadians have been consumed by a number of economic worries, including high inflation, rising interest payments and a worsening housing crisis, which is pushing up resale prices and rents across the country.

At the same time, Canada is growing rapidly. Over the 12 months through June, the population expanded by around 1.2 million people, bringing the total number of residents to 40.1 million. At 3 per cent, this was the largest 12-month increase since 1957; international migration accounted for almost the entirety of the expansion.

This surge has led to a spirited debate about immigration and Canada’s ability to absorb so many people so quickly. The results from Environics are similar to other recent surveys, including a Nanos poll for The Globe and Mail that found more than half of Canadians want the country to accept fewer immigrants than Ottawa’s plan.

“We see these results as a clarion call for action,” said Lisa Lalande, the chief executive officer of the Century Initiative. “You cannot address demographic decline through immigration without having these corresponding investments” in housing and other areas.

The survey was published just before the federal government unveils its next three-year plan for immigration this week, covering 2024 to 2026. Last year, Ottawa said it was aiming to admit 500,000 permanent residents annually by 2025, part of a steady increase since the Liberal Party came to power in 2015.

As the Liberals struggle with weaker support in the polls, the Century Initiative is hoping the government doesn’t water down its immigration plans. “Now is not the time to pull back on immigration,” Ms. Lalande said.

Of late, the population increase is mostly driven by the arrival of temporary residents, such as international students and workers, many of whom wish to settle permanently in Canada. There are no limits on the issuance of temporary visas, although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last week that his government was considering a cap.

Under Mr. Trudeau, the Liberals have made high immigration a cornerstone of their economic agenda. They argue that not only will immigration lead to stronger growth, but it will also help fill jobs as Canada gets progressively older.

David Williams, vice-president of policy at the Business Council of British Columbia, said this is a naive view of how economies work. He pointed to a stagnation in gross domestic product per capita as a sign that average living standards were not improving, despite the high intake of newcomers. Furthermore, there is ample research that indicates immigration has little effect – positive or negative – on per-capita output or average wages.

“Canada’s immigration policy has really become disconnected from the academic evidence,” Mr. Williams said. “There seems to be a view in Ottawa that ever-increasing immigration levels is a panacea for all of the structural problems in Canada’s economy.”

Rupa Banerjee, a Canada Research Chair in immigration and economics at Toronto Metropolitan University, said the country has struggled for a long time to build homes in sufficient quantities. “People are getting this wrong impression that the immigration situation is causing the housing crisis,” she said.

The Environics survey found the largest declines in support for immigration in British Columbia and Ontario. There was a sharp divide by political party: Nearly two-thirds of Conservative Party supporters agreed with the statement that “there is too much immigration to Canada,” compared with 29 per cent of Liberals and 21 per cent of New Democratic Party backers.

Still, the results suggest that Canadians see the upsides of immigration. Around three-quarters of people agreed that immigration has a positive impact on the economy, down from 85 per cent last year.

The survey was based on telephone interviews conducted with 2,002 Canadians between Sept. 4 and 17. The results are accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points in 19 out of 20 samples.

The Century Initiative was co-founded by Mark Wiseman, chair of Alberta Investment Management Corp., and Dominic Barton, the former global managing partner of consulting giant McKinsey & Co. Mr. Barton also served as chair of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which recommended to the Trudeau government in 2016 that it raise its annual intake of permanent residents by 50 per cent over five years.

“We do not believe in growth at all costs,” Ms. Lalande said. “That growth must absolutely be accompanied by investments in infrastructure, both physical and social.”

Dr. Banerjee said the federal government could do a better job of communicating its plans for how these newcomers will integrate into Canada. Otherwise, she said, people are left with the impression that there is no plan.

“For several years now, I’ve been slightly concerned that we shouldn’t take this high support for immigration for granted,” she said. “It’s very precarious, to be honest.”

Source: Focus Canada: Public support for immigration falls sharply amid affordability concerns

Interesting to contrast Canadian and foreign-born along with party. Striking that more immigrants feel levels too high compared to Canadian born. Party differences less surprising:

Overall, there is too much immigration to Canada: Canadian-born 43 percent, Foreign-born 47 percent, Liberals 29 percent, CPC 64 percent, NDP 21 percent

Many people claiming to be refugees are not real refugees: Canadian-born 33 percent, Foreign-born 45 percent, Liberals 29 percent, CPC 49 percent, NDP 21 percent

There are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values: Canadian-born 48 percent, Foreign-born 46 percent, Liberals 38 percent, CPC 65 percent, NDP 27 percent

Overall, immigration has a positive impact on the economy of Canada: Canadian-born 72 percent, Foreign-born 81 percent, Liberals 85 percent, CPC 64 percent, NDP 89 percent

The other question that is interesting to look at the breakdown between Canadian and foreign-born pertains to those immigrants considered to be high priority. Not surprisingly, immigrants place higher priority on family immigration and international students but a lower priority on refugees. Both give priority to higher skilled compared to lower skilled:

