[Canadian] Military failing to remove barriers to diversifying ranks: ombudsman

2022/05/18 Leave a comment

Long-standing challenge:

Canada’s military ombudsman is joining the chorus of those accusing the Canadian Armed Forces and Defence Department of failing to address long-standing barriers to recruit and retain more women, visible minorities and Indigenous people.

Gregory Lick says in a new report that the military and department have adopted numerous initiatives over the last 20 years to increase the share of Armed Forces members who come from those underrepresented groups.

The moves followed several human-rights decisions and the passage of employment equity laws, amid a growing disconnect between the makeup of the military, predominantly composed of white males, and the rest of the country’s population.

Yet the ombudsman found those initiatives resulted in little progress on increasing representation from underrepresented groups, with the military consistently falling far short of its own targets.

“I am adamant that in order to not repeat the same mistakes, the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces need to do things differently,” Lick said in a statement Monday.

“Fresh and creative thinking is required. Rehashing former initiatives simply will not cut it. Period. We will continue to monitor developments within the defence community in order to inform our own next steps on this matter.”

The ombudsman’s report comes weeks after a panel of retired Armed Forces members released the results of its own review, which took the military to task for not acting on dozens of previous studies and reviews of racism in the organization.

The scathing anti-racism report, which followed a yearlong review ordered by then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan, also accused the military of not doing enough to detect and prevent white supremacists and other extremists from infiltrating its ranks.

Lick’s review, also requested by Sajjan, looked at efforts to increase the share of women, visible minorities and Indigenous people in the Defence Department and military since becoming subject to employment equity laws in 1997 and 2002, respectively.

It specifically noted the military’s failure to make any real progress toward its various targets, which include having 25.1 per cent of all Armed Forces members be women, 11.8 per cent be visible minorities and 3.5 per cent Indigenous people.

“Despite the CAF’s efforts over the past 19 years, the percentage of women members stagnated until 2019, when a one-per-cent increase brought that representation level to 16 per cent of all CAF members,” the report reads.

“The limited increase in Aboriginal peoples (2.8 per cent) and visible minority members (9.6 per cent) has not been sufficient to keep up with Canadian demographics,” it adds.

The report goes on to note that not only has the Armed Forces failed to achieve its targets, but that those targets have been repeatedly criticized by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and others as far too low given the country’s changing composition.

The Defence Department reported more success in terms of diversifying its civilian workforce, but nonetheless faced many of the same challenges.

The ombudsman reported that his office had received 931 complaints relating to recruitment and 879 complaints involving promotions or career advancement since 2010. Another 189 workplace discrimination complaints were received.

“While designated employment equity groups did not submit all these complaints and not all would have been deemed to be unfair, these numbers show that the DND and CAF face challenges to the provision of fair and equitable employment,” he wrote.

The ombudsman noted numerous barriers to the recruitment of Armed Forces members from the designated groups had been reported over the years, including language requirements, security-clearance delays and a lack of representation among recruiters.

The review also noted that because military personnel have to start at the bottom and work their way up, fixing the recruitment process is a critical first step. Concerns were nonetheless also identified around retention and promotions.

Lick emphasized the importance of addressing the problem given what he described as a growing need for a diverse force that reflects Canadian society and is able to operate in new and innovative ways.

“With the CAF currently operating at a deficit of approximately 10,000 to 12,000 regular and reserve force members and thousands of positions unfilled in the civilian ranks, a crisis is slowly emerging,” he said.

“Critical to the ongoing success of the DND and the CAF is ensuring that people of diverse backgrounds consider a career in these organizations and see themselves reflected in their mandates.”

While past reports and reviews have proposed a number of measures to address the problems, Lick echoed the anti-racism panel’s findings about a lack of action, saying: “It is unclear whether the CAF has implemented all these initiatives.”

Although Defence Minister Anita Anand was given four weeks to respond to the ombudsman’s report before its public release, Lick said he had yet to receive a response. The Defence Department did not immediately comment Monday.

Source: Military failing to remove barriers to diversifying ranks: ombudsman

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‘Dire Consequences’: SCOTUS Justice Gorsuch Sides with Liberals Against Justice Barrett’s Majority Opinion in Immigration Case

2022/05/18 Leave a comment

Bizarre ruling but given the make-up of the court, not surprising:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled against immigrants seeking judicial review of mistakes and errors made by immigration agencies. In a 5-4 majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that federal courts are categorically barred from considering such issues.

“It is no secret that when processing applications, licenses, and permits the government sometimes makes mistakes,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a passionate dissent. “Often, they are small ones—a misspelled name, a misplaced application. But sometimes a bureaucratic mistake can have life-changing consequences. Our case is such a case.”

Joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Gorsuch castigated the sweeping nature of the majority’s decision and its fealty to the administrative state.

“Today, the Court holds that a federal bureaucracy can make an obvious factual error, one that will result in an individual’s removal from this country, and nothing can be done about it,” the dissent notes. “No court may even hear the case. It is a bold claim promising dire consequences for countless lawful immigrants.”

In the case stylized as Patel v. Garland, Pankajkumar Patel, who has lived in the country for nearly 30 years, accidentally ticked the wrong box on a driver’s license application question about his citizenship status in Georgia. Peach State prosecutors initially pressed charges but later determined that they lacked evidence to prove a crime had been committed. Notably, his incorrect check mark didn’t have any bearing on his request for a driver’s license because under Georgia law, he was entitled to one even though he wasn’t a U.S. citizen because he had filed for a green card and had a valid work permit.

