More Canadians prefer status quo on immigration: poll

2022/02/16 Leave a comment

Of note. Will be interesting to see if the further increase in the 2022-24 immigration plan results in any change, most surveys don’t include the number of immigrants although I remember one which did which highlighted some concerns with the actual higher numbers:

In 2020, the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigration to Canada were not particularly clear.

With universities moving to virtual classes, there was little incentive for international students to secure loans and pack their bags. Economic uncertainties at home also made hiring workers from abroad more complicated.

Last year, the federal government set an aspiration of welcoming 400,000 immigrants to Canada. In December, it was announced that the goal had been reached. Ottawa touted the benefits of immigration, particularly in the area of health care, where professionals who were not born in Canada amount to 25% of the workforce.

Other countries around the world have struggled to explain how immigration works over the past few years. Canada has not been immune to these problems, even if the issue is not as polarizing as it has been in the United States and parts of Europe.

It is also clear that COVID-19 exacerbated some unjustified feelings of animosity. A survey Research Co. conducted on behalf of BC’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner (BCOHRC) found that 9% British Columbians have directly experienced hate incidents since the start of the pandemic, a proportion that rises to 15% among residents of East Asian descent.

Research Co. and Glacier Media recently reviewed the feelings of Canadians on immigration, and some views are stable. More than half of Canadians (54%, unchanged since a similar survey conducted in December 2020) think immigration is having a mostly positive effect in Canada, while just over one in four (26%, down four points) consider the effect as mostly negative and about one in five (19%, up three points) are undecided.

While majorities of Canadians of all ages concur on the positive effect of immigration, there are some regional differences. Ontario is ahead of all provinces at 58%, followed by Quebec and Alberta (each at 56%), Atlantic Canada (54%) and British Columbia (51%). The situation in Saskatchewan and Manitoba is strikingly different, with practically the same proportion of residents looking at immigration either positively (40%) or negatively (39%).

Canadians who voted for the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the 2021 federal election are also more likely to regard immigration in a favourable light (69% and 60% respectively) than those who cast ballots for Conservative Party candidates (46%).

There is some movement when Canadians are asked about the number of immigrants that are allowed to settle in the country each year. About two in five (39%, down four points) think immigration levels should remain the same, while the same proportions would prefer to increase them (25%, up eight points) or decrease them (25%, down seven points).

A seven-point drop in the proportion of Canadians who call for lower immigration levels is noteworthy, even if we continue to see larger numbers for the status quo. Once again, not every province feels the same way. Quebecers are particularly adamant on allowing more immigrants into Canada (36%), followed by Atlantic Canadians (26%). In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, more than a third (35%) want the number to be reduced.

There was no change in two other statements that we test every time we ask Canadians about this issue. Three in four Canadians (75%, unchanged) believe that the hard work and talent of immigrants makes Canada better. However, while almost half of supporters of the New Democrats (49%) and Liberals (46%) “strongly agree” with this statement, only 28% of Conservatives concur.

Finally, almost two-thirds of Canadians (65%, also unchanged) think immigrants should only be allowed in Canada if they adopt Canadian values. Four groups have particularly strong feelings about this dictum: men (70%), Canadians aged 55 and over (77%), Quebecers (72%) and Conservative voters in 2021 (80%).

On the economic front, Canada is going through a time of mixed signals. Canadians are increasingly worried about inflation but expect the economy to do better in the future. The national unemployment rate is 6%, making the argument of immigrants taking away domestic jobs moot.

Still, it is important to recognize that the divide on the immigration file is mostly ideological. Conservative Party voters are significantly more likely than other Canadians to say that immigration has a negative effect, to call for a decrease in the number of immigrants allowed into Canada and to demand that newcomers adopt Canadian values.

As a new leadership race gets underway, Canada’s official opposition party runs the risk of overreacting on immigration, in a similar fashion to the way its provincial cousins in Alberta and Saskatchewan have recently misread public sentiment about the pandemic. Conservative voters in Canada may be more reticent about immigration, but not in numbers that suggest that the ruinous positions of other centre-right parties around the world should be emulated.

Source: More Canadians prefer status quo on immigration: poll

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Krugman: When ‘Freedom’ Means the Right to Destroy

2022/02/16 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

On Sunday the Canadian police finally cleared away anti-vaccine demonstrators who had been blocking the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, a key commercial route that normally carries more than $300 million a day in international trade. Other bridges are still closed, and part of Ottawa, the Canadian capital, is still occupied.

The diffidence of Canadian authorities in the face of these disruptions has been startling to American eyes. Also startling, although not actually surprising, has been the embrace of economic vandalism and intimidation by much of the U.S. right — especially by people who ranted against demonstrations in favor of racial justice. What we’re getting here is an object lesson in what some people really mean when they talk about “law and order.”

Let’s talk about what has been happening in Canada and why I call it vandalism.

The “Freedom Convoy” has been marketed as a backlash by truckers angry about Covid-19 vaccination mandates. In reality, there don’t seem to have been many truckers among the protesters at the bridge (about 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated). Last week a Bloomberg reporter saw only three semis among the vehicles blocking the Ambassador Bridge, which were mainly pickup trucks and private cars; photos taken Saturday also show very few commercial trucks.

The Teamsters union, which represents many truckers on both sides of the border, has denounced the blockade.

So this isn’t a grass-roots trucker uprising. It’s more like a slow-motion Jan. 6, a disruption caused by a relatively small number of activists, many of them right-wing extremists. At their peak, the demonstrations in Ottawa reportedly involved only around 8,000 people, while numbers at other locations have been much smaller.

Despite their lack of numbers, however, the protesters have been inflicting a remarkable amount of economic damage. The U.S. and Canadian economies are very closely integrated. In particular, North American manufacturing, especially but not only in the auto industry, relies on a constant flow of parts between factories on both sides of the border. As a result, the disruption of that flow has hobbled industry, forcing production cuts and even factory shutdowns.

The closure of the Ambassador Bridge also imposed large indirect costs, as trucks were diverted to roundabout routes and forced to wait in long lines at alternative bridges.

Any attempt to put a number on the economic costs of the blockade is tricky and speculative. However, it’s not hard to come up with numbers like $300 million or more per day; combine that with the disruption of Ottawa, and the “trucker” protests may already have inflicted a couple of billion dollars in economic damage.

That’s an interesting number, because it’s roughly comparable to insurance industry estimates of total losses associated with the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd — protests that seem to have involved more than 15 million people.

This comparison will no doubt surprise those who get their news from right-wing media, which portrayed B.L.M. as an orgy of arson and looting. I still receive mail from people who believe that much of New York City was reduced to smoking rubble. In fact, the demonstrations were remarkably nonviolent; vandalism happened in a few cases, but it was relatively rare, and the damage was small considering the huge size of the protests.

By contrast, causing economic damage was and is what the Canadian protests are all about — because blocking essential flows of goods, threatening people’s livelihoods, is every bit as destructive as smashing a store window. And unlike, say, a strike aimed at a particular company, this damage fell indiscriminately on anyone who had the misfortune to rely on unobstructed trade.

And to what end? The B.L.M. demonstrations were a reaction to police killings of innocent people; what’s going on in Canada is, on its face, about rejecting public health measures intended to save lives. Of course, even that is mainly an excuse: What it’s really about is an attempt to exploit pandemic weariness to boost the usual culture-war agenda.

As you might expect, the U.S. right is loving it. People who portrayed peaceful protests against police killings as an existential threat are delighted by the spectacle of right-wing activists breaking the law and destroying wealth. Fox News has devoted many hours to fawning coverage of the blockades and occupations. Senator Rand Paul, who called B.L.M. activists a “crazed mob,” called for Canada-style protests to “clog up cities” in the United States, specifically saying that he hoped to see truckers disrupt the Super Bowl (they didn’t).

I assume that the reopening of the Ambassador Bridge is the beginning of a broader crackdown on destructive protests. But I hope we won’t forget this moment — and in particular that we remember it the next time a politician or media figure talks about “law and order.”

Recent events have confirmed what many suspected: The right is perfectly fine, indeed enthusiastic, about illegal actions and disorder as long as they serve right-wing ends.

Source: When ‘Freedom’ Means the Right to Destroy

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The Quiet Flight of Muslims From France

2022/02/15 Leave a comment

Of interest. Haven’t found any comparable data for Canada but will check the 2021 census data when it comes out (which will have religious affiliation data):

France’s wounded psyche is the invisible character in every one of Sabri Louatah’s novels and the hit television series he wrote. He speaks of his “sensual, physical, visceral love” for the French language and of his attachment to his hometown in southeastern France, bathed in its distinctive light. He closely monitors the campaign for the upcoming presidential elections.

But Mr. Louatah does all of that from Philadelphia, the city that he began considering home after the 2015 attacks in France by Islamist extremists, which killed scores of people and deeply traumatized the country. As sentiments hardened against all French Muslims, he no longer felt safe there. One day, he was spat on and called, “Dirty Arab.”

“It’s really the 2015 attacks that made me leave because I understood they were not going to forgive us,” said Mr. Louatah, 38, the grandson of Muslim immigrants from Algeria. “When you live in a big Democratic city on the East Coast, you’re more at peace than in Paris, where you’re deep in the cauldron.”

Ahead of elections in April, President Emmanuel Macron’s top three rivals — who are expected to account for nearly 50 percent of the vote, according to polls — are all running anti-immigrant campaigns that fan fears of a nation facing a civilizational threat by invading non-Europeans. The issue is top of their agenda, even though France’s actual immigration lags behind that of most other European countries.

The problem barely discussed is emigration. For years, France has lost highly educated professionals seeking greater dynamism and opportunity elsewhere. But among them, according to academic researchers, is a growing number of French Muslims who say that discrimination was a strong push factor and that they felt compelled to leave by a glass ceiling of prejudice, nagging questions about their security and a feeling of not belonging.

The outflow has gone unremarked upon by politicians and the news media even as researchers say it shows France’s failure to provide a path for advancement for even the most successful of its largest minority group, a “brain drain” of those who could have served as models of integration.

“These people end up contributing to the economy of Canada or Britain,” said Olivier Esteves, a professor at the University of Lille’s center on political science, public law and sociology, which surveyed 900 French Muslim émigrés and conducted in-depth interviews with 130 of them. “France is really shooting itself in the foot.”

French Muslims, estimated at 10 percent of the population, occupy a strangely outsize place in the campaign — even if their actual voices are seldom heard. It is not only an indication of the lingering wounds inflicted by the attacks of 2015 and 2016, which killed hundreds, but also of France’s long struggle over identity issues and its unresolved relationship with its former colonies.

Source: The Quiet Flight of Muslims From France

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This initiative is opening doors for hundreds of Ontario’s internationally-educated nurses

2022/02/15 Leave a comment

On a more positive note, progress on pathways for internationally-educated nurses:

When Champ Noval came to Canada from the Philippines in 2012 he thought that the country that gave him permanent resident status because he was a nurse would enable him to continue in his profession.

Instead, he found himself cleaning toilets and waging a five-year battle — which he eventually won — to get licensed as a registered nurse with the College of Nurses of Ontario.

“I thought it was going to be faster, easier,” said Noval about getting licensed by the college, “and I just have to complete a couple of requirements, just like what other countries are doing. But it was completely different.”

Now, hospitals like Sunnybrook, where Noval works, are offering paid clinical placements to internationally-educated nurses that could give hundreds of foreign-trained nurses the credentials they need to get licensed.

The placements are part of the Supervised Practice Experience Partnership, a partnership between the College of Nurses of Ontario, Public Health and approved partners like Sunnybrook.

As of Jan. 28, more than 800 applicants, and 57 employers, were approved to participate in the program, according to the college. More than 30 of the applicants are willing to relocate to rural or northern hospitals, which can have trouble recruiting nurses.

Often, internationally-educated nurses, or IENs, come to Canada expecting to work in their profession but fall short of getting licensed because they don’t meet all of the standards set by the college, which was created to ensure safe nursing practice in Ontario.

The new partnership is for nurses who have met all of the college’s requirements for licensure, but are missing recent evidence of practice or language qualifications.

Part of the problem for many applicants is the length of time it can take to get assessed by the college, which can stretch to years.

In 2020, more than 14,600 IENs were pursuing licensing by the college, according to a report by the Office of the Fairness Commissioner. There were another 5,000 or so IENs who were inactive and hadn’t been in touch with the college for the past year.

The college says that in the last five years the number of internationally educated nurses that it has registered, or licensed, has increased, from 1,456 in 2017 to 3,235 last year.

While waiting to be assessed, an applicant often gets another job working in a field outside nursing and stays in it to support their families, as was the case, said Norval, with many of his friends.

Or the college takes so long to process an application that aspects of it, such as recent evidence of practice, or language competency tests, expire past the time frame set by the college.

When an IEN falls short of meeting the college’s requirements, going back to school to upgrade is not only expensive, but time-consuming.

Before this new program, school was the only way to get a clinical placement to meet the college’s requirement for recent hours of practice. And placements through schools are unpaid.

“There are a lot of nurses that I know that were excellent nurses back at home and just don’t do it anymore,” said Noval, who is a registered nurse and mentors IENs at Sunnybrook.

The hospital plans to do more than just offer the clinical placements. Sunnybrook says it is creating a career path for IENs, many of whom are already working in hospitals, hidden in plain sight in nonnursing roles such as PSWs or bed sitters, a paid role for employees who monitor patients with illnesses such as dementia.

The hospital wants to identify IENs who are employees, as well as hire more, in unregulated roles such as observers or patient support providers and help put them on a career path. For IENs who are already enrolled in an academic program or working on their language proficiency, the hospital is using funding from the Ministry of Health to offer paid placements in clinical teams in unregulated roles.

Since promoting the career pathway on its website, the hospital has had “an overwhelming response of people that are reaching out because they want guidance on how they can move along and how they can remove the barriers,” said Tracey DasGupta, Sunnybrook’s director of interprofessional practice.

“As a health-care system, knowing that we’ve got so many people that are skilled that could contribute to a system that’s in such need, our responsibility is to help people do that,” said DasGupta. “So we have to work together as a system to help know where these individuals are, provide clear direction, provide them with opportunities, but also employment opportunities because financial considerations are an important barrier.”

Many foreign-trained nurses have to navigate the system on their own.

Noval was working as a registered nurse in the Philippines, which requires a three-year diploma, before he came to Canada in 2012. He also taught and worked in research.

Once here, he registered with the College of Nurses of Ontario and was told he could write the exam to become a registered practical nurse, which requires a diploma in Ontario, and that he would have to go back to school to get a Bachelor of Science in nursing degree if he wanted to become a registered nurse.

Noval began working as a registered practical nurse and appealed the college’s decision. In the meantime, Noval started a bridging program for RPNs who want to become RNs, while working three jobs.

Just a couple of weeks before he graduated in 2017 he heard back about the appeal — the college told him he did indeed have the qualifications to become an RN and could write the exam.

At “that time, for you to get your licence, was an uphill battle with the College of Nurses of Ontario,” said Noval.

The situation was similar for Chandra Kafle, who came to Canada in 2012 from Nepal with five years of nursing education, including a three year diploma and another two years to get her Bachelor of Science in nursing. She had worked as a nurse for eight years before she came here to do her master’s degree.

Instead, the college told her she couldn’t write the NCLEX, the nursing exam for registered nurses, because she didn’t have all of the qualifications.

“Even just with a diploma, other nurses in Nepal who went to the U.S. were able to write the NCLEX exam,” said Kafle. “So I was hoping that I would be able to write (it) within a year or so. But it took so long for them to decide. It took more than three years just to say that no, your education is not enough.”

The college told her she would have to go back to school to get her degree.

“I felt deflated. I felt demotivated,” said Kafle. “But I had to keep going … I didn’t want to go (back) until I achieved something,” she said. “I felt like I lost my identity as a nurse and I wanted to regain that identity.”

Like Noval, Kafle wrote the exam to become a registered practical nurse and eventually started working part-time at Sunnybrook. She went to York to get her Bachelor of Science in nursing degree so that she could become an RN. She says she knew a number of foreign-trained nurses who remained as PSWs because they had to support their family.

Kafle now works as an RN in Sunnybrook’s cardiac intensive care unit and is pursuing her master’s degree.

She said of her journey, “I was a full-time student, part-time employee and my daughter was three, four years old at the time. So I had a tough time.”

Source: This initiative is opening doors for hundreds of Ontario’s internationally-educated nurses

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Sears: Warning bells have rung for years over the risk of American money flowing into Canadian politics

2022/02/15 Leave a comment

Of note, and reinforcing the Marshall Fund analysis:

For decades now, Canadians have been proud at how effectively we have limited the influence of money in politics.

Arguably, there is not another G7 country with as clean a political culture as ours. It has been the hard work of two generations of campaign finance reformers. Those protections are now at serious risk, however, and our record on anti-money-laundering action has been frankly appalling. The issues are linked.

The attacks by small groups of truckers on several Canadian cities have revealed many things. That the Conservatives flirtation with anti-democratic militant groups continues. That our three orders of government are still dreadful at co-ordination. That Canadian intelligence and policing has not kept up with the “clear and present danger” represented by these well-funded groups of angry young men.

The most alarming revelation, though, is the large hole that has been blown in our walls of protection against foreign influence in Canadian political life. Conservative hysteria pre-pandemic about American environmental foundations’ funding of green groups here turned out to simply be that — hysteria.

In Alberta, the Kenney government spent millions of public dollars trying to find the secret bank accounts and found pennies. Conservatives’ reactions to the revelation that the militant truckers have access to millions of American dollars — with the promise of millions more from international neo-fascist allies — will be interesting. This flood of cash is a genuine threat to the sovereignty of Canadian democracy.

A chilling incident unfolded before my eyes this week, as I drove by the truckers’ Ottawa compound. Suddenly, two large black SUVs swept past me and turned into the protest command centre. They had New York state plates. Interestingly, they had no insignia, no flags and no slogans anywhere; they wanted to be invisible. It was an almost cinematic moment, with the bad guys surfacing at the scene of the crime.

We now need to reconsider how we prevent the flow of secret money from the U.S. into the hands of Canadian militants — or worse, from there into the war chests of the People’s Party of Canada, or even Conservative candidates. Our current election finance laws were not written to deal with this type of interference. Neither do we have the investigatory or prosecution expertise to track it being washed through third parties.

For years, experts have demonstrated our record on money laundering is embarrassing. Meanwhile, CSIS has been focused on Islamic terrorism for far too long, and only last year did Public Safety Canada recognize white supremacists as among the top 10 national security risks. Our police and intelligence agencies will need to pivot from their outdated focus to our actual reality: the growing power of these insurrectionists and their political allies.

The successful blockade of three of the nation’s important north-south trucking corridors is ominous. How do we harden our ability to prevent this? Unless this ends soon with fines and even prison sentences, it sets a damaging precedent. That owners of heavy equipment or RVs can blockade a bridge, highway or an entire city is unacceptable in a democracy. Now that heavy tow truck owners have caved to the truckers’ threats, there is literally no one to remove the insurgents.

Former defence minister David Pratte eloquently summed up the inevitable end to this impasse, declaring that Ottawa has every right to use the military. He aptly observed that “when there is no one else to turn to, the military are there as a disciplined, well-trained and professional body to take orders under strict rules of engagement and get a job done. The Ottawa occupation should be treated as a national emergency. If allowed to continue, it will breed disrespect for the law … It will encourage others who abuse the constitutionally protected right to protest and who weaponize the concept of freedom.”

These blockades must be brought to an end within days, or we may deeply regret the future they bequeath. It will be one where “freedom” is twisted to mean the right to behave criminally with impunity.

Source: Warning bells have rung for years over the risk of American money flowing into Canadian politics

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U.S. accounts drive Canadian convoy protest chatter

2022/02/15 Leave a comment

Of note. While recent concerns have understandably focussed on Chinese and Russian government interference, we likely need to spend more attention on the threats from next door, along with the pernicious threats via Facebook and Twitter:

Known U.S.-based sources of misleading information have driven a majority of Facebook and Twitter posts about the Canadian COVID-19 vaccine mandate protest, per German Marshall Fund data shared exclusively with Axios.

Driving the news: Ottawa’s “Freedom Convoy” has ballooned into a disruptive political protest against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and inspired support among right-wing and anti-vaccine mandate groups in the U.S.

Why it matters: Trending stories about the protest appear to be driven by a small number of voices as top-performing accounts with huge followings are using the protest to drive engagement and inflame emotions with another hot-button issue.

  • “They can flood the zone — making something news and distorting what appears to be popular,” said Karen Kornbluh, senior fellow and director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund. 

What they’re saying: “The three pages receiving the most interactions on [convoy protest] posts — Ben Shapiro, Newsmax and Breitbart -—are American,” Kornbluh said. Other pages with the most action on convoy-related posts include Fox News, Dan Bongino and Franklin Graham.

  • “These major online voices with their bullhorns determine what the algorithm promotes because the algorithm senses it is engaging,” she said.
  • Using a platform’s design to orchestrate anti-government action mirrors how the “Stop the Steal” groups worked around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, with a few users quickly racking up massive followings, Kornbluh said.

By the numbers: Per German Marshall Fund data, from Jan. 22, when the protests began, to Feb. 12, there were 14,667 posts on Facebook pages about the Canadian protests, getting 19.3 million interactions (including likes, comments and shares).

  • For context: The Beijing Olympics had 20.9 million interactions in that same time period.
  • On Twitter, from Feb. 3 to Feb. 13, tweets about the protests from have been favorited at least 4.1 million times and retweeted at least 1.1 million times.
  • Pro-convoy videos on YouTube have racked up 47 million views, with Fox News’ YouTube page getting 29.6 million views on related videos.

The big picture: New research published in the Atlantic finds that most public activity on Facebook comes from a “tiny, hyperactive group of abusive users.”

  • Since user engagement remains the most important factor in Facebook’s weighting of content recommendations, the researchers write, the most abusive users will wield the most influence over the online conversation.
  • “Overall, we observed 52 million users active on these U.S. pages and public groups, less than a quarter of Facebook’s claimed user base in the country,” the researchers write. “Among this publicly active minority of users, the top 1 percent of accounts were responsible for 35 percent of all observed interactions; the top 3 percent were responsible for 52 percent. Many users, it seems, rarely, if ever, interact with public groups or pages.”

Meanwhile, Foreign meddling is further confusing the narrative around the trucker protest. 

  • NBC News reported that overseas content mills in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania and other countries are powering Facebook groups promoting American versions of the trucker convoys. Facebook took many of the pages down.
  • A report from Grid News found a Bangladeshi digital marketing firm was behind two of the largest Facebook groups related to the Canadian Freedom Convoy beforebeing removed from the platform.
  • Grid News reported earlier that Facebook groups supporting the Canadian convoy were being administered by a hacked Facebook account belonging to a Missouri woman.

Source: U.S. accounts drive Canadian convoy protest chatter

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Caste has become a university diversity issue in the US

2022/02/14 1 Comment

Hard to imagine that this also happens in Canada to some extent given the large number of South Asian students and grateful for information readers may have:

Many international students from disadvantaged groups hope to leave the entrenched social structures and caste discrimination behind and start afresh as they come to the United States or elsewhere. 

But to their consternation and horror, some South Asian students have found that caste discrimination is alive and well overseas, particularly where there is a large South Asia diaspora or foreign students on campus.

Mounting evidence of such discriminatory treatment and harassment led the California State University (CSU) system to add caste to its list of protected groups in January, prohibiting caste-based discrimination, harassment or retaliation. Other universities in the US are examining whether they should do the same. 

The CSU system, with some 485,000 students and about 56,000 faculty and staff, is sending a signal out to the rest of the university sector that caste discrimination exists and that affected students and staff require protection, say inclusivity activists who have campaigned for years to include caste-oppressed students and faculty. They have called the CSU decision an important civil rights win. 

“This is very important because we can now feel safer,” said Prem Pariyar, who recently graduated from CSU’s East Bay campus with a masters degree in social work. He began the campaign for caste protection at East Bay and helped extend it across CSU’s 23 campuses. 

“At least now the university has a policy to recognise our pain and to recognise our issues,” he told University World News. “In the US people are conscious about race and religion and the like but they did not know about caste discrimination.”

“Being a protected category is important as it means people like me [and] other students will feel more comfortable to go and complain. Before adding caste as a protected category, even if students reported to the administration, they would not understand what it is. It is not racial discrimination, but it is the same logic.”

Michael Uhlenkamp, senior director of public affairs in the CSU Chancellors Office, said: “While caste protections were inherently included in previous CSU non-discrimination policies, the decision to specifically name caste in the interim policy reflects the CSU’s commitment to inclusivity and respect, making certain each and every one of our 23 CSU campuses is a place of access, opportunity and equity for all.” 

“The existing processes for reporting instances of discrimination, whether based on caste or any of the categories listed in the policy, still apply,” he added. 

‘Long overdue’

“It’s long overdue. This was a campaign that we were working on for almost two and a half years,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, a US-based civil rights organisation fighting for the rights of Dalits, a low-caste group formerly known as ‘untouchables’.

Equality Labs has been advising institutions and companies in the US. It carried out the first survey of Dalit discrimination among the South Asian diaspora in the US in 2016. In a sample of 1,500 respondents, “the numbers are high – one in four experience some form of physical or verbal assaults, one in three face discrimination in terms of their education and two out of three face workplace discrimination,” Soundararajan told University World News.

The survey was instrumental in convincing the CSU system to include caste in their policy, along with students like Pariyar, himself a Dalit, who were willing to speak out. 

“The whole process of educating and transforming these institutions towards caste equity has been one of very powerful testimony, and storytelling by really courageous and bold caste-oppressed students and faculty and campus community members. 

“And doing so under very difficult environments where caste bigots were literally intimidating, harassing and doxing them,” said Soundararajan, who is also a visiting scholar at the Center for South Asia, Stanford University. 

Soundararajan points to various types of campus discrimination – including discrimination with housing, work or student groups “openly using caste slurs and other microaggressions as well as more serious cases of gender-based violence like harassment and assault”. 

Equality Labs has been advising a large number of universities and colleges in the US, including providing advice from legal scholars “who have already done some thinking about this – we’ve worked with many institutions, large and small on these issues”.

“In our countries of origin, while there are laws to protect against caste oppression, there is a great deal of impunity and a lack of political will to enforce them. In the United States, however, because of the struggles of black and indigenous and other communities of colour, civil rights laws still have teeth,” Soundararajan explained.

“Increasingly, American institutions that are concerned about their liability related to civil rights and human rights compliance are proactively adding caste and making it explicit,” she noted. “When it’s not explicit, all the things that come from [being] a protected category don’t exist within the campuses’ or institutions’ purview.”

But universities are also key to educating society in general. “In making caste a protected category, institutions of higher learning are positioned to take the critical issue of caste oppression and discrimination seriously and to render it visible,” said Angana Chatterji, cultural anthropologist and scholar at the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.

“Such commitment is imperative to deepening the study of caste and generative of new knowledge formations attentive to its intersections with gender and race. And to developing support systems, curricula and interventions to dismantle caste oppression and caste privilege within the university,” she added.

Often invisible

Caste harassment can often be invisible to those outside the South Asian community, but that does not mean it does not exist outside Asia. 

“I have been experiencing caste discrimination from my childhood, but I did not imagine that caste discrimination exists in the US, but then I experienced it myself. I was discriminated against within campus and outside campus,” said Pariyar, who is from Nepal. His caste are often not allowed to sit at the same table as higher castes or share food. 

Pariyar, who arrived in the US in 2015, said other South Asians “will ask your name, what does your father do. Their intention is to know my caste identity. In the beginning the conversation is respectful, but after knowing my caste identity that respect is gone,” he said.

“This is happening in California and not just in California but elsewhere in the US,” he added, saying he was left embarrassed, humiliated and depressed by these experiences and preferred not to go to get-togethers, house parties or other parties where there were other South Asian students present. 

Others who face caste discrimination are often reluctant to speak out because, in effect, it means revealing their caste origins. Some of them drop their surname or adopt a caste-neutral surname.  

“Many people do not feel comfortable talking about this type of discrimination and they want to hide their identity because they want to be protected; they don’t want harassment from dominant-caste people,” noted Pariyar, who says he is talking to other campuses about similar protections, including the University of California system – separate from the California State University system – starting with UC Berkeley. 

“We have to take it step by step,” said Pariyar, noting the victories in the CSU system and elsewhere along the way. 

The wording varies in different institutions. Brandeis University added this category in December 2019 that says caste is a recognised and protected characteristic in the school’s anti-discrimination policy. In September 2021, UC Davis added ‘caste or perceived caste’ as a category to its anti-discrimination policy. 

Colby College of Maine revised its non-discrimination policy to add caste to its list of ‘protections for the campus community’. In December 2021 Harvard, the first Ivy League university to do so, “added protections for caste-oppressed students” to its graduate student union contract.

Before CSU included it more broadly, some student and faculty organisations passed resolutions last year calling on the university to add caste to its anti-discrimination policy. These include the California Faculty Association, a CSU labour union, as part of their collective bargaining agreement, and Cal State Student Association, a non-profit representing students across the university, in April 2021.

“The student resolutions really matter because when the voice of the students from all 22 campuses say ‘we need this’, it’s huge. So that began the engagement with the [CSU] Chancellor’s office, and they have their own legal team. So they’re confident about the choices,” said Soundararajan. “But we also connected them with top legal scholars on caste in the United States.”

Periyar says it was an uphill battle. When the CSU-wide resolution came up, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a Hindu lobby group, vehemently opposed it. Its website includes a comment by Sunil Kumar, professor of engineering at San Diego State University. 

Rather than redressing discrimination, “it will actually cause discrimination by unconstitutionally singling out and targeting Hindu faculty of Indian and South Asian descent as members of a suspect class because of deeply entrenched, false stereotypes about Indians, Hindus and caste,” he said. 

HAF had been virtually silent until then, perhaps not understanding the significance of student and faculty resolutions. But Pariyar counters: “This policy is not dividing. It is a policy of inclusion. There are marginalised students and they need to be included.”

Berkeley’s Chatterji said: “Hindu nationalist organisations in the diaspora have repeatedly attempted to silence conversations around caste oppression, gender and Islamophobia. If systems of higher education in California determine to make caste a protected category, it will have an impact not just on California, but nationally.”

A ‘caste curriculum’

Becoming more inclusive is also important in the context of broadening diversity of incoming international students. 

“It is already a topic of conversation on campuses on how to diversity the pool of international students, [to know] what are the systemic forms of discrimination that exist over time and how can US institutions make sure they are reaching a broader diversity of South Asian students,” said international education consultant Rajika Bhandari. 

“On-the-ground understanding is definitely required, because if policies are not shaped by individuals who deeply understand the context, it can fall into a kind of neocolonialist framework or a very Americanised view of another countries’ social issues,” she said. 

Social stratification by caste, prevalent in India for centuries, has variations by region and community, even within India and its neighbouring countries, as well as further afield in South Africa, East Africa and Southeast Asia – particularly in Singapore and Malaysia, the Caribbean and elsewhere with communities from South Asia, often since British colonial times. Its complexity is difficult to explain to others. 

Pariyar agrees universities will need to understand caste better in order to be truly inclusive. 

“Adding caste is not enough, application is very important,” he said. “We need a caste equity action plan”. 

“We need training and a curriculum. We need to train all the diversity and inclusion committee members, all the faculty within the CSU system about the gravity of caste discrimination, what it is and how it exists. There is visible discrimination and invisible discrimination and they need to understand that,” Pariyar said, adding that the university system needs to hire experts to train staff and faculty.  

Some of this expertise is provided by Equality Labs which says it helps institutions develop better tools and know the process of how to identify discriminatory behaviour on the basis of caste.

“Institutions need to create real metrics – enrolment metrics, application metrics – to get a sense of what the baseline of crimes or incidents are, then to be able to bring it down. Data is the key – if we don’t begin with a set of really strong KPIs [key performance indicators], we can’t measure progress,” said Soundararajan.

Source: Caste has become a university diversity issue in the US

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Sweden: Academics protest against ‘fatal’ changes to Aliens Act

2022/02/14 Leave a comment

Seems counterproductive to make it harder for highly-skilled PhDs to transition to permanent residency:

Changes to the Aliens Act in Sweden, which impose onerous self-sufficiency requirements on international doctoral students and researchers and require them to leave the country to apply for Swedish residence permits for family members – even those born in Sweden – have been denounced by academic stakeholders.

The legislation was enacted after a heated discussion in parliament in June 2021.

Online magazine Universitetsläraren has identified several researchers that have had to travel as far afield as Asia to apply for visas to travel with their families to neighbouring countries such as Denmark or Germany. “With the COVID situation the travel can be very lengthy,” said researchers who did not want to disclose their identity.

Disruption

Erik Kvist, who is international coordinator at Lund University, said he and colleagues have been involved in similar cases where families have been uprooted from their work in Sweden to travel abroad, a process that can create problems at their workplaces and disrupts their lives.

Kvist said that in these cases the parents of the children are in Sweden on a valid residence permit. 

“The expulsion [out of the country] of a lone baby [without a permit] would be morally unacceptable, lead to great personal suffering and I am questioning how his can be related to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the right to private and family life according to the European Convention on Human Rights,” Kvist said.

“The contention that one should make an application before the newborn baby came to Sweden is an unjust demand when the child is born in Sweden,” he said.

According to the press officer for the Swedish Migration Agency, Annica Dahlqvist, no exemptions to the rules will be offered.

Pil Maria Saugmann, Swedish National Union of Students (SFS) representative and chairperson of the Doctoral Students’ Committee at SFS, told University World News that roughly 20% of doctoral students in Sweden are affected by the new legislation. “But it is maybe also important to mention that the issue digs deeper and affects post-docs and other early career researchers as well,” she said.

The legislation’s impact goes beyond having to travel outside the country to apply for permit applications.

Financial self-sufficiency

Since 2014, international doctoral students have been able to secure permanent residency after four years of doctoral studies. However, last year’s changes – introduced without a transition period – also make it necessary for international students and researchers to show they are financially self-sufficient, in other words, have a job, for a period of time, a period interpreted by the Swedish Migration Agency to be at least 18 months.

A petition by the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers (SULF), the Swedish National Union of Students’ Doctoral Students’ Committee (SFS-DK) and trade union Fackförbundet ST calling for a reversal of the legislation, notes that doctoral students and other early career researchers are very rarely offered such long-term contracts, whether employed by universities, private companies or the state. 

At the same time, those who hold a PhD degree are rarely unemployed and, if they are unemployed, it is usually only for a short time. 

“While the demand for their skills and expertise is high, their chances of being given a long-term contract are low during the first few years after graduation. The new permanent residency rules will create additional hurdles in their pursuit of long-term career development in Sweden. Hence, the new rules will also create a lose-lose situation for Sweden as a knowledge-based nation,” the petition, signed by almost 5,000 people, states.

‘Fatal consequences’

Adding her voice to criticisms of the legislation, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, president of Stockholm University, wrote in her blog on 23 September 2021 that the consequences of changes in the Aliens Act “risk becoming fatal for international doctoral students and junior researchers” and “threaten Sweden’s position as a prominent knowledge nation”.

She said the Swedish Migration Agency’s insistence on fixed-term employment for at least 18 months meant that doctoral students “can no longer count on completing their doctoral education in Sweden under reasonable conditions, while those with a newly earned doctor’s degree no longer have the opportunity to secure a multi-year post-doc or equivalent with the help of ‘bridge funding’ after the completion of their PhD”.

She called on parliament to introduce an exemption for doctoral students and junior researchers from the requirement to be financially self-sufficient in the narrow sense defined by the agency, saying: “All of Sweden’s higher education institutions agree.”

Speaking to University World News on behalf of the European Migration Network, migration expert Bernd Parusel said that for some time the main focus of migration policy in Sweden has been to limit the immigration of people seeking asylum and their family members. 

“It seems that this restrictive approach in Swedish migration policy has spilled over and affected other groups as well, even those that Sweden wants to attract and retain,” he said.

The call for changes to the new legislation continues, with the establishment of a Facebook page, “Intl PhD students in Sweden call for changes in permanent residency law”, which has so far attracted 2,300 members. 

SULF is also keeping the issue alive by arranging webinars on the topic and has set up a webpage hosting question-and-answer sessions and other information.

Source: Academics protest against ‘fatal’ changes to Aliens Act

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New Zealand: Immigration ‘reset’ could link migrant numbers to building consents, and tightly limit migration

2022/02/14 Leave a comment

Always interesting to see how other immigrant-based societies adapt and change policies, generally from a much more restrictive approach compared to Canada:

A Government immigration “reset” aims to make it harder for migrant workers to find jobs, and could see immigration policy linked to building consent numbers.

The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) is conducting discussions behind the scenes to prepare industry for a big shock after the border opens.

Based on documents seen by Stuff and discussions with some who have been involved in the stakeholder forums, the scheme will allow accredited employers in selected industries with sector agreements to bring in a quota of temporary lower-paid workers.

It may also be harder for skilled migrants who move to New Zealand to bring their partners and family members across with them, and those who come over may have to satisfy separate skills and labour requirements.

IntoNZ Immigration adviser Katy Armstrong says she also understands a “green list” of specific occupations will also be exempt from the reset restrictions.

“That will be what some people in the country will love because they will think it’s great that Government steps in and uber-controls, but it’s a delicate balance isn’t it?

“Because employers also need the freedom to get the right people to do their jobs and I think they’re going to be constrained.”Those industries without sector agreements will have to recruit lower-cost temporary workers who are on open work student visas or working holiday visas.

However, it will be much easier for businesses across the board to hire migrants for highly skilled, highly paid roles.

An MBIE document accompanying the discussions says a key outcome of the changes will be to: “restrict the set of jobs that potential migrants and their families can pursue to work in NZ”

“Some businesses, sectors and regions will find it tougher to adapt.

“Sectors that use large numbers of migrants to fill low-paid, low-skilled roles such as tourism, hospitality and retail.

“Businesses in regions where there are thinner labour markets such as tourism and primary sector businesses in places like Queenstown.”

One of the core aims of the reset is to encourage greater productivity, but Sense Partners economist, Shamubeel Eaqub, says blocking low-skilled migrants, and making it easier for businesses to hire highly-skilled, highly paid migrants from overseas, might actually discourage the creation of a more highly skilled workforce domestically.

“Essentially what we’re saying is that there are these highly paid, highly skilled jobs that are available, but they will be filled by migrants.

“But if you couldn’t do that what would the business do? They would probably train up somebody who was close enough, they might create career pathways, training pathways, scholarships.

“If you are always going to bail-out businesses that need highly skilled people, how are you going to create pathways to become highly skilled in New Zealand?”

The number of work visas issued will be linked to residency places, and residency places will be linked to a measure of the “absorptive capacity” of the economy.

Officials are allegedly exploring measures to better measure this link, including linking residency places to long-term trends around building consents, or the infrastructure deficit.

Some officials are also allegedly warning stakeholders that residency criteria will be tightened too. Presently people who apply for residency need to meet a points-threshold.

After the reset Immigration officers may continue counting points beyond this threshold, and prioritise applications with higher scores. They are also allegedly exploring introducing distinctions like whether a person’s university degree was obtained from a university with a higher international ranking than a New Zealand university (a measure which could benefit European and North American university graduates).

The proposals look set to attract fire from both ends of the political spectrum, with National MP Erica Stanford criticising the approach as the Government “picking winners”, and the Green Party MP Ricardo Menendez March saying it is “a way to sneak in a population policy which would be led by companies”.

March also worries the big role employers will play within the scheme will lead to a large power imbalance between migrants and employers.

With such tight restrictions he argues it may also prove difficult for migrants to switch between employers and jobs.

Eaqub says this is a concern of his too, and it could be difficult for migrant workers to escape an exploitative employer, because they might not have the freedom to take on a different occupation under the proposed system.

Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi was presented with a detailed list of the alleged ideas under discussion, but said they “do not accurately reflect the choices under consideration”, and declined a request for an interview.

He said an announcement around the Immigration reset would be made in the coming weeks.

Sources have told Stuff Finance Minister Grant Robertson is another important force pushing for the changes, however, he too has declined to comment.

March says giving businesses and industries a quota of migrants, that they lobby for, is effectively “devolving these important nation-impacting decisions” to private companies.

“Any move towards have a population policy deserves to have a very fulsome discussion that should be Treaty-led.”

However, it is understood no single population target will underpin the immigration reset, because of fears it could be labelled a “population policy”.

Eaqub sees the lack of a population target as a big weakness within these proposals. Many of the ideas appeared to be about limiting immigration, but equally the country could face issues with a lower than expected rate of population growth too.

A population target could help the country correct for an underwhelming level of population growth, while the current proposals were more about limiting the inflow of skilled migrants.

“Whether or not you’re going to have 10 million people in 50 years time, or you’re going to have 4 million people, actually matters a lot.

“Without that population policy, it’s quite hard to know what kind of capacity we should have as a country.”

However, Eaqub says the alleged immigration changes would represent a real change, because prior to the pandemic New Zealand businesses had access to a range of different migrants, but under the new changes the range of businesses and occupations would be more tightly controlled by the Government.

“What we will have is a bunch of industries, rightly or wrongly, who will have access to workers, and others won’t.

“I don’t know how much faith you have in the skills list that Immigration has used in the last decade or so, but most of the evidence from people in the industry I speak to is the skills list is not accurate, it’s quite dated.

“There’s a real risk that a centrally planned approach will have that issue.”

Stanford says she is worried about a policy that picks favoured industries as winners, and singles out others as being unable to access migrant labour.

“They’re going to a much more highly restricted approach at a time when there is a worldwide labour shortage where we’re competing against other countries in the world for the top talent, and yet we’re making it more difficult.

“If we need people like truck drivers, for example. Well truck drivers won’t have degrees, and if they do, they may not be from a great university, but do we care?”

The Government’s immigration reset has been a magnet for controversy since it as announced, and the Government has provided few details about what it might entail.

Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi was unable to attend the announcement and his fill-in, Stuart Nash, struggled to answer detailed questions about the proposal on day one.

Then announcements around temporary visas, like working holiday visas, filtered through, which appeared to contradict the overall thrust of the policy.

Now, the “Immigration Reset” has been rebranded as an “Immigration Rebalance”.

NZ Initiative chief economist Eric Crampton says one of the problems with the “reset”, or “rebalance”, is that it is targeting a problem that doesn’t exist.

He argues New Zealand has a housing and infrastructure problem, not an immigration one.

“You’re not running out of new cars or used cars because migrants are taking them all. You’re not out of haircuts at barbers’ shops because immigrants have taken up all the haircuts.

“There is nothing else where you’re seeing ‘oh my God the migrants took all these things’.

“It’s just pressure in housing, because we’ve got infrastructure supply that’s been heavily constrained, because the financing of it is a mess, and local councils don’t have abilities to keep up with that.”

Crampton says the root of this problem lies not immigration, but in the supply of zoned land for housing. He points to cities like Atlanta, in the United States, which has maintained a stable level of housing affordability despite high levels of population growth.

To keep house prices down Crampton argues councils need to zone much more land for apartments, townhouses, and other residential dwellings, than they need.

Crampton says making immigration contingent on housing consents, or similar measures, could actually lead to councils zoning less land for housing.

If lower than expected immigration levels are fed into back into future population growth estimates, then councils would have even more reason not to consent more land for housing.

Eaqub also questions the link between population growth and housing affordability. Population growth has been very low over the last two years, yet the number of building consents issued have reached historically high levels – something you might not expect with forecasts of lower population growth.

He believes things like the number of houses being built relative to population are much more based on the political appetite for investment in infrastructure.

“I think all the evidence on housing is that it doesn’t matter if it’s high [population growth] or low, we just suck at building houses.”

Source: Immigration ‘reset’ could link migrant numbers to building consents, and tightly limit migration

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‘They’re Authoritarians, Dammit!’ Art Spiegelman On the School Board That Cancelled ‘Maus’

2022/02/14 Leave a comment

Worth noting:

In the four decades since Art Spiegelman began Maus, the graphic novel has sold millions of copies, won a Pulitzer Prize, and secured a place in the Western canon. The book communicates the history of the Holocaust through the history of his family— Polish Jews, who are rendered as mice, sent to death camps by Nazis, who are rendered as cats. Maus is taught in thousands of schools, including, until recently, to eighth-graders in Tennessee’s McMinn County, where the local school board voted 10-0 on Jan. 10 to remove it from the middle school curriculum. With predictable results.

Already alert to a flurry of previous efforts to remove titles deemed inappropriate by state and local politicians—including a Texas state lawmaker’s demand that every school district “investigate” some 850 books dealing with race or sexuality—liberals smelled a rat. Public school curriculums feature prominently in the culture wars that many Republicans are hoping to ride to electoral victory. Progressives may argue for an unvarnished instruction of U.S. history, but in Maus, one member of the McMinn County school board found “it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it.”

“Who’s the snowflake now?” Spiegelman shot back in one interview.

The cartoonist, who turns 74 on Feb. 15, spoke to TIME the morning after headlining a webinar that had attracted an audience of 17,000 before crashing the Facebook page of the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga, which had hosted the conversation along with an array of Tennessee clergy, rabbis, and local activists Spiegelman found so enlightened and reasonable he said he might “have to jettison my caricatured notion of them all as Lil’ Abner-style hillbillies.”

TIME: How much are we dealing with caricatures here?
Art Spiegelman: Well, we’re dealing with everything from vile, racist and antisemitic caricatures to caricatures of what children are. And on the other end of the spectrum, maybe caricatures the way Walt Kelly and Herb Blockapplied them.

Have you ever been to eastern Tennessee?
Never.

You read the minutes of the meeting?
Yes I did. Several times.

What do you think is actually going on?
That’s what left me so filled with flop sweat before the conversation last night, because I kept veering back and forth. Am I just a total Pollyanna naive idiot? Or are these people really idiots? Or are they actually sinister forces that have gathered to, like, kill America for their own profit? Or what are they? I don’t know to what degree they’re genuinely out to destroy America and to what degree they’re actually just like I the metaphor I used last night: If you saw somebody like a psycho killer, strangling a loved one of yours, and you couldn’t reach that person to stop them. And your only response was, “God, did you see the fingernails on that creep’s hands? They’re dirty.”

Do you think it would help to meet the people?
Through bulletproof glass, yeah.

We refer to it as a ban. Is it a ban?
It’s not banned in its broadest meaning, but it is a ban of sorts to use authority to keep people from things. Yes, it’s a ban. And yet it’s not a book burning.

The board later put out a statement that their decision “does not diminish the value of Maus as an impactful and meaningful piece of literature.” Do you take them at their word?

I don’t know. That’s where I started this conversation with you. I don’t know. I don’t know. Did they rewrite their minutes to get rid of all the terrible things actually said to each other in order for us to sanitize the meeting minutes, two or three weeks later? How would I know? My guess is that what they did was the law of the land still is based on the 1982 decision that you can ban things further affect young minds and whatever but you can’t on the basis of content. So they focus on how terrible it was to see what they described as a nude woman—what I saw as the naked corpse of my mother in the bathtub having slashed her wrists in that bathtub. And to call her nude, it made me angry. Naked, which means a kind of vulnerable lack of covering, is enough to get you livid, because look, what do they want me to show, like her upside down in the bathtub? Or wearing a bathrobe splattered with blood in the bathtub? Which didn’t make any sense. They didn’t want to show it. And that was a problem.

I just can’t tell to what degree this carried water for more whacked out people than they are, the ones who really stand to profit from getting more charter schools in the area that teach religion, thereby taking money away from a public education that needs far, far more to do its job well. I don’t know. So we’ll have to see how this plays out. I don’t think I’ve changed and hearts and minds. What this thing last night did show is that caricatures aren’t the way through unless you really know how to use them. It’s like these people that I met last night are wonderful … talking about building bridges rather than blowing bridges up.

Some of the people in the webinar appeared quite pleased. Was that because they have a battle that has been joined?
Yeah. They’re fighting not to burn the book burners or whatever, but really trying to make some kind of bridge—although I think it might be a bridge too far—it’s such an admirable thing to do. They’re better people than I am. I tried to rise to the occasion. But the caricature thing is: caricatures can be used be used to subvert themselves, you know, like the caricature of reducing Nazis and Jews to Cats and Mice. But by showing the caricatures as masks with humans underneath it, and pointing to that more and more as the book goes on, dissolves whatever their caricature is by creating a kind of self-destructing metaphor. But you’re play with dynamite when you’re playing with caricature.

It’s such a personal book. Is the offense personal?

Yes. Because when they’re really most focused on me yelling at my father when he destroyed my mother’s diary and finally confessed to it. I say something like “God damn you, murderer, you murdered her a second time!” The memories that she had managed to preserve for me, because what she said when she was young ,when she died, reoccur, and were destroyed so my cursing is there. And I’m cursing at my mother. I’m calling her a bitch, in the confusion of finding out that my mother had just died that day by killing herself. And there’s a a turmoil, there’s a turmoil of remembering my early childhood, of what the reasons might be, ranging from premenopausal depression to life in the camps damaging her so badly.

That I felt was a little place they had really focused. But why? Because I believe, they were upset that I was breaking the commandment to honor thy father and mother. And that was usurping their authority. They’re all parents. They don’t want their kids talking to them like that, thank you. Authority is what they like the most. They’re authoritarians, dammit.

The board’s attorney said the book could be salvaged if the author approved “extensive edits,” like whiting out “bitch.” Maybe we should just put in “blintz” or “bagel.” Make for a more wholesome Jewish cultural experience.

You have a long history with censorship, right? The Comics Code?
The Comics Code is what made me. Yes, the burning of comic books literally in the 40s and 50s by teachers, clergyman, parents. There were several bonfires across the country. I have a photo of one in Binghamton, N.Y., where I was in college till I got kicked out. That was an important moment because comics had been perceived as being for children, although adults—certainly, GIs, and young women who read true romance magazines were reading romance comics—were probably reading them more than children. But it was focused on the same thing these school board people focused, on we have to protect the children as opposed to educate them, and not let them actually follow their fantasies.

But those comic books that they were burning were pretty far out there and getting more far out as they lead into the more adult audience. You know, the horror comics and some of the very lurid images in many of those comics more and more were among the comics I love the most, because they were kind of on the edge of the forbidden, because they were showing me things to their most exaggerated. And I love those comics, the horror comics. And mainly the horror comics companion from the same publisher:MAD. If there was one of these Citizen Kane biographies about me, like the rosebud at the end would be a copy of MAD comics.

This controversy has boosted sales, hasn’t it?
I think enormously. I haven’t seen it yet. But you know the cynical side of this is like: “Oh man you just got to get your book banned, it’ll really do wonders.” I can envision a future in which there are book galleys going out to people saying publication date, April 5, ban date May 1 .

I didn’t need the uptick in sales. Maus has been really selling steadily since 1986, when the first volume came out, even more so after it won the Pulitzer Prize. I didn’t need to boost my income. It’ll give me more money to donate to things like voter registration.

But the other thing about the forbidden is that it’s it’s it’s always richer if you have to sneak it right? I had to hide MAD magazine from my mom.

As my friend oldest, closest friend, who is now dead, would say, there was a point where he had to hide MAD inside a school book, and a point where he had to hide MAD inside his copy of Playboy.

Which you’ve also worked for, as the school board noted.
Yes, they sure did note it! The roster of authors who have appeared there probably are on their banned list. They include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Shel Silverstein. It’s an honorable company to be in, even though I understand how Playboy hasn’t aged well in our current moment. Great one to be able to throw at me.

Source: ‘They’re Authoritarians, Dammit!’ Art Spiegelman On the School Board That Cancelled ‘Maus’

Filed under Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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