US Black Farmworkers Say They Lost Jobs to Foreigners Who Were Paid More

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Seems like a clear case of displacement of long-term farmworkers by temporary foreign workers, ironically and disgracefully African Americans replaced by white South Africans:

For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa.

He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been around farming all my life,” Mr. Strong said. “It’s all we knew.”

Black families with deep connections to the Delta have historically been the ones to perform fieldwork. That began to change about a decade ago, when the first of dozens of young, white workers flew in from South Africa on special guest worker visas. Mr. Strong and his co-workers trained the men, who by last year were being lured across the globe with wages of more than $11 an hour, compared with the $7.25 an hour that Mr. Strong and other Black local workers were paid.

Growers brought in more South Africans with each passing year, and they are now employed at more than 100 farms across the Delta. Mr. Strong, 50, and several other longtime workers said they were told their services were no longer needed.

“I never did imagine that it would come to the point where they would be hiring foreigners, instead of people like me,” Mr. Strong said.

From the wheat farms in the Midwest to the citrus groves in California’s Central Valley, growers have increasingly turned to foreign workers as aging farmworkers exit the fields and low-skilled workers opt for jobs in construction, hospitality and warehouses, which offer higher pay, year-round work and, sometimes, benefits.

The agricultural guest worker program, known by the shorthand H-2A, was once shunned by farmers here and elsewhere as expensive and bureaucratic. But the continuing farm labor shortages across the country pushed H-2A visas up to 213,394 in the 2020 fiscal year, from 55,384 in 2011.

“Our choice is between importing our food or importing the work force necessary to produce domestically,” said Craig Regelbrugge, a veteran agricultural industry advocate who is an expert on the program. “That’s never been truer than it is today. Virtually all new workers entering into the agriculture work force these days are H-2A workers.”

In the Mississippi Delta, a region of high unemployment and entrenched poverty, the labor mobility that is widening the pool of fieldworkers is having a devastating effect on local workers who are often ill-equipped to compete with the new hires, frequently younger and willing to work longer hours.

The new competition is upending what for many has been a way of life in the rich farmlands of Mississippi. “It’s like being robbed of your heritage,” Mr. Strong said.

In Mississippi, where the legacy of slavery and racism has long pervaded work in the cotton fields, a federal lawsuit filed by Mr. Strong and five other displaced Black farmworkers claims that the new foreign workers were illegally paid at higher rates than local Black workers, who it said had for years been subjected to racial slurs and other demeaning treatment from a white supervisor.

Two additional plaintiffs are preparing to join the suit, which says farmers violated civil rights law by hiring only white workers from South Africa, a country with its own history of racial injustice.

“Black workers have been doing this work for generations,” said Ty Pinkins, a lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is representing the Black farmworkers in the lawsuit. “They know the land, they know the seasons, they know the equipment.”

A vast flood plain, the Mississippi Delta boasts some of the country’s richest soil. It also is the poorest pocket of the poorest state. In Indianola, a town of almost 10,000 about 95 miles north of Jackson, the median household income is $28,941.

The hometown of the blues legend B.B. King, Indianola is the seat of Sunflower County, where empty storefronts line forlorn downtowns and children play outside crumbling shacks.

The region, which is more than 70 percent Black, remains rigidly segregated. Black children attend underfunded public schools while white students go to private academies. Black and white families bury their dead in different cemeteries.

The Delta is only one of a number of places where South Africans have been hired for agricultural work in recent years. While Mexicans accounted for the largest share of last year’s H-2A visas, or 197,908 of them, the second-largest number, 5,508, went to South Africans. Their numbers soared 441 percent between 2011 and 2020.

Garold Dungy, who until two years ago ran an agency that recruited foreign farmworkers, including for Pitt Farms, the operation that employed Mr. Strong and the other plaintiffs, said South Africans represented the bulk of his business. They are “the preferred group,” he said, because of their strong work ethic and fluency in English.

Under the program, growers can hire foreign workers for up to 10 months. They must pay them an hourly wage that is set by the Labor Department and varies from state to state, as well as their transportation and housing.

Farmers must also show that they have tried, and failed, to find Americans to perform the work and they must pay domestic workers the same rate they are paying the imported laborers.

According to the Black workers’ lawsuit, Pitt Farms paid the South Africans $9.87 an hour in 2014, a rate that reached $11.83 in 2020. The plaintiffs who worked in the fields were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or $8.25 on weekends, plus occasional bonuses.

