Nanny state? Hardly. Canada has left its foreign caregivers in a stalled system that’s derailing lives, critics say

2021/03/29 Leave a comment

Likely more than COVID slowdown at play:

The system that is supposed to help foreign nannies and care workers build a new life in Canada is, simply put, a hot mess.

That’s the conclusion of caregivers, their advocates and their lawyers, two years after reforms were brought in by the federal Liberal government.

Just how bad are things?

Until this past November, over an 18-month period, not a single work permit was issued under two new pilot programs. Meanwhile, there’s a backlog of at least 9,100 applications for permanent residence. That matches the kind of numbers that government saw back in 2017, when the processing time was known to be as long as five years.

Some say new data shows applications were moving at a snail’s pace even before the COVID-19 lockdowns reduced the immigration department’s processing capacity last year.

There’s more.

The system is ensnarled in six overlapping programs. Critics say the pathway for foreign caregivers is far from clear and secure, and that added language and higher education requirements may end up slowly phasing out what has been a unique immigration approach that set foreign caregivers apart from other temporary foreign workers.

“We’ve said time and again these changes were not going to work,” said Vilma Pagaduan, a longtime advocate for foreign caregivers in Toronto.

“Things were bad even before the pandemic.”

For decades, Canada has relied on foreign caregivers to look after our children and elderly.

To entice foreign workers to take up the jobs that few Canadians were willing to do, the Live-in Caregiver Program, which ran from 1992 to 2014, provided what’s called an automatic pathway to permanent residence, allowing them to pursue permanent status here in Canada in exchange for the work they put in and the sacrifices they made.

The scheme has gone through multiple changes since 2014. The former Conservative government eliminated requirements that workers live with their employers, but imposed new language and education standards as well as an annual cap on the number of caregivers who could take advantage of the program.

It also raised the employers’ application fee.

The fee was later removed by the Liberal government, which in 2019 introduced the two new pilot programs. The Liberals changed caregivers’ work permits so they could freely change jobs as long as they stayed in the caregiving occupation. The government also moved to grandfather those caregivers already in the system so they could pursue permanent residence in spite of the changing requirements.

Under the Conservatives’ and Liberals’ reforms, temporary foreign workers who were already in Canada but did not come here through the caregiver programs could also apply to the programs and access the pathway for permanent residence if their experience fit.

When the Liberals announced the changes in early 2019, they said they had reduced the backlog in processing caregiver permanent residence applications by 94 per cent and shortened the processing time to 12 months.

Immigration officials said the changes had been made after extensive consultation with the community.

“Caregivers provide a vital service for many families and, like any other worker in Canada, they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity,” said department spokesperson Rémi Larivière.

“We value their critical contributions, which is why we’re removing barriers and keeping families together by allowing their family members to work and study in Canada.”

But the latest numbers don’t show the success story for which many might have hoped.

Ottawa received a total of 13,230 permanent residence applications from foreign caregivers between January 2019 and November 2020, according to new data obtained by Vancouver immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens.

Only 4,140 were processed and the approval rate was 74 per cent.

And, among the applications received, 4,206 or 32 per cent came under the Liberals’ two new pilot programs. Officials processed only 279 — or less than seven per cent of them. Some 69 per cent of those were approved.

As of Nov. 27, the total number of permanent residence applications in the backlog stood at 9,094 applications — surpassing the 9,000 cases in the backlog in 2017.

The permanent residence backlog does not even include someone such as Merynold Magallanes, who came under the old Live-in Caregiver Program.

The Filipino woman was brought to Canada by an Oakville family of five in 2013 before any of the changes to the caregiver programs. She applied for her permanent residence three years later after fulfilling her two-year full-time live-in employment requirement.

She was refused in 2017 because of a consultant’s mix-up, and her divorce paper and police clearance certificate were missing from her application. She reapplied in 2018 but pulled out because she was told the elder of her two daughters was too old to be a dependant child and should be dropped from her application.

Magallanes then enlisted the help of a lawyer and submitted a third application in August 2019. Over the years, she’s kept renewing her work permit to maintain her status in Canada and keep her hope for permanent residence alive.

That decision has cost her years with her family.

“I have only visited my two daughters (now 23 and 24) once since I came to Canada in 2013 because I need to save all my money to support my family in the Philippines,” said Magallanes, who also provides for her widowed mother, her nieces and nephews, and occasionally her siblings.

“We work hard so our kids can have better opportunities here. Life is easy in Canada if you work hard. Back home, life is hard even if you work hard.”

Pagaduan, the advocate, said caregivers working in Canada suffer from prolonged family separation as they await the processing of their permanent residence applications.

The work itself is no picnic. Sometimes they have to put up with abusive work conditions due to their precarious immigration status.

The changes made to the caregiver scheme are confusing and the new requirements for post-secondary education and language tests have created additional hurdles and further bureaucracy, she noted. Furthermore, language test results, medical and police clearances do expire and have to be redone if applications are not processed in time.

“Applicants need to get their credentials assessed and must pass the English test. They have to keep renewing their work permits until they get permanent residence,” said Pagaduan. “All these cost money.”

Unlike the previous programs, the Liberals’ two pilots do offer the opportunity for caregivers to bring their dependants with them to Canada from the outset and mean that they are no longer restricted to working for one specific employer.

“These pilots make it easier for caregivers to quickly switch employers, provide open work or study permits for their immediate family members so that families can come to Canada together and create a clear transition from temporary to permanent status,” said Larivière, the department’s spokesperson.

“We will continue to work closely with the caregiver community to make further improvements to the system.”

However, Vancouver immigration lawyer Deanna Okun-Nachoff said that these improvements are meaningless if no foreign caregivers are getting their work permits to come to Canada under the new programs.

“The program has been there since June 2019,” said Okun-Nachoff, who helps a lot of caregivers in her legal practice.

“I have not seen one work permit approved and I have applied for many.”

According to the government data, the immigration department received 1,055 new work permit applications under the recent pilot programs in 2019 and 2020 (up to November). Only five were processed: four were withdrawn and one was refused.

Meanwhile, 4,234 work permits were issued to general temporary foreign workers who were listed as caregivers under their occupation code. These could be work permit holders who initially came as international students or were admitted in other occupations.

Given that the programs are a pathway to permanent residence, immigration officials said work permits under the current pilots can only be issued after permanent residence eligibility has been thoroughly assessed. Hence, the processing speed is compromised.

“As you know, global migration has been upended by the pandemic. Yet we’ve taken quick action and come a long way since the onset of the pandemic, while also managing lockdowns at processing offices within Canada,” Larivière said.

While the old live-in caregiver program took a long time for applicants to get permanent residence due to the overwhelming demand, Okun-Nachoff said it was the most straightforward scheme: one automatically qualified when the two-year live-in requirement was met. The permanent residence grant rate hovered above 90 per cent then.

Critics say the Conservatives’ program was flawed because caregiver work permit applicants were admitted without being assessed under the new education and language requirement they needed to become permanent residents. Hence, many only found out later that they couldn’t qualify for permanent residence.

While the Liberals’ changes were meant to address these problems, the new programs are “mind-bending” and muddied the whole caregiver scheme even further.

“People complained about the changes made by the previous government, but what we’re seeing is worse. Before they were able to come in, now we can’t even get them in (under the caregiver programs),” said Manuela Gruber Hersch, a co-founder of the Association of Caregivers and Nanny Agencies Canada.

“An aging population and lack of national child care are two of the greatest challenges of our government, so why are they not prioritizing the caregiver programs?”

The bottleneck in processing work permits for overseas caregivers could lead to caregiver shortages in Canada as in-Canada caregivers become permanent residents and seek other job opportunities, Hersch warned, and it would ultimately kill the designated caregiver program.

Last year, as a result of the pandemic, Canada saw the overall number of permanent residents admitted to the country nosedive by 45.7 per cent, to just 185,130, from 2019, far below its 340,000 target.

Last month, in anticipation of another potential shortfall, Ottawa invited 27,332 people in one draw to apply for permanent residence — five times more than its previous high of 5,000 — 90 per cent of the invitees were already living in Canada.

Francia Rafallo, who came to Canada in 2017 under the Conservatives’ caregiver programs, applied for permanent residence under the interim pathway in 2019 and has been waiting in queue since, so her husband and their two sons can join her here.

She says it’s an affront to the caregiver community that their immigration applications are not being prioritized even though the pandemic has shown caregivers are providing an essential service to Canadians.

“Canada has accepted a lot of other immigrants, approving international students and other workers. It is unfair that foreign caregivers are left behind,” said Rafallo. “We are taxpayers, too, and we are not treated equally and fairly. There’s been no improvement.”

York University professor Ethel Tungohan, who has researched extensively on labour migration, said it’s short-sighted for Ottawa not to prioritize caregiver applications — whether it’s for permanent residence or work permits — especially in the wake of the pandemic.

Many caregivers do become personal support workers and even nurses, she said.

Tungohan, who is the Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism, has been part of multiple consultations under both the Conservatives and Liberals but said there’s always lip service paid to the value of care work.

“What this whole exercise is showing is that regardless of the government in power, care work remains undervalued. These changes that are put in are meant to improve the lives of caregivers. It’s sad that they are actually making it harder for them to come and get citizenship,” she said.

“All caregivers want is to be treated like other immigrants to Canada and be able to come and live with their families.”

Source: Nanny state? Hardly. Canada has left its foreign caregivers in a stalled system that’s derailing lives, critics say

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U.S. research shows race, age of jurors affects verdicts but Canada lacks data

2021/03/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

The race and age of jurors has a noticeable effect on trial verdicts, American studies indicate, but Canada has no data allowing similar research here.

Experts in Canada said it’s imperative to gather such demographic information to better understand systemic biases in the criminal justice system.

One 2012 study in Florida found all-white juries convicted Blacks at a rate 16 percentage points higher than whites. The gap disappeared when the jury pool included at least one Black member, the research found.

“The impact of the racial composition of the jury pool — and seated jury — is a factor that merits much more attention and analysis in order to ensure the fairness of the criminal justice system,” the study concludes.

Another U.S. study, in 2014, showed older jurors were significantly more likely to convict than younger ones:

“If a male defendant, completely by chance, faces a jury pool that has an average age above 50, he is about 13 percentage points more likely to be convicted than if he faces a jury pool with an average age less than 50.”

“These findings imply that many cases are decided differently for reasons that are completely independent of the true nature of the evidence,” it says.

Shamena Anwar, co-author of the papers, said in an interview this week that juries can be highly unrepresentative of their communities as a result of the selection process.

The research, which shows age of jurors and race play a substantial role in verdicts and convictions, indicates demographics “definitely” matter, Anwar said.

As a result, collecting the data was important in understanding that role, said Anwar, an economist who studies criminal justice and racial disparities at the non-profit Rand Corporation.

“If you don’t collect it — you don’t have access to the problem,” Anwar said. “This work shows you that (jury demographics) can have a big impact on (trial) outcomes.”

However, a survey by The Canadian Press found provinces and territories collect almost no demographic data of jurors, despite concerns about systemic bias and government promises to address it.

The absence of information makes it all but impossible to discern whether juries reflect the makeup of the community, experts said.

Colton Fehr, an assistant criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, said bias can infiltrate a trial in many ways, but the lack of data makes it difficult to track and study.

“I’d rather know just how bad it is, so that we can try to fix it, as opposed to just not know where things are going wrong,” Fehr said.

Source: U.S. research shows race, age of jurors affects verdicts but Canada lacks data

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Wolfson: Without good data, we’re flying blind on good health care

2021/03/27 Leave a comment

Hard to disagree:
Yet again, the provinces are wailing about the need for more federal money for health care, with no strings attached. These are the same provinces who have for decades grossly underfunded long-term care. And as we are seeing in real time, many of the provinces are scrambling last minute to have the data to understand and manage the pandemic, most recently in rolling out vaccinations.Of course, the federal government should not cave in to these unwarranted provincial demands. It is entirely within the federal government’s constitutional authority, despite what the provinces are saying, to play all kinds of roles in the health sector. The provinces never object to the billions of dollars the federal government pours into health research every year.

But many of the provinces are still in the dark ages when it comes to collecting and making available for crucial health services research the kinds of data essential to understanding how well health care is being delivered.

Car dealers and airlines have for years had far better computer systems to keep track of the health of your car, and every airplane seat in the world. The Big Tech software companies not only collect humongous volumes of data on many of us, with their real-time technologies; they are continually doing experiments to see what will induce us to click more on their sites and advertisements.

Yet our public health authorities are having difficulties even connecting our COVID-19 tests, our vaccinations, and any hospital visits, as in many cases these software systems are completely separate silos.

So, what’s wrong with the federal government saying to the provinces, if you want more cash, you first have to implement decent real-time data systems? Indeed, the constitution expressly assigns jurisdiction for statistics to the federal government, hence the authority to play a strong leadership role in health data systems in the provinces.

The federal government has to be accountable to us in our role as federal taxpayers, not only as provincial taxpayers. It is incumbent on the federal government to ensure that any monies it transfers to the provinces are used for the purposes intended.

If the transfer is for health care, a province cannot use the cash received to finance tax cuts. If the transfer is to push the provinces to improve the generally awful state of long-term care, then it is entirely reasonable for the federal government to impose requirements on the ways the provinces spend the money, including collecting data and other reporting to ensure that provincial promises are more than rhetoric.

These requirements are more than just reasonable; they are based on the federal government’s constitutional authorities for the spending power, and for peace, order and good government.

At the same tine, the federal government sorely needs to up its game.  For example, the most recent speech from the throne committed the federal government to take the lead in developing national standards for long-term care. But one has to wonder how this can be achieved when there is virtually no nationally comparable data on one of the most crucial aspects of long-term care quality, namely staffing.

The federal government was negotiating the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines many months ago. That should have been more than sufficient lead time to ensure that there would also be a national system in place when the vaccines started arriving to track how the vaccine rollout was progressing.

Yes, it can and should be left up to each province to decide vaccine allocation. But with the current hodge-podge of computer, fax and email systems, there is no way to keep track in real time of what’s being done across the country. There’s also no way to connect vaccinations to rises and falls in outbreaks at the level of detail needed to inform lockdown policy.

Health care and public health are quintessentially knowledge industries. It should be obvious that they should be organizations that learn from experience. But it is impossible to learn from experience if you have no way of knowing just what you are experiencing.

Proper data collection and analysis are essential.

It is long past time that the federal government stiffened its spine and, in addition to saying it will work collaboratively with the provinces, put some muscle into meeting nation-wide concerns.

Michael Wolfson, PhD, is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada and a member of the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa.

Source: Wolfson: Without good data, we’re flying blind on good health care

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New tool could help immigrants decide where to live in Canada

2021/03/27 Leave a comment

Of interest. Useful experiment and it will important to see how much it is used and the extent that it improves immigrant outcomes:

Researchers are working on a new tool that will help newcomers identify which Canadian city they are most likely to be successful in.

Most immigrants end up choosing to live in one of Canada’s major cities. In fact, more than half of all immigrants and recent immigrants to Canada currently live in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, according to Statistics Canada.

However, there may be better opportunities for these immigrants elsewhere. Perhaps a film director or a tech worker may be suited to Toronto, but a petroleum engineer may not.

Since 2018, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has been working on a research project alongside the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) at Stanford University that may pave the way for this tool, dubbed GeoMatch, to come to fruition.

The project attempts to repurpose an algorithm that is used in resettlement efforts, to work for Canadian immigration. It uses historical data to help immigrants choose where they might thrive the most, IRCC spokesperson Isabelle Dubois told CIC News.

“The study suggested that prospective economic immigrants who followed the GeoMatch recommendation would be more likely to find a well-paying job after they arrived,” Dubois said in an email.

“Currently, newcomers tend to gravitate to cities they’ve heard of— which tend to be the largest. Yet such a tool could help change that by promoting different localities across Canada, beyond major urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver.”

According to their website, GeoMatch uses machine learning capabilities to make its predictions. It considers factors such as previous immigrants’ work history, education as well as personal characteristics. It then finds patterns in the data by focusing on how these factors were related to economic success in different locations.

GeoMatch may then be able to predict an immigrant’s likelihood of success in various locations across Canada.

“Research suggests that an immigrant’s initial arrival location plays a key role in shaping their economic success. Yet immigrants currently lack access to personalized information that would help them identify optimal destinations,” said a report published by the IPL.

The report reiterates that the approach is motivated by data that show an immigrant’s first landing location is influential in their outcomes.

“We find that for many economic immigrants the chosen [first] location is far from optimal in terms of expected income,” the report adds.

The report suggests that many economic immigrants choose Toronto simply because that is all they know of Canada, but they may be in “the wrong place” for their skillset. For example, Toronto is ranked number 20 out of 52 regions in terms of maximizing income in the year after arrival. This means that for many immigrants, there were 19 other regions where they would have likely made a higher income.

Immigrants may, of course, choose not to use the tool. However, it is worth mentioning that GeoMatch takes into consideration not just “data-driven predictions” but immigrants’ location preferences as well.

Source: New tool could help immigrants decide where to live in Canada

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Canada votes to collect data to document ‘environmental racism’

2021/03/27 Leave a comment

Interesting, likely correlates with lower income as well:

Canada will collect data on the impact of siting a disproportionate number of polluting industries and landfills in areas inhabited by racial minority communities, federal lawmakers voted Wednesday.

The bill aims to tackle “environmental racism,” where Indigenous, Black and other racial minority communities are exposed to higher levels of dirty air, contaminated water or other toxins and pollutants.

One of the most famous cases is in the Indigenous Grassy Narrows First Nation community in Ontario, where residents have since the 1960s suffered health impacts from mercury contamination produced by a former pulp and paper mill.

Source: Canada votes to collect data to document ‘environmental racism’

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There’s an Immigration Crisis, But It’s Not the One You Think

2021/03/27 Leave a comment

Good long interview with MPI’s Andrew Seles with a good overview of the substance and politics of immigration in the USA:

It’s become the Old Faithful of American politics: Every two or three years, there’s a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. It follows a predictable script: White House aides shy away from the term “crisis,” lest it suggest they’re to blame. Leaders of the opposition party repeat the term ad nauseam, spreading the perception of a crisis through sheer force of will. Media coverage features the same tired clichés: sensationalized “caravans,” b-roll of border fencing and windbreaker-clad TV reporters doing live hits from the Rio Grande or some dusty, mud-cracked vista. The immediate crisis passes, but the underlying problems go ignored, all but ensuring another crisis in a few years’ time. Lather, rinse, repeat.

“When something keeps happening to you over and over, you should ask why,” says Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that studies immigration. “Every two or three years, we get a spike of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet we deal with this each time as though it’s a separate incident that can be controlled, rather than looking at the larger forces at play.”

Source: There’s an Immigration Crisis, But It’s Not the One You Think

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Supporting Canada’s COVID-19 Resilience and Recovery Through Robust Immigration Policy and Programs

2021/03/26 Leave a comment

While I have a great deal of respect for all the people involved in this useful overview and discussion of the issues, disappointing that no serious discussion about the advisability of the government plans to increase immigration to catch up for the 2020 shortfall, given that we know from previous downturns of the short and medium-term “scarring” of immigrants who arrive during economic downturns.

Of course, some of the specific recommendations (e.g., the annual levels plan should include temporary residents as well) are long overdue:

“Canada has been seen globally as a leader in immigration and integration policies and programs, and as an attractive and welcoming country for immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and international students. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed some of the strengths of Canada’s immigration system, as well as some of the fault lines that have been developing and have deepened over the last few years. In this briefing, we provide an overview of Canada’s immigration system prior to the pandemic, and the policies and programs in place to support immigrant selection, settlement, and integration. We then discuss the system’s vulnerabilities as revealed by the pandemic, and explore a post-COVID-19 immigration vision. 

Canada’s immigration process has been highly selective, garnering support from the Canadian public for its strong focus on highly skilled immigrants and the economic contributions they can make, while overlooking the fact that many temporary foreign workers in Canada who are deemed low-skilled are in fact involved in essential work. Canada has created a bifurcated migration system with high-skilled migrants becoming permanent residents, and migrants deemed lower-skilled becoming permanently temporary. Yet as the pandemic has revealed, many temporary foreign workers, including agricultural workers, are essential to the functioning of our economy and the food security of our country. The pandemic has also highlighted the vulnerability of a variety of permanent and temporary resident groups in Canada (e.g., refugees, refugee claimants, temporary foreign workers, international students, immigrant women), the drive for family reunification and the constraints therein, the benefits and particular challenges of regionalization, and the difficulties involved in meeting targets for Francophone immigration and sustaining these immigrants in Francophone minority communities in Canada. To address these issues requires a consolidated re-evaluation of Canada’s immigration program and policies, engaging Canadians in these discussions.

It is also the case that despite Canada’s focus on bringing in highly skilled immigrants, a long-standing problem in Canada is the underutilization of these immigrants’ skills, leading to a waste of human capital. This has been especially salient during the pandemic in terms of internationally educated healthcare professionals. Many immigrants in health-related occupations have experienced deskilling, which is particularly noteworthy given the large number of jobs in health occupations in Canada that are unfilled. With the urgent need for health workers to be mobilized for testing, tracking, and provision of health services during the pandemic, it is time to revisit the need to more fully use the skills of immigrant healthcare professionals who are in Canada but not working in the professions for which they were trained.

Canada has a highly respected settlement sector that provides a variety of services to immigrants and refugees settling in Canada, and these services have also been deemed essential during the pandemic. These services have traditionally been provided in person and the pivot to online delivery has not occurred without difficulty. Agencies often lack the equipment and digital expertise to provide all services online, and immigrant and refugee digital literacy and access to technology is at times lacking. It is also the case that the pandemic has highlighted a variety of additional services and supports that are required during, and beyond, the pandemic. The pandemic has also underscored the lag between eligibility for settlement services, which is organized around a historical norm of direct entry of immigrants as permanent residents, and Canada’s current immigration regime, in which more newcomers enter with temporary status, with the hope or intention of transitioning to permanent residents. The need for international students, temporary foreign workers, and refugee claimants to receive some of these services has become especially salient at this time.

The settlement and integration of immigrants also requires the support of Canadians, and public attitudes toward immigrants in this country are not fully immune to xenophobia, especially at a time of higher unemployment and when uncertainty and feelings of threat dominate. It is thus essential to closely monitor Canadians’ attitudes toward immigrants, temporary residents, and immigration, and to proactively engage in efforts to promote positive attitudes while reducing the racism that these groups may experience.

This report provides a set of recommendations for action by the federal and provincial/territorial governments designed to optimize immigration to Canada: see Appendix A. At a broad level, these include: 

·       A public education program on immigration (to promote an informed public), followed by a comprehensive review, whether in the form of a Royal Commission, task force, or other mechanism, to engage Canadians in a discussion of the future of immigration to Canada, and a recalibration of its policies and programs to meet Canada’s own current and future needs and its global responsibilities

·       Immigration planning and federal settlement funding that takes into account both permanent and temporary residents

·       Expanded pathways to permanence for temporary residents

·       Targeted policies and programs that address the needs of vulnerable permanent and temporary resident groups

·       Special consideration of Francophone immigration

·       Public campaigns and civic engagement program expansion to promote positive attitudes toward immigrants, refugees, and immigration among established Canadians and to promote smaller jurisdictions to newcomers 

·       A coordinated network of national promising practices in the incorporation of skilled immigrants in the workplace

·       Research to drive evidence-based policy and program redesign during the pandemic and beyond

·       Leadership on the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration

As of the third quarter of 2020, Canada’s population growth has stopped, and all future growth will solely rely on immigration. Over the next three years, the Canadian Government intends to bring to this country the population equivalent of the Province of Manitoba through permanent resident streams. Additionally, Canada will continue to accept many international students, refugee claimants, and temporary foreign workers for temporary residence here. The importance of immigration for Canada will continue to grow and be an integral component of the country’s post- COVID-19 recovery. To succeed, it is essential to take stock, to re-evaluate Canada’s immigration and integration policies and programs, and to expand Canada’s global leadership in this area. The authors offer insights and recommendations to reinvigorate and optimize Canada’s immigration program over the next decade and beyond.”

Read or download the full report:

https://rsc-src.ca/en/research-and-reports/covid-19-policy-briefing/supporting-canada%E2%80%99s-covid-19-resilience-and-recovery

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Germany: New law eases citizenship for descendants of Nazi victims

2021/03/26 Leave a comment

Needed change:

The German government on Wednesday agreed to a draft law to grant citizenship to more descendants of Nazi victims.

If enacted, the law should fully close a loophole that led to many victims’ descendants being denied German citizenship, despite a long-standing policy of allowing descendants of persecuted Jews to reclaim citizenship.

Some were denied citizenship because their ancestors fled Germany and changed citizenship before Nazi Germany officially revoked their German citizenship. Others were denied because they were born before April 1, 1953, to a non-German father and a German mother in a gender-discriminating rule.

In 1941, the Nazi regime stripped citizenship from any German Jews living outside its borders, rendering Jewish refugees stateless and stranded. Jews inside the country were stripped of their rights and rendered state subjects.

Before this, many Jews and other victims of Nazi rule had their citizenship stripped of them individually by decree for political or racial reasons.

Enshrining a new rule

The government said the new law was largely symbolic but would set into law a change in rules adopted in 2019.

“This is not just about putting things right, it is about apologizing in profound shame,” said Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.

“It is a huge fortune for our country if people want to become German, despite the fact that we took everything from their ancestors,” he said in a statement.

Interior Ministry spokesman Steve Alter said formalizing the 2019 rule change was a way of strengthening the legal position of beneficiaries and giving them “the value they deserved.”

‘Injustice cannot be undone’

The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, said: “During the Nazi era, countless German Jews were forced to flee or were expatriated. In addition, Jews were fundamentally excluded from acquiring German citizenship due to racist legislation. This injustice cannot be undone. But it is a gesture of decency if they and their descendants are given legal opportunities to regain German citizenship.”

His organization had campaigned for the law, saying that the previous decrees had been inadequate.

The loopholes were thrust into the spotlight recently, as many Britons lodged citizenship applications due to Brexit. Many of those based their claim on the Nazi persecution of their ancestors. Numbers rose from 43 such applications in 2015 to 1,506 in 2018, according to ministry figures.

Austria changed its rules in 2019, too, allowing the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fled the Nazis to be renaturalized. It previously only allowed Holocaust survivors themselves to obtain Austrian citizenship.

Source: Germany: New law eases citizenship for descendants of Nazi victims

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Un peu d’humanité s’il vous plaît, M. Legault

2021/03/26 Leave a comment

More on the “gardian angels” by Quebec opposition members:

Marie (nom fictif), le téléphone dans la main droite et sa petite fille de deux ans agrippée à son bras gauche, tente désespérément de récupérer les passeports de toute la famille détenus par Citoyenneté et immigration Canada (CIC) afin d’obtenir une copie certifiée de toutes les pages des précieux carnets et de les acheminer au ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI) à Québec. L’épisode est kafkaïen. La tâche de récupérer tous les documents exigés par le MIFI afin de compléter le dossier du programme des « anges gardiens » est titanesque. Peu importe, elle fera tout pour avoir accès à ce certificat de sélection du Québec (CSQ) béni qui les conduira, elle et ses enfants, à la résidence permanente.

Une résidence permanente pour Marie, veuve d’un préposé aux bénéficiaires mort de la COVID-19, lui permettra de sortir la tête des eaux troubles de la pauvreté. Ça voudra dire pouvoir envoyer ses enfants de deux et trois ans en garderie et, donc, travailler comme préposée aux bénéficiaires, métier pour lequel elle a étudié, et contribuer à la société québécoise. Ça voudra dire aussi ne plus avoir peur d’être expulsée en Haïti, qui sombre de plus en plus dans l’anarchie. L’anxiété est à son comble.

Marie a soumis sa demande en décembre, dès l’ouverture du programme des anges gardiens visant les étrangers au statut précaire qui ont prodigué des soins au printemps dernier dans le domaine de la santé. Et tout traîne toujours.

Même si ce programme est pancanadien, le gouvernement Legault, en raison d’un accord avec le gouvernement fédéral en matière d’immigration, demande une liste différente de documents à fournir. « Les exigences du MIFI sont inadaptées à la crise », nous dit Me Guillaume Cliche-Rivard, spécialiste en droit de l’immigration. Et pourtant, pour Québec, tout va bien, Madame la Marquise.

La lenteur avec laquelle la CAQ traite la régularisation des « anges gardiens » n’est pas seulement honteuse, elle nuit à la société québécoise.

Dans un article de Radio-Canada, on apprenait la semaine dernière qu’en deux mois, seulement 3 dossiers sur 721 ont été approuvés au Québec. Tandis que dans le reste du Canada, ce sont 459 dossiers sur 932. Pourquoi ? Par manque de volonté politique ou incompétence dans sa mise en œuvre ? Les questions se posent et cela n’aide personne.

Ce qui est absurde dans tout ceci, c’est que ce manque d’humanité, cette bureaucratie digne des 12 travaux d’Astérix du gouvernement de la CAQ, n’a rien de bon pour le Québec. Elle laisse des gens dévoués dans une grande précarité avec tous les dommages collatéraux que cela implique. La précarité est synonyme de pauvreté et d’exclusion sociale. Leur situation les rend vulnérables à l’exploitation de toutes sortes. L’incertitude quant à leur statut crée aussi un climat anxiogène qui se transmet à toute la famille, et la santé mentale en prend un coup énorme. Tout ce désespoir accable les ressources communautaires, qui sont déjà à bout de souffle.

Le gouvernement se doit d’accélérer le processus de traitement des demandes du programme. Il doit aussi l’élargir et l’ouvrir aux travailleurs de la santé qui ont travaillé au-delà du 14 août 2020. La guerre contre la COVID-19 n’est pas terminée. Ces gens-là donnent encore à manger aux malades, les nettoient, les aident. Certains ont même contracté le coronavirus. Il faut les considérer.

Le gouvernement doit finalement accepter la main tendue d’Ottawa qui souhaite élargir le programme à d’autres travailleurs essentiels de la santé, comme les gardiens de sécurité et les gens responsables de l’entretien, entre autres.

La ministre, Nadine Girault, doit imposer un leadership fort. Ce n’est pourtant pas le cas. Ce manque de vision nous désespère. Le sentiment d’exclusion qui est en train de se développer nous conduit tout droit vers une intégration toute croche. Mauvaise intégration, pauvreté, exclusion : les ingrédients pour un gros gâchis. C’est très mauvais pour le Québec.

Si le gouvernement a décidé d’en prendre moins, il devrait peut-être en prendre soin.

Paule Robitaille et Christine St-Pierre, Respectivement députée de Bourassa-Sauvé, porte-parole en matière de lutte contre la pauvreté ; et députée de l’Acadie, porte-parole en matière d’immigration

Source: Un peu d’humanité s’il vous plaît, M. Legault

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Few Quebec ‘guardian angels’ who worked in health care during COVID granted residency

2021/03/26 Leave a comment

Hard to understand the reasons for the delays:

Advocates for asylum seekers who worked in health care during the pandemic’s first wave are calling on Quebec to speed up the processing of immigration applications from workers dubbed “guardian angels” by the premier.

In December, the federal government launched two special programs allowing asylum seekers who worked in the health-care sector during the early part of the health crisis to apply for permanent residency.

One program, which applies outside Quebec and is run by the federal government, has received 932 applications for permanent residency, according to the most recent data available. Of those, 459 had been approved in principle as of Feb. 20, the federal Immigration Department said in an email.

The other program is run through an agreement between Ottawa and Quebec. The federal government said it has received 721 applications — the first step in the process. Of those, just three applications for permanent residency have been approved in principle by the federal government, the Immigration Department said.

Wilner Cayo, president of Debout pour la dignite, a group that advocates for asylum seekers to be given status, said the difference shows a lack of political commitment from Quebec. “Quebec has always been very reluctant to recognize the extraordinary contribution of the ‘guardian angel’ asylum seekers,” Cayo said in an interview Tuesday.

Premier Francois Legault said Tuesday he was unaware Quebec was lagging behind other provinces, adding that the criteria for the program was decided in conjunction with the federal government. “There is no instruction given not to accelerate the acceptance of these people,” Legault told reporters in Quebec City.

“On the contrary, we want to keep our word.”

Cayo said the delays have caused people to put their lives on hold. Some “guardian angels,” he said, are waiting for permanent residency so they can earn a degree or take a training program.

Many are parents, he said, adding that without permanent residency, they don’t have access to Quebec’s public daycare program. For people with low salaries, paying for private daycare has a big impact on their quality of life, Cayo said.

“It’s a big disadvantage.”

Marjorie Villefranche, director of La Maison d’Haiti, a community group that works with newly arrived immigrants, said applicants in Quebec have an additional step compared with asylum seekers in the rest of the country. After their initial applications are approved by the federal government, they have to apply to the province to receive a Quebec selection certificate. Once that is issued, they have to apply to Ottawa for permanent residency.

Villefranche said Quebec needs to put additional resources into application processing. “I don’t think there’s any political will,” she said in a recent interview.

Flore Bouchon, a spokeswoman for Quebec Immigration Minister Nadine Girault, said the government hasn’t received any formal complaints about the program from immigration support organizations or from the affected asylum seekers.

Files are processed “within a very reasonable time frame, 21 days on average,” she wrote in a recent email. The number of applicants who have received Quebec selection certificates is a sign of the program’s success, she wrote.

As of March 19, the Quebec government had received 389 requests for Quebec selection certificates and 114 of those requests had been finalized, she said. Counting applicants and dependants, 237 people have been given Quebec certificates, Bouchon wrote.

Quebec Immigration Department spokeswoman Arianne Methot said after certificates are issued, applications become the responsibility of the federal Immigration Department.

Alexander Cohen, press secretary for federal Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, said delays are to be expected with a new program. Ottawa’s priority, he said in a recent interview, is expanding the program to include more workers.

The two special programs are only open to people who worked at least 120 hours between March 13 and Aug. 14, 2020, and who provided direct care in a health-care establishment in Canada.

Villefanche said she would like to see the program expanded to more workers who may have been exposed to COVID-19 on the job but who didn’t provide direct care, such as cleaning staff. She said she would also like the August deadline extended because she said it’s not fair to people who provided vital care during the second wave of the pandemic.

“It’s like if there was a good wave and a bad wave,” she said. “This is ridiculous.”

Source: Few Quebec ‘guardian angels’ who worked in health care during COVID granted residency

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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