The Department of Homeland Security rejected Patel’s green card application on the basis of a statute barring immigration status adjustments to anyone who “falsely represents . . . himself . . . to be a citizen of the United States” to obtain a “benefit under . . . State law.”

After that, the government initiated deportation proceedings against Patel, who has three children who also live in the country. He then re-filed his green card application under the relevant statutes and repeated his consistent claims about his lack of intent to deceive and how Georgia law regarding that benefit–the driver’s license–wasn’t actually contingent on how he filled out the form in the first place.

“None of this moved the immigration judge,” Gorsuch writes. “He said he did not believe Mr. Patel’s testimony that he checked the wrong box mistakenly. Instead, the immigration judge found, Mr. Patel intentionally represented himself falsely to obtain a benefit under state law. According to the immigration judge, Mr. Patel had a strong incentive to deceive state officials because he could not have obtained a Georgia driver’s license if he had disclosed he was ‘neither a citizen [n]or a lawful permanent resident.’”

But the immigration judge was incorrect. Patel followed up and said exactly as much before the Board of Immigration Appeals.

“In his appeal, Mr. Patel argued that the immigration judge’s finding that he had an incentive to deceive state officials was simply wrong—under Georgia law he was entitled to a driver’s license without being a citizen or a lawful permanent resident given his pending application for adjustment of status and permission to work,” the dissent notes. “Mr. Patel submitted, too, that all the record evidence pointed to the conclusion he simply checked the wrong box by mistake; even state officials agreed they had no case to bring against him for deception.”

The agency tribunal ruled against him. In additional appeals, with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, various federal judges opined at length about whether or not they even had the ability to review Patel’s case. In their first ruling against him, a three-judge panel determined they lacked jurisdiction to even hear the case.

Patel appealed again. The full court then decided, in a 9-5 opinion, that one small bit of statutory language precludes courts from reviewing cases like Patel’s–while also noting that they had to overrule “numerous” precedents in various circuits in order to reach the conclusion that they can’t really consider such cases at all.

The statute reads, in relevant part:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law . . . and regardless of whether the judgment, decision, or action is made in removal proceedings, no court shall have jurisdiction to review— (i) any judgment regarding the granting of relief under section . . . 1255 of this title.

Under federal law, there’s a two-step process for whether or not an immigrant is entitled to relief from a deportation decision. The first step is whether or not an immigrant is entitled to having their status adjusted. The next step is whether or not, in the government’s discretion, they might then not be deported.

In Patel’s case, the judge, the BIA, and the 11th Circuit ruled against him at step one. The 11th Circuit’s logic was that the above-referenced statute foreclosed against a court hearing anything about how the agency had erred at the first step. The second step was never even considered by the court. Barrett’s majority opinion endorses that view.

Gorsuch explains (and criticizes) at length:

Following the Eleventh Circuit’s lead, the majority contends that subparagraph (B)(i)’s phrase “any judgment regarding the granting of relief under § 1255” sweeps more broadly. On its account, the statute denies courts the power to correct all agency decisions with respect to an adjustment-of-status application under § 1255—both the agency’s step-one eligibility decisions and its step-two discretionary decisions. As a result, no court may correct even the agency’s most egregious factual mistakes about an individual’s statutory eligibility for relief. It is a novel reading of a 25-year-old statute. One at odds with background law permitting judicial review.

“It does not matter if the BIA and immigration judge in Mr. Patel’s case erred badly when they found he harbored an intent to deceive state officials,” the dissent goes on. “It does not matter if the BIA declares other individuals ineligible for relief based on even more obvious factual errors. On the majority’s telling, courts are powerless to correct bureaucratic mistakes like these no matter how grave they may be.”

The dissent even repeats some of its own language verbatim but with added italics to stress the points:

[U]nder the majority’s construction of subparagraph (B)(i), individuals who could once secure judicial review to correct administrative errors at step one in district court are now, after its decision, likely left with no avenue for judicial relief of any kind. An agency may err about the facts, the law, or even the Constitution and nothing can be done about it.

Gorsuch goes on to note that tens of thousands of such rejections are handed out by agency officials each year and argues that Barrett’s opinion “will almost surely end all that and foreclose judicial review for countless law-abiding individuals whose lives may be upended by bureaucratic misfeasance.”

Source: ‘Dire Consequences’: Justice Gorsuch Sides with Liberals Against Justice Barrett’s Majority Opinion in Immigration Case

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Statistics Canada: Portrait of the social, political and economic participation of racialized groups

2022/05/18 Leave a comment

No real surprises in this useful overview but important to have:

In response to Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, Statistics Canada’s Centre for Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics is releasing an initial set of 13 data tables on social inclusion. Nearly 100 indicators can now be used to examine various socioeconomic facets of racialized groups. 

The concept of racialized population is measured with the ‘visible minority’ variable in this release. ‘Visible minority’ refers to whether or not a person belongs to one of the visible minority groups defined by the Employment Equity Act. The Employment Equity Act defines visible minorities as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” (for more details, please refer to Note to readers). 

These indicators provide valuable information to develop policies to combat racism and discrimination, and they reflect the agency’s commitment to greater insights through the use of disaggregated data. The new data sheds light on the unique experiences of racialized Canadians, whether they immigrated to Canada or were born in the country.

The indicators published today are organized into a wider framework of themes for measuring social inclusion within Canada’s diverse population. The themes are the following: participation in the labour market; civic engagement and political participation; representation in decision-making positions; basic needs and housing; health and well-being; education, training and skills; income and wealth; social connections and personal networks; local community; public services and institutions; and discrimination and victimization.

This article provides an overview of social inclusion of racialized populations under the two themes: civic engagement and political participation, and representation in decision-making positions. It looks at key indicators of participation in community groups and organizations, representation in senior management, and voting in elections and political engagement. The analysis focuses on the seven largest racialized groups in Canada: South Asian; Chinese; Black; Filipino; Latin American; Arab; and Southeast Asian Canadians.

The findings show that while the rates of civic participation of racialized Canadians are generally similar to the rest of the population, their representation in management positions is considerably lower, and their voter turnout and political engagement are somewhat lower compared with other Canadians. There are also important differences amongst the racialized groups on these measures of social inclusion.

Source for full report with tables: Portrait of the social, political and economic participation of racialized groups

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Let Actors Act

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

Adrian Lester, a British actor from Birmingham and the son of two immigrants from Jamaica, was nominated last week for a Tony Award for his performance in “The Lehman Trilogy” as Emanuel Lehman, one of the German-born Jewish founders of the fallen investment behemoth Lehman Brothers. Lester, like the other actors in the three-man play, takes on several parts, including female characters and at one point, a thumb-sucking toddler.

There has been no outcry about a British actor of African descent playing a German Jew, nor was there any fuss when he played Bobby, a character traditionally performed by white actors, in a London production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” for which he won an Olivier.

And why should there have been? It’s called acting.

There was no protest either about Lester’s co-star Simon Russell Beale, born to British parents in what was then British Malaya and a former chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral, playing a German Jew. Adam Godley, the third actor in the play, is Jewish in real life, but he’s also gay — not so in the play. Again, it’s called acting, and Beale and Godley were also nominated for Tony Awards last week.

And yet countless actors have been criticized for playing people they do not resemble in real life.

Earlier this year, Helen Mirren was lambasted for portraying Golda Meir, a former prime minister of Israel, in a forthcoming biopic even though she’s not Jewish — engaging in what is now called “Jewface.” In a recent interview defending Mirren, Ian McKellen (who incidentally has played everything from a wizard to a cat) asked, “Is the argument that a straight man cannot play a gay part, and if so, does that mean I can’t play straight parts?” He went on: “Surely not. We’re acting. We’re pretending.”

Daring to take on parts different from oneself didn’t always kick up a storm. Back in 1993 when Tom Hanks played a gay character in “Philadelphia,” he was hailed as brave for taking on homophobia and won an Oscar. Today, his performance no longer plays so well in some quarters. “Straight men playing gay — everyone wants to give them an award,” the performer Billy Porter complained in a 2019 actor’s round table. Yet many of our best gay, lesbian and bisexual actors — Jodie Foster, Alan Cumming, Kristen Stewart, Nathan Lane — have won awards for straight roles without even a murmur of complaint.

What we are effectively saying here — without ever, heaven forbid, saying it out loud — is that it’s OK for actors from groups considered to be marginalized — whether gay, Indigenous, Latino or any other number of identities — to play straight white characters. But it’s not OK for the reverse.

Such double standards may not trouble you. But if it’s a problem that a “miscast” actor — one who differs in identity from the character — takes a role away from a “properly cast” actor when there are already fewer roles for underrepresented or marginalized groups, then why not condemn Simon Russell Beale for taking a job from a Jewish actor? Why no outcry every time a 40-something actress bends biology to play the mothers of 25-year-old actresses, robbing older actresses who more plausibly fit the part?

If, however, the real problem is actors not being able to understand what it feels like to be part of a demographic group or to have a sexual orientation outside the confines of their own experience, then none of these actors should be able to play anyone unlike themselves. In other words, no one should ever be allowed to play a part.

Hollywood has wisely moved on from the offensive extremes of blackface and Shylock stereotypes, “queeny” stock gay characters and Mickey Rooney’s embarrassing turn as a Japanese landlord in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” There is plenty of room in the middle without ricocheting to the other undesirable extreme.

It’s not that strict typecasting should never happen; it can yield rewarding opportunities for both actors and audiences. Behold the deaf performers in the Oscar-winning “Coda.”

But deaf performers can also act movingly in a musical like the 2015 Deaf West revival of “Spring Awakening,” which featured them in roles that were originally performed as hearing characters and performed simply as characters, neither explicitly hearing nor deaf, but transcendently human in their expression.

Likewise, in a recent revival of “Oklahoma!” Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair, was able to fully embody Ado Annie, who spends much of her time in the movie and previous stage versions swishing away from her suitor, Will Parker, just as Daniel Day-Lewis once captured, with extraordinary sensitivity in “My Left Foot,” the wheelchair-bound writer and painter Christy Brown.

Good actors are able to find a way to portray people who are not like themselves, whether on the surface or well below, which is what differentiates them from those of us who could barely remember our lines in a fourth-grade production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Acting is a feat of compassion and an act of generosity. Those capable of that kind of emotional ventriloquy enable audiences to find ourselves in the lives portrayed onscreen, no matter how little they may resemble our own.