Both Walter Pitts, a co-owner of Pitts Farms, and the farm’s lawyer, Timothy Threadgill, declined to discuss the farm’s hiring strategy because of the pending litigation.

The reliance on South Africans may reflect the nature of agriculture and the demographics in the Mississippi Delta, compared with places like California.

“In the Mississippi Delta, row-crop production requires fewer workers but workers who have skills to use machinery and equipment,” said Elizabeth Canales, an agricultural extension economist at Mississippi State University. “We hardly have any Latinos in this remote region. Naturally, it’s easier to hire South Africans where language will not be a barrier, especially because in this area, you have a very small Spanish-speaking population.”

The South Africans arrived in the region willing to work weeks that sometimes stretched to 75 hours or more, grueling schedules that might have been difficult for older local workers to maintain, industry analysts said.

There was initially no public controversy over the program in Indianola. Growers in the region described the South Africans as “good workers,” said Steve Rosenthal, a three-term mayor of Indianola who lost his bid for re-election in October. Until the lawsuit was filed, he did not realize that some Black workers had been let go.

“If you have a man that you’ve trained and worked with for years and he knows how to get stuff done,” he said, “how in good conscience can you bring somebody over and pay him more than a man that’s been with you five, eight, 10 years?”

The Strong family has worked for generations for the Pitts family, which has farmed in the Mississippi Delta for six decades. Richard Strong’s grandfather Henry and grandmother Isadora worked their land. So did his father and his uncle.

Mr. Strong and his brother got hired in the 1990s; he eventually operated not only tractors, but big equipment like combines and cotton pickers. He mixed chemicals to control weeds and pests. He ran irrigation pivots in 19 fields, covering some 3,000 acres. He rose to manager, driving across the farm to verify that everything was in working order.

When he first heard that Africans were coming to work on the farm, about eight years ago, “I didn’t question it. I just went along doing my job,” he said.

But when four white men showed up, they were not the Africans he had expected. Even so, Mr. Strong said, the men, a good 20 years younger than him, were “cool guys.”

He taught the men how to properly plow, how to input GPS settings into the tractors’ navigation systems, how to operate the irrigation system so just the right amount of water was sprinkled on the crops.

Over the next few years, more South Africans came, until more than half the farm’s work force was there on foreign visas.

One of them was Innes Singleton, now 28, who learned about the opportunity to work in Mississippi from a friend in 2012.

He had recently finished secondary school and did not know what to do next.

He arrived in Indianola in early 2013, and is now earning $12 an hour, making in one week what would take a month for him to earn in South Africa, where the unemployment rate now exceeds 30 percent.

“I learned a lot here,” he said, adding that he sometimes had to work up to 110 hours a week. South Africans now do the main work on the farm, he said, and four locals “help us out.”

After the 2019 season, Mr. Strong traveled to Texas to visit his ailing father-in-law. When he returned, the Pitts Farm truck that he drove had disappeared from outside the house he had rented from the grower for about a year. He was told to vacate and was not offered work for the 2020 season.

A year later, others were let go, including his brother, Gregory, who said he had devoted much of his life to Pitt Farms.

“I gave them half my life and ended up with nothing,” he said. “I know everything on that place. I even know the dirt.”

Andrew Johnson, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is 66 and said he had worked 20 years at the farm.

“I used to work rain or shine or anything,” he said.

But before the 2021 season began, he said, one of the Pitts owners told him “he didn’t need me no more.”

Since the lawsuit was filed, other Black workers have come forward, saying they had labored in the fields and catfish farms of the Delta before unfairly losing their jobs, Mr. Pinkins, the lawyer, said.

In late October, as the harvesting season came to a close, eighteen-wheelers in Indianola rumbled down the highway, loaded with bales of cotton. Driving alongside the farm where he spent 24 years, Mr. Strong scanned the rows of neatly carved earth as far as the eye could see. “I put in all that,” he said, with a certain pride.

Then a tractor passed by, a young South African man at the wheel, and Mr. Strong looked away. “I miss working the land,” he said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/us/black-farmworkers-mississippi-lawsuit.html

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Saudi Arabia Gives Citizenship to ‘Outstanding’ Expats in Shift

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see who qualifies:

Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to an unspecified number of foreigners whose expertise could help the country as it diversifies away from oil, a major shift that follows a similar decision by the neighboring UAE earlier this year.

The program targets people with “outstanding capabilities” and backgrounds in “rare specialties,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported. The kingdom will focus on naturalizing foreigners in fields including Shariah, medicine, science, culture, sports and technology, “in order to strengthen the pace of development” and boost its attractiveness for investment and human capital, the agency said.

Saudi Arabia becomes the second Gulf country to formalize a process aimed at giving expatriates a bigger stake in the economy after the UAE announced its own naturalization program for exceptional foreigners in January.

It also underlines the kingdom’s growing competition with its neighbors for business and talent as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tries to expand non-oil sectors such as tourism and manufacturing.

Immigrants make up a third of the population in Saudi Arabia, but with extremely limited mechanisms for granting permanent residency or nationality, they have little long-term stability.

Even as officials work to attract more highly-educated foreigners, the government has been reserving for Saudis many jobs once occupied by lower-income immigrants from other Arab, Asian and African countries — part of an effort to tackle citizen unemployment of over 11%.

Source: Saudi Arabia Gives Citizenship to ‘Outstanding’ Expats in Shift

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

Canada forced these Japanese Canadians into internment camps. Now they’re at the same nursing home

2021/11/13 2 Comments

Good reminder of our history and the lasting memories:

Leaning forward in her wheelchair to look over a massive photo album, Sue Kai delves into memories from decades ago. Kai, 96, and her son, Brian, pore over snapshots of her past, some dating back to the moment her life was irrevocably changed.

Kai was 16 years old, and living with her family in the downtown Vancouver home her father built with his own two hands, when it happened.

“One Sunday everybody is going crazy: ‘Bomb bomb bomb bomb,'” said Kai. “I said, what’s a ‘bomb bomb bomb bomb?’ Then they said ‘Pearl Harbor.'”

Source: Canada forced these Japanese Canadians into internment camps. Now they’re at the same nursing home

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Australian comms agencies perceive diversity as not urgent

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Of note. Any views on how this compares with Canada?:

A new study by the Framework for Agency Inclusion and Representation (FAIR) and comms agency Think HQ showed that Australian comms agencies are falling behind on diversity practices. While awareness appeared to be high, qualitative findings showed that there were inconsistencies on knowledge and implementation in the workplace as well as in client work and advisory.

The survey, which used 131 responses from the country’s comms industry, found that while all respondents are quite aware of broader diversity and inclusion principles that initially focused on gender, many have limited understanding, much less a focus on cultural diversity. Most of them were aware of the cultural diversity of the Australian population, but do not see the urgency or importance of integrating it in their business operations enough to equate it with business success.

For example, one respondent suggested that they do not see integrating cultural diversity matters in their business as essential because “people are succeeding without it”. The respondent added: “We still seem to be progressing well adapting and being so people don’t see the urgency of the need.”

Another respondent said that diversity in the workplace is not a priority for them because it isn’t tied to their KPIs. Yet another respondent said that multiculturalism in comms work is ‘niche’ whether communicating to Australian-born audiences or residents with migrant backgrounds. “I don’t think it is so much about making your communication sharper for… culturally diverse audiences because they are too niche,” this person said.

In terms of hiring, the interviewees acknowledged the lack of communication practitioners with culturally diverse backgrounds. A few of them who recruited from England had the propensity to count those hires as part of the ‘culturally diverse’ cohort. A majority of respondents quoted that some 20% of their staff have a culturally diverse background but when further probed, they indicated that the number could have included British, who are not considered culturally and linguistically diverse.

One respondent said: “If I think about my career today, it’s predominantly been in agencies with privileged white people, private school-educated, tertiary education.”

While ‘positive discrimination’ was quoted as a way to recruit more culturally diverse talent, many respondents also mentioned that second- and third-generation Australians do not necessarily want to be identified based on their ethnicity or ancestry. This appears to be a conundrum that many recruiters or leaders still face in Australia.

Here are a few charts that reflect findings from the study:

Source: Australian comms agencies perceive diversity as not urgent

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Facebook Employees Found a Simple Way To Tackle Misinformation. They ‘Deprioritized’ It After Meeting With Mark Zuckerberg, Documents Show

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

More on Facebook and Zuckerberg’s failure to act against mis- and dis-information:

In May 2019, a video purporting to show House Speaker Nancy Pelosiinebriated, slurring her words as she gave a speech at a public event, went viral on Facebook. In reality, somebody had slowed the footage down to 75% of its original speed.

On one Facebook page alone, the doctored video received more than 3 million views and 48,000 shares. Within hours it had been reuploaded to different pages and groups, and spread to other social media platforms. In thousands of Facebook comments on pro-Trump and rightwing pages sharing the video, users called Pelosi “demented,” “messed up” and “an embarrassment.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Two days after the video was first uploaded, and following angry calls from Pelosi’s team, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the final call: the video did not break his site’s rules against disinformation or deepfakes, and therefore it would not be taken down. At the time, Facebook said it would instead demote the video in people’s feeds.

Inside Facebook, employees soon discovered that the page that shared the video of Pelosi was a prime example of a type of platform manipulation that had been allowing misinformation to spread unchecked. The page—and others like it—had built up a large audience not by posting original content, but by taking content from other sources around the web that had already gone viral. Once audiences had been established, nefarious pages would often pivot to posting misinformation or financial scams to their many viewers. The tactic was similar to how the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Russian troll farm that had meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, spread disinformation to American Facebook users. Facebook employees gave the tactic a name: “manufactured virality.”

In April 2020, a team at Facebook working on “soft actions”—solutions that stop short of removing problematic content—presented Zuckerberg with a plan to reduce the reach of pages that pursued “manufactured virality” as a tactic. The plan would down-rank these pages, making it less likely that users would see their posts in the News Feed. It would impact the pages that shared the doctored video of Pelosi, employees specifically pointed out in their presentation to Zuckerberg. They also suggested it could significantly reduce misinformation posted by pages on the platform since the pages accounted for 64% of page-related misinformation views but only 19% of total page-related views.

But in response to feedback given by Zuckerberg during the meeting, the employees “deprioritized” that line of work in order to focus on projects with a “clearer integrity impact,” internal company documents show.

This story is partially based on whistleblower Frances Haugen’s disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal team. The redacted versions were seen by a consortium of news organizations, including TIME. Many of the documents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. They paint a picture of a company obsessed with boosting user engagement, even as its efforts to do so incentivized divisive, angry and sensational content. They also show how the company often turned a blind eye to warnings from its own researchers about how it was contributing to societal harms.

A pitch to Zuckerberg with few visible downsides

Manufactured virality is a tactic that has been used frequently by bad actors to game the platform, according to Jeff Allen, the co-founder of the Integrity Institute and a former Facebook data scientist who worked closely on manufactured virality before he left the company in 2019. This includes a range of groups, from teenagers in Macedonia who found that targeting hyper-partisan U.S. audiences in 2016 was a lucrative business, to covert influence operations by foreign governments including the Kremlin. “Aggregating content that previously went viral is a strategy that all sorts of bad actors have used to build large audiences on platforms,” Allen told TIME. “The IRA did it, the financially motivated troll farms in the Balkans did it, and it’s not just a U.S. problem. It’s a tactic used across the world by actors who want to target various communities for their own financial or political gain.”

In the April 2020 meeting, Facebook employees working in the platform’s “integrity” division, which focuses on safety, presented a raft of suggestions to Zuckerberg about how to reduce the virality of harmful content on the platform. Several of the suggestions—titled “Big ideas to reduce prevalence of bad content”—had already been launched; some were still the subjects of experiments being run on the platform by Facebook researchers. Others —including tackling “manufactured virality”—were early concepts that employees were seeking approval from Zuckerberg to explore in more detail.

The employees noted that much “manufactured virality” content was already against Facebook’s rules. The problem, they said, was that the company inconsistently enforced those rules. “We already have a policy against pages that [pursue manufactured virality],” they wrote. “But [we] don’t consistently enforce on this policy today.”

The employees’ presentation said that further research was needed to determine the “integrity impact” of taking action against manufactured virality. But they pointed out that the tactic disproportionately contributed to the platform’s misinformation problem. They had compiled statistics showing that nearly two-thirds of page-related misinformation came from “manufactured virality” pages, compared to less than one fifth of total page-related views.

Acting against “manufactured virality” would bring few business risks, the employees added. Doing so would not reduce the number of times users logged into Facebook per day, nor the number of “likes” that they gave to other pieces of content, the presentation noted. Neither would cracking down on such content impact freedom of speech, the presentation said, since only reshares of unoriginal content—not speech—would be affected.

But Zuckerberg appeared to discourage further research. After presenting the suggestion to the CEO, employees posted an account of the meeting on Facebook’s internal employee forum, Workplace. In the post, they said that based on Zuckerberg’s feedback they would now be “deprioritizing” the plans to reduce manufactured virality, “in favor of projects that have a clearer integrity impact.” Zuckerberg approved several of the other suggestions that the team presented in the same meeting, including “personalized demotions,” or demoting content for users based on their feedback.

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, rejected suggestions that employees were discouraged from researching manufactured virality. “Researchers pursued this and, while initial results didn’t demonstrate a significant impact, they were free to continue to explore it,” Stone wrote in a statement to TIME. He said the company had nevertheless contributed significant resources to reducing bad content, including down-ranking. “These working documents from years ago show our efforts to understand these issues and don’t reflect the product and policy solutions we’ve implemented since,” he wrote. “We recently published our Content Distribution Guidelines that describe the kinds of content whose distribution we reduce in News Feed. And we’ve spent years standing up teams, developing policies and collaborating with industry peers to disrupt coordinated attempts by foreign and domestic inauthentic groups to abuse our platform.”

But even today, pages that share unoriginal viral content in order to boost engagement and drive traffic to questionable websites are still some of the most popular on the entire platform, according to a report released by Facebook in August.

Allen, the former Facebook data scientist, says Facebook and other platforms should be focused on tackling manufactured virality, because it’s a powerful way to make platforms more resilient against abuse. “Platforms need to ensure that building up large audiences in a community should require genuine work and provide genuine value for the community,” he says. “Platforms leave them themselves vulnerable and exploitable by bad actors across the globe if they allow large audiences to be built up by the extremely low-effort practice of scraping and reposting content that previously went viral.”

The internal Facebook documents show that some researchers noted that cracking down on “manufactured virality” might reduce Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI)—a statistic that Facebook began using in 2018 to help rank its News Feed. The algorithm change was meant to show users more content from their friends and family, and less from politicians and news outlets. But an internal analysis from 2018 titled “Does Facebook reward outrage” reported that the more negative comments a Facebook post elicited​​—content like the altered Pelosi video—the more likely the link in the post was to be clicked by users. “The mechanics of our platform are not neutral,” one Facebook employee wrote at the time. Since the content with more engagement was placed more highly in users’ feeds, it created a feedback loop that incentivized the posts that drew the most outrage. “Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook,” Haugen told the British Parliament on Oct. 25.

How “manufactured virality” led to trouble in Washington

Zuckerberg’s decision in May 2019 not to remove the doctored video of Pelosi seemed to mark a turning point for many Democratic lawmakers fed up with the company’s larger failure to stem misinformation. At the time, it led Pelosi—one of the most powerful members of Congress, who represents the company’s home state of California—to deliver an unusually scathing rebuke. She blasted Facebook as “willing enablers” of political disinformation and interference, a criticism increasingly echoed by many other lawmakers. Facebook defended its decision, saying that they had “dramatically reduced the distribution of that content” as soon as its fact-checking partners flagged the video for misinformation.

Pelosi’s office did not respond to TIME’s request for comment on this story.

The circumstances surrounding the Pelosi video exemplify how Facebook’s pledge to show political disinformation to fewer users only after third-party fact-checkers flag it as misleading or manipulated—a process that can take hours or even days—does little to stop this content from going viral immediately after it is posted.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, after Zuckerberg discouraged employees from tackling manufactured virality, hyper-partisan sites used the tactic as a winning formula to drive engagement to their pages. In August 2020, another doctored video falsely claiming to show Pelosi inebriated again went viral. Pro-Trump and rightwing Facebook pages shared thousands of similar posts, from doctored videos meant to make then-candidate Joe Biden appear lost or confused while speaking at events, to edited videos claiming to show voter fraud.

In the aftermath of the election, the same network of pages that had built up millions of followers between them using manufactured virality tactics used the reach they had built to spread the lie that the election had been stolen.

Source: Facebook Employees Found a Simple Way To Tackle Misinformation. They ‘Deprioritized’ It After Meeting With Mark Zuckerberg, Documents Show

Filed under Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Olympic Games are great for propagandists – how the lessons of Hitler’s Olympics loom over Beijing 2022

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

Canadian sports journalists to note:

On the morning of Aug. 14, 1936, two NBC employees met for breakfast at a café in Berlin. Max Jordan and Bill Slater were discussing the Olympic Games they were broadcasting back to the United States – and the Nazi propaganda machine that had made their work, and their visit to Germany, somewhat unpleasant. 

Slater complained about all the staged regimentation and the obviously forced smiles everywhere. 

“Why don’t they revolt? We wouldn’t stand for all this browbeating and bullying in America. I know that. Why do they stand for it here?” Slater asked Jordan. 

As they were talking, three armed Nazi guards sat down at the next table. The whole café quieted. “It was as though a chill had come over those present,” Jordan later recalled. “In a nutshell, there was the answer to Bill’s question.”

I included the story Max Jordan recounted in his memoir in my book on the Nazi origins of Olympic broadcasting because it perfectly encapsulated the quandary facing American sports journalists whenever the International Olympic Committee pushes them to broadcast happy images provided by repressive regimes.

It’s now less than 100 days from the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and therefore it’s time for an honest discussion about the ethics of sport journalism and the morality of American media’s complicity with authoritarian regimes that hide the active repression of their citizens.

Abundant evidence

The world knows what China is doing right now. Courageous reporting has publicized the series of repressive domestic and international actions taken by the Chinese government over the past five years.

The persecution of the Uyghurs and other human rights abuses, the abrogation of the Hong Kong treaty along with the imposition of the Chinese government’s repression in that port city, and the prevention of a comprehensive and transparent investigation into the origins of COVID-19 are all well documented. 

Thus, the Chinese government now wants good press in the West. And its efforts to ensure favorable coverage have prompted new concerns about media control and censorship during the Games, with a U.S. government spokesman recently urging Chinese government officials “not to limit freedom of movement and access for journalists and to ensure that they remain safe and able to report freely, including at the Olympic and the Paralympic Games.”

But, as was clear from the experience during the 1936 Olympics, if U.S. journalists go to Beijing and emphasize the beauty of its landscape, the happiness of its citizenry and its futuristic infrastructure, and fail to cover the more controversial realities in China, that would signal compliance with – and promotion of – Chinese propaganda. 

This is American sports journalism’s Red Smith moment. 

Politics, meet sports

On Jan. 4, 1980, Walter “Red” Smith, the veteran New York Times sports columnist, surprised his readership with his endorsement of the boycott movement against that summer’s Moscow Olympic Games. Boycott advocates were protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. 

Smith’s stance was unexpected, as he had carefully sidestepped – or even ignored – many other moments he considered unhealthy political intrusion into international athletic competition. But Smith wrote that history had proved that America’s participation in the Nazi Games was a mistake – even if the great Black American runner Jesse Owens redeemed the event in public memory.

“When Americans look back to the 1936 Olympics,” Smith wrote in his famous column, “they take pleasure only in the memory of Jesse Owens’ four gold medals.” Outside of that, he admitted, “we are ashamed at having been guests at Adolf Hitler’s big party.”

Smith was an old-school sports reporter, already an old-timer in 1980 – he died in 1982. His reporting and columns reflected the influence of Grantland Rice and Paul Gallico, the giants who invented modern American sports writing in the 1920s. But there had always existed another group of sports reporters less afraid to point out obvious political unpleasantness.

For example, the great Jimmy Cannon had no problem freely peppering political references and acerbic commentary throughout his columns. Westbrook Pegler detested the Nazis and criticized them relentlessly throughout the 1936 Games. And Howard Cosell’s sharp commentaries, on such issues as Muhammad Ali’s boxing suspension in the 1960s and the political activism that erupted in 1968 in Mexico City, remain a credit to his legacy.‘The U.S. Olympic Committee … is in the main a group of pompous, arrogant and medieval-minded men who regard the games as a private social preserve,’ said Howard Cosell.

That Red Smith had spent decades remaining largely apolitical in public made his support for the boycott surprising. That he was only the second sports columnist to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and that his opinions were widely respected, gave his endorsement significant clout. 

‘The one lever we have’

Smith opened the gates for others to point out the incongruity and obvious hypocrisy of celebrating the Soviet Union’s peaceful intentions while the Soviet army was invading and occupying Afghanistan. In his column, Smith quoted British Member of Parliament Neville Trotter, who led the boycott movement in Great Britain. 

“This is the one lever we have to show our outrage at this naked aggression by Russia,” Trotter told Smith. “We should do all we can to reduce the Moscow Olympics to a shambles.” 

One well-known and nationally respected sports journalist has explicitly and unambiguously called for boycotting the 2022 Beijing Games: Sally Jenkins. The Washington Post’s veteran columnist – who last year was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary – published a scorching column plainly stating that “ignorance is no longer an excuse.”

“It was a forgivable mistake to award an Olympics to Beijing in 2008,” she wrote. “It’s unforgivable to hold one there now.”

Red Smith’s boycott column remains one of his most important and lasting examples of public service. As a media historian, I believe that those who emulate his courage today, like Sally Jenkins, will likely be remembered in the same way tomorrow.

Source: https://theconversationcanada.cmail20.com/t/r-l-trtkukiy-kyldjlthkt-jj/

Filed under foreign policy Tagged with , ,

Poland Gets Support From Europe on Tough Borders

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

Good example of “weaponization” of refugees:

The migration crisis of 2015, when millions of migrants and asylum seekers surged over Europe’s borders, nearly tore apart the European Union. Many members offered asylum to the refugees; others, like Poland and Hungary, wanted no part of it.

Six years later, the current standoff at the border of Poland and Belarus has echoes of that crisis, but this time, European officials insist that member states are united when it comes to defending Europe’s borders and that uncontrolled immigration is over.

What is different, the Europeans say, is that this crisis is entirely manufactured by the dictator of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, as a response to sanctions that the Europeans imposed on his country in the face of a stolen election and a vicious repression of domestic dissent.

“This area between the Poland and Belarus borders is not a migration issue, but part of the aggression of Lukashenko toward Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, with the aim to destabilize the E.U.,” Ylva Johansson, the European commissioner for home affairs, said in an interview over the summer.

The crisis began in late August, when growing groups of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, began massing at the borders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, shepherded there by Belarus. That movement has now become much larger, with at least 4,000 or more men, women and children trapped in the freezing cold, without proper shelter or toilets, between Belarus and its neighbors.

Both Poland and Lithuania declared states of emergency and fortified their borders, while Belarusian forces have in some cases aided the migrants in breaking through. The border regions have been shut to journalists and aid workers, but upsetting videos and pictures of the migrants facing barbed wire have been distributed, often by Belarus itself.

On Wednesday, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, called Mr. Lukashenko’s tactics a “cynical power play” and said that blackmail must not be allowed to succeed. In Washington the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, met President Biden and emerged to say that what was transpiring on the Belarus border is “a hybrid attack, not a migration crisis.”

Source: Poland Gets Support From Europe on Tough Borders

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , ,

USA: The Rate of Successful Asylum Cases Shot Up This Year. But That’s Probably Not Due to Biden

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

There’s been a significant uptick in the rate at which immigrants have been granted asylum since President Joe Biden took office, new research shows. But that likely has nothing to do with the new President’s policies.

Asylum case success rates jumped from 29% to 37% between Fiscal year 2020 and Fiscal Year 2021, during which Biden took office, according to a new report published Wednesday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data and research organization at Syracuse University. Looking only at the period Biden has been in office, the success rate has been 40% — and as high as 47% in September.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“The obvious inference is, oh, well this is because of Biden,” says Austin Kocher, assistant professor and researcher at TRAC. But, he notes, the Biden Administration has made no major policy changes that would influence how immigration judges rule in asylum cases.

Instead, Kocher says, the higher rate of asylum grants may be due to a confluence of factors. For example, more asylum seekers this past year have had legal representation — and, historically, having a lawyer significantly increases the odds of winning asylum. (The reason for the uptick in legal representation is unclear. One possibility, the researchers say, is that attorneys representing clients with particularly strong cases may have simply succeeded in pushing their cases to the front of the line.)

Another factor may be the nationality of the people whose cases were heard. For example, Chinese applicants have more frequently won asylum cases in the past, while Haitian or Central American nationals have had lower success rates. “The country that people are from goes a long way in determining who gets asylum,” Kocher says. Geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy goals have historically played a big role in shaping asylum decisions.

The absolute number of people being granted asylum remains low, largely because courts have yet to resume their pre-pandemic decision rates after COVID-19 shut down some court activity. “The immigration courts have absolutely not recovered at all, not even a fraction really,” Kocher says. “We still have only had barely more than than 2,000 cases completed a month even right up until the end of September [2021].”

Immigrants Waiting Years for a Decision

Immigration courts are roughly 1.5 million cases behind schedule, which means thousands of people have been waiting for years for their asylum requests to be decided by a judge.

A partial shut down of immigration courts beginning in March 2020 as COVID-19 spread across the U.S. exacerbated this backlog. Before COVID-19, immigration judges were deciding approximately 10,000 asylum cases per month, according to TRAC. That number dropped after the pandemic started. In April of 2020, judges were deciding fewer than 2,000 asylum cases per month.

In Fiscal Year 2021, which ended in September, just over 23,800 asylum cases were decided in court. That’s down from 60,000 cases that were decided in Fiscal Year 2020. Roughly 8,350 people won their asylum claim in FY21, about half the number of people who won their claims in FY20, according to TRAC, which analyzed data it received through a Freedom of Information Act Request.

An additional 400 people won some type of relief from deportation in FY21 that was not asylum, the researchers note.

In the meantime, asylum seekers will likely have to continue to endure long waiting periods before their cases are heard in court. Prior to the pandemic it was not uncommon for people to wait up to four years for a case to be heard.