People with good education and skills who move to Canada permanently: High priority: Canadian-born: 66 percent, Foreign-born: 67 percent

Family members of current residents of Canada, including immigrants: Canadian-born: 38 percent, Foreign-born: 43 percent

Refugees who are fleeing conflict or persecution in their own countries: Canadian-born: 58 percent, Foreign-born: 47 percent

Workers with specialized skills that are in high demand in Canada: Canadian-born: 76 percent, Foreign-born: 80 percent

Students who come to study in Canadian colleges and universities: Canadian-born: 29 percent, Foreign-born: 45 percent

Lower skilled workers who are hired to come to Canada for a short time to take on hard-to-fill jobs: Canadian-born: 34 percent, Foreign-born: 33 percent

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Yakabuski: The Liberals’ immigration blueprint is unsound, and will hinder the economy it seeks to help

2023/10/30 1 Comment

Good, long and informative read on the fallacies of the government’s immigration policies and programs. Good quotes by Mikal Skuterud, Pierre Fortin and yours truly:

On the afternoon of June 16, Canada’s population surpassed the 40-million mark.

In a country long lamented by some of its leading thinkers as a low-density also-ran stunted by a lack of bodies to fill its vast expanses and dynamize its sleepy cities, it was to be expected that hitting this milestone would be considered a big deal by some.

…

Source: Opinion: The Liberals’ immigration blueprint is unsound, and will … – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

Globe editorial: How Ottawa ignored its own warning and made Canada’s refugee crisis even worse

2023/10/30 Leave a comment

Good policy advice, not listened to.

And it appears from a variety of public opinion research that this ill-advised policy change is likely one of the changes contributing to declining public support for immigration:

There is a thicket of bureaucratic language in the eight-page briefing document from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada on the upside and downside of waiving temporary visitor visa requirements to get rid of a massive backlog of applications.

…

Source: How Ottawa ignored its own warning and made Canada’s refugee crisis even worse

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Miller to provinces: If you can’t fix international student rackets then feds will

2023/10/30 Leave a comment

Some stronger messaging from the feds:

The federal government is prepared to crack down on dubious post-secondary institutions that recruit international students if provinces aren’t up to the task, Immigration Minister Marc Miller warned Friday.

Miller made the comments as he announced new rules to curb fraud and “bad actors” in the international student program, following an investigation this summer into more than 100 cases involving fake admission letters.

Provinces are responsible for accrediting schools that can accept international students, which include both public universities and colleges as well as private institutions.

In his final months in the role former immigration minister Sean Fraser raised concerns about the number of private colleges in strip malls and other venues that rely on international student tuition, but in some cases offer a meagre education in return.

Several advocacy groups, including the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change have highlighted cases of student exploitation by some of those intuitions.

Miller said Friday the international school program has created an ecosystem that is “rife with perverse incentives,” and that is very lucrative for the institutions and for provinces that have underfunded their post-secondary schools,

“The federal government is coming forward and opening its arms to our provincial partners, territorial partners, to make sure we all do our jobs properly,” Miller said at a press conference at Sheraton College in Brampton, Ont. Friday.

“If that job can’t be done, the federal government is prepared to do it.”

The immigration department counted 800,000 active study permits at the end of 2022, a 170 per cent increase over the last decade.

“What we are seeing in the ecosystem is one that has been chasing after short term gain, without looking at the long term pain. And we need to reverse that trend. But it will take time,” he said.

Ontario in particular has “challenges” when it comes to the accreditation of post-secondary intuitions, but it is not the only one. Miller did not elaborate on what those specific challenges are.

The Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities did not answer specific questions, but said in a statement the provincial government will “again ask for a meeting with the new federal minister to discuss the planned changes once they’ve been communicated with ministry.”

Sarom Rho, an organizer with the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, said the “fly-by-night colleges” are sometimes partnered with public institutions. But even those can be exploitative, she said.

She said she is working with a group of students who paid tuition up front to one of those intuitions, but were asked for more money just weeks before class enrolment began.

“The school said, ‘Well, if you don’t have the money, you can go back home, earn some and come back,'” Rho said Friday.

She said the federal government must take up the accreditation of colleges and universities that accept international students.

“They are aware of the substandard nature of these institutions, these fly-by-night private colleges,” she said.

Also on Friday Miller announced new rules in the federal government’s jurisdiction to address fraud and “bad actors” in the international student program.

Miller’s department plans to set up a system to recognize post-secondary schools that have higher standards for services, supports and outcomes for international students in time for the next fall semester.

The standards could include adequate access to housing, mental health services, and a lower ratio of international to Canadian students, Miller said, though the criteria hasn’t been finalized.

Details about how exactly recognized schools and institutions would benefit under the new system will be released later, the minister said. As an example, he said applicants for those schools would be prioritized when it comes to processing their study permits.

“Our goal here is to punish the bad actors to make sure that they are held accountable, and reward the good actors who provide adequate outcomes for the success of international students,” the minister said.

The details of that system will be important, Rho said, especially since students often fear speaking out because of their precarious status in Canada.

“Migrant student workers should not be caught in this … carrot and stick system,” she said.

“What will happen to those who do go to the schools that are ‘bad actors?’ They will also be punished. So instead, what they need is protections and equal rights.”

The department is also looking to combat fraud by verifying international students’ acceptance letters from Colleges and Universities.

The extra verification is a reaction to a scheme that dates back to 2017, which saw immigration agents issue fake acceptance letters to get international students into Canada.

The department launched a task force in June to investigate cases associated with the racket. Of the 103 cases reviewed so far, roughly 40 per cent of students appeared to be in on the scheme, while the rest were victims of it.

The task force is still investigating another 182 cases.

“The use of fraudulent admissions letters has been a major concern for my department this year and continues to pose a serious threat to the integrity of our student program,” Miller said, adding that international students are not to blame.

The new rules come as a welcome development to the National Association of Career Colleges, the group’s CEO said in a statement Friday.

“We welcome the opportunity to work with the federal government to improve our international student system by building greater trust and security, supporting Canadian communities, and ensuring that Canada’s immigration programs are student-centred,” the CEO, Michael Sangster said in a statement.

Source: Miller to provinces: If you can’t fix international student rackets then feds will

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , , ,

A GOP plan for the census would revive Trump’s failed push for a citizenship question

2023/10/30 1 Comment

Of note (the usual suspects):

A coalition of conservative groups is preparing for a chance to shape the country’s next set of census results in case a Republican president returns to the White House in 2025.

Their playbook includes reviving a failed push for a citizenship question and other Trump-era moves that threaten the accuracy of the 2030 national head count.

The plan also calls for aligning the mission of the government agency in charge of the next tally of the country’s residents with “conservative principles.” Many census watchers, including a former top Trump administration official, tell NPR they find this position particularly alarming.

The policy proposals — led by The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank — are part of a broader “Project 2025” plan for dismantling aspects of the U.S. government. “For too long, conservative presidents’ agendas have been stymied by liberal bureaucrats who put their own agenda over that of the President, whom they serve,” Paul Dans, a former Trump appointee who is Project 2025’s director, claims in a statement.

Since the plan’s release in April, most public attention has focused on its climate policy and calls to expand the president’s power over federal agencies. But 2025 marks a pivotal year for one particular and often-neglected agency — the Census Bureau.

The federal government’s largest statistical agency is about to start a critical planning period for the upcoming once-a-decade count. Decisions expected to be made during the next administration, including what census questions to ask and how, will have long-lasting effects on the statistics used to divvy up congressional seats and Electoral College votes, redraw voting districts for every level of government, inform policymaking and research, and guide more than $2.8 trillion a year in federal money for public services across the country.

If former President Donald Trump or another Republican candidate is elected in 2024, many census watchers are bracing for a potential sequel to the years of interference that muddled the last tally in 2020.

Why do these conservative groups want a citizenship question?

It’s not clear exactly why these conservative groups want the next census to ask for the U.S. citizenship status of every person living in every household in the United States.

Research by the bureau has shown that including the question “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” on forms is likely to discourage many households with Latino or Asian American residents from getting counted in official population totals.

The bureau’s annual American Community Survey already produces estimates of U.S. citizens, which are used to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.

And a future Republican administration could, as the Trump administration tried to, seek citizenship data from an alternate source — government records. The agency’s researchers said those would be more accurate and less costly to use than people’s self-reported answers. (President Biden stopped that work in 2021.)

Still, Thomas Gilman — a former Chrysler executive who, during the Trump administration, served as chief financial officer for the bureau’s parent agency, the Commerce Department — writes in the Project 2025’s policy guide: “Any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”

Gilman declined NPR’s interview requests through a Heritage Foundation spokesperson and did not respond to written questions. The Heritage Foundation also did not make any representatives available to be interviewed for this report.

During the Trump administration, a citizenship question was part of a secret strategy to alter a key set of census numbers, the 2020 release of a presidential memo and, later, internal documentsconfirmed. Those numbers are used every 10 years to reapportion each state’s share of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College.

According to the 14th Amendment, the congressional apportionment numbers must include the “whole number of persons in each state.” But Trump officials wanted to make the unprecedented move of excluding unauthorized immigrants.

In public, however, the Trump administration claimed to want a citizenship question to better enforce the Voting Rights Act’s protections against the discrimination of racial and language minorities — a justification the Supreme Court found appeared to be “contrived.”

In court, groups that sued over the proposed question pointed to another reason that remains a potential motivating factor for a future GOP administration — neighborhood-block level citizenship data that could be used to draw voting districts that a Republican redistricting mastermind said would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”

That kind of data would be key to a legal dispute that the Supreme Court left unresolved in 2016: whether it is legal for states to redraw legislative districts based on the number of citizens old enough to vote rather than of all residents in an area.

Would Trump, if reelected, try again for a citizenship question?

