Canada expands settlement support for Ukrainians coming to Canada

2022/04/01 Leave a comment

Press release confirming these precedents, again drawing contrasts with other groups of refugees:

The Honourable Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, announced that Canada is offering temporary federal support to help Ukrainians settle in their new communities. Settlement Program services, which are typically only available to permanent residents, will soon be extended until March 31, 2023, for temporary residents in Canada eligible under the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel (CUAET). This is an extraordinary temporary measure aimed at supporting Ukrainians arriving under this special, accelerated temporary residence pathway. Key services that will be available to Ukrainians as they settle into their new communities include

  • language training
  • information about and orientation to life in Canada, such as help with enrolling children in school
  • information and services to help access the labour market, including mentoring, networking, counselling, skills development and training
  • activities that promote connections with communities
  • assessments of other needs Ukrainians may have and referrals to appropriate agencies
  • services targeted to the needs of women, seniors, youth and LGBTQ2+ persons
  • other settlement supports available through the Settlement Program

Settlement services are delivered through more than 550 agencies across Canada. The Government of Canada will continue working closely with provinces and territories, which are mobilizing to support Ukrainians arriving in Canada. They play a key role in helping temporary residents through settlement and social services.

Starting early April 2022, the Canadian Red Cross, in support of the Government of Canada, will provide arrival services at the Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver international airports. This support includes providing translation services, as well as information in their language of choice to help connect Ukrainians with government and community services.

We have also created a Ukraine Cross-Sectoral Collaboration Governance Table, which will bring together settlement sector leadership, provincial and territorial representatives, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the Canadian Red Cross, federal partners and other stakeholders. This table will facilitate communication and collaboration on the Ukraine response and will help to triage logistics for cash donations and volunteers.

IRCC is exempting certain individuals who are low-risk from providing biometrics on a case-by-case basis at the decision maker’s discretion. Biometrics are currently a requirement before arrival in Canada for the majority of Ukrainian nationals. IRCC relies on biometrics for identity management and to ensure the integrity of Canada’s visa programs. The collection of biometrics is an essential component of the security screening process to protect the safety and security of Canadians and Ukrainian nationals when they arrive on Canadian soil. The easing of biometrics requirements will ensure Ukrainian nationals arrive in Canada as quickly and as safely as possible.

Service Canada is working with service delivery partners to provide Ukrainian newcomers with information about Government of Canada programs and services, in particular the social insurance number (SIN), including through SIN clinics delivered at convenient locations. To help connect Ukrainian newcomers with available jobs, the government also launched Job Bank’s Jobs for Ukraine webpage, including a fact sheet in Ukrainian, on March 17, 2022. Since its launch, the site has been viewed close to 96,000 times.

Canadians have been stepping up to help Ukrainians. Together, and with our partners, we will welcome Ukrainians into our communities and provide the supports they need to thrive, until they can safely return home.

Source: Canada expands settlement support for Ukrainians coming to Canada

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Tiger Mom Amy Chua offers solutions to America’s toxic political tribalism

2022/04/01 Leave a comment

Incredibly shallow commentary, largely divorced from the extreme political polarization in the USA and the various players in stoking such polarization:

Despite a dangerous torrent of toxic partisanship, America’s undergirding values remain exceptional and can be leveraged to overcome the tribalism threatening it, “Tiger Mom” and Yale law professor Amy Chua said Tuesday at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Chua staked out an independent, centrist and optimistic position while she scolded divisive voices on the American right and left. Her talk was the sixth and final BYU forum of the school year on “Creating the Beloved Community.”

She earned applause for her praise of the pluralistic benefits of the missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors BYU. The crowd of 1,834 in the Marriott Center also gave her a final standing ovation.

“America is changing,” she said. “There’s no going back. We are in a period of renegotiating and rediscovering our collective identity. We are struggling to arrive at a national identity that is capacious enough to resonate with and hold together as one people Americans of all sorts — old and young, immigrants and native born, urban and rural, descendants of slaves as well as descendants of slave owners.”

“I think,” she added, “we all need to be much more protective of American’s special national identity, and this is a lesson that both the left and right need to take to heart.”

Chua said the United States alone among world superpowers fits her definition of a supergroup. The term denotes a country with a strong, overarching national identity that simultaneously allows for strong, smaller subgroup identities based on ethnicity, religion, linguistics or race.

“The fact that as a constitutional matter, our national identity is ethnically and religiously neutral makes the United States as a country uniquely equipped to overcome the challenges of political tribalism,” she said. “Having said that, we are at a perilous moment.”

Still, she found room for optimism while she spoke in front of four screens depicting a blue sky with a U.S. flag backlit by a bright sun.

She said tribalism is hard-wired in human biology, that once people connect, they cling to and protect that connection. Tribalism can lead to unconscious bias and memory distortion and lends itself to schadenfreude — pleasure at the missteps or misfortune of others.

She outlined three reasons the United States is experiencing toxic division between its political tribes.

The first is a vast demographic transformation that will result in a nonwhite majority by 2050, according to U.S. census estimates.

“As a result in America today, every group feels threatened,” Chua said. “It’s not just the minorities anymore who feel threatened. Whites feel threatened. Over half of white Americans feel that they are now subject to more discrimination than minorities. And this is not just a Republican thing.”

“Studies show,” she added, “that it’s exactly when groups feel threatened, that’s when they retreat into tribalism. That’s when they close ranks, become more insular, more us-versus-them and more defensive. That’s why we are seeing a new kind of really explicit identity politics today on both sides of the political spectrum.”

On the right, she said, are openly xenophobic white nationalist movements. On the left are openly anti-white movements.

“There’s a growing number of bestselling books, and training programs right on the campus where I work, in which whites are demonized and asked to feel guilty and bad about themselves just for being white.

“The result is more and more resentment and distrust all around.”

The second and third reasons for increasing tribalism are the amplifying factor of social media and the divide between what Chua called coastal elites and working-class heartland Americans.

“Each side sees the other side as evil, un-American and not even worth talking to,” she said.

Those factors are putting tremendous strain on America’s status as a supergroup, Chua said.

“The good news is that we don’t have to choose between having a really strong, group-transcending, collective identity and multiculturalism. We can have both,” she said.

She offered what she called three concrete suggestions for America to overcome tribalism.

First, Americans on both ends of the political spectrum need to protect a strong national identity true to America’s constitutional ideals and historical values, she said.

She placed progressives on dangerous ground when they take a scorched-earth approach to American history and ideals, calling it a land of oppression founded on genocide, ideas she commonly hears at Yale.

Equally dangerous rhetoric exists on the right, she said.

“America cannot remain a supergroup if we start defining our national identity, for example, through our immigration policy in terms of whiteness, or Anglo-Protestant culture, or Christianity or any other term that is not inclusive of all colors and creeds,” Chua said. “To do so would be a movement in the direction of ethno-nationalism, away from what it is that makes us special as a nation whose identity is rooted in principles and ideas, not blood.”

Her second suggestion is to experiment with initiatives to help Americans see each other as fellow Americans, such as incentivizing American young people to spend a year serving other Americans in a different part of the country.

“We really need to do some work to bridge that deep chasm between the coasts and the heartland,” she said.

Chua held up the missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an example she called inspiring.

“I understand, of course, that the Mormon mission is first and foremost an experience of religious consecration and sacred service,” she said. “But at the same time, it’s also a wonderful example and a successful example of an experience of civic engagement in which Mormons from one country, say the United States, live and interact with people from completely different ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds in a way that opens one’s eyes and broadens one’s perspective.”

Her third suggestion is to improve American history and civics education.

“I think we need to think very hard about how we can teach our children U.S. history in a way that tells the truth while still conveying the idea of America as a special nation,” she said. “It is really important that we no longer teach our children a whitewashed version of American history, but I think it’s also important not to overcorrect, which I worry is what we are now doing.”

For example, she noted that hundreds of students and faculty at the University of Virginia signed a letter saying they were offended when the university’s president quoted Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder.

“George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, but they were also political visionaries who helped give birth to what became the most inclusive form of governance in world history,” Chua said.

Chua is the author or co-author of several books, including the international bestseller “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” “The Triple Package” and “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.”

Source: Tiger Mom Amy Chua offers solutions to America’s toxic political tribalism

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RCMP’s ‘bias-free’ training and policies fall short, watchdog says

2022/04/01 Leave a comment

Of note. The importance of assessing what works and what doesn’t, in the context of a corporate culture that is hard to change:

The RCMP has introduced training and policies to rid its ranks of racism and other forms of bias — but until it starts tracking allegations it won’t know whether the plan is actually working, says a new report from the national police force’s civilian watchdog.

The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission (CRCC) conducted a review of what the RCMP calls its “bias-free policing model,” a training model meant to ensure equitable delivery of services.

“The RCMP’s national bias-free policing policy is inadequate, insufficient and unclear,” reads the report released Wednesday.

“When police actions are viewed as unfair or biased, the legitimacy of law enforcement suffers.”

RCMP policy states that employees are not to engage in racial profiling. That’s a “laudable” goal but it’s “too narrow,” the CRCC said.

“Profiling based on religion, ethnic origin, or other prohibited grounds is equally as harmful and to be avoided,” the CRCC wrote. “This should be clearly stated.”

The RCMP says it allows officers to rely on “relevant information” as part of a criminal investigation. That phrase should be explained and expanded on in RCMP policy to rule out bias, the CRCC wrote.

The RCMP’s public complaint system and its internal code of conduct both lack a category to cover allegations of bias. Allegations of discrimination, for example, could be lumped together under categories covering “act[ing] with integrity, fairness and impartially” or “discreditable conduct.”

The commission said that without proper accounting, it’s unable to determine if any Mounties face allegations of bias.

Source: RCMP’s ‘bias-free’ training and policies fall short, watchdog says

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@DouglasTodd ‘People are dying’ — Canada must expose dirty money now

2022/04/01 Leave a comment

Longstanding issue:

In authoritarian countries, Canada has a reputation for having the weakest anti-money-laundering laws in the democratic West.

So, with the recent crackdown on Russian oligarchs who prop up Vladimir Putin, experts say it is urgent that Canada finally and rapidly make it possible to track the trans-nationals who secretly ship ill-gotten money into this country through a process dubbed “snow-washing.”

Corporate lawyer Kevin Comeau, an expert on money laundering, says “it’s terrific“ that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced an agreement with NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to speed up the deadline for a publicly accessible registry to identity the real owners of companies, particularly those invested in real estate.

It was three years ago that Trudeau first promised a national corporate ownership registry, which would be searchable by name. The Liberals slated it to be up and running by 2025. Now, in the light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the pledge is that the registry will be active by next year.

Even though Comeau thinks a national ownership registry, loosely modelled on one recently started in B.C., could actually be pressed into place by the end of this year, he is hopeful the federal government will meet its 2023 deadline — because “people are dying. There’s a lot of political pressure on them.”

Such registries, which reveal the true owners of corporations, trusts and property, are the only way that Western governments can follow through on their high-profile promises to sanction corrupt billionaires and others who benefit from being cronies of ruthless strongmen.

A working ownership registry that can identify and lead to the seizure of illicitly held assets in Canada — which should have been put in place years ago to stop dirty money pouring into the nation’s real estate — “will put pressure on the oligarchs and in turn pressure on Putin to stop this war,” Comeau said.

“There is a huge incentive for persons from authoritarian regimes to get their money out and send it into a western liberal democracy that has the rule of law, which protects against arbitrary confiscation” by volatile leaders, said Comeau, who has produced reports on money laundering for the C.D. Howe Institute, Transparency International and other organizations.

“Why do they pick Canada? Of the large western liberal democracies, we have the weakest anti-money-laundering rules.” Britain, the U.S. and European Union nations are far ahead in monitoring and sometimes targeting the real owners of laundered assets.

The Economist magazine has found that Russia, which last month invaded Ukraine, has the most billionaire oligarchs who are cronies of autocratic leaders. Russia is followed by China, which has a stronger presence in Canada through trade, international education and immigration. Saudi Arabia, Iran and many other regimes also have rich citizens seeking offshore havens to hide their tainted money.

Ownership registries should have been up and running much earlier in Canada, said Comeau. But somehow, many Canadians bought the idea that global money-laundering and tax evasion is a “victimless crime”, and that it’s useful to have foreign money, even the proceeds of corruption, flow into an economy.

Slowly, however, more Canadians have been realizing it is “a horrible thing,” especially for housing affordability.

“In the past few years, people have become aware there is a real problem of laundered money coming in from around the world and entering our real estate market. That has been driving up prices for Canadians, such that many persons couldn’t afford to buy a home in the cities and towns which they grew up in,” Comeau said. “It’s the first time in Canadian history that middle-class persons, as a group, cannot purchase homes in their own cities and towns.”

And taxpayers don’t have to worry about the cost of setting up federal and provincial registries that will make it possible to expose shady owners of corporations and properties. On the contrary.

A public ownership registry creates a “massive weapon” against oligarchs, kleptocrats, human traffickers and tax evaders because it is the key to seizing their assets, including properties they might have held for decades.

“It’s a huge source of revenue for the Canadian government and the provinces. It can bring in many, many billions of dollars. You’re talking millions of dollars to set up a registry. You will probably bring in a hundred-fold more by having a registry in place. Just by (seizing) 20 houses, you’ve paid for a registry many times over.”

Since Comeau is among those who are calling for a “pan-Canadian” registry system that includes the provinces, which have jurisdiction over real estate, he praises the B.C. NDP for helping lead the way by last year creating a beneficial housing ownership registry.

Even though B.C.’s registry has a few weaknesses, Comeau said they are fixable.

With a bit more spending, he said, B.C. could remove the $5 paywall for each search, provide a line for tipsters, require third-party identify verification, and make sure foreign passports written in non-Latin scripts, such as Russian, Chinese and Arabic alphabets, are translated into English.

In addition, Comeau said, people found to make fraudulent entries on any Canadian registry should be subjected not only to fines — “which are often just the cost of doing business” — but to potential prison sentences.

With such reforms, Canada and the provinces would no longer be known around the world as a “snow-washing” capital.

Source: Douglas Todd: ‘People are dying’ — Canada must expose dirty money now

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She’s trilingual, has a PhD and loads of work experience. So why was getting a job in Canada an ordeal?

2022/03/31 Leave a comment

Ongoing barriers of note:

With a PhD and eight years of project management experience, Hala El Ouarrak didn’t expect finding a job would be that hard in Canada.

Before the Moroccan woman arrived in Toronto in 2019, she took part in all the pre-arrival settlement services and employment counselling that were available to soon-to-be newcomers. She was assured her skills and experience were sought after in the Canadian job market.

“I did everything to the letter to make sure that I’m not missing anything when I get here. The feedback was I wouldn’t have any problem finding a job, and all I would need would be a Canadian phone number for employers to reach me,” said El Ouarrak, whose doctoral degree is in applied math and automatic control engineering.

Instead, the 31-year-old worked as a sales account manager at a shoe store and teaching statistics on a side as a private tutor, while “upgrading” her CV by acquiring four additional Canadian project-management credentials. (Some of El Ouarrak’s struggle came during the pandemic’s disruptions, but she says the number of job postings wasn’t affected.)

“It actually took me two years to get back to my field,” said El Ouarrak, now an IT consultant and part-time lecturer in project management and data analysis at Northeastern University’s Toronto campus.

A new study suggests this sort of problem has been an issue for years — that many highly skilled and educated female immigrants in Canada are facing immense disparities in employment outcomes due to employer biases, gender-based barriers and other factors.

“Immigrant women face distinct challenges in entering and advancing in the Canadian labour market. They encounter downward career mobility and underemployment relative to their education and professional backgrounds,” says the study by Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC).

“Data also shows that the earnings of immigrant women, especially those who are racialized, lag behind those of immigrant men and Canadian-born women, and their unemployment rate is higher.”

Based on an online survey of 365 immigrant women in Greater Toronto — two-thirds with at least a master’s degree — and subsequent interviews, researchers found that 83.8 per cent of respondents had taken at least one of the following measures to “fit” the culture or expectations of Canadian employers:

  • 57.5 per cent had downgraded their stated educational achievements and/or experience to not appear overqualified for a position;
  • 43 per cent had accepted unpaid work or internships in a role related to their field of expertise to gain “Canadian experience”;
  • 21.9 per cent said they had changed or shortened their name to sound “more Canadian”;
  • 15.3 per cent sought training to help change their accents;
  • 13.7 per cent of respondents changed their appearances to make their looks more acceptable to “Canadian culture.”

“The compromises some immigrant women have to make to start their careers in Canada is in contrast to the high value Canada’s points-based immigration system places on their skills,” said report author Sugi Vasavithasan, TRIEC’s research and evaluation manager.

“Having to downplay their qualifications or change aspects of themselves to enter the Canadian labour market can be demoralizing for immigrant women. It hurts their dignity and self-esteem.”

Immigrant women’s jobless rate, at 12.2 per cent, is much higher than their Canadian-born peers (4.9 per cent) and immigrant men (6.4 per cent), said the report. Among principal applicants admitted in 2009 under various skilled immigration programs, women made $17,400 less than their male counterparts after 10 years.

Maysam Fadel settled in Toronto in 2019 after working for the United Nations Refugee Agency as a community service co-ordinator and for UNICEF as emergency officer in Syria for a decade.

The 36-year-old applied to more than 500 jobs posted in the not-for-profit sector but didn’t receive one single reply. She finally found a survival job working as a sales associate in retail while volunteering at different organizations, including the Canadian Red Cross.

“Employers all ask for Canadian experience and don’t consider any of the experience you had back home,” said Fadel, who has an undergraduate degree in English literature from Damascus University.

“I was very depressed and I lost my hope of ever finding an appropriate job in alignment with my experience.”

The husband of a friend’s friend helped her polish her resumé and she dropped her last name, Allah, on her CV, to avoid any potential biases she might face from prospective employers. Then response started trickling in and she finally was hired as a volunteer co-ordinator at a community service agency.

While she needed to learn about the operations and work culture at the organization, she said she’s simply applying the same skills she acquired from back home to her new job in Canada. 

“I didn’t get a new skill I didn’t have before. It’s just transferring my skills from one context to another. You need to learn and adapt whenever you change jobs even in Canada. That’s normal,” said Fadel, who last year got a promotion to be a manager at the same agency. 

El Ouarrak, who speaks fluent Arabic, English and French, said immigrant women shouldn’t have to downplay their credentials just to get their foot into the door.

Rather, she said, Canadian employers should adopt blind hiring practices to focus on seeking out candidates with the right skills and block out personal information that could bias a hiring decision. 

“Hiring managers are looking for unique profiles of candidates who qualify but to get to the hiring managers, you have to go through recruiters, the gatekeepers who are checking the boxes. If you don’t check 80 per cent of the boxes, they don’t even look at your profile,” said El Ouarrak. “I think that’s where the disconnect is.”

The study calls for improvement to generic employment support programs to reflect the unique needs of highly skilled immigrant women, as well as further education of hiring managers and recruiters in looking past stereotypes and recognizing the value of foreign credentials brought by female immigrants.

Source: She’s trilingual, has a PhD and loads of work experience. So why was getting a job in Canada an ordeal?

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China tightens restrictions and bars scholars from international conferences

2022/03/31 Leave a comment

Further restrictions of note:

The international conference was supposed to gather some of the most promising and most established Asia studies scholars from across the world in lush Honolulu.

Instead, at least five Chinese scholars based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were prevented from attending virtual events via Zoom, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter.

They said Chinese security officers and education officials directly intervened, citing education regulations published during a global coronavirus pandemic which require all Chinese scholars to receive university permission to attend any international event in-person or online.

“After years of encouraging and funding PRC scholars to participate internationally, the intensifying controls of recent years are now full-scale, and academic work, at least on China, is to be quarantined from the world,” saidJames Millward, a history professor at Georgetown University who attended the conference. “The doors have slammed shut fast.”

The conference, which ended last weekend, was an annual gathering organized by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), one of the largest membership-based organizations in the field. For emerging scholars as well as more senior academics, the conference is an opportunity to network and to hear the latest research on Asian countries across a variety of disciplines.

Because of the ongoing COVID pandemic, AAS decided this year to hold a mix of in-person events and online-only panels.

In one case, a group of police officers visited the home of a scholar in China after they had presented their research paper to an online Zoom panel earlier in the week, questioning the scholar for hours, in part because they considered the title of the paper “incorrect.”

“It was deeply frightening,” said one academic who attended the panel but requested anonymity to protect the identity of the scholar involved.

NPR reviewed the paper but is not publishing its title or subject to protect the identity of the writer. The paper did not touch on subjects which Chinese authorities normally consider sensitive, such as human rights, Tibet, Xinjiang or Hong Kong.

Chinese scholars on a separate virtual panel were also told by Chinese university administrators to cancel their presentations. Eventually, they emailed the other attendees to withdraw from the panel due to “medical reasons” but hoped to partake in AAS events again “in less sensitive times,” according to two people with direct knowledge of the incident.

“Topics that have seemingly been considered nonpolitical are now being yanked or deemed not permissible to be exchanging with international colleagues,” said another academic who attended the panel who also did not want to be named so as not to identify the Chinese scholars impacted.

Strict COVID prevention policies had already stymied the volume of intellectual exchanges between the PRC and the rest of the world. Those who study China have found themselves isolated by border closures that have made travel to and from China nearly impossible, rendering archives and field sites in China inaccessible for the last two years and counting.

Since 2016, China’s education ministry has required its academics to seek university approval for all overseas trips and collaborations. In September 2020, universities began applying these rules for online events held by international organizations, as well, though such rules had not been extensively enforced until now.

Academics say these controls will further deplete the already-sparse exchanges between China and the rest of the world while hobbling the careers of young Chinese scholars.

“We have already been anxious, because for those of us in modern China studies, it’s been two years with no end in sight about when we might be able to return to the archives,” said a third academic who went to the AAS conference. “You keep thinking maybe things will get better, so after the [Winter] Olympics, after [October’s Chinese Communist] Party Congress, there will be a loosening of restrictions, but unfortunately it continues to worsen.”

The AAS said it was aware some PRC-based scholars were prevented from attending and now is trying to ascertain exactly how many scholars were impacted. “The AAS firmly supports the right of scholars worldwide to take part in the free exchange of ideas and research through conferences and other forms of academic cooperation,” the association said in a statement posted on its website Wednesday.

AAS has previously come under heightened scrutiny within China. In March 2021, the Chinese Foreign Ministry sanctioned a member of one of AAS’ governing councils because of her research examining Chinese state policy in the region of Xinjiang, where authorities had detained hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Uyghurs. The academic, Joanne Smith Finley, had organized two panels on Xinjiang for the annual AAS conference just days earlier.

Source: China tightens restrictions and bars scholars from international conferences

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U.S. immigration agency moves to cut 9.5 million-case backlog and processing delays

2022/03/31 Leave a comment

Not only Canada that has backlog problems:

The Biden administration on Tuesday is announcing three measures to reduce a growing multimillion-case backlog of immigration applications that has crippled the U.S. government’s ability to process them in a timely fashion, a senior U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) official told CBS News.

The agency plans to expand the number of applicants who can pay extra fees to have their immigration petitions adjudicated more quickly, propose a rule that would provide relief to immigrants waiting for work permit renewals and set processing time goals, the official said, requesting anonymity to detail the measures before a formal announcement.

USCIS adjudicates requests for work permits, asylum, green cards, U.S. citizenship and other immigration benefits, including the temporary H-1B program for highly skilled foreign workers and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy for undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.

The agency, which is largely funded by fees, has struggled with application bottlenecks and processing delays for years. But the COVID-19 pandemic, which initially led to a shutdown of most global travel, a drop in applications and a suspension of in-person interviews and other services, greatly exacerbated those issues.

As of February, USCIS was reviewing more than 9.5 million pending applications, a 66% increase from the end of fiscal year 2019, according to agency data.

The growing case backlog has dramatically extended application processing delays, trapping many immigrants — from asylum-seekers and green card applicants to would-be U.S. citizens — in a months- or years-long legal limbo that can force them to lose their jobs, driver’s licenses and sources of income.

“USCIS remains committed to delivering timely and fair decisions to all we serve,” USCIS Director Ur Jaddou said Tuesday. “Every application we adjudicate represents the hopes and dreams of immigrants and their families, as well as their critical immediate needs such as financial stability and humanitarian protection.”

The new measures

Among USCIS’s new measures is a rule to expand “premium processing,” which allows certain applicants to pay $2,500 in extra fees to have their cases reviewed on an expedited basis. Currently, the service is limited to certain applications, including H-1B petitions and some employment-based green card requests.

The rule, set to take effect in 60 days, will expand premium processing to additional employment-based green card applications, all work permit petitions and temporary immigration status extension requests, allowing applicants to pay $2,500 to have their cases adjudicated within 45 days.

Premium processing will expand gradually, starting with work-based green card petitions for multinational executives or managers and professionals with advanced degrees or “exceptional ability” who are requesting a waiver that allows them to immigrate to the U.S. without having a job offer, which is typically required.

The senior USCIS official said the phased implementation will ensure other applications are not delayed by the premium processing expansion, which was authorized by Congress in 2020, when the agency faced a fiscal crisis that threatened to furlough 13,000 employees.

“We can’t just shift all our resources to premium filers, while everybody else suffers,” the official said.

USCIS is also unveiling another rule to provide temporary relief to immigrants affected by the work authorization delays by extending the period of automatic work permit extensions for those who apply for a renewal, the senior agency official said. The rule was recently submitted to the White House for review.

Currently, most work permit holders who apply for renewals are eligible for an automatic 180-day extension if their authorization to work lapses. However, many immigrants are waiting for their work permit renewals longer than that, often beyond 10 months, USCIS figures show.

“We’re regularly unable to adjudicate these renewals, not just by the expiration date, but by those 180 days past the expiration date,” the USCIS official said.

USCIS’ third measure includes hiring more caseworkers and improving processing technology to meet new timelines for adjudicating applications, which it believes it can achieve by September 2023. USCIS currently has several thousand job vacancies, according to agency data.

The agency will instruct caseworkers to try to adjudicate requests for temporary work programs, such as H-1B and H-2A visas for agricultural workers, within two months. Requests for work permits, travel documents and temporary status extensions or changes should be reviewed within three months.

According to the new processing guidelines, USCIS officers should adjudicate other applications, including those for U.S. citizenship, DACA renewals and green card requests for immigrants sponsored by U.S. family members or employers, within six months.

“It’s pretty unprecedented for the director of USCIS to say to the entire agency, to the entire workforce, ‘Our processing times are too long, it’s inhibiting us from delivering on our mission and so here are the goals that the entire agency is going to pursue and is going to achieve,'” the USCIS official said.

“You’re always worried”

Jairo Umana, a political dissident from Nicaragua seeking U.S. asylum, has been waiting for his work permit to be renewed for nearly a year. Because his permit expired, he’s working as a roofer in the Miami area using the 180-day automatic work authorization extension. But that is also set to expire on April 14.

As the sole provider for his two children, Umana said he’s worried about losing his work authorization and driver’s license, which is tied to his work permit.

“It is stressful. You’re always worried,” Umana told CBS News in Spanish. “Being out of work triggers a chain reaction: there’s no income, there’s no money for rent, there’s no food.”

The backlog of applications before USCIS is part of a broader logjam plaguing the immigration system. The Justice Department is currently overseeing 1.7 million unresolved court cases of immigrants facing deportation, while the State Department is handling a backlog of over 400,000 immigrant visa applicants waiting for interviews at U.S. consulates, which limited operations during the pandemic.

The Biden administration has vowed to reduce these backlogs, which it partially attributes to Trump-era policies that cut legal immigration and placed more immigrants in deportation proceedings. USCIS has made bureaucratic changes aimed at speeding up processing, but it still relies on paper records and forms.

As part of a massive spending bill passed by Congress earlier this month, USCIS received more than $400 million to address processing delays and application backlogs. On Monday, President Biden asked Congress to give USCIS another $765 million in fiscal year 2023 to finance the backlog reduction effort.

Conchita Cruz, co-founder of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), an organization that works with more than 280,000 immigrants who requested U.S. asylum, called USCIS’ proposal to prolong automatic work permit extensions a “huge victory.”

“This extension will not only help ASAP members, but will benefit asylum seekers, other immigrant workers, as well as their employers and the communities that rely on their work as doctors, construction workers, truck drivers, software engineers and more,” Cruz said.

Lynden Melmed, the top lawyer at USCIS during the George W. Bush administration, said Tuesday’s announcement shows the agency recognizes the urgency of its case backlog and processing crisis — and its humanitarian impact on applicants and economic consequences on U.S. employers.

“At a time where every company is struggling to find workers, it is rubbing salt to a wound to have to terminate a worker because the government can’t process a four-page application in over a year,” Melmed told CBS News.

Source: U.S. immigration agency moves to cut 9.5 million-case backlog and processing delays

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Why US Population Growth Is in the Danger Zone

2022/03/31 Leave a comment

Always struck by the lack of thinking and analysis regarding options and approaches on living with a declining population. A larger population is not good for the planet from any number of perspectives, and even advantages at the country level are mixed at best.

Just as we have to do with climate change, we need to consider what a mix of curbing growth and mitigating the impacts would look like, how to manage transitions and address externalities:

The U.S. population grew at the slowest pace in history in 2021, according to census data released last week. That news sounds extreme, but it’s on trend. First came 2020, which saw one of the lowest U.S. population-growth rates ever. And now we have 2021 officially setting the all-time record.

U.S. growth didn’t slowly fade away: It slipped, and slipped, and then fell off a cliff. The 2010s were already demographically stagnant; every year from 2011 to 2017, the U.S. grew by only 2 million people. In 2020, the U.S. grew by just 1.1 million. Last year, we added only 393,000 people.

What’s going on?

A country grows or shrinks in three ways: immigration, deaths, and births. America’s declining fertility rate often gets the headline treatment. Journalists are obsessed with the question of why Americans aren’t having more babies. And because I’m a journalist, be assured that we’ll do the baby thing in a moment. But it’s the other two factors—death and immigration—that are overwhelmingly responsible for the collapse in U.S. population growth.

First, we have to talk about COVID. The pandemic has killed nearly 1 million Americans in the past two years, according to the CDC. Tragically and remarkably, a majority of those deaths happened after we announced the authorization of COVID vaccines, which means that they were particularly concentrated in 2021. Last year, deaths exceeded births in a record-high number of U.S. counties. Never before in American history have so many different parts of the country shrunk because of “natural decrease,” which is the difference between deaths and births.

Excess deaths accounted for 50 percent of the difference in population growth from 2019 to 2021. That’s a clear sign of the devastating effect of the pandemic. But this statistic also tells us that even if we could had brought excess COVID deaths down to zero, U.S. population growth would still have crashed to something near an all-time low. To understand why, we have to talk about the second variable in the population equation: immigration.

As recently as 2016, net immigration to the United States exceeded 1 million people. But immigration has since collapsed by about 75 percent, falling below 250,000 last year. Immigration fell by more than half in almost all of the hot spots for foreign-born migrants, including New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco

Some of this reduction is a result of economic factors; immigration from Latin America has slowed as those economies have grown. Some of it is epidemiological; immigration declined around the world because of COVID lockdowns. But much of this is an American policy choice. The Trump administration worked to constrain not only illegal immigration but also legal immigration. And the Biden administration has not prioritized the revitalization of pro-immigration policy, perhaps due to fears of a xenophobic backlash from the center and right.

America’s bias against immigration is self-defeating in almost every dimension. “Immigration is a geopolitical cheat code for the U.S.,” says Caleb Watney, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a new think tank in Washington, D.C. “Want to supercharge science? Immigrants bring breakthroughs, patents, and Nobel Prizes in droves. Want to stay ahead of China? Immigrants drive progress in semiconductors, AI, and quantum computing. Want to make America more dynamic? Immigrants launch nearly 50 percent of U.S. billion-dollar start-ups. The rest of the world is begging international talent to come to their shores while we are slamming the door in their face.”

Finally, yes, Americans are having fewer babies—like basically every other rich country in the world. Since 2011, annual births have declined by 400,000. Two years ago, I wrote that “the future of the city is childless,” and the pandemic seems to have accelerated that future. Just look at Los Angeles: L.A. County recorded 153,000 live births in 2001 but fewer than 100,000 in 2021. At this rate, sometime around 2030, L.A. births will have declined by 50 percent in the 21st century.

Declining births get a lot of media coverage, with mandatory references to Children of Men, followed by mandatory references to Matrix-style birthing pods, followed by inevitable fights over whether it’s creepy for dudes like me to talk academically about raising a nation’s collective fertility. My personal opinion is that wanting and having children is a personal matter for families, even as the spillover effects of declining fertility make it a very public issue for the overall economy.

The fact that declining fertility is a global trend suggests that it’s not something we can easily reversed by mimicking another country’s politics or culture. Around the world, rising women’s education and employment seem to correlate with swiftly declining birth rates. In just about every possible way you could imagine, this is a good thing: It strongly suggests that economic and social progress give women more power over their bodies and their lives.

But I should stress that declining fertility isn’t always a sign of female empowerment, as indicated by the large and growing gap between the number of children Americans say they want and the number of children they have. There are many potential explanations for this gap, but one is that the U.S. has made caring for multiple children too expensive and cumbersome for even wealthy parents, due to a shortage of housing, the rising cost of child care, and the paucity of long-term federal support for children.

The implications of permanently slumped population growth are wide-ranging. Shrinking populations produce stagnant economies. Stagnant economies create wonky cultural knock-on effects, like a zero-sum mentality that ironically makes it harder to pursue pro-growth policies. (For example, people in slow-growth regions might be fearful of immigrants because they seem to represent a threat to scarce business opportunities, even though immigration represents these places’ best chance to grow their population and economy.) The sector-by-sector implications of declining population would also get very wonky very fast. Higher education is already fighting for its life in the age of remote school and rising tuition costs. Imagine what happens if, following the historically large Millennial cohort, every subsequent U.S. generation gets smaller and smaller until the end of time, slowly starving many colleges of the revenue they’ve come to expect.

Even if you’re of the dubious opinion that the U.S. would be better off with a smaller population, American demographic policy is bad for Americans who are alive right now. We are a nation where families have fewer kids than they want; where Americans die of violence, drugs, accidents, and illness at higher rates than similarly rich countries; and where geniuses who want to found new job-creating companies are forced to do so in other countries, which get all the benefits of higher productivity, higher tax revenue, and better jobs.

Simply put, the U.S. has too few births, too many deaths, and not enough immigrants. Whether by accident, design, or a total misunderstanding of basic economics, America has steered itself into the demographic danger zone

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He is also the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Plain English.

Source: Why US Population Growth Is in the Danger Zone

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#COVID-19: Comparing provinces with other countries 30 March Update

2022/03/31 Leave a comment

Numbers from China continue to climb. New omicron variant showing up in increased infections in G7 countries and in some provinces (uneven testing hides some of the change).

Vaccinations: Some minor shifts but convergence among provinces and countries but minimal increases to overall vaccination rates. Canadians fully vaccinated 82.9 percent, compared to Japan 79.7 percent, UK 73.9 percent and USA 66.3 percent.

Immigration source countries: China fully vaccinated 88.8 percent, India 60.6 percent, Nigeria 4.8 percent, Pakistan 47 percent, Philippines 609 percent.

Trendline Charts:

Infections: Increased number of infections due to omicron variant in G7 countries with most Canadian provinces having lower rates of increase save for Atlantic Canada.

Deaths: No relative changes.

Vaccinations: China ahead (again) of Atlantic Canada, Japan ahead of Prairies.

Weekly

Infections: Germany ahead of California.

Deaths: No relative change.

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The invasion of Ukraine is making life difficult for right-wing populists

2022/03/30 Leave a comment

Reality dawns, hopefully marking a permanent shift:

It was the sort of crowd you might expect on Amsterdam’s Leidseplein, around the corner from the Bulldog Palace marijuana café. Several dozen demonstrators—awkward young men, middle-aged couples and ageing hippies—turned out on March 13th to support Forum for Democracy (fvd), a far-right populist party that thinks covid is a hoax and blames Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the West. A DJ played electronic dance music atop a trailer festooned with posters of Thierry Baudet, the fvd’s leader, a dandyish Eurosceptic with a phd in legal philosophy. The party has five seats in the Netherlands’ 150-seat parliament.

Soon Mr Baudet’s ally, Willem Engel, a dreadlocked salsa-dance instructor and covid-sceptic internet influencer, took the stage. “We cannot let ourselves get dragged into a war,” said Mr Engel, denouncing Dutch shipments of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine’s defenders. The media, he said, was whipping up hatred towards Russians just as the Nazis had towards Jews. (“Ach, the media”, tutted a woman in the crowd.)

Source: The invasion of Ukraine is making life difficult for right-wing populists

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