Bravo to those actors who do that well. Bravo to the talented Adrian Lester, who makes you forget the color of his skin, his nationality and his religion — and gives himself over entirely to his performance. There is no reason for any actor to apologize for exercising and reveling in his craft.

Source: Let Actors Act

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How prejudice rooted in an ancient social system has migrated from India to Canada

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Seeing more accounts of caste discrimination here and in the USA:

When Gurpreet Singh packed his bags last fall and arrived in Ontario from India, he soon learned there was one thing some fellow Indians in Canada hadn’t left behind in their home country — their prejudices.

The human resource management student at Durham College in Oshawa, Ont., said he is viewed as an outcast in the ancient South Asian social structure known as the caste system, but faces more discrimination from Indians in Canada than he did in India.

“I have been here for roughly five months and I have faced it in a way more aggressive or aggravated form in this country from my own Punjabi community,” Singh said. “They beat their chest with pride that they come from this caste or that caste.”

India is a main source of immigrants to Canada. It’s also a huge pipeline for international students both to Canada and the United States, and some universities are taking note of concerns around discrimination based on caste.

California State University, the largest four-year public university system in the U.S., specifically added caste to its non-discrimination policies in January. In Ottawa, the academic staff association at Carleton University passed a motion in November to include caste-based discrimination in its policies.

Singh recalled a conversation with an acquaintance in Oshawa that shocked him after she used a casteist slur to address him.

“I confronted her that you’d be behind bars if you were in India right now … The girl who uttered that word acted as if she didn’t know anything, why it’s offensive, etc.,” Singh said. “To put it in her brain in the easiest possible way, I equated the word with the N-word.”

He said it was “strange” that she knew the N-word was a slur for Black people, “but even after living in India for 23 years, she had no idea, or at least pretended to have no idea, about the thing she just said so casually.”

The Hindu caste system divides people into four sub-communities based on ancestry — Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras — and the caste of a person can often be identified by their last name. The four main castes are further divided into 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes.

The caste tradition transcends religion. Many Indians with Hindu lineage whose ancestors adopted Sikhism or Christianity retained their last names, and their caste designations.

Singh belongs to a scheduled caste, members of which are also known as Dalits. According to the caste system, scheduled castes are outcasts and do not belong to the social order.

According to the 2011 census, scheduled castes made up for 16.2 per cent of the Indian population. From 2018 to 2020, India’s National Crime Records Bureau recorded 50,202 registered cases of crimes or “atrocities” against scheduled castes. Activists from the community have long fought against caste oppression.

Singh’s last name was originally Badhan, which indicated his caste. He stopped using it, even on official documents, but he said in Canada he’s been asked for his full name so people could identify his community.

“I have had to hide my identity a number of times,” Singh said. “I had to lie twice. I told them I come from the Jatt community and my surname is something else because I felt that I might be isolated, and no one wants to feel that way when you are so far away from home.”

Casteism can cause harm

Chinnaiah Jangam, an associate professor in the department of history at Carleton University and an advocate for the rights of people from scheduled castes, believes casteism can hurt immigrants long term.

“A student or an employee coming from these backgrounds will not feel comfortable to express their own identity and they won’t feel comfortable being themselves,” said Jangam, who is the author of Dalits and the making of modern India and spearheaded the push to add caste to the anti-discrimination policies of Carleton’s academic association.

Meera Estrada, the Toronto co-host of the pop culture show kultur’D on Global News radio, was born in Canada but said she was aware she was a Dalit since childhood. She often hid her identity because other people of Indian background looked down on her community.

She recalled going to Gujarati language classes and people asking what samaj, or community, she belonged to. “And people were quite proud in saying which group they belong to, but it was always the Brahmin group or the so-called upper caste,” Estrada said.

India passed a law in 1955 to abolish “untouchability,” a term once used to describe the practice of ostracizing scheduled castes. But Estrada believes the social stigma against Dalits remains, something that became more apparent to her in her 20s.

“Aunties in mandirs [temples] trying to play matchmakers would always say, ‘Oh, this is a good boy from a good family.’ The implication there was that he is from a higher caste, and I would just feel like if that is the equivalent of good, who am I? Am I not good?”

Brahmin-only group

One matchmaking Facebook group, the Samast Brahman Society of Canada, has 4,100 members. The group’s description says its “goal is to unite all Brahmins under one roof while they can serve in all other Brahmin organizations.”

Source: How prejudice rooted in an ancient social system has migrated from India to Canada

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El-Assal on backlogs etc

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Good and sound testimony before CIMM, with reasonable recommendations to improve transparency, accountability and collaboration (the harder of the three):

Canada’s immigration backlog stands at over two million people. It has nearly doubled since the start of the pandemic. The permanent residence inventory has grown from 400,000 people to 530,000 people. The temporary residence inventory has doubled to 1.2 million people, and the citizenship inventory has gone from 230,000 people to 400,000 people.

    The backlog is undermining Canada’s economic, social and humanitarian objectives. We have the lowest unemployment rate on record and over 800,000 job vacancies. The backlog hurts our economic recovery effort, since we can’t bring newcomers into Canada quickly enough to address our labour shortages. For instance, it’s now taking 31 months to process Quebec’s skilled worker applications and 28 months to process paper-based provincial nominee program applications, even though the service standard for both is 11 months.

    The backlog is keeping families apart. For example, although the service standard for spousal sponsorship is 12 months, it’s taking us 20 months on average to process outland applications.

    On the humanitarian side, Canada is making refugees and displaced persons live in discomfort for far longer than necessary, as we’re currently seeing with Afghans and Ukrainians. It is absolutely imperative that we get the immigration system back on track.

    Within the next decade, all nine million baby boomers will reach retirement age. We’re going to need more immigrants to grow our labour force, tax base and economy. However, other countries will win the race for talent if Canada continues to struggle to provide immigrants with certainty that we’ll process their applications quickly and fairly. This will be to the detriment of our economic and fiscal health.

    I’d like to provide three recommendations to the committee.

    First, we need more transparency. 

    The government should be mandated to provide monthly updates to the public on the state of immigration policy and operations. Immigration in Canada is far too important to be a black box. We should not have to rely on access to information requests, as has been the case during the pandemic, to remain informed about the immigration system. The monthly update should contain critical information, such as the government’s policy priorities and its backlog reduction plan, among other details that can help to restore the trust in our immigration system that was eroded during the pandemic. Providing monthly updates would also reflect well on the government. People are more understanding and forgiving when you’re honest with them.

    Second, we need more accountability. 

    An independent study should be commissioned to better understand the operations of the immigration system during the pandemic. Right now, we have many unanswered questions. What are the causes of this backlog? The pandemic alone can’t entirely explain the situation we’re in. For instance, express entry was designed to avoid backlogs, so why then do we have an express entry backlog? We need an evidence-based study that answers these sorts of questions and provides us with guidance to ensure such backlogs never happen again.

    Third, we need to work more collaboratively. 

    Major decisions have been made during the pandemic with little consultation, leading to avoidable consequences. We’re blessed to live in a country with many immigration experts from law, academia, think tanks, business and the settlement sector, among others. They are assets to our immigration system. 

    Hence, my final recommendation is that the government form a national advisory council on immigration. The council’s mandate would be to provide the government with technocratic advice to inform our country’s major immigration decisions. We’re a diverse nation with diverse immigration objectives; we need diverse views reflected in our immigration policy.

    To conclude, I want us to remember that among these two million people waiting in the backlog are future colleagues, friends, neighbours, voters, politicians, and business and civil society leaders. They are Canada’s future, and we must treat them with the dignity and respect that they deserve.

Source: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CIMM/meeting-21/evidence

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Australia: Only 8% of candidates in the federal election come from diverse backgrounds

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

Sharp contrast with Canada where 18.2 percent of candidates in the 2021 election were visible minorities:

Of the more than 1,200 candidates in the federal election running for the House of Representatives, just 100 (8%) come from backgrounds other than Anglo-Australian, according to lists compiled by the Asian Australian Alliance and the Centre of Multicultural Political Engagement, Literacy and Leadership (Compell). There are a further 38 diverse candidates running for the Senate.

According to a report from the Australian Human Rights Commission, 21% of Australians have a non-European background and 3% an Indigenous background. Over 300 ancestries were identified in the 2016 census.

Less than 40% (458) of House candidates are women, with the majority of both diverse and female candidates running as challengers in safe or fairly safe seats.

The most commonly self-identified occupations of House candidates – aside from existing members of parliament – are managers, retirees and businesspeople. Some unique occupations listed by only a single candidate include a showman, firearms dealer, humanitarian and a carbon farmer.

Although the lists are largely crowdsourced via public statements and may not be comprehensive, as the Australian Electoral Commission does not release extensive data on candidates’ backgrounds, they nevertheless highlight a troubling lack of diversity in the electionwhich “is not representative of multicultural Australia”.

Most diverse candidates are challenging safe seats

Of the 100 House candidates identified as having backgrounds other than Anglo-Australian, just three are incumbents in safe seats: the Coalition’s Ian Goodenough and Labor’s Linda Burney and Peter Khalil. Labor’s Cassandra Fernando is contesting in Wills, where the incumbent Labor MP Anthony Byrne is retiring.

The majority of diverse candidates identified (57%) are challengers in safe or fairly safe seats. There are five diverse candidates in marginal seats currently held by their parties, including Dave Sharma, Marion Scrymgour, Gladys Liu, Anne Aly and Ken Wyatt.

Tharini Apolline Rouwette, the CEO of Compell, says the makeup of parliament and the candidates isn’t reflective of Australian society. “Our parliament is not representative of multicultural Australia, hence why we need diversity in parliament and also to normalise people of colour in leadership roles,” she says.

“There’s about 4% of people of colour in parliament today which is hardly reflective of the Australian population that is increasingly becoming multicultural. The information collected, together with my follow-up surveys/interviews will hopefully be the beginning of a long journey towards collecting information that will inform us as to what we need to do to get more people of colour elected in government.”

More candidates in marginal seats are women

Men make up over 60% of the 1,204 candidates in the AEC list, according to data compiled by Ben Raue at the Tallyroom. There are four non-binary candidates and two whose gender is unknown.

Both major parties have more male than female candidates, but a slightly higher percentage of Labor candidates are women.

Women make up a disproportionate share of candidates in marginal seats – they represent 38% of all candidates, but 41.6% of candidates in marginal seats. Some 263 women (56%) are running as challengers in safe or fairly safe seats.

Occupations

Guardian Australia compiled a list of occupations from the AEC candidate list, identifying around 254 unique occupations – an approximation, since there can be a number of names for the same occupation, and some candidates wrote expansive job titles such as “finance” or “business”.

Aside from member of parliament, lawyers, directors, consultants, managers, retirees and the unemployed are among the biggest occupations for candidates in the major parties. Some candidates who quit their jobs to contest the election are listed as unemployed.

The most common occupations for Coalition members are lawyers and directors (nine each), followed closely by consultants and managers. Union officials and unemployed are the top occupations for Labor candidates.

Students and retirees make up the top occupations for the Greens. Managers and businesspeople top the list for the United Australia Party, and retirees is the most common occupation listed for One Nation.

Source: Only 8% of candidates in the federal election come from diverse backgrounds

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COVID-19 Immigration Effects – March 2022 update

2022/05/17 Leave a comment

My latest monthly update.

March 2022 marks two-years since the COVID measures and lockdowns began. As a result, the two-year comparisons become more striking.

The government’s not wishing the “crisis to go to waste” by increasing immigration levels by about one-third compared to pre-pandemic 2019 continues, with just over 40,000 admissions in March, across all categories. However, there is a declining trend of temporary residents transitioning to permanent residents, suggesting an “inventory” decline.

The planting season can be seen in the increase of Temporary Foreign Workers in the agriculture sector, both in terms of the regular seasonal patterns as well as the COVID disruption in March 2020.

The citizenship program continues to increase the number of new citizens and thus starting to reduce backlogs or at least move to restoring normal processing times.

The introduction of streams for Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion is seen in the dramatic jump in visas issued to Ukrainians, mainly under the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel, from a pre-pandemic average of 648 per month in 2019 to 21,465 March 2022. 

covid-19-immigration-effects-key-slides-march-2022-draft-1Download

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The Silence of the Right on Ukrainian Refugees

2022/05/16 Leave a comment

Of note (not unique to USA as contrasting Canada’s previous firm policies in terms of access to work permits, healthcare and settlement services to Ukrainian temporary residents under the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel program compared to Afghans and others illustrates:

Last summer, anti-immigration advocates mobilized in opposition to the resettlement of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees in the United States. “It threatens the national security of the United States,” wroteStephen Miller, the former top Donald Trump adviser. Miller charged in another tweet that President Joe Biden had “cruelly betrayed his oath of office” by expediting the entry of Afghans fleeing the Taliban without, Miller said, proper vetting. A prominent immigration-restrictionist group issued a report warning of fraud and abuse in the nation’s refugee programs, and immigration hard-liners flooded conservative airwaves throughout the fall to denounce the administration’s plans.

Then came another refugee crisis, this time in Ukraine. In March, Biden said the U.S. would admit up to 100,000 of the millions of Ukrainians who had left their country after the Russian invasion. The announcement was sure to provoke the outrage of the nation’s most ardent immigration foes, whose cries about an influx of refugees from a war-stricken region had barely faded from the news.

Except it didn’t.

Anti-immigration advocates have been far quieter about the Biden administration’s policy toward Ukrainian refugees than they were about its stance toward Afghan refugees. What’s more, the criticism they have leveled has had almost nothing to do with concerns about vetting or national security. Miller, for example, tweeted dozens of dire warnings about Afghan refugees during the summer and fall of 2021. He has also tweeted frequently about Ukraine since the crisis escalated at the beginning of this year, but not a single time about Biden’s plan to accept 100,000 refugees. (Through a spokesperson, he declined an interview request.)

To the groups who resettle refugees in the U.S., the divergent responses from the political right are a stark but familiar example of the long-standing bias against immigrants from poor or predominantly Muslim countries in favor of those from Europe, who are predominantly white. Those attitudes are also reflected in—and might contribute to—public opinion about America’s refugee policy. In a poll conducted last month for The Atlantic by Leger, 58 percent of respondents supported the U.S. accepting refugees from Ukraine, while just 46 percent backed admitting those from Afghanistan. Asked whether the U.S. should admit more refugees from one country than the other, 23 percent of respondents said the U.S. should take more people from Ukraine, while just 4 percent said the U.S. should accept more from Afghanistan, despite America’s two-decade involvement in the war there. Gallup found even broader support for admitting Ukrainian refugees, the highest for any refugee group it has polled about since 1939.

“Americans get a certain amount of compassion fatigue for certain parts of the world that are chronically in turmoil, and no American alive today can ever remember a time of peace in the Middle East,” Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that seeks a reduction in overall immigration to the U.S., told me. “It’s also true that Ukraine has not been viewed routinely as a source of refugees, of political conflict, at least not in the modern world.”

Senior officials with refugee-resettlement groups told me that they haven’t put much stock into the reaction of immigration hard-liners, because Republican governors and leaders in Congress have remained broadly supportive of accepting Afghan refugees. But they have sharply criticized the Biden administration for what they say is unequal treatment of refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine. “It certainly appears that Ukrainians are receiving special treatment,” Adam Bates, a policy counsel for the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me.

Under its Uniting With Ukraine program, the Biden administration is waiving all fees associated with applying for humanitarian parole. By contrast, IRAP says, the U.S. government charged more than 40,000 applicants from Afghanistan as much as $575 to seek similar protection last summer. The government is also scrapping requirements that Ukrainians submit evidence that they were specifically targeted by the Russian military or President Vladimir Putin, whereas Afghan applicants must provide proof of individualized, targeted violence against them by the Taliban.

The White House declined to comment. The administration has touted its evacuation of more than 82,000 Afghans to the U.S., including many allies who helped the U.S. military during its 20-year war. In both crises, the government has sought to route many applicants around the official refugee and special-immigrant visa programs because they are so backlogged. Officials have said that the humanitarian parole that the U.S. is offering to Ukrainians lasts for only two years, which Bates took as a suggestion that the government assumes many refugees will want to stay in the country only temporarily. I asked him what he thought was the real reason the Biden administration was expediting the process for Ukrainians in ways it did not for Afghans. “This is just speculating,” he cautioned in his reply. “But to me, I do not think that the influence of systemic racism and xenophobia in this country has been limited to just one party in the context of immigration.”

The politics of immigration have bedeviled Biden from his first days in office. Republicans have accused him of countenancing a veritable invasion of the southern border by migrants and asylum seekers, while progressives criticized his decision to keep in place some Trump-administration policies reviled by immigrant advocates. Biden’s critics on the right say his lax handling of the southern border has left the country stretched too thin to respond effectively to the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine. “The problem is that resettling refugees takes work and money and infrastructure, which has been overwhelmed by all the illegal aliens who were using asylum as a gambit to get past the Border Patrol,” Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, told me.

Many others, however, say the U.S. has both the moral obligation and the capacity to open its doors to those fleeing war and persecution.

Conservatives who have raised alarms about resettling Afghan refugees say the need to vet them is stronger because the American invasion created enemies who could try to sneak into the U.S. to exact revenge. They’ve also warned about the cultural differences between Afghanistan and the U.S., highlighting reports of child trafficking by male evacuees who claim young girls as their brides.

Krikorian has assailed the nation’s refugee policy across the board and told me the U.S. could do more good simply by sending money overseas to help resettle evacuees in countries closer to their homeland. But he had harsher words for the Biden administration’s pledge to admit refugees from Ukraine. “We clearly have more obligation to Afghans than we do to Ukrainians,” Krikorian said. At the same time, he said, individual Afghan refugees presented bigger security and cultural concerns than did Ukrainians. As an example, Krikorian referenced reports of widespread sexual abuse of young boys by members of the Afghan security forces made by members of the U.S. military during the war. “I wouldn’t say because of that, we don’t take Afghans, but we do take Ukrainians,” he said. “But in individual cases, in doing vetting and assessing whether it’s a good idea to bring somebody into the United States, we definitely should take that into consideration.”

Those reports and the stereotypes they feed may help explain why the public voices stronger support for refugees from Ukraine than from Afghanistan, and, on some level, why the government has treated them differently. But to those who work on behalf of refugees, they are beside the point. “Of course, we need to vet immigrants who are coming into the U.S. to make sure that they are not a threat to the American public. But we need to do that consistently,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, told me. “Both populations have strong rationales for seeking refuge here in the U.S. We shouldn’t pit one population against the other.”

Source: The Silence of the Right on Ukrainian Refugees

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , ,

Commodification of EU citizenship: Will the EU ban ‘golden passports’?

2022/05/16 Leave a comment

More on EU debates and tightening:

Europe is not quite the same since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. European reaction to the war is in many ways strengthening the old seams of the EU project and, since its outbreak, one of the moral contradictions facing EU member states in recent years, the sale of citizenship, is now being tackled with much greater consensus.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, which hit southern European economies particularly hard, a number of countries, such as Portugal in 2012 and Spain in 2013, decided to set up schemes to enable the purchase of residence visas for “international investors”, that is, third-country nationals with sufficient purchasing power to secure the right to reside in the EU against payment, providing them with the key to full European citizenship within just a few years. Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta and Cyprus soon went down the same route. They were followed not long after by the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and even Luxembourg.

In countries such as Bulgaria, Malta and Cyprus, these ‘golden visa’ programmes, technically known as ‘residence by investment’ schemes (RBI), were accompanied by the so-called ‘golden passport’ programmes, which speed up the whole process and offer direct access to ‘citizenship by investment’ (CBI). After years of pressure from Brussels, Bulgaria and Cyprus have committed to ending CBI. Malta, however, has not, so it is still possible to buy an EU passport within a matter of a year.

“The main beneficiaries of both systems have been Chinese oligarchs and Russian oligarchs,” Spanish MEP and former justice minister Juan Fernando López Aguilar, who chairs the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, tells Equal Times. In many cases, he insists, “they are mafiosi and corrupt individuals who launder the wealth, illicitly acquired in their countries of origin, by buying the privilege of residing in Europe and acquiring property in Europe, which has nothing to do with investment, and much less with creating jobs – all they have to do is buy mansions, yachts and real estate, which is what they do.”

RBI programmes were defended at the time as a way of attracting investments into countries such as Spain and Portugal.

“In both cases they were adopted at the time of conservative governments, which [against a backdrop of economic crisis] introduced legislative measures to, in practice, make money from granting residence rights, even though they are not linked to any actual investment and there are no checks on that investment. So we are clearly faced with issues that impact on European money laundering legislation,” the MEP summarises.

In October 2020, at the request of the European Parliament, the European Commission referred Malta and Cyprus to the European Court of Justice, alleging that their CBI programmes violated several fundamental articles of EU law.

The European Parliament also called on the Commission in March 2022 to prepare legislation banning ‘golden passports’ (CBI) across the EU and to set very strict conditions on ‘golden visa’ (RBI) schemes, with “stringent background checks” on applicants. And, adds López Aguilar, “with mandatory checks against all the databases shared by the EU-LISA agency, which reports regularly to the committee I chair, so that not only people who acquire this residence permit, but also all their direct first-degree relatives can be examined, and with the express obligation to consult and notify all member states, so that they can raise objections [on a case-by-case basis] to any person seeking residence in another member state.”

Investment migration and due diligence

These schemes are not, however, a European invention. There is a whole network of companies specialising in advising wealthy individuals interested in paying for a visa or residence permit in the 30 or so countries around the world that offer them, from small island nations in the Caribbean to economic giants such as the US, the UK and Canada, where the first such programmes were launched in 1986.

It is from Canada that Eric Major, the ‘father’ of the Malta Individual Investor Programme originally hails. Now a founding member and CEO of one of these firms – Latitude RCBI Consultancy – he assured Equal Times that these CBI schemes are a very useful tool for small or economically distressed countries, and that it would be senseless to disregard that.

Major defends the Maltese CBI scheme as an example of how best to regulate so-called “migration by investment”, a global market that generated 21.4 billion euros between 2011 and 2019 through CBI and RBI schemes.

“The US is still the country that approves the most ‘golden visas’ at around 10,000 people a year, while Portugal approved about 1,500 last year, Spain about 1,000,” says Major. “Depending on the size of the family being considered, the cost (of Maltese citizenship) will typically range between €900,000 at the low end, and €1.2 to €1.3 million.” It is “an injection to the National Development and Social Fund,” he adds, which finances “schools, roads and hospitals”. Malta, he explains, receives some 400 applications a year, of which around 250 are approved. “That is around 250 families; that means less than 1,000 people a year. And in the grand scheme of things, that’s 1,000 people who give on average a million euros each. So, you have an island nation that receives €200 million a year with this programme and that is particularly transformative for a small country, and all the more so in a post-Covid world.”

For Major, whose views are fairly representative of those of the Investment Migration Council, what MEPs are raising “are absolutely acceptable issues and need to be addressed”, as “some countries are doing better than others”. He argues that Malta offers an example of what could be satisfactory controls, which were inspired by practices in the banking sector. He refers to this as “four-tier due diligence”, whereby the state has to verify the good moral character of the applicants and the provenance of the funds provided through recourse to international banking databases, the law enforcement agencies of the countries in which they have resided and reports from firms specialising in data verification and risk analysis – all paid for by each applicant as part of the conditions of the programme.

For the European Parliament, however, this is not enough. “Malta and Cyprus keep in place these tools that are supposed to attract foreign investment but [they] have inevitably led to corruption and the laundering of illicitly obtained capital, without the slightest doubt,” says López Aguilar, who hopes that the ECJ will ultimately invalidate these programmes “based on their incompatibility with European law.”

For citizenship scholar Dimitry Kochenov, professor at the Institute of Democracy at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, the possibility of such a ruling is not so clear. As he explains to Equal Times, in Europe “citizenship has always been regulated, by default, at the national level, and there is no legal basis for regulating it at the supranational level”, so he does not believe that CBI programmes could be banned. “With residence, it is different, because there is a legitimate legal basis in the treaties by which the EU can legislate to harmonise residence rules and laws in the member states.”

Kochenov, himself a Dutch citizen of Russian origin, fears that the European Parliament’s measures against Russian beneficiaries of these programmes may be counterproductive. “The majority of the oligarchs on the sanctions list did not receive their European passports by investment, because there are plenty of other fully lawful ways,” he explains, as seen with Roman Abramovich, who became Portuguese based on his descent from the Sephardic diaspora. And then there are those who “have acquired citizenship in Europe, or the Caribbean, or elsewhere, because they wanted to escape Putin’s regime rather than support it,” such as Pavel Durov, the creator of the messaging app Telegram, who after refusing to collaborate with the FSB was able to flee Russia by buying citizenship of the Caribbean micro-state of Saint Kitts & Nevis. In 2021, he also acquired Emirati and French citizenship.

“To say that every person who comes from Russia and naturalises in the EU is potentially suspect ignores the simple fact that Russia is not a democracy” and that “many of the people who flee the country need to naturalise elsewhere because there is simply no other way”, so “naturalisation precisely enables their fight with the regime and their opposition to the war in Ukraine”, insists Kochenov.

López Aguilar believes that “this has to be filtered on a case-by-case basis, with all the guarantees required,” so that no one can make wrongful claims. The European Parliament’s intention is not to act against legitimate migration, but to close the door to international criminals and corrupt individuals who have been exploiting these schemes in the EU. And the war is acting as “an accelerant” in this regard, prompting the European Commission to strongly defend and adopt the EP’s proposals to strictly regulate ‘migration by investment’. “If we want to hurt Putin, we have to hurt the Russian oligarchs,” he concludes. “And if we want to hurt the Russian oligarchs, we have to put an end to this.”

Source: Commodification of EU citizenship: Will the EU ban ‘golden passports’?

Filed under Citizenship, citizenship-by-investment Tagged with , , , ,

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