It’s an open question whether Trump, if reelected, would make another go for a citizenship question. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Hermann Habermann — a former deputy director of the bureau who testified in court against the Trump administration’s citizenship question push — sees echoes of that failed effort embedded within the Project 2025 plan. It repeats a misleading Trump-era talking point that appears to reference the United Nations Statistics Division’s census recommendations: “Asking a citizenship question is considered best practice even by the United Nations.”

“I don’t think they’ve read properly what it says there,” says Habermann about how Project 2025 interprets recommendations he helped write while serving as the director of the U.N. Statistics Division. “It doesn’t say thou shalt do this. It recommends that citizenship be one of the areas that is looked at. The U.S. does look at citizenship at the block-group level through the American Community Survey. So we do it. We just don’t do it at the block level. And so the question always became, why is that necessary?”

How a Republican administration answers that question could be the focus of another round of lawsuits, says Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented some of the groups that sued the Trump administration over its citizenship question push.

“I’ve never heard articulated a justification for the citizenship question that is not fairly obviously a veil to disguise racial and partisan intent,” Saenz says.

Still, in the Biden years, GOP calls to add a census citizenship question and alter the congressional apportionment numbers have not gone away. In July, House Republicans released a draft funding bill that would have banned the bureau from using the money to include unauthorized immigrants in future counts used to divide up House seats.

These conservative groups also have a “conservative agenda” for the Census Bureau

While the Project 2025 plan also outlines garden-variety presidential transition moves such as reviewing budgets and eliminating duplicative census operations, there are other proposals that many census watchers find troubling.

They call for more political appointee positions at the bureau, which has largely been run by career civil servants.

“Strong political leadership is needed to increase efficiency and align the Census Bureau’s mission with conservative principles,” Gilman, the former Commerce Department CFO, writes, adding there’s a need to have “both committed political appointees and like-minded career employees” in place to “execute a conservative agenda” as soon as the next Republican president takes office.

During its final months in office, the Trump administration installed four additional political appointees without any past experience at the agency or obvious qualifications for joining the highest ranks. In a 2020 email, the bureau’s top civil servant raised concerns that the appointees showed an “unusually” high level of “engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses.” After an investigation, an official from the Government Accountability Office told Congress that the appointees ultimately “did not have undue influence into the operations of the census.” Their exact responsibilities, however, remain murky.

Habermann, the former deputy director at the bureau, sees any similar return of this Trump-era move as “the first step to having a set of statistics which the people, the nation will not trust.”

“Some of us would believe that the function of statistics is, if you will, the lifeblood of a democracy,” Habermann adds. “The idea of statistics agencies is to produce reliable, unbiased, trustworthy information that the nation can use in making its decisions and in understanding itself. They want the statistics agency to be a mouthpiece, if you will, for the Republican administration.”

Their plan includes delaying potential changes to how the census asks about race and ethnicity

The plan also criticizes an ongoing review by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget of how the census and federal government surveys ask about people’s racial and ethnic identities. Ahead of the 2020 census, Trump officials stalled that process, which has been driven by years of research by the bureau into how to better reflect the country’s ever-shifting diversity.

The bureau has found that many people of Middle Eastern or North African descent do not identify as white, which is how the federal government officially categorizes them. The agency has also been tracking the rise of a catch-all checkbox known as “Some other race,” now the second-largest racial category in the U.S. after “White.” It’s mainly the result of the difficulty many Latinos face when answering a census question about their race that does not include a checkbox for “Hispanic” or “Latino,” which the government considers to be an ethnicity that can be of any race.

Based on their testing, the bureau’s researchers have recommendedcombining the questions about race and ethnicity into one and adding a checkbox for “Middle Eastern or North African.” OMB is expected to announce decisions on those proposals by summer 2024.

Project 2025’s plan, however, calls for a Republican administration to “take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes” because of “concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

Meeta Anand, senior program director of census and data equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, says any attempts to modify or roll back changes would be a movement away from accuracy and “truly understanding who we are as a nation.”

“If you were to have a stop and say, ‘Let’s review the questions again. Let’s conduct another research test,’ we would need to see appropriations for the Census Bureau to be able to do that. They would need to mount another test all over again. And there’s no way it would be done in time for 2030,” Anand adds. “Census advocates were trying to get revisions in place for the 2020 census, and that just never happened.”

The plan’s emphasis on a “conservative” approach to the census is raising concerns, including from a former top Trump official

Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House oversight subcommittee for the census who served on former President Barack Obama’s presidential transition team on census issues, sees the plan’s call to get rid of at least one of the bureau’s committees of outside advisers as a way to reduce transparency about how the agency produces the country’s statistics.

“This really is sort of undermining all of the principles and practices that federal statistical agencies should be following. And that is extremely troubling,” says Lowenthal, who is now a census consultant.

For Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, one of the few vocal census advocates in Congress, Project 2025’s proposals run counter to his attempts to shield the bureau from further interference through new legislation.

“This is a clear partisan effort to force an undercount of communities of color. It’s unlawful and unconstitutional,” Schatz says in a statement.

The plan’s call to carry out a “conservative agenda” at the bureau is also catching public criticism from a less likely source: former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.The former top Trump administration official pushed for a citizenship question while overseeing the bureau, and an investigation by the Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General found that Ross “misrepresented the full rationale” for adding a citizenship question when testifying before Congress in 2018. During the Trump administration, the findings were presented to the Justice Department, which declined to prosecute Ross.

“I think that the job of the census is to provide data. If the elected officials want to interpret that one way or another, well, that’s OK. That’s their prerogative. I don’t think the census should try to shade things in any political direction,” said Ross, who declined to answer questions about a citizenship question but said he believes it is “a valid question.”

On whether there should be more political appointees at the bureau, Ross said it’s not a question he has “really thought about” but noted: “To the degree that the implication was that the census should be more politicized, I do not agree with that.”

Ross said that until NPR contacted him, he was not aware of Project 2025’s census proposals written by Gilman, who served under Ross as the Commerce Department’s CFO.

“I’m frankly a little bit surprised that he regards himself as an expert on what actually happens in terms of the census. I don’t recall him being that involved in the whole process,” Ross said.

For Lowenthal, the census consultant who is a longtime watcher of the national head count, Project 2025’s census recommendations mark a notable shift in the right wing’s approach.

“I have not seen anything remotely like these proposals in this document coming out of previous Republican administrations,” Lowenthal says. “I think that the author or authors of this document clearly understand that if you control the production and flow of information, you can control how people view their government, the actions their government is taking or not taking and their view of the world around them. These proposals should raise alarm bells, I think, for anyone worried about the future.”

Source: A GOP plan for the census would revive Trump’s failed push for a citizenship question

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Stateless in Germany have hardly any rights – DW (English)

2023/10/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

For people like Christiana Bukalo, 29, born in Germany but stateless, everyday life can become a challenge at any time: Opening a bank account, booking a hotel, getting married, pursuing a career as a civil servant — you need an ID for everything. But which state will issue you a passport if you don’t have any nationality at all?

“You don’t have freedom to travel because a travel document is required. You have difficulties when it comes to getting a job,” Bukalo told DW. “I know people who couldn’t finish their studies because they would have had to show a birth certificate to take the exam at the end. Also, stateless people don’t have the right to vote, even if they’ve always lived here.”

Bukalo is the daughter of West African parents whose nationality could not be verified by German authorities. She is one of a growing number of stateless people living in Germany — currently some 126,000 people. Many of them are Palestinians, Kurds, or former citizens of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia — states that no longer exist.

Bukalo learned from an early age what it means to have no nationality. “Even as a child, you get the message that you don’t belong,” she said. “That you’re not supposed to stay here, but at the same time you can’t leave either. It’s very banal things that turn into a problem: Student exchanges, skiing trips abroad, none of that is possible. And of course, you have a great sense of shame, because you’re asked to explain something that has never been explained to you.”

‘Statefree’: A voice for stateless people

Two years ago, Bukalo decided to give stateless people a voice and founded the human rights organization “Statefree” in Munich. The goal was not only to inform the wider public, and to bring together those affected, but also to make demands on politicians.

“In Germany, we have an extreme reproduction of statelessness, as no way has been found to deal with stateless children who are born here,” she said. “We demand that stateless children born in Germany have a right to German citizenship.”

In Germany, it is the parentage that counts, not the place of birth. If the parents are stateless, so is their child. As a result, a third of all stateless people in Germany are children, though Bukalo also knows 65-year-olds who were born in Germany and are still stateless.

Statefree had high hopes for the new citizenship law proposed by the current center-left government of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP), but the issue of statelessness has not appeared in any draft law so far.

A spokesperson for the German Interior Ministry said in response to a DW question: “The concerns of stateless people are already sufficiently taken into account in the citizenship law. In addition, the general regulations for acquiring German citizenship apply to stateless people, since stateless people are also foreigners in the sense of citizenship law.”

Europe mulls deportations, not integration

The reform of the new citizenship law, which includes rapid naturalizations and incentives for skilled immigrants, comes at a time when the debate on migration is also at the top of Germany’s political agenda.

Bukalo is not surprised that her campaign is not making much progress at present. “I explain this to myself on the one hand with the politicians’ lack of knowledge about statelessness and on the other hand with the general political situation: The shift to the right in Europe,” she said. “Germany’s more progressive parties are having a hard time standing up for supposedly ‘progressive’ issues that have long been part of the status quo in countries like Spain or Portugal.”

No uniform legal procedures

Judith Beyer, professor of ethnology at Konstanz University, has been researching statelessness since she came across the topic seven years ago on a research trip to Myanmar, where 700,000 members of the Rohingya Muslim minority were fleeing persecution. They now live in Bangladesh but are considered stateless under international law.

Beyer works as an expert witness in a UK court when stateless people are in asylum proceedings. “Statelessness is a problem that is really not yet in the public eye in Germany,” she told DW.

Take the judiciary, for example: While in the UK experts like Beyer examine the life stories of stateless persons, and their expertise is incorporated into the final verdict on their status, in Germany the decision often rests solely with the judges.

There are also no standardized procedures in Germany for determining statelessness — it is up to municipal authorities, which means people in Munich sometimes get different decisions than they would in Hamburg or Cologne.

“The bottom line is that it depends on the individual who makes the decision,” Beyer said. “That’s what many stateless people keep complaining about: there is no legal certainty. Quite often it’s not malicious intent at all, but simply a lack of knowledge about how to deal with stateless people.”

Around 30,000 people in Germany like Bukalo have been officially recognized as stateless, which means they can apply for naturalization after six years of residency. But almost 100,000 individuals are categorized as persons with unclear nationality: Refugees who have no documents to prove their identity, such as the Rohingya who were expatriated from Bangladesh.

Being stateless is a violation of human rights, says SPD politician Sawsan Chebli. She was born in Berlin to stateless Palestinian parents and was not naturalized until she was 15. The ethnologist Beyer agrees: Stateless people are effectively denied the right to have any rights.

Source: Stateless in Germany have hardly any rights – DW (English)

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

Le Bloc compte forcer un débat sur les cibles d’immigration à Ottawa

2023/10/28 Leave a comment

Long overdue, but Parliament likely not the best place for a meaningful discussion and debate:

Le Bloc québécois va utiliser sa journée d’opposition de mardi prochain pour forcer la tenue d’un débat, en Chambre, sur la nécessité ou non d’Ottawa de consulter le Québec et les autres provinces avant de fixer ses cibles d’immigration.

La formation politique entend mettre de l’avant une motion afin que les Communes « demande[nt] au gouvernement de revoir ses cibles d’immigration dès 2024 après consultation du Québec, des provinces et des territoires en fonction de leur capacité d’accueil, notamment en matière de logement, de soins de santé, d’éducation, de francisation et d’infrastructures de transports, le tout dans l’objectif d’une immigration réussie », selon le libellé qu’a lu aux journalistes le chef bloquiste, Yves-François Blanchet, jeudi.

Il a affirmé en mêlée de presse qu’il estime que la motion, « sur le principe », « devrait pouvoir rallier un peu tout le monde ».

« On n’a pas voulu être trop contraignants », a-t-il déclaré, disant vouloir « forcer une réflexion de bonne foi ».

Geler les cibles d’immigration ?

Le Canada a pour cible d’accueillir 500 000 nouveaux résidents permanents par an partout au pays d’ici 2025. Selon un reportage publié par Radio-Canada, le Conseil des ministres du gouvernement Trudeau a des discussions sur la possibilité de stabiliser, voire de revoir à la baisse cet objectif.

Si l’option du plafonnement en venait à être préconisée, cela signifierait qu’une pause surviendrait quant à la hausse des cibles d’immigration qui s’est maintenue au courant des dernières années.

La Presse canadienne n’a pas été en mesure de corroborer les informations rapportées par le diffuseur public, qui a précisé s’être entretenu avec une demi-douzaine d’élus libéraux.

Appelé à commenter ce reportage, M. Blanchet a dit vouloir se garder une certaine réserve considérant qu’aucune décision n’a été prise par le Conseil des ministres.

Il a néanmoins soutenu que l’idée de stabiliser ou réduire, si elle se concrétise, n’équivaudrait « pas [à] un recul au sens politique ».

« C’est un recul au sens mathématique […] et juste arrêter de monter est probablement une politique intéressante. Geler, ce serait une amélioration. Réduire serait probablement une amélioration en attendant que le Québec soit capable d’avoir mis en place des mesures et des choix en termes de nombres et de manières qui soient propres au Québec », a dit le chef du Bloc québécois.

« Pro-immigration » et Québécois

Habituellement, le débat sur la motion d’opposition commence le jour même de son dépôt, prévu mardi prochain. Le vote, toutefois, a en temps normal lieu à une date ultérieure.

Le Bloc québécois n’a pas attendu pour questionner le gouvernement sur sa réceptivité quant à l’idée de sa motion à être déposée. Dès jeudi, il a utilisé plusieurs de ses interventions à la période des questions pour interpeller les libéraux.

Le ministre de l’Immigration, Marc Miller, a soutenu qu’il est « pro-immigration » en plus d’être Québécois. « On a besoin d’immigrants au pays, on a besoin de construire des maisons. Ça nous prend 100 000 emplois dans la construction. Ça ne va pas nécessairement venir d’ici. Ça va prendre de l’immigration », a-t-il répondu.

Il a, du même souffle, invité le Bloc québécois, « s’ils sont contre l’immigration », à le dire « high and clear » (haut et fort).

Source: Le Bloc compte forcer un débat sur les cibles d’immigration à Ottawa

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Sean Speer: The Left has a self-policing problem

2023/10/28 Leave a comment

Yep:

A key feature of a political movement’s health is its ability to self-police against ideological excesses or reactionary forms of politics. It’s not easy to do. There are powerful incentives that tilt against it, including the risk of alienating prospective supporters, harming personal relationships, and granting political ammunition to one’s opponents. There are also practical limits in a distributive democracy where there are rarely points of authority that can plausibly claim to speak for a political movement as a whole. 

Yet just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that there isn’t some onus—particularly among elite actors—to call out and, where necessary, isolate radicalism within their ranks. 

At its apogee in the second half of the twentieth century, National Reviewmagazine played this role on the American Right. Its founder, William F. Buckley Jr., famously wrote the John Birch Society out of the mainstream conservative movement that he was assiduously building. He similarly published a scathing review of Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, by one of the magazine’s editors, Whittaker Chambers, that signaled to the world that Rand’s objectivism didn’t have a home in it either.

In the ensuing decades, the American Right has ceased to self-police. At this point, not only are its political leaders merely trying to stay ahead of their most radical voices, but within the adjacent world of conservative ideas and thought, it can at times be hard to distinguish between the elites and the fringe. 

Canadian conservatism has generally had less of a reactionary problem. There are doubtless various factors including the Westminster model’s emphasis on top-down leadership and party discipline, the country’s more moderate political culture, and its lower racial salience. 

The Hub has nevertheless, in the two-and-a-half-years since its launch, taken seriously a sense of responsibility for calling out conservative excesses including the reactionary parts of the movement that disposed Jason Kenney as Alberta’s United Conservative Party leader, the conspiratorial impulsesbehind some of the conservative criticism of the World Economic Forum, and the growing trend of online ideas and voices radicalizing young men. 

We know that these instances have antagonized some conservatives who believe that it’s a tactical mistake to cede any ground to the Left. They’ve probably cost us some number of donors and subscribers. We also recognize that there are inherent limits to our ability to neutralize some of these excesses. No one is asking our permission before tweeting or driving their transport truck onto Parliament Hill for that matter. But we still think it’s ultimately healthy for The Hub as an institution and conservatism as a whole to speak out when we feel it’s called for. 

This notion of self-policing is something that I’ve thought a lot about in recent years. I wonder what I would have done if I had been a Republican in 2015 and 2016. I don’t know. It’s easy to look the other way or rationalize bad ideas on one’s own side. 

But the lesson of the past several years in the United States is that even if there are downsides for those who are prepared to be self-critical, there’s not a lot of upside for those who aren’t. Ask Republican congressional leaders like Kevin McCarthy or Jim Jordan. Do their choices in hindsight look better or shrewder than Liz Cheney’s? The answer is self-evidently no. 

I share this context because the reaction of the Canadian Left to Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel has revealed a self-policing problem. It’s become clear that the movement’s intellectual and political leaders have permitted radical ideas and voices to occupy an outsized place in today’s progressivism. The consequences have alarmingly played themselves out in recent weeks on university campuses, the streets of the country’s major cities, and even inside our mainstream politics. Put bluntly: the Left has an antisemitism problem. 

Even that however doesn’t seem to fully capture the magnitude and nature of the problem. It’s not merely the fringe expressions of outright Jew-hatred that we’ve witnessed. It’s actually something far deeper and more mainstream that may be the bigger cause for concern.

The Left’s strong attachment to radical ideas such as “decolonisation”, “oppressor versus oppressed” frameworks, and the so-called “right to resist” has created an intellectual context in which acts of terrorism and violence can find affirmation and support. 

There are different factors that have contributed to the problem. One is that progressives have so convinced themselves that the rise of the so-called “far right” represents an existential threat that they’ve been prepared to make alliances with radical political figures and organizations (“no enemies to the Left”) or opted to overlook the rise of radicalism within their movement. To the extent that they may acknowledge it, there’s been a tendency to minimize these intellectual trends as merely a form of campus politics or faculty lounge theorizing. 

Another is that the problem on the Left is essentially the opposite of the one on the Right. For conservatives, self-policing is mainly about conservative elites trying to constrain the excesses of the right-wing masses. For progressives, the excesses are among left-wing elites themselves. Radicalism finds its strongest expression among university faculty, law school students, and the panoply of non-profit organizations that comprise the modern Left. It’s not obvious therefore who’s supposed to be doing the policing. 

But it needs to happen. North American scenes of anti-Jewish rallies and full-throated defences of Hamas’s horrific terrorist attacks rooted in left-wing theories of anti-colonialism and anti-settler resistance are signs that radicalism has spilled out from university seminar rooms into the streets. 

These protests and rallies—including ones that have targeted Jewish restaurants and cultural centres—have exposed these problems for everyone to see. They’ve forced us to confront the interrelationship between these Manichean ideas about identity and power promulgated by left-wing voices and antisemitism. This should lead to a reassessment of the public good case for subsidizing various forms of critical theory education and scholarship which often seem like a thin veneer of academic rigour for what is otherwise a set of retrograde intellectual propositions about race, gender, sexuality, and society. 

But that’s probably a necessary yet insufficient response to what has played out in recent weeks. This is in large part a progressivism problem that progressives themselves must address. Progressive elites who lament the rise of the far right need to reckon with the rise of the far left and their own role in galvanizing it. Self-policing is hard—especially when it requires serious introspection—but it’s necessary. It’s time for the Left to police its own side. 

Source: Sean Speer: The Left has a self-policing problem

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Kheiriddin: Pro-Palestine protesters ignore history — and their own causes pay the price

2023/10/28 Leave a comment

Valid questions for those who openly support Hamas and its actions, as distinct from those who support a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel:

By now, the world has been treated to countless demonstrations in support of Palestinian self-determination, most of which conveniently whitewash the Oct. 7 atrocities committed by Hamas as a justifiable “resistance” against Israel. The latest was a protest on Thursday by students in Toronto.

This mirrors another walkout a couple years ago, in which Toronto high school students were photographed holding a sign reading: “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free.” As a parent, that one felt the most disturbing.

Do these young people understand what that slogan means? Do they know who they are “allied” with by chanting those words? I suspect not. Kids know what they are fed on TikTok and Instagram, where disinformation is rampant and history, both recent and ancient, is conveniently ignored. And they aren’t the only ones who ignore it.

How is it that feminists can cheer a “resistance” that raped women so badly, they were found with their pelvises shattered, and that paraded half-naked, half-dead young women the streets? Perhaps because they conveniently ignore that violence against women is also endemic in Gaza: in 2019, the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics reported that 41 per cent of women there had experienced domestic violence.

How can LGBTQ+ groups shout and scream for a “free Palestine” when earlier this month, a gay Palestinian man was beheaded in Hebron, his head and torso dumped near his family’s home, for the “crime” of being LGBTQ+? How can they support an organization like Hamas, which killed one of its own commanders in 2016 after accusing him of having gay sex?

How can Black Lives Matter (BLM) post an image on Twitter of a paragliding terrorist with the caption, “I stand with Palestine”? (BLM subsequently took it down, but stated that, “We must stand unwaveringly on the side of the oppressed.”)

How is it that BLM turns a blind eye to Hamas’s Black slave trafficking in the early 2010s to fund its terror operations? Why don’t they mention that up to 800,000 Africans were trafficked to the Middle East during the late 19th and early 20th centuries — and that slavery continued to be legal in much of the Mideast as late as the 1960s?

Why? Because to concede any of these things would spoil the left-wing narrative that binds these “allies” together: oppression is solely the purview of white, heterosexual, colonizing westerners, and any group that is “west-adjacent,” such as the Jews. It also undermines their belief that any means, including terror, is justified in order to resist it.

What we are witnessing is intersectionality gone amok. It’s also a story that is over 200 years old, again buried in the mists of time.

The year was 1789, and the event was the French Revolution. The Jacobins and their allies revolted against the French ruling class, including nobility, clergy and anyone who smelled of privilege, on behalf of the peasants who were starving, miserable and oppressed.

But they didn’t just revolt. They launched the Reign of Terror, formally declaring in the French National Assembly that, “Terror is the order of the day.”

In the words of their leader, Maximilien Robespierre, “Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie (homeland).”

For the next five years, the French terror crew gave Hamas a run for their money. They held public executions by guillotine, filling the streets with blood. They slaughtered entire towns. When they ran out of guillotines, they used cannons.

In the worst district, the Vendée, they slaughtered thousands of people, including women and children. They held mass drownings in the Loire River, where if victims managed to free their hands from shackles, troops in boats were there to hack off their arms. The latter event was even immortalized by artist Pierre-Gabriel Berthaul as one of the “great moments” of the revolution.

By the time the Reign of Terror ended in July 1794, 17,000 people had been officially executed, and as many as 10,000 had died in prison or without trial.

The left has copied this playbook consistently since then. The Bolsheviks deployed the Red Terror in Russia between 1918 and 1922; Stalin presided over the genocide of an estimated seven-million people in the ’30s and ’40s; Mao Zedong’s government sent between 500,000 and two-million Chinese to their deaths during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. All justified in the name of overthrowing the “oppressors” to liberate the oppressed.

Today’s “allies” ignore this history. To them, the end justifies the means — even if those means contradict every social-justice principle they claim to espouse.

The irony, of course, is that the end they seek would not be the paradise they envision. It would not be a state where women, LGBTQ+ and Black lives are respected. It would not be one of equality and human rights.

A Palestinian state under Hamas would be no different than any other murderous theocratic or ideological regime, where the government uses terror and oppression to keep people in line. And where you can bet that kids wouldn’t be allowed to skip school and hold protests on the street.

Source: Pro-Palestine protesters ignore history — and their own causes pay the price

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Immigration Minister set to combat international student fraud 

2023/10/28 Leave a comment

Overdue baby steps:

Immigration Minister Marc Miller is set to unveil on Friday a package of reforms designed to combat fraud in international student admissions and stop bad actors from preying on those students for financial gain, and to fast-track study-permit applications at colleges and universities that meet high standards.

Among the new measures will be a multilayered authentication system for ensuring letters of acceptance from universities and colleges are genuine. A foreign student needs such a letter to apply for a study permit, an immigration document that allows them to enter the country. Fake letters have been used to obtain permits fraudulently.

…

Source: Immigration Minister set to combat international student fraud

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →