Dave Chappelle, Transphobia And Anti-Semitism

2021/11/17 Leave a comment

Interesting take and contrast:

Dave Chappelle’s alma mater, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Georgetown, first cancelled his fundraiser for the school and then changed their minds and postponed him to late April. Now they have announced that they are still going to name their theater after him.

It’s easy to see what’s going on here. Chappelle has been a loyal alum to the Duke Ellington School and has donated lots of money to it. But he spoke quite a bit about transgendered people in his last Netflix special, “The Closer”, and many people consider his jokes transphobic. Students at Duke Ellington complained and threatened to protest the fundraiser. The school’s first instinct was to mollify the most vocal students and cancel Chappelle. But it didn’t want to kill the golden goose and is hoping that by April the controversy will have died down enough that they can have the fundraiser, avoid too much controversy and not alienate Dave Chappelle.

Hypocrisy reigns supreme over this entire situation. The school is obviously triangulating desperately to balance its desire for Chappelle’s money with its desire to avoid controversy.

There is no indication that they might consider this a teaching moment. There is a genuine discussion to be had about whether “The Closer” is transphobic. The word itself is clumsy and inaccurate. Phobias are fears and Chappelle certainly isn’t afraid of trans people. He does believe that gender is matter of biology. He says that: “every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth.” So, he doesn’t believe that a trans woman, who can’t give birth, is a woman in the same sense as a woman with a uterus, birth canal, etc. Obviously, trans women who are incapable of giving birth but deeply believe themselves to be women strongly object to what he said, and they have every right to do so. He also makes a joke comparing trans genitals to plant-based meat substitutes and it’s easy to understand why many trans individuals find this hurtful.

But this doesn’t automatically make Chappelle afraid of trans people or hateful towards them. Many people are confused by the idea of women with penises and men with vaginas. Joking about it isn’t the same thing as spreading hate or fear. The worst thing anybody can do to another group (short of violence of course) is to dehumanize them. Chappelle does the opposite of that. He has a long segment about a trans woman comedian, Daphne Dorman, whom he invited to open for his act in San Francisco. Dorman defended Chappelle against charges of transphobia, writing: “Punching down requires you to consider yourself superior to another group. He doesn’t consider himself better than me in any way. He isn’t punching up or punching down. He’s punching lines. That’s his job and he’s a master of his craft.”

Dorman got mauled on social media for defending Chappelle and ended up committing suicide. No one can know for sure if the criticism is what drove her to take her own life, but Chappelle paints a rich portrait of her and makes the point that hate against a trans person can take many forms. It’s not always obvious who is “punching up” and who is “punching down”. When a social mob gangs up on a vulnerable person, Chappelle believes that they are victimizers even if many are trans persons themselves. One can agree or disagree with this, but his point merits discussion, not boycotts, and certainly not the craven hypocrisy of the Duke Ellington School.

The left’s obsession with “punching up” and “punching down” leads to another form of hypocrisy as well—it’s blindness towards anti-Semitism (unless it comes from the political right). In the same show, Chappelle makes a joke about making a movie called “space Jews” in which the Jews come back from an unsuccessful venture into outer space and now want to conquer Earth and take it back. The idea that Jews want to rule the world is an old anti-Semitic trope and a very harmful one. And Chappelle certainly doesn’t balance it with any warm and empathetic stories about Jewish people he knows. It is anti-Semitism served straight up. Yet, outside of the Jewish press, this blatantly anti-Semitic joke produced almost no reaction.

The point isn’t that Chappelle is necessarily ant-Semitic. He may have been trying to put the audience on edge. After the joke he said “it’s gonna get worse than that, hang in there.” The point is that, because the left thinks of Jews as being on top of the power hierarchy, they don’t react to a dehumanizing joke about Jews being alien invaders bent on taking over the world. Because they see trans people as lacking power, they paint a simplistic picture of Chappelle as phobic and hateful. An argument can certainly be made that, despite the warm portrait of a trans woman comedian, Chappelle’s show is harmful to transgendered people. That’s a great discussion to have. But the silence over raw anti-Semitism while Chappelle is simplistically vilified over his jokes about transgender people shows that we need more dialogue and fewer cancellations.

Source: Dave Chappelle, Transphobia And Anti-Semitism

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Canada is refusing more study permits. Is new AI technology to blame?

2021/11/16 Leave a comment

Given the high volumes (which immigration lawyers and consultants benefit from), expanded use of technology and templates inevitable and necessary, although thorough review and safeguards necessary.

Alternate narrative, given reporting on abuse and exploitation of international students and the program itself (The reality of life in Canada for international students), perhaps a system generating more refusals has merit:

Soheil Moghadam applied twice for a study permit for a postgraduate program in Canada, only to be refused with an explanation that read like a templated answer.

The immigration officer was “not satisfied that you will leave Canada at the end of your stay,” he was told.

After a third failed attempt, Moghadam, who already has a master’s degree in electronics engineering from Iran, challenged the refusal in court and the case was settled. He’s now studying energy management at the New York Institute of Technology in Vancouver.

His Canadian lawyer, Zeynab Ziaie, said that in the past couple of years, she has noticed a growing number of study permit refusals like Moghadam’s. The internal notes made by officers reveal only generic analyses based on cookie-cutter language and often have nothing to do with the particular evidence presented by the applicant.

“We’re seeing a lot of people that previously would have been accepted or have really what we consider as complete files with lots of evidence of financial support, lots of ties to their home country. These kinds of files are just being refused,” said Ziaie, who added that she has seen more than 100 of these refusals in her practice in the past two years.

It’s a Microsoft Excel-based system called Chinook. 

Its existence came to light during a court case involving Abigail Ocran, a woman from Ghana who was refused a study permit by the Immigration Department.

Government lawyers in that case filed an affidavit by Andie Daponte, director of international-network optimization and modernization, who detailed the working and application of Chinook.

That affidavit has created a buzz among those practising immigration law, who see the new system — the department’s transition to artificial intelligence — as a potential threat to quality decision making, and its arrival as the harbinger of more troubling AI technology that could transform how immigration decisions are made in this country.

All eyes are now on the pending decision of the Ocran case to see if and how the court will weigh in on the use of Chinook. 

Chinook was implemented in March 2018 to help the Immigration Department handle an exponential growth in cases within its existing, and antiquated, Global Case Management System (GCMS).

Between 2011 and 2019, before everything slowed down during the pandemic, the number of visitor visa applications skyrocketed by 109 per cent, with the caseload of applications for overseas work permits and study permits up by 147 per cent and 222 per cent, respectively.

In 2019 alone, Daponte said in his affidavit, Canada received almost 2.2 million applications from prospective visitors, in addition to 366,000 from people looking to work here and 431,500 from would-be international students.

Meanwhile, the department’s 17-year-old GCMS system, which requires officers to open multiple screens to download different information pertaining to an application, has not caught up. Each time decision-makers move from screen to screen they must wait for the system to load, causing significant delays in processing, especially in countries with limited network bandwidth.

Chinook was developed in-house and implemented “to enhance efficiency and consistency, and to reduce processing times,” Daponte said.

As a result, he said, migration offices have generally seen an increase of between five per cent and 35 per cent in the number of applications they have been able to process.

Here’s how Chinook works: an applicant’s information is extracted from the old system and populated in a spreadsheet, with each cell on the same row filled with data from that one applicant — such as name, age, purpose of visit, date of receipt of the application and previous travel history.

Each spreadsheet contains content from multiple applicants and is assigned to an officer to enable them to use “batch processes.”

After the assessment of an application is done, the officer will click on the decision column to prompt a pop-up window to record the decision, along with a notes generator if they’re giving reasons in the case of a refusal.

(An officer can refuse or approve an application, and sometimes hold it for further information.)

When done, decision-makers click a button labelled “Action List,” which organizes data for ease of transfer into the old system. It presents the decision, reasons for refusal if applicable, and any “risk indicators” or “local word flags” for each application.

The spreadsheets are deleted daily after the data transfer for privacy concerns.

While working on the spreadsheet, said Daponte, decision-makers continue to have access to paper applications or electronic documents and GCMS if needed.

“Chinook was built to save decision-makers time in querying GCMS for application information and to allow for the review of multiple applications,” Daponte noted.

However, critics are concerned that the way the system is set up may be guiding the officers toward certain conclusions, giving them the option of not reviewing all the material presented in each case, and that it effectively shields much of the decision making from real scrutiny.

According to Daponte’s court affidavit, the notes generator presents standard language that immigration officers may select, review and modify to fit the circumstances of an application in preparing reasons for refusal. The function is there to “assist them in the creation of reasons.”

Ziaie believes that explains the templated reasons for refusals she’s been seeing.

“These officers are looking at a spreadsheet of potentially 100 different applicants. And those names don’t mean anything to the officers. You could mix up rows. You could easily make errors,” said the Toronto lawyer.

“There’s no way to go back and check that because these decisions end up with very similar notes that are generated right when they’re refused. So my concern is about accountability. Every time we have a decision, it has to make sense. We don’t know if they make mistakes.”

That’s why she and other lawyers worry the surge of study permit refusals is linked to the implementation of Chinook. 

In fact, that question was put to Daponte during the cross-examination in the Ocran case by the Ghanaian student’s lawyer, Edos Omorotionmwan.

Immigration data obtained by Omorotionmwan showed the refusal rate of student permit applications had gone from 31 per cent in 2016 to 34 per cent in 2018, the year Chinook was launched. The trend continued in 2019 to 40 per cent and reached 53 per cent last year.

“Is there a system within the Chinook software requiring some oversight function where there is some other person to review what a visa officer has come up with before that decision is handed over to the applicants?” asked Omorotionmwan.

“Within Chinook, no,” replied Daponte, who also said there’s no mechanism within this platform to track if an officer has reviewed all the support documents and information pertaining to an applicant’s file in the GCMS data.

“This idea of using portals and technology to speed up the way things are done is the reality of the future,” said Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Will Tao, who has tracked the uses of Chinook and blogged about it.

“My concern as an advocate is: who did this reality negatively impact and what systems does it continue to uphold?”

Tao said the way the row of personal information is selected and set out in the Chinook spreadsheet “disincentivizes” officers to go into the actual application materials and support documents out of convenience.

“And then the officers are supposed to use those notes generators to justify their reasoning and not go into some of the details that you would like to see to reflect that they actually reviewed the facts of the case. The biggest problem I have is that this system has had very limited oversight,” he said.

“It makes it easier to refuse because you don’t have to look at all the facts. You don’t have to go through a deep, thoughtful analysis. You have a refusal notes generator that you can apply without having read the detailed study plans and financial documents.”

He points to Chinook’s built-in function that flags “risk factors” — such as an applicant’s occupation and intended employer’s information — for inconsistency in an application, as well as “local flag words” to triage and ensure priority processing of time-sensitive applications to attend a wedding or a funeral.

Those very same flag words used in the spreadsheet can also be misused to mark a particular group of applicants based on their personal profiles and pick them out for refusals, said Tao.

In 2019, in a case involving the revocation of citizenship to the Canadian-born sons of two Russian spies, the Supreme Court of Canada made a landmark ruling that helps guide judges to review the decisions of immigration officials.

