Cuts in Britain Could Cause a Covid Data Drought

2022/04/04 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, many governments are short sighted.

Canada did the same when it disbanded the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) the year before the pandemic, many provinces are no longer carrying out regular testing and reducing the frequency of reporting etc.

Interesting example of South Africa and how it is able to maintain monitoring at a reasonable cost:

The British government on Friday shut down or scaled back a number of its Covid surveillance programs, curtailing the collection of data that the United States and many other countries had come to rely on to understand the threat posed by emerging variants and the effectiveness of vaccines. Denmark, too, renowned for insights from its comprehensive tests, has drastically cut back on its virus tracking efforts in recent months.

As more countries loosen their policies toward living with Covid rather than snuffing it out, health experts worry that monitoring systems will become weaker, making it more difficult to predict new surges and to make sense of emerging variants.

“Things are going to get harder now,” Samuel Scarpino, a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, said. “And right as things get hard, we’re dialing back the data systems.”

Since the Alpha variant emerged in the fall of 2020, Britain has served as a bellwether, tracking that variant as well as Delta and Omicron before they arrived in the United States. After a slow start, American genomic surveillance efforts have steadily improved with a modest increase in funding.

“This might actually put the U.S. in more of a leadership position,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

At the start of the pandemic, Britain was especially well prepared to set up a world-class virus tracking program. The country was already home to many experts on virus evolution, it had large labs ready to sequence viral genes, and it could link that sequencing to electronic records from its National Health Service.

In March 2020, British researchers created a consortium to sequence as many viral genomes as they could lay hands on. Some samples came from tests that people took when they felt ill, others came from hospitals, and still others came from national surveys.

That last category was especially important, experts said. By testing hundreds of thousands of people at random each month, the researchers could detect new variants and outbreaks among people who didn’t even know they were sick, rather than waiting for tests to come from clinics or hospitals.

“The community testing has been the most rapid indicator of changes to the epidemic, and it’s also been the most rapid indicator of the appearance of new variants,” said Christophe Fraser, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. “It’s really the key tool.”

By late 2020, Britain was performing genomic sequencing on thousands of virus samples a week from surveys and tests, supplying online databases with more than half of the world’s coronavirus genomes. That December, this data allowed researchers to identify Alpha, the first coronavirus variant, in an outbreak in southeastern England.

A few other countries stood out for their efforts to track the virus’s evolution. Denmark set up an ambitious system for sequencing most of its positive coronavirus tests. Israel combined viral tracking with aggressive vaccination, quickly producing evidence last summer that the vaccines were becoming less effective — data that other countries leaned on in their decision to approve boosters.

But Britain remained the exemplar in not only sequencing viral genomes, but combining that information with medical records and epidemiology to make sense of the variants.

“The U.K. really set itself up to give information to the whole world,” said Jeffrey Barrett, the former director of the Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Britain.

Even in the past few weeks, Britain’s surveillance systems were giving the world crucial information about the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron. British researchers established that the variant does not pose a greater risk of hospitalization than other forms of Omicron but is more transmissible.

On Friday, two of the country’s routine virus surveys were shut down and a third was scaled back, baffling Dr. Fraser and many other researchers, particularly when those surveys now show that Britain’s Covid infection rates are estimated to have reached a record high: one in 13 people. The government also stopped paying for free tests, and either canceled or paused contact-tracing apps and sewage sampling programs.

“I don’t understand what the strategy is, to put together these very large instruments and then dismantle them,” Dr. Fraser said.

The cuts have come as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called for Britain to “learn to live with this virus.” When the government released its plans in February, it pointed to the success of the country’s vaccination program and the high costs of various virus programs. Although it would be scaling back surveillance, it said, “the government will continue to monitor cases, in hospital settings in particular, including using genomic sequencing, which will allow some insights into the evolution of the virus.”

It’s true that life with Covid is different now than it was back in the spring of 2020. Vaccines drastically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death — at least in countries that have vaccinated enough people. Antiviral pills and other treatments can further blunt Covid’s devastation, although they’re still in short supply in much of the world.

Supplying free tests and running large-scale surveys is expensive, Dr. Barrett acknowledged, and after two years, it made sense that countries would look for ways to curb spending. “I do understand it’s a tricky position for governments,” he said.

But he expressed worry that cutting back too far on genomic surveillance would leave Britain unprepared for a new variant. “You don’t want to be blind on that,” he said

With a reduction in testing, Steven Paterson, a geneticist at the University of Liverpool, pointed out that Britain will have fewer viruses to sequence. He estimated the sequencing output could drop by 80 percent.

“Whichever way you look at it, it’s going to lead very much to a degradation of the insight that we can have, either into the numbers of infections, or our ability to spot new variants as they come through,” Dr. Paterson said.

Experts warned that it will be difficult to restart surveillance programs of the coronavirus, known formally as SARS-CoV-2, when a new variant emerges.

“If there’s one thing we know about SARS-CoV-2, it’s that it always surprises us,” said Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a lead investigator on one of the community surveys being cut. “Things can change really, really quickly.”

Other countries are also applying a live-with-Covid philosophy to their surveillance. Denmark’s testing rate has dropped nearly 90 percent from its January peak. The Danish government announced on March 10 that tests would be required only for certain medical reasons, such as pregnancy.

Astrid Iversen, an Oxford virologist who has consulted for the Danish government, expressed worry that the country was trying to convince itself the pandemic was over. “The virus hasn’t gotten the email,” she said.

With the drop in testing, she said, the daily case count in Denmark doesn’t reflect the true state of the pandemic as well as before. But the country is ramping up widespread testing of wastewater, which might work well enough to monitor new variants. If the wastewater revealed an alarming spike, the country could start its testing again.

“I feel confident that Denmark will be able to scale up,” she said.

Israel has also seen a drastic drop in testing, but Ran Balicer, the director of the Clalit Research Institute, said the country’s health care systems will continue to track variants and monitor the effectiveness of vaccines. “For us, living with Covid does not mean ignoring Covid,” he said.

While Britain and Denmark have been cutting back on surveillance, one country offers a model of robust-yet-affordable virus monitoring: South Africa.

South Africa rose to prominence in November, when researchers there first discovered Omicron. The feat was all the more impressive given that the country sequences only a few hundred virus genomes a week.

Tulio de Oliveira, the director of South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation, credited the design of the survey for its success. He and his colleagues randomly pick out test results from every province across the country to sequence. That method ensures that a bias in their survey doesn’t lead them to miss something important.

It also means that they run much leaner operations than those of richer countries. Since its start in early 2020, the survey has cost just $2.1 million. “It’s much more sustainable,” Dr. de Oliveira said.

In contrast, many countries in Africa and Asia have yet to start any substantial sequencing. “We are blind to many parts of the world,” said Elodie Ghedin, a viral genomics expert at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The United States has traveled a course of its own. In early 2021, when the Alpha variant swept across the country, American researchers were sequencing only a tiny fraction of positive Covid tests. “We were far behind Britain,” Dr. Ghedin said.

Since then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has helped state and local public health departments start doing their own sequencing of virus genomes. While countries like Britain and Denmark pull back on surveillance, the United States is still ramping up its efforts. Last month, the C.D.C. announced a $185 million initiative to support sequencing centers at universities.

Still, budget fights in Washington are bringing uncertainty to the country’s long-term surveillance. And the United States faces obstacles that other wealthy countries don’t.

Without a national health care system, the country cannot link each virus sample with a person’s medical records. And the United States has not set up a regularly updated national survey of the sort that has served the United Kingdom and South Africa so well.

“All scientists would love it if we had something like that,” Dr. Ghedin said. “But we have to work with the confines of our system.”

Source: Cuts in Britain Could Cause a Covid Data Drought

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Trichur: TD raising the bar for corporate Canada by agreeing to racial-equity audit

2022/04/02 Leave a comment

Look forward to seeing the results as I assume TD will share these at least at the macro level:

It’s often said in the corporate world that “what gets measured gets done.”

That’s why one of Canada’s biggest companies is heeding the call of an institutional investor to become more rigorous about assessing the effectiveness of its diversity and inclusion policies.

Toronto-Dominion Bank TD-N +0.48%increase is believed to be the first chartered bank and one of the first public companies in Canada to agree to an independent racial-equity audit to provide a reality check of its progress on dismantling systemic discrimination across its North American operations.

A racial-equity audit – also known as a racial-justice audit, a racial-equity assessment or a civil-rights report – is an important tool that helps shareholders determine which companies are taking real action on combatting racism. These audits are conducted by third parties and cover a company’s employment, compensation and business practices, including how it sells products and services. Companies are then expected to publicize the findings and use the feedback to fix problems.

Dozens of public companies, including Amazon, AT&T and Goldman Sachs in the United States, have received shareholder proposals calling for racial-equity audits over the past year, according to a search of securities filings conducted on the financial-intelligence platform Sentieo.

Although more investors are advocating for these audits, some companies still oppose this type of accountability. That’s why the commitment made by TD Bank is noteworthy – it is raising the bar for the rest of corporate Canada.

TD made its decision after holding talks with the BC General Employees’ Union (BCGEU). Specifically, TD has agreed to hire a third-party law firm to conduct a racial-equity assessment of its Canadian and U.S. employment policies. It has also agreed to provide updated information about the assessment by June 30, 2023.

The details are still a bit fuzzy, but it’s progress, folks.

Diana Lee, vice-president of diversity and inclusion at TD, said the bank recognizes that “assessment and measurement are vital tools to create meaningful progress” toward racial equity.

“We are committed to use the results of this racial-equity assessment to inform not only our employment policies and practices, but also our future business practices in supporting Black, Indigenous and minority customers and communities,” Ms. Lee added.

Separately, regulators are also putting increased pressure on banks to ensure their business practices don’t create disparate outcomes for racialized people. In the U.S., for instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans stricter enforcement of fair-lending laws and a crackdown on digital and algorithmic practices that potentially discriminate against Black customers.

TD, of course, isn’t the only Canadian bank with significant U.S. operations. BCGEU, which has withdrawn its shareholder proposal at TD in light of the bank’s commitment, is putting other lenders and public companies on notice.

“We will continue doing everything in our power as investors to make sure that racial-equity assessments and audits become standard practice for public issuers and institutions in Canada. We will start contacting other chartered banks on this issue after the TD AGM,” BCGEU president Stephanie Smith said.

“The bottom line is, it isn’t enough for Canadian public issuers and institutions to talk the talk of diversity and inclusion by developing and announcing policies; investors deserve to know what impact those policies are having.”

Property and casualty insurer Intact Financial Corp., meanwhile, has agreed to “assess some internal practices” and to “enhance disclosure,” a company spokeswoman said.

Intact received a proposal from the Shareholder Association for Research and Education, a non-profit organization that represents institutional investors, said Kevin Thomas, SHARE’s chief executive.

SHARE, along with its clients, is interested in various employment issues affecting insurers but also whether their underwriting assumptions create unequal impacts for racialized people.

It takes a similar approach with asset managers, advocating for racial equity within companies but also pushing them “to address the potential impacts of investment decisions down the chain with investee companies,” Mr. Thomas said.

SHARE, meanwhile, says it has also filed proposals with companies Mondelez and Constellation Software.

Mondelez has yet to publish its proxy circular so its position on the proposal is not clear. However, Constellation Software has already opposed the idea in its filing, arguing that while it believes in an equitable and inclusive work force, “the Corporation’s interests, as well as the interests of racial diversity, equity and inclusion, are best served by its existing organizational structure and approach.”

Ridiculous. We all know who benefits from the status quo. And – here’s a big hint – it’s never racialized people.

“Every CEO these days will tell you they are committed to diversity and inclusion,” Mr. Thomas said. “For investors, a racial-equity audit is our way of testing whether management is blowing smoke or whether they are delivering on that promise. That tells us a lot about management quality, ethics and their ability to implement on the goals they set – all critical questions for their investors.”

Companies must hold themselves accountable for the public pledges they made to eradicate systemic discrimination after the police murder of George Floyd nearly two years ago prompted a massive public outcry.

That’s why TD deserves kudos for agreeing to a racial-equity audit. By taking this important first step, TD is putting pressure on other public companies to follow suit. Investors will be watching to see which ones step up next.

Source: TD raising the bar for corporate Canada by agreeing to racial-equity audit

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Campos: Canadian Immigration: Will the Improvements Be Enough?

2022/04/02 Leave a comment

Seem like a reasonable assessment, one that will become clearer over the course of the year:

In this feature, Canadian immigration lawyer Maria Campos offers her thoughts on the issue.

Do you think the proposed measure will go far enough to tackle Canada’s 1.8 million+ immigration backlog?

It is uncertain whether the current $85 million budget will have any meaningful positive impact in the short term, on the 1.8+ million immigration backlog. Most of the money was meant to be spent on developing online and electronic processing systems, which in themselves take time to create and meanwhile the backlog only increases. Also, there is a transition period once these new systems come into effect, which requires re-training of officers while many will still be processing applications in the traditional way. The express entry system is a perfect example of the time that it takes for an electronic processing system to become effective.

The express entry system was created in 2015, and in my opinion only started to show positive results within the last 2-3 years. This is because most people who are applying under express entry are finally familiarised with the system itself and the officers are now well aware of how the system works, both technically and legally. The pause in the express entry draws have nothing to do with the ineffectiveness of the electronic system itself, but with the significant number of invitations that IRCC issued in February 2021.

Most technical difficulties under express entry have been dealt with, but even with an already proven-to-work system it was insufficient to handle the backlog after the invitations last February. It does not matter how much technology IRCC uses if they continue to expand on the number of applications taken into processing. Another problem with technology in the immigration field is that there are currently several different portals to work with and multiple areas to submit applications, which may make it more difficult for applicants who qualify under different streams to navigate an ever more complicated electronic bureaucracy.

I do believe that the funds allocated now to improve the current system will have results at some point, but definitely not in the short term. The government of Canada has increased the number of targeted immigrants year after year without being ready to process all the applications.

It is uncertain whether the current $85 million budget will have any meaningful positive impact in the short term

Recently, what are some of the most common concerns you see from clients wishing to enter the country?

It is obvious that younger immigrants are usually the best candidates. Clients in their late thirties or early forties often feel discouraged by the fact that they will most likely have fewer opportunities to qualify under the various programs available. That being said, with the current backlogs and potential applicants getting older, they are concerned about not getting invitations on time or before they continue to lose points because of their age.

In your experience, which groups are most heavily impacted by the backlog?

Citizenship applicants are the most heavily impacted group. However, they are not necessarily in a rush, as most are already established permanent residents in Canada. The delays of the processing in the citizenship applications indeed help to prove intent to reside in Canada because applicants are “patiently” waiting for their citizenship applications to be processed.

How have IRCC operations attempted to address the increased demands of the pandemic?

There are some candidates across the world who would have not thought to come to Canada in the past, and the response by the Canadian government during the pandemic made people more aware of how incredible it is to be here. Those people who never thought of immigrating now look to Canada as an option. As a result, IRCC has more and better candidates to choose from.

However, the government has been missing out on this opportunity by not issuing invitations under the FSW program because they also have a responsibility to the applicants who are already in Canada, which might be the reason why they decided to issue thousands of invitations early last year under the Canadian Experience Class instead. It could be said that Canada has attempted to respond to this increased demand by facilitating more permanent residency options to immigrants who are already here.

Those people who never thought of immigrating now look to Canada as an option.

How has the IRCC started to reduce processing times?

The first move shown by IRCC to reduce processing times happened in the middle of the pandemic when the minister committed to processing family class applications within the regular processing times despite the initial backlog created at the beginning of the pandemic. Right after his statement, IRCC started issuing temporary file numbers to most applicants in the backlog. It was noticeable how within a few days, I started receiving dozens of emails from IRCC, all regarding family class applications providing their temporary file numbers.

Another obvious move was seen in the spring of 2021 when IRCC processed entire express entry applications within 3-4 months. Something that is definitely helping to reduce the backlog is the electronic landing system, which means applicants do not have to book appointments to perform their landing. They also do not risk missing their landing date deadline and are able to complete their process electronically.

It has been suggested that express entry draws would not invite FSWP candidates or CEC candidates for the first half of 2022. In your opinion, what are the major pros and cons of this?

A pro is that better candidates will submit their profiles for the next several draws once express entry resumes. Also, not issuing as many invitations helps reduce the backlog.

But the major cons are that in-Canada applicants are now turning to provincial nominee programs which are starting to show a backlog as well, and some applicants are relying on invitations to continue remaining in Canada, which makes their futures uncertain.

What is your opinion about the public policy permanent residency programs for international graduates and essential workers? Did these programs contribute to the backlog?

The essential workers program was great, because not many of those people had options to become permanent residents. The areas also cover industries in high demand and the program provided certainty for those immigrants.

The program for international students was good in substance as well, although badly planned. There are hundreds of thousands of international students in Canada and it was obvious that the program was going to fill up within hours, meaning that over 40,000 applications contributed to the backlog in one single day. Not to mention that many self-represented applicants rushed into submitting their applications without even understanding the basics, and while those applications have the right to be processed, their relatively poor quality puts an added burden on the system.

How do you foresee these changes to immigration processing times impacting your firm?

We have had to accommodate our cases remaining active for a longer period of time. Invicta Law is taking on new clients and addressing their immigration needs, but at the same time focusing on active files and addressing the statutory stages of the processing, replying to procedural fairness letters and ensuring clients keep their legal status at all times until they become permanent residents.

Source: Canadian Immigration: Will the Improvements Be Enough?

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Tech group wants new visa for skilled workers to enter country without a job offer

2022/04/02 Leave a comment

Of note. Not clear why Canadian companies also cannot hire people to work remotely:

A group representing 150 of Canada’s fastest growing and most promising technology companies wants the federal government to pilot a new visa stream allowing high-skilled tech workers to enter the country without a job offer.

The visa proposed Thursday by the Council of Canadian Innovators would target in-demand professions like software developers and data scientists, allow recipients to work, switch jobs or employers and help them extend their stay and attain permanent residency without needing to switch into another visa category.

The idea is one of 13 the council included in a new report aimed at addressing the country’s critical shortage of skilled tech talent and helping startups compete against Silicon Valley giants and multinationals.

“There’s over 200,000 positions in the tech space that are not being filled in Canada,” said Benjamin Bergen, the council’s president.

“At the onset of COVID, borders basically collapsed and the problem that we were seeing in terms of lack of skilled workers in the country was only exacerbated by the fact that foreign firms can now come into Canada and hire people to work remotely, increasing the pressures … on the general labour market.”

On Tuesday, Facebook owner Meta announced it would hire 2,500 Canadians over the next five years with many working remotely.

They’re joined by Microsoft, DoorDash, Amazon, Google, Wayfair, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and Netflix, which revealed Canadian hiring plans during the pandemic, causing homegrown startups to fret about how they’ll compete with these companies’ big names and salaries.

“If you’re an Amazon or you’re Facebook or you’re Google, you’ve already set up in Canada…you’re able to bring in technology talent through some of the immigration streams that already exist…because they’re doing it at such a massive scale,” said Arif Khimani, the president and chief operating officer at MobSquad, a Calgary company helping businesses with recruitment and visas.

Many companies he works with are looking to hire a small number of people to work from Canada, and trying to figure out immigration rules, tax policies, payroll, benefits, office space, and remittances can be difficult for them.

Khimani feels they would be helped by more policies targeting immigration and giving workers better pathways to permanent residency, which the council’s report advocates for.

The council also wants to see programs better reflect emerging talent needs. Khimani notices the most in-demand job roles right now are full-stack and software engineers and developers, and jobs related to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Given how quick tech innovation changes, looking for a salesperson who has experience on X, Y or Z product, that happens to only reside in a specific jurisdiction often doesn’t apply for some of those programs, so we’re really pushing for an expanding (of current policies),” Bergen said.

Immigration changes could be accompanied by a “digital nomad strategy,” which the council envisions including clarity around taxes and length of stay for Canadians working remotely and internationally and foreigners who locate to Canada for part of the year.

The council also recommended the country target talent retention with a 12-month student loan repayment grace period for new graduates who work for Canadian firms and tax-advantaged loan repayment benefits for employers who make contributions towards their employees’ outstanding student debt.

Finally, the council wants to see talent generation prioritized. It asked the government to consider funding for Canadian businesses developing up-skilling or retraining programs and incentives to encourage post-secondary institutions to offer more experiential learning opportunities like longer co-op placements.

Source: Tech group wants new visa for skilled workers to enter country without a job offer

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Antigua and Barbuda maintaining defense of Citizenship by Investment program

2022/04/02 Leave a comment

Unlikely to be successful:

Antigua and Barbuda has stepped up its efforts to stave off efforts by the European Union (EU) to derail the controversial Citizenship by Investment Program (CBI), with Prime Minister Gaston Browne indicating that he has sent a letter to the EU on the issue.

“I have taken the opportunity to write to them, to let them know the impact that they are about to inflict on our CBI programs and the impact on our economies,” said Browne.  Last week Browne called on member countries of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) to provide a united front on the issue.

He said the letter will provide evidence that Antigua and Barbuda probably has the most robust due diligence process before citizenship can be granted.

“Citizens from these countries who are trying to access citizenship under the program would have to get clearance from Interpol, a review of their financial background, and a police report from their country of residence,” Browne added.

Under the CBI, foreign investors are afforded citizenship of a country in return for making a significant investment in the socio-economic development of the particular country. Several Caribbean countries have instituted CBI programs.

The United States has moved to decline visas to holders of passports obtained by the CBI, and the European Union has passed a law giving countries three years to phase out the program or face visa requirements for all its passport holders.

The EU Parliament has called for an EU “levy of a meaningful percentage on the investments made – until ‘golden passports’ are phased out, and indefinitely for ‘golden visas’” within the block.

According to its website, “It also asks the Commission to put pressure on countries that benefit from visa-free travel to the EU to follow suit,”

The resolution passed by the parliament with 595 votes to 12, and 74 abstentions, says golden passports should be phased out fully.

Foreign Affairs Minister, E.P Chet Greene has promised that St. John’s will be robust in its defense of the CBI telling reporters while a final decision has not been made as yet by Europe, scraping the CBI will not be an option.

“We won’t preempt losing this fight, we will fight it to the end. We understand the importance of this program to us, we are operating a program that is really above and beyond reproach. Our books can be pulled at any time and our reports are tabled in Parliament,” Greene said.

“We won’t be quick to disband these programs, but rather we will continue to show the virtue, value, and management of these programs, and hope that common sense will prevail,” he added.

Prime Minister Browne said the CBI does not represent any risks to Europe, adding “as far as we are concerned, we are now collateral damage.”

Browne said about 10 per cent of the country’s revenue comes from the CBI while in other countries, their economies are almost absolutely reliant on their own CBI.

“If they are successful in undermining our CBI, it will create problems for the OECS currency union countries. You can imagine the impact on these countries,” Browne added.

Apart from Antigua and Barbuda, the other OECS countries with a CBI program are St. Lucia, Grenada, Dominica, and St. Kitts-Nevis.

Source: Antigua and Barbuda maintaining defense of Citizenship by Investment program

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

What Archaeologists Are Learning About the Lives of the Chinese Immigrants Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

2022/04/02 Leave a comment

Similar to the experience of Chinese railroad workers in Canada:

The desert of far northwestern Utah stretches 60 miles from the arid border of Nevada to the saline-crusted shores of the Great Salt Lake. The terrain is exceedingly flat, punctuated only by the intermittent dry arroyo, rocky hill or volcanic cinder cone. Horned lizards and jack rabbits dart between thorny shrubs and scrawny box elder trees. Apart from the occasional cattle ranch or sheep-herding camp, the landscape appears desolate and lonely, forgotten in the expanse of geologic time.

But in a place called Terrace, identified today by little more than a single, bullet-ridden informational sign staked into the desert soil, a close look reveals a colorful story camouflaged in the sand. Scattered among dunes and tumbleweeds are small glass bottles, ceramic jars and abandoned wooden railroad ties, clues to a surprising history.

From outside a small excavation pit, Karen Kwan and Margaret Yee watch as a researcher carefully extracts a scrap of linen clothing from the buried ruins of a house. A few yards away, another researcher brushes dirt from a ceramic bowl intricately painted with bamboo and floral motifs.

Terrace was established by Chinese railroad workers in 1869, when construction crews were racing to connect the eastward and westward tracks of the railroad 70 miles from here at Promontory Summit. Eventually, simple wood structures rose on both sides of Main Street, housing hotels, clothing stores, restaurants, railroad machine shops, even a 1,000-volume library specializing in science, history and travel literature. Because water was scarce, engineers constructed an aqueduct from hollowed-out timber, funneling water from mountain springs that were miles away. At its peak, the town was home to some 500 residents, and it welcomed hundreds more each year, mostly rail and wagon-train travelers.

In 1903, Terrace burned in a fire, and after the railroad was rerouted 50 miles south—straight across the Great Salt Lake—the following year, the town was abandoned. But researchers have returned, seeing the ghost town as an ideal site to learn not only about the workings of a remote railroad town but especially about the immigrant community that thrived here. “Terrace had all the different activities that you would expect in a frontier town,” says Michael Sheehan, an archaeologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. “But it wasn’t just a railroad town. It was a microcosm that offers a glimpse into class, ethnicity, even international relations.” For descendants of Chinese railroad workers, such as Kwan and Yee, the research also allows them to recover a part of their heritage that was thought lost to history. “Archaeology like this is important,” Kwan says, “because it puts the individual back into the picture.”

The dream of a single, continuous railroad that would unite America’s east and west coasts dates back to the 1830s, not long after the introduction of the country’s first steam locomotive. A transcontinental railroad would shrink a dangerous, cross-country wagon-train journey of six months or more to less than a week, and it would open vast stretches of the West to new settlement. But it wasn’t until 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, that Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Pacific Railway Act, which finally undertook to make that dream a reality. “There is nothing more important before the nation,” he’d once said, “than the building of the railroad to the Pacific.”

The legislation granted huge swaths of federal land and substantial funds to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies to connect Sacramento to the nation’s existing rail network terminus in Nebraska. Both railroad companies held ceremonial groundbreakings in 1863, complete with crowds, bands and parades, but the war prevented real construction from getting underway until 1865.

That spring, James Strobridge, the Central Pacific’s construction supervisor, put an ad in the Sacramento Union seeking 5,000 skilled laborers to begin blasting a path through the High Sierra. Given the job’s punishing conditions, no more than a few hundred people even replied, most of them, Strobridge later said, “unsteady men” who “would stay a few days . . . until pay-day, get a little money, get drunk, and clear out.”

Faced with a herculean project and no workforce, a railroad official named E.B. Crocker proposed a controversial plan to bring on a 50-person crew of Chinese workers who’d immigrated to California to mine for gold. According to Chris Merritt, an archaeologist and Utah state preservation official, most railroad officials believed the Chinese workers were “unskilled” and “too feminine for hard labor,” but the crew swiftly set records for rail laying. So the railroad dispatched recruitment emissaries to China’s rural Guangdong Province, which was then plagued by a civil war. “Southern China was in turmoil,” says Gordon Chang, a historian at Stanford University and the author of 2019’s Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. “Wars, ethnic conflicts and economic insecurity were scourges, and young people were leaving to seek work and support their families from afar.”

Altogether, the Central Pacific Railroad hired an estimated 12,000 Chinese workers, some as young as 12. The Chinese workers, at that time the largest industrial workforce in American history, made up 90 percent of the Central Pacific’s total labor force. (The Union Pacific, by contrast, did not employ Chinese laborers.) But when Chang started looking into the subject as a young historian, in the 1970s, he was shocked to discover that he could find scarcely any information about them. Nearly all of the scholarship about the railroad’s construction centered on the European and American workforces. Chang has devoted much of his career to piecing together their history, and in 2012 he co-founded the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, which now includes the most comprehensive collection of historical documents and oral histories on the subject.

The Chinese workers carried out an exceptional feat. After blasting and cutting through granite in the Sierra Nevada, they expediently laid track across the Great Basin. Chang and other historians attribute their success in part to the diversity of their training. Before migrating to the United States, many Chinese workers were architects, blacksmiths, woodworkers, cooks, doctors and farmers. Their varied skill sets allowed crews to function as miniature communities, capable of tackling complex problems encountered along the railroad grade—not only problems of engineering, such as building railroad trestles, but also maintaining large field camps in the remote desert. It also enabled crews to acquire much-needed supplies, such as cookware, medicine and even food, often imported from China at a cheaper price than could be obtained by the railroad company or in nearby towns, which gouged prices for immigrant workers.

This communal cooperation was critical, because Chinese crews were routinely marginalized, subjected to poor treatment, racist oversight and negligible support from their employers. According to the Central Pacific’s own disclosures, white workers earned $35 a month on top of full room, board and equipment. Chinese workers, by contrast, earned a salary of $30 and nothing else. “Not only were they paid less than their white counterparts,” Chang says. “They also had to pay for their food, supplies and medicine, all of which the railroad company provided to white workers.” What little money the Chinese workers saved, they sent back to their families. Despite these challenges, Chinese crews completed 690 miles of track to meet the Union Pacific builders at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869. “Without employing Chinese workers, the meeting at Promontory Summit would have never happened—period,” Merritt says. Yet not a single Chinese employee was welcomed at the Promontory ceremony.

After the railroad was completed, thousands of Chinese workers stayed on as employees of the railroad. They were forced to live on the edges of railroad towns and larger cities. White mobs repeatedly attacked Chinese neighborhoods. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, 28 Chinese coal miners (all former railroad workers) were killed in an attack that drove hundreds more from town. In Los Angeles, 18 Chinese residents were lynched in a single day, including at least one child. Reno, Nevada’s Chinatown was burned to the ground twice in 30 years. “Almost every Chinese community in the western United States in the 19th century suffered destruction,” says Chang. “Fire and forced expulsion was their lot.” In formal censuses, the U.S. government often recorded Chinese immigrants living in railroad towns simply as “Chinaman” or ​“Chinawoman” in place of their names. They were barred from obtaining citizenship, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited further immigration, which prevented many railroad workers from reconnecting with their families.

Those who returned to China faced challenges of their own, sometimes preferring not to speak about their experiences. In time, personal histories recorded in diaries or letters home were lost, or were likely destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in 1966, when such documents could have been branded as anti-nationalist and disloyal to the Communist government.

Between the community’s exclusion in the United States and the upheaval it faced in China, its history slowly vanished. Of the 12,000 Chinese workers employed by the railroad, researchers have identified the names of just a few dozen. Still, their impact on establishing Chinese communities across the American West is unmistakable. Shortly before the start of the railroad project, census records estimated that there were 34,933 Chinese immigrants living in the country. By the time the railroad was completed, the population had nearly doubled, as family members joined relatives in places like Terrace or in other newly formed Chinese communities. By 1880, 105,465 Chinese immigrants had settled in the United States, forming anchors for many of the modern-day Chinatowns found today across the West.

Source: What Archaeologists Are Learning About the Lives of the Chinese Immigrants Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

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Sciubba: Immigration Is a Political Choice—Not a Certainty

2022/04/01 Leave a comment

A needed reminder:

The Mistaken Assumption That Immigration Is Inevitable

The notion that mass movement is foreordained distorts our politics, galvanizing anti-immigrant forces and lulling progressives into complacency.

“They keep coming. The numbers are climbing with no end in sight,” claims an ominous voice over images of migrants crowded at the southwestern U.S. border. The implication of the 30-second spot sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which lobbies for lower immigration, is that the mass migration of people across borders is inevitable. On that point, even many immigration advocates agree. Only their interpretation is different: If large-scale population movement is inevitable, they argue, the receiving countries—and especially wealthy liberal democracies such as the United States—need fairer, more humane systems for processing people as they arrive.

The widespread assumption that immigration is inevitable shapes public discourse in other ways. To light a fire under Western governments only sluggishly moving to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, climate activists have cited a looming migration of people from countries prone to floods, fires, extreme storms, and desertification. Supporters of an internationalist foreign policy paint the many Ukrainians streaming across Europe’s borders so close on the heels of the 2015 influx of Syrian refugees as evidence of a foreordained future, in which those displaced by a surge in conflict will force open Europe’s doors.

But as I explain in my new book, 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World, this rhetoric does not match reality. It has, however, distorted the politics of the U.S. and other wealthy nations by galvanizing anti-immigrant forces while lulling progressives into complacency. In practice, national governments can and do exercise considerable control over how many people cross their borders. People fleeing conflict, displaced by environmental changes, or just hoping for a better life may try to come to liberal democracies. But those states don’t have to take them—and probably won’t, unless immigration advocates convince the general public that an influx of newcomers is desirable rather than inevitable.

Even after Donald Trump, who pursued a “zero tolerance” immigration policy, left office, the U.S. has continued his restrictive approach using a policy known as Title 42, which, since March 2020, has allowed the U.S. to remove people who were recently in a country where a communicable disease was present. Critics see this as a border-enforcement mechanism masquerading as a COVID-19 measure; under first a Republican administration and then a Democratic one, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has used it to expel more than 1.7 million would-be immigrants and asylum seekers along the southwestern U.S. border. (Yesterday, the Biden administration floated the idea of lifting Title 42 in late May.)

Contrast recent American gatekeeping at the Mexican border with Colombia’s more welcoming response to the mass displacement of people from Venezuela, its economically and politically troubled neighbor. Colombian President Iván Duque recently offered 10-year residency permits to nearly 1 million Venezuelans living in Colombia.

In Europe as in the Americas, individual nations differ significantly in their willingness to admit migrants. More than 1.1 million people applied for asylum in European Union countries in 2016. Although 61 percent of cases received a positive decision overall—largely driven by Germany, which issued approvals in 69 percent of its 631,000 cases—France approved only 33 percent, the United Kingdom (then an EU member) 32 percent of cases, and Greece just 24 percent. But the welcome mat can just as easily be rolled up as rolled out. As citizens in many European democracies soured on immigration in the second half of the 2010s, even Germany denied more than 50 percent of first-time applicants in 2020.

The initial European response to Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion has been generous. But just a month into the brutal conflict, officials in Moldova, Ukraine’s smallest neighbor, are already saying that refugees are putting their country under strain. Past experience elsewhere in the world suggests that host nations’ resolve to support a huge exodus may not last as long as the crisis will.

Predictions of future human mobility—voluntary and forced—frequently focus on the dozens of “push” factors, such as crime and poor job prospects, that could drive people from their home country. The pressures that create emigration will continue in the future. Changing climates will make earning a living difficult for many people, and natural disasters will render some currently populated areas dangerous or even uninhabitable. The global retreat of democracy could yield more civil conflict and an increase in forced-displacement trends. But even if emigration from a troubled country is inevitable, immigration to a wealthy, peaceful one is far from it. Liberal democracies will not open their borders enough to accept all those seeking refuge.

Similarly, the “pull” factors that make a country attractive to migrants do not guarantee their legal entry. As America’s population ages, unless it can boost its fertility rate (which isn’t looking likely), the country will have to either accept more immigrants to supplement native-born workers or else face the consequences of a shrinking labor force. Experts have made the same argument in Japan, where low fertility would seem to have made immigration an economic necessity. But Japanese voters and public officials continue to resist proposals to invite migrants from elsewhere in Asia. Although Japan has the world’s oldest population, immigrants make up only about 2 percent of its residents, and the country imposes significant institutional barriers to discourage immigrants from settling permanently.

Sovereign nations, for reasons of their own, can and do enact restrictive immigration policies even when doing so is not in their best economic interest. Domestic political concerns—including those in response to fears of ethnic change—can prop up anti-immigration laws indefinitely. I have previously argued that, far from trying to keep immigrants out, the United States should build a wall to keep them in.

Perpetuating the narrative of inevitable immigration has consequences for a country’s politics. Demographic analysis frequently suffers from what psychologists call desirability bias—the data appear to show exactly what the observer wishes to be true. For those who wish to welcome migrants—or who stand to benefit politically from demographic change—the presumption that the flow will always continue may breed inaction and complacency.

In the U.S., that presumption made the Democratic Party overly confident about its long-term electoral prospects. “Many Democrats came to believe that long-term demographic trends would inexorably produce a Democratic majority,” Elaine Kamarck and William Galston—both policy experts who served in the Clinton administration—argued in The Wall Street Journal in February. “The expectation was that decades of robust immigration from Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region would steadily increase the diversity of the U.S. population. As these Americans entered the electorate, they would join forces with other people of color—especially African-Americans and Native Americans—to strengthen support for the Democratic Party.”

But voters’ political affiliations are not fixed. Although people of color make up a growing share of younger voters, many Hispanic voters of all ages are shifting to the Republican Party, seemingly out of frustration with the Democratic platform or party norms that seem divorced from their values on a variety of issues, including immigration.

Of course, the narrative of inevitable immigration can also increase some voters’ resolve to keep would-be newcomers out. Governments respond to those pressures. Many democratic countries have used extreme measures to deter would-be asylum seekers from crossing into their borders. Australia has created offshore processing centers that prevent migrants from ever setting foot on the country’s soil; the U.S. has followed a “Remain in Mexico” policy to keep Central American migrants at bay; and the EU criminalized rescues at sea in 2017. In lieu of permanently settling refugees, Denmark chose to issue temporary residency permits in many cases, a move supported by politicians on both the right and the left. And now that many Danes are ready for those Syrians to leave, Denmark has instituted a plethora of policies designed to force them to return home, including a “jewelry bill” entitling the Danish government to seize asylum-seekers’ assets to build the country’s funds. 

Immigration advocates, including those in the private sector who are hoping that immigrants will fill skills gaps, need to push for legal changes to increase immigration, rather than simply assuming that immigration will happen no matter what. 

This piece is adapted from Sciubba’s recent book, 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World. 

​​Source: Immigration Is a Political Choice—Not a Certainty

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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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