‘A different perspective’: Justice Mahmud Jamal on minority rights, bilingualism and the Supreme Court Social Sharing

2022/06/07 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Settling into an imposing red leather armchair in a wood-panelled office in Ottawa, Justice Mahmud Jamal recalled his anxious first moments in this country as a 14-year-old immigrant.

“I remember the first day here very well. I was scared,” he told Radio-Canada in a recent interview, describing the path that took him to the nation’s highest court — first from Kenya to England, then to Edmonton in 1981 for high school.

“I was scared for a lot of reasons. I left all my friends. I left a culture where I had spent my whole life. But at the same time, it was an opportunity to start life again.”

Coming from a modest family that moved halfway around the world in search of a better life, Jamal rose through the ranks of the Canadian legal world after graduating from McGill University’s law school. He was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in July 2021.

It’s a position he hopes to use to protect the rights of minorities and other historically disadvantaged groups — something he wrote about when completing his application to sit on Canada’s top court.

Jamal is the first person of colour to be nominated to Canada’s top court. He’s also a member of a religious minority.

Jamal grew up Muslim in the Ismaili community before converting to the Baha’i faith like his wife, who is an Iranian refugee.

He told Radio-Canada that his personal experience is an asset for the court, just like the personal experiences of each of his fellow Supreme Court justices.

“If you are a woman, if you are a man, if you are even a member of a minority, you bring your experience to work. I have experiences as a member of a visible minority, of a religious minority, so it gives a different perspective,” he said.

Source: ‘A different perspective’: Justice Mahmud Jamal on minority rights, bilingualism and the Supreme Court Social Sharing

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Immigrants are suing the U.S. government over delays in citizenship process

2022/06/07 Leave a comment

Of note. Comparable delays as in Canada, although initial progress on reducing backlog. Canadian applications are stored in the IRCC Sydney processing centre (unless changed since my time), certainly more accessible than a cave in Kansas city:

A group of immigrants is suing the U.S. government, claiming that unreasonable delays have kept their citizenship applications on hold for years. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is the agency responsible for processing applications. But the recent lawsuit alleges that the agency moved a mass amount of applications to a storage facility at the beginning of the pandemic and never retrieved the documents, stalling the immigrants’ hopes of becoming U.S. citizens. Now that the agency is working at full capacity again, the applicants are demanding prioritization.

We wanted to know more about what’s going on here, so we called Kate Melloy Goettel. She is the legal director of litigation at the American Immigration Council, the legal nonprofit bringing this lawsuit on behalf of immigrants. Kate Melloy Goettel, welcome.

KATE MELLOY GOETTEL: Hi, Elissa.

NADWORNY: So first, can you give us the background on filing this lawsuit?

MELLOY GOETTEL: Yeah. So we started hearing a couple of months ago that people were really frustrated that they had filed for naturalization about two years ago and that their applications were stuck. For a lot of people, they were looking towards November and want to be able to vote in the election then. Others just want to be a bigger, fuller member of U.S. society. And so they were getting frustrated that their applications were stuck, and they had learned that it was because their immigration files needed to be retrieved from the National Records Center that operates a limestone cave in the Kansas City area.

NADWORNY: So the crux is that the files are not in the place they need to be.

MELLOY GOETTEL: Exactly.

NADWORNY: And is that what the government is saying is the reason for these delays? Have they provided a response?

MELLOY GOETTEL: Well, so a lot of the applicants know through their attorneys that their immigration files need to be retrieved. Some of them have heard, in fact, that they’re at these National Archives cave in the Kansas City area, while others have just learned that they’re not moving forward because their immigration files are delayed, and they need those immigration files to go forward with scheduling the naturalization interview and then continuing with the sort of bureaucratic processes that have to happen before the final step of swearing the oath as a naturalized U.S. citizen.

NADWORNY: Can you tell me about some of the clients you represent?

MELLOY GOETTEL: One of the clients is Thomas Carter (ph). He’s filed suit because he’s very fearful that he and his husband could be separated if they don’t share the same citizenship. He also has an infant child, and I think that that has really encouraged him to want to have roots in the United States with his newly growing family. He’s also anxious to participate in the electoral process and to put down roots, so he’s one of the applicants who has been waiting since 2020 to be naturalized.

NADWORNY: What are you asking the court to do?

MELLOY GOETTEL: So we’re asking the court to tell the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as well as the National Archives to prioritize these naturalization applications and to go in there and try to get these applications out so that they can move forward with processing the applications. As you can imagine, there’s a number of steps and bureaucratic process that has to take place in order to approve someone for naturalization, and that process takes many months. And so we’re really down to the wire now to get people naturalized for November’s election.

NADWORNY: So some reports say that it can take up to 24 months to complete the naturalization process. I’m wondering, how is what’s happening here different than the wait times applicants typically experience?

MELLOY GOETTEL: Well, the wait times that USCIS has recently published have been around 11 months. But what we also know more anecdotally is we’re hearing many, many stories of people who filed after these 13 plaintiffs getting scheduled for their naturalization interviews and actually going forward and taking the naturalization oath. So we know that they’re not processing these in any sort of systematic line but rather that there are people who applied in 2020 who are just stuck because, frankly, their immigration files are stuck.

NADWORNY: Yeah, because these are stories, you know, that – they have implications for their family, for their life. You know, it’s…

MELLOY GOETTEL: That’s right.

NADWORNY: …This ripple effect. Your organization is representing 13 named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, but how many are actually impacted here?

MELLOY GOETTEL: Well, we don’t know the exact number of how many are impacted, but I can tell you that since we filed our lawsuit, we have heard so many stories from individuals and from their attorneys that are stuck in the same position. So we do think this is a fairly widespread problem, and we’re hoping that, through this lawsuit, that we can really encourage the agency to prioritize naturalization and prioritize getting those files out and getting them scheduled.

NADWORNY: You’ve mentioned there is kind of a looming deadline. Your clients want to be able to vote in this year’s election this fall. Tell me about the timeline. Is that going to be possible?

MELLOY GOETTEL: With prioritizing naturalization applications, it totally could be possible. And what we want to point to is this administration, their own words and their own commitment to naturalization. In the early days of the Biden-Harris administration, they issued an executive order specifically calling out better processing of naturalization applications and, you know, talking about how important naturalization is. And so we really want them to live up to those words that they said in the early days of the administration and make this a priority. We think if it can be a priority, that that is a realistic timeline to get this done in the next six months.

NADWORNY: That was Kate Melloy Goettel. She is the legal director of litigation at the American Immigration Counsel. Kate, thank you so much for being with us.

Source: Immigrants are suing the U.S. government over delays in citizenship process

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Coates: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Condemnation and renaming are easy compared to addressing the substantive issues, where action is more needed, not to mention the regrettable lack of nuance in understanding history and context:

With the decision to rename itself Toronto Metropolitan University, the former Ryerson University — known briefly as “University X” — fumbled the opportunity to use public criticism of Egerton Ryerson as a learning opportunity, instead bowing to the passionate protests of activists who believe that condemning a handful of historical figures is one way to address generations of discrimination and paternalism. 

Attacking the reputation of Ryerson, one of the most effective educational reformers in Canadian history, requires a narrow reading of his career. Regardless, he is now a dead letter in Canadian public life, and efforts to expunge his name from schools, monuments and other public facilities will no doubt continue apace. 

The number one target in the country is now Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald — like Ryerson, singled out for his role in Indigenous residential schools. Across the country, statues in Macdonald’s honour have been removed or doused in red paint, and public bodies are having earnest discussions about removing his name from schools and other facilities. 

There is nothing wrong with calling out or re-examining the public memory of historical figures for their actions. However, reading history reductively, losing sight of context, and misreading personal responsibility do not help us to understand the past. 

Right now, for good reason, the country is focused on a specific policy — residential schools — with the belief that by removing the tributes to the architects of the school movement we can turn a page. This approach is seriously misguided. 

Residential school education was horrific, its multi-generational negative effects still not fully understood. A system purportedly designed to provide personal opportunity to Indigenous students was instead used to attack Indigenous cultures, undermine centuries-old languages, destroy Indigenous families, and assimilate Aboriginal peoples. Dealing with the long-term impact of the residential schools has rightly become a national priority. 

We must, however, remember that the residential school concept was not foisted on an unwilling nation by its government. Virtually all non-Indigenous Canadians of that time, led by the Christian churches and supported by non-Indigenous advocates for Indigenous peoples, favoured residential schools. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, many non-Indigenous Canadians still defended the schools as clearly being a “good thing” and a sign of the benevolent state. 

Most Canadians did not know — or did not want to know — what happened in the schools. They neither expected nor countenanced the violence and brutality, but encouraged teachers and principals to undermine Indigenous language and culture, believing this was in Indigenous people’s best interests.

In today’s efforts to assign accountability for wrongs of the past, the tendency to focus on individuals — whatever their roles in establishing the institutions — simply misses the point. It was racism and a nationwide sense of cultural superiority that backstopped all of Canada’s aggressive actions against Indigenous peoples. If dismantling a statue or renaming a school (or university) serves some, it also deflects attention from where responsibility properly rests: with society at large. 

Criticizing early promoters of residential schools misses the historical mark. 

With Ryerson’s name now removed from a campus, and Macdonald’s image being assailed across Canada, where next? There are thousands of targets, including the political leaders, government and church officials, and public supporters who expanded the residential school system, including its rapid acceleration after the Second World War. 

Let’s consider two potential targets, modern-era political leaders who espoused simple ideas of potentially destructive impact on Indigenous peoples. They wanted to eliminate the Indian Act and Indian status, break up the reserves, abandon treaties, and integrate Indigenous peoples into the Canadian mainstream. Their stated goal sounded honourable to some — producing “real” equality among all Canadians — and there had been consultations, of a sort, with Indigenous groups. 

The 1969 White Paper was one of the most aggressive Indigenous policy initiatives in Canadian history, designed to remove barriers between peoples and overcome decades of discrimination and state paternalism. The response from First Nations was ferocious. Indigenous leaders organized protests and demanded the federal government retract its policy. The government did so, to the dismay of many non-Indigenous Canadians who wanted to remove the “special status” afforded Indigenous peoples. The contemporary Indigenous rights movement in Canada owes a great deal to the reaction to this ill-conceived and assimilationist strategy. 

The Prime Minister was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His minister of Indian and Northern Affairs was future prime minister Jean Chrétien. They were the architects of the White Paper of 1969. Trudeau believed “no society can be built on historical might-have-beens,” and opposed Indigenous land claim negotiations, modern treaties, and the concept of historical redress. 

The Trudeau government’s much-touted “Just Society” had a blind spot when it came to Indigenous peoples. The government’s preference for state intervention and the inherent paternalism of federal policy in the 1960s and 70s arguably accelerated the decline of Indigenous language and culture, fostering a culture of welfare dependency in Indigenous communities. 

Would it be appropriate for critics of government policy to focus their anger on Trudeau and Chrétien, leading to more monument destruction and renaming? Absolutely not; we can use our time and effort much better. Besides, when faced with sustained Indigenous anger, the Liberal government backed down. Unlike residential schools, which had major effects across generations, the White Paper brought to the surface the core ideas and values of the government of the day.

The past is a complicated place. It should not be reduced to memes and social-media messages. Historical leaders are people, with personal foibles, living in and reflecting their places and times. Democracies hold leaders accountable during their political lives. Historians and the public determine their legacy. Attitudes toward the leaders and their actions change over time, as the debate about John A. Macdonald demonstrates. But these discussions should be handled with caution. 

The piecemeal and reactive redoing of historical nomenclature, however well meaning, produces distortions of history. This said, Canada is desperately overdue for a rethinking of the many people and events we memorialize. 

Names and monuments should not be fixed for all time. New Zealand, now also known as Aotearoa, and Australia have both ventured down this road, with considerable achievement. New Zealanders are increasingly comfortable with both Maori names and cultural references in public affairs; Australia’s newly elected prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was introduced on a stage where the Australian flag shared pride of place with the flags of Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders.

There is so much to recognize and celebrate in Indigenous cultures that Canada should get on with it. Indigenous peoples, cultures and knowledge need to be more prominently recognized across Canada. The same holds for women, minority groups, and events either poorly or inaccurately represented in our historical nomenclature. A cautious renaming process in Canada could actually produce the most thoughtful and comprehensive historical and cultural reuniting in the nation’s history. 

Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples requires thoughtful and engaged reflection. Changing the names of institutions and tearing down monuments might gratify some, but there is a better way. Toronto Metropolitan University will hardly provide a rallying cry for a nation seeking real healing with Indigenous peoples. 

If Canada is to find common ground with First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, the country must reverse the lens, begin to view history from Indigenous perspectives and listen respectfully to elders and knowledge keepers. 

This reckoning will take more than attacks on historical figures. The problem rests not with a few individuals but with the profound sense of racial superiority that animated public policy for generations, underpinning a suite of government initiatives that marginalized and overwhelmed Indigenous peoples. For all of our condemnation of historical decisions that are now seen as egregious and destructive, Canadians remain largely oblivious to the paternalism and discrimination toward Indigenous people that is part of our national reality.

Canada is, by international standards, a remarkably successful country, even if it is built significantly on the displacement and domination of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. They were sacrificed in the interests of the nation, with most non-Indigenous peoples truly believing that assimilation and cultural domination was the only legitimate path forward. This position, dangerously and tragically wrong, animated the government for a century and a half, to be replaced in our time by a more evolved but still paternalistic approach to Indigenous affairs. 

This country needs to devote a great deal of effort to improving relationships with Indigenous communities. To Canada’s collective good fortune, Indigenous peoples remain open to such discussions and to rebuilding Confederation, despite the painful destruction of the past. 

We can do much more than try to eliminate historical guilt by changing a few names and sloshing paint on some statues. Instead, the country needs to listen closely to First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples and build a policy agenda inspired by Indigenous priorities, a deep understanding of the multi-generational impacts of racism, and a real commitment to lasting reconciliation. 

Ken Coates is a Distinguished Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan.

Source: Condemning historical figures like Ryerson and John A. Macdonald must not distract us from true reconciliation

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André Pratte: How to prevent Quebec’s immigration sabre rattling from turning into a full-blown separatist crisis

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Worth reading and thinking about, given the massive shift towards temporary immigration, many of course who transition to permanent residency.

The vast majority of temporary residents in Quebec are international students, 85 percent in 2021, but couldn’t easily find the breakdown between French and English language institutions (where much of the controversy lies).

Still, one can question just how important temporary workers, whether IMP or TFWP, are really that important in the broader scheme of things.

And of course, any agreement should avoid the failure of the Canada-Quebec accord, which guaranteed Quebec funding for immigration and integration based on the overall percentage increase in federal integration spending, largely independent of the number of immigrants. As a result, as Canada increases the number of immigrants to the rest of Canada, the imbalance between Quebec and rest of Canada increases:

Four months before voting day in Quebec’s provincial election on Oct. 3, Premier François Legault launched his de facto campaign, using the closing speech at his party’s convention last Sunday to announce what he would like to be the central theme of the election: immigration.

Legault explained that he will be seeking a strong mandate to convince the federal government to cede its jurisdiction over immigration to the province. “It’s a question of survival for our nation,” he asserted in his speech.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, the premier went so far as to say that if the provincial government did not get full jurisdiction over immigration, “in a matter of time, we could become a Louisiana.” In other words, French could practically disappear from Quebec.

The prediction, of course, is laughable. French is alive and well in Quebec, where 80 per cent of the population have French as their first language, while only two per cent of the residents of Louisiana still speak French. The premier’s apocalyptic scenario was ridiculed by most commentators. “Louisiana? Come on!” headlined La Presse’s editorial page.

But in the following days, Legault insisted that, “If no one is left speaking French at home, this means that French will eventually disappear.” His minister for the French language, Simon Jolin-Barrette, relayed the government’s view that if nothing is done, “the situation could become similar to that of Louisiana.”

It is difficult to know how Quebecers will react to this obvious ploy to create a crisis where none exists. We do know that a majority of them are convinced that the French language is at risk; this is why support for Bill 96 is so high. But do Quebecers think that French will disappear in short order? Hopefully, most of us are confident enough in our ability to keep our distinct culture alive.

However, one thing is certain: every time there is a jurisdictional squabble between the governments of Quebec and Canada, Quebecers side with their provincial government, even more so when the conflict regards an issue as sensitive as immigration.

Reacting to Legault’s demands, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the federal government would not cede its jurisdiction over immigration.

With both sides entrenched in their respective positions, and Legault sailing towards a sweeping victory on Oct. 3, what will the former separatist do when faced with what will be perceived as intransigence on the part of the federal government? Since this issue is now deemed to be essential to the French language’s survival in Quebec, what will his next step be if Ottawa continues to say no?

Some federalists are convinced that Legault will bring back to life the idea of Quebec’s independence. “Look at him go: he will say that he has no other choice but to hold a referendum on separation,” a prominent federalist told me.

The federalists’ fear is the separatists’ hope. “Quietly, before our eyes, a little more each day, the indestructible national question raises its head and recomposes itself,” wrote former Parti Québécois minister Joseph Facal, now a columnist at the Journal de Montréal.

For my part, I doubt that Legault is secretly planning a referendum on separation. On Thursday, he said: “I am a nationalist inside Canada.” Up until now, most Quebecers have supported the premier and his Coalition Avenir Québec government because they offered nationalist policies without the risk of separation. Would they follow him if he went as far as to propose Quebec’s sovereignty? I doubt it.

Nevertheless, the threat of separatism is back. What can Canada do to defuse the menace while not caving in to Quebec’s demands? It’s quite simple, really. Instead of shutting the door on negotiations with Legault, Trudeau should say that he is open to discussing amendments to the 1991 Quebec-Ottawa agreement on immigration.

That agreement gave Quebec the power to choose about 70 per cent of the immigrants coming into the province — mostly economic immigrants. Armed with this new power, Quebec has been able to choose a majority of newcomers who already speak French or are more susceptible to learning it.

The problem is that the number of immigrants still selected according to federal criteria — e.g., temporary workers and foreign students — has been increasing steadily in recent years. Most of those people do not speak French. This is what is perceived as a threat to Quebec’s culture — not the fact that they are immigrants, but the fact that, when they become permanent residents, they will grow the ranks of the English-speaking minority.

In other words, since the agreement was signed 31 years ago, the composition of immigration to Quebec has changed. The agreement is in need of an update to reflect the new reality, while continuing to affirm the federal government’s jurisdiction over the parts of the immigration system that are crucial for the protection of Canada’s interests and security.

If both parties were of good faith, a new deal could be reached in a matter of months, and there would be no need for grandstanding. In the current circumstances, however, this is a big “if.”

Source: André Pratte: How to prevent Quebec’s immigration sabre rattling from turning into a full-blown separatist crisis

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Brownstein: No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Good response and political assessment on the need for shared narratives for whites and visible minorities:

Ann Coulter, in so many words, thinks that I am responsible for the mass shooting in Buffalo in mid-May.

Not me alone. After the shooting, Coulter wrote a column dismissing the idea that Republican politicians and commentators had popularized the “Great Replacement” theory, a conspiracy theory that the young, white Buffalo shooter cited as a motivation before killing 10 people at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Instead, Coulter argued that the theory had been popularized by political analysts and Democratic operatives who have predicted that the nation’s changing demographics will benefit Democrats over time.

In particular, Coulter, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and others on the right have cited the work of journalists like me, the Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, and the electoral analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority, claiming that, by writing about demographic change and its electoral impact, we are responsible for seeding the idea that white Americans are being displaced. “If you don’t want people to be paranoid and angry, maybe you don’t write pieces like that and rub it right in their face,” Carlson, who has relentlessly touted replacement theory on his show, declared in a recent monologue.

It might go without saying that documenting demographic change is not the same as using it to incite and politically mobilize those who are fearful of it. It’s something like the difference between reporting a fire and setting one. But given how many right-wing racial provocateurs are trying to disavow the consequences of their “replacement” rhetoric, it apparently bears explaining how their incendiary language differs from the arguments of mainstream demographic and electoral analysts.

Let’s start with defining replacement theory. It’s a racist formulation that has migrated from France to far-right American circles to some officials and candidates in the GOP mainstream. In its purest version, the theory maintains that shadowy, left-wing elites—often identified as Jews—are deliberately working to undermine the political influence of native-born white citizens by promoting immigration and other policies that increase racial diversity. This conspiracy theory was the inspiration, if that’s the right word, for the neo-Nazis who chanted during their 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that “Jews will not replace us.”

Stripped of the overt anti-Semitism, replacement theory has become a constant talking point for Carlson. A growing number of Republican politicians, such as House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and the Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance, have incorporated versions of it into their rhetoric. It’s the most virulent iteration of the core message former President Donald Trump has imprinted onto his party: Republicans are your last line of defense against diverse, urban, secular, LGBTQ-friendly, “woke” Democrats, who are trying to uproot the nation from its traditions and transform it into something unrecognizable.

Undoubtedly, some Democrats over the years have argued that the party would benefit from higher levels of immigration. But this is the first point of difference between mainstream demographic analysis and replacement theory: No serious student of history or politics believes that a Democratic plot to import “more obedient voters from the Third World,” as Carlson puts it, has been the driving force behind U.S. immigration policy. Until the 1990s, most of the key decisions in modern immigration policy were bipartisan—from the passage of the landmark 1965 immigration-reform act to the amnesty for undocumented immigrants signed into law by President Ronald Reagan to the Republican-controlled Senate’s passage of comprehensive immigration reform in 2006, with unwavering support from President George W. Bush. A Democratic-led conspiracy that ensnared Reagan and Bush would be pretty impressive—if it weren’t so implausible.

Second, replacement theory pinpoints immigration policy, particularly the potential legalization of undocumented immigrants, as the key reason that white Americans are being “displaced.” But Frey, the Brookings demographer, has repeatedly documented that immigration is no longer the principal driver of the nation’s growing diversity. As he wrote in a 2020 paper, census “projections show that the U.S. will continue to become more racially diverse” no matter what level of future legal immigration the U.S. government authorizes. Diversity will grow somewhat faster under scenarios of high rather than low immigration, but diversity will increase regardless, Frey notes, because it is propelled mostly by another factor. Among those already living in the United States, people of color have higher birth rates than white people, who are much older on average. Even eliminating all immigration for the next four decades would not prevent the white share of the U.S. population from declining further, Frey’s analysis of the census data found.

A third big difference between replacement theory and analyses of demographic change revolves around the role that race plays in the changing balance of political power in America. Many on the right see racial change as the key threat to the Republican Party’s electoral prospects. But demographic analysts have never seen racial change as sufficient to tilt the electoral competition between the parties. White Americans still cast somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all votes (depending on the data source). That number has been steadily declining, at a rate of about two to three percentage points every four years. Even at that pace, it would be another seven or eight presidential elections—roughly until 2050—before minorities cast a majority of the vote.

No party can write off America’s white majority for that long. Instead, I and other analysts have long argued that Democrats have the opportunity to build a multiracial coalition composed of both the increasing minority population and groups within the white population that are most comfortable with a diversifying America: namely those who are college-educated, secular, urban, and younger, especially women in all of those cohorts. The combination of these white groups (many of which are growing) and the expanding minority population is what I have called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation.”

Even Democratic organizations that are focused on maximizing political participation among nonwhite voters recognize the centrality of building a multiracial coalition, on electoral as well as moral grounds. “First and foremost, multiracial democracy is inherently inclusive of white people,” says Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategist for Way to Win, which helps fund organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color. “I don’t imagine an America in which a winning coalition across the nation and in the key states we’re going to need to be winning … [is] without white people as part of the coalition.”

This leads to perhaps the most important divergence between replacement theory and theories of demographic change. Those on the right who push replacement theory tell their mostly white supporters that they are locked in a zero-sum competition with minorities and immigrants who are stealing what rightfully belongs to them: electoral power, economic opportunity, the cultural definition of what it means to be a legitimate American. “There’s always this underlying theft—they are taking these things by dishonest means; they are taking what is yours,” explains Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican strategist who has become a leading critic of the party’s direction under Trump.

By contrast, I and other analysts have emphasized the interdependence of the white and nonwhite populations. Building on work from Frey, I’ve repeatedly written that America is being reshaped by two concurrent demographic revolutions: a youth population that is rapidly growing more racially diverse, and a senior population that is increasing in size as Baby Boomers retire but that will remain preponderantly white for decades. (The Baby Boom was about 80 percent white.) Although these shifts raise the prospect of increased political and social tension between what I called “the brown and the gray,” the two groups are bound together more than our politics often allows. A core reality of 21st-century America is that this senior population will depend on a largely nonwhite workforce to pay the taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare, not to mention to provide the medical care those seniors need.

While the likes of Carlson and Coulter tell white Americans to fear that immigrants or people of color are replacing them politically, financial security for the “gray” is impossible without economic opportunity for the “brown.”

This isn’t to say that there is no political competition between older white Americans, who make up the core of the Republican coalition, and younger nonwhite Americans, who are more and more central to the Democratic coalition. In fact, a mistake that I and many other demographic and electoral analysts made over the past decade was to underestimate how big a coalition a candidate like Trump could mobilize in the name of protecting culturally conservative, white, Christian America.

For many years, I have argued that the diversification of the Democratic coalition wouldn’t always work to the party’s electoral advantage. As the party’s most culturally conservative components sheared off, I believed, Democrats would need to take more consistently liberal positions on social issues, which in turn would alienate more centrist voters from the party. That ideological re-sorting, I wrote in National Journal in 2013, would both “increase the pressure” on the Democratic Party “to maintain lopsided margins and high turnout among minorities and young people” and “make it tougher for [Democrats] to control Congress, at least until demographic change ripples through more states and House districts.” That prediction has held up.

At the same time, I stressed—and quoted experts from both parties who shared the view—that Republicans would face a growing long-term challenge in winning the White House if they could not improve their performance among minorities, young people, and college-educated and secular white voters. (The famous Republican National Committee “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential loss largely reached the same conclusion.) In one sense, that prediction held up too: Democrats won the popular vote in 2016 and 2020.

But, to a greater extent than I and others had forecast, Trump’s ability to win an Electoral College majority in 2016, and the fact that he came so close again in 2020, made clear that Republicans could seriously compete for the White House with what I have called their “coalition of restoration,” centered on the nonurban, non-college-educated, and Christian white voters who are most alienated by the changes remaking 21st-century America. The difficulty for the Democrats in holding the House, and especially the Senate, which favors smaller states that tend to elect Republicans, was even greater than I and others had expected.

Trump’s success among blue-collar white voters in key Rust Belt states was at least somewhat foreseeable. But his unique persona and message—a more open appeal to white racial resentments than any national figure since George Wallace, a bruising economic nationalism, and a sweeping condemnation of “elites”—generated even greater margins and larger turnout among his core supporters than I thought possible. And although some center-right suburban voters abandoned the GOP in the Trump era, many demographic analysts like me—along with the Never Trump movement—underestimated the number of Republican voters who would still vote for Trump or Trumpist GOP candidates as a way to block Democrats and advance other priorities, including tax cuts and conservative judicial appointments.

A new development in 2020 further solidified Trumpism’s hold on the GOP:Trump’s improved performance among Latino voters. That has convinced many Republicans that they can energize racially resentful white voters using nativist and racially coded messages, while still gaining ground among Latinos who are drawn mostly to the Republican economic agenda, as well as conservative views on some social issues such as abortion. This trend has proved an uncomfortable complication for the purveyors of replacement theory, who often portray Latinos as the invidious replacers. In a recent monologue, Carlson tried to square the circle by insisting that Democrats are still trying to displace white voters, but that they have miscalculated about the loyalties of Latino voters.

Due in part to the provocations of Carlson and others, the United States appears trapped in a cycle of increasing racial, generational, and partisan conflict that is escalating fears about the country’s fundamental cohesion. But imagine, Frey suggested to me, if instead of trying to convince older white Americans that younger nonwhite Americans are displacing them, political leaders from both parties emphasized the growing interdependence between these two groups. Ancona, of Way to Win, offers one version of what that message could sound like: “If we start telling a story that America is the richest country in the world, that there is enough pie for everyone, there is no need for ‘replacement.’ The whole construct is wrong. There should be enough for all of us to be free and to be healthy and to be living the life we want to live. There is a beauty in that story we could tell people, but it’s just not being told in a way that it needs to be.”

The refusal of many GOP leaders to condemn replacement theory even after the Buffalo shooting, and their determination to block greater law-enforcement scrutiny of violent white supremacists, underscores how far we are from that world. To me, the safest forecast about the years ahead is that the Republican Party and its allies in the media will only escalate their efforts to squeeze more votes from white Americans by heightening those voters’ fears of a changing country. I’d like to be wrong about that prediction, too, but I’m not optimistic that I will be.

Source: No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

Australia: Will the hateful army who bullied Yassmin Abdel-Magied come after Australia’s diverse new parliamentarians?

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Remains to be seen:

If the euphoria and back-patting over the federal election results are anything to go by, Australia is a vastly different country from the one Yassmin Abdel-Magied left five years ago.

A new cohort of confident, competent, successful and ethnically diverse parliamentarians are about to enter public life. They have been widely celebrated as a sign that the country is getting multiculturalism right.

I am sceptical of these good vibes. History teaches us to be worried about how they will be treated over the next few years.

If recent history is anything to go by, at least some of them will be in for a rough ride. The ones most likely to attract negative attention will be those who are unlucky enough to have the deadly combination of confidence and “difference” due to wearing a hijab, having dark skin or non-Anglo features.

Australia’s tall poppy syndrome goes into overdrive when it comes to people who aren’t white and have the audacity to criticise Australian racism

Australia’s tall poppy syndrome goes into overdrive when it comes to people who aren’t white and have the audacity to criticise Australian racism. Lest we forget, two years before Abdel-Magied was relentlessly abused and trolled for a six word Facebook post that sought to remind Australians of the plight of people affected by war and living in horrendous conditions at Manus and Nauru, Adam Goodes was subjected to appalling, career-ending bullying by footy fans in stadia across Australia.

Like Abdel-Magied, Goodes’ “mistake” was that he was both brilliant and uncompromising in his rejection of racism.

For both personalities, public vilification followed soaring success. Goodes had been Australian of the Year, and Abdel-Magied had a string of high-profile engagements including a television program on the ABC.

And yet, as Ketan Joshi has calculated, in the year following the Anzac Day post, over 200,000 words were written about her in the Australian media, with 97% of those words appearing in News Corp.

The pile-on included Peter Dutton who, from the lofty height of his position as immigration minister, welcomed her sacking by gloating “One down, many to go” and called for more ABC journalists to be fired.

Imagine that? How is it fair dinkum for a 26-year-old naturalised Australian citizen who posted on her personal Facebook account to be personally targeted by the minister for immigration?

The pile-on fuelled by wealthy and unhinged News Corp presenters created an environment in which Abdel-Magied endured real-life attacks. A pig’s head was dumped at the Islamic primary school she attended and posters were put up in a Sydney neighbourhood by a white nationalist group that racially stereotyped Abdel-Magied and journalist Waleed Aly – another overachieving brown migrant who has been the subject of sustained abuse.

Thankfully, the campaign to silence Abdel-Magied has not worked, just as the efforts to silence Goodes have not killed his spirit nor dimmed his capacity to be a positive influence on the lives of members of his community.

Still, their treatment creates a chilling effect. They are not alone of course. There is ongoing racial abuse hurled at other footy players, and racist commentary follows virtually every appearance of high-profile African Australian Nyadol Nyuon. Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi wrote in the Guardian last year that she has been called “a maggot, a cockroach, a whore and a cow”.

I haven’t copped it as bad, but each time I have appeared on Q+A the memory of Abdel-Magied’s treatment has loomed large. Indeed, before my first appearance I was warned they shouldn’t “Yassmin me”. Each time, I worried about appearing too strident lest I spark a frenzy based on a comment I didn’t see coming.

While nerves are part of the deal when you appear on television, being afraid to speak your mind is not. Being overly concerned about making factual observations about racism and sexism is a function of living in a society that has a track record of bullying Black people with a public profile. As Yumi Stynes found out, it can be easier to minimise and ignore racism, even when it is staring you in the face live on television. The consequences of calling it out, or even observing it, can be catastrophic.

This sort of silencing has the cumulative effect of diminishing the quality of the national conversation about racism. We should be able to have honest, mature discussions about racism. Instead, we are held hostage by the thin-skinned bullies at News Corp, the lily-livered bosses at the ABC and the worst instincts of their audiences.

To be sure, the record numbers of public representatives voted into office from non-European backgrounds is a cause for celebration. In a proud editorial, the West Australian noted that WA Labor senator Fatima Payman, who came to Australia as a refugee at the age of nine, represents “modern Australia, for now and the future”. The paper is right.

Unfortunately it is also the case that if Payman dares to point out systemic race-based obstacles that prevent the success of people from her communities, the army of hateful people who bullied Abdel-Magied will almost certainly come after her.

Diversity in parliament isn’t just about new faces, it’s also about accepting hard truths. The class of 2022 is inspiring because, against all odds, its members have made it into politics.

But if Australians want parliament itself to become a site of inspiration too, we will all need to move beyond the good stories and learn how to celebrate those who refuse to sugarcoat the truth.

If Abdel-Magied’s assured refusal to hang her head in shame for being herself teaches us anything, it is that there is no expiry date on the truth.

  • Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist and the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)

Source: Will the hateful army who bullied Yassmin Abdel-Magied come after Australia’s diverse new parliamentarians?

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Tsek’ene, Farsi, Punjabi, Tagalog: The push to diversify languages in schools [Vancouver and the lower mainland]

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Of note. Language demands change with time. When I was in high school in the 1970s, Latin was still offered and Russian was an option. Believe Latin classes ended sometime in the 1980s and of course Chinese has far eclipsed the former need for Russian (influenced by the Cold War).

Our kids went to Farsi Saturday morning classes when they were young, offered by the Ottawa Board of Education.

How this interest in “heritage” languages plays out with respect to second official language instruction remains to be seen:

Nine-year-old Armiti Atayi takes private Farsi classes, but would rather learn the language at her West Vancouver public school in a classroom with all her friends — something that may be possible one day, if the Education Ministry approves a new proposed Farsi curriculum.

“So when I go back for a vacation to Iran, I can read signs and read books and watch Persian TV, and cartoons,” said the Grade 3 Westcot Elementary student.

Her father, Omid Atayi, argued it is “long overdue” for Farsi to be offered in public schools given B.C.’s fast-growing Persian community.

“That would be a dream come true,” Atayi said. “We want our kids to be close to our culture, so establishing meaningful connection through language. … So they can read books, read poems, and write their own name. And a good example would be when they travelled back home (to Iran), they can communicate in an effective way with their relatives, or children their own age.”

If the Education Ministry accepts the new proposed Farsi curriculum developed and approved last month by the Coquitlam school board, it will become the ninth language, in addition to English and French, for which the province has official course guidelines. The others are French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Punjabi, Spanish and American Sign Language.

The province also has curriculum for 18 First Nations languages, and the Education Ministry said in an email that more are “in development.”

Three additional languages are offered in a tiny number of districts using “locally developed,” as opposed to ministry-approved, curriculum, such Russian in Prince George and the Comox Valley, Arabic in Victoria, and Croatian in Burnaby, although there is not always enough demand to run these courses every year.

Most of B.C.’s approved languages, with the exception of English, French and Spanish, are taught in only a small number of schools, where there is sufficient interest from students and enough qualified teachers.

During this 2021-22 school year, just 34,000 students took a secondary language that wasn’t English or French or who weren’t involved in an immersion programs, according to Education Ministry data provided to Postmedia. That is less than 10 per cent of B.C.’s 564,000 elementary and secondary students.

In B.C., all students must take a second language in Grades 5 to 8, unless they have so-called diverse needs, receive English-as-a-second-language services, or are in an immersion program. French is the default language if a district offers no alternatives, the ministry says. Second languages in high school are optional.

Nearly one third of B.C.’s 60 school districts didn’t offer a secondary language course beyond English or French in the 2021-22 calendar year. However, the ministry says courses run by districts fluctuate year by year based on enrolment.

The Vancouver school board, for example, ran second language instruction in French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and Italian this year, and in past years has also offered Korean, German, Russian and Punjabi. The VSB also operates French and Mandarin immersion programs.

After French, Spanish was the most popular secondary language, with more than 20,000 students enrolled in two thirds of boards across B.C. Punjabi as a second language, by comparison, was offered in just six districts and had just 2,125 students taking it this year.

About 11 of the 18 Indigenous languages were taught this year to a total of 1,515 students in a handful of schools, the vast majority of them in the north, on Vancouver Island or in the Interior. The most common were 233 students taking Kwak’wala in the Campbell River and Vancouver Island North districts, and 219 students studying Secwepemctsin in the Cariboo-Chilcotin and Kamloops-Thompson districts.

Chilliwack appears to the closest city to Metro Vancouver to offer an Indigenous language, with 106 students studying Halq’eméylem this year. The Vancouver school board said in an email, though, that it is working with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations with an aim to one day offer programs in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Skwxwú7mesh languages.

Statistics Canada says B.C. has the largest number of Indigenous languages, but they are spoken by an increasingly small number of people.

“I would love to see the province provide more support towards the revitalization of Indigenous languages within British Columbia, because it is the province that has the highest number of varied Indigenous languages and they are at risk,” said Rome Lavrencic, a New Westminster French teacher who has been on a B.C. Teachers’ Federation languages committee for 16 years.

Lavrencic said he recently met with officials from various universities and colleges who indicated there is renewed interest from students to learn Indigenous languages, but the challenge at the post-secondary level is the same in high schools: The classrooms need to be full, or it is not financially feasible to run the courses.

Another challenge to offer these programs is finding enough books and other teaching resources. While the federal government provides extra resources for French courses, Lavrencic said, “the minority languages, like Japanese, German, Mandarin and Punjabi, don’t get as much in terms of recognition and funding.”

Despite those shortcomings, B.C. should offer even more languages in its schools, such as Tagalog from the Philippines, argued Lavrencic, president of the BCTF’s Association of Teachers of Modern Languages.

“There’s so many different benefits from learning a foreign language,” added Wendy Yamazaki, a Japanese teacher in Delta who is treasurer of the BCTF language committee. “It just gives you that global perspective, that understanding of cultures and understanding of other people in different areas.”

In response to questions about whether B.C. will introduce more languages in public schools, the ministry said it is up to teachers and community groups to first develop new language curriculums that they would like to see taught. It is also up to districts to recruit the required teachers, but the ministry says it does provide some assistance.

Twelve years ago, Coquitlam started a Mandarin immersion program. Abby Chow was part of that inaugural group of students, and is now in it first graduating class.

Although her parents do not speak Mandarin, the Grade 12 student at Gleneagle Secondary School leaves the public school system able to speak it fluently.

“It will open a lot of doors if I want to study an international language or travel in Asia,” said Chow, who will attend the University of B.C. next year to study science and play on the golf team. “I’m super grateful.”

Coquitlam is one of a very small number of B.C. districts that offers Mandarin immersion and the program often has a waiting list, said Sophie Bergeron, Coquitlam’s language and culture coordinator.

“Mostly due to a shortage of teachers, we cannot expand our program, even though we have more demand than we have space for students,” she said, adding the same is true for its French immersion classes.

Her district became the first in B.C. to approve the new Farsi curriculum, which was developed by teachers from Coquitlam and Surrey, with help from a Simon Fraser University professor. It is now under review by the province, which will decide later this year whether it meets all requirements to become an authorized language course, the ministry’s email said.

Bergeron said Coquitlam doesn’t plan to offer Farsi courses in the near future, mainly because of a shortage of Persian teachers and timetable challenges. However, the district sponsored the curriculum in the hope that Farsi could one day be added to the list of languages that Grade 11 and 12 students can “challenge,” meaning if they speak the language fluently, they can write an exam and earn a high school credit.

“Hopefully a challenge exam will be developed so those students will at least have one way of having their (Farsi) language recognized for credits,” Bergeron said. “Maybe another district would be willing to go” with classes.

And that’s the exact outcome hoped for by Amir Bajehkian, who founded Farsi dar B.C. five years ago to lobby for his native language to be taught in schools. While he is grateful that Coquitlam sponsored the curriculum, he hopes classes will be offered on the North Shore, where B.C.’s largest Persian community lives.

“Our main focus is on North Vancouver and West Vancouver school districts,” he said, adding one of the key reasons is the number of readily available Farsi-speaking teachers there.

Bajehkian has spoken with the districts, and has asked them to consider offering Farsi courses in Handsworth and Carson Graham in North Vancouver, and West Vancouver Secondary and Sentinel in West Vancouver.

“I think this is a great move in the right direction,” said North Vancouver’s assistant superintendent, Chris Atkinson. “I think it’s important for students to see themselves represented in the curriculum. … It helps build a diverse culture in the schools.”

While he said Handsworth and Carson both have large Persian student populations, he cautioned there is a lot that needs to happen before students will be sitting in a Farsi classroom. Assuming the ministry approves the curriculum, high school principals must then decide if they have enough teachers and students, and then must find room in their timetables.

The earliest Farsi could be offered is September 2023, Atkinson said.

The West Vancouver district said it would examine the Farsi proposal in the coming year.

Bajehkian estimates there are as many as 90,000 Iranians and up to 30,000 Afghans in the Lower Mainland, and said those numbers are growing. And he is proud that the two communities came together to create and lobby for this curriculum.

“Having the Farsi speaking community, Iranians and Afghans, in Canada, and B.C. particularly, we’re getting to a point that we’re becoming more established. And, in my opinion, now is the time to preserve and protect our language for our kids and share it with our neighbours,” he said.

Source: Tsek’ene, Farsi, Punjabi, Tagalog: The push to diversify languages in schools 

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El-Assal: Canada wants to change Express Entry: A look at the pros and cons

2022/06/04 Leave a comment

Usual good balanced analysis, that overall gives the impression that the cons are stronger than the pros:

The Canadian government is set to make the biggest reform to Express Entry since it introduced the application management system in January 2015.

Bill C-19 is currently being evaluated by Canada’s Parliament and based on precedent, should become law sometime in June before Parliament recesses for the summer. It contains a provision that would allow Canada’s Immigration Minister to create Express Entry groups and then issue Invitations to Apply (ITAs) to these groups. As explained by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada(IRCC), the minister would be able to form groups based on occupations in demand, and to address other policy goals, such as welcoming more francophone immigrants.

This proposal would give IRCC the ability to depart significantly from the current method it uses to issue ITAs for permanent residence. Since the Express Entry application management system was launched, IRCC has issued ITAs based on Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) score, and Express Entry program of eligibility.

Prior to the pandemic, IRCC generally prioritized ITAs to candidates with the highest CRS score. The rationale being, the CRS is an objective way to forecast an Express Entry candidate’s likelihood of economically establishing in Canada. That is, candidates with higher CRS scores have a better chance of success in the Canadian labour market. IRCC has temporarily departed from this approach, but will be returning to it in early July when it resumes all-program Express Entry draws.

For much of the pandemic, IRCC has been issuing program-specific ITAs. Until September 2021, it invited Canadian Experience Class (CEC) candidates as it sought to transition as many in-Canada candidates to permanent residence to achieve its goal of landing over 400,000 immigrants last year. It has also been inviting Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) candidates to help the provinces and territories address their labour force needs.

While these two methods of issuing ITAs are imperfect, they are still relatively objective and give candidates some form of certainty. Once all-program draws resume in early July, candidates will once again know that their best shot of getting an ITA is to maximize their CRS score.

Lack of certainty is one of the major drawbacks of the proposal to allow ITAs to be issued based on groups. Moving forward, IRCC will have significant discretion to issue ITAs based on any criteria the department chooses. This runs the risk of ITAs being issued on non-objective criteria, such as public sentiment. For instance, IRCC may feel pressure from the public or special interest groups to issue ITAs to candidates in a given sector, even if objective economic data does not indicate the sector has labour shortages. Although this is an extreme example, it is meant to highlight a potential limitation of giving IRCC such wide autonomy when it comes to ITAs.

The lack of certainty is extremely problematic from a candidate’s perspective. In theory, having a very high CRS score may no longer result in an ITA. For instance, a candidate with a CRS 480, which was more than enough to guarantee an ITA prior to the pandemic, may no longer receive an ITA, at the expense of a candidate with a CRS 200 who happens to fall under an occupation in-demand. This would occur in the absence of evidence suggesting that it is wise for the Canadian government to select lower scoring candidates ahead of higher scoring ones.

When it launched Express Entry, IRCC argued that the CRS was shaped by many decades of Statistics Canada research outlining which human capital criteria best predicted the economic outcomes of immigrants. This explains why candidates get more CRS points for the likes of being young, and having high levels of education, language skills, and having professional work experience. Moving forward, IRCC will be able to issue ITAs in the absence of evidence justifying why certain groupings are more worthy of ITAs than others.

Another concern is the lack of public consultations in the lead up to these reforms being proposed. The Express Entry reforms have been included in Bill C-19, which is a collection of various reforms across a spectrum of policy areas that are being proposed together as a means of allowing the ruling federal government to make legislative changes quickly.

While there is a time and place to make legal changes quickly, such as during crisis periods like with what we dealt with at the beginning of the pandemic, it is difficult to understand why the federal government feels the rush to implement such important changes to Express Entry with little time for stakeholder consultations, oversight, and debate.

The current debate in Parliament appears to be a formality since the ruling Liberal Party of Canada have the support of the New Democratic Party (NDP). This means we are the verge of the biggest change to Express Entry ever without the opportunity for stakeholders to highlight potential problems with the change.

IRCC is arguing that if the change becomes law, it will consult with stakeholders before it establishes Express Entry groupings. However, given the lack of consultations leading up to this proposal, why should we feel confident IRCC will consult if the proposal goes into law?

On the other hand, there are also potential benefits to be had from the proposal. There are particular areas of the economy that are being hit hard by Canada’s over one million job vacancies. Providing IRCC with the tools to issue ITAs to help fill job vacancies in such areas will be beneficial to the economy and to Canadians. For instance, Canada is grappling with a shortage of health care workers due to its aging population and the pandemic, and so prioritizing health care workers in the Express Entry pool will be helpful.

In addition, it will be beneficial for IRCC to issue ITAs based on important policy goals, such as strengthening francophone immigration across Canada. As a country with two official languages, English and French, it is crucial the federal government continues its efforts to welcome more francophone immigrants.

Looking ahead, the proposal will likely soon go into law but it is unknown when IRCC would begin to employ its newfound authority. We will need to wait to hear more from the department in this regard.

In the meantime, we can only hope that IRCC will be as transparent as possible before it establishes Express Entry groups and consults widely before issuing ITAs.

There are many expert stakeholders who are available to provide IRCC with objective insights on how to best form Express Entry groups to address Canada’s various labour market needs.

Source: Canada wants to change Express Entry: A look at the pros and cons

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U.K.’s ‘Brightest and Best’ Visa Plan Faces Charges of Elitism

2022/06/04 Leave a comment

The English “public school” insularity! No surprise that Canada’s big three (UBC, McGill Toronto) are on the list:

When Britain started a program this week offering a two-year visa to graduates from some top global universities, Nikhil Mane, an Indian computer science student at New York University, welcomed the news.

“I was happy,” said Mr. Mane, 23, whose university was on the list. “It’s a good way to pursue our dreams.”

More than 5,000 miles away, Adeola Adepoju, 22, a biochemistry student at Olabisi Onabanjo University in Nigeria, also read the announcement with great interest. But he had the opposite reaction.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Mr. Adepoju said. “No university from the third world is ranked.”

Britain’s “High Potential Individual” visa program allows graduates from 37 top-rated world universities in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United States to come to the country for two years even if they do not have a job offer.

A majority of universities on the list are in the United States, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego.

The government said the plan would attract the world’s “brightest and best” and benefit the British economy. Critics, however, say the plan nurtures global inequalities and discriminates against most developing countries.

The purpose of the policy is to create “a highly desirable and able pool of mobile talent from which U.K. employers can recruit” and drive economic growth and technological advances, the government said in its announcement. It did not put a cap on the number of applicants who would be accepted, and said that graduates with Ph.D.s would be allowed to stay for three years.

“We want the businesses of tomorrow to be built here today,” Rishi Sunak, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a statement. “Come and join in!”

The program is in line with Britain’s post-Brexit visa policy, which has made entry easier for high-skilled workers and harder for those considered low-skilled ones, as well as asylum seekers. Visa pathways include a skilled worker visa for people who have received a job offer in Britain, a visa for people considered a “leader or potential leader” in certain fields, and a program to allow international students who graduated from British universities to stay for at least two years.

Mr. Mane, the New York University student, said that after he graduates with a master’s degree, he will be allowed to stay in the United States for three years. After that, his prospects of getting another visa are uncertain.

The opportunity to go to Britain “opens more options,” he said.

The new British visa has been praised in some academic circles in the United States as one to emulate. But many academics, students and politicians in Britain, Africa and India have spoken out against it, saying that the universities that students attend are largely influenced by their social and geographical circumstances, and that the new scheme rewards those who are already more privileged.

“I would not be eligible,” said Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and a senior lecturer in machine learning at Queen Mary University of London, who went to a university in India that is not on the list. “It is very hurtful to find that you’re devalued and that people within your community are devalued because of arbitrary thresholds.”

Dr. Gurdasani said that as a student, she got one of seven spots to study medicine at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, for which thousands of students competed. There, she received what she said was rigorous training, seeing patients with very complex illnesses, including infectious diseases, and building expertise that she then brought to Britain.

“We’ve seen the lack of this in the U.K. during the Covid pandemic,” she said, “It’s very, very shocking to see that after that we are seeing the same sort of names, the same universities pop up, which will favor obviously a particular kind of privileged white person.”

Madeleine Sumption, the director of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, which tracks immigration patterns, said the new policy was an innovative idea, but with drawbacks.

“How do you decide who the highly skilled people are?” she asked, adding that the current policy would admit someone who just scraped through Harvard but not the highest achieving students at a top Indian university.

Introducing other criteria for assessing applicants, such as grades, would be fair, she said, but much harder to enforce. “It’s very convenient for the government to just have an institution be on the list or not.”

Britain’s Home Office said the list had been compiled from leading global university ranking lists, and that new international institutions could move up the ranks and later join the list.

However, university rankings are widely criticized in many quarters, with critics saying they often fail to grasp the quality of teaching and often overemphasize research over instruction.

Phil Baty, who is responsible for developing the methodology of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which is among those the British government used, said in a post on LinkedIn that “this isn’t what we had in mind when creating the rankings.”

Zubaida Haque, the executive director of Equality Trust, a British charity, said that in offering the new visa, the British government failed to grasp that race, class and financial barriers prevented many deserving students from reaching top universities.

A 2017 study of Ivy League colleges, as well as institutions like the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT and Duke, most of which are on the British visa list, showed that more students came from families in the top 1 percent of income distribution in the United States than the bottom half.

“This scheme shows that the government does not understand the systemic racial and class inequality in this country and they clearly do not understand it anywhere else,” Ms. Haque said. “It’s an elitist visa scheme.”

She added that the program gave an unfair advantage to those who needed it the least. “There is likely to be a good pipeline for these graduates anyway,” she said.

Christopher Trisos, a senior researcher at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town, said that the program was also detrimental to Britain itself.

“If U.K. businesses and governments want to play a role in addressing the biggest challenges of this century — energy access, fighting climate change and pandemics — they need to be including skills and knowledge from developing countries,” he said.

Mr. Adepoju, the student from Nigeria, said he hoped to become a researcher in molecular oncology.

“I might not get a degree in the 50 top universities but I have high potential and I want to achieve great things,” he said. But, he added, “It’s their loss, not mine.”

Source: U.K.’s ‘Brightest and Best’ Visa Plan Faces Charges of Elitism

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Milloy: Where is the progressive counter-narrative to Pierre Poilievre?

2022/06/04 Leave a comment

Important question:

As a member of the lefty chattering class, I am not sure what concerns me more — the rise of Pierre Poilievre or the inability of his progressive critics to develop a positive counter-narrative to his message.

The main criticism of Poilievre from those on the left seems to be that he is an angry “nut” with bad policies.  Although he may be popular in some circles, they would argue that it tends to be with the not-too-bright and ill-informed. Clever people from downtown Toronto, Ottawa or other urban centres have no time for him.

Labelling someone early in the game can work — just ask Michael Ignatieff — and maybe Poilievre is simply a crank who is just stirring up a small fringe minority.

Perhaps there is nothing to worry about.

I am not convinced.

From where I sit, it looks like Pierre Poilievre has touched a nerve. Canadians are angry, exhausted, divided, and looking for answers. Poilievre is providing them. He has developed a narrative about how he would address Canada’s problems that has caused many to sit up and take notice.

So, how is the other side responding?

Let’s start with one of Poilievre’s most high-profile promises. If he were prime minister, he would fire the governor of the Bank of Canada for his apparent role in fuelling inflation.

“Ridiculous,” say his critics. Not only does Poilievre not understand basic economics but look at what happened when John Diefenbaker tried to fire the governor of the Bank of Canada in 1961.

I have news for my progressive friends: When gas is two bucks a litre and grown children can’t afford to move out of their parents’ basement, ordinary Canadians aren’t interested in history lessons from the 1960s.

Then there is the issue of restoring freedom — the central theme of Poilievre’s campaign. Once again, the progressive crowd dismisses Poilievre as touting crazy conspiracy theories about big government.

But hold on a minute. I don’t care where you stand on vaccines, lockdowns, and masks. The last few years has seen an unprecedented intrusion in the lives of Canadians. Governments have regulated and curtailed our activities like never before, all in the name of public health.

Where are the limits? What is the progressive narrative about the need to balance personal freedom with the common good? Where is there even an acknowledgement from those on the left that the level of government control over our lives during the pandemic has been scary for some Canadians and they understand and respect that fact?

What about natural resource development and climate change?

Like all Conservative leadership candidates, Poilievre is anxious to cancel the carbon tax and dramatically increase oil and gas production in Canada.

What is the left’s counter-narrative?

Why has it been seemingly impossible for progressives to develop an easy-to-understand story that explains how we need to balance short-term support for oil and gas through actions like the purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and approval of Bay du Nord offshore oil project with a long-term commitment to fighting climate change?

How about defunding the CBC — a proposal that always produces cheers at any Conservative gathering?

Sure, enjoying Canada’s national network over a latte or a glass of chardonnay is a favourite pastime for of every small “l” liberal.  But is it just me, or has the CBC increasingly turned into a northern version of MSNBC? Shouldn’t we be concerned that a big chunk of the population doesn’t see their views represented on our taxpayer-funded network?

Could progressives not even acknowledge the concern and outline a way forward to improve our national broadcaster?

And yes, Poilievre appears to have an unhealthy obsession with cryptocurrency and its growing presence in the global economy.

But how do progressives propose to deal with this emerging phenomenon?

What about the whole style of political discourse these days?

Poilievre claims that Canada is governed by “a small group of ruling elites who claim to possess moral superiority and the burden of instructing the rest of us how to live our lives.”

Ouch!

Be honest all you lefties. Can you see how some people (maybe many people) might view progressives that way? What are you going to do about presenting a style of leadership that is open, prepared to listen and willing to engage?

I end this column where I began. Maybe Pierre Poilievre will ultimately go nowhere.

But be careful. Although I am generally uncomfortable with comparisons between Canadian politicians and Donald Trump, there is one point worth making: Love him or hate him, Trump entered the 2016 election campaign with a whole range of easy-to-understand solutions to the apparent ills facing the United States. The counter-narrative from the other side left much to be desired.

Let’s not make the same mistake here in Canada.

Source: Where is the progressive counter-narrative to Pierre Poilievre?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with ,

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