In the unanimous judgment, Canada’s highest court ruled it would be “unacceptable for an administrative decision maker to provide an affected party formal reasons that fail to justify its decision, but nevertheless expect that its decision would be upheld on the basis of internal records that were not available to that party.”

Tao said he’s closely watching how the Ocran decision is going to shed light on the application of Chinook in the wake of that Supreme Court of Canada ruling over the reasonableness standard.

“Obviously, a lot of these applications have critical points that they get refused on and with the reasons being template and standard, it’s hard for reviewers to understand how that came to be,” he said.

In a response to the Star’s inquiry about the concerns raised about Chinook, the Immigration Department said the tool is simply to streamline the administrative steps that would otherwise be required in the processing of applications to improve efficiency.

“Decision makers are required to review all applications and render their decisions based on the information presented before them,” said spokesperson Nancy Caron.

“Chinook does not fundamentally change the way applications are processed, and it is always the officer that gives the rational for the decisions and not the Chinook tool.”

For immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo, Chinook is another step in the Immigration Department’s move toward digitalization and modernization.

Ottawa has been using machine learning technology since 2018 to triage temporary resident visa applications from China and India, using a “set of rules derived from thousands of past officer decisions” then deployed by the technology to classify applications into high, medium and low complexity.

Cases identified as low complexity and low risk automatically receive positive eligibility decisions, allowing officers to review these files exclusively on the basis of admissibility. This enables officers to spend more time scrutinizing the more complex files.

Chinook, said Bellissimo, has gone beyond the triage. He contends it facilitates the decision-making process by officers.

The use of templated responses from the notes generator makes the refusal reasons “devoid of meaning,” he noted.

“Eventually, do you see age discriminators put into place for study permits when anyone over the age of 30 is all automatically streamed to a different tier because they are less likely bona fide students? This is the type of stuff we need to know,” Bellissimo explained.

“When they’re just pulling standard refusal reasons and just slapping it in, then those decisions become more difficult to understand and more difficult to challenge. Who made the decision? Was technology used? And that becomes a problem.”

He said immigration officials need to be accountable and transparent to applicants about the use of these technologies before they are rolled out, not after they become an issue.

Petra Molnar, a Canadian expert specializing in migration and technology, said automated decision-making and artificial intelligence tools are difficult to scrutinize because they are often very opaque, including how they are developed and deployed and what review mechanisms, if any, exist once they are in use.

“Decisions in the immigration and refugee context have lifelong and life-altering ramifications. People have the right to know what types of tools are being used against them and how they work, so that we can meaningfully challenge these types of systems.”

Ziaie, the lawyer, said she understands the tremendous pressure on front-line immigration officers, but if charging a higher application fee — a study permit application now costs $150 — can help improve the service and quality of decisions, then that should be implemented.

“They should allocate a fair amount of that revenue toward trying to hire more people, train their officers better and give them more time to review the files so they actually do get a better success rate,” she said. “By that, I mean fewer files going to Federal Court.”

As a study permit applicant, Moghadam said it’s frustrating not to understand how an immigration officer reaches a refusal decision because so much is at stake for the applicant.

It took him two extra years to finally obtain his study permit and pursue an education in Canada, let alone the additional application fees and hefty legal costs.

“Your life is put on hold and your future is uncertain,” said the 39-year-old, who had a decade of work experience in engineering for both Iranian and international companies.

“There’s the time, the costs, the stress and the anxiety.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/11/15/canada-is-refusing-more-study-permits-is-new-ai-technology-to-blame.html

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Blow: The Impact of the Browning of America on Anti-Blackness

2021/11/16 1 Comment

Likely similar in Canada:

One of the things I often hear as a person who frequently writes about race, ethnicity and equality, is that the browning of America — the coming shift of the country from mostly white to mostly nonwhite — is one of the greatest hopes in the fight against white supremacy and oppression.

But this argument always flies too high to pay attention to the details on the ground. For me, white supremacy is only one foot of the beast. The other is anti-blackness. You have to fight both.

The sad reality is, however, that anti-blackness — or anti-darkness, to remove the stricture of a single-race definition for the sake of this discussion — exists in societies around the world, including nonwhite ones.

In too many societies across the globe, where a difference in skin tone exists, the darker people are often assigned a lower caste.

And, when people migrate to this country from those societies, they can bring those biases with them, underscoring that you don’t have to be white to contribute to anti-blackness.

A fascinating report issued this month by the Pew Research Center explored colorism in the Hispanic community and underscored how anti-blackness, or anti-darkness, is no respecter of race or ethnicity. It is pervasive and portends a future in which the browning of America does not succeed in wiping away its racial prejudices.

First, the report reaffirmed what we all know to be true: A majority of Hispanic adults, regardless of skin tone, report experiencing discrimination.

But dark-skinned Hispanics reported far more discrimination than light-skinned ones.

The survey allowed Hispanics to select the skin tone closest to their own on a 10-point scale. Eighty percent of respondents chose the four lightest tones, which the report identified as light-skinned, but only 15 percent chose the six darker skin tones, which the report identified as dark-skinned. Others chose not to answer.

The survey found that:

“A majority (62 percent) of Hispanic adults say having a darker skin color hurts Hispanics’ ability to get ahead in the United States today at least a little. A similar share (59 percent) say having a lighter skin color helps Hispanics get ahead. And 57 percent say skin color shapes their daily life experiences a lot or some, with about half saying discrimination based on race or skin color is a “very big problem” in the U.S. today.”

Intolerance wasn’t only coming from outside the Hispanic community, but also from within it. Nearly half of the Hispanic adults surveyed said that they have often or sometimes heard a Hispanic friend or family member make comments or jokes about other Hispanics and about non-Hispanics “that might be considered racist or racially insensitive.” Dark-skinned Hispanics reported these incidents at a higher rate than light-skinned Hispanics.

When it came to how much attention was paid to racial issues in this country, a majority of Hispanics, understandably, said too little attention is paid to race and racial issues concerning Hispanics. A plurality also said that too little attention is paid to race and racial issues nationally.

But a plurality said too much attention was paid to issues concerning Black people.

This is troubling. Concern over racial issues isn’t a zero-sum game. There should be more concern for all groups and less of a belief that some are receiving too little and others too much.

These issues around how darker-skinned people of all races and ethnicities are perceived and treated must be addressed. This is in part because we are racing toward a future in which the share of minorities who are dark-skinned will only be a fraction.

By 2065, it is projected that not only will Asian Americans outnumber African Americans, but there will also be nearly twice as many Hispanics in the country as Black people.

As I have mentioned before, I worry that white supremacy could be replaced with a light supremacy, a society in which light-skinned people are still advantaged and dark-skinned people are still oppressed, even as the white majority recedes.

Interestingly, in the Pew report, respondents who identified as Hispanic, Latino or of Spanish origin were asked their race and told that for the purposes of the race question, “Hispanic origins are not races.” They could pick more than one race. According to the report, 58 percent identified as white. (Actual census datafound that dramatically fewer identified as white.)

I have seen some encouraging allyship between Black and brown people in my lifetime. Just last year, following the murder of George Floyd, a Pew survey found that an even higher percentage of Hispanics than Black people said that they had participated in protests.

But these groups have different histories with oppression in this country and different ongoing relationships with it. Pew found in 2015 that “immigration since 1965 has swelled the nation’s foreign-born population from 9.6 million then to a record 45 million.” The vast majority of that growth obviously happened after the Civil Rights Movement.

We must all recognize these differences and confront them in honest and deliberate ways. Colorism and racism are cousins, and both are a pestilence.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/14/opinion/latinos-colorism-anti-blackness.html

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Soccer stars, technocrats among those granted Saudi citizenship

2021/11/16 Leave a comment

Apart from the propagandist language (“wise leadership”) interesting to note Saudi priorities and how they define “exceptional:”

Three leading Saudi football players as well as a number of technocrats and eminent academics are among those who were granted Saudi citizenship following a royal order issued by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman on Thursday, Saudi Gazette has learned from well informed sources. This was in recognition of their outstanding contributions and distinguished services to Saudi Arabia in their respective fields.

Saudi Arabia has decided to grant citizenship to a selected number of expatriates with distinguished talents, unique expertise and specialized skills in a number of key professions such as medicine, industry, energy, agriculture, geology, space, aviation and artificial intelligence. The initiative emanates from the wise leadership’s ambitious drive to attract top world-class professionals to these vital sectors.

Saudi Arabia needs such top standard professions to supervise the Kingdom’s development march in those vital areas where it wants to achieve and consolidate its leadership and expertise par excellence. This will facilitate these professionals to contribute vigorously to the nation’s development march and initiatives to diversify its sources of income and spurring its robust economic growth.

The great initiative is aimed at supporting to achieve the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 goal to create an environment that enables attracting, investing in and retaining professionals with exceptional creativity and talent.

The following are the prominent professionals who were granted citizenship. They include three football stars, who all were born in the Kingdom and represented the national team several times.

It is noteworthy that the decision to grant citizenship to those who made outstanding contributions in sports to benefit from the country’s children who grew up on its land and imbibed its culture, after many of them left and started serving countries of their origin.

The list of distinguished persons who were granted citizenship also included some top professionals in the fields of technology and various branches of science.

Abdulfattah Adam

Abdulfattah Adam is a professional footballer who plays as a striker for Al-Nasr Club in the Saudi League, and represented Saudi Arabia’s national team in many matches. Born on Jan. 1, 1995, in Saudi Arabia, he is a famous Association Football Player. Abdulfattah is also listed among famous people born on Jan. 1, and one of the richest celebrities born in Saudi Arabia.

Mukhtar Ali

Mukhtar Ali is a professional footballer who plays as midfielder for Al-Nasr and the Saudi Arabian national football team. He was born in Saudi Arabia, and was a professional in the English Premier League at Chelsea, and contributed to Saudi Olympic team’s qualification to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. In 2008, Ali joined Chelsea and was part of the Chelsea youth side, which recorded back to back triumphs in the FA Youth Cup in 2015 and 2016. Later in 2017, Ali joined the Dutch club Vitesse and later became part of Al-Nasr team.

Haroune Camara

Haroune Moussa Camara is a professional football player who plays as striker for Al-Ittihad in the Saudi Professional League. Born on Jan. 1, 1998 in Saudi Arabia, he represented the Saudi national team at the youth and Olympic level, and was selected more than once for the camp of Saudi national team.

Dr. Manahel Thabet

Dr. Manahel Abdulrahman Thabet is an internationally-acclaimed mathematics and finance expert. She is the youngest and only Arab with a PhD in Financial Engineering. She writes research papers on quantum mathematics. Her work to revolutionize understanding of math and physics is poised to earn her a second PhD at the age of 32.

She is one of the rare Arab women to have entered the field of Quantum Mathematics, and currently her research has been adopted by several American universities for development purposes. In the year 2000 she attained the “Excellence of Global International Environmental and Humanitarian Award.”

She was also recognized as “The Woman of the Year 2000” by “Woman Federation for World Peace.” In December 2010, Dr. Thabet was awarded L’Officiel Women Of the Year, Inspiration Women Of the year award.

Dr. Thabet is the vice president of the World Intelligence Network, and supervisor of the Arabian Intelligence Network. She is an active member of MENSA, Young Arab Leaders, and the International Association of Financial Engineers.

This is all in addition to her day job as President of SmartTips Consultants, a company offering management consultancy, feasibility studies, strategic planning advice and crisis management to the business community. She is also a columnist and an economic researcher in many leading financial publications.

Omar Mounes Yaghi

Omar Mounes Yaghi is in the field of advanced research as a chemist currently working at the famous Lawrence Berkeley Research Center and a chemistry professor at the University of California Berkeley.

Born in Jordan to a Palestinian family, Yaghi pioneered a new field known as reticular chemistry. He is the founding director of the Berkeley International Institute for Science, which offers educational programs to people who would otherwise not have access to them. Yaghi has established several laboratories in different universities.

He has been awarded numerous accolades including the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science, and Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal International Prize. He received the US Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Program Award.

Ihab Khalil

Ihab Khalil is an expert in corporate finance and investment strategies and his experience in financial consultancy spans 20 years. He had his higher education at the American University of Beirut. He has experience in closed-end stocks, corporate finance, investment strategies and evaluating and structuring investments. Khalil has been a managing director and partner of management consultant giant Boston Consulting Firm for the last five years.

Asif Sajid

Asif Sajid has held many leadership positions in consulting and financial services companies. His work in the field contributed to the digital strategies of several Saudi ministries and government agencies, including ministries of justice, human resources, and commerce. An expert in digital technologies, Sajid has contributed to the formation of strategic programs for a number of government agencies. He served as the head of the public sector and financial services for the consulting company KPMG. He is currently the CEO of Raz Group in Riyadh

Source: Soccer stars, technocrats among those granted Saudi citizenship

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Big rise in Irish citizenship decisions this year after streamlining

2021/11/16 Leave a comment

Small numbers but recovery from COVID impact of note:

The Department of Justice is “on track” to make 11,000 citizenship decisions this year, despite the administrative difficulties created by the Covid-19 pandemic, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee has said.

The department made only 5,159 decisions last year, down significantly on 2019 (9,332) and 2018 (11,139). However, new temporary processes were introduced in January.

A number of changes to streamline the application process, and to facilitate immigration movements over the Christmas period, have been announced by Ms McEntee.

From January 1st, new applicants for citizenship will not be required to submit their original passport with their initial application. Instead they can submit a full colour copy of their entire passport, including the front and back covers, witnessed by a solicitor.

“I know that this change in practice will be very much welcomed,” Ms McEntee said. “They may need their passport to travel to see family or friends abroad, something many of us have not have been able to do for a long time due to Covid-19.”

The department is to introduce measures to streamline the system in January, including measures aimed at helping doctors working in the HSE or the voluntary hospitals in relation to proof of residence.

People who are entitled to receive a new Irish Residence Permit card may use their current expired card to enable them to depart from and return to Ireland over Christmas and until January 15th, 2022, the Minister said. The re-entry visa requirements for children under the age of 16 are also being suspended during this period.

“This will benefit up to 6,000 children and their families,” she said.

A residence permit card that was in date at the beginning of the pandemic in March of last year now has its validity period extended to January 15th.

Anyone travelling during this time will be able to print a copy of the travel confirmation notice provided by the department and display it with their existing card to show proof of residence when returning to Ireland.

The department is engaging with airline carriers to notify them of this new arrangement and to ensure that the process runs smoothly, the Minister said.

Source: Big rise in Irish citizenship decisions this year after streamlining

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Boswell: The dark flip side of Canada’s oldest English coin

2021/11/15 Leave a comment

Good reminder to be more inclusive in reporting such discoveries and include the historical context:

The discovery in Newfoundland of what appears to be the oldest English coin ever found in Canada certainly does “spark the imagination,” as a provincial government press release noted this week.

But there’s also been a failure of imagination in communicating the significance of this 525-year-old artifact dug up at Cupids Cove Plantation Provincial Historic Site, settled in 1610 after a series of English expeditions to the region over the previous century.

Yes, it’s true: As those heralding the find have noted, this silver relic — a two-penny piece believed to have been minted in Canterbury between 1493 and 1499 — symbolizes a landmark moment in the history of European colonization in Canada.

It features the likeness of King Henry VII, who championed English exploration of the “new founde land” and paid sailors to “serche and fynde” the fabled territory across the Atlantic, bring it under his control and spread Christianity to the New World.

However, there’s a flip side to every coin. And in this era of long-overdue reckoning with the Indigenous history of North America and the often-violent dispossession of First Peoples, the province shouldn’t trumpet the unearthing of such an archeological prize without at least acknowledging the dark side of history that’s also associated with it.

Specifically, in this case, that’s the forced retreat of the Beothuk inhabitants of Newfoundland from coastal sites in the face of the 17th-century English settlement of the island, and their eventual extinction.

The vanishing of the Beothuk is one of the great tragedies of Canadian history. Does recognition of this sorrowful outcome of East Coast colonization complicate an otherwise super-cool, time-machine tale about archeologists digging up a coin at Cupids Cove stamped with the visage of the first Tudor king?

Yes, it’s now a more complicated story. Much more. Or we could say the narrative has just become more layered, more comprehensive, more balanced — and more true.

Along with a sense of awe about the efforts of early English colonizers to gain a toehold in Canada centuries ago, we now also need to consider what the coin represented to the millennia-old Beothuk civilization, and what news of the coin’s discovery this year might mean to present-day Indigenous people.

I was a national reporter for many years with a history buff’s fascination for archeological discoveries shedding light on Canada’s past. I wrote many stories in a voice of breathless enthusiasm that, in hindsight, should have been told with a more reflective tone, a deeper awareness of what milestone moments in the European “discovery” and settlement of the Americas would have meant to the people who had already been living here for countless generations.

Granted, that’s not how such discoveries were typically framed by scholars, museums and governments in past decades. But in 2021, just weeks after Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we are in the midst of an ongoing transformation in the way historians shape stories, curators construct exhibitions, and governments manage controversies over street names, memorials and other landmarks of historical commemoration.

In short, across the country in recent years, there’s been an ever-strengthening push to bring other, overlooked, often-obliterated sides of Canada’s history into official depictions of the past.

In recent weeks, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador has taken important steps to rename “Red Indian Lake” – henceforth to be called Beothuk Lake – and erect a statue honouring the disappeared nation outside the provincial legislature.

But genuine reconciliation means going beyond symbolic gestures and reframing many of our historical narratives – at least enough to acknowledge the ultimate impact of contact-era settlements on the Indigenous peoples encountered during the European colonization of the lands that became modern Canada.

In other words, why rename a lake and build a statue to pay tribute to the Beothuk if other historical narratives perpetuate their erasure?

The old coin, to be sure, is an amazing find that tangibly, evocatively recalls “the story of the early European exploration in the province and the start of English settlement,” as Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism Minister Steve Crocker put it in Wednesday’s formal announcement.

But that’s not the only tale it tells. Celebrating the discovery of the coin and extolling its value as a long-lost, newly-found symbol of European exploration and English settlement leaves a glaring gap in the storytelling.

The province’s press release on the find — and, predictably, the subsequent news coverage — makes no mention of the fallout for the Beothuk of England’s colonization of Newfoundland. It’s like all those local history books filling the shelves of Canadian libraries that begin the biography of this county or that township with an account of the day the first white settler arrived in the place, chopped some trees and pitched a tent circa 1820 — as if First Peoples hadn’t already been there for many thousands of years.

There is a lesson here for all governments and all politicians across Canada. If they’re serious about healing relationships with the country’s Indigenous peoples, high-profile gestures of reconciliation must be matched by routine, sincere adjustments in the way they understand, frame and talk about history — especially in the context of the European age of exploration and so-called discovery.

Historians and archeologists, heritage officials and Indigenous leaders, teachers and multiculturalism advocates, municipalities and historical societies — these and many other individuals and groups in Canada are already engaged in difficult discussions about how to rewrite and rejuvenate the nation’s history, to rediscover the many voices and experiences that have traditionally been pushed into the shadows of the country’s past.

The last known Beothuk, a young woman named Shawnadithit, died in 1829. Her aunt, Demasduwit, survived an 1819 kidnapping attempt that left her husband and newborn child dead. But she died in 1820 after helping to create a record of the Beothuk language, and a painted portrait of her held by Library and Archives Canada remains an iconic image of a lost people.

The Newfoundland discovery of the coin stamped with a 15th-century king’s face is exciting and important. But it also illuminates a largely forgotten face of Canada’s history.

Randy Boswell is a Carleton University journalism professor and a former national reporter with Postmedia News.

Source: The dark flip side of Canada’s oldest English coin

Filed under Aboriginal Tagged with , , ,

Switzerland – Voting rights: ‘The foreign community is too big to be ignored’

2021/11/15 Leave a comment

One of the most restrictive approaches:

One in three Swiss residents is not allowed to take part in national elections and votes. In most cases that’s because they don’t have Swiss citizenship. How does it feel to live in the country that holds the most referendums in the world without being able to vote?

 “I’ve lived in several countries, but my experience in Switzerland is the first time I’ve been directly confronted with a situation where other inhabitants make decisions about my life and my welfare,” says Estefania Cuero, who has an Ecuadorian and a German passport and has lived in Switzerland for four years. “This is very new to me – and sometimes, very unpleasant.”Cuero, a diversity consultant and doctoral candidate at the University of Lucerne, says specific issues are behind that feeling. “The vote on the burqa ban [passed in March by 51.2% of voters] really affected me. I felt unwelcome – even though I don’t wear a niqab and I’m not Muslim. But for me the message behind it was: ‘We don’t want to see anyone here who looks foreign’.

The purpose of direct democracy is to involve the population in political decision-making. But regular referendums and people’s initiatives repeatedly reveal who does not belong to the electorate.

Of Switzerland’s resident population of about 8.7 million, around 35% are not allowed to vote at a national level.

“You often hear ‘Switzerland has voted’ or ‘Switzerland has decided’,” Cuero says. “But if 35% aren’t allowed to vote, then a statement like that is problematic, maybe even wrong. It’s not Switzerland but very specific individuals or a group that can decide for others and therefore exercises power over other groups that belong to Switzerland.”

The biggest group of people excluded from decisions on national issues is foreigners. Switzerland takes the same approach as almost all other countries on this. Only four countries in the world allow non-citizens to vote at a national level: Chile, Uruguay, New Zealand and Malawi. But in Switzerland the question of participation for foreign residents is more pressing than in other countries because the proportion of foreigners is high: roughly a quarter of permanent residents are not Swiss.

This can lead to strange situations. At the 2019 federal elections the municipality of Spreitenbach in northern Switzerland was home to as many adult foreigners as people with voting rights. The electorate accounted for only 39% of the population. What’s more, the turnout in Spreitenbach was very low, so only 10% of all residents took part in the elections.

For a very long time another huge segment of society was excluded from democratic representation: women. “The share of foreign residents has reached dimensions that can no longer be ignored,” says Sanija Ameti, co-president of the pro-European Operation Libero movement.

Ameti was three when her parents fled from Bosnia to Switzerland. When she was young, a number of people’s initiatives, usually launched by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, concerned migration policy and often stirred up sentiment against the Balkan diaspora.

“My parents and I had no voice in these votes even though we were directly affected by them. It was extremely frustrating, because we had no choice but to put up with the xenophobic and anti-Muslim politics,” Ameti says, adding that this was one of the reasons she entered politics.

“The mass immigration initiative politicised me,” says Hendrik Jansen, who was born, raised and educated in Switzerland. Today he works in public administration and can’t voice his opinion in public, so we have changed his name.

In 2014 Swiss voters narrowly approved a proposal to curb immigration, imposing limits on the number of foreigners allowed into the country.

Jansen emphasises that as a Dutchman he has an easier time than other migrants. “People rarely have issues with northern Europeans,” he says. “When I say where I come from, the response is often: ‘You’re one of the good ones!’ But the law doesn’t care about that: a tighter law on deportation, for example, affects everyone without a passport equally.

Voting rights as a means of integration?

Jansen, who is active in clubs and does voluntary work, could vote if he adopted Swiss citizenship. So why doesn’t he? “On the municipal level, at the very least, citizenship shouldn’t be a prerequisite,” he says. “If I’m engaged in society, I should be able to vote.”

He thus addresses one of the key arguments put forward by advocates for foreigners’ voting rights: residents without a Swiss passport take part in community life and pay taxes in Switzerland – why shouldn’t they be able to vote on what happens with that money?

They are directly affected by Swiss laws, so why should one section of the population be denied a say in rules it must obey? At the same time, Switzerland guarantees the right to vote to one group of people who neither pay taxes in Switzerland nor are directly affected by most of the laws: Swiss expatriates.

Even if Jansen wanted to become Swiss, it would take a while. He recently moved – only a few kilometres away, but into a new municipality. That means any application for citizenship would have to wait several years.

Ameti, on the other hand, did gain Swiss citizenship and is an active politician in the Liberal Green Party. “I was lucky to be able to apply for citizenship in the city of Zurich,” she says. “The citizenship process is not as fair everywhere – in some municipalities people are subjected to real harassment.”

Ameti thinks the idea of integration via political participation should be revived. The example of Jens Weber shows that this can work.

Weber lives in the northeastern municipality of Trogen, one of the few villages in German-speaking Switzerland that recognises foreigners’ right to vote (see box). As an American, he was elected to the local council in 2006. “It was one of the best days of my life, when I went to Trogen in 2006 and could say ‘right, now I can join in!’” he said in an SWI swissinfo.ch panel discussion. “This experience had a major impact on me and convinced me that I wanted to become a Swiss citizen,” he says.

Diversity taken for granted

However, a possible reform of the voting or naturalisation laws is not the only decisive factor in the fair treatment of the many Swiss residents without citizenship.

“What’s needed is an honest discussion about what and who Switzerland is,” Cuero says. “We need Switzerland’s self-image to mirror the diversity of this society.”

“Anyone who insists there is a single defining Swiss culture should explain the Rösti ditch to me,” says Jansen, referring to the linguistic divide between the French- and German-speaking parts of the country. “The Swiss are not all the same. There are differences between them that are not necessarily smaller than the differences between a Swiss person and a foreigner.”

Source: Voting rights: ‘The foreign community is too big to be ignored’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Bouchard: L’interculturalisme, indifférent au social?

2021/11/15 1 Comment

More Quebec diversity debates with the unfortunate mischaracterization of multiculturalism in opposition to interculturalism whereas in reality, the practical differences are nuanced (multiculturalism allows one to integrate into either French or English, interculturalism into French):

C’est un plaisir d’échanger avec un interlocuteur comme Marco Micone. Son engagement en faveur du Québec est bien connu, ses analyses sont toujours pertinentes et ses avis méritent attention. Dans son texte paru dans l’édition du Devoir des 23 et 24 octobre, il soulève à propos de l’interculturalisme une critique que d’autres ont déjà formulée, mais il le fait d’une façon particulièrement bien articulée.

Sa critique principale, c’est que l’interculturalisme québécois, tel que proposé, donnerait dans le culturalisme. Il accorderait donc une nette préséance aux facteurs culturels (et ethniques) aux dépens et même dans l’ignorance d’autres facteurs, principalement tout ce qui se rattache au social. C’est la première objection. Selon la deuxième, l’interculturalisme en viendrait ainsi à masquer la réalité concrète des hommes et des femmes dans leur vie quotidienne. Selon une troisième objection, il faudrait centrer l’attention non pas sur les différences, mais sur « l’humanité » que partagent ces hommes et ces femmes — « on ne peut pas parler de culture italienne, algérienne, haïtienne ou autre au Québec ».

En quatrième lieu, l’interculturalisme est accusé de proposer une conception abstraite et statique des cultures et de « ne pas tenir compte du contexte qui les détermine et les nourrit ». Enfin, les propositions et explications soumises par le modèle ne déborderaient pas la sphère culturelle.

Voici comment je réponds à ces cinq objections, à la lumière de la définition que j’ai déjà donnée de l’interculturalisme (notamment dans mon ouvrage de 2012).

En ce qui concerne la première critique, nous savons que depuis quelques décennies, au Québec comme dans plusieurs sociétés, le racisme se nourrit moins de traits physiques que de caractéristiques culturelles (les Noirs sont paresseux, les musulmans, fondamentalistes, les Mexicains, violents, etc.). On reconnaît là un fondement de diverses pratiques discriminatoires bien connues. Voilà un exemple où le culturel est intimement lié au social. Un autre exemple a trait au rapport majorité-minorité. Encore là, l’analyse culturelle révèle des systèmes de perceptions favorisant la domination et l’exclusion. Dans ce cas, l’interculturalisme invite à examiner une configuration démographique et le rapport de pouvoir inégal qui lui est associé.

Des modèles préétablis

À propos du deuxième argument, ce sont bien sûr les comportements des hommes et des femmes qui sont en définitive déterminants, ceux des membres de la société d’accueil comme ceux des immigrants. Mais les premiers seront incités à reproduire (souvent inconsciemment) les préconceptions que je viens d’évoquer alors que les seconds devront les confronter pour s’en défendre. La sociologie a bien établi que les individus inventent rarement leurs conduites. Ils obéissent ou réagissent le plus souvent à des modèles préétablis, des modèles relativement stables que les acteurs perpétuent par leurs comportements.

La troisième objection appelle une nuance importante. Encore une fois sur la base de nombreuses études, il paraît peu contestable que, parmi les populations immigrantes, il subsiste pendant longtemps assez d’éléments de la culture d’origine pour parler de différences ethnoculturelles. C’est justement parmi ces différences que se trouvent les traits servant de prétextes au racisme. Il importe donc d’y porter attention. En même temps, bien évidemment, on doit se garder de figer ces traits dans des carcans culturels dont l’immigrant n’arrive plus à se défaire — c’est l’une des principales critiques adressées au multiculturalisme. Ainsi, au gré des contacts, des échanges et des choix de chacun dans la vie quotidienne, une culture commune prend forme — une culture québécoise (c’est aussi ce que pense Marco Micone).

Quatrièmement, affirmer que l’interculturalisme propose une vision abstraite et statique des cultures, hors de leur contexte, c’est lui faire un faux procès. Je dirais même que ce type de préoccupation est au cœur du modèle. Sur ce point, j’aurais apprécié que l’auteur produise quelques références.

Cinquièmement, Marco Micone affirme que l’interculturalisme ne rend pas compte des disparités économiques et des affinités de classes. Il a raison, mais ce ne sont pas là ses objectifs propres. Il est par contre inexact d’affirmer qu’il s’en désintéresse. Certes, il ne prétend pas les expliquer, mais il en tient compte assurément, dans la mesure où ces réalités pèsent sur les possibilités et modalités de l’intégration et ses aléas.

Enfin, on aura compris que, dans mon esprit, l’interculturalisme ne prétend nullement « expliquer le sort et le comportement des individus par la culture, au mépris des déterminants sociaux ». Je soutiens cependant qu’il existe une composante culturelle inhérente aux performances scolaires, à la déviance et à la pauvreté (je reprends ici le texte de l’auteur), ce qui a été bien établi par une longue tradition de recherche. Il va de soi, par ailleurs, que la culture n’est qu’une composante parmi d’autres.

Pour toutes ces raisons, j’affirme que, si on veut comprendre le culturel, on ne peut éviter de porter attention au social. Et vice-versa.

Je remercie Marco Micone de m’avoir donné l’occasion d’apporter ces clarifications.

Source: L’interculturalisme, indifférent au social?

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Document suggesting students learn positive aspects of Nazi Germany deleted by Alberta education officials

2021/11/15 Leave a comment

Striking that the document dates from 1984 with multiple revisions without anyone noticing or taking action:

A document that suggested Alberta students learn about the positive aspects of Nazi Germany has been deleted from the Ministry of Education’s website, following criticism from multiple groups.

The document, a set of guidelines for “recognizing diversity and promoting respect,” suggested considering whether a given educational resource addressed “both the positive and negative behaviours” of various groups.

“For instance,” it read, “if a video details war atrocities committed by the Nazis, does it also point out that before World War II, German government’s policies substantially strengthened the country’s economy?”

Source: Document suggesting students learn positive aspects of Nazi Germany deleted by Alberta education officials

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Pakistan: When Databases Get to Define Family

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Good long and interesting read:

“ERROR: UNMARRIED MOTHER” flashed across the computer screen as 30-year-old Riz began the process of renewing his Pakistani Computerized National ID Card (CNIC), a compulsory identification document that functions like a social security number, driver’s license, and passport all rolled into one. Riz’s parents have been married for 31 years, but the database did not agree; there was no way to proceed without this validation check. Every visit to the registration office ended with an officer saying, “Sorry, sir, the computer doesn’t allow it.”

Without a renewed CNIC, Riz could not even buy a bus ticket. In Pakistan, access to sectors and services as diverse as telecom, banking, health records, social welfare, voting, and employment have all been made contingent on having a verified record with the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA).

Riz’s identity validation problem was not caused by a glitch in the system. The requirement of having two married parents is, instead, an example of the social judgments encoded within Pakistan’s digital ID database design. It turned out that, to avoid taking on her husband’s family name, Riz’s mother had never updated her marital status with NADRA. In the analog Pakistan of the early 1990s, she had gotten by without issue. Thirty years later, social expectations had become embedded into databases, and Riz would be unable to access basic services unless a query on his mother’s marital status returned “TRUE.”

Riz’s experience tells the larger story of how Pakistan chose to structure its digital ID system. The system places each individual within a comprehensive digital family tree. Digital households are built up of pre-encoded, socially and legally approved relationships, and can be connected to other households through similar socially and legally approved relationships. Each registered individual is required to prove ties of blood or marriage to another verified Pakistani citizen. Marriages (state-approved) create a link between two households, and children (only through marriage) create a continuing link with both households’ genealogies.

Pakistan’s experience with creating databases that encode kinship reveals important lessons about the complexities of building digital ID systems. Database design is not just computational. At every step, social, political, and technical decisions coalesce.

Source: When Databases Get to Define Family

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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