Multicultural Meanderings

Pakistan’s problem—Dual citizenship

2021/03/24 Leave a comment

Overly simplistic to blame all problems on dual citizenship. Some other countries that do not formally allow dual citizenship have similar issues although may be more acute in Pakistan:

So much has been written about why Pakistan is fast becoming a basket case but none of what I have read on Pakistan from the world’s greatest analysts have come to the root problem—It is because Pakistan allows dual citizenships. None of the elites have a stake in Pakistan—not the generals; not the politicians nor the big business or feudal families.

Everyone one who can get a Western passport, along with their Pakistani ones has their kids studying and then working abroad and when these elitists retire, they have sent enough money abroad to live a life of luxury but their dollars came from deals they did living in Pakistan.

Tarek Fatah often talks about the mini-Pakistan of ISI and armed officers in Canada where they have been able to buy the best of properties and even have their own fancy club where they can act just like they did the Pakistan. No wonder even the poor try to escape as refugees along with Syrians, Afghans and other failed state migrants to Europe.

India does not allow dual citizenship and as a developing country I think it was the right decision to take. Thus, even our blatantly rich and corrupt politicians who manage to get millions of dollars abroad, round trip it back to India to invest.

While in Pakistan the military who own a whole industrial empire would rather invest their ill- gotten gains in Papa Johns Pizza and malls and real estate in the US. It almost seems that they have no faith in their country or no real stake. Such a mindset robs the country of not only the foreign aid that comes to it but also is not concerned about the ordinary citizens of the country. It almost feels like the elite use the country as a steeping stone to settle abroad.

Indian generals never go abroad to retire. Most Pakistani generals have one foot in Pakistan and another via their dollar wealth, abroad with their children as well as their extended families.

I feel if you do not have a solid stake in your country than all you are working for is robbing it as Pakistani elite have been doing for the last 70 years. I am convinced this is because of the dual nationality the country allows.

How can one possibly owe allegiance to two countries and when it comes to choosing would you live in a failing state where the there are massive power shortages; very high food inflation; water problem; irregular cooking gas; a huge shortage of medicines, vaccines and medical care; and growing poverty, or would you ditch and run to a Western country, in which you have invested and which has the rule of law and much better standard of living?

If Pakistan was to ban dual citizenship as it should than the well-educated army brats and generals and politicians would have to make their country livable and work harder at doing that. Even when they scam the system– as corruption and greed go together– at least they will have to invest it in businesses and factories in Pakistan. It will compel them to bring about policies that make Pakistan a viable place for industry and will force them to have more of a stake in making their nation better. This can only happen if Pakistan bans dual citizenship and I am convinced that if the nation does this it can recover from the malaise it is in.

Source: Pakistan’s problem—Dual citizenship

Filed under Citizenship, Dual Citizenship Tagged with Ashali Varma, Pakistan

There Is No Rung on the Ladder That Protects You From Hate

2021/03/23 Leave a comment

Good overview and reminder of the diversity of Asian Americans and how anti-Asian incidents are increasing fear:

The Asian-American experience is a tale of contrast.
We are immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, from more than 20 countries in East, South and Southeast Asia. We speak different languages and eat different food. Some lead America’s most successful companies, like Google and Zoom. Others run small businesses, like Chinese restaurants and spas, which have been the hardest hit by the pandemic. We also have the nation’s largest wealth gap: While some Asians earn household incomes that far exceed the national average, others consistently have the highest poverty rates.
The endless list of disparities and nuances has made solidarity elusive for Asian-Americans, even as activist groups demand that our issues be recognized. While Asian-Americans are the nation’s fastest-growing racial group — now 6 percent of the population — not everyone’s priorities are the same, far from it in some cases, so increasing numbers haven’t led to increasing power, politically or culturally.
The events of the past year — from the former president’s racial slurs to the series of attacks on Asians, leading up to the Tuesday shootings of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at massage parlors in Atlanta — could be uniting people for a new reason: fear.
In a country with hate crimes at their highest level in more than a decade, the professional status that many Asian-Americans enjoy, conferred by competing and succeeding in the most elite educational and professional institutions in America, doesn’t help.
Anna Mok, a Chinese-American executive at the consulting firm Deloitte, who lives in San Francisco and acknowledged that she was in a position of privilege, said hate crimes against Asian-Americans over the last year had prompted friends to urge her to not even go outside for a walk.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt that degree of physical vulnerability,” Ms. Mok said.
She added that many other Asian-Americans working for big companies had described similar magnitudes of stress to her: “There’s no buffer, there’s no isolation. No matter how much money one makes, no matter how successful one is, it’s the reality of being an Asian in the U.S.”
Asian-Americans are also becoming the most economically divided demographic in the country. In 2016, their incomes ranged from about $12,000 at the 10th percentile to roughly $133,500 at the 90th percentile, with a median of about $51,000, according to the Pew Research Center. That compares with about $15,100 and $118,000 for whites.
The income disparity is, in part, driven by immigrants, who accounted for 81 percent of the growth in the Asian adult population over the past five decades. Many who arrived under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which gave priority to people with family ties, and after the Vietnam War ended in 1975 were relatively low-skilled workers. Later, the Immigration Act of 1990 brought in a new wave of higher-skilled immigrants under the H-1B visa program, which helped American companies hire foreigners with exceptional skills.
Many Asian immigrants have higher levels of education than native-born Americans, which is largely why they settle in at the top of the income ladder. At the same time, Asians at the bottom of the ladder have lower education levels.
In nearly a dozen conversations this past week with scholars, activists and historians, the sadness and grief around this inflection point was clear — as was the recognition of how starkly divided two professional paths for Asian immigrants in this country have been.
The Asian-American story has been a complicated narrative. There are the restaurant workers and massage therapists nested in metropolitan enclaves, but there are also the high achievers attending elite schools who end up in well-compensated careers. Often one generation of immigrants in service jobs raises the next generation of corporate strivers. In this moment, though, as the population grows, the groups are becoming increasingly isolated from one another.
In the aftermath of a summer of protests for racial justice and increasing awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement, corporate employees of color, including Asians, are demanding equity and inclusion, which would put an end to a white-dominated culture. The workers in spas and nail salons don’t have the luxury to even think about that; they are more vulnerable to the whims of their white clientele. In a nation already divided by politics, religion and income, here is a community divided within itself.
But the “kung flu” pandemic — the xenophobic language, fueled by President Donald J. Trump, that added hate crimes to a deadly disease and the rest of the list of things for Asian-Americans to fear this past year — may be gradually bringing people together.
Last year, reported hate crimes against people of Asian descent in New York City jumped 833 percent from 2019. Nearly 3,800 hate incidents, which range from name-calling to assault, against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were reported to Stop AAPI Hate, a group that has collected data for the last year. (The number could be higher because not all incidents were reported.) Sixty-eight percent of those incidents were reported by women.
As the country reeled from the all-too-familiar scenes of mass shootings in Atlanta, especially killings that may have targeted people because of their race and gender, some scholars recalled an earlier death. In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, was beaten to death by two white men at a time of rising tensions over Japanese dominance in the auto market. The killers, who insisted the attack was not racially motivated, were sentenced to three years of probation.
The fact that the men did not serve jail time sent tremors through Asian communities. Activists formed civil rights groups to protest.
We know that the Vincent Chin murder really did help communities across different ethnic groups come together,” said Nancy Yuen, a sociologist at Biola University in California.
Yet for decades, policymakers and government leaders have historically treated Asian-Americans as if they were invisible. That was in part because of the diverse makeup and smaller size of the group, which made it challenging to gain influence and attention. Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University, said Asian-Americans had to compile data just to prove that they were minorities who suffered from issues like discrimination. Being recognized has been an uphill battle ever since.
The shared pain and disrespect could finally be giving Asians grounds for solidarity — and a platform to be visible. On Twitter, the hashtag #stopasianhate went viral, and all over the country, crowds gathered in the streets this past week, lighting candles for the Atlanta victims and holding signs proclaiming “Asian Lives Matter.”
Asian-American professionals in journalism, medicine and technology reflected on a year of swelling anxiety and pain from microaggressions. On my social media feeds and in conversations, fellow Asian-Americans recounted being chastised by a white person at a grocery store to keep a distance, enduring a road-rage encounter that felt ambiguously racist and being ignored by a worker at a store who was happy to help white shoppers. For Asian-American women, the nature of the Atlanta attack sparked a conversation about racism and sexism — times they had heard men yell lines like “Me so horny” while walking down the street.
Doctors who were usually booked full with appointments found that their calendars were empty, which tracks with the broader trends of how discrimination has manifested in the past year like patients refusing medical care from doctors and nurses of Asian descent. Some doctors even reported verbal abuse by their patients.
Stop AAPI Hate, the organization documenting reports of Asian hate incidents, noted sharp upticks in verbal harassment, shunning and physical assaults over the last year.
For those working remotely during the pandemic, who could mostly stay home and felt less vulnerable, their fear began to manifest when they saw photos posted online of Asian elders — people who looked like their parents — beaten to a pulp. Ms. Mok, the Deloitte executive, moved to San Francisco in January from Palo Alto, Calif., to be closer to her father, who is 88 and lives alone there.
“My own sense of helplessness when I told him, ‘Please don’t go out, not even to get your newspaper,’ was very difficult for me to handle,” Ms. Mok said.
Ms. Wu said she had noticed unity in the last year even among Asian activists who usually butted heads. She mentioned groups that have been fighting fiercely over the future of affirmative action in higher education. Both sides published statements condemning Mr. Trump’s racial slurs about Asians spreading the coronavirus.
“There’s something about the Covid issue and the anti-Asian hate issue that presents this common denominator, a point of convergence,” Ms. Wu said. “There is a certain baseline where, across the board, there does seem to be recognition and fear that bad things are happening to people of Asian ancestry, undeniably.”
Jo-Ann Yoo, the executive director of the Asian American Federation, a nonprofit network of community groups, has spent the last year producing videos about small Asian-American businesses hit hard by the pandemic and speaking at rallies and news conferences about hate crimes against Asians.
It has been devastating and infuriating, Ms. Yoo said. But she is hopeful, in a way, that the year of increasing attacks and now the violence in Atlanta will begin to bridge the class divide by creating a dialogue among people of Asian descent. The victims at the spas, like the 16 percent of Asian workers in the service industry, had to leave home to make a living during the pandemic.
When most people are vaccinated and white-collar workers are fully back out in the world — commuting, stopping for coffee and heading to offices — the way the world has changed in the past year could further force solidarity: Any Asian could be targeted.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/technology/personaltech/asian-american-wealth-gap.html

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with Asian Americans

How to prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace

2021/03/23 Leave a comment

Some useful suggestions:

In a few weeks, the 2021 list of Canada’s Best Managed Companies will be announced—and that’s something to get excited about. These companies are the high-performance businesses that energize our economy, even in the toughest of times. We’re looking into their DNA and what makes them outstanding in their field, and it is clear that one of those factors is a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. This year, for example, 24 per cent of the new winners have a CEO that identifies as a member of a diverse group. But it goes beyond that.

Deloitte’s DE&I Special Advisor to the Best Managed Companies Program, Chinmaya Thakore, explains that, “as a first step, it is critical to understand what diversity, equity and inclusion does not mean—it’s not simply a matter of checking a box or filling a quota. This is about equitable sponsorship of everyone who has an aspiration to lead and progress. Therefore, a successful diversity, equity and inclusion strategy involves accepting and implementing it as a standard practice within the culture, training, policies, skills and every every aspect of running and building a successful business.”

To that end, here’s how some of these companies are prioritizing—and championing—diversity, equity and inclusion in their workspaces:

Ensuring that clients are able to be served in their language of choice—meaning hiring staff that speak more than 50 languages

Allowing and encouraging uniform modifications for religious purposes and celebrating holidays, festivals and traditions of all cultures

Keeping a close eye on the percentage of marginalized and other underrepresented areas in their business and continuously creating opportunities where there are gaps

Making an effort to go beyond stereotypical hiring and creating more opportunities for women in traditionally male-dominated roles

Going above and beyond traditional hiring by looking globally and providing immigration support, language-skills training and team-integration assistance

Committing to inclusion, equity and diversity beyond the workplace by donating to social justice organizations and encouraging employees to follow suit with a donation-matching program

“As leaders, we want our Best Managed companies to feel empowered to act, paving the way for businesses across Canada. If we want to prosper and succeed in these very disruptive times, we will need the full strength of the Canadian demographic and we will need to pivot from the old practices,” adds Thakore.

Though diversity, equity and inclusion is not the only solution to a well-managed company, it is a common success factor among companies on this year’s Best Managed list. The Best Managed community is a platform to strengthen the bonds between like-minded companies and nurture new relationships—driving Canada toward a more prosperous future.

Source: How to prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Best Managed Companies, diversity, inclusion, workplace diversity

Douglas Todd: Slow vaccine rollout threatens Trudeau’s lofty immigration target

2021/03/23 Leave a comment

Of note:

Canada’s vaccine rollout, which is slower than 41 other countries, threatens Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chances of reaching his record target for immigration this year. But that could benefit young Canadians and recent migrants struggling to find work during the pandemic.

University of B.C. geographer Daniel Hiebert has found COVID-19 has elevated the number of “underutilized” workers in Canada to almost four million — many of whom will compete with the 401,000 immigrants Ottawa is welcoming in 2021, in addition to temporary workers.

Saying Canada is only about “halfway” through resolving the pandemic through vaccinations, Hiebert told the influential Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies of B.C. (AMSSA) it will be a “really significant challenge” to “economically integrate 400,000 newcomers into a labour market with nearly four million looking for work — or more work. It’s completely unprecedented.”

Canada’s labour and migration systems have been tremendously disrupted by COVID-19, Hiebert said. But despite a mishmash of pandemic-spurred border restrictions, Trudeau is drastically hiking immigration targets. Meanwhile, more than half-a-million people came into Canada in 2020 on various kinds of temporary visas that allow them to work at jobs ranging from high to low skill.

Going against the trend set by Quebec and most immigrant-receiving countries, Trudeau’s stated goal is to bail out Canada’s economy through immigration. Immigration Minister Marco Mendocino said in January that 401,000 new permanent residents (compared with 184,000 in 2020 and 240,000 in 2015) are needed this year “to fill acute labour shortages.”

While that may be true in some sectors, Hiebert said the government has to come to grips with the “sheer size” of Canada’s underutilized workers, whose plight isn’t captured in ordinary unemployment figures.

Hiebert told the AMSSA, which represents 80 B.C. service agencies, there are 3.8 million people in Canada not getting as much work as they want, compared with 2.5 million before the pandemic. That includes roughly 1.1 million working less than half their usual hours, 1.7 unemployed or temporarily laid off and 600,000 discouraged people who have given up seeking employment.

Chart shows almost 3.8 million Canadians aren’t getting as much work as they want, compared with about 2.5 million before the pandemic hit.

Many underutilized people struggle in the service and tourist industry. The Business Council of B.C. this month said in the past year employment in the once-large food and drink sector has fallen by 37 per cent, while jobs in accommodation, entertainment, the arts and recreation have plummeted by more than 46 per cent.

What’s more, many who are managing to hold down full-time or part-time jobs are highly subsidized by taxpayers, Hiebert said. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in December announced she would rescue COVID-19-threatened businesses by raising the maximum wage subsidy to 75 per cent.

It’s projected that Ottawa, which is handing out many other subsidies, will be running a never-before-imagined deficit of $400 billion this fiscal year. It’s caused the International Monetary Fund to rank Canada as the country most likely, out of 21 examined, to have to impose future austerity programs.

While the volume of asylum seekers trying to get into Canada was far down in 2020 (to about 1,000 a month compared with 4,000 a month the year before), a large number of foreign nationals were still arriving on a range of work visas.

Hiebert’s comprehensive look at migration during COVID-19 found more than 500,000 potential new “temporary” workers were allowed to come into Canada in the last eight months of 2020 — at the height of the pandemic. That includes more than 160,000 who arrived through the “international mobility program,” plus 38,000 agricultural workers and 96,000 people on postgraduate work permits, which Ottawa recently stretched to four years.

Rounding out the figure for that eight-month period were 248,000 new foreign students (compared with 345,000 in the same period in 2019). They’re eligible to work 20 hours a week, unlimited hours on campus and full-time anywhere in summers. More than 69,000 students came from India and 54,000 from China — despite rising diplomatic conflict and Communist China’s warning it would keep its young people in their homeland.

Such an influx of foreign nationals who are able to work will no doubt grow the country’s GDP, but economists agree it normally doesn’t enhance incomes for individuals. Senior bank economists predict high immigration targets for 2021, plus the continuing arrival of hundreds-of-thousands of temporary workers, will refuel housing prices, which are already on fire because of the Bank of Canada’s extremely low interest rates.

But, as Hiebert says, Trudeau and Mendocino have been going out of their way to trumpet those aggressive targets. And one way they’re trying to meet them is by drastically lowering language standards and skills expected of permanent residents.

As Hiebert’s data suggests, most likely to be hurt are those who are already underemployed, especially the low-skilled and recent immigrants. Labour Force Survey data shows immigrants who arrived in the last 10 years are now roughly 25 per cent more likely to be out of work than others.

The influx of immigrants and temporary workers is less likely to hurt high-skilled Canadians and established immigrant families. Studies show children of immigrants tend to be successful in Canada, particularly those of Chinese, Korean or South Asian origin. They have the largest proportion of advanced education degrees and the most high-skill jobs.

While many economists are worried about Ottawa’s high immigration targets, and Quebec and most countries are restricting inflow, particularly while awaiting vaccines, economist Rupa Subramanya, who is based in India, believes Trudeau might be highlighting his goal of 401,000 new permanent residents as a trap for the Conservatives.

“New immigrants tend to be reliable Liberal voters, and, on the flip side, those who identify themselves as Liberal supporters are much more supportive of immigration than self-identified Conservatives,” Subramanya says.

Will Tory Leader Erin O’Toole risk capitalizing on a recent Bloomberg/Nanos poll that found 40 per cent of respondents want a smaller, not a larger, number of immigrants than the previous year, and only 17 per cent favour more immigration? Quebec’s premier has reduced his province’s immigration intake this year to just 30,000.

But it’s doubtful O’Toole will take on the immigration file, since English-speaking Canadians still tend to find the subject unsuitable for public discussion. If Trudeau is setting a trap, it’s likely to go politically unchallenged.

Source: Douglas Todd: Slow vaccine rollout threatens Trudeau’s lofty immigration target

Filed under Immigration Tagged with AMSSA, COVID-19, Dan Hiebert, Douglas Todd, levels

Sullivan: When The Narrative Replaces The News

2021/03/23 Leave a comment

Valid points by Sullivan on the media’s responsibility to provide context and background to hate crimes and incidents, including comparative data between groups and perpetrators:

…
There’s a reason for this shift. Treating the individual as unique, granting him or her rights, defending the presumption of innocence, relying on provable, objective evidence: these core liberal principles are precisely what critical theory aims to deconstruct. And the elite media is in the vanguard of this war on liberalism.
This isn’t in any way to deny increasing bias against Asian-Americans. It’s real and it’s awful. Asians are targeted by elite leftists, who actively discriminate against them in higher education, and attempt to dismantle the merit-based schools where Asian-American students succeed — precisely and only because too many Asians are attending. And Asian-Americans are also often targeted by envious or opportunistic criminal non-whites in their neighborhoods. For Trump to give these forces a top-spin with the “China virus” made things even worse, of course. For a firsthand account of a Chinese family’s experience of violence and harassment, check out this piece.
The more Asian-Americans succeed, the deeper the envy and hostility that can be directed toward them. The National Crime Victimization Survey notesthat “the rate of violent crime committed against Asians increased from 8.2 to 16.2 per 1000 persons age 12 or older from 2015 to 2018.” Hate crimes? “Hate crime incidents against Asian Americans had an annual rate of increase of approximately 12% from 2012 to 2014. Although there was a temporary decrease from 2014 to 2015, anti-Asian bias crimes had increased again from 2015 to 2018.”
Asians are different from other groups in this respect. “Comparing with Black and Hispanic victims, Asian Americans have relatively higher chance to be victimized by non-White offenders (25.5% vs. 1.0% for African Americans and 18.9% for Hispanics). … Asian Americans have higher risk to be persecuted by strangers … are less likely to be offended in their residence … and are more likely to be targeted at school/college.” Of those committing violence against Asians, you discover that 24 percent such attacks are committed by whites; 24 percent are committed by fellow Asians; 7 percent by Hispanics; and 27.5 percent by African-Americans. Do the Kendi math, and you can see why Kendi’s “White Supremacist domestic terror” is not that useful a term for describing anti-Asian violence.
But what about hate crimes specifically? In general, the group disproportionately most likely to commit hate crimes in the US are African-Americans. At 13 percent of the population, African Americans commit 23.9 percent of hate crimes. But hate specifically against Asian-Americans in the era of Trump and Covid? Solid numbers are not yet available for 2020, which is the year that matters here. There’s data, from 1994 to 2014, that finds little racial skew among those committing anti-Asian hate crimes. Hostility comes from every other community pretty equally.
The best data I’ve found for 2020, the salient period for this discussion, are provisional data on complaints and arrests for hate crimes against Asians in New York City, one of two cities which seem to have been most affected. They record 20 such arrests in 2020. Of those 20 offenders, 11 were African-American, two Black-Hispanic, two white, and five white Hispanics. Of the black offenders, a majority were women. The bulk happened last March, and they petered out soon after. If you drill down on some recent incidents in the news in California, and get past the media gloss to the actual mugshots, you also find as many black as white offenders.
This doesn’t prove much either, of course. Anti-Asian bias, like all biases, can infect anyone of any race, and the sample size is small and in one place. But it sure complicates the “white supremacy” case that the mainstream media simply assert as fact.
And, given the headlines, the other thing missing is a little perspective. Here’s a word cloud of the victims of hate crimes in NYC in 2020. You can see that anti-Asian hate crimes are dwarfed by those against Jews, and many other minorities. And when you hear about a 150 percent rise in one year, it’s worth noting that this means a total of 122 such incidents in a country of 330 million, of which 19 million are Asian. Even if we bring this number up to more than 3,000 incidents from unreported and far less grave cases, including “shunning”, it’s small in an aggregate sense. A 50 percent increase in San Francisco from 2019 – 2020, for example, means the number of actual crimes went from 6 to 9.
Is it worse than ever? No. 2020 saw 122 such hate incidents. In 1996, the number was 350. Many incidents go unreported, of course, and hideous comments, slurs and abuse don’t count as hate “crimes” as such. I’m not discounting the emotional scars of the kind of harassment this report cites. I’m sure they’ve increased. They’re awful. Despicable. Disgusting.
But the theory behind hate crimes law is that these crimes matter more because they terrify so many beyond the actual victim. And so it seems to me that the media’s primary role in cases like these is providing some data and perspective on what’s actually happening, to allay irrational fear. Instead they contribute to the distortion by breathlessly hyping one incident without a single provable link to any go this — and scare the bejeezus out of people unnecessarily.
The media is supposed to subject easy, convenient rush-to-judgment narratives to ruthless empirical testing. Now, for purely ideological reasons, they are rushing to promote ready-made narratives, which actually point away from the empirical facts. To run sixteen separate pieces on anti-Asian white supremacist misogynist hate based on one possibly completely unrelated incident is not journalism. It’s fanning irrational fear in the cause of ideological indoctrination. And it appears to be where all elite media is headed.

Source: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-narrative-replaces-the-news-9ea?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMDcxOTUwNywicG9zdF9pZCI6MzM4NTQ3NDcsIl8iOiJ3SVY5SCIsImlhdCI6MTYxNjMyMjg4MiwiZXhwIjoxNjE2MzI2NDgyLCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjEzNzEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.p90yZ3tRiph43-8Wq6msRWTYlRMmdY_GZy0T0FrTkOQ&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share

Filed under Data, Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with Andrew Sullivan, Asian Americans

Longitudinal Immigration Database: Immigrant children and census metropolitan area tables, 2018

2021/03/23 Leave a comment

Encouraging analysis showing good economic outcomes for children of immigrants (those who arrived under 15 years of age). Would be interesting to have a breakdown by visible minority group as well:

The most recent 2018 data from the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) indicate that immigrant children make a significant contribution to Canadian society and the Canadian economy over time. Although immigrant children (32.2%) are more than twice as likely as non-immigrant children (15.4%) to live in low-income households, factors such as the opportunity to be educated in the Canadian system and an increased proficiency in the official languages help immigrant children attain wages in adulthood similar to those of their Canadian-born peers.
This analysis connects the characteristics of immigrants who came to Canada as children with their adulthood socioeconomic outcomes in 2018, such as participation in postsecondary education and median wages. The IMDB provides a long-term perspective on immigrants and their socioeconomic outcomes in Canada, offering details on how immigration is shaping Canada’s future. In addition, these data from 2018 contribute to baseline estimates in preparation for future research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigrant children, including immigrant children admitted during the pandemic, their adjustment period and their long-term socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood.

Immigrants who came to Canada as children are more likely to participate in postsecondary education than the overall population

In 2018, 70% of 20-year-old immigrants who were admitted to Canada before the age of 15 participated in postsecondary education, according to tax data. This compares with 56% of the overall population of 20-year-olds in the same year.
Similar to the overall Canadian population, the median wage of immigrants who were admitted as children increased with age. In 2018, 25-year-olds in the overall population had a median wage of $29,710, compared with $30,300 for 25-year-old immigrants admitted as children. For 30-year-olds, the median wage was $41,810, compared with $47,400 for 30-year-old immigrants admitted as children. This represents a 13.4% difference in the median wage between the 30-year-olds in the total population and 30-year-old immigrants admitted as children.

Children admitted to Canada with economic immigrant families report higher postsecondary education participation than Canadians overall or immigrants admitted under other categories

Many factors influence the socioeconomic outcomes of immigrant children in adulthood, including the conditions under which they were admitted to Canada. Economic immigrants, selected for their potential to contribute to Canada’s economy, tend to have a higher median wage than refugees, who are fleeing persecution or conflict, or immigrants sponsored by family already living in Canada.
Immigrant children who were admitted as dependants of economic immigrants are likely to benefit from the higher median wage of the principal applicant in the economic immigrant category. Among children admitted in economic immigrant families, 75% of those who were 20 years old in 2018 reported postsecondary education participation. This compares with 60% for children admitted in sponsored families, 51% for refugees and 56% for the overall population of the same age, in the same year.

Chart 1
Postsecondary participation of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

At age 30, immigrants who were admitted to Canada before the age of 15 with economic immigrant families report the highest wages compared with those admitted under other categories

Lower participation in postsecondary education can lead to earlier labour market entry. Until the age of 23, people admitted as children in sponsored families, refugees and the overall population had higher wages than their economic immigrant counterparts. At this age, immigrants admitted as children in sponsored families had median wages of $19,200, compared with $19,000 for immigrants admitted as children in refugee families, $21,300 for the overall population, and $18,900 for people admitted as children in economic immigrant families.
However, beginning at the age of 24, a time when many have completed their postsecondary studies, the wages of people admitted as children in economic immigrant families began to surpass those of their counterparts in other admission categories and the overall population, and they continued to increase at a steeper rate over time compared with the other categories.
At the age of 30, in 2018, people admitted as children in economic immigrant families had median wages of $52,400. This compares with $41,600 for immigrants admitted as children in refugee families, $40,100 for immigrants admitted as children in sponsored families, and $41,810 for the overall population.

Chart 2
Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

Immigrant women admitted to Canada as children have higher postsecondary education participation than men

In 2018, 74% of 20-year-old immigrant women admitted as children reported participating in postsecondary education. In comparison, participation rates were lower among immigrant men (65%) who also came to Canada as children. At 74%, the participation rate of immigrant women who came as children was also higher than the rate of the overall female population (62%) and the overall male population (50%) of the same age.
With regard to wages, 30-year-old immigrant women admitted to Canada as children had median wages of $43,300, 48% more than those of 25-year-old immigrant women admitted as children ($29,200). However, their median wages were lower than those of immigrant men who also came as children ($51,900) and of the overall male population ($48,850) of the same age. These gender income differences are in line with those in previous studies that found that women with a similar level of education as men report lower income.
Nonetheless, the median wages of 30-year-old immigrant women admitted as children were higher than those of the overall female population ($35,280), who earned the lowest median wages.

Chart 3
Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and sex, 2018

These new data will facilitate further analysis of other factors that can affect the future adulthood socioeconomic outcomes of immigrants admitted as children, such as their age at immigration, year of immigration and their incidence of living in a low-income household during childhood.
In addition to the table about the economic outcomes of immigrants admitted to Canada as children used in the analysis above, tables on the income and mobility of immigrants by census metropolitan area are now available. These tables use data from the IMDB.

Source: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210322/dq210322c-eng.htm?CMP=mstatcan

Filed under Immigration Tagged with children, economic outcomes, Statistics Canada

In a Palace of Colonialism, a ‘Quiet Revolutionary’ Takes Charge

2021/03/22 Leave a comment

Noteworthy:

It was a monument to the power and glory of colonial France. When the Palais de la Porte Dorée opened in Paris in 1931, every corner of it was designed to extol the colonizing mission: from the bas-reliefs of laborers in faraway lands, to the frescoes of imperial magnificence, to the aquariums swarming with tropical fish.

That institution is now led by a man whose family members were among the colonized peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. Pap Ndiaye, a historian and academic of Senegalese and French descent, was last month appointed to revitalize the Palais de la Porte Dorée — an institution that was born as the Museum of the Colonies in 1931, and that now houses the Tropical Aquarium and the National Museum of the History of Immigration.

Ndiaye knows the issues well. A graduate of the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he studied for several years in the United States, and is a specialist in African-American history. He recently co-wrote a report on racial diversity for the Paris Opera. The question is whether he can turn around an institution with a problematic legacy and the sensitive mission of telling the story of France’s immigrants.

In an interview at his new workplace, Ndiaye acknowledged that the Palais de la Porte Dorée was “a more difficult environment than a museum with a more straightforward identity, because the issues tackled here, around immigration and colonial history, are among the burning questions in French political life.”

He said that the French had “a hard time picturing their country as a land of immigration.” That’s because immigrants in France were expected to “forget where they came from, and become more French than the French” — speak French, dress French — in a process of assimilation that was the opposite of multiculturalism. “Our role is to make immigration a more essential part of the vision that the French have of their national history,” he added.

The interview began with a grand tour of the premises: the frescoed foyer with its allegorical images of France’s transcontinental reach, from Africa to Indochina and the South Pacific; the circular aquarium with its swimming turtles and patterned stingrays. All are legacies of the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, a sprawling six-month fair for which the Palais de la Porte Dorée was built, that also featured elaborately constructed pavilions representing some of France’s colonies through their native architecture. The idea was to show the grandeur of Imperial France, and the benefits its colonies brought to the mainland.

When the empire dissolved three decades later, the Palais changed names a few times, and eventually became the National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts, until its collections were folded into those of the Quai Branly Museum, founded in 2006. The following year, the Palais de la Porte Dorée became the headquarters of the National Immigration Museum. Yet because of political sensitivities, President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to inaugurate it, according to museum administrators and historians. The official ceremony took place seven years after the opening, with President François Hollande.

In its 14 years of existence, the museum has staged a number of popular exhibitions — on football and immigration, and on Italian migration to France — and now draws 500,000 visitors a year, many of them no doubt to see the spectacular tropical aquarium. Yet it has never quite found its place in Paris’s cultural landscape.

“Since the 1930s, the Palais de la Porte Dorée has always been somewhat cursed, and in search of an identity,” said Pascal Blanchard, a French historian of immigration and colonialism.

It was time for the Palais de la Porte Dorée to confront the issues at its heart — colonialism and immigration — which were also key to the national debate, Blanchard noted. “Pap Ndiaye is not afraid to tackle those,” he added. “He is familiar with them.”

Ndiaye was born and raised in middle-class suburbs of Paris with his sister, Marie, now a best-selling novelist who won the 2009 Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary accolade. Their father — the first student from sub-Saharan Africa to be admitted to Paris’s elite École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées engineering school — moved back to Senegal when they were toddlers. The children were raised by their mother, a French science teacher, and attended local schools.

“We are products of the French meritocracy,” Marie NDiaye, who renders her last name differently than her brother, said in an interview, noting that they grew up in predominantly white social circles. “As a child and an adolescent, I never felt Black,” she added. “Because we didn’t know our father, and were raised by our mother, we actually didn’t know any Black people.”

Her brother said he first became aware of race when he took a gap year to study at the University of Virginia and received an invitation from the university’s Black Student Alliance. He was intrigued to have been asked because of his skin color, he recalled, and started going to the group’s meetings. He became fascinated with African-American history, which would later become his academic specialty.

Today, he said, he identified as Black “out of solidarity with those who are Black and who suffer from it,” he said, even though, he added, he never experienced racism and discrimination firsthand.

His experience in the United States and knowledge of African-American history have made Ndiaye into something of a go-to guy on matters of racial inclusivity. In 2019, he advised the Musée d’Orsay on its blockbuster exhibition “Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” which focused on Black figures in 19th- and 20-century French painting. And in 2020, he was called in by the Paris Opera’s new director Alexander Neef to co-write the report on diversifying the institution. The document, published in February, called for an end to racist caricatures and for the hiring of more performers of color.

“Everyone recognized that it was time to do something, and that you could change dancers’ recruitment and abolish blackface without the world coming to an end,” said Ndiaye.

Neef described Ndiaye as “a quiet revolutionary” — someone who “knows exactly what he wants” and how to get it without crashing through walls. He said he expected that in his new job overseeing the Palais de la Porte Dorée, Ndiaye would “listen first before he does something.”

The one problem is that the institution at the Palais’s core, the Immigration Museum, already has a boss: Sebastien Gökalp, who took over two years ago. How will that work?

So far, so good, said Gökalp in an interview. The two had discussed the prospect of staging an exhibition about Asian migration to France, and would jointly present a major October show, “Picasso, l’Etranger” (“Picasso the Foreigner”) about Picasso’s outsider status in France. (The artist, who lived in France for many years, applied for French citizenship, but was refused.)

Gökalp said his new boss had extra responsibilities such as running the building, the budget, the staff, and the aquarium. He described Ndiaye as “poised, quite gentle, and a consensus seeker. He’s here to appease the debate.” He was also “a fast learner,” he added.

Another adjective commonly used to describe Ndiaye — including by his own sister — is “ambitious.” So what were his ambitions for the Palais?

“This is an institution that is viewed as peripheral,” he replied. “I would like it to be at the center of French cultural life.”

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with History of Immigration, paris

Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare?

2021/03/22 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of some of the challenges:

On a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back.

For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.

But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim before the attack, investigators said. Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive. The attacker was charged with attempted murder, but not as a hate crime.

The announcement outraged Asian-American leaders in New York City. Many of them protested outside the Manhattan district attorney’s office, demanding that the stabbing be prosecuted as a hate crime. They were tired of what they saw as racist assaults being overlooked by the authorities.

“Let’s call it what it is,” said Don Lee, a community activist who spoke at the rally. “These are not random attacks. We’re asking for recognition that these crimes are happening.”

The rally reflected the tortured public conversation over how to confront a rise in reports of violence against Asian-Americans, who have felt increasingly vulnerable with each new attack. Many incidents have either not led to arrests or have not been charged as hate crimes, making it difficult to capture with reliable data the extent to which Asian-Americans are being targeted.

That frustration erupted on a national scale this week after Robert Aaron Long, a white man, was charged with fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night.

Investigators said it was too early to determine a motive. After Mr. Long’s arrest, he denied harboring a racial bias and told officials that he carried out the shootings as a form of vengeance for his “sexual addiction.”

The Atlanta shootings and other recent attacks have exposed difficult questions involved in proving a racist motive. Did the assaults just happen to involve Asian victims? Or did the attackers purposely single out Asians in an unspoken way that can never be presented as evidence in court?

Many Asian-Americans have been left wondering how much cultural stereotypes that cast them — especially women — as weak or submissive targets played a role.

Other incidents that clearly seemed racially motivated have not resulted in arrests. The police are still searching for a man who called an Asian-American mother the “Chinese virus” and spat at her child in Queens last week.

As the debate over what legally qualifies as anti-Asian bias unfolds, the community is grappling with the reality that the law is simply not designed to account for many of the ways in which Asian-Americans experience racism.

In New York State, to charge such attacks as hate crimes, prosecutors would need to show that the victims were targeted because of their race.

But proving a racist motive can be particularly difficult with attacks against Asians, experts say. There is no widely recognized symbol of anti-Asian hate comparable to a noose or a swastika. Historically, many Asian crime victims around the country were small-business owners who were robbed, complicating the question of motive.

“There’s a recognizable prototype with anti-Black or anti-Semitic or anti-gay hate crime,” said Lu-in Wang, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “They’re often more clear-cut.”

Asian-Americans are sharply divided over the best measures to curb the violence, reflecting the wide ideological and generational differences within a group that encompasses dozens of ethnicities. There are about 1.2 million Asians in New York City, according to census data, making up 14 percent of the city’s population.

Some have called for lowering the bar to bring hate-crime charges, toughening penalties and boosting funding for the New York Police Department to investigate attacks against Asians.

Others have opposed these proposals, saying more policing could harm their own communities, worsen racial tensions and disproportionately target the Black and Latino communities that have long dealt with aggressive policing.

“I’ve rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes,” said Anne Oredeko, the supervising attorney with the racial justice unit at Legal Aid, a public defenders group. “Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes.”

Under New York State law, certain offenses can be upgraded to hate crimes, increasing the potential prison sentence. As evidence, prosecutors often point to hateful verbal statements or social media posts by the defendant.

Among large American cities, New York City had the largest increase in reported hate crimes against Asians last year, according to an analysis of police data by a center at the California State University, San Bernardino. There were 28 such incidents in 2020, up from 3 in 2019, according to New York Police Department data.

In the past month alone, several assaults on Asian victims have been reported to the police, including an attack on an older woman who was pushed outside a bakery in Queens. None of the incidents has been charged as a hate crime.

In fact, the only person who has been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime in New York City this year is Taiwanese. He was accused of writing anti-Chinese graffiti outside several businesses in Queens.

The authorities acknowledge that the data is limited and imperfect. A pending bill that is expected to pass by June would set up a more standardized system for New York’s courts, police and prosecutors to report hate crime incidents.

Stewart Loo, a deputy inspector who heads the Police Department’s Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, said in an interview that Asian-Americans are often reluctant to report crime because of language barriers or worries over having their immigration status questioned. Many also fear retaliation from perpetrators, he said, or simply do not want to make trouble.

“The process is very daunting,” Mr. Loo said. “You have to go to the police station, you have to talk to detectives, you have to talk to prosecutors.”

Last year, the attacks in New York City that did get prosecuted as hate crimes typically involved people blaming Asians for spreading the coronavirus, echoing the rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump, who has referred to the disease as the “China virus” and the “Kung Flu.”

For instance, a white woman was charged with a hate crime last March after she bumped into an Asian woman crossing the street in Manhattan and said, “You’re the reason why the coronavirus is here,” before spitting on her and pulling out some of her hair, according to prosecutors.

In the Chinatown stabbing last month, prosecutors said there was no evidence that the defendant, Salman Muflehi, targeted the victim because he was Asian or saw the victim’s face before stabbing him. Mr. Muflehi did tell the police afterward that he did not like the way the victim had looked at him.

Mr. Muflehi immigrated from Yemen to New York as a teenager. He has suffered from severe mental health issues for years, often getting into fights and landing in jail, according to interviews with his brother and mother. They say he has never expressed any hatred against Asians.

He has previously been arrested on accusations that he assaulted both his brother and his father. Most recently, he was charged in January with punching a Hispanic man in the head, prosecutors said. (Prior news reports incorrectly identified that victim as Asian.)

Mr. Muflehi remains in jail. He faces four criminal charges, including attempted murder. Adding a hate crime designation to the charge would raise the minimum sentence he faces from five years to eight years.

The 36-year-old victim, whose identity has not been made public, was hospitalized for more than two weeks. He was released on Sunday.

Police investigators recommended the stabbing be charged as a hate crime, but the Manhattan district attorney’s office disagreed.

Shirley Ng, a community organizer in Manhattan’s Chinatown, supports easing the criteria for hate crime charges and eliminating bail for them, because, in her view, officials have been too lenient in cases involving Asian victims.

“It’s too easy to say these suspects have mental illness,” Ms. Ng said. “Sometimes they are also cognizant that they’re out to hurt people.”

Others say tougher enforcement could end up pitting Asian-Americans against Black and Latino communities, inflaming racial tensions.

Wayne Ho, president of the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social services agency, said many of his Asian colleagues were verbally harassed during the pandemic but chose not to alert law enforcement because they worried the perpetrators, who were often people of color, could be mistreated by the police.

“I asked myself, do I want this person in jail?” said Alice Wong, one of Mr. Ho’s colleagues. “Just because you put someone in jail doesn’t make them not hate anyone anymore.”

Recognizing this challenge, some law enforcement officials have called for people who commit hate crimes to attend antiracism classes as an alternative to prison.

The approach was used after four teenage girls last March assaulted a 52-year-old Asian woman on a bus in the Bronx while accusing her of spreading the coronavirus, according to prosecutors. One of the girls beat her with an umbrella.

With the consent of the victim, prosecutors allowed three of the girls to be cleared of criminal charges if they participated in an educational program on hate crimes for two months. Their identities have not been made public because they are minors.

Elizabeth OuYang, a civil rights lawyer who supervised the program, said the program helped debunk stereotypes for the girls, who are Black and grew up without much interaction with Asian-Americans. By the end, Ms. OuYang felt confident that they were remorseful about what they had done.

“The girls are good kids,” Ms. OuYang said. “They’re not evil monsters. I swear on my mother’s grave they will not commit another hate crime again.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/nyregion/asian-hate-crimes.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with Asian Americans

Trudeau Sr. cabinet opposed payments to interned Japanese-Canadians

2021/03/22 5 Comments

Not much new here in terms of the substance of former PM Trudeau and his Cabinet’s position but nevertheless of interest:

The cabinet of then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau opposed compensation for interned Japanese-Canadians because they didn’t seem unhappy, say secret documents.

The declassified documents, obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, said the cabinet was concerned about the precedent it would set to give cash to people whose property was seized.

“Any assistance should not be addressed only to the Japanese since other groups were treated badly on racial grounds,” cabinet agreed at a confidential April 18, 1984 meeting.

The National Association of Japanese Canadians had sought for years settlement of claims over the seizure and forced sale of property in 1942.

About 22,000 Japanese, including Canadian citizens, were removed from the BC coast after the Pearl Harbour attack and taken to the interior, Alberta, Manitoba and northern Ontario.

The wartime cabinet invoked the War Measures Act and seizing more than $152.4 million worth of fishing boats, real estate and automobiles owned by Japanese-Canadians.

Then-Multiculturalism Minister David Collenette in a censored 1984 report to cabinet proposed a settlement of claims.

“Many Japanese people who were relocated stayed in the new communities and were not unhappy,” said Cabinet Minutes.

“A nation cannot go back and wipe out the past, it should look forward. A more general approach should be taken, if anything is to be done.”

“All minorities will feel they should have a right to redress. Any resolution in the House of Commons should not be related to a single group.”

Cabinet said instead of compensating Japanese-Canadians, “other ways should be looked at, for example endowing chairs at universities,” said Minutes.

“In concluding, Ministers expressed the wish that the Minister (of Multiculturalism) look at the issue again and have it discussed in the cabinet committee on social development.”

Trudeau, Sr. at the time also publicly opposed any apology or compensation for the wartime internment.

“I’m not inclined to envisage questions of compensation about acts which have maybe discoloured our history in the past,” Trudeau told the Commons.

“I’m not sure where we would stop in compensating.”

The Liberal cabinet lost re-election five months later without settling the issue.

When Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was elected, in 1he 988 formally apologized for the wartime internment and approved $21,000 in compensation to some 6,000 surviving internees.

“All Canadians know apologies are inadequate,” Mulroney said at the time.

Japanese were interned under a 1942 order that demanded “all property situated in any protected area of British Columbia belonging to any person of the Japanese race be delivered up” for sale by federal agents.

Japanese-Canadians did not regain the right to vote until 1949.

Source: Trudeau Sr. cabinet opposed payments to interned Japanese-Canadians

Filed under Historical Recognition, Multiculturalism Tagged with Cabinet, internment, Japanese Canadians, PM Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Cross and Taylor: Lies, Damned Lies, And Race-Based Statistics

2021/03/22 Leave a comment

Reading this commentary reminded me of an anecdote that I can’t unfortunately locate: former PM Harper’s decision to replace the mandatory census with the voluntary, and less accurate, National Household Survey in 20ll was driven in part by the data being used by academics, advocates and activists as a basis for more progressive policies.

The alternative, as Cross and Taylor appear to advocate, is not to have visible minority breakdowns in the labour force survey to avoid this use of data. To my mind, it is a head in the sand approach as such data is needed to understand how well Canadian society is working in terms of economic integration.

COVID-19 has demonstrated the various inequalities between different groups. The regular censuses have also captured these inequalities as well so expanding this to the labour force survey (and public service employment equity reports) is consistent with long-standing practice.

To my mind, issues lie more with respect to how the disparities are interpreted, whether narrowly or looking at the range of factors that influence these disparities.

For example, when I look at public service employment equity data, groups that have lower levels of educational attainment (e.g., Blacks, Latin Americans) are less represented among occupations requiring university degrees. This disparity, of course, likely reflects in part earlier barriers and discrimination encountered by those groups (e.g., streaming of Blacks into non-academic streams, recently addressed by the Ford government).

Disaggregated date is need to be aware of disparities and point towards questions regarding the reasons for these disparities, and assess the degree to which policy interventions, and which kinds, may be warranted.

To their credit, Cross and Taylor do some analysis, looking at occupations and visible minorities, highlighting that Koreans, Filipinos and Southeast Asians are more concentrated in the accommodation and food service industry than not visible minorities as an explanation of why these groups were more affected by COVID-19 lockdowns.

But it is ingenuous, at best, to present socioeconomic circumstances as completely unrelated to barriers faced by some groups.

And of course, the data will be used and sometimes misused by advocates and activists, and one could argue that Cross and Taylor are equally and legitimately using data to support their position.

But curious for a former statistician to be arguing for less data and thus less needed information for evidence-based policy. And using France as a model?:

Since July, Statistics Canada has been publishing labour-market data divided into 12 ethnocultural categories including Chinese, South Asian, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Korean, Japanese, Arab, Black, Filipino, Latin American, White, and Others. Sliced this way, Statcan’s figures reveal the unsurprising fact that unemployment is unevenly distributed across Canada’s racial populations, just as it varies by region, gender and age. The adult Canadian unemployment rate in January was 9.4 percent, but 20.1 percent for Southeast Asians, 16.4 percent for Blacks and 16.6 percent for Latin American Canadians. “Others” had a slightly-better-than-average unemployment rate of 8.9 percent.
This move to produce racially-specific labour-market data may well have been inevitable, given the intersectional enthusiasms of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who recently declared his next budget will be an explicitly “feminist”document. It also follows logically from his government’s creation of Statcan’s Centre for Gender, Diversity and Inclusion Statistics in 2018. Equally predictable is the effect this new information has had on public discourse.
The release of race-based labour-market data has provided further fuel to the ascendent view that Canada is an inherently unfair and racist country. Lobby groups and organizations representing the various racial groupsidentified by Statcan have latched onto the new data to back up claims regarding the “negative labour market impact of racism on Black youth” and other collective sins aimed at Canadian society. The figures are also frequently held as proof that employment equity programs and other government market interventions must be scaled to industrial proportions to eliminate the discrimination baked into Canada’s labour market.
But when it comes to fomenting outrage, Statcan is just getting started. In a recent commentary in The Globe and Mail, Anil Arora, Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada, explained his organization’s intention to double down on the collection and dissemination of race-based data. Because the initial effort last July revealed such glaring “racial disparities”, he wrote, Statcan will now be using “data from varying lenses…to measure those inequalities and track the progress being made to address them.”
French law specifically forbids INSEE from processing or analyzing data regarding “ethno-racial classifications” because it could violate constitutional requirements that all citizens must be treated equally.Tweet
As exciting and progressive as all this may seem, however, Statcan should tread carefully. Collecting race data is inherently contentious and divisive, something all national statistical agencies must recognize. While the United States has a long history of collecting very detailed race-based data, others such as France’s Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) do not disseminate any race statistics. In fact, French law specifically forbids INSEE from processing or analyzing data regarding “ethno-racial classifications” because it could violate constitutional requirements that all citizens must be treated equally “without distinction of origin, race or religion.”
As we shall see, unequal racial outcomes revealed by national statistics do not necessarily prove racism, and often lead to intractable debates. This is especially so in a country like Canada, where there’s a large overlap between visible minorities and immigrants who historically take years to match the outcomes for Canadians born in the country. Feeding a culture of grievance that denies any role for cultural differences in generating observed inequality can, paradoxically, perpetuate unequal racial outcomes. And as the state of affairs in the U.S. suggests, a surfeit of race-based statistics is no guarantee of racial harmony.
Neither is Statcan exempt from the principle of opportunity cost. Collecting one set of data inevitably means foregoing others – some of which may be of greater value. For years, researchers from social policy groups such as Cardus have asked for better data on how marital status affects employment and income. This would provide more detail on the important role played by family in the labour market. Yet these requests have long been ignored for cost reasons. Statcan presumably has better things to do with its limited resources. Now, however, in the middle of a pandemic, the agency has suddenly discovered the means to produce divisive race-based unemployment data.
Pandemic and Race
There are many pitfalls and risks associated with attributing different outcomes experienced by different racial groups exclusively to race, especially when these accusations are based on superficial statistics. In its July 2020 labour market report that, for the first time, segmented unemployment by race, Statcan itself noted that the top line figures showing poorer outcomes for most visible minorities categories reflected, in large part, the tendency of certain racial groups to work in industries deeply affected by the pandemic.
For example, 19.1 percent of Koreans, 14.2 percent of Filipinos and 14.0 percent of Southeast Asians were employed in the accommodation and food industry, according to the 2016 Census, compared with only 5.9 percent of Whites. Given the dramatic effect the pandemic-related lockdowns and other measures have had on the hospitality sector, it seems reasonable to conclude that race played little or no role in these unequal outcomes. Rather, it was the circumstances of the industries they were working in.
It has also been widely reported that different racial groups contract Covid-19 at different rates. Some concluded that this was because these groups are particularly disadvantaged by a racist society, while others wondered whether particular racial groups might have a different genetic susceptibility to the virus. As a recent U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research study warns, merely noting differences among racial groups without knowing their source means “the political discourse can gravitate toward ‘biologic explanations’ or explanations based on racial stereotypes which are harmful in themselves and get in the way of policy solutions.” The same study made plain that it was the socio-economic circumstances of particular groups that affected their exposure to the virus. This was due to working in particular industries and using public transit, which increased their contact with other people and, in turn, led to a higher rate of infection. Once the data was corrected for these variables, visible minorities in the U.S. were found to be no more susceptible to the virus than whites.
Given how easily some data can be misinterpreted or misrepresented, it would seem that Statcan has a clear responsibility to caution users about its proper use. Figures regarding the distribution of federal government revenues and spending by province, for example, are regularly twisted by politically-motivated analysts and governments. As a result, Statcan published an article in 2007 offering a detailed explanation for why these statistics should not be considered a scorecard for which provinces are gaining or losing from their dealings with the federal government.
Much of the current debate over racism in Canada arises from the presumption that all aspects of life should be perfectly evenly distributed, and that any deviation from pure equality must be considered prima facie evidence of systemic racism. Tweet
It is, accordingly, curious that these new race-based labour-market figures do not come with a similar warning; race data is far more emotionally and politically incendiary than provincial fiscal data. It is also surprising that Statcan did not directly address the issues raised by France’s refusal to collect race-based data.
Racism of the Gaps
Much of the current debate over racism in Canada arises from the relatively recent presumption that all aspects of life should be perfectly evenly distributed, and that any deviation from pure equality (a term also recently redefined from equality of opportunity to sameness of outcomes) must be considered prima facie evidence of systemic racism. With dizzying speed, this eminently contestable claim has been elevated nearly to conventional wisdom.
In an insightful commentary published earlier this month by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Vancouver-based writer Sonia Orlu tackled head-on the notion that “any disparity in outcomes between blacks and whites is the direct result of racism, as opposed to class differences, culture, personal ‘(ir)responsibility,’ or any other myriad of situational factors.” As Orlu, who is black, points out, this “racism of the gaps” generally relies on surface-level observations lacking in context or detail.
Nowhere is this assumption more explosive than regarding claims that members of visible minorities are disproportionately targeted, arrested or killed by police. As Orlu points out, a case for systemic racism in policing can only be proven with detailed race-based data showing police interactions as a share of the overall criminal population, rather than the population at large. While racism may create the conditions in which visible minorities commit more crime, simply arresting more visible minorities is not, in and of itself, proof police are acting with racist intent.
Orlu notes, however, that Canada does not collect the sophisticated race-based data necessary to come to an informed observation on this heated topic. With only the most basic statistics available regarding race, arrests and incarcerations, it is easy to conclude that police actions are driven by racism rather than other factors. And even when detailed race and crime evidence is available, as it is in the U.S., Orlu points out it is generally ignored by the media and public because it does not align with popular “anti-racism ideology” narratives. More information, in this case, does not produce a better debate or better decisions.
This problem is further illuminated by economist Tim Harford in his fascinating new book The Data Detective. Harford offers the example of an algorithm called COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) used in the U.S. to predict the probability of a criminal being re-arrested. Because the algorithm produced racially disparate results – giving higher probabilities for blacks to be re-arrested than whites under similar circumstances – it was accused of perpetuating systemic racism. And yet the algorithm itself was colour-blind; race was not an input factor.
A detailed investigation by a team of statisticians revealed that the differing results were the product of members of different races behaving differently and/or living in different neighborhoods. As Harford concluded, “The only way in which an algorithm could be constructed to produce equal results for different groups…would be if the groups otherwise behaved and were treated identically.” Such an outcome adds evidence to the proposition that unequal results between races do not prove racism if behaviour and circumstances differ.
Examples of the racism gap fallacy are in ample supply elsewhere. Last month, for example, Akim Aliu, a former NHL player and founding member of the lobby group Hockey Diversity Alliance, claimed that an observed lack of racial diversity in the National Hockey League could only have one possible source. “There are still owners in the league who don’t even believe [racism] is a problem,” Aliu complained to Reuters in a Black History Month article. “To me that is just unfathomable, 95 per cent of your league is white and you don’t see there is an issue of race.”
Yet visible minorities make up a vast majority of the lineups in many other sports. The National Basketball Association is 74 percent black, and the National Football League 68 percent. While the Canadian Football League does not provide readily-accessible race-based statistics, the number of black players in this league also appears to far exceed representation in the general population. Should all this be taken as self-evident proof that football and basketball are equally prejudiced, but in favour of visible minorities? Of course not.
In another fixation on gaps, Statcan’s Arora in his Globe and Mail commentary emphasizes the importance of moving “toward levelling the uneven economic playing field”, citing the unequal unemployment and poverty rates among immigrant women as a key example. It must be noted, however, that there is a large overlap in Canada between visible minorities and immigrants. The lagging labour market outcomes for visible minorities and other Canadians reflect the long-standing challenges of immigrants establishing themselves in Canada.
In 2016, for example, Canada admitted thousands of Syrian refugees, many with limited education and little or no knowledge of either of Canada’s official languages. Do inferior incomes and more joblessness among the women of this group in the short time since they arrived prove the “playing field” in Canada is uneven? Inferior outcomes for some players don’t necessarily indicate a tilted field, it may merely demonstrate that they were sent out onto the field without the skills and training needed to compete. It is also worth remembering that the prevalence of poverty and inequality of income is much greater in the countries most immigrants come from, than is their inequality compared with native-born Canadians.
The Inconvenient Truth that some Minority Groups Outperform the Majority
Racism – defined as the presence of deep-seated prejudices that affect individual and collective behaviour – certainly exists in Canada, as it does in all countries. And wherever present, it should be challenged and overcome. That said, collecting race-based data may not contribute to that worthy goal at all. It could instead cultivate a mentality of grievance and entitlement that undermines the impetus for individuals to strive to achieve more for themselves and their children. Look how easy it was for Aliu, for example, to take a simple statistic regarding the race of NHL players and turn it into a bitter accusation.
Arora’s recent Globe commentary, meanwhile, laments the “many economic challenges facing racialized populations, Indigenous people, persons with disabilities and other marginalized groups” as proof of the need for Statcan’s big move into race data. But might it not be more useful to study how certain minority groups have overcome even-greater challenges in the past? Few groups have suffered more persecution and discrimination than Jews, yet their internal culture enabled Jewish people to achieve superior results in multiple fields of endeavour in country after country. Japanese Canadians are another example, overcoming their forcible removal from their homes to be quarantined in remote camps during the Second World War, and going on to achieve one of the highest income levels of any racial group.
It is too easy to dismiss the achievements of certain races or ethnic groups as the result of advantages and privileges. While the lagging performance of some visible minorities is automatically assumed to be evidence of Canada’s innate racism, the opposite conclusion is never drawn from the superior results displayed by other minority groups (such as Chinese, to use Statcan’s terminology) in terms of employment, scholastic achievement or avoidance of crime. Looking south of the border, pre-Covid U.S. Census Bureau data revealed that the real median household income of Asian-Americans is nearly 30 percent higher than that of whites.
Thomas Sowell, the renowned black economist at the prestigious Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has written extensively on the use and misuse of race-based data. His insights on the importance of the culture internalized within racial groups provides a good lesson on the pitfalls of superficial interpretations of race data. As Sowell observed in his 2013 book Intellectuals and Race: “Different races, after all, developed in different parts of the world, in very different geographical settings, which presented very different opportunities and restrictions on their economic and cultural evolution over a period of centuries.” Further, people tend to blame racial differences on bias, which ignores “internal explanations of intergroup differences in favor of external explanations.”
As Sowell noted wryly in his 1996 book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, “all things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities.” Given current demands for diversity in all things, he was observing, why should anyone expect identical outcomes as a result? Perhaps that comment should be attached to every Statcan press release on racial differences in the labour force survey.
The Politics of Distribution Versus the Economics of Growth
There is a growing sense of malaise in Canada, including worry that we are falling well short of our economic potential. Our political and economic leaders ought to be focusing on creating the macroeconomic and cultural conditions wherein all groups can thrive. Instead, our country’s growing fixation on racial issues – including the collection of race data – invites policymakers to think in terms of improving Canada one micro-group at a time.
We have already seen its nefarious impact. The most salient fact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been its devastating impact on all of Canada, with 5.5 million people losing their jobs or having their work severely curtailed in the spring of 2020. Rather than proposing general solutions to support growth and allow the reopening of the economy, numerous special interest groups have used the pandemic as an excuse to advance their particular pet policy projects, re-packaging old proposals that have circulated for years or decades to “solve” a once-in-a-lifetime crisis. The ideas include greater provision of day care, universal basic income, universal Pharmacare, extended employer-paid sick leave and so on, almost ad infinitum, as if budget constraints no longer existed.
The greater influence of broad economic conditions than specific social policies is revealed by Arora’s own reference to the “significant progress” visible minorities were making towards equality before the pandemic set them back. He cited a sharp drop in poverty and “rapidly rising employment rates among working-age immigrant women” as evidence of this happy situation. Such pre-pandemic levels of achievement – closing numerous gaps with the rest of society – was not the product of programs targeting specific aggrieved minority groups, but the result of an improving and robust economy-at-large. As Canada as a whole grows, its gaps shrink.
The best way to resuscitate the fortunes of visible minorities is the same as for all other Canadians: reopen the economy as quickly as possible and adopt policies and attitudes aimed at supporting long-term economic growth. Tweet
The same phenomenon was in even greater evidence in the U.S., where wage gains in 2019 were led by the lowest wage-earners, especially visible minorities. In recognition of this, more Latino and black voters cast ballots for Donald Trump last November than in 2016, despite his obvious negative attributes. The clear lesson is that better macroeconomic policy and economic growth always outweigh the impact of targeted government programs.
It is important to remember that the reversal of fortunes for minorities during the pandemic was because our economy was struck by the economic equivalent of a thermonuclear device, not because Canada overnight became more racist. The best way to resuscitate the fortunes of visible minorities, therefore, is the same way as for all other Canadians: reopen the economy as quickly as possible and adopt policies and attitudes aimed at supporting long-term economic growth.
Statcan’s new race-based data invites the facile conclusion that one group’s success explains another group’s relative failure and justifies its grievance. And our faltering economic growth reinforces the sterile view that the size of the economic pie is fixed and any gain by one group comes at the expense of others. The result is a focus on the politics of distribution instead of the economics of growth.
To be fair, Statcan did a lot of good work in response to the pandemic. This includes flash estimates of GDP, adjustments to how it measures labour under-utilization, more timely data on firm turnover, and innovative ways to track population mobility during a lockdown. The agency’s recent move into race-based data does not, however, rank among these useful innovations. And its effects may outlast all the others due to the appeal it holds for groups dedicated to fanning the flames of internal complaint.
With race-based data now being widely disseminated, this process may be unstoppable. Any move to cut off funding for this project will be widely condemned by the many vocal advocates of the “race industry”. Canadians should thus prepare themselves for a steady stream of studies in the coming years declaring the presence of gaps that allegedly prove the existence of systemic racism, but which tell us nothing about their origin or the best way to reduce them. All this is an unfortunate but costly distraction from the bigger and more important issues of innovation, investment and entrepreneurship that will be necessary to restore an economy that will benefit all Canadians – of every race and colour.
Philip Cross is a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada. Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor of C2C Journal.

Source: https://c2cjournal.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e8efce716429c34122979e2de&id=ca577642d5&e=4174a59277

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with Peter Shawn Taylor, Philip Cross, racial disparities, Statistics

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Chart 1
Postsecondary participation of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

At age 30, immigrants who were admitted to Canada before the age of 15 with economic immigrant families report the highest wages compared with those admitted under other categories

Chart 2
Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

Immigrant women admitted to Canada as children have higher postsecondary education participation than men

Chart 3
Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and sex, 2018

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Immigrants who came to Canada as children are more likely to participate in postsecondary education than the overall population

Children admitted to Canada with economic immigrant families report higher postsecondary education participation than Canadians overall or immigrants admitted under other categories

Chart 1 Postsecondary participation of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

At age 30, immigrants who were admitted to Canada before the age of 15 with economic immigrant families report the highest wages compared with those admitted under other categories

Chart 2 Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

Immigrant women admitted to Canada as children have higher postsecondary education participation than men

Chart 3 Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and sex, 2018

Follow Blog via Email

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Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote

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Chart 1
Postsecondary participation of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

Chart 2
Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and admission category, 2018

Chart 3
Median wages of immigrants admitted to Canada as children and of the overall population, by age and sex, 2018