Ottawa announces new Hong Kong immigration options as committee warns Uighurs face ‘genocide’

2020/11/14 Leave a comment

A reminder that Canadian immigration policy has a large element of self-interest given the priority given to younger, highly-educated potential immigrants rather than political refugees (which it may prefer to be discrete about given likely Chinese government thuggish reactions):

The federal government today announced long-awaited plans to help more people living in Hong Kong come to Canada as the Chinese government cracks down on the pro-democracy movement in the territory.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said Canada is introducing a new measure targeting students and young people in Hong Kong: a work permit designed to speed up the process toward permanent residency.

“This announcement also supports the commitments made by the Government of Canada to maintain the many connections between Canada and Hong Kong in response to the Chinese government’s imposition and implementation of the national security law in Hong Kong on June 30, 2020,” his department said in a statement.

There are about 300,000 Canadians living in Hong Kong, the department said, adding that the new Chinese national security law criminalizes “secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces,” using very broad definitions that undermine rights and freedoms.

Hong Kong was supposed to operate under a “one-country, two-systems” framework after Britain handed its former colony over to Beijing in 1997 under an international agreement. But human rights and pro-democracy advocates say Beijing’s new national security law is undermining freedom in Hong Kong.

Mendicino said the new immigration stream announced today was crafted in response to the Chinese crackdown on some Hong Kongers.

“We find ourselves at a challenging moment. Canada remains deeply concerned about China’s passage of the new national security law. We have unequivocally stated that this legislation and the unilateral powers within it are in direct conflict with China’s international obligations,” Mendicino said.

By targeting young Hong Kongers with post-secondary degrees from Canadian and foreign universities, Mendicino said Canada hopes to bring in “the best and the brightest” individuals fleeing repression.

On Wednesday, Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Canada was “deeply disappointed” by China’s latest decision to remove four elected lawmakers from office in Hong Kong.

“This decision further narrows Hong Kong’s autonomy and the space for freedom of expression and public participation in governance in Hong Kong,” the minister said in a media statement. “This action clearly demonstrates a concerning disregard for Hong Kong’s Basic Law and the high degree of autonomy promised for Hong Kong under the ‘one-country, two-systems’ framework.”

Earlier today, members of a House of Commons committee looking into the plight of ethnic Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province cited their recent conclusion that the Chinese Communist Party is guilty of perpetrating a genocide against the ethnic minority.

The all-party Commons subcommittee on human rights heard harrowing testimony from survivors of China’s imprisonment of Uighur Muslims. They shared accounts of mass incarceration, rape, forced sterilization of women and mass surveillance.

Critics say China has detained as many as one million Uighurs and members of other Muslim groups in what amount to mass prisons, where they are subjected to “re-education.”

The Chinese government has denied any abuse of human rights in the region and insists that reports claiming that are false.

“The subcommittee is persuaded that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party constitute genocide, as laid out in the Genocide Convention,” said Liberal MP Peter Fonseca, the committee chair. “In particular, the subcommittee would like to thank the Uighur witnesses that provided evidence at great risk to themselves and their families living in Xinjiang.”

New Democrat MP Heather McPherson said the most compelling testimony she heard came from women who “survived the concentration camps and shared their stories of abuse and violence.”

“It has been shown again and again that to wipe out a people, to perpetrate a genocide, one must destroy the women. Acts designed to prevent births constitute genocide,” she said.

Thursday’s developments are sure to anger China, which has warned the Trudeau government not to intervene in Hong Kong and to stop levelling criticism related to the Uighurs.

Canada’s relations with China are at an all-time low because the People’s Republic has imprisoned two Canadian men, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — an action the Trudeau government has branded as one of coercive or “hostage” diplomacy.

Kovrig and Spavor were rounded up by Chinese authorities in December 2018, nine days after Canada arrested Chinese high-tech scion Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant.

The subcommittee made it clear it was pointing the finger at the Chinese Communist Party specifically.

“This is not about a people. This is not about a country,” said Liberal MP Sameer Zuberi. “What we want are these practices to stop and then we will have nothing to say on the matter of the Uighur people.”

The subcommittee’s report will make its way up to the full Commons committee on foreign affairs and international development before it goes to the government for a response.

The Trudeau government has said repeatedly it won’t back down on public criticism of China’s human rights record.

Source: Ottawa announces new Hong Kong immigration options as committee warns Uighurs face ‘genocide’

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The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

To watch:

Counting has ended, but the 2020 census is not over yet — and it’s likely to get tangled in the fraught transition to President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.

Some major final steps for this year’s national head count are set to take place while President Trump is still in office. That includes the release of the first set of results, legally due by Dec. 31, that are used to reapportion congressional seats among states and reset the Electoral College map for the next decade. Under federal law, the president is required by Jan. 10 to hand off those numbers to Congress for certification.

And the census continues to be mired in legal fights over the Trump administration’s push to alter the apportionment numbers, as well as last-minute decisions to shorten the schedule for the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the United States. A federal judge in California, plus Census Bureau employees themselves, said those changes risked serious data inaccuracies.

Once in office, the Biden administration is poised to start shaping the 2030 count and could reverse some of the Trump administration’s census-related moves. Perhaps most notably, Biden could stop the bureau from producing citizenship data the Trump administration requested that could be used to radically change state-level redistricting in a way that a prominent Republican strategist concluded would benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic white people.

“It’s probably no secret that the census is not top of mind for every administration on an ongoing basis,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House Oversight subcommittee for the census who advised the Obama-Biden transition team in 2008. “But this time is really different because this census faced unprecedented challenges and then disruptions.”

In a statement to NPR before the election, Jamal Brown, the Biden campaign’s national press secretary, said that Biden “knows the critical importance of the census and how it touches every aspect of American life, from federal investments around health care, housing, and education, to how states redistrict and draw their congressional boundaries.”

Among the members of Biden’s transition agency review team for the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, are two census watchers who have been calling for more transparency as the bureau prepares to release the 2020 census results. They include Nancy Potok — who, during the Obama administration, served as a deputy director at the bureau and was later appointed to be the chief statistician within the White House Office of Management and Budget — and Denice Ross, a senior fellow with the National Conference on Citizenship who worked on data projects and policy in the Obama administration as a presidential innovation fellow and an adviser at OMB.

But before Biden officials can make any changes, there are some key questions about the census for the courts and Congress to answer in the final weeks of the Trump administration.

Can Trump change who is counted in numbers that determine House seats and the next Electoral College map?

The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in with its answer to that question after hearing oral arguments on Nov. 30.

So far, three lower courts have rejected the presidential memo Trump issued in July that calls for an unprecedented change — the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the census numbers used for determining each state’s share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as each state’s Electoral College votes.

All of those three-judge panels unanimously found that carrying out the memo would violate a federal law requiring the president to deliver a report to Congress of “the whole number of persons in each State” as determined by the census. One of those panels also ruled that it would go against the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration has been pushing the high court to rule before Dec. 31. That’s the legal deadline for the commerce secretary, who oversees the bureau, to give the president the first set of census results, which Trump wants to alter.

But it remains unclear, given all of the schedule changes the Trump administration has made, whether the Census Bureau can meet the Dec. 31 deadline and how that would affect the president’s ability to report numbers to Congress by Jan. 10. Any delays that push key steps in the congressional reapportionment process past the Jan. 20 inauguration could strip Trump of control over the count.

Last month, the bureau’s top career official in charge of the census, Al Fontenot, said the agency hasn’t committed to when it will wrap up processing and checking all of the information it has collected.

“We are trying to maintain the flexibility to get the job done in a quality way,” Fontenot said during a news briefing.

Justice Department attorneys say the administration hasn’t finalized how to accurately count unauthorized immigrants, aside from those in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, in order to exclude them from the apportionment numbers.

In July, Biden condemned Trump’s memo in a tweet, writing: “We won’t let him deny communities the funding and representation they deserve. Because in America, everyone counts.”

But Brown, the Biden campaign spokesperson, has not responded to NPR’s question about what the Biden administration would do if, before leaving office, Trump attempted to remove unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment numbers before giving them to Congress.

If Trump did that, it is also unclear whether the clerk of the House, which will remain under Democratic control, would certify those numbers.

Will Congress extend legal deadlines for reporting census results to allow for more quality checks?

That question has been hanging over the census since April, when the Trump administration first proposed four-month extensions to the legal deadlines for reporting the apportionment counts and redistricting data, which are due to the states by March 31.

Publicly backed at the time by Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, career officials at the bureau said that because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, they needed more time to tally the country’s residents and run quality checks on the results.

But the administration made an about-face in July and began pushing to end counting early, sticking with the original reporting schedule. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed the administration to cut counting short, leaving open the possibility for Trump to control the apportionment numbers even without winning reelection.

Faced with a shortened window for counting in their states, some Republican lawmakers in Congress began publicly supporting the Democratic-led push for deadline extensions.

But now that counting has stopped, it’s unclear if there’s enough bipartisan support for deadline extensions to be passed.

The bureau has already scaled back some quality checks, risking “serious errors,” career officials warned, that they may not have time to fix.

Some census advocates — including Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — are calling for Congress to pass deadline extensions during the lame-duck session to help ensure that the bureau has enough time to address any major errors it finds in the census results before they’re used to reapportion House seats.

“I think waiting until a new administration and new Congress to act would be too late for the census,” Gupta, a former Obama administration official, says. “A new administration and new Congress really would be in uncharted territory that would take time to navigate, conceivably creating a constitutional crisis that could be avoided if Congress gives the Census Bureau the time that it needs and the time that it asked for.”

Source: The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

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Delacourt: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Nails the virtue signalling and hypocrisy:

The great furor over the poppy ban at Whole Foods lasted less than one news cycle last week, thanks to the full-throated outrage from political leaders all over Canada.

Imagine how long Quebec’s secularism bill — which bans a lot more than poppy-wearing — would have lasted with similar shock and condemnation from those same politicians.

Sanctimony is never in short supply in the realm of politics, but we seem to have entered the season for freedom-of-expression lectures in Canada.

Politicians have waded into the frays over saying the N-word in the classroom, wearing poppies in upscale supermarkets and the publication of religiously offensive cartoons in France. There’s no end of courage — almost no end — when it comes to standing up for the right to make a statement.

Bloc Québécois Leader Yves François Blanchet has been the most strident, but by no means has he been the only one. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has put out videos proclaiming himself as a free-speech champion in the face of what he sees as worrying ambivalence by Justin Trudeau after acts of terrorism in France.

Funny, though, not one of them rushed to the podium over the stories being told in a Quebec court last week about the lives ruined by Bill 21’s limits on the rights of religious expression. Several constitutional challenges have been launched against that legislation, which bans the wearing of religious symbols in public, and one is now underway.

Even though it’s freedom-of-expression season in federal politics, not one party leader — not Blanchet, not O’Toole, not Trudeau or NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — has offered comment on the tales being told in the Bill 21 trial. There have been stories of teachers having to choose between their careers and their religion, and Muslims being targets of hate and bigotry because of the law. And from the selective free-speech champions in Ottawa? Silence.

Trudeau and Singh have said they don’t like Bill 21, but they’re going to let the courts do what they do. O’Toole has said the law is “difficult,” but he’s not touching it because he doesn’t think it’s any of the federal government’s business — unlike poppies in supermarkets or acts of violence in Europe.

Blanchet has said he supports Bill 21 because it has majority support in Quebec, even though allowing minority rights to be settled by majority opinion has always been a sketchy kind of argument when it comes to constitutional matters. Where do we get that idea? Oh yes, from Quebec.

To its credit, Whole Foods didn’t try that one with its poppy ban, though it’s kind of fun to imagine how over-the-top the political outrage would have been if the Amazon-owned outlet had said, “Most people who work for us don’t want to wear poppies.”

Let’s face it, though, it was pretty easy to be mad at Whole Foods. No one in politics wants to be associated with billion-dollar companies, tech giants or overpriced food these days, so it was simply a matter of hearing about the poppy ban and pressing “play” on the outrage tape.

It’s a little harder, apparently, to work up the nerve to say that Bill 21 is a flagrant slap in the face of freedom of expression and, worse yet, that it is inflicting real, not symbolic damage on real citizens.

It’s politics, naturally. No one wants to get on the wrong side of that majority opinion in Quebec, or worse, get accused of trying to interfere with provinces’ rights to make their own laws. We may be enthusiastic rights champions in Canada, but we are also very polite about poking our noses into constitutional-jurisdiction matters. See O’Toole’s arguments, above.

As for why politicians are suddenly falling over each other to climb aboard the freedom-of-expression these days, there may be an easy explanation: It’s the pandemic, and especially this second wave of COVID-19, which is proving to be a real freedom-wrecker.

People are angry, frustrated and fatigued with limits on their lives. The addition of one more constraint, even if it extends to their speech alone, gives the public and politicians a way to vent a little emotion about how unfree we’re all feeling behind our masks and closed doors.

But the sanctimony of the free-speech champions at the podium in Ottawa is a little hard to take while Bill 21 is sitting on the books as a stain on Charter rights in Canada.

These staunch champions of rights are of course free to proclaim they believe in freedom of expression day after day at their political pulpits. But we should feel free to take note of what freedoms — and whose freedoms — they are also failing to defend.

Source: Canada’s federal leaders will defend your right to wear a poppy, Just don’t ask them to stick up for your freedom of religion

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Regg-Cohn: Surprised that some Black people and Latinos voted for Trump? Try looking at them as individuals

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the diversity within groups:

In other news, it turns out that more Blacks, Latinos and gays turned out for Donald Trump this time than last time.

Why is that news? The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.

That certain groups are presumed to vote in their supposed self-interest — as determined by other groups who know better what’s best for them — is not merely presumptuous. It’s profiling.

Today, some of the same social critics who warn against stereotyping Blacks or Latinos are now scratching their heads about why they didn’t vote as expected in the U.S. presidential election. Profiling can be perilous.

Today, some of the same social critics who warn against stereotyping Blacks or Latinos are now scratching their heads about why they didn’t vote as expected in the U.S. presidential election. Profiling can be perilous.

It is a human impulse. But impossibly dehumanizing at times.

Profiling seeks out similarities, but it is pointless if we forget individual differences. It relies on the notion that people of similar backgrounds or aspirations hold similar beliefs, live in similar neighbourhoods, and so on.

Profiling seeks out similarities, but it is pointless if we forget individual differences. It relies on the notion that people of similar backgrounds or aspirations hold similar beliefs, live in similar neighbourhoods, and so on.

The biggest problems with profiling are the premises and definitions that underlie it. That more Latinos voted for Trump this time tells us little of interest, because it’s such an imprecise term (and is overshadowed by the overpowering reality that whites voted massively and decisively for him).

Latinos range from anti-Communist arch-capitalists in Miami’s Cuban émigré community to impoverished Honduran refugees fleeing drug wars via Mexico, to second-generation strivers in Texas or Arizona aspiring to join the ruling Republican establishment. Ethnic is not monolithic.

Just as LGBTQ voters can be Republican or Democrat, Latinos are more different than they are alike.

Profiling is a tool and a template. It is a form of demography and part of democracy, for better or for worst — which is why pollsters, political operatives and party fundraisers mine the data to harvest votes and donations at election time.

They’re just more sophisticated than the rest of us in slicing and dicing the fruit salad. They know that skin colour is only skin deep, so they drill down for other demographic details such as education, income, location.

That’s why postal codes are the preferred proxies for pollsters. Yet zeitgeist and zip codes are rarely congruent.

My own education in demographic divisions came when I was posted to the Toronto Star’s Middle East bureau years ago. Despite my background as a political reporter, I only realized as a foreign correspondent how many ways Israelis could be subdivided.

Not merely as hawks versus doves, but ethnic Ashkenazi versus Sephardi; secular Russian immigrants versus ultra-Orthodox Haredi; socialist kibbutzniks versus modern Orthodox Jewish settlers; urban versus suburban; Muslim and Christian Arab citizens versus Jewish citizens; and last but not least, left versus right. The miracle was how quickly those internecine divisions melted away when Israelis faced an external enemy and existential threat; and how quickly the internal tensions returned (Palestinians, too, fought their own civil war in Gaza between Islamist Hamas rejectionists and secular Yasser Arafat loyalists).

The security services typecast people as safe or threatening based not only on background but back story and behaviour — whether at airport check-ins, military checkpoints or political rallies. Which is why Yitzhak Rabin’s security guards let down their guard when a kippah-wearing orthodox Jew chatted them up before assassinating the prime minister — he didn’t fit their Palestinian profile of a clear and present danger.

Stephen Harper’s Tories made inroads in the GTA suburbs by appealing to the traditional values of many immigrant communities that converged with conservatism. His then-minister of multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, once sat me down to demonstrate his mastery of Chinese Canadian demographics — delineating early anti-Communist immigrants from Taiwan, subsequent waves of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong dual citizens, and more recent (more apolitical) arrivals from mainland China.

The New Democratic Party — founded as an alliance between the co-operative agricultural movement and the labour movement — long ago learned the working class would not reflexively rally to their side. If workers are reluctant to recognize their own enlightened self-interest — rallying to Doug Ford’s Tories even when they campaigned on cancelling a minimum wage hike and then freezing it for years — why are progressives perplexed when Blacks or Latinos warm up to Trump?

Vote-determining issues are more likely to be economic than ethnic, and political preferences are often more idiosyncratic than ideological. That’s only human.

The point is that profiling tells you everything and nothing about people. Just as postal codes are imprecise — people are unpredictable.

Political parties bank on profiling because there’s much to gain from voters and donors, and little to lose from mass mailings or email blasting that misses the mark. The minimal cost of bulk postage and mass spamming is a mere rounding error.

The point is that profiling tells you everything and nothing about people. Just as postal codes are imprecise — people are unpredictable.

Political parties bank on profiling because there’s much to gain from voters and donors, and little to lose from mass mailings or email blasting that misses the mark. The minimal cost of bulk postage and mass spamming is a mere rounding error.

The rest of us can’t afford to be so reckless with our wild guesses, unproven hunches and dehumanizing assumptions. If the penalty of your profiling is an assassin’s bullet, or an airplane bombing, or a human rights humiliation, then the miscalculation yields an incalculable cost.

Source: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2020/11/11/surprised-that-blacks-and-latinos-voted-for-donald-trump-try-looking-at-them-as-individuals.html

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Immigration committee study highlighting coronavirus impact on Canadian immigrants

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to follow, particularly with respect to backlogs and processing (hopefully citizenship as well):

Separated family members, approved permanent residents unable to travel to Canada, and others are speaking up in the House of Commons as witnesses in a study on Canadian immigration.

Canada’s Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration is conducting a study that will examine the impact of COVID-19 on the Canadian immigration system over the course of no more than eight sessions. Once the study is complete, the committee will report its findings to the House. The government then has 120 days to table a comprehensive response, however, they are not obligated to make any change in policy.

This particular study will look into the following issues relevant to the coronavirus impact on Canadian immigration:

  • Application backlogs and processing times for the different streams of family reunification and the barriers preventing the timely reunification of loved ones, such as denials of Temporary Resident Visas (TRVs) because of section 179(b) of the Immigration and Refugees Protection Regulations, and the ongoing closures of Visa Application Centres;
  • Examine the government’s decision to reintroduce a lottery system for the reunification of parents and grandparents; to compare it to previous iterations of application processes for this stream of family reunification, including a review of processing time and the criteria required for the successful sponsorship;
  • TRV processing delays faced by international students in securing TRVs, particularly in francophone Africa, authorization to travel to Canada by individuals with an expired confirmation of permanent residency, use of expired security, medical, and background checks for permanent immigration.

While House is in session, the committee is meeting at 3:30 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. The next meetings are scheduled for November 16, and 18. Immigration minister, Marco Mendicino, has been invited to appear before the committee on November 25 and December 2.

How travel restrictions are affecting immigrants’ mental health

Among other early findings, the mental health of immigrants and their Canadian family members was examined in two scenarios relating to family separation.

Faces of Advocacy is a grassroots organization established to reunite families in Canada during COVID-19 travel restrictions. They say they are directly responsible for the exemption on extended family members, which was announced on October 2.

The group indexed the mental health of 1,200 members at the end of August. They used validated mental health rating scales for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress in civilians. The results are not diagnostic, but offer a glimpse into the mental health effects that have resulted from travel restrictions.

Despite 49 per cent of respondents reporting they have never been diagnosed with mental illness, just over 69 per cent would screen positive for symptoms of clinical depression. In addition, 16 per cent of respondents had a history of self harm or suicidal thoughts prior to the travel restrictions, but after family separation this nearly doubled to 30 per cent.

Spousal Sponsorship Advocates was established during the pandemic. It is as another grassroots movement, created to advocate for the accelerated reunification of families with ongoing spousal sponsorship applications in Canada.

Their survey took a mental health snapshot of 548 respondents, who had been separated from family for months or even years at a time. Of these, a reported:

  • 18 per cent have suicidal thoughts;
  • 22 per cent had to stop working;
  • 70 per cent have anxiety and 44 per cent generalized anxiety;
  • 35 per cent started having panic attacks;
  • 78 per cent have periods of severe depression;
  • 76 per cent have severe energy loss;
  • 57 per cent now have physical pain;
  • 52 per cent gained or lost weight abnormally;
  • 85 per cent have sleep problems.

The mental state of expired confirmation of permanent residence, or COPR, holders was also mentioned. These are people who were approved for permanent residence, but were not able to travel to Canada before their documents expired. As a result, many are unable to come to Canada without an authorization letter from Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, and they have already upended their lives in their home country. The evidence includes a series of tweets that are intended to show the “pains, agony, [and] mental torture” experienced by COPR holders.

Source: Immigration committee study highlighting coronavirus impact on Canadian immigrants

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La part québécoise de l’immigration continue de diminuer

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

No surprise. Conscious policy decision with longer-term political impact:

Le Québec n’a peut-être pas accueilli autant d’immigrants qu’il le souhaitait en 2020 à cause de la pandémie, mais il n’en accueillera pas plus l’année prochaine que ce qu’il avait initialement prévu. Du coup, parce qu’Ottawa, lui, entend procéder à un rattrapage, la part québécoise de l’immigration canadienne diminuera encore.

Québec a reconnu fin octobre qu’il recevra cette année entre 30 % et 40 % moins d’immigrants que prévu et qu’il effectuerait un « rattrapage » de 7000 dossiers au cours des deux prochaines années. Plusieurs en ont déduit que ces 7000 personnes s’ajouteraient aux 44 500 à 47 500 personnes que Québec avait planifié d’accueillir en 2021. Ce ne sera pas le cas, a appris Le Devoir.

« Nous maintenons le cap sur les seuils d’immigration. En effet, la cible d’admission pour 2021 demeure la même, soit entre 44 500 et 47 500 immigrants », précise par courriel Flore Bouchon, l’attachée de presse de la ministre québécoise de l’Immigration, Nadine Girault. « L’ajustement des 7000 personnes est pour compenser la baisse des admissions qu’on pourrait avoir. » En d’autres mots, on pense que l’effet de la pandémie pourrait se prolonger en 2021 : garder la même cible constitue donc en soi un « rattrapage » aux yeux de Québec.

Or, le gouvernement fédéral entend vraiment, au cours des trois prochaines années, augmenter le nombre d’immigrants reçus par rapport à ce qu’il avait initialement prévu. Ainsi, il vise 401 000 admissions en 2021 (au lieu de 351 000), 411 000 en 2022 (au lieu de 361 000) et 421 000 en 2023 (les anciennes projections n’allaient pas jusque-là).

Or, le gouvernement fédéral entend vraiment, au cours des trois prochaines années, augmenter le nombre d’immigrants reçus par rapport à ce qu’il avait initialement prévu. Ainsi, il vise 401 000 admissions en 2021 (au lieu de 351 000), 411 000 en 2022 (au lieu de 361 000) et 421 000 en 2023 (les anciennes projections n’allaient pas jusque-là).

Ces hausses feront donc en sorte que Québec recevra une part plus faible qu’avant de nouveaux arrivants au Canada. En 2018, Québec avait reçu 15,9 % du total canadien. Ce taux a chuté à 11,9 % en 2019 et il sera seulement de 11,5 % en 2021 si les cibles des deux gouvernements sont atteintes. Pour l’année 2020 en cours, Ottawa pense être en mesure de respecter sa cible de 341 000 admissions, alors que Québec prévoit d’arriver bien en deçà, dans une fourchette de plus ou moins 25 000 à 30 000 arrivants, ce qui représenterait alors environ 8 % du total canadien.

La baisse de l’apport québécois à l’immigration canadienne se fera surtout sentir dans la catégorie des réfugiés et de la réunification familiale. Le Québec avait accepté 14,4 % de toutes les personnes arrivant au Canada pour rejoindre leur famille en 2018 et 10,6 % en 2019, mais ce taux passera à 9,6 % en 2021. Le déclin est de même amplitude du côté des réfugiés. La part québécoise était de 17,8 % en 2018 et de 13,6 % en 2019, mais ne sera plus que de 12,1 % en 2021.

La baisse de l’apport québécois à l’immigration canadienne se fera surtout sentir dans la catégorie des réfugiés et de la réunification familiale. Le Québec avait accepté 14,4 % de toutes les personnes arrivant au Canada pour rejoindre leur famille en 2018 et 10,6 % en 2019, mais ce taux passera à 9,6 % en 2021. Le déclin est de même amplitude du côté des réfugiés. La part québécoise était de 17,8 % en 2018 et de 13,6 % en 2019, mais ne sera plus que de 12,1 % en 2021.

L’accord entre Ottawa et Québec sur l’immigration commande que Québec accepte plus ou moins 20 % de tous les réfugiés venant au pays. Même si Québec est loin du compte, le gouvernement de Justin Trudeau accepte ses cibles, indique le bureau du ministre fédéral de l’Immigration, Marco Mendicino. « Le plan des niveaux d’immigration du gouvernement du Québec a été intégré au plan des niveaux d’immigration 2021 annoncé par le ministre Mendicino 30 octobre dernier. Nous collaborons avec le Québec afin de nous assurer de leur permettre de recevoir les immigrants nécessaires à la prospérité des entreprises », indique le porte-parole du ministre, Alexander Cohen.

Des craintes

Stephan Reichhold, qui dirige la Table de concertation des organismes au service des personnes réfugiées et immigrantes, trouve « très inquiétante » cette diminution. « Depuis deux ou trois ans, le Québec privilégie beaucoup plus l’immigration temporaire », note-t-il. Ces gens viennent travailler au Québec, mais attendront des années avant que leur statut soit régularisé, faute de place. Cela aura un impact sur leurs droits démocratiques et leur accès aux programmes sociaux ou encore les soins de santé.

Aussi M. Reichhold dit-il à ceux qui seraient tentés de se réjouir de cette diminution des seuils d’immigration que « c’est de la poudre aux yeux ». « Il y a autant de bodiessur le territoire québécois que lorsque les niveaux d’immigration étaient plus élevés. C’est ça que les gens ne comprennent pas. Ils sont déjà parmi nous. Ils vivent parmi nous. Ce sont nos voisins, ils sont là, ils participent, ils travaillent. […] Mais tout ça précarise beaucoup de personnes. »

La hausse des cibles d’immigration d’Ottawa a été généralement bien reçue par le milieu des affaires, qui y voit une solution à la pénurie de main-d’œuvre. Mais la population semble l’accepter avec moins d’enthousiasme. Un sondage Nanos Research Group effectué pour le compte de Bloomberg au début du mois indique que seulement 17 % des répondants pensent que le Canada devrait accueillir plus d’immigrants. 40 % ont dit qu’il faudrait plutôt maintenir les niveaux actuels d’immigration, tandis que 36 % des répondants ont dit qu’il faudrait abaisser les cibles.

Source: https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/589588/immigration-la-part-quebecoise-continue-de-diminuer?utm_source=infolettre-2020-11-12&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=infolettre-quotidienne

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Citizenship applicants call on Ottawa to resume knowledge tests halted due to COVID-19

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

Given that we are unlikely to be out of various lockdowns and restrictions for the next 6 months, hard to understand why the government is not able to move faster on this beyond citizenship being a lessor priority for IRCC.

The last dataset on new citizens dates from June, compared to immigration datasets which include August data and will likely be updated with September data this week:

After spending the prime years of her childhood fleeing conflict and living as a refugee in Turkey, Sedra Alshamaly describes her arrival in Canada four years ago with warmth and gratitude.

“It’s the first place we felt welcomed,” said Sedra, now 12. “We felt like we belonged here.”

Sedra and her family arrived in Canada in 2016 after a circuitous journey sparked by the Syrian civil war. Today, she describes herself as a more-or-less ordinary Canadian Grade 7 student and a budding artist.

Source: Citizenship applicants call on Ottawa to resume knowledge tests halted due to COVID-19

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New documentary tells the story of Ukrainians’ role in Canada’s war effort

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

As one of my multiculturalism files was historical recognition of communities that were either subject to immigration restrictions or wartime internment, found this documentary of interest:

The late Ukrainian Canadian poet Michael Gowda, who in 1907 enlisted in the Canadian Home Guard and sought to create a Ukrainian regiment to serve the British army, once wrote a series of verses addressed directly to his new homeland.

Written from the perspective of an immigrant allowed to live in Canada primarily to colonize the prairie, as 170,000 Ukrainians did between 1891 and 1914, “To Canada” describes these new Canadians as in some sense merely “holders of thy soil.” To be recognized as fully Canadians, their people would have to fight and even die for Canada. It would take a blood sacrifice for their children to one day be “free to call thee theirs,” as the poem reads.

It is an outmoded vision of Canadian citizenship but no less powerful for the cultural change that has occurred since then, as Ukrainian-Canadians established themselves in Canada over many generations, with veterans of every war Canada has fought.

Award-winning Winnipeg filmmaker John Paskievich said this poem “proved prophetic.” The sacrifice was real, and the sense of belonging was finally ensured.

His new documentary, A Canadian War Story, describes Ukrainian Canadians’ contribution to Canada’s war efforts. Working for the Ukrainian Canadian Research & Documentation Centre, he and other researchers tracked down details of veterans in Legion Halls and various archives, and gave voice to old correspondences.

As a story of racist exclusion giving way to acceptance, the film also offers a chance to reflect on the ethnic diversity of military service, especially from an ethnicity of Canadians who, like Japanese Canadians, were once persecuted as enemy aliens, even interned in work camps.

For Ukrainian Canadians in the late 19th and early 20th century, many of whom immigrated with the promise of title to a quarter section if they could farm it, resentment and suspicion were the norm. The film quotes then Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell referring to the consternation felt by established Canadians as trainloads passed through Ontario on their way west, filled with “disgusting creatures… being bearing human form” but having “sunk to such a bestial level.”

That was the climate in which Gowda tried to create a Ukrainian Canadian regiment as the threat of war grew in Europe. Canada was not interested. On the contrary, Ukrainians were suspected of sympathy for the enemy Austro-Hungarian empire, whence they came. Those who were not naturalized were forced to register as enemy aliens. Others were disenfranchised, and some were interned in forced labour camps.

There were exceptions, and the film describes how Filip Konowal, a Ukrainian Canadian from the allied Russian empire, became the only Eastern European born person to win the Victoria Cross, for “most conspicuous bravery and leadership when in charge of a section in attack.”

The second wave of Ukrainian immigration in the 1920s was similarly met with broad racism and exclusion. By the end of the 1930s, the reasons for enlisting were similar to other Canadians — patriotism, duty, excitement, lack of other work — but with that added cultural sense that Gowda’s blood sacrifice had not yet been paid.

The film quotes veterans such as Joseph Romanow of Saskatoon, who described an awareness that Ukrainian Canadians mustn’t be seen as second-rate citizens, and one way to do that was to fight for their country.

John Yuzyk of Rhein, Sask., said the economic climate was also so bad that “guys joined up because it paid and you could get three square meals a day.”

Ann Crapleve of Ladywood, Man., who would later participate in reconstruction efforts after the war, said: “I was a Canadian and wanted to do my bit for the country.”

The film ends with a description of Ukrainian Canadians assisting in this effort to rebuild Europe, and sometimes finding Ukrainians in camps for displaced persons, and facilitating their immigration to Canada rather than repatriation to the Soviet Union.

Source: New documentary tells the story of Ukrainians’ role in Canada’s war effort

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How A Minneapolis Clinic Is Narrowing Racial Gaps In Health

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

Of interest:

North Minneapolis, one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in Minnesota, was already dealing with high coronavirus infection and death rates when George Floyd was killed by police outside a corner store just 3 miles away.

His death on May 25 sparked deeper conversations all across the U.S. about the ways racial inequality plays out, including when it comes to health. Nationally, Black people are at least twice as likely to die from heart disease, from COVID-19 or in childbirth, compared with white people, and north Minneapolis mirrors those trends. Nearly two-thirds of Latinos in the area who get tested for the coronavirus test positive — that’s a rate nearly 10 times higher than the state’s rate overall.

“We were not surprised, because we serve a community that has health disparities,” says Stella Whitney-West, CEO of NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center, a community health and dental clinic and social services agency located in the heart of north Minneapolis.

Stella Whitney-West has been CEO of NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center for the last 16 years. “Our staff is reflective of our community that we serve,” she says.

But NorthPoint also has a five-decade history of addressing public health through the lens of race. It was founded with a mission to increase access to health care and social services in a community that today is 90% Black, Latino or Asian.

Central to its approach is tackling the social problems that contribute to illness — in order to better prevent and treat disease. Over the years, the center has made strides in public health: increasing the rates for child vaccinations and screenings for things like cancer, depression and dental care needs.

Of course the coronavirus pandemic has also added weight to many existing social burdens that contribute to poor health: loss of employment and insurance, poverty and food scarcity, stress and anxiety. Whitney-West says the racial strife layered on top of that also feels like a step backward.

“It’s been hard — not only for the community but patients, clients and our staff,” says Whitney-West. “Our staff is reflective of our community that we serve. Civil unrest — the riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death — brings us back to the history of how NorthPoint was started.”

The NorthPoint center began during a time eerily reminiscent of today.

NorthPoint is located at a corner of Plymouth Avenue that burned down during protests and rioting in 1967, when long-standing grievances in the Black community over lack of access to adequate housing, education and health care turned violent.

“I was 10 years old at the time, but it was very traumatizing to see all these Black people getting beat up by police and the fires right on our block,” says Gary Cunningham, who lived on Plymouth Avenue and watched it burn that night.

Inadequate access to medical care was a major issue that shaped life for Cunningham and his neighbors.

“There was an issue with ambulance service,” Cunningham says. “The ambulance wouldn’t serve the Black community there,” so he and his mother would take the bus across town when they needed care. “Most Blacks went to Dr. Brown — his office would be like 200 people in the waiting room because he was one of the few Black physicians.”

The federal government tried to increase access to health care for minorities. Among other efforts, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty established pilot programs in 14 cities to offer health and social services.

North Minneapolis got one of those programs. Months after the 1967 riots, Pilot City — which later became NorthPoint — opened in an old synagogue on Plymouth Avenue.

“I just remember it being a place where community gathered. The health center and social service center at that time were one place,” Cunningham recalls.

Nearly four decades later, Cunningham took over as the clinic’s CEO.

By then, Pilot City had fallen into disarray — its public image was that of an impoverished clinic of last resort. By 2002, when Cunningham took over, he says, it was running a $2 million annual deficit, and few patients were getting regular vaccinations or mammogram screenings.

So Cunningham refocused on Pilot City’s original mission: to increase access to health care by also identifying and enhancing social services to support that goal.

Cunningham’s team developed some innovative solutions to bring more patients in, including providing bus tokens to patients who couldn’t otherwise afford transportation. NorthPoint’s new approach reached a growing Somali and Hmong population in the area through hosting lunch events with religious leaders and featuring food from those communities. Over the last 15 years, vaccination and health screening rates more than doubled, to close to 80%.

That has meant more prevention of disease and lower costs for treatment and care.

Diabetes, lead poisoning and depression are also big problems in the community. So NorthPoint lobbied local agencies to get lead paint safely removed from homes. The center stocks a free-food shelf with healthy, culturally relevant food. All patients — regardless of what health problem they come in for — are now automatically screened for depression and dental care needs and are told to bring their family members in as well.

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NorthPoint’s founding mission was to increase access to health care and social services. Over the years, this approach helped the clinic increase the neighborhood’s rates of child vaccinations and screenings for things like cancer, depression and dental care needs.

These measures have increased NorthPoint’s reach into a diverse community — something many other medical centers facing similar dynamics are struggling with today.

Rashida Jackson first came to NorthPoint as a patient in childhood, and is now community board member. The clinic, she says, is a beloved part of the community.

As a child, Rashida Jackson, 52, came to NorthPoint for health care, and now her mother, children and all her grandchildren see their doctors there.

Jackson is now on NorthPoint’s board of directors, which draws a majority of its seats from patients like her, who are members of the community.

“This is one of those powerful institutions that developed out of a lot of civil unrest and pain,” says Jackson, “and it’s a thing of pride to see this small community health clinic explode and grow. Whatever social service support you need, they have.”

That’s why the center is so beloved by the community, she says: “We own it, it’s family — it’s almost a living, walking, breathing thing.”

And today, NorthPoint is once again being held up as a model.

This past summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Minneapolis and the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners declared racism a public health crisis.

Irene Fernando, one of the co-authors of the county’s declaration, says just as NorthPoint has done in the health realm, the county wants other government agencies to rethink policy — by looking at how race affects outcomes in education, employment and criminal justice.

“NorthPoint listens to the community,” says Fernando, who also serves on NorthPoint’s board. “Earlier than other entities, NorthPoint was reporting on race; earlier than other entities, NorthPoint was willing to do free testing for COVID.” So thinking about improving access to health care “is in how NorthPoint operates,” she says.

One reason its approach differs from those of other health centers is that it is a community health clinic, not a hospital, says Ed Ehlinger, former Minnesota health commissioner, who has written about racism in health.

That means, he says, its mandate is to improve public health in the community; it’s not under the same commercial pressures many private hospitals are up against.

Ehlinger compares NorthPoint to medical centers in countries that have universal public health care. “They focus on community-oriented primary care and have much better outcomes and lower health care costs,” he says. “So even though there aren’t as many of those neighborhood health centers left, I see them as the model that we should look to replicate, in moving forward.”

At a time when few patients trust their health care providers, NorthPoint has bucked that trend.

LaVonne Moore, a midwife and lactation consultant with the center, says that’s in part because NorthPoint recruits its leaders and doctors from the community it serves.

Moore, who lives nearby, says that interconnection between residents and staff fosters enduring, trusted relationships with patients and a level of care that is highly unusual today.

“I’m a provider,” she says. “I have dropped medicines for COVID-19 patients at their door: I just leave it at the door, go back in the car, make sure they know what’s out there, and they come to the door and pick it up.”

That trust is critical, especially given the gravity of problems that north Minneapolis faces these days: Nearly two-thirds of Latino patients who test for the coronavirus at NorthPoint are testing positive. While that’s an alarmingly high rate, CEO Whitney-West says it’s also a positive sign. A significant number of those patients are undocumented immigrants, she notes, and the findings suggest they trust NorthPoint enough to get tested at the center.

And from a public health standpoint, that’s a win, she says, because you need to know where the virus is in order to stop its spread.

Source: How A Minneapolis Clinic Is Narrowing Racial Gaps In Health

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Trump administration’s revisions to the naturalization exam could make the test harder for immigrants seeking citizenship

2020/11/12 Leave a comment

Last gap of a lame-duck administration, still in denial and one easy to overturn. While there is always a case to update and revised citizenship processes, this is not the way to proceed.

Perhaps members of the administration could test themselves on their understanding of the Constitution and democratic principles and practices:

The Trump administration is planning to make the naturalization test, which immigrants must pass to become US citizens, longer, according to a draft memo obtained by CNN, a move that could make it more difficult and marks the latest in a string of actions intended to alter the citizenship process.

Last year, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the exam,announced that it was making changes to the civics portion of the test. The agency last launched revisions of the naturalization exam in 2009, “which implemented standardized test forms for both the English and civics test requirements,” according to a May 2019 memo. The memo also said the agency was in the process of formalizing a decennial revision process.

The agency appears to be nearing the finish line for its latest slate of changes. According to the memo, revisions include adding more civics test questions and topics, as well as changing the passing score. The exam generally consists of both an English test and civics test.

Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has tried to curtail legal immigration and doubled down on citizenship, teasing an end to birthright citizenship and attempting to include a citizenship question on the census. Earlier this year, his administration also moved to increase the cost of online naturalization applications from $640 to $1,160.

The naturalization exam is a crucial step to an immigrant’s path toward US citizenship. The planned revisions would stand to affect hundreds of thousands of immigrants who seek citizenship annually.

Currently, the exam features 100 civics questions. Hopeful American citizens are asked up to 10 of these during an interview and have to answer six correctly to pass. But the changes, according to the memo, include an increase in civics test questions from 10 to 20, and as such, changing the passing score to 12/20 instead of 6/10. The memo also says USCIS officers will ask all 20 questions, rather than stopping when an applicant reaches the passing score.

The updated test, according to the memo, “includes more questions that test applicants’ understanding of U.S. history and civics in line with the statutory standard than the current test.”

The agency says it added more topics touching on specific amendments to the Constitution, the “rationale for the legislative branch structure,” and an item on “American innovations.” It also includes more “why” questions, though it’s unclear what that entails.

It’s unclear when the agency will roll out the changes to the exam. USCIS declined to comment on the planned revisions.

“It’s not unprecedented to change the questions … what stands out to me is once again a desire to slow down the process and require more from immigrants,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, a non-profit group that advocates for the rights of immigrants, in part because it takes more to ask additional questions.

“This administration seems locked into an endless cycle of making the process more difficult and inevitably, discouraging more and more people from seeking citizenship and legal immigration benefits,” Reichlin-Melnick added.

USCIS, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, has been at the center of some of the administration’s most hardline immigration policies, notably policies that have made it exceedingly difficult for migrants to seek asylum in the US and the controversial “public charge” rule, which makes it more difficult for immigrants to obtain legal status if they use public benefits.

Ken Cuccinelli, who now serves as the senior official performing the duties of the Homeland Security deputy secretary, brought the agency into a rare spotlight when he served as the acting USCIS director, working to rebrand it as an vetting agency, rather than a benefits agency.

“Updating, maintaining, and improving a test that is current and relevant is our responsibility as an agency in order to help potential new citizens fully understand the meaning of U.S. citizenship and the values that unite all Americans,” Cuccinelli said in a statement last year when the agency announced it would revise the exam.

USCIS has boasted about the number of people it naturalizes on a yearly basis. In fiscal year 2019, USCIS naturalized 834,000 new citizens, an 11-year high. But during the pandemic, naturalization ceremonies, which occur in person, were halted.

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