“The key thing here in terms of what’s driving a lot of the data is really getting past the pandemic,” Kocher says. “Until the immigration courts are fully open, and society is fully back to normal there’s just no way that the courts are ever going to be able to really get through these cases.”

Source: The Rate of Successful Asylum Cases Shot Up This Year. But That’s Probably Not Due to Biden

Filed under Refugees Tagged with , ,

Ukrainian Canadians fight to save a forgotten cemetery in Quebec’s Abitibi region

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

Spirit Lake was one of the examples cited by Ukrainian Canadians during endowment fund negotiations over the World War I Internment Fund in 2008-9:

Beyond the crops, tucked deep in a boggy forest on a farmer’s land in the Abitibi region of Quebec, you’ll find the remnants of a cemetery, a few crosses still visible between the trees.

More than 100 years ago, at least 16 detainees from the nearby Spirit Lake internment camp were buried here.

But there’s no commemorative plaque or historical protection for the land that is slowly being swallowed up by forest.

Source: Ukrainian Canadians fight to save a forgotten cemetery in Quebec’s Abitibi region

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

US citizenship naturalizations are highest in more than a decade [meanwhile in Canada …]

2021/11/11 Leave a comment

Striking difference between the USA and Canada, the former’s citizenship program having recovered from the pandemic, while the number of new citizens in Canada remains less than half of pre-pandemic levels. Australia was also much faster than Canada in moving to online testing and ceremonies. IRCC’s priority, as usual, the number of new Permanent Residents where the department is on track to meet its expanded target of 401,000 this year, more than recovering from COVID (wise or not):

The number of people who became naturalized US citizens in fiscal year 2021 was the highest in more than a decade, according to new data, surpassing the Trump administration-era high and rebounding after the pandemic had prompted office closures and service disruptions.

Around 855,000 people were naturalized during the fiscal year, which ended September 30, compared with 625,400 people in fiscal year 2020, according to data provided by US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
In 2019, under the Trump administration, the agency reached an 11-year high of 843,593 naturalizations.
After struggles with processing and financial issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency has been able to ramp up naturalizations, USCIS Director Ur Jaddou told CNN.
“It is a tremendous value to the nation to have people that are lawful permanent residents become citizens, so we would like to encourage that,” she said, speaking at a naturalization ceremony at the agency’s headquarters on Tuesday.
In July, CNN first reported that the Biden administration planned to introduce an unprecedented effort to encourage eligible immigrants to apply for US citizenship, according to a USCIS official at the time.
The effort stems from one of President Joe Biden’s early executive orders that called on federal agencies to develop “welcoming strategies that promote integration, inclusion, and citizenship.”
“The idea is to find a whole-of-government way to reach out to people who are able to naturalize,” the USCIS official previously said, adding that there are 9 million people in the US who are lawful permanent residents who may be eligible to apply for citizenship.
Efforts, for example, could include holding naturalization ceremonies at national parks to raise awareness, partnering with the US Postal Service to display promotional posters and engaging with the Department of Veterans Affairs and veteran service organizations to find ways to educate service members and veterans on citizenship, according to the strategy, titled “Interagency Strategy for Promoting Naturalization.”
USCIS is working with 11 federal agencies to integrate and to promote naturalization, according to Jaddou, who said the agency’s role in processing applications for naturalization is only one part of the effort.
“We want to ensure that we are working together as a team to ensure that we’re promoting naturalization,” she added.
On Tuesday, Jaddou was joined by Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough and retired Army Maj. Gen. Viet Xuan Luong for a naturalization ceremony at which 12 active-duty military members became citizens in celebration of Veterans Day.
The new US citizens came from 10 countries: Cameroon, China, El Salvador, Ghana, Jamaica, Mexico, Nepal, the Philippines, Poland and Vietnam.
Another ceremony will be held Wednesday with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in Baltimore.
Asked how the Biden administration’s efforts contrast with those of the Trump administration, Jaddou said, “Number one is called public engagement.”
“That is one of the biggest things that we have changed, is to ensure that we’re working with the public in as many venues as possible,” she said.
The agency is also looking at streamlining its forms, said Jaddou. “Some of them are just too long and and too difficult to understand.”
The record for naturalizations was in 2008, with more than a million people becoming US citizens, an uptick that was attributed to upcoming fee increases and efforts to encourage eligible applicants to apply for citizenship.

Source: US citizenship naturalizations are highest in more than a decade

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →