In Reversal Because of A.I., Office Jobs Are Now More at Risk

2023/08/25 Leave a comment

Implications for governments are immense, given the large number of clerical and administrative jobs. However, given government inertia, bureaucracy, unions and other interests, will likely lag private sector significantly, to the likely detriment of citizen service:

The American workers who have had their careers upended by automation in recent decades have largely been less educated, especially men working in manufacturing.

But the new kind of automation — artificial intelligence systems called large language models, like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — is changing that. These tools can rapidly process and synthesize information and generate new content. The jobs most exposed to automation now are office jobs, those that require more cognitive skills, creativity and high levels of education. The workers affected are likelier to be highly paid, and slightly likelier to be women, a variety of research has found.

“It’s surprised most people, including me,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I., who had predicted that creativity and tech skills would insulate people from the effects of automation. “To be brutally honest, we had a hierarchy of things that technology could do, and we felt comfortable saying things like creative work, professional work, emotional intelligence would be hard for machines to ever do. Now that’s all been upended.”

A range of new research has analyzed the tasks of American workers, using the Labor Department’s O*Net database, and hypothesized which of them large language models could do. It has found these models could significantly help with tasks in one-fifth to one-quarter of occupations. In a majority of jobs, the models could do some of the tasks, found the analyses, including from Pew Research Center and Goldman Sachs.

For now, the models still sometimes produce incorrect information, and are more likely to assist workers than replace them, said Pamela Mishkin and Tyna Eloundou, researchers at OpenAI, the company and research lab behind ChatGPT. They did a similar study, analyzing the 19,265 tasks done in 923 occupations, and found that large language models could do some of the tasks that 80 percent of American workers do.

Yet they also found reason for some workers to fear that large language models could displace them, in line with what Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, told The Atlantic last month: “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”

The researchers asked an advanced model of ChatGPT to analyze the O*Net data and determine which tasks large language models could do. It found that 86 jobs were entirely exposed (meaning every task could be assisted by the tool). The human researchers said 15 jobs were. The job that both the humans and the A.I. agreed was most exposed was mathematician.

Just 4 percent of jobs had zero tasks that could be assisted by the technology, the analysis found. They included athletes, dishwashers and those assisting carpenters, roofers or painters. Yet even tradespeople could use A.I. for parts of their jobs like scheduling, customer service and route optimization, said Mike Bidwell, chief executive of Neighborly, a home services company.

While OpenAI has a business interest in promoting its technology as a boon to workers, other researchers said there were still uniquely human capabilities that were not (yet) able to be automated — like social skills, teamwork, care work and the skills of tradespeople. “We’re not going to run out of things for humans to do anytime soon,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said. “But the things are different: learning how to ask the right questions, really interacting with people, physical work requiring dexterity.”

For now, large language models will probably help many workers be more productive in their existing jobs, researchers say, akin to giving office workers, even entry-level ones, a chief of staff or a research assistant (though that could signal trouble for human assistants).

Take writing code: A study of Github’s Copilot, an A.I. program that helps programmers by suggesting code and functions, found that those using it were 56 percent faster than those doing the same task without it.

“There’s a misconception that exposure is necessarily a bad thing,” Ms. Mishkin said. After reading descriptions of every occupation for the study, she and her colleagues learned “an important lesson,” she said: “There’s no way a model is ever going to do all of this.”

Large language models could help write legislation, for instance, but could not pass laws. They could act as therapists — people could share their thoughts, and the models could respond with ideas based on proven regimens — but they do not have human empathy or the ability to read nuanced situations.

The version of ChatGPT open to the public has risks for workers — it often gets things wrong, can reflect human biases, and is not secure enough for businesses to trust with confidential information. Companies that use it get around these obstacles with tools that tap its technology in a so-called closed domain — meaning they train the model only on certain content and keep any inputs private.

Morgan Stanley uses a version of OpenAI’s model made for its business that was fed about 100,000 internal documents, more than a million pages. Financial advisers use it to help them find information to answer client questions quickly, like whether to invest in a certain company. (Previously, this required finding and reading multiple reports.)

It leaves advisers more time to talk with clients, said Jeff McMillan, who leads data analytics and wealth management at the firm. The tool does not know about individual clients and any human touch that might be needed, like if they are going through a divorce or illness.

Aquent Talent, a staffing firm, is using a business version of Bard. Usually, humans read through workers’ résumés and portfolios to find a match for a job opening; the tool can do it much more efficiently. Its work still requires a human audit, though, especially in hiring, because human biases are built in, said Rohshann Pilla, president of Aquent Talent.

Harvey, which is funded by OpenAI, is a start-up selling a tool like this to law firms. Senior partners use it for strategy, like coming up with 10 questions to ask in a deposition or summarizing how the firm has negotiated similar agreements.

“It’s not, ‘Here’s the advice I’d give a client,’” said Winston Weinberg, a co-founder of Harvey. “It’s, ‘How can I filter this information quickly so I can reach the advice level?’ You still need the decision maker.”

He says it’s especially helpful for paralegals or associates. They use it to learn — asking questions like: What is this type of contract for, and why was it written like this? — or to write first drafts, like summarizing a financial statement.

“Now all of a sudden they have an assistant,” he said. “People will be able to do work that’s at a higher level faster in their career.”

Other people studying how workplaces use large language models have found a similar pattern: They help junior employees most. A study of customer support agents by Professor Brynjolfsson and colleagues found that using A.I. increased productivity 14 percent overall, and 35 percent for the lowest-skilled workers, who moved up the learning curve faster with its assistance.

“It closes gaps between entry-level workers and superstars,” said Robert Seamans of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, who co-wrote a paper finding that the occupations most exposed to large language models were telemarketers and certain teachers.

The last round of automation, affecting manufacturing jobs, increased income inequality by depriving workers without college educations of high-paying jobs, research has shown.

Some scholars say large language models could do the opposite — decreasing inequality between the highest-paid workers and everyone else.

“My hope is it will actually allow people with less formal education to do more things,” said David Autor, a labor economist at M.I.T., “by lowering barriers to entry for more elite jobs that are well paid.”

Source: In Reversal Because of A.I., Office Jobs Are Now More at Risk

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Canada is Recruiting H-1Bs. DACA Recipients Could Be Next.  

2023/08/25 Leave a comment

Of note:

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, is a program that provides legal protections and work authorization to immigrants who otherwise lack legal status but were brought to the U.S. as children through no fault of their own. In place since 2012, DACA currently protects over 570,000 Dreamers, the majority of whom have been productive members of the American economy for years.

Despite the well-documented contributions of DACA recipients, the program continues to hang in legal limbo. For two decades, Congress has failed to authorize permanent protection, and now, some Republican states are suing to terminate the program. While activists scramble for solutions ahead of an inauspicious Supreme Court decision, the door is open for Canada to poach yet another crucial group of U.S. residents.

In recent months, Canada has escalated its efforts to actively recruit immigrants with work experience in the U.S. or an American education. From creating a new visa for specialized foreign workers in the U.S. to running targeted ads for individuals frustrated with the American immigration system, Canada and its businesses have long since benefited from the dysfunction of our immigration laws. 

While Canada has not yet publicly attempted to entice DACA recipients to consider northern migration, it may be a matter of time before it does. DACA recipients would be competitive applicants for Canadian visa pathways like the points-based Express Entry program designed to attract the world’s best and brightest. 

Express Entry does not require employer sponsorship and instead awards points for qualifying factors like work experience, English language proficiency, and education. Points are also assigned according to age, with applicants between 18 and 35 receiving the highest possible age points. 

The average DACA recipient is 29 years old, and nearly half have college degrees. More than 80 percent of DACA recipients are working, and most have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years, receiving the majority, if not all, of their formal education here. Although many DACA recipients are bilingual, surveys indicate that “over 90 percent speak English well, or better.” By these standards, most DACA recipients would likely receive high scores that could result in invitations to migrate. 

Given the number of American corporations that have previously voiced supportfor their Dreamer employees, it is easy to imagine employers willing to sponsor employees who transfer to their Canadian offices through other visa pathwaysshould they lose work authorization here. 

If Canada poached these Dreamers, the United States would face significant economic losses as Canada reaps the benefits of highly productive U.S.-trained immigrants. 

For instance, Dreamers would pay their rent or mortgage in Canada, which, in the U.S., currently generates $272 billion in economic activity every month. They would spend money on groceries, clothes, transportation, and services in Canada. 

The U.S. would also lose teachers and essential workers while Canada filled its labor market gaps with our American-educated talent. The nearly $40 billion that Dreamers would contribute to Social Security and Medicare over the next ten years would instead bolster the Canadian social security system. 

Even after taxes, DACA-recipient households still hold over $25 billion in spending power, but if they go to Canada, their money will likely go with them. Under the Express Entry program, selected candidates receive permanent residence for themselves, their spouses or common-law partners, and their dependent children. Even temporary foreign worker programs in Canada permit immediate family members to accompany the beneficiary and work. 

With over 300,000 U.S. citizen children, the impacts of their departure would represent a significant loss for the U.S. economy and labor market when we are already struggling to fill the jobs we need. DACA recipients are, on average, more educated than the native-born U.S. population and have higher workforce participation rates. Yet, without action, we risk losing these productive individuals raised with American values, educated in the American school system, and trained in the American labor market. 

We have already witnessed Canada siphoning thousands of our valuable immigrant workers and taking advantage of our inability to create policies that retain the talent we attract and cultivate. If we do not act on DACA, Canada will also take advantage of this opportunity by becoming the haven that DACA recipients have been seeking in the U.S. for over a decade. Bipartisan solutions can protect Dreamers and allow them to stay and contribute to the only home they’ve ever truly known. Timely action is imperative. 

Source: Canada is Recruiting H-1Bs. DACA Recipients Could Be Next.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up.

2023/08/25 Leave a comment

Interesting read:

The hotel was soulless, like all conference hotels. I had arrived a few hours before check-in, hoping to drop off my bags before I met a friend for lunch. The employees were clearly frazzled, overwhelmed by the sudden influx of several hundred impatient academics. When I asked where I could put my luggage, the guy at the front desk simply pointed to a nearby hallway. “Wait over there with her; he’s coming back.” 

The conversation was wide-ranging: the papers we were presenting, the bad A/V at the hotel, our favorite things to do in the city. At some point, we began talking about our jobs. She told me that—like so many academics—she was juggling a temporary teaching gig while also looking for a tenure-track position. 

“It’s hard,” she said, “too many classes, too many students, too many papers to grade. No time for your own work. Barely any time to apply to real jobs.” 

When I nodded sympathetically, she asked about my job and whether it was tenure-track. I admitted, a little sheepishly, that it was. 

“I’d love to teach at a small college like that,” she said. “I feel like none of my students wants to learn. It’s exhausting.” 

Then, out of nowhere, she said something that caught me completely off guard: “But I shouldn’t be complaining to you about this. I know how hard BIPOC faculty have it. You’re the last person I should be whining to.” 

I was taken aback, but I shouldn’t have been. It was the kind of awkward comment I’ve grown used to over the past few years, as “anti-racism” has become the reigning ideology of progressive political culture. Until recently, calling attention to a stranger’s race in such a way would have been considered a social faux pas. That she made the remark without thinking twice—a remark, it should be noted, that assumes being a Black tenure-track professor is worse than being a marginally employed white one—shows how profoundly interracial social etiquette has changed since 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning.” That’s when anti-racism—focused on combatting “color- blindness” in both policy and personal conduct—grabbed ahold of the liberal mainstream. 

Though this “reckoning” brought increased public attention to the deep embeddedness of racism in
supposedly color-blind American institutions, it also made instant celebrities of a number of race experts and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) consultants who believe that being anti-racist means undergoing a “journey” of radical personal transformation. In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness ofpolicies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than
balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it. 

As a Black guy who grew up in a politically purple area—where being a good person meant adhering to the kind of civil-rights-era color- blindness that is now passé—I find this emergent anti-racist culture jarring. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances now seem to believe that being a good person means constantly reminding Black people that you are aware of their Blackness. Difference, no longer to be politely ignored, is insisted upon at all times under the guise of acknowledging “positionality.” ough I am rarely made to feel excessively aware of my race when hanging out with more conservative friends or visiting my hometown, in the more liberal social circles in which I typically travel, my race is constantly invoked —“acknowledged” and “centered”—by well-intentioned anti-racist “allies.” 

This “acknowledgment” tends to take one of two forms. The first is the song and dance in which white people not-so-subtly let you know that they know that race and racism exist. This includes finding ways to interject discussion of some (bad) news item about race or racism into casual conversation, apologizing for having problems while white (“You’re the last person I should be whining to”), or inversely, offering “support” by attributing any normal human problem you have to racism. 

The second way good white liberals often “center” racial difference in everyday interactions with minorities is by trying, always clumsily, to ensure that their “marginalized” friends and familiars are “culturally” comfortable. My favorite personal experiences of this include an acquaintance who invariably steers dinner or lunch meetups to Black-owned restaurants, and the time that a friend of a friend invited me over to go swimming in their pool before apologizing for assuming that I know how to swim (“I know that’s a culturally specific thing”). It is a peculiar quirk of the 2020s’ racial discourse that this kind of “acknowledgment” and “centering” is viewed as progress. 

My point is not that conservatives have better racial politics—they do not— but rather that something about current progressive racial discourse has become warped and distorted. e anti-racist culture that is ascendant seems to me to have little to do with combatting structural racism or cultivating better relationships between white and Black Americans. And its rejection of color-blindness as a social ethos is not a new frontier of radical political action. 

No, at the core of today’s anti-racism is little more than a vibe shift—a soft matrix of conciliatory gestures and hip phraseology that give adherents the feeling that there has been a cultural change, when in fact we have merely put carpet over the rotting floorboards. Although this push to center rather than sidestep racial difference in our interpersonal relationships comes from a good place, it tends to rest on a troubling, even racist subtext: that white and Black Americans are so radically different that interracial relationships require careful management, constant eggshell-walking, and even expert guidance from professional anti-racists. Rather than producing racial harmony, this new ethos frequently has the opposite effect, making white-Black interactions stressful, unpleasant, or, perhaps most often, simply weird. 

Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, progressive anti-racism has centered on two concepts that helped Americans make sense of his senseless death: “structural racism” and “implicit bias.” e first of these is a sociopolitical concept that highlights how certain institutions—maternity wards, police barracks, lending companies, housing authorities, etc.—produce and replicate racial inequalities, such as the disproportionate killing of Black men by the cops. e second is a psychological concept that describes the way that all individuals—from bleeding-heart liberals to murderers such as Derek Chauvin—harbor varying degrees of subconscious racial prejudice. 

Though “structural racism” and “implicit bias” target different scales of the social order—institutions on the one hand, individuals on the other— underlying both of these ideas is a critique of so-called color-blind ideology, or what the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “color-blind racism”: the idea that policies, interactions, and rhetoric can be explicitly race-neutral but implicitly racist. As concepts, both “structural racism” and “implicit bias” rest on the presupposition that racism is an enduring feature of institutional and social life, and that so-called race neutrality is a covertly racist myth that perpetuates inequality. Some anti-racist scholars such as Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi have put this even more bluntly: “‘Race neutral’ is the new “separate but equal.’” Yet, although anti-racist academics and activists are right to argue that race-neutral policies can’t solve racial inequities—that supposedly color-blind laws and policies are often anything but—over the past few years, this line of criticism has also been bizarrely extended to color-blindness as a personal ethos governing behavior at the individual level. 

The most famous proponent of dismantling color-blindness in everyday interactions is Robin DiAngelo, who has made an entire (very condescending) career out of asserting that if white people are not uncomfortable, anti-racism is not happening. “White comfort maintains the racial status quo, so discomfort is necessary and important,” the corporate anti-racist guru advises. Over the past three years, this kind of anti-color-blind, pro-discomfort rhetoric has become the norm in anti-racist discourse. On the final day of the 28-day challenge in Layla Saad’s viral Me and White Supremacy, budding anti- racists are tasked with taking “out-of-your-comfort-zone actions,” such as apologizing to people of color in their life and having “uncomfortable conversations.” Frederick Joseph’s best-selling book e Black Friend takes a similar tack. e problem with color-blindness, Joseph counsels, is it allows “white people to continue to be comfortable.” e NFL analyst Emmanuel Acho wrote an entire book, simply called Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, that admonishes readers to “stop celebrating color-blindness.” And, of course, there are endless how-to guides for having these “uncomfortable conversations” with your Black friends. 

Once the dominant progressive ideology, professing “I don’t see color” is now viewed as a kind of dog whistle that papers over implicit bias. Instead, current anti-racist wisdom holds that we must acknowledge racial difference in our interactions with others, rather than assume that race needn’t be at the center of every interracial conversation or encounter. Coming to grips with the transition we have undergone over the past decade—color-blind etiquette’s swing from de rigueur to racist—requires a longer view of an American cultural transition. Civil-rights-era color-blindness was replaced with an individualistic, corporatized anti-racism, one focused on the purification of white psyches through racial discomfort, guilt, and “doing the work” as a road to self-improvement. 

Writing in 1959, the social critic Philip Rieff argued that postwar America was transforming from a religious and economic culture—one oriented around common institutions such as the church and the market—to a psychological culture, one oriented around the self and its emotional fulfillment. By the 1960s, Rieff had given this shift a name: “the triumph of the therapeutic,” which he defined as an emergent worldview according to which the “self, improved, is the ultimate concern of modern culture.” Yet, even as he diagnosed our culture with self-obsession, Rieff also noticed something peculiar and even paradoxical. erapeutic culture demanded that we reflect our self-actualization outward. Sharing our innermost selves with the world—good, bad, and ugly—became a new social mandate under the guise that authenticity and open self-expression are necessary for social cohesion. 

Recent anti-racist mantras like “White silence is violence” reflect this same sentiment: exhibitionist displays of “racist” guilt are viewed as a necessary precursor to racial healing and community building. In this way, today’s attacks on interpersonal color-blindness—and progressives’ growing fixation on implicit bias, public confession, and race-conscious social etiquette—are only the most recent manifestations of the cultural shift Rieff described. Indeed, the seeds of the current backlash against color-blindness began decades ago, with the application of a New Age, therapeutic outlook to race relations: so-called racial-sensitivity training, the forefather of today’s equally spurious DEI programming. 

In her 2001 book, Race Experts, the historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn painstakingly details how racial-sensitivity training emerged from the 1960s’ human-potential movement and its infamous “encounter groups.” As she explains, what began as a more or less countercultural phenomenon was later corporatized in the form of the anemic, pointless workshops controversially lampooned on e Office. Not surprisingly, this shift reflected the ebb and flow of corporate interests: Whereas early workplace training emphasized compliance with the newly minted Civil Rights Act of 1964, later incarnations would focus on improving employee relations and, later still, leveraging diversity to secure better business outcomes. 

If there is something distinctive about the anti-color-blind racial etiquette that has emerged since George Floyd’s death, it is that these sites of encounter have shifted from official institutional spaces to more intimate ones where white people and minorities interact as friends, neighbors, colleagues, and acquaintances. Racial-awareness raising is a dynamic no longer quarantined to formalized, compulsory settings like the boardroom or freshman orientation. Instead, every interracial interaction is a potential scene of (one-way) racial edification and supplication, encounters in which good white liberals are expected to be transparent about their “positionality,” confront their “whiteness,” and—if the situation calls for it—confess their “implicit bias.” 

In a vacuum, many of the prescriptions advocated by the anti-color-blind crowd are reasonable: We should all think more about our privileges and our place in the world. An uncomfortable conversation or an honest 

A look in the mirror can be precursors to personal growth. We all carry around harmful, implicit biases and we do need to examine the subconscious assumptions and prejudices that underlie the actions we take and the things we say. My objection is not to these ideas themselves, which are sensible enough. No, my objection is that anti-racism offers little more than a Marie Kondo–ism for the white soul, promising to declutter racial baggage and clear a way to white fulfillment without doing anything meaningful to combat structural racism. As Lasch-Quinn correctly foresaw, “Casting interracial problems as issues of etiquette [puts] a premium on superficial symbols of good intentions and good motivations as well as on style and appearance rather than on the substance of change.” 

Yet the problem with the therapeutics of contemporary anti-racism is not just that they are politically sterile. When anti-color-blindness and its ideology of insistent “race consciousness” are translated into the sphere of private life—to the domain of friendships, block parties, and backyard barbecues—they assault the very idea of a multiracial society, producing new forms of racism in the process. e fact that our media environment is inundated with an endless stream of books, articles, and social-media tutorials that promise to teach white people how to simply interact with the Black people in their life is not a sign of anti-racist progress, but of profound regression. 

The subtext that undergirds this new anti-racist discourse—that Black-white relationships are inherently fraught and must be navigated with the help of professionals and technical experts—testifies to the impoverishment of our interracial imagination, not to its enrichment. More gravely, anti-color-blind etiquette treats Black Americans as exotic others, permanent strangers whose racial difference is so chasmic that it must be continually managed, whose mode of humanness is so foreign that it requires white people to adopt a special set of manners and “race conscious” ritualistic practices to even have a simple conversation. 

If we are going to find a way out of the racial discord that has defined American life post-Trump and post-Charlottesville and post-Floyd, we have to begin with a more sophisticated understanding of color-blindness, one that rejects the bad color-blindness on offer from the Republican Party and its partisans, as well as the anti-color-blindness of the anti-racist consultants. Instead, we should embrace the good color-blindness of not too long ago. At the heart of that color-blindness was a radical claim, one imperfectly realized but perfect as an ideal: that despite the weight of a racist past that isn’t even past, we can imagine a world, or at least an interaction between two people, where racial difference doesn’t make a difference. 

Tyler Austin Harper is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College. 

Source: I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up.

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Will reining in the number of international students in Canada help the housing crisis — or bring more harm?

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Some good comments by immigration lawyer Raj Sharma and if I do say myself, me:

Canada’s post-secondary education sector is pushing back on a proposed cap on international student admission, arguing it won’t help address the country’s current housing crisis but threatens the economy.

“Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages,” said Colleges and Institutes Canada, the largest national post-secondary advocacy group.

“We want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted.”

The group, which represents 141 schools across Canada, was responding to a suggestion by Housing Minister Sean Fraser at the federal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown to restrict the number of international students to help ease the housing crunch.

“That’s one of the options that we ought to consider,” the former immigration minister told reporters on Monday.

On Tuesday, Marc Miller, his successor, echoed the need to rein in the growth of international enrolment.

“Abuses in the system exist and must be tackled in smart and logical ways,” Bahoz Dara Aziz, Miller’s press secretary, told the Star. “This potentially includes implementing a cap.

“But that can’t be the only measure, as it doesn’t address the entire problem. We’re currently looking at a number of options in order to take a multi-faceted approach to this.”

The post-secondary educational sector has increasingly relied on revenue from international students to subsidize the Canadian tertiary education system after years of government cuts.

According to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, there were 807,750 international students in Canada at all levels of study last year, up 43 per cent from five years ago.

So much is at stake with international students, who pay significantly higher tuition rates than Canadians, contributing more than $21 billion to colleges and universities, local communities and the economy nationwide, creating 180,000 jobs.

Fraser’s remarks also marked a change from when he was overseeing Immigration and staunchly defended the Liberals’ record immigration levels and strategy to stimulate economic recovery through immigration.

“I find this a little bit disingenuous,” said Calgary immigration lawyer Raj Sharma. “The minister who’s talking about capping international students is the same minister that eliminated the 20-hour limit of working in a week for the international students.”

“It’s very odd for Mr. Fraser to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

While concentration of international students in particular urban hot spots has contributed to the rising rental costs and strained housing supplies in the GTA, the Lower Mainland in B.C. and parts of Alberta and the Maritimes, Sharma said the housing challenges predated the influx.

International students have become such an integral part of the immigration system and the Canadian economy that it’s hard to just turn the tap on and off, he said.

Canada has made it a policy a decade ago to attract more international students and eased the rules by offering postgraduate work permits and a pathway for permanent residence.

International students have been touted as ideal immigrants because of their Canadian education and employment credentials. However, critics have warned that international education has been misused as a shortcut for those only here for a shot at permanent residence.

“There’s a lot of stakeholders, a lot of vested interest in keeping international student intake high. These students are exploited from basically before they come to Canada and then after they come to Canada up until they become permanent residents,” said Sharma.

“So there’s employers that are using them as cheap labour. These international students are causing even concern among various diasporic communities that they’re driving down wages.”

The immigration minister’s office said it recognizes the important role international students play in local communities and to Canada’s economy, but something has to be done.

“To tackle these challenges around fraud and bad actors, we also have to have some difficult conversations with the provinces around the threats to the integrity of the system, and outline the perverse incentives that it’s created for institutions,” Aziz said.

“We must also reward the good actors because there is so much real value in the international students program, and those who do it well are essentially mentoring the future of this country.”

The surge of international students is only part of the problem as the number of temporary foreign workers and work permit holders are also going through the roof in recent years, said Andrew Griffith, a retired director general at the federal immigration department.

The number of temporary foreign worker positions approved through a Labour Market Impact Assessment annually have skyrocketed from 89,416 in 2015 to 221,933 last year, according to federal data.

The numbers don’t include the hundreds of thousands of international graduates who have open work permits, refugee claimants pending asylum and those who arrive from more than two dozen countries that have shared mobility agreements with Canada.

“They picked international students because they probably calculated it’s the easiest group to go after. There are enough stories about abuse that it’s a way to get into Canada,” said Griffith.

“It’s by no means a slam dunk, but it does signal that the government is starting to realize that there are some impacts of large immigration. You can’t just expand immigration and expect that society will automatically adapt.”

Griffith said any immediate relief to the housing market won’t be felt in at least a year until the next round of intake because it’s already September and incoming students have been issued student visas or are in Canada.

In Ontario, international students accounted for 30 per cent of the public post-secondary student population and represented 68 per cent of total tuition revenue in the 2020-21 school year, said Jonathan Singer, chair of the College Faculty Division of OPSEU, which represents 16,000 college professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians.

Singer said any cap on international students would need to be accompanied by a model of stable and predictable post-secondary provincial funding. When such a funding model was last in place in Ontario, he added, the schools had no need to seek out a number of international students that they or the province couldn’t manage.

“One role they shouldn’t have to play is filling in the fiscal gaps left by an erosion in public funding,” Singer explained. “Our colleges and universities need to ask how many international students they have the resources to accommodate — including supports related to housing, academics and health care, including mental health.”

Although education is a provincial jurisdiction and admissions are the responsibility of the schools, both Sharma and Griffith said the federal government does have the leverage to raise the bar for language proficiency and financial assets in granting visas to students as a control mechanism.

“If you increase the quality of the intake and necessarily that may result in a decrease in the hard numbers,” said Sharma. “But instead of capping it, I think it’s time for us to optimize it and ensure that we’re getting the best bang for our buck.”

Colleges and Institutes Canada said its members have long recognized housing shortage challenges and have fast-tracked the development of new residences and approvals for building accommodations. It has also asked Ottawa to invest $2.6 billion in a new Student Housing Loan and Grant Program.

Source: Will reining in the number of international students in Canada help the housing crisis — or bring more harm?

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Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis 

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Expect other provinces will join the chorus given all rely on international students to fund post-secondary education. Education organizations already also chiming in:

The Quebec government says it won’t accept a cap on the number of international students it can admit, rejecting one of the options the federal government is considering as part of a plan to tackle a national housing crisis.

Universities and colleges, meanwhile, said they were surprised and troubled, respectively, by the suggestion, which was first raised by Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser at a Liberal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown on Monday.

Quebec’s reaction indicates that attempts to limit international student admissions could create conflict with the provinces. They have jurisdiction in areas of education and their postsecondary institutions have come to rely on lucrative international tuition fees.

“Quebec does not intend to impose a cap on the number of foreign students in its jurisdiction. Although issuing study permits is the responsibility of the federal government, education is the exclusive power of Quebec. It’s up to Quebec and its educational institutions to determine the number of people they can accommodate,” said Alexandre Lahaie, a spokesperson for Quebec Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette.

Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller confirmed his government is strongly considering a cap on the number of international students Canada accepts. But Mr. Miller stressed that such a measure alone won’t fix the housing crunch.

“This will be a multipronged approach. A cap is something we’ll definitely entertain,” Mr. Miller said on Tuesday.

The number of international students in Canada soared past 800,000 in 2022, more than twice as many as when Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. Some experts have said the influx of students in need of lower-cost rental accommodation has contributed to rising rents in some cities, at a time when construction of new housing has been inadequate.

More than half of all international study permits issued in 2022 went to students at Canadian colleges, a sector that has surpassed universities as the top destination for international students.

In a statement, Colleges and Institutes Canada, which represents publicly funded colleges, said it is “troubled” by the suggestion of a cap on international enrolment.

“Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages. Furthermore, we want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted,” Colleges and Institutes Canada said in a statement.

Michael Sangster, president of the National Association of Career Colleges, which represents private colleges, said his members are willing to work with a cap, if that’s what the federal government decides, or with a trusted institution model, another proposal the federal government has floated that could see institutions with a good track record receive preference in permit processing.

“The students that are coming to our institutions, many of them are training to become tradespeople to build the homes we need. So we’re in a bit of a catch-22 right now, but we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Sangster said.

Philip Landon, interim president of Universities Canada, an umbrella group representing nearly 100 institutions, said the idea of a cap on international university students is concerning and something universities don’t believe is necessary.

“Universities seek to attract talented students to Canada and have been doing so in a responsible way with responsible growth rates,” he said.

Mr. Landon called on the federal government to make low-cost financing available to universities to allow them to build more residence spaces.

Mr. Miller said the government is already in talks with postsecondary schools about what they can do to guarantee more housing availability. He said provinces also need to be at the table, as they’ve benefited greatly from the international student program.

He said it has become “very lucrative” for some schools, adding that the economic impact of international students in Canada is more than $20-billion a year. While he said much of that is good, there is also “some abuse in the system.”

The international student program is a temporary resident immigration stream that isn’t subject to the yearly caps or targets that Ottawa sets for permanent resident immigration streams.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Tuesday that the premiers have not raised the need for a cap on foreign students with him. He added that while they talk often about the need for more housing, the premiers have also made clear they need more immigrants to fill labour shortages, including in the construction industry.

Mike Moffatt, the founding director of the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute and one of the authors of a new report on housing supply, spoke to the federal cabinet behind closed doors on Tuesday.

He said the increase in foreign students has had knock-on effects in the housing market that have helped turn a rental crisis into a home-ownership crisis.

In the area around Fanshawe College in London, Ont., for example, neighbourhoods once occupied by young families have “turned into a sea of student rentals” bought up by investors, he said.

“Domestic and international students are the biggest victims of this, not the cause of it,” he said.

“This is a systemic failure, I would say of both the federal and provincial governments and as well the higher education sector.”

Source: Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis

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Clark: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

Indeed. As it is for an annual immigration plan that includes temporary workers and international students:

You have to agree with Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s assertion that the answer to Canada’s housing crisis isn’t new political branding. Still, it would be nice if the federal government had a plan.

The good news is there are signs that the Liberal government is putting together what could be the rudiments of a plan. But it needs an actual plan. And it needs to come to grips with the screaming urgency.

So perhaps the best exercise for the Liberal cabinet retreat taking place in Charlottetown this week would be having all ministers dip their heads in vats of ice water before and after their briefings about the housing crisis. You know, so everyone there feels the kind of shocking wake-up call that should be motivating them now.

It sounded promising when Mr. Fraser, freshly appointed as Housing Minister on July 26, outlined some of the government’s thinking about increasing the housing supply – and even said he thinks the government is thinking of capping the rapidly increasing number of international students coming to Canada. But then he said a decision on that is “premature” right now.

The problem is that Mr. Fraser is mixing up the concepts of “premature” and “overdue.”

The feds have missed a window to cap – and reduce – those numbers for this school year.

Let’s note here that Mr. Fraser is quite right when he says that we should be careful not to “somehow blame immigrants for the housing challenges that have been several decades in the works in Canada.”

That’s absolutely true. We should blame governments. They failed to plan.

Immigration itself isn’t the cause of the problem: It is good for Canada, and international students can be an especially good thing. But successive governments, federal and provincial, encouraged a boom in numbers, especially international student numbers, without planning policies to encourage housing for them.

One of the people briefing the Liberal cabinet Tuesday was economist Mike Moffatt, who has been doing the academic equivalent of waving his arms trying to get governments to pay attention to the problem. “We are in a crisis and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now,” he wrote in The Hub this week.

Mr. Moffatt’s diagnosis boils down to the fact that the population grew quickly in recent years, especially in Ontario, but the pace of home-building was a lot slower. Few places for a lot more people means house prices and now apartment rents skyrocketed.

The rapid population growth went a little under the radar because it was not just an increase in permanent immigrants. The number of temporary residents has ballooned. In 2015, there were 352,325 international students. In 2021, the number was 617,250. The following year, 2022, it was 807,260. But there weren’t a lot more student residences and apartments for rent.

Now the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates Canada needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to make housing affordable again. So it’s good the Liberals are talking about policies to encourage more home-building. Mr. Fraser unironically noted that the Liberals campaigned on some of them in the past two elections. In fact, they promised to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing back in 2015. It’s time to step it up.

It’s true successive federal governments are to blame. Municipal administrations and provincial governments are to blame for a lot of it, too. All for a lack of planning.

Now the plan is urgent, and it will have to include short-term measures like cutting back the number of international students. A government that doesn’t craft such a plan will create more poverty and damage many Canadians’ standard of living. And despite Mr. Fraser’s words, it is not at all clear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is shaking off the complacency.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he hadn’t heard talk of the idea of capping the number of international students and hasn’t spoken to premiers about it.

Mr. Trudeau, who was criticized three weeks ago for saying housing is not a primary federal responsibility, provided a nonsensical explanation for that on Monday when he said his point was that his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, had “completely walked away from housing.”

And sure, we have to expect politicians will make points about politics. But this is a bigger issue now, and it’s time to pull together a plan.

Source: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

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Petition e-4511 – Opposing self-affirmation of the #citizenship oath “citizenship on a click” – Signatures to August 22

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

The chart below breaks down the 1,471 signatures as of 22 August by province. No major changes by province as numbers plateau.

And if you haven’t yet considered signing the petition, the link is here: https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4511

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The Political Impact of Increased Diversity: What the Census Shows with Respect to Indigenous peoples

2023/08/24 Leave a comment

As a companion piece to my earlier riding level analysis of visible minorities, The Political Impact of Increased Diversity: What the Census Shows, I performed the same analysis with respect to Indigenous groups, highlighting that the relative political importance of Indigenous groups is declining in relation to visible minorities in electoral terms. This draft was shared with the three national Indigenous organizations but no comments were received given their higher priorities. 

census-2021-the-political-impact-of-increased-indigenous-populationDownload

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Keller: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Another good column by Keller, on how the objectives of international student recruitment have been largely overtaken by economic objectives of low-paid workers:

Over the last two decades, the number of foreign students studying in Canada has increased almost sevenfold, to more than 800,000. The jump has been particularly sharp in recent years. At the end of 2022, there were nearly half a million more visa students than in 2015.

At first blush, this sounds like a success story: Canadian higher education must be so outstanding that record numbers from around the world are lining up to pay university and college tuitions several times higher than those for Canadian students.

Foreign students clearly believe that they’re paying for something that offers a positive return on their investment. But what are they paying for? And what are they getting?

Also: What are we getting?

For many international students, what they are buying is mostly not education. And what many – or most – schools are selling is not education. A big part of what is being bought and sold are public goods: the right to enter Canada, to legally work and to get on a track to citizenship.

There are, of course, excellent university and college programs attracting the best and the brightest to this country. That’s what tying higher education to immigration is supposed to be doing: boosting economic vitality by pulling in, say, the world’s best engineering or computer science students, and giving them opportunities to become Canadians after graduation.

Using foreign student recruitment to raise the education and skill level of the work force benefits all Canadians. When highly-skilled and productive foreigners graduate from a high-level program and become even more skilled and productive – and choose to become Canadians – everyone wins.

But much of the current visa-student pathway is about something else. It has become an important, though unofficial, stream of temporary foreign workers – a bottomless supply of labour to flip burgers, stack boxes and deliver late-night burritos, at minimum wage. And the number of student visas on offer is not capped.

Consider what’s happening at Ontario’s 24 public colleges. Between 2012 and 2020, their foreign enrolment grew by 342 per cent. There’s been more growth in the last three years. But a large part of that growth comes from public colleges selling their name, and their publicly-bestowed credentials, to private operators.

Students in these so-called public-private career college partnerships are often hosted at a “campus” that is a few classrooms in a strip mall or office park, usually somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area – and often hundreds of kilometres from the public college whose credentials the private partner paid to use.

Consider Lambton College in Sarnia. According to its strategic mandate agreement with the province, between 2020 and 2024 it expects domestic student enrolment to drop from 2,104 to 2,038. But international student enrolment will more than double to almost 9,000. Most visa students study at one of two campuses in Toronto, run by private operators in suburban office parks.

Why is a foreign student willing to pay $25,460 tuition for a four-semester course in hotel and resort management, from a Lambton-affiliated private business called “Queen’s College,” in a warehouse district in Mississauga?

Perhaps because the holder of an education visa can legally work while enrolled. And thanks to private Queen’s link with public Lambton, the federal government will issue another work visa upon graduation. Even a low-level Canadian educational credential plus Canadian work experience boosts one’s chances of claiming “PR” status – permanent residency, the last stop before citizenship.

That’s what many schools are selling. At $25,460, it’s a bargain.

But it brings me back to the question of why Canada is not being more selective. Using the education-to-citizenship pathway to recruit highly skilled, future Canadian citizens is a great idea. It boosts GDP-per-capita, increasing the size of the economic pie by more than the number of forks in the pie.

But much of the educational visa stream is no longer about that. And graded on the curve, Lambton is far from the bottom of the class.

The federal government lists 526 higher-education institutions in Ontario as “designated learning institutions.” Most are private and may not offer much in the way of education. Yet enrolling at any DLI includes the opportunity to come to Canada on a student visa, and the legal right to work while enrolled.

Even more than at public colleges, that’s what foreign students at private career colleges appear to be paying for: the right to enter Canada, and to work, mostly at low-skill, low-wage jobs.

However, despite the fact that governments have allowed private operators access to a bottomless helping of student visas, they’re sufficiently dubious of their education that completion of a private career college program generally does not gives students the right to a post-graduation work visa – unlike grads from public-private partnerships.

When these private college students are asked to stop working and leave Canada upon graduation from their short course, will they? Don’t bet on it. But that’s a column for another day.

Source: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

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Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Looking at vs doing something about….

Raj Sharma developed what I view as a neat little test as to whether the government is serious or not:

The federal government should reassess its policy on international students and consider a cap on a program that has seen “explosive growth,” putting pressure on rental markets and driving up costs, Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser said.

The number of international students in Canada has more than doubled since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, government data show. At the end of 2022, it sat at 807,260.

“The reality is we’ve got temporary immigration programs that were never designed to see such explosive growth in such a short period of time,” Mr. Fraser said Monday in Charlottetown. He noted that unlike the permanent resident immigration programs where the government sets targets each year, the study permit program is a temporary resident program that is driven by demand and doesn’t have a set cap.

He said the growth of the program for international students is happening in concentrated regions of Canada and is putting an “unprecedented level of demand” on the job market but even “more pronounced” demand on the housing market.

Asked if the government should cap the number of international students allowed in Canada each year, he said it’s an option Ottawa should consider.

Mr. Fraser did not provide any timeline for when Ottawa might lower the number of study permits issued. Asked if a change would be made this fall, he said Immigration Minister Marc Miller would have more to say at a later date.

Mr. Fraser spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a three-day cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island.

The affordability crisis pushing many Canadians to the brink, in particular owing to rising housing costs, is at the top of the agenda for the meetings. The government wants to come up with new ways to make the first-time homebuyers’ market more accessible and also address rental costs that are increasingly unsustainable for lower- and middle-income households.

Postsecondary schools in Canada have relied more and more on international students for their revenue streams because their tuition fees are much higher than the fees paid by domestic students.

Mr. Fraser said the federal government needs to work with colleges and universities to ensure those institutions also take responsibility for housing the record numbers of international students they’re accepting.

He also said the government needs to more closely scrutinize private colleges, some of which he suggested were illegitimate and taking advantage of the international student permit system.

Some of those schools “exist purely to profit off the backs of vulnerable international students,” Mr. Fraser said. He added that there are some “plaza colleges” that have up to six times more students enrolled than physical space for them in their buildings.

“Not all private colleges should be treated with the same brush,” he said. “There are good private institutions out there and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work.”

As part of the federal cabinet’s focus on the housing crisis, it will hear from two of the authors of a report released last week. That report says the spike in rental housing costs is in part attributed to the growth in young adults living in Canada, which is in part linked to the rise in international students

The authors call on the government to establish an industrial strategy for housing, saying that in order to restore affordability by 2030, the country needs to build 5.8 million more housing units, of which approximately two million should be rentals.

In Ottawa, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre blamed the government for the sky-high housing costs, noting the rapid rise has happened under Mr. Trudeau’s watch.

“Now he wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants; he wants to divide people to distract from his failings,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters on Parliament Hill.

Mr. Poilievre would not say whether he would lower immigration levels, and instead said that Ottawa needs to crack down on slow-moving municipal bureaucracies that make it harder to start construction projects.

In Charlottetown, the Housing Minister stressed the need to be “really, really careful” not to blame immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis. And Mr. Fraser dismissed Mr. Poilievre’s criticism entirely, saying the Conservatives are now promising what the Liberals have already campaigned on in past elections.

At a separate press conference, Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Cornwall, PEI, that immigration is a key part of the solution for Canada’s housing shortage because the construction industry needs more skilled labour.

“There’s much more we need to do on housing and we’re continuing to step up,” he said. “But we’re going to continue to be the open, welcoming, prosperous and growing country we’ve always been, because that has been something that has led to great opportunities and prosperity for all Canadians.”

Source: Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

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