John Ivison: Who really killed Canadian moderation?

2023/09/11 Leave a comment

Thoughtful analysis:

I’ve been immersed in Winston Churchill’s My Early Years, a ripping yarn that sees the future wartime leader take part in a cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman in Sudan and escape captivity during the Boer War in the late 1890s.

As gripping as the incredible Boy’s Own adventures are his accounts of the fin-de-siecle British Empire — which, when he is writing in 1928, he described as a “vanished age.”

Ages always vanish, of course, usually because of traumatic cataclysms like wars or pandemics.

In our own time, COVID seems to have been the catalyst for a new age of discontent, accelerating anxieties that were already percolating, and taking with it the classical liberal consensus that dominated the postwar world.

It is paradoxical that a prime minister who ventured the thought that Canada is stronger because of its differences, rather than in spite of them, is now presiding over a political landscape dominated as never before by ill-will and alienation.

Politics in this country may never have been exactly civil — it’s been said the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. But the respect and a broad policy consensus that undeniably existed has been replaced by loathing and partisan hostility. Illiberalism is the dominant strain on both the left and the right.

There is empirical evidence that Canada is a meaner country than it was a few short years ago.

Police-reported hate crimes have soared 72 per cent from 2019 to 2021. The homicide rate has risen steadily to its highest level in 30 years. Meanwhile, social trust has plummeted. Only a third of adults now agree that most people can be trusted.

The political system is a direct casualty of that disillusionment. A recent study by the Public Policy Forum into the rise of polarization, appropriately called Far and Widening, said only 50 per cent of the respondents it polled believe voting is the best way to enact change. One person in six said that only taking power from “global elites” would effect real change.

It used to be the case that most people could agree on what many consider to be “Canada’s advantage” — an immigration policy that has attracted the best and brightest from around the world.

Yet that too is breaking down, in large part because of careless, incoherent federal government policy.

Last week, a video on social media featured a long lineup of what appeared to be Southeast Asian students queuing to apply for jobs at a Food Basics supermarket in Hamilton, Ont. The comments in response to the video suggested that a nativist backlash to Liberal immigration policy is in full swing.

The government has overseen an explosion in international students coming to Canada — 900,000 this year alone — many of whom are using education as a back door to citizenship.

By paying tuition fees of around $25,000, students can come to Canada, study part-time at a private college, work legally in low-wage jobs and stay in the country for years after graduating. Coupled with a Liberal plan to boost the number of permanent residents to 500,000 by 2025 — double the number from a decade earlier — it is clear that there has been a massive increase in low-skilled immigration that threatens to put pressure on wages at the bottom end of the labour market.

The lobby group Colleges and Institutes Canada, whose members are the main beneficiaries of the huge influx in tuition fees, acknowledged as much when it said in a statement that the cap on international students being contemplated by Ottawa could “exacerbate current labour shortages.” A reminder: this is a program for international students, not temporary foreign workers.

As many economists have noted, such high numbers of newcomers have the happy corollary for the government of boosting GDP — immigration is likely to account for the total output increases of 1.5 per cent in 2023 and 2024.

But those gains will mask a cumulative decrease in output per person and add to the housing crisis. In short, Canadians will be worse off under this policy and resistance to similar levels of immigration will surely follow.

The Liberals have to accept a disproportionate share of the blame for the state we’re in because they have been in government for nearly eight years.

But the conditions for a more bitter politics were already ripe in 2015. After the Second World War, average real wages doubled in roughly 30 years. In the subsequent half-century they have been relatively stagnant. Poll after poll has shown the majority of Canadians think the next generation will have a lower standard of living than their parents did — an economic backdrop against which it is hard to generate optimism.

The advent of social media that prioritizes provocative content has helped erode the common ground most Canadians shared in the postwar world.

Politicians have found that what former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole called “performance politics” works for them: ramping up the rhetoric and demonizing their opponents in order to get noticed. MPs not viewed as being sufficiently combative are considered suspect by their colleagues and partisan constituents.

O’Toole’s successor, Pierre Poilievre, has fine-tuned the cartoonish manipulation of the outrage machine that is X (formerly Twitter), combining bombastic rhetoric and an indifference to truth. Impressively, in one recent tweet, he managed to malign the trifecta of Conservative scourges — the prime minister, the CBC and the World Economic Forum — in under 140 characters.

As Justin Ling, author of the PPF report on polarization, noted, political parties used to be big tents, a microcosm of the country at large, but they now more closely resemble special interest groups.

The pandemic only accelerated that division of Canadians into two tribes, when a material minority emerged who were vocal in their belief that governing elites had lost their connection to the people they are meant to serve. That gave birth to the truckers’ convoy protest that blockaded downtown Ottawa last year. It is a significant indication of widespread disillusionment that one poll suggested a majority of 18- to 34-year-olds sympathized with the protest against vaccine mandates, even if they didn’t agree with the blockade.

Justin Trudeau did little to reconcile alienated voters by calling a snap election and using vaccine status as a wedge issue. He even referred to his opponents as “often anti-science, often misogynistic, often racist” and wondered if they should be tolerated.

For a leader who is quick to blame those who disagree with him of engaging in “the politics of fear and division,” it revealed his own tendency toward intolerance.

His critics contend that Trudeau has been on a quest to transform Canada into something more closely resembling his own progressive leanings — and of portraying those who oppose him as uninformed, irresponsible or motivated by unworthy goals.

Moderation and the modest compromises that characterized much of Canadian political history have been jettisoned in favour of lofty goals that often come with unintended consequences, such as the immigration targets. It is telling that the debate around the cabinet table apparently was not whether 500,000 newcomers was too many, but rather whether that number was ambitious enough.

In the current fervid political environment, it is unrealistic to expect a politician to emerge who will appeal for calmer heads to prevail, like the medieval knight in the middle of melee in the Far Side cartoon: “Hey, c’mon. Hold it! Hold it! Or someone’s gonna get hurt.”

Voters are in a vitriolic mood. Appealing to their better angels is likely to leave any politician feeling like Winston Churchill after his first abortive venture into politics, “deflated as a bottle of champagne when it has been half-emptied and left uncorked for a night.”

Source: John Ivison: Who really killed Canadian moderation?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Whitzman: Stopping immigration won’t fix Canada’s housing crisis, Triandafyllidou: As mortgage costs rise, it is international students’ rent keeping households afloat:

2023/09/11 Leave a comment

A number of weak commentaries trying to change the narrative on immigration and pressures on housing (along with healthcare and infrastructure). None of these address the time lags in approving new housing.

Starting with the more intelligent analysis by Carolyn Whitzman, who notes the policy failures in housing policies (but fails to recognize the failure of immigration policies) and the need for better data:

As the country’s housing crisis intensifies, there’s been a lot of finger-pointing: at foreign investors snapping up residential real estate, at municipal governments and prohibitive zoning by-laws, and now, at immigrants and international students, the latest group thrust into the spotlight for exacerbating the crunch.

Canada is, by far, the fastest-growing country in the G7. We passed the 40 million mark in June, after the population surged by over a million in 2022. Nearly all of those new Canadians were temporary and permanent immigrants. The international student population has also skyrocketed—we’re on track to welcome 900,000 international students this year, three times as many as in 2013.

Although Canada’s major political parties have been careful not to blame newcomers for housing challenges, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that “volume is volume, and it does have an impact,” in reference to the influx of immigrants. The federal government, which is not backing down from its recently increased annual target of 500,000 new permanent residents by 2025, is also considering a cap on international students as a way to ease the pressure.

But limiting immigration isn’t the solution, says Carolyn Whitzman, housing policy researcher at the University of Ottawa and expert adviser to the University of British Columbia’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project. In fact, since current estimates of housing need don’t take into account millions of Canadian residents, as well as projected newcomers, we have a woefully uninformed picture of the situation. “Immigrants are an easy target,” says Whitzman. We spoke to her about why we’re so eager to shift the focus to immigration, the dearth of data on who actually requires housing, and the urgent need for a national social housing program.

A growing chorus of people are openly blaming immigration for the housing crunch. What’s your take?
Even if Canada stopped immigration tomorrow, we still couldn’t serve the population who live here. Nearly 1.5 million Canadian households are in what’s called “core housing need,” which refers to households that are living in unaffordable, overcrowded or otherwise uninhabitable homes, where an affordable and adequate home is not available in their area. Millions of other Canadians—homeless people, students, people in congregate housing like long-term care and group homes—aren’t even factored into core housing need. How will their need for low-cost homes be helped by restricting immigration or foreign students? Where’s the evidence? Immigrants and international students are an easy target.

An easy target, sure, but won’t ever-increasing numbers of permanent residents and international students put additional strain on the housing market?
Yes. So will the formation of new households, including young adults moving away from home or couples divorcing.

Why has the focus of the housing crisis conversation shifted so abruptly to immigration?
It appears to me to be a sign of desperation. Immigrants have always been blamed for the housing crisis. Look back 100 years and people were against building boarding houses because they were scared of foreigners moving in and endangering their families. Nowadays, politicians are blaming foreign investors for housing shortages, too. I’m very impatient about people pointing fingers at immigrants for the housing crisis, because it has very little to do with immigration and a lot to do with government policy.

Which government policy?
That’s the problem—there hasn’t been a national housing policy since the early 1990s. That’s when the federal government decided it was a provincial or territorial responsibility, and in the case of Ontario, the province punted it to municipalities. There are more and more international students each year who need places to live, but colleges and universities are provincially regulated. Immigration, on the other hand, is a federal responsibility. There needs to be coordination between federal, provincial and municipal governments. And that needs to start with an accurate sense of who needs housing, where, and at what price.

Do we have that information?
Partially. We know that new migrants are among the groups most likely to be in core housing need. Our data from UBC’s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project shows that in 2021, 16 per cent of new migrant households—those who moved to Canada since the last census in 2016—were in core housing need. That’s higher than the Canadian average of 10 per cent. Refugee claimants were the most likely households to be in core housing need, almost one in five. But the census only tracks housing need in private, non-farm and non-student households.

So we don’t have data on students?
No. The federal government has zero information on student housing needs, international or otherwise. In 1991, when the measure for core housing need was created by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and Statistics Canada, the decision was made to leave out students because it was considered a “temporary situation of voluntary poverty.” As a result, we don’t have any information on what students can afford to pay, whether they’re overcrowded or living in mouldy basement apartments. That’s unusual for a developed economy like Canada. France, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany—every country I know of with strong non-market housing programs builds student housing into it.

Why the lack of data?
I think it goes back to the ’90s, again, when the federal government backed out of housing policy. It’s been three decades of people passing the buck.

A classic tale of Canadian federalism.
I won’t disagree with you there.

And yet the federal government is looking into a possible cap on the number of permits issued to international students.
I believe we need evidence-driven policy instead. A good example is the Rapid Housing Initiation, which was first proposed as a COVID-19 relief measure in 2020. The initial target was 3,000 very affordable, rapidly constructed (or renovated) homes for the homeless. About 4,700 homes were constructed or under construction within 18 months. It was renewed in 2021 and 2022—the total number of units created is expected to be over 15,500 units. It needs to be an ongoing program.

The Liberals did introduce a national housing strategy in 2017, which promised to restore Ottawa’s involvement in building social housing. And legislation was passed in 2019 designating housing a human right.
Sure, but look at the national housing strategy. It literally has nothing to say about students. Do they not exist? Are they not part of the housing market?

You mentioned the fact that new migrants are more likely to be in core housing need. How else are they impacted by the housing crisis?
Asylum-seeking families, for instance, tend to be larger households, and there’s a critical shortage of rental housing that has three bedrooms or more. Also, new migrants traditionally moved to the inner city, where there are social services and other resources. But there’s no affordable housing there anymore, so migrants are moving to areas that aren’t near services or jobs or public transit, and most don’t have Canadian driver’s licences on arrival. All that exacerbates settlement issues, like isolation and unemployment. The federal government needs to think about an integrated policy between immigration and housing.

It sounds like you’re on the same page as Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who said that the government should “tailor its policies on immigration and housing to acknowledge the link between the two.” What would that look like?
For one thing, we’d be able to project population increases over the next 10 years. Remarkably, the 2017 national housing strategy we’ve referred to has targets that don’t include the impact of population growth through immigration.

The CMHC projected that we’ll need 5.8 million homes by 2030 to reach affordability. Do figures like that take immigration into account?
They don’t, though I do know that the author of that report is planning to publish a follow-up to revise that figure in light of current immigration projections. We can’t plan for housing if we don’t know how many people are coming in. Canada is a rich country and a smart country—we have the highest rate of individuals with higher education in the world. So if we’re a rich, smart country, and we can’t solve the housing crisis, what are we even doing?

Speaking of solving it, you’ve got a new book coming out next year, How to Home: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis. Spoiler alert, but how do we fix it?
We need a calculation of supply shortage that doesn’t just tell us we need X million units, but actually gets into what kind of housing and where. We have one of the lowest rates of social housing in the world. And we’re going to have to scale up purpose-built rentals, rather than condos, again. That kind of fell off the cliff in the ’70s. Back then, during another period of high immigration, we were literally building more housing than we are today because we had a national housing social housing program and purpose-built rentals.

What is one pragmatic step the government could take?
Enable purpose-built rentals again, with some conditionality. In other words, you can’t have a 30-storey building in the middle of the Greenbelt, for instance. There needs to be some conditions around location, price point and environmental sustainability. There were measures in place in the ’60s and ’70s that led to the construction of most of our current purpose-built rental stock—meaning most apartment buildings are 40 to 60 years old, which is a whole other problem. But we need a social housing program. We haven’t had one for three decades, and we’re seeing the impact of that.

Is a federal social housing program in our future, realistically?
Absolutely. The federal government promised a new co-op housing strategy in the 2022 budget. Sources tell me it’s ready to roll. I’m not sure why it hasn’t yet, but every single major federal evaluation of the national housing strategy has asked why a non-market, social housing program isn’t part of the plan. Everyone from Scotiabank on down is saying you need to start by doubling social housing. It’s the most direct way to start building the housing that people need most.

How do we quickly build a lot of homes?
In the post-war period in Canada, housing patterns were used—the CMHC literally had Type A, Type B, Type C stamped on the front of their “victory houses.” That happened in Sweden, too, with the Million Homes Program in the 1960s and ’70s. Kitchens and bathrooms of a predetermined size were built off-site. That helped streamline construction—and led to the pre-eminence of Ikea, by the way. There are currently a whole bunch of modular housing providers who have expanded with the new rapid housing initiative, and that’s a positive thing Canada could export. There’s a big advantage to going modular and building off-site, particularly in northern climates where the construction season is shorter. It’s really problematic if construction workers can’t afford to live in the cities they’re building.

Last year, Canada’s purpose-built rental apartment vacancy rate hit 1.9 per cent, its lowest level since 2001.
The best metaphor I can think of is the credits from The Simpsons, where everyone’s running for a seat on the same sofa. We have students running toward the sofa, seniors looking to downsize running toward the sofa. People who would have been able to buy homes in a previous generation are also in the race. So if we want everybody to have a seat, we need to build more sofas and make sure that they’re the right kind.

Source: Stopping immigration won’t fix Canada’s housing crisis

Anna Triandafyllidou argues that the housing needs can be accommodated by basement apartments and rooms but without any supporting data on their availability or the degree to which it helps homeowners pay their mortgages.

In recent months there has been a heated debate about Canada’s housing affordability crisis and the role of international students in the mess.

Some argue that, particularly in Canada’s big three (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver), international students drive up rents because they are prepared to rent rooms in larger apartments or houses, and even share rooms with flatmates, bringing the overall possible rent of a unit to levels that are totally unaffordable for a local family.

In many smaller cities and towns, the sheer numbers of international students are also said to put pressure on housing, as there are simply not enough units for rent, regardless of the cost.

The question thus arises whether the average Canadian family is worse off because international students are creating an impossible rental market.

It is my contention that this is not the case, and I would actually argue the opposite: International students are saving both the average Canadian homeowner (and mortgage holder) and the Canadian banking system. How is that?

International students are high-paying and often exploited tenants in basement apartments and spare bedrooms across Canada’s large and smaller cities. Some are indeed contributing to competition in the market. But the housing crisis began long before the current surge in international students, and many of them, rather than competing with domestic renters, are living in arrangements that Canadians would not be seeking anyway.

Moreover, the rents that international students pay are allowing Canadian families to survive the Bank of Canada’s string of interest-rate hikes and their galloping mortgage payments. This, in turn, helps the banking system, as it grapples with the rising risk of defaults.

Recent reports show that, as the central bank tries to tame inflationwith higher borrowing costs, several Canadian banks have allowed borrowers to extend their mortgage amortizations to more than 55 years in an effort to keep the loans afloat and allow households to keep up their payments.

Anecdotal evidence suggests many families are renting not only their basements but their bedrooms to international students. In many cases, parents and children have squeezed into one or two rooms to leave the spare rooms for renters. Networking often works through friends and extended family, as many homeowners prefer to have a student from their own ethnic and/or linguistic background, to make sharing the home easier for everyone.

These rentals play a crucial and still unaccounted role in keeping households afloat now that their mortgage payments have grown sharply in less than a year.

While this is not a long-term solution for the housing affordability crisis, nor a strategy for international student migration, these insights point to a few ideas that could help in the short and medium terms.

Colleges and universities should be asked to arrange affordable accommodations for their incoming international students as part of the study permit application process. Such accommodation arrangements can include tailored schemes where, for instance, seniors are paired with students, offering full board for a reasonable price while the student helps by doing chores and grocery shopping or befriending the older person.

Young families could also be paired with international students and receive tax breaks on the rental income they make.

Provincial governments should provide strong incentives for colleges and universities to build more student residences.

International student migration needs to be reconsidered in Canada in some ways. We need to identify both bad practices (such as overexploiting international student streams as a revenue and sustainability strategy with little educational value) and bad actors (brokers and postsecondary institutions that prey on international students and their families, selling false promises for a path to migration). We also need to offer adequate services and protections to international students, including access to health care and clear pathways to job prospects.

But we must remember that international students are not the cause of Canada’s housing crisis – and that many households would be a lot worse off without them.

Anna Triandafyllidou is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Source: As mortgage costs rise, it is international students’ rent keeping households afloat

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Australia’s multicultural framework can no longer be separate from … – Pearls and Irritations

2023/09/09 Leave a comment

While errs on the side of discounting the risks of foreign influence and interference, fundamental point that foreign and multiculturalism policies should be more coherent, to which I would add a caution of not being overly influenced by diaspora politics and issues (all too often the case):

A new multicultural framework needs to recognise that the well-being of Australia’s multicultural communities is closely related to, and inevitably affected by, geopolitics, and by Australia’s foreign policy towards migrants’ countries of origin. It is no longer viable to conceptualise foreign policy and multicultural affairs as two separate entities.

The Australian government is currently conducting a Multicultural Framework Review, and I have made a submission.

My submission is focused on the need for Australia’s multiculturalism to be reconceptualised and redesigned by taking into account the opportunities and challenges posed by current geopolitics, and by the growing complexity of the myriad Chinese-Australian communities.

This focus on the Australian-Chinese communities is in response to a number of unique factors: (a) a higher percentage of arrivals from the PRC than in previous periods; (b) a fast-changing geopolitical dynamics featuring growing tension and hostility between the US and China; and (c) Australia’s foreign-policy positioning vis-à-vis the US and China, and the Australian government’s national security and defence strategy, which increasingly imagines China as the nation’s greatest military threat.

In my submission, I have made a few recommendations

  • At the conceptual level, a new multicultural framework needs to recognise that the well-being of Australia’s multicultural communities is closely related to, and inevitably affected by, geopolitics, and by Australia’s foreign policy towards migrants’ countries of origin. It is no longer viable to conceptualise foreign policy and multicultural affairs as two separate entities. This new reality may have serious implications for the current bureaucratic structure of various departments in the federal government, and the relationships between them.
  • In terms of the well-being of various Chinese-Australian communities, the government should recognise that the ‘China threat’ discourse has caused serious concern among the Chinese-Australian communities, many of whom feel that, caught in the hostility between their motherland and their new country of residence, they have been subject to undue suspicion and distrust. My recent research shows a worryingly low level of acceptance of the Chinese-Australian communities by the Australian public, and a low level of trust between English-language media and Chinese-Australian communities, especially Mandarin-speaking first-generation Australians and permanent residents. These tendencies alert us to serious problems in the nation’s bid for multicultural harmony and social inclusiveness.
  • Future multicultural policy needs to put the principle of human rights back into its framework, especially in the context of countering foreign interference. The Chinese-Australian communities are complex and diverse in terms of political views, social values, and cultural practices. In light of this diversity or sometimes even conflict, the overall principle of respecting individuals’ right to freedom of expression is paramount. For this reason, just as individuals speaking out against the Chinese government should be safe from harassment and abuse, those who wish to speak in support of the Chinese government should not automatically be seen as brainwashed by China’s propaganda, or – even worse – suspected or accused of operating as agents and spies of the Chinese state.
  • Similarly, free access to all social media platforms including WeChat needs to be respected. Naturally, WeChat should comply with all relevant Australian regulations. However, because WeChat is by far the most useful platform for PRC migrants, it is important that the government respect this community’s right to stay connected with their families, friends and networks in China. It is crucial that the issue of WeChat should not be weaponised by politicians who single-mindedly push for a ban or partial ban in the name of security interests.
  • In line with the goal of developing adequate communication platforms to reach out to non-English speaking populations, the government should continue to use Chinese social media such as WeChat and Xiaohongshu to facilitate political engagement, better delivery of social services in aged care, health care and disability care, as well as to promote social inclusion and belonging.
  • More than ever before, there is a serious need to support ongoing research in order to identify feasible strategies, methods and pathways of ensuring inclusion and acceptance of Chinese-Australians, especially first-generation PRC migrants. The government should actively harness the hitherto largely untapped resource of the Chinese-Australian communities as assets in defending Australia’s national security and national interest, rather than regarding them as primarily a liability. Identifying effective strategies to promote their social, cultural and political integration should be considered as an urgent matter of national interest and national security.

Chinese-Australians, social inclusion and the national interest

In recent years, and especially since COVID-19 and during the last period of government by the Coalition, we have witnessed growing anti-Chinese racism, the demonisation of Chinese-Australians, suspicion of Chinese-Australians’ political loyalties, and a lack of civic and citizenship education for new migrants.

Social cohesiveness has been identified as a key element of Australia’s national interest, underpinning Australia’s prosperity and security. Indeed, security commentators make the case that ‘building trusted and apolitical engagement with all parts of the community, and notably Australians of Chinese origin’ is an important component of formulating an overarching national interest strategy. Facilitating the integration of minority groups, particularly those as sizeable as the Chinese-Australian communities, is not only consistent with a liberal perspective of justice and equality, but it is also a matter of pragmatic importance, especially if Australia is intent on growing its own political influence and increasing its national power in strategic competition with foreign coercive influence.

For the same reason, Osmond Chiu cautions that pursuing our foreign policy through a defence and security lens needs to stop fuelling ‘the perception that Chinese-Australians would be acceptable collateral damage in a conflict’.

This view – that Chinese-Australians would be acceptable collateral damage in a conflict – seems to have been implicitly adopted by many commentators in our media, as well as by some think-tanks and politicians. This has been extremely damaging to the legitimacy and validity of the ethos and philosophy of multiculturalism.

A new multicultural framework needs to reflect the fact that the well-being of Chinese-Australians is closely related to, and inevitably affected by, current geopolitics, by Australia’s foreign policy towards China, and by Australia’s national security policy favouring a close alliance with the US. It is increasingly difficult to conceptualise the two as separate entities.

Given this, the challenge to facilitate the social integration of this particular cohort is enormous. Recently, Andrew Jakubowicz commented on what he has called ‘Sinophobia in times of COVID-19’. He writes:

Identity within and attachment to Australia for ethnic immigrants depend on how well the system they enter protects their human rights from the omnipresent threats from racists and xenophobes. They will not release their grip on the old if the new emerges as threatening and potentially dangerous.

Lack of Information and Communication Platforms for Practical Needs
While many people in these communities feel marginalised and excluded in political and social terms, in practical terms there is also a gap in the government’s efforts to deliver a wide range of services, including aged care, health care, legal aid, and myriad other social initiatives, such as GambleAware and information about domestic violence.

Academics who conduct research on various aspects of the Chinese-Australian communities have demonstrated the importance of Chinese social media platforms in the everyday lives of people in these communities. For instance, Bingqin Li (UNSW) has been studying how community organisations such as the Chinese Australian Services Society (CASS) use WeChat to recruit volunteers in aged care and self-help groups. WeChat is particularly useful for community-based service providers to contact hard-to-reach older people. Li reports that some of these older people have been quietly contributing to the shortage of aged care labour in Australia for many years. But now, with the help of WeChat, CASS has recruited many more volunteers, including many new migrants from mainland China.

For older Chinese Australians, WeChat is essentially a lifeline for overcoming social isolation and learning about Australian culture, regulations, social services, events and networks. If it were banned or its use restricted, many of these elders would return to a state of effectively being ‘blind, deaf and mute’.

Similarly, Tina Du, (currently at University of South Australia) has studied the information behaviour of Chinese migrants over the age of 67, and found that WeChat plays a significant and essential role in enabling these senior citizens to live in Australia and remain connected with China. This is especially relevant, given the challenges identified in the Australian Government’s recent 2023 Intergenerational Report.

Some researchers are also urging health professionals to use WeChat to assist their patients. Dr Ling Zhang (Sydney University) is a nurse practitioner and research fellow specialising in the care of patients with cardiovascular disease. Based on her finding of low levels of eHealth literacy among migrant communities, Zhang argues that WeChat should be used as a platform for GPs and cardiologists to disseminate health information by health care providers, given its wide reach.

This growing body of evidence-based research is pointing to the crucial role that WeChat is playing in the lives of many Chinese-Australian migrants, and so far, no concrete evidence has been identified that shows that WeChat is a threat of any kind to Australia’s national security.

Senator James Paterson, who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media, believes that ‘We must also harden the resilience of our diaspora communities targeted by transnational repression to protect their right to free speech’.

To echo Senator Paterson’s call to protect our diaspora communities’ right to free speech, it is important to point out that the right to freedom of expression and free access to all social media platforms, including WeChat, indeed needs to be respected. While WeChat should be expected to comply with all relevant Australian regulations, it is also important that the government recognise and accept that WeChat is the most widely used social media platform for PRC migrants, and has become essential for them in staying connected with their families, friends and networks in China. Whatever policies emerge in this space must respect this community’s right to use the platform for such purposes. Moreover, these policies must encourage the government to harness the platform as a way of improving PRC migrants’ capacity to access information about social services and other vital government functions. It is crucial that the issue of WeChat should not be weaponised by politicians who single-mindedly push for a ban or a partial ban in the name of security interests.

The government should not only continue its nascent use of WeChat to facilitate political engagement, to deliver social services in aged care, health care, disability care, and to encourage and promote inclusion and belonging; it should also fund further research to identify ways of doing more with the platform in these spheres, and to do it better.

Summary

The question of how to address the issue of Australian-Chinese communities is an integral component of the multicultural framework review. A number of factors – a large number of recent arrivals from the PRC, a fast-changing geopolitical dynamics featuring growing tension and hostility between the US and China, and Australia’s increasing tendency in its foreign policy to imagine China as our biggest military threat – come to bear on the current review of the multicultural framework. Much work – overall reconceptualisation, governing structure, a rethinking of policy, and the design of practical strategies – remains to be done. The government will benefit enormously by actively seeking the views of scholars, multicultural agencies and community stakeholders in updating its framework.

Wanning Sun is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She also serves as the deputy director of the UTS Australia-China Relations Institute.

Source: Australia’s multicultural framework can no longer be separate from … – Pearls and Irritations

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Democrats press McCarthy, Jeffries to save key naturalization grant – Yahoo News

2023/09/09 Leave a comment

Meanwhile, in Canada, few if any settlement funding goes to citizenship preparation:

A group of Democrats is appealing to party leaders in the House to restore funding to a grant program that helps immigrants prepare for naturalization.

In a letter led by Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), 26 members called on Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to support funding for the Citizenship and Integration Grant Program (CIGP).

The program is a relatively tiny fraction of the Department of Homeland Security budget: It has awarded $132 million in grants since 2009.

But the lawmakers say its effects are substantial.

Through 579 competitive grants over that time, the program “has helped more than 300,000 lawful permanent residents prepare for U.S. citizenship,” they wrote.

Still, they noted, that number represents a fraction of a percent of the estimated 9 million permanent residents eligible to naturalize.

A key target population for grants under the program is immigrants who are poorer and who lack English skills; 32 percent of eligible immigrants targeted by the program have income below 150 percent of the poverty line and about 3 million “speak little to no English.”

“By providing increased assistance through the Grant Program, this eligible population could have greater access to naturalization and English-language classes,” wrote the lawmakers.

Yet all funding for the grant, originally proposed at $10 million for fiscal 2024, was scrapped entirely in the House Appropriations Committee in June.

On the Senate side, the Homeland Security Appropriations bill cleared the committee with $23.5 million for the CIGP.

Gomez, who has pushed to increase funding for the program, last month sent a dear colleague letter to Democrats and Republicans, asking them to join his appeal.

Though only Democrats answered, the co-signers include representatives from nearly every region of the country.

In their letter, the lawmakers made the case that more funding is required to support immigrants who wish to naturalize and who don’t live in cities with high immigrant concentrations.

“… [W]hile [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)] reviewed and supported funding for only 66 organizations nationwide, recipient organizations served both traditional immigrant population centers and emerging immigrant population centers in only 35 states, out of 50 states and several territories,” they wrote.

“Increasing funding for the CIGP will both support immigrant-serving institutions, as well as increase the capacity for additional qualified legal service providers to assist with the naturalization application and process.”

That increased capacity, the lawmakers added, would ease pressure on the overburdened USCIS, “by reducing filing errors, likely contributing to the agency-wide effort towards reducing casework backlogs and improving processing times.”

Source: Democrats press McCarthy, Jeffries to save key naturalization grant – Yahoo News

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John Ivison: Canada’s UN envoy warns of a North American migrant crisis unlike any other

2023/09/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Bob Rae has seen more than his fair share of distressing scenes as Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar, advising the Trudeau government on the Rohingya crisis.

But he said his visit to Panama’s Darién Gap in late August, to bear witness to the irregular migration crisis unfolding in one of the world’s least accessible places, was particularly heartbreaking.

Darién has become a funnel point for a great migration that is turning into a humanitarian crisis, as hundreds of thousands of people brave raging rivers, robberies, sexual assaults and venomous snakes to try to make their way north toward the United States.

Rae said the increasing number of children and single mothers making the dangerous trek is especially concerning.

Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations was flown into the remote jungle area at the invitation of the Panamanian government to observe the torrent of distressed humanity crossing by foot and small boat from South America to Central America.

Rae said 4,000 people arrived in Panamanian reception areas last Monday. “The numbers have really skyrocketed,” the former Ontario premier said.

In 2019, just 24,000 people made the perilous 100-kilometre jungle crossing, which can take up to 10 days. The flow rose to 250,000 last year, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, and it expects that this year numbers will rise to 600,000.

To put that in context, just 180,686 irregular migrants arrived in the European Union last year from Africa and Asia.

There are no roads in the region, so irregular migrants either walk across the border from Colombia or hire Indigenous locals to take them in small boats.

Venezuelans and Ecuadorians make up the bulk of migrants, pushed by rising food insecurity, political instability and gang activity.

But Rae said he was shocked to find that there were also people from China, Afghanistan, Syria and Azerbaijan. “It’s become a global industry telling people how to get on El Camino (the northward route) and go all the way up to the U.S. and Canada,” he said. “(Traffickers) feed them misleading information. The countries in the region are only starting to co-operate to find out what is driving this. It’s quite extraordinary.”

He said he talked to a man from Fujian province on China’s southeastern coast who had flown with around 10 others to Quito in Ecuador. “I asked him what he was doing and, through the translator, he said he tried to get in through Mexico, that there is no work in China at the moment and that he wants a better future for his family in the U.S. or Canada,” Rae said.

Social media is full of accounts that suggest the Darién Gap can be crossed easily in a day. The reality is quite different. “It’s very dangerous, the rivers are very fast-flowing and people are dying on the route,” Rae said. The very remoteness of the crossing means there are no reliable records of how many have perished on the way.

A published interview by a worker from the UN’s International Organization for Migration with a recent arrival in Panama detailed a typical journey.

Gabriela left Ecuador with her 15-year-old son, hoping to get to the U.S., having watched a video that said Darién could be crossed in a day.

Ecuador has been plagued by chronic political instability and spiralling crime rates — homicides have quadrupled in two years.

Gabriela said she took the decision to leave to provide for a younger son who has special needs. But she said found herself lost in the mountainous jungle and swampland after losing contact with the group she was travelling with. She was rescued and said she would never do it again. But crossing the Darién Gap is just the beginning. Migrants are attempting to fulfill their American dream, despite being warned that travellers who arrive irregularly in the U.S. will be returned to their country of origin.

Rae said the Panamanians have been keen to move new arrivals to the Costa Rican border, providing buses that have carried over 200,000 people toward their northern neighbour.

Costa Rica has declared a state of emergency along its southern border, as its ability to cope with sanitation and health issues has been swamped.

In the town of Paso Canoas, which straddles the Costa Rican-Panamanian border, makeshift refugee camps have grown up, overwhelming the local community.

Those with US$30 for the bus fare can head north on the Inter-American Highway to Nicaragua.

The rest are stranded in a garbage-strewn camp with only half a dozen bathrooms. There is little in the way of food or shelter. Migrants endure 30-degree heat and daily downpours. The Red Cross is present, providing rudimentary first aid for people with stomach complaints from drinking untreated water on the journey, according to local media accounts.

In April, Colombia, Panama and the U.S. held a trilateral meeting to discuss joint efforts to meet the emerging crisis, including combatting human-smuggling networks and expanding lawful pathways for Colombians, such as temporary work visas.

The continuing flow of migrants, and Panama’s public comments, suggest those efforts have been in vain.

Panama is set to launch a publicity campaign: “Darién is a jungle, not a road” to discourage would-be travellers.

Panamanian officials complain that Colombia continues to “indiscriminately” send migrants their way. Rae said the crisis is increasing tensions in the region.

In August, Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chavez met his American counterpart, Joe Biden, in the White House to discuss legal pathways for some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have arrived in his country to move onward to the U.S.

Rae said one of the things Canada can do is to bring together countries in the region to deal with what is an increasingly serious humanitarian situation.

“It’s not about pointing fingers at each other. We have to work together,” he said.

“Obviously along the route, we donate to the Red Cross and others who are helping, but we have to encourage everyone to create a policy that will deal with this together. Each government on their own gets desperate — the Panamanians were talking last week about closing the border. Well, it’s not physically possible to close the border. But there’s a lot of agitation and people are getting angry.”

Source: John Ivison: Canada’s UN envoy warns of a North American migrant crisis unlike any other

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Rioux: L’abaya, un vêtement comme les autres?

2023/09/09 Leave a comment

Le Devoir Paris correspondant on the French abaya ban (consistent in his support for dress restrictions):

Lundi, c’était jour de rentrée scolaire en France. Mais ce n’était pas une rentrée ordinaire. Dans une grande partie des collèges de France, on était littéralement sur les nerfs. Comment cela allait-il se passer ? Comment réagiraient les élèves ? Les parents viendraient-ils protester devant les grilles ? Bref, on craignait le pire.

C’est qu’une semaine plus tôt, le tout nouveau ministre de l’Éducation nationale, Gabriel Attal, avait décrété l’interdiction du port de l’abaya en classe. L’abaya est cette tunique traditionnelle musulmane que portent un nombre croissant de jeunes d’origine maghrébine afin de dissimuler leur corps. Tout juste nommé, à une semaine de la rentrée scolaire, le jeune ministre de 34 ans a décrété que ce vêtement distinctif identifié à la culture arabo-musulmane n’avait « pas sa place à l’école ». Le message était clair. On ne se présente pas devant un professeur en revendiquant sa religion.

Cela faisait des mois que, partout en France, enseignants et directeurs d’établissements réclamaient une intervention du ministre. Laissées à elles-mêmes, les directions étaient aux prises depuis plus d’un an avec des campagnes islamistes sur les réseaux sociaux incitant ouvertement les jeunes musulmanes à contourner la loi qui, depuis 2004, interdit aux élèves le port de tout signe religieux ostensible. Pas surprenant qu’en deux ans, le nombre d’incidents scolaires portant atteinte à la laïcité ait plus que doublé.

Or, quoi de plus ostensible que cet accoutrement patriarcal destiné à dissimuler tout le corps ? Dans sa déclaration, il aura suffi d’une seule phrase à Gabriel Attal pour clarifier le débat. « Lorsque vous entrez dans une classe, vous ne devez pas être capables d’identifier la religion des élèves », a-t-il tranché.

Les associations musulmanes eurent beau prétendre qu’il s’agissait d’une simple tenue traditionnelle sans la moindre connotation religieuse, il est clairement apparu dans le débat que l’abaya était aussi musulmane que la ceinture fléchée est québécoise. D’abord, rien de plus difficile dans la civilisation musulmane que de distinguer clairement ce qui relève de la culture de ce qui est proprement religieux. Comme l’a brillamment expliqué le philosophe Rémi Brague dans son essai magistral Sur l’islam (Gallimard) publié l’an dernier, contrairement à la chrétienté, l’islam est ce qu’il appelle « une religion intégrale » où « tout est culte » puisqu’il intègre un code juridique et définit les moeurs des bons musulmans.

Comme l’expliquait la spécialiste de l’islamisme Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, il n’existe pas de vêtements qui seraient par essence religieux, seulement « un habit qui permet de se conformer à une norme religieuse, celle qui d’après les rigoristes considère que la femme ne doit pas montrer les formes de son corps ». Comme le voile en 2004, ce rôle revient aujourd’hui à l’abaya. Il suffit de consulter les publicités sur Internet pour voir combien les marchands de guenilles le considèrent comme un prolongement du voile permettant de rompre avec la tradition laïque de l’école française.

Une tradition plus que centenaire que les Français ne semblent pas prêts à renier. Soutenue par 81 % des Français, l’interdiction de l’abaya fait l’objet d’un consensus encore plus fort que celui observé en 2004 sur la loi interdisant les signes religieux à l’école. Même les jeunes ayant entre 18 et 24 ans, que l’on dit pourtant multiculturalistes, se rangent à 63 % derrière la décision de Gabriel Attal. Ce consensus s’étend à toutes les familles politiques sans exception, mettant d’ailleurs en porte-à-faux la majorité de la gauche française avec ses électeurs. Ainsi, 58 % des partisans de La France insoumise (LFI) approuvent la décision du ministre alors même que son leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fait un virage électoraliste à 180 degrés sur le sujet, dénonçant « une mesure dangereuse et cruelle ».

Certaines féministes ont aussi de graves questions à se poser. Alors que l’écologiste radicale Sandrine Rousseau dénonce une « machine de broyage » des adolescentes, le caractère religieux de l’abaya ne fait aucun doute pour 74 % des Françaises qui se disent féministes. Rarement un événement aura illustré de manière aussi évidente le cul-de-sac dans lequel s’est engagée depuis plusieurs années une grande partie de la gauche en se ralliant aux thèses du multiculturalisme et en ne craignant pas de s’allier aux musulmans les plus obscurantistes.

Lundi, comme en 2004, après moult explications de la part des proviseurs, à peine quelques dizaines de jeunes filles ont dû être renvoyées chez elles. Les autres se sont facilement conformées à la règle. Le cours normal de l’école a ainsi pu reprendre. Cela démontre que, pour peu que l’on fasse respecter les lois et la tradition laïque de l’école, l’immense majorité des élèves musulmans se conformeront aux traditions et règles de vie de leur pays d’accueil. Ils n’attendent qu’une chose, qu’on le leur dise !

Pour tous les Québécois que l’on stigmatise en permanence pour avoir simplement osé exiger des enseignants qu’ils se gardent d’exprimer par la parole ou le vêtement leurs convictions religieuses à l’école, le message est on ne peut plus clair : pour être respecté, encore faut-il se tenir debout.

Source: L’abaya, un vêtement comme les autres?

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Paul: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Good column:

Elitism is a frequent target of criticism, especially in politics. Historically, Americans haven’t liked elitists. They don’t appreciate the hoity-toity who look down on everyone else.

These days that disdain emanates most vocally from the populist right. To these self-described down-to-earth folk without airs or fancy talk, “the elite” is shorthand for those who are more educated and have more power, especially cultural power, code for people they don’t agree with and resent.

But the left also has a beef with elitism. To those concerned with social inequity, “the elite” symbolize a flawed meritocracy. In their view, certain demographic groups get elevated over others and bar access to those historically deprived of power, especially political and economic power.

Whatever their respective merits, both critiques are hard not to read as variations on “I want what you have.” The word “elite,” after all, signifies something people aspire to. We admire elite athletes. We rely on elite research institutions to make medical advances. Most people wish they too could sit in first class. Until then, they hotly resent whoever does.

A more sophisticated and productive critique of elites comes from Fredrik deBoer, known to those who read his popular newsletter as Freddie. DeBoer, a Marxist, activist and the author of the book “The Cult of Smart,” is one of the sharpest and funniest writers on the internet. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s always thoughtful and he pushes me to think. I hope his new book, “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” will be read especially by those on the left, because the left is where his heart lies and the failings of the left seem to break his heart most. In this, he and I are fully aligned.

“It’s OK to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your own side,” he writes. “You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.” As deBoer points out, it’s far better for those of us on the left to clean up our own mess than to hand it over to conservatives as easy fodder for mockery. To that end, he scrutinizes the self-interests of the nonprofit industry, the “elite capture” of the Black Lives Matter movement, the neglect of class as a primary category of political thought and other failures and shortcomings among progressive movers.

What drives deBoer’s argument here is the idea that on the left, elites are undermining progress for the average Joe. Worse, they’re doing it in the name of progress. It’s time, he says, to forcefully question exactly what elites on the left claim is best for everyone else, especially when evidence suggests otherwise.

One of the bravest chapters in his new book examines the elitism of the defund the police movement, which, deBoer argues, hurts the cause of racial justice. Research shows more policing has reduced homicides, which disproportionately affect Black Americans. Black Americans are about 13 percent of the population but make up more than half of homicide victims. As deBoer explains, “police abolition and incremental efforts to reduce policing could easily result in more hardship for the very community that we’re ostensibly fighting for.”

In deBoer’s view, this misplaced enthusiasm for police abolition is largely a result of the economic and cultural gulf between elite activists of all races and the vast majority of Black Americans. What’s easy for radical activists and academics to write on a placard turns out to be hard for many Black Americans to actually live with. Taking police off the streets may minimize the possibility of police violence against Black people, but it will do little to mitigate the far greater problem of all other violence against Black people.

Many Black people, particularly outside of elite circles, are all too aware of this. As deBoer notes, “significant majorities of Black Americans want not less policing but better policing.” In 2022, Black Democrats were twice as likely as white Democrats to say reducing crime should be a top priority. A 2021 survey found that white liberals were more inclined than Black Americans to support defunding the police: “71 percent of white liberals say they would support reducing police budgets and shifting funding to social services,” compared with 53 percent of Black Americans; a significant 44 percent of Black people oppose it altogether.

Yet for many on the left, to point out these facts is considered sacrilege, somehow racist and essentially tantamount to serving the enemy. Many white progressives are so terrified of being labeled “racist” themselves that they prioritize self-protection and fear of their critics over helping out the very people they profess to want to help — people they may not understand well at all.

For deBoer, police violence and other problems of social justice require action from people of all races and ethnicities, rather than heeding the empty diktats of elite discourse. “I feel strongly that there must be a way — there must be a way — to take police violence against Black people immensely seriously and to fight for major police reform,” he writes, “while acknowledging that crimes and violence committed against Black people by those other than police are far more common.”

Last month I met deBoer for lunch near where he lives in Connecticut. He talked a lot about the class disparities of the state, which contains many of the wealthiest pockets in the nation alongside extreme poverty. He sees himself writing in the tradition of leftist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawm, Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty and Adolph Reed. It seems to pain him that the left so often shoots itself in the foot.

When I asked why he wrote this book, he said, “I really do believe that we live in a country and a culture with deeply entrenched racial inequality, and all decent people have a duty to try to confront that inequality.” However, he emphasized, it’s not only something we have a moral duty to do — we also have a moral duty to do it well. The number of people who genuinely thought there was a chance of police abolition was very small, he told me. “But by making that a centerpiece of their demands, it allowed them to say afterward, ‘Look at how awful things are now, we didn’t go far enough.’”

It’s a way for the left, deBoer explained, to look like “a beautiful failure.”

DeBoer doesn’t consider himself an optimist, but he nonetheless doesn’t want to concede that kind of defeat. The left, he told me, needs to return to the “up from below” approach of the socialist politician Eugene Debs: It needs to invest in real change for those in need rather than heed elite rhetoric. To my ears, all this does sound quite optimistic, considering the polarized discourse and politics of 2023, where shouty or performative extremism often gets in the way of duller and more difficult action. But as deBoer says, a bottom-up approach may be the best, or only, option for meaningful social progress.

Source: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

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Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

2023/09/08 1 Comment

Ignored then and no sign yet of meaningful action today:

North America’s foreign-student system is no longer a humanitarian endeavour to lift up the planet’s best and brightest, and support the developing world.

Instead, it’s become a commercial competition full of marketing rhetoric, which is creating chaos in higher education.

That’s what the West’s leading experts in international education told me 10 years ago.

They were describing how governments and post-secondary institutions were adopting an increasingly cynical attitude toward foreign students.

Philip Altbach, Hanneke Teekens and Jane Knight were ahead of their time in lamenting how international education was turning into a “cash cow” for public and private universities and colleges in the U.S. and especially Canada, where there are at least eight times more per capita than in the U.S.

While the concept of international education continues to have upsides, it’s now becoming obvious to many in Canada that the foreign-student system is creating hard times, especially for students from abroad. Even the Liberal government, long in denial, is starting to admit it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government acknowledges it has pumped up the number of foreign students in Canada to, officially, 900,000. That compares to 225,000 in 2013. And experts say Ottawa’s number is a serious undercount.

The Liberals are still not necessarily admitting the obvious: That governments and post-secondary institutions are addicted to foreign-student spending and fees, which are four times higher than those of domestic students. Ten years ago, foreign students brought $8 billion into Canada, now Ottawa estimates it’s up to $30 billion.

The main problem, however, that has suddenly drawn more attention to foreign students is the out-of-control cost of housing, particularly renting.

International students, say housing analysts, are hiking competition for places to live. The average rent for a one-bedroom in Canada has jumped to a worrying $1,800, according to Rentals.ca. Vancouver is the most extreme in the country, at a devastating average of $3,013. A one-bedroom in Toronto is $2,592.

Foreign students are an expanding factor in such expensive housing — and it’s hurting the study visa holders themselves, who, according to both social media and the mainstream media, are increasingly feeling taken advantage of.

Even Canada’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, last month used the word exploited. And he finally admitted universities and colleges are bringing in far more students than they could possibly provide housing for.

That was before Benjamin Tal, chief economist for the CIBC Capital Markets, told Liberal cabinet ministers the government is dangerously undercounting the number of temporary residents, particularly foreign students, in Canada.

While the government, and Statistics Canada, state there are more than one million non-permanent residents in Canada, Tal’s calculations show there are at least one million more missing from the count. “Housing demand is stronger than what official numbers are telling you and that’s why we’re approaching a zero vacancy rate.”

The government’s calculations, Tal said, have ignored that many foreign workers and students don’t leave the country when their visas expire. They stay on in hopes of applying to become immigrants. Census methods for surveying foreign students, he added, are misleading.

Giacomo Ladas of Rentals.ca says, “International students do add pressure to the rental market,” even while he emphasized it’s not their fault.

“There’s such a supply and demand issue in the rental market right now and they add to this imbalance. The study permits for international students have increased by 75 per cent in the last five years. So, that’s a huge influx of people coming in and nowhere to put them.”

Delegates at a recent Union of B.C. Municipalities’ housing summit heard how rapidly foreign students and other non-permanent residents are adding to demand for housing.

The number of non-permanent residents and newcomers to Metro Vancouver has in five years almost doubled, delegates were told. Foreign students and other recent arrivals own eight per cent of all homes in Metro Vancouver, and account for 25 per cent of renters.

Canada’s housing minister received a lot of media attention in August when he responded to a reporter’s direct question by saying he wouldn’t rule out a cap on international students.

But since then both he and Immigration Minister Marc Miller have backtracked, and Trudeau has warned not to “blame” foreign students.

Miller admitted Canada’s “very lucrative” foreign student system “comes with some perverse effects, some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen to be a backdoor entry into Canada.”

Whatever the Liberal cabinet is starting to admit in the past month, however, the public would be naive to expect any real reforms.

In addition to anxiety over the housing crisis, many economists also worry international students are being taken advantage of by employers to keep wages down. An earlier StatCan study showed up to one out of three foreign students aren’t attending school.

While some representatives of universities and college, especially private ones, are trying to shut down debate by accusing critics of blaming study visa holders for high housing costs and low wages, the reality is those raising concerns can be seen as standing up for people on study visas.

Many people are aware of a high suicide rate among international students, including alarms raised by funeral homes. The largest cohort of foreign students, by far, now comes from India, and it is often South Asian voices in Canada who are pointing to their victimization, including employer abuse and sexual harassment by landlords.

And Vancouver immigration lawyers such as Richard Kurland and George Lee add the federal government’s decision to allow unlimited international students is setting up many for future immigration disappointment.

Canada is building far too big a pool of people who will be highly qualified for permanent resident status, they say. Not everyone can win the immigration points-system competition, which has an annual cutoff.

The trouble is a lot of vested interests are eager for the foreign-student gravy train to keep chugging along, regardless of the unintended suffering it causes — including for students desperate for a place to live.

Source: Douglas Todd: Warnings of today’s foreign-student exploitation began a decade ago

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UN envoy links temporary foreign worker program to ‘contemporary forms of slavery’

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Of note. Wonder how Canada compares to other Western countries, let alone the workers in Gulf countries:

A United Nations official on Wednesday denounced Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Tomoya Obokata, UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, made the comments in Ottawa after spending 14 days in Canada.

“I am disturbed by the fact that many migrant workers are exploited and abused in this country,” he said.

Source: UN envoy links temporary foreign worker program to ‘contemporary forms of slavery’

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Antisemitic Comments by Palestinian Leader Cause Uproar

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Sigh….

Video has emerged of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, recently asserting that European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he said were their predatory lending practices, rather than their religion.

Mr. Abbas’s false claim drew swift condemnation from Israeli and European officials. It also fueled accusations that Mr. Abbas — an architect of interim peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s — is not genuinely committed to resolving the ongoing conflict.

In a speech late last month, Mr. Abbas said: “They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews.”

“No,” Mr. Abbas added. Jews were persecuted, he continued, because of “their social role, which had to do with usury, money, and so on.”

Mr. Abbas also repeated a widely discredited theory that European, or Ashkenazi, Jews have no ancient roots in the Middle East. Instead, Mr. Abbas claimed that European Jews were the descendants of a nomadic Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism during the medieval period, and therefore were not victims of antisemitism.

“When we hear them talk about Semitism and antisemitism — the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites,” Mr. Abbas said.

Mr. Abbas’s comments were broadcast live on Palestinian television two weeks ago, in a speech to members of his secular political party, Fatah,

The remarks were brought to a wider audience on Wednesday, when the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based monitoring group that mainly translates extremist comments by Arab and Iranian leaders, distributed a subtitled version of Mr. Abbas’s speech.

Mr. Abbas is the president of the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that has administered parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the 1990s, when the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships signed interim peace accords.

His comments illustrated why he has developed a checkered reputation among Israeli and Western partners. Mr. Abbas was one of the chief negotiators in the peace process, and often is credited with helping to reduce tensions following a wave of violence in the 2000s. At times, he has also described the Holocaust as a crime against humanity.

But Mr. Abbas also has a long history of antisemitic remarks. He made similar comments in 2018 about usury and Ashkenazi Jews, and last year he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

In 1984 he published a book in which he condemned the Holocaust but also cited historians who disputed the widely accepted death toll of as many as six million Jews.

“This is the true face of Palestinian ‘leadership,’” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, wrote on social media in response to Mr. Abbas’s latest speech.

“It is no wonder that mere hours ago a Palestinian teenage terrorist hacked innocent Israelis with a meat cleaver,” Mr. Erdan added, referring to an attack on Wednesday in the Old City of Jerusalem that wounded at least two people.

The European Union said in a statement that Mr. Abbas’s “historical distortions are inflammatory, deeply offensive, can only serve to exacerbate tensions in the region and serve no-one’s interests.”

The statement added: “They play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated for.”

Source: Antisemitic Comments by Palestinian Leader Cause Uproar

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