Poilievre says Canada needs ‘more people leaving than coming’

2025/07/16 Leave a comment

Of note:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says for the next couple of years “we need more people leaving than coming” into Canada.

On Monday, Poilievre was asked by Global News to clarify his June comments calling for “severe limits on population growth.

“In order to fix the problem we’ve got to put very hard caps on immigration levels. We need more people leaving than coming for the next couple of years,” said Poilievre at a news conference in Ottawa. “So our country can actually catch up.”

 Poilievre said this move could help housing, health care and jobs “catch up,” but he did not elaborate on how he would ensure more people leave the country.

“We’ve had population growth of roughly a million a year under the Liberals while we barely built 200,000 homes. Our job market is stalled and yet we are adding more people to the workforce,” said Poilievre.

“Our young people are facing generational highs in unemployment because the jobs are, multinational corporations are giving jobs to low wage temporary foreign workers.”…

Source: Poilievre says Canada needs ‘more people leaving than coming’

And the Globe editorial commenting on his remarks:

…Mr. Poilievre would take a different approach by applying a “hard rule” in which population intake does not exceed the growth in the housing stock, the job market and the availability of doctors.

There is merit to that approach, although the emphasis should be on using permanent residency as a tool to ease shortages of specific skills, such as doctors. The focus of any effort to reduce the weight of migration on housing and social services should be squarely on temporary residents. 

Re-establishing public confidence in the immigration system means restricting temporary foreign workers to areas where there simply aren’t Canadians able and willing to take a job, such as in the agriculture sector. Permits for other businesses should, for the most part, be denied. If those firms cannot operate without the subsidy of indentured labour, then they do not have a viable business model.

Federal and provincial governments must return the international student program to its former role of recruiting highly qualified students from around the world who will make excellent candidates to become permanent residents once they graduate. As this space has repeatedly argued, those students should be limited to on-campus work.

And the government must follow through on its proposals to end the abuses of the asylum system.

Mr. Poilievre’s proposed formula needs work, but the idea is at least a recognition that immigration targets in recent years have been arbitrary – and a big part of the reason that Canadians are losing faith in the system.

Source: Let’s focus on the right fix for immigration

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Republicans renew a bid to remove noncitizens from the census tally behind voting maps

2025/07/16 Leave a comment

Yet again, for partisan advantage:

Republicans in Congress are reviving a controversial push to alter a key set of census numbers that are used to determine how presidents and members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected.

Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says the “whole number of persons in each state” must be included in what are called apportionment counts, the population numbers based on census results that determine each state’s share of House seats and Electoral College votes for a decade.

But GOP lawmakers have now released three bills this year that would use the 2030 census to tally residents without U.S. citizenship, and then subtract some or all of them from the apportionment counts. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee unveiled the latest bill Monday.

Any attempt to carry out the unprecedented exclusion of millions of noncitizens from the apportionment counts of the 2030 census is likely to undermine the head count’s accuracy and face legal challenges, as the first Trump administration did in its failed push for similar changes for the 2020 census.

How the three bills would reshape election maps for Congress and president

More than a year ago, the GOP-controlled House narrowly passed a bill to leave out noncitizens from apportionment counts, though a divided Congress ultimately stymied that push. The current Republican trifecta, however, has opened up the possibility of getting similar legislation over the finish line.

The latest measure in Congress is a funding bill that would ban the Census Bureau from including noncitizens without legal status in the 2030 apportionment counts. A House Appropriations subcommittee is set to vote Tuesday on whether to advance the bill.

The other two bills — one reintroduced in June by Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and another in January by Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina — call for a broader group to be left out: all noncitizens, including green-card and visa holders.

None of the bills take issue with the counting of noncitizens in the overall census numbers that are used to distribute trillions in federal funding to local communities for public services each year.

Source: Republicans renew a bid to remove noncitizens from the census tally behind voting maps

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Courts unlikely to provide fifth extension to Ottawa to address Lost Canadians before November, says immigration lawyer

2025/07/15 Leave a comment

Extension unlikely to be needed as adequate time in fall session. Government should improve C-3 by adding a time limit of five-years to meet the 1,095 day physical presence requirement, not the current open ended provision (the Don Chapman specific airline pilot example in contrast to the vast majority of likely applicants):

Parliament needs to “just get on with it” and address the issue of “lost Canadians” through amendments to the Canada Citizenship Act, according to Jenny Kwan, NDP critic of citizenship and immigration.

She told The Hill Times that she wonders if a judge would have the patience to grant the federal government a fifth extension on a court order requiring action before the current November deadline.

“This is astounding. What the current situation is right now is that Canada’s Citizenship Act,
with respect to lost Canadians, is in violation of the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms], and [Bill
C-3] will make it Charter-compliant,” said Kwan (VancouverEast, B.C.).

“I don’t know how much patience [the judge] will have to continue to see delays in the
passage of the bill to make it Charter-compliant.”

Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab (Halifax West, N.S.) tabled Bill C-3, an Act to amend the Citizenship Act (2025), in the House on June 5. The House rose for the summer on June 20, pausing the bill’s progress until Sept. 15, when the next parliamentary sitting begins.

If passed, the bill would reverse a change to the Citizenship Act made by then-Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in 2009 that introduced a “first-generation limit” when it came to citizenship status. Since that 2009 amendment, a Canadian citizen who was born outside of Canada cannot pass citizenship status on to their child if that child was also born or adopted outside the country.

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice declared in December 2023, that the first-generation limit was unconstitutional on the grounds that it unjustifiably limited mobility and equality rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At that time, the Court gave the federal government a deadline of six months to fix the law through legislation. This deadline was later extended on four occasions, with the current deadline set as Nov. 20, 2025.

Kwan described Bill C-3 as “a significant piece of legislation that needs to be done,” in an interview with The Hill Times. The bill is nearly identical to the former Bill C-71, which was introduced in May 2024, but died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued on Jan. 6, 2025.

Kwan argued that a Conservative filibuster in the fall sitting that delayed progress in the House contributed to death of Bill C-71. “Basically, nothing got through, and [Bill C-71] also died on the order paper. So, in this round, it will depend on whether or not the Conservatives will continue to play political games ahead of lost Canadians,” said Kwan.

The Hill Times reached out to Conservative MPs including citizenship and immigration critic
Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill, Alta.) and Brad Redekopp (Saskatoon West, Sask.), a member of the House citizenship committee, but did not receive a response by deadline.

Bill C-3 would amend the Citizenship Act to automatically grant Canadian citizenship to anyone who would be a citizen today were it not for the first-generation limit. The bill would also introduce a “substantial connection test” for Canadian citizens born outside of Canada who wish to pass on citizenship to their children born abroad. Going forward, the bill would allow access to citizenship beyond the first generation, so long as the parent has spent at least 1,095 cumulative—not necessarily consecutive—days in Canada prior to the birth of their child.

Redekopp told the House on June 19 that Conservatives have significant issues with Bill C-3, and criticized the substantial connection test of 1,095 non-consecutive days as “not substantial at all.”

“It is a very weak way to commit to being a Canadian citizen and then to confer that citizenship onto children. It is not a real test of commitment because the days do not have to be consecutive,” Redekopp told the House. “Also, people need to understand the current situation in our country. They need to live here to understand how things are and some of the issues we have right now in our country … People do not know that if they are living in another country.”

Kwan argued that objections to the non-consecutive 1,095-day minimum don’t make sense.

“Take, for example, a person who’s a pilot, right? You travel all the time. You could be a seond-generation born and you’re a pilot. You fly out of Canada regularly as a pilot, and then that means you’re leaving Canada all the time. So, does that mean to say that they can never get a Canadian citizenship? That doesn’t make any sense at all,” she said.

“You have to recognize the fact that we live in a global society now. Canada is a global country, and people move. You have to make sure that is addressed in such a way that fits the times of today.”…

Source: Courts unlikely to provide fifth extension to Ottawa to address Lost Canadians before November, says immigration lawyer

Filed under C-3, Citizenship Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Krugman: Making Immigration Great Again

2025/07/15 Leave a comment

Good take:

…In any case, however, it seems to me that the lie is beginning to unravel as it becomes clear that ICE is having a really hard time finding violent immigrants to arrest.

According to the Miami Herald, only around a third of the people being held in “Alligator Alcatraz” — a cute name, but it’s a concentration camp, pure and simple — have any kind of criminal conviction.

Why aren’t they rounding up more undocumented criminals? Because that would be hard work, and anyway there aren’t that many of them. Morris did a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that there may in total be only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and 14,000 convicted of violent crimes. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is demanding that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day. Do the math, and you see why they’re grabbing farm workers and chasing day laborers in Home Depot parking lots.

So Americans may be turning on Trump’s immigration policies in part because they’re starting to realize that they’ve been lied to. But an even more important factor may be that more native-born Americans are beginning to see what our immigrants are really like, rather than thinking of them as scary figures lurking in the shadows.

It’s a familiar point that views of immigration tend to be most negative in places with very few immigrants and most positive in places where there are already many foreign-born residents. You can get fancy about why that’s true, but I would simply say that if you live in a place like New York, where you’re constantly interacting with immigrants, they start to seem like … people.

And the Trumpies — for whom, as Adam Serwer famously observed, the cruelty is the point — are inadvertently humanizing immigrants for Americans who don’t have that kind of daily experience. The nightmarish ordeal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has probably done more to highlight the humanity of immigrants, documented or not, than any number of charts and tables. And while some Americans are instinctively cruel, most are, I believe, instinctively decent.

Will the public backlash against Trump’s immigration policies force ICE to stand down? Probably not, although the courts may at least slow the mass arrests. Business may also have a say, as labor shortages disrupt agriculture, construction and more.

In any case, however, harsh anti-immigrant policies are looking like a political loser, not a winner.

Source: Making Immigration Great Again

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McWhorter: It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’

2025/07/15 Leave a comment

Makes sense given recent immigration from Africa in contrast to descendents of the slave trade:

I’m no fan of performative identity politics, and I think racial preferences are long past their expiration date. Yet I don’t think the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani did anything wrong when, as was reported last week, he checked off “Black or African American” on a college application. As a man of South Asian descent who spent the first part of his life living in Uganda, he was within his rights to call himself African American. The problem is that the term appeared on the application, or anywhere else. Plenty of Black people have never liked it, and ever more are joining the ranks. It’s time to let it go.

“African American” entered mainstream circulation in the late ’80s as a way to call attention to Black people’s heritage in the same way that terms like “Italian American” and “Asian American” do for members of those groups. The Rev. Jesse Jackson encouraged its usage, declaring: “Black does not describe our situation. In my household there are seven people and none of us have the same complexion. We are of African American heritage.” In 1989 the columnist and historian Roger Wilkins told Isabel Wilkerson: “Whenever I go to Africa, I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I’ve had all these years.”

Since that time, the United States has seen an enormous change in immigration patterns. In 1980 there were about 200,000 people in America who were born in Africa; by 2023 there were 2.8 million. So today, for people who were born in Africa, any children they have after moving here and Black people whose last African ancestors lived centuries ago, the term “African American” treats them as if they are all in the same category, forcing a single designation for an inconveniently disparate range of humans.

Further complicating matters is that many Africans now living here are not Black. White people from, for example, South Africa or Tanzania might also legitimately call themselves African American. As for the community that Mamdani grew up in, it dates back to at least the late 19th century, when South Asians were brought to Uganda to work as servants for British colonizers. “Mississippi Masala,” the movie for which Mamdani’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, is perhaps best known, tells the story of South Asian Ugandans expelled from the country in 1972 by the dictator Idi Amin. Feeling just as dislocated from the only home they had ever known as I would feel if expelled from the United States, they would be quite reasonable in viewing themselves as African Americans after settling here.

A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly.

And not just silly but chilly. “African American” sounds like something on a form. Or something vaguely euphemistic, as if you’re trying to avoid saying something out loud. It feels less like a term for the vibrant, nuanced bustle of being a human than like seven chalky syllables bureaucratically impervious to abbreviation. Italian Americans call themselves “Italian” for short. Asian Americans are “Asian.” But for any number of reasons, it’s hard to imagine a great many Black Americans opting to call themselves simply African.

To the extent that “African American” was designed to change perceptions of what “Black” means, it hasn’t worked. The grand old euphemism treadmill has done it in. Again and again we create new terms hoping to get past negative associations with the old ones, such as “homeless” for “bum.” But after a while the negative associations settle like a cloud of gnats on the new terms as well, and then it’s time to find a further euphemism. With no hesitation I predict that “unhoused person” will need replacement in about 2030.

At an earlier point in its life cycle, “African American” could at least be argued to have an air of pride and lineage, free of any historical association with inferiority. Back in the day you could imagine it sung to the same melody as Alexander Hamilton’s name is in the opening song to the musical about him: “A-le-XANder HA-mil-ton”; “A-fri-CAN a-MER-i-can.” But these days “African American” and “Black” strike the same note.

In 2020, when a Black man in Central Park asked a white woman to leash her dog, she dialed 911, warning him, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” There was nothing euphemistic in the way she used that term.

But all along we’ve had a perfectly good word to describe Black people: Black. We should just use that.

Black power! Yeah. But African American power? Do we imagine Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone explaining how it feels to be “Young, Gifted and African American”? And would we want to?

Let Mamdani and other people — of all shades — born in Africa or about a generation past it call themselves African Americans. But here, over centuries, descendants of African slaves have become something else — and proudly, I hope. In American parlance, we are Black. And proud. And (you knew it was coming) say it loud.

“Black is beautiful.” Yes. Truly, “African American” isn’t.

Source: It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’

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Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Ban Faces New Peril: Class Actions

2025/07/14 Leave a comment

Of note:

When the Supreme Court ruled in President Trump’s favor two weeks ago in a case arising from his efforts to ban birthright citizenship, he called the decision “a monumental victory.”

But the victory may turn out to be short-lived.

To be sure, the 6-to-3 ruling severely limited a key tool federal trial judges had used in checking executive power — universal injunctions that applied not only to the plaintiffs but also to everyone else affected by the challenged program nationwide.

But the justices made clear that another important tool remained available — class actions, which let people facing a common problem band together in a single lawsuit to obtain nationwide relief.

The differences between the two procedures may at first blush seem technical. But universal injunctions have long been criticized across the ideological spectrum as a judicial power grab without a basis in law. Class actions, on the other hand, are an established mechanism whose requirements are set out in detail in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Judge Joseph N. Laplante, a federal judge in New Hampshire, embraced class actions on Thursday, opening a new front in the battle to deny Mr. Trump’s effort to redefine who can become a citizen. The move was also a new sign that Mr. Trump’s win at the Supreme Court may turn out to be less lasting than it at first appeared.

The judge provisionally certified a class of all children born to parents who are in the United States temporarily or without authorization. Then he entered a preliminary injunction in their favor barring the enforcement of Mr. Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship. It applied nationwide.

That means Mr. Trump’s executive order, which has never come into effect and may never will, remains blocked. The ban would upend the conventional understanding of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

A White House spokesman called Judge Laplante’s ruling “an obvious and unlawful attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s clear order against universal relief.”

But the court’s decision specifically contemplated the alternative, and it gave challengers 30 days to pursue it and other options….

Source: Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Ban Faces New Peril: Class Actions

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Canadians in ICE detention centres left in legal limbo as families try to secure release

2025/07/14 Leave a comment

Likely first of many comparable cases:

Relatives of Canadians detained by ICE in the United States say they’re furious and frustrated by the treatment of their loved ones and the battles they’re having to fight for even the most basic information. 

Global Affairs Canada said it’s aware of roughly 55 Canadians in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, though it said that the numbers can fluctuate. 

Cynthia Olivera — born in Mississauga, Ont., but living in Los Angeles — was arrested last month when she and her husband went to an immigration office to complete an interview for her U.S. citizenship application. Paula Callejas of Montreal was in the process of finalizing a work visa when she was arrested for a misdemeanor — and then transferred to an ICE facility…

Source: Canadians in ICE detention centres left in legal limbo as families try to secure release

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Bernhard: Canada’s most valuable import is talent – we need more of it

2025/07/14 Leave a comment

Not the more, but the who:

…A confident Canada would stop dwelling on arbitrary immigration targets and instead recruit people who have solved the very challenges we’re currently stuck on, in whatever numbers are required. Fundamentally, we have a mindset problem. We’re stuck in the antiquated paradigm where hardscrabble immigrants arrive with $5 in their pockets and build good lives upon hard work and Canadian generosity. In this paradigm, immigration is a favour we do for immigrants. 

But today’s truth is that immigration is one of Canada’s top three talent development pathways, alongside our education system and our innovation industries. We often fault immigrants for lacking Canadian experience, while ironically overlooking the pre-Canadian experience they have in solving the precise problems we face.

Canada is a great country, but we face many serious challenges. Talented people around the world have solved our problems – only they’ve done it elsewhere. They know how to do what we don’t. We can build a strong, sovereign Canada by recruiting them to play for our team. 

Source: Canada’s most valuable import is talent – we need more of it

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How US views of immigration have changed since Trump took office, according to Gallup polling

2025/07/12 Leave a comment

Impact of Trump administration over reach and repressive policies:

Just months after President Donald Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.

During Democratic President Joe Biden’s term in office, negative views of immigration had increased markedly, reaching a high point in the months before Trump, a Republican, took office. The new Gallup data suggests U.S. adults are returning to more pro-immigrant views that could complicate Trump’s push for sweeping deportations and other anti-immigration policies. The poll shows decreasing support for the type of mass deportations Trump has championed since before he was elected. 

Since taking office, Trump has called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to do all in its power to deliver “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” His administration has also pushed to limit access to federal benefits for immigrants who lack legal status, sought to revoke the citizenship of immigrants who commit crimes and is working to end birthright citizenship for children born to those without legal status or who are in the country temporarily….

Source: How US views of immigration have changed since Trump took office, according to Gallup polling

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Sullivan: Trump’s Deportation Stormtroopers

2025/07/12 3 Comments

Accurate take:

….I cite all this not to diminish any of today’s awfulness, but to see it more clearly. We have been a brutal deportation nation long before our Trumpian 21st Century gambit. What’s different now, it seems to me, are four things: the sheer scale of it; the frantic pursuit of quantity over quality; the relative paucity of resources for courts and judges; and the fact that the enforcers are anonymous, masked, and unknowable — and will soon be on every street in America.

ICE will now have more resources than all but 15 countries’ military budgets, and is set to grow from an annual budget of $10 billion to $150 billion over four years. This is a ramp up of mind-boggling size and speed. Some of it will be helped by deputizing the military to some tasks, including, as we saw in Los Angeles this week, performative acts of intimidation. Garrett Graff notesthe inevitable result of such spurts;

“Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. … [We’ll likely see] a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.”

And indeed the evidence of such recruits exists. From a recent ICE jobs fair:

“I spoke to a gregarious New York police officer who was fed up with patrolling Times Square and all “the savages” there. Another applicant said he was sick of installing office furniture in properties subleased by the United States Marines.”

And the order is now a simple one: arrest and detain as many as you can: old, young, criminal, lawful, children, those who have lived here for decades with no incident — alongside drug traffickers. Child rapists alongside landscapers. Gang members alongside church regulars. And the percentage of violent criminals is quickly dwindling — only 8 percent of all detainees this year, according to CBS.

Miller is demanding that ICE beat Obama’s record of 438,421 removals in one year, by any means necessary. In fact, he wants Operation Wetback’s numbers in one year rather than ten. Trump’s daily quota was initially 1,800; then Miller pushed it to 3,000; and now Tom Homan says, “Do the math, we have to arrest 7,000 every single day for the remainder of this administration just to catch the ones Biden released into the nation.” And that’s a sky-high goal made much, much, much harder when there are so few deportations at the Southern border. No wonder ICE officers are drained.

Resources to speed up trials and shorten detentions by adding more immigration courts and judges? A mere $3.3 billion. A 2023 analysis by the Congressional Research Service found we need more than 1,300 judges to make progress on the backlog of cases. But the bill actually caps the numberat 800. You mean we could process deportations too quickly? E-Verify is off the table. So what this policy represents is actually a dramatic increase in the backlog of cases, meaning ever-more arrests, and ever-more people in custody, for ever-more years. Why, one wonders? Why not make real progress on the backlog in the courts, and leave less need for mass detention?

And those tasked with enforcing all this will be anonymous. That is utterly new — and a deeply authoritarian and un-American development. Thousands of men and women with the power to seize anyone off the street will have no faces, no badges, no identification, and often no uniform. We are told the reason for this is that the families of the “brave” ICE officers can be doxxed by enraged citizens and potentially harassed or threatened. In the words of one officer:

“We wear masks not to scare people, but to protect our families. If our faces are known, our children and spouses could be threatened at school, at church, or even at the grocery store.”

But this logic applies to every single law enforcement officer anywhere — to anyone in public anywhere — and yet only the ICE officers get to look like Putin’s thugs. If cops can’t wear masks, and must have ID, neither should ICE cops. Threats to and assaults of them — 79 incidents this year out of a workforce of 20,000, we’re told — can and should be strongly prosecuted. But masks have to go. If we’re going to call ICE officers brave, then showing their faces in public is the least they can do. …

America not as a shining city on a hill, nor as a republic diligently enforcing its immigration laws as humanely as possible. But as a potential gulag for the ages. 

Source: Trump’s Deportation Stormtroopers

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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