More questioning of increasing levels of immigration and their impact on housing and productivity, along with legitimate worry regarding ongoing support for high levels:
One of the most encouraging national polls in recent weeks was a survey done by Nanos Research for Bloomberg News that showed large flows of international migration into Canada continue to be widely supported by the public.
This is a relief. I’ve been worried, and not because I’m an immigrant.
Other than perhaps our endowment of natural resources, Canada probably has no competitive advantage greater than our willingness to open our doors to the world’s brightest and hardest working people. Our country is largely free of the hang-ups and complexities that hamper immigration policy in other large industrialized economies, an advantage that is doubly important today as our native-born population quickly ages.
But questions are being raised whether current migration numbers are coming in too large and too fast.Not from politicians in Ottawa. At a time when parties struggle to find anything to agree on, the broad multi-partisan parliamentary consensus around open immigration is holding.Canvass Conservative members of Parliament and you get little sign of distress over the Liberal government’s efforts to drive up immigration flows. As long as immigration remains focused on the nation’s economic needs and filling job shortages, the main opposition party appears to be supportive of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plan to raise annual immigration targets to about half a million.
Economists though — a handful at least — are beginning to raise some flags as stresses grow in the housing market and data show the economic gains from accelerated population growth may be producing diminishing returns. (On my Twitter feed, the University of Waterloo’s Mikal Skuterud has been on the forefront of this issue).
The numbers are big and historic and well ahead of our peers.Canada’s population is estimated to have increased by just over one million last year — easily a record and up 2.7 per cent from 2021. (This number included a large increase in non-permanent residents such as foreign students and temporary foreign workers.)In the United States, with more than eight times the population, the increase is estimated at 1.5 million. The International Monetary Fund projects our population to grow by about nine per cent over the next six years, which is more than twice as fast as the U.S., which ranks second in the G7.
We all know this is producing strains in housing
Stéfane Marion, chief economist at National Bank of Canada, pointed out in an April 10 note that the ratio of housing starts to working-age population has fallen to the lowest on record. “Ottawa should consider revising its immigration targets to allow supply to catch up with demand,” he said.
But it’s not just housing. Economists are beginning to see warning signs in another gauge: rising population isn’t coming with a commensurate increase in economic output.According to data released by the International Monetary Fund last week, Canada’s population growth will help fuel the biggest increase in national income among G7 countries over the next six years, but our economy will also see the smallest increase in GDP per capita.
The IMF projects that our GDP per capita — income per person — will shrink over the next two years and grow by just 2.1 per cent over the next six years. That’s a third of the G7 average.
In other words, our economy will grow fast but our actual living standards will stagnate. It’s a very peculiar phenomenon and it will be hard to sustain.
This is not to suggest the growth in population is responsible for sluggish productivity numbers. Maybe it’s coincident and there’s no link whatsoever.
Weak productivity is deep rooted in Canada. Perhaps we’re paying the price for being too reliant on housing over the past decade. Or there’s something particular about the sharp increase in foreign students or temporary foreign workers that is skewing the numbers and will soon correct.
Or, maybe there is a link. The greater supply of workers — one could postulate — is making companies less willing to invest.
I don’t know. But someone should take a closer look and get a better understanding as we proceed on such a major endeavour.
An economy that produces strong gains in national income but leaves per capita incomes stagnant — it seems to me — would be a very fragile one with growing inequality. That income will accrue to someone, but it won’t be the average worker.
My worry is that these are exactly the sort of economic dynamics that could produce much worse polling results on immigration in the future.Theo Argitis is managing director at Compass Rose Group.
More commentary opposing self-administered citizenship oaths among broader concerns:
There are few more endearing sights than a Canadian citizenship ceremony. As a reporter years ago, I witnessed a couple. They are memorable in the extreme: the judge intoning on the importance of being a good citizen, a chorus of new Canadians taking the oath together, and the smiles and tears of participants looking as if they won the lottery.
And in many cases, they have: for the chance to come to a country as wealthy, as open, as full of opportunity, is what drives that joy. And we benefit from the talented people who come here. When I worked in Bangladesh in 2000, my bank manager was applying to immigrate to Canada. When I asked why, he replied, “We consider Canada to be a kind of paradise.”
While we struggle with an influx of refugees and cope with the impact of discriminatory laws like Quebec’s Bill 21, immigration is a Canadian success story. Indeed, among the major federal parties, none is spouting an anti-immigrant bias, which is unusual compared to many western countries.
And so it was disappointing to read of a proposal in February’s Canada Gazette, innocuously titled “Regulations Amending the Citizenship Regulations (Oath of Citizenship).” It describes the backlog of citizenship applications due to the pandemic and offers a solution: “Technology offers the potential to vastly transform client service by helping to address long processing times and application inventories.”
In short, with the click of a mouse, you could become Canadian. No ceremony, no tears, no real effort. This simple act would reduce Canadian citizenship into a convenience, like online shopping.
Andrew Griffith, the former director general for citizenship and multiculturalism, doubts the idea came from the public service. “I find it hard to imagine anyone advocating for this,” despite the pressures of backlogs, he said. He thinks the deputy minister got a message from the minister’s office to “find a solution” to speed up processing and produced what Sir Humphrey of Yes, Minister would call a “courageous decision.”
Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard famously said: “Canada is not a real country.” The current prime minister once stated: “Canada is a post-national state with no core identity.” To assist that perception, it has been years since a new version of the Citizenship Study Guide was published.
At the same time, there is a decline in the number of permanent residents who become citizens: only half living here take the oath. We also have one of the world’s largest diasporas: three million Canadians live abroad, without plans to return. I recently met a Korean family living in Halifax for three years to obtain citizenship before heading home. While in Portugal, I met a couple from Hong Kong who blithely said they had Canadian citizenship, but had no intention of living here.
It has also become too easy to obtain citizenship. The Harper government tightened regulations by, among other things, moving the residency requirement to four years. The Trudeau Liberals put it back to three in 2017. In many other countries, five and even 10 years residency is common.
Many talented friends and relatives have moved to the U.S. over the decades, and are never coming back. They are among the 50,000 Canadians who leave for the U.S. and U.K. each year. One young friend who is moving called Canada “genocidal” and “communist,” while the U.S. was “the best country in the world.” Her opinion was evidently shaped by the self-flagellating commentary on our history from our leaders. Now, try to imagine Americans debating whether their capital should be renamed because George Washington owned hundreds of slaves.
The thought someone should obtain citizenship with the click of a button from this country, which has achieved so much, is an embarrassment. Have we become so low in our self-esteem that we have abandoned any pride in being a citizen, and its responsibilities?
The current government could easily cut the backlogs by renting arenas and stadiums to welcome new Canadians in mass citizenship ceremonies. It could renew the citizenship guide, offering a positive take on our history. And maybe more people would be attracted to live here. If it does not change the negative narrative it is sending Canadians and the world, it should get out of the way to allow others to lead.
Andrew Caddell is retired from Global Affairs Canada, where he was a senior policy adviser. He previously worked as an adviser to Liberal governments. He is a town councillor in Kamouraska, Que. He can be reached at pipson52@hotmail.com.
Quebec’s adventures in state secularism — laïcité — have always been full of contradictions, hypocrisies and flimsy explanations. Thankfully, if belatedly, in recent days, those have been coming to a head over two main issues: The role of the Catholic church as part of Quebec’s history and heritage — its patrimoine — and the provision of rooms in public schools for students (read: Muslim students) to pray.
Education Minister Bernard Drainville banned schools from providing prayer spaces the week before last, deeming them incompatible with laïcité. The National Assembly passed one of its famous unanimous motions: “The putting in place of prayer areas, regardless of confession, in public school rooms goes against the principle of secularism.”
But then came Easter, when leading-light nationalist columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté took to the pages of Le Journal de Montréal with a surprising defence of the Catholic church. Catholicism provided “particular impetus” and “poetic breath” to the French adventure in North America, he argued, and a sense of “solidarity” that began under British oppression and remains to this day.
Premier François Legault tweeted out the column, quoting the bit about solidarity. It did not go well. A few hours later, digging out from an avalanche of negative responses both online and off, Legault added: “We must distinguish between laïcité and our heritage.” And that didn’t go well either — which is interesting, because until recently that was an entirely mainstream position.
In 2008, the National Assembly unanimously (of course) affirmed Quebecers’ “attachment to our religious and historic heritage represented by the crucifix” — i.e., the crucifix hanging over the Speaker’s chair in the legislature. “The crucifix is about 350 years of history in Quebec that none of us are ever going to erase,” then-premier Jean Charest averred. (Minor clarification: Then-premier Maurice Duplessis had the crucifix installed in 1936. According to University of Montreal historian Jacques Rouillard, Duplessis “wanted to distinguish himself from previous Liberal governments by showing he would be more receptive to Catholic principles.”) Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard left office in 2018 still defending said crucifix, and he defended crucifixes in hospitals as well. “To be open and tolerant, that doesn’t mean we have to erase our history,” he argued.
Legault seems to be getting far more pushback than his predecessors did. Liberal education critic Marwah Rizqy accused him of violating his duty of neutrality “as premier of all Quebecers in our secular state.” Liberal MNA Monsef Derraji accused the premier of a “lack of judgment.” Other provincial and federal Liberals and New Democrats chimed in disapprovingly, along with businessman Mitch Garber and comedian Sugar Sammy.
Some of Bock-Côté’s colleagues at Le Journal weren’t much impressed either. “If the Church allowed the French-Canadian people to survive in America, this influence was also unhealthy,” wrote staunch secularist Elsie Lefebvre. This went for women and homosexuals in particular, she argued, but also for the whole population, which was deliberately kept poorly educated and backward.
“Far from cultivating solidarity, the Church favored charity for the deserving poor, that is, for people who complied with its precepts,” Réjean Parent argued. “It has not contributed to our evolution; on the contrary, it has delayed it.”
In a very interesting column, Philippe Léger argued that Legault revealed himself as simply not very interested in laïcité. Indeed, Legault hasn’t worked very hard to hide that, often framing Bill 21 — the restrictions on public servants’ religious attire — as a sort of social consensus under which Quebec could draw a line and move on. (Lotsa luck!)
Léger made a critical observation, as well: Younger Quebecers, few of them religious but none having lived under the Pope’s thumb, are far more likely to see all these contradictions as simply irreconcilable, just as many in the Rest of Canada do now. They (and we) are asked to believe a ban on religious symbols in the public service was an inevitable offshoot of the Quiet Revolution, but one whose necessity only became clear half a century later —mysteriously enough, at a time of increased Muslim immigration. They (and we) can’t help but see “the inconsistency of prohibiting a prayer room for Muslim students during the week, and celebrating … Catholic heritage on weekends,” as Léger put it.
Indeed, the prayer-room issue is a great litmus test for exactly what people mean by secularism: Is it a matter of the government privileging certain ways of life over others, or a matter of the government simply recusing itself from matters of religion?
There was controversy here in Toronto a few years ago when a public middle school essentially brought congregational Muslim prayers in-house on Fridays, for the dubious sake of convenience. I felt it was an unnecessary and unfortunate mash-up of an important secular place with organized religion — whereas allowing students room to pray individually and privately strikes me as a simple matter of hands-off personal liberty. Drainville arrived at the peculiar position that silent prayer in public schools where others can see you is OK, but not quiet prayer in a dedicated room.
That’s a very difficult position to defend, and in the past, Drainville and Legault might not have had to bother. Unanimous vote in the National Assembly aside, there has been healthy and fearless pushback against the prayer-room decision as well. It almost seems like Legault’s government might accidentally have triggered the honest secularism debate Quebec so desperately needs, and which Legault so hoped to avoid. It’s excellent news, if true.
Interesting findings, on the “healthy immigrant” effect and how that declines over time (a perverse form of integration):
In Ontario’s poorest neighbourhoods, newborns of non-refugee immigrant mothers face a lower risk of serious illness and death than those born to Canadian-born mothers, according to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday.
Both immigration status and living in a low-income neighbourhood are associated with worse outcomes for newborns, write researchers from the University of Toronto, two Toronto hospitals, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
However, while previous research has looked at the risk of adverse outcomes for newborns in low- versus high-income neighbourhoods, the study’s authors said it has overlooked the comparative risks for babies born to immigrant and non-immigrant parents living in similar low-income neighbourhoods.
“Efforts should be aimed at improving the overall health and well-being of all females residing in low-income areas, and at determining if the risk of adverse birth outcomes can be equitably reduced among immigrant and non-immigrant groups,” wrote co-author Jennifer Jairam.
To compare the risk of severe neonatal illness and death in immigrant- and non-immigrant-born infants, researchers looked at data on all live, in-hospital births of single babies from 20 to 42 weeks’ gestation between 2002 and 2019 in Ontario.
Ontario, they wrote, is the landing place for about 53 per cent of all female immigrants who enter Canada.
They measured severe neonatal illness or disease by looking at breathing support, intravenous fluid use, birth before 32 weeks’ gestation, very low birth weight and respiratory distress.
During the study period, there were 414,241 single babies born to 312,124 mothers aged 15 years and older living in low-income urban neighbourhoods. Of all the live births during this period, 148,050 were to mothers who had immigrated to Canada, and 266,191 to Canadian-born mothers. Most of the mothers who immigrated to Canada came from South Asia and the East Asia and Pacific regions and had lived in Ontario for less than 10 years.
Jairam and her team found the risk of severe neonatal illness and death for newborns of mothers who had immigrated to Canada was significantly lower than for newborns of Canadian-born mothers, at 49.7 per 1,000 live births compared with 65.6 per 1,000 live births.
However, they said that risk varied depending on the country of origin, with a higher risk of severe neonatal illness and death in newborns of immigrants from Jamaica and Ghana, and in those who had lived for a greater length of time in Ontario.
THE ‘HEALTHY IMMIGRANT EFFECT’
Rather than suggesting immigrant mothers and their newborns receive better care in Ontario than Canadian-born mothers and babies, the authors believe their findings might be explained by the “healthy immigrant” effect.
“Immigrant females who are healthier and more resilient may be most capable of migration; the immigration policy of a host country may preferentially select healthy immigrants,” wrote Dr. Joel Ray, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and one of the study’s co-authors, adding that, paradoxically, immigrants face greater barriers to health care access.
According to the researchers, the “healthy immigrant” effect wanes relative to the length of time an immigrant spends living in a new country.
Another explanation the researchers suggested is some immigrants have greater net income, educational achievement and health literacy than the average for a low-income neighbourhood.
Either way, Jairam, Ray and their co-authors said the study underscores the importance of paying attention to trends at the neighbourhood level so pregnant parents and babies in low-income communities can hope for better health outcomes.
Quebec’s immigration department is investing $10 million to study immigration-related matters in the francophone province.
The financing is being provided by the province’s immigration department, the Ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI), over two years, starting this fiscal year, but the research projects themselves will be conducted over the coming five years.
The money is being invested through Quebec’s non-profit which funds societal and cultural research projects, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).
“I am very happy to announce this partnership with the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture which will address the needs expressed by so many stakeholders in Quebec to identify the factors which enhance the attraction, retention, and the experiences of immigrants in all Quebec’s regions,” said provincial Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette in French.
“This agreement will provide MIFI with the necessary information to put in place innovative programs adapted to the reality and needs of immigrants in Quebec.”
Although the specific details of how the funds are going to be spent will only be revealed once the FRQSC starts issuing requests for research proposals, Quebec’s immigration department has noted there will be two streams.
The first stream will examine cross-cultural practices and the sense of belonging immigrants have for the regions in which they live and the province of Quebec.
The second stream will look at the migratory patterns of immigrants within Canada, the factors which enhance the attraction and retention of immigrants and their willingness to settle in regions, the existing linguistic dynamics and the capacity of the province to welcome immigrants.
The province is hoping to use the insights it will gain from this research to improve its current policies and programs and also to develop innovative new ones.
Quebec Welcomed Record Numbers Of Permanent And Temporary Residents Last Year
“This support for immigration research by MIFI is an excellent opportunity to contribute to the advancement of our knowledge of this societal challenge, to develop the next generation of researchers interested in this subject, and, in doing so, elaborate on the public policies with regards to settlement services and the integration of immigrants, in French, to Quebec,” said Rémi Quirion, Quebec’s chief scientist.
Quebec welcomed a record-breaking 51,260 foreign nationals through the IMP last year, up almost 18.4 per cent from the 43,295 in 2021.
The province also welcomed a record-breaking 38,505 foreign nationals through the TFWP last year, up 27 per cent from the 30,310 TFWP workers in 2021.
Importance Of Temporary Foreign Workers To Quebec Economy Is Increasing
“The number of temporary foreign workers in Quebec is increasing every year, and particularly since Ottawa has granted us more flexibility in the wake of recent negotiations,” said Quebec Labour Minister Jean Boulet in French.
“This labour force is more and more involved in all sectors of our economy throughout Quebec.”
As immigration levels have risen, Quebec Premier François Legault has gotten antsy about the future of the French language in the francophone province.
During the last provincial election in Quebec, Legault insisted the province must hold the line on immigration. Then, in his inaugural address to open the latest session of the legislature, the premier announced plans to require that all economic immigrants to the province be francophone by 2026.
In her first immigration plan, the Plan d’immigration du Québec 2023, Fréchette tried to hold the line on immigration to between 49,500 and 52,500 new permanent residents to the province, citing the need to be able to provide adequate settlement services and integrate them all.
“Immigrants bring with them a wide range of talents to Quebec and all the supports must be in place to help them integrate,” said Fréchette in a statement in French.
“This immigration plan contains important measures to help them learn French and integrate. Our government wants immigration to contribute to the Quebec economy in all regions of the province and to also maintain the vitality of the French language.”
A member of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s new multiculturalism panel resigned Monday after the Opposition resurrected past antisemitic social media posts.
The Alberta NDP asked Smith to remove Tariq Khan, a Calgary-based Realtor, from the Premier’s Council on Multiculturalism, citing “a documented history” of antisemitic social media posts.Smith’s office said Monday that Khan offered his resignation and the premier has accepted it.
“The premier denounces all forms of intolerance and hate,” Smith’s office said in an email.
Smith announced the new council Friday to promote cultural diversity and inclusiveness in Alberta. Khan was a part of the 30-member council, headed by co-chairs Sumita Anand and Philomina Okeke-Iherjirika.
The Opposition NDP provided The Canadian Press screen grabs of what appears to be Khan’s Facebook account.
One shows an edited image of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the Star of David on his forehead, feasting on the blood of a child with the words “can’t get enough” written above his head. Another post shows Khan allegedly praising a terrorist convicted for his role in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament.
The Canadian Press could not independently verify those posts were once on Khan’s Facebook account.The Alberta NDP also shared a screen-grab of a 2018 letter rejecting Khan as a UCP nominee for the constituency of Calgary-North East. In the letter, then-party executive director Janice Harrington refers to a video he allegedly shared that labels the Holocaust a hoax.
Khan was not immediately available for comment.
Deputy premier Kaycee Madu said Monday that it’s “obvious” someone in the vetting process missed the gap.
“We will go back and take a look at our process and show that we close whatever gap that existed that made it impossible for us to catch this serious error,” he said at a news conference at the Alberta Legislature.
“We are humans. I think what is important is that when ⦠it’s brought to our attention, we will fix the problem.”
Alberta Opposition Leader Rachel Notley said she finds the error disturbing.
“It goes beyond odd,” she said in Calgary. “It’s either demonstrative of next-level incompetence from the premier’s office ⦠or it’s demonstrative of a genuine desire to divide and discriminate and promote racism.”
In Romania, Laurentiu David Cobzaru was called the “tigan” or the untouchable.
Other kids in his neighbourhood weren’t allowed to play with him and his siblings. In school, he and other Roma children were made to sit at the back of the class because of their dark skin.
And that label as an outcast, “Zigeuner” in German, would follow him even after he moved from Bucharest to Berlin, where he found himself the target of the neo-Nazis yet again.
“I was called a ‘gypsy’ and was beaten and pushed down by others my whole life,” says Cobzaru, who arrived in Toronto in November for asylum with his wife, Claudia, and daughter, Eva, after he was attacked by four skinheads in Berlin on his way home after work.
While Canada is a beacon of hope for many Roma seeking protection, equality and a better future, the 39-year-old man says few people understand why he and his people come all the way for asylum from Europe where biases and discrimination against his people still run deep.
“My heart is broken with all the Romani people who are coming here from all over Europe trying to find a society where they are accepted,” said Cobzaru. “We are coming to Canada because we want to break the chain of discrimination. We don’t want our children to suffer like we did.”
Historically called gypsies, a derogatory label, Roma have endured centuries of discriminatory treatment and slavery in Europe. With a population of 10 to 12 million, it’s the largest minority group in the continent and within the European Union.
Back in 2005, a non-binding pan-European initiative called The Decade of Roma Inclusion was launched to address the discrimination they faced and improve the life of “the world’s most populous marginalized community” so they could share equal opportunities as others.
Last year, in passing a resolution to “urgently” address the conditions of Roma people, the European Parliament said deep-rooted structural and institutional “anti-Gypsyism” continues to exist at all levels of EU society, whether it’s in their access to employment, housing, education, health care, protection or public services.
It referred to surveys that found only one in four Roma age 16 or older was employed; 80 per cent of Roma lived below their country’s at-risk-of-poverty threshold; every third Roma lived in housing without tap water and one in 10 without electricity; every third Roma child had family going hungry at least once a month; and almost half of Roma of the usual school age did not attend.
In many places, said the report, Roma students were segregated in schools; disproportionate numbers of them were also often placed in “special” schools for children with intellectual disabilities.
“Poverty and lack of access to basic services has a considerable impact on children’s physical, mental and emotional development, and increases their chances of lagging behind in all aspects of their adult life,” it noted.
Faced with blatant discrimination and adversity, Cobzaru said many young Roma are discouraged and made to give up, because they know they don’t get rewarded for their hard work and won’t get the same opportunities.
In grade school, Cobzaru said, his teachers would give him lower grades even though he had the same answers in tests and assignments as non-Roma classmates. Whenever there was an issue between him and others, he was always the one who got punished, he said.
He was one year short of completing an early childhood education program when he decided to quit, because he couldn’t put up with hostile instructors who would be watching him over his shoulder during exams, looking for cheating behaviour.
But his mother, who can’t read or write, recognized the importance of education and encouraged him to return to school. He ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree in Romani language and later a master’s degree in counselling, a rare feat among his peers.
“My mother always prayed on her knees for us to achieve our goals. I got my strength from her,” said Cobzaru, who worked in Berlin as a teacher and social worker for newcomers from eastern Europe.
Gina Csanyi-Robah, co-founder of the Canadian Romani Alliance, said little has improved for the Roma and factors still very much exist to drive them out of Europe.
“I still see the same sad headlines around segregation in schools, the fight for compensation by victims of forced sterilization, police brutality and the lack of accountability for deaths of Roma,” said Csanyi-Robah, whose family came to Canada from Hungary, after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution; they worked in tobacco farms in Hamilton.
“The human rights are on paper, but they are not in action.”
Although Roma can blend in more easily in Canada’s multicultural fabric, she said they have continued to face entrenched systemic biases especially from more established Canadians.
Back in 1997, the Star reported that Czech Roma refugee claimants staying at a Kingston Road motel in Toronto were confronted by protesters waving swastikas and placards scrawled with “Canada Is Not A Trash Can” and “Honk If You Hate Gypsies.”
Under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, visa requirements were imposed on Eastern European countries amid a surge of Roma refugees arriving here. In response to protest by the EU, those conditions were lifted but replaced by new rules to restrict access to asylum, which advocates said were meant to target Roma refugees on grounds that their claims were bogus.
The Canadian courts later ruled against the new regime, but Csanyi-Robah said Canada then introduced other air travel measures to keep potential Roma refugees from boarding planes. The number of Roma asylum claims declined.
“I feel like the Canadian government has an ongoing campaign of discriminating against the Roma community. They seem to lack knowledge about the situations that Roma have faced historically in Europe and are still facing right now,” she said.
According to the Immigration and Refugee Board, claims from Roma-refugee producing countries — Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia — fluctuated with travel requirement changes in Canada.
The claims from these countries surged to 2,150 in 2018, the year after Ottawa lifted visa requirement against Romania, but it dropped by half to 1,054 right before the pandemic in 2019. Last year, it was down to 919, with more than half of the claimants being Romanians.
Prof. Sean Rehaag of Osgoode Hall Law School said acceptance rates for Roma seeking asylum have risen over the years, which he attributed to the improved quality of legal representation and recognition among refugee judges of the level of persecution and inadequate state protection Roma claimants face. In the past five years, he said, success rates have hovered around 70 per cent.
What critics have failed to recognize is that mobility rights within the EU are tied to employment, Rehaag said: Roma face systemic barriers in accessing quality education and hence the labour market, let alone the fact that residents in one EU country can’t make an asylum claim in another member state.
“Overall, the discrimination and mistreatment seems to be continuing,” said Rehaag, director of York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies. “If anything, in some countries, it’s a doubling down on the kind of racist rhetoric coming out of the far-right countries.”
I likely have a lack of innovation but hard to avoid the bureaucratic approach in large organizations as they grapple how to manage and implement policy and programs:
I have been writing and researching about Canada’s history of Blackface for over a decade. This work requires me to travel through history to a time when Black people were not seen as human and we had few rights. Because I do this work, I have a deep understanding of the development of human rights procedures and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) offices.
I am a knowledge expert. And I unequivocally believe that EDI offices are failing us. Not because of a lack of talented or well-intentioned people, but because of a lack of courage to imagine new ways of problem solving that centre people, not procedures, processes, and paper trails.
By insisting on bureaucratic solutions to execute strategic plans and prioritizing institutional value statements, with well-thought-out bullet-point “action items” these offices take what Benjamin Ginsberg, author of “The Fall of the Faculty” has called, “the neo-liberal all-administrative university” approach.
This model of education privileges economic-based relationships, it treats students as customers — who are always right — and faculty, who are cast in the role of service providers rather than knowledge experts, as failed subjects when students file complaints against them to human rights services embedded within EDI offices.
There is little room, in the current system, for decision-making at the point of intake. Instead, every complaint is treated as a potential threat to the institution’s reputation and as a result, faculty suffer collateral damage in this process.
The ever-expanding “regime of bureaucratization,” as Amna Khalid described in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, has taken as its mission the fulfilment of student EDI demands at all costs, while weakening and undermining more meaningful EDI efforts, such as ongoing community engagement and knowledge-expert-driven ideation and collaboration.
Human rights services at Ontario universities have publicly available statements about their policies and procedures, which are informed and guided by the Ontario Human Rights Code. Created in 1961, Ontario was the first province to create a human rights code and a Human Rights Commission to enforce it.
Daniel G. Hill, a Black American who moved to Canada in the 1950s and who wrote a landmark dissertation, “Negroes In Toronto; A Sociological Study Of A Minority Group,” was the first chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Hill often tackled racism head-on, in public forums, with Black community and the public present to bear witness to what discrimination actually looked like. In doing that, he transformed the human rights process into a community event, rather than a backroom investigation to serve measurable outcomes.
We live in different times. But EDI offices are taking the joy out of education because they resist collaborative, restorative approaches to conflict and instead cling to approaches that are too bureaucratic, dehumanizing, and almost solely focused on the document trail.
Inside these institutions there is a culture of fear and silence among faculty, staff and even decision makers, who are rendered powerless by procedures and policies that are just not working.
At the same time faculty are invaluable to the institution as knowledge experts, once they become embroiled in a complaint process, which can go on for an unspecified number of years, they become voiceless, powerless, and invisible.
I agree with blogger Jodre Datu, who in 2022 declared, “if EDI isn’t igniting joy, we’re doing it wrong.” In that post, they called for an overhaul of EDI that would not create environments in which people are afraid to say the wrong thing but instead EDI work would involve an entire restructuring of our workplaces and a reorganization of power.
I know I don’t speak for all academics and there are EDI people who will disagree with me. But good people are leaving universities — something I have even contemplated — because of the “business as usual” approach to conflict taken by EDI offices. No one wins with this approach. It ultimately feeds into the hands of racists, homophobic and transphobic hate, and in the long run, is harming our institutions.
Cheryl Thompson is an associate professor in Performance at The Creative School. She is also director and creative lead, The Laboratory for Black Creativity. Twitter @DrCherylT
The United States has long touted itself as a nation built by immigrants. Yet there has never been a precise measure of immigrants’ contribution to the country’s economic and technological progress. Around the time that President Donald Trump was moving to curb employment visas for skilled foreigners, economist Rebecca Diamond and a team of researchers set out to examine this unresolved question.
To find the answer, the researchers looked at the output of nearly 880,000 Americans who patented inventions between 1990 and 2016. They found that immigrants made an outsize contribution to innovation in the U.S. While they comprised 16 percent of inventors, immigrants were behind 23 percent of the patents issued over these years.
It wasn’t just a matter of quantity: The share of patents immigrants produced was slightly higher when weighted by the number of citations each patent received over the next three years, a key measure of their quality and utility. Moreover, immigrants were responsible for a quarter of the total economic value of patents granted in that period, as measured by the stock market’s reaction to new patents.
“The high-skilled immigrants we have in the U.S. are incredibly productive and innovative, and they’re disproportionately contributing to innovation in our society,” says Diamond, a professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
Past research has indirectly pointed to the sizable role immigrants play in American innovation. Studies have shown that immigrants represent nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and more than a quarter of the nation’s Nobel Prize winners. But this study, described in a recent working paper, is the first time economists have used patents to directly measure the output of foreign-born innovators living in the U.S.
The data was clear: “The average immigrant is substantially more productive than the average U.S.-born inventor,” write Diamond and her colleagues, Shai Bernstein of Harvard Business School; Timothy McQuade of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business; Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, a former predoctoral fellow at SIEPR and now a Stanford PhD student; and Beatriz Pousada, a PhD student at Stanford and SIEPR Dissertation Fellowship recipient in 2022-23.
The researchers took a unique approach to their work. They started with a database of 300 million adults who had lived in the country between 1990 and 2016 and then used Social Security numbers to identify those who had immigrated after age 19. (The first five digits of a Social Security number encode the date it was issued; U.S.-born citizens typically receive their numbers at birth or in childhood.) Using names and address history, they matched individuals in the database to those listed as inventors with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. (When patents had multiple authors, each got credit for a proportional share.)
The researchers found that immigrants generate patents across a broad swath of sectors, including computers, electronics, chemicals, and medicine. They also discovered that, while all inventors reach peak productivity in their late 30s and early 40s, immigrants decline from that peak at a slower rate than U.S.-born inventors over the rest of their careers, a disparity that remains unexplained.
The immigrant innovation gap
Diamond believes there are several potential reasons for the innovation gap between immigrant and native-born inventors. One is brain drain: “There’s likely a pretty strong positive selection in terms of the types of people from every country that end up as high-skilled professionals with U.S. visas,” she says.
Another factor is cross-border collaboration: The researchers observed that foreign-born inventors are more likely to work with inventors based in other countries and cite foreign technologies in their patents. “Different pools of knowledge get imported by immigration, and diversity in background is good for innovation,” Diamond says.
Diamond and her team also found evidence that immigrant inventors are more likely to live in innovation hubs, such as Silicon Valley or Boston, and to work on patents in cutting-edge technology sectors. Still, the researchers estimate that these two factors explain just 30 percent of the gap in patent output.
Immigrant inventors’ contributions go beyond their own work — they also make their native-born collaborators more productive, the researchers discovered. To arrive at this finding, Diamond and her team identified inventors who died before they turned 60 and examined the output of people who had co-authored a patent with that individual before their early death. Compared to a control group of inventors that did not lose a collaborator, surviving inventors produced 10 percent fewer patents after the death of their co-author. The effect was larger for inventors whose deceased co-author was an immigrant — their productivity declined by 17 percent. This gap persisted even after the researchers controlled for a number of factors, such as the productivity of the deceased inventors.
“At the end of the day, we weren’t really able to explain the gap,” Diamond says. “It seems there’s something special about being an immigrant. Their knowledge has these huge external effects on who they work with, and what they know impacts what their collaborators can produce in the future.”
Diamond believes these findings have direct implications for policymakers who want to maintain the nation’s role as a technological trailblazer. “Understanding the forces that make the U.S. one of the most innovative and productive countries in the world is important,” she says. “The U.S. has done an amazing job of attracting the best and the brightest immigrants. Any policy that would revamp the visa process might want to consider how big a deal immigrants are in our innovation output.”
I was 14 the first time I saw Adolf Eichmann in person. He wore an ill-fitting suit and had tortoise shell glasses, with the bearing of a nervous accountant. He did not seem at all like someone who had engineered the deaths of millions of people, except of course that I was at his trial for genocide.
My father, Leo Hurwitz, directed the television coverage of the Eichmann trial, which was held in Jerusalem and broadcast all over the world in 1961. My dad was chosen for the position after the producer convinced both Capital Cities Broadcasting, then a small network that organized the pool coverage, and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, that the trial needed to be seen live. In the 1930s, my father had been one of the pioneers of the American social documentary film. In later years, he had directed two films on the Holocaust and had helped to invent many of the techniques of live television while director of production in the early days of the CBS network. Also, as a socialist, he had been blacklisted from all work in television for the previous decade, so he came cheap.
My mother and I joined my father in Jerusalem. Each day I stood in the control room and watched my father call the coverage — “Ready camera 2, take 2!” For perhaps the first time in history, a trial was being recorded, not as in the style of a newsreel, with its neutrally positioned single camera, but more like a feature film, with concealed cameras placed to cover several points of view — the witnesses’, the judges’, the attorneys’, the public’s, and of course, Eichmann’s. These were cut, one against the other, often in close-up, so that the drama became vastly more personal. The style of my father’s work would come to define this trial, and its place in historical memory, even more than Eichmann’s confession.
The prosecutor confronted Eichmann with his own words: “The fact that I have the death of 5,000,000 Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” The writer and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Di-nur testified from the witness box about the lines of people selected for death in the different “planet” of Auschwitz. Suddenly, Di-nur collapsed with a stroke. Through it all, Eichmann’s face, as revealed in my father’s close-ups, showed no feeling except the occasional tic.
Each night my father’s work was air-shipped, on 2-inch videotape, to be broadcast in Europe and the United States. It sharpened the way the world saw the anti-Semitic depredations of the Nazis. Meanwhile, my father was plagued by the question of how fascism had risen in the first place, how educated and progressive working classes had left their unions to fall into the lock step of a militarized, authoritarian regime.
It was a question that the West all but ignored. With the end of World War II, the prospect of justice for war criminals quickly dissolved, replaced by the need to build the postwar alliance against Communism. Leaders and thinkers were occupied with rearming for a nuclear future and rooting out leftists, the trend that had made my father unemployable.
He thought that he might use the trial to gather social scientists for a discussion of how fascism took root. During preproduction for the broadcast, he began to cast around for an Israeli institution that could host it. He said he asked a former classmate who was editor of a major Israeli newspaper, but they were not interested. Another outlet, the Israeli equivalent of the BBC, said they were not the place for it. A prestigious university couldn’t see the relevance. As the trial began and his production ramped up, he had to let the idea drop.
Though he did not know it at the time, these institutions showed no interest in the sources of fascism because the trial was not a trial of fascism. Instead, it was an opportunity for Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency to rebrand the Zionist movement. While the early days of Zionism extolled muscular, self-sufficient pioneers in a new, empty and promised land, that image had not aged well in the postwar world. In addition, many Israeli Jews looked down on the Jews of “old Europe,” whom they saw as trembling in their shtetls and walking helplessly to their deaths. Of course, they grieved the Holocaust, and their diplomats used its memory to convince the United Nations to recognize the State of Israel. Still, the ring of shame had settled around the survivors, many of whom had been traumatized to the point of dysfunction.
As witnesses at the trial spoke of crimes and suffering that had never been heard before, Israeli attitudes changed. The survivors of the Nazis — once seen as tattooed strangers, muttering to themselves on street corners in Tel Aviv — now began to be looked upon with more compassion. Their deaths and suffering, the crimes of the Shoah, were moved to the heart of Zionism. It helped point to Israel as the safe haven for the persecuted, with “never again!” as their rallying cry.
As Hannah Arendt famously pointed out, the aim of the prosecutor was to frame the trial as justice for crimes against Jews. The slaughter of Roma, Gays, labor leaders, Socialists, Communists, the disabled, and any opposition was hardly mentioned.
Without meaning to, my father helped to reinforce the emotional aspect of the trial and in so doing weaken its political implications. Though his previous films included a fuller view of the crimes and victims of Nazism, the way he shot the trial did the opposite: His brilliant coverage individualized Eichmann and steered viewers away from a more historical view. The work of studying fascism could not compete with the satisfaction of blaming a villain and imagining that the problems could be solved with his sentencing.
My father helped to make this Nazi into a character in a drama of cinematic confrontation, not of real understanding. It was now the Jewish state against the murderer of Jews. Crimes against other groups were not germane to the purpose to which the State of Israel and its head prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, sought to turn the trial.
The question of how fascism gains power is no less urgent today. As nationalisms multiply around the globe, lies gain supremacy as political weapons and scapegoating minorities proves itself a powerful mobilizing force, danger is burgeoning, here and in Israel itself. What I witnessed as a 14-year-old in that control room, I am witnessing again. The fascination with individual people’s guilt or innocence is obscuring the society-wide re-emergence of fascism. And we appear to be no more interested in viewing the full picture.
The immigrant innovation gap
Multicultural Meanderings 