“Dreamers” in Canada need protection, too

2020/06/24 Leave a comment

It would be helpful having more accurate estimates on the numbers rather than the anecdotal wide range. The numbers are important to assess what policy approach or approaches are more appropriate and or needed:

Thursday’s long-awaited U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting the Trump administration’s bid to end the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program was met with sighs of relief on both sides of the border. The plight of so-called “Dreamers” — youth and young people who were brought to the U.S. as children who remained with no legal immigration status — is a well-known and heartbreaking story. Despite most often having had no role in the decision to migrate, nor having remaining connection to their previous country, these young people are vulnerable to deportation. Anti-immigration advocates accuse them of “cheating the system.”

While we gasp at this close call in the U.S., the truth is that Canada is no better on this issue. In fact, non-citizens brought to Canada as children are perhaps in a worse position. We have no DACA-equivalent legislation to provide protection from deportation or temporary work authorization to our “Dreamers.” We do not even have a public discourse on the issue.

While the term “Dreamers” invokes idealistic accounts of overcoming odds and happy endings, the people this term refers to are in fact real people living real lives. Like other children, they have gone to school, made neighbourhood friends, and developed views of the world based on their Canadian lives.

As the pandemic has laid bare, while migrants are essential to our communities, they are so often exploited and excluded. Migrants face barriers to health care, education, decent work, family unity and equal rights. While legalization theoretically enables “Dreamers” to access K-12 education, many require the intervention of lawyers and community advocates to enforce that right. As they grow up, they discover they cannot work legally, access supports such as OHIP and OSAP, enrol at most universities and colleges (or if they are admitted, face elevated international fees). Without SIN numbers, they cannot access CERB or CESB. Seeking professional support or calling the police, always a perilous choice for racialized groups, risks exposure to immigration authorities.

These barriers not only close doors to opportunities that other Canadians take for granted, they force these young people into precarious employment, housing and social situations that make them vulnerable to abuse. To protect themselves and their families, they work to “fly under the radar.” Living as an undocumented person carries huge psychological weight. In this case, that weight is carried by children and youth.

Consider “Marla,” who was brought to Canada at the age of 4. She has lived in the GTA for 18 years. An academic star throughout school, she was completely unaware of her insecure immigration status and what that meant until she was mid-way through high school. The revelation was harsh. While her friends entered university, she had to abandon her own university ambitions and instead enter precarious factory employment.

Since 2012, DACA has enabled approximately 800,000 young adults to work lawfully in the U.S.. How many undocumented childhood arrivals do we have in Canada? We do not actually know. Estimates of the number of people living in Canada without legal immigration status vary from 20,000 to 500,000, but there is no estimate of those who arrived during childhood. The existence of childhood arrivals is seldom even acknowledged.

Therefore, hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of young people across the country are living in marginalization and vulnerability. They also cannot contribute to our communities and economies in the ways they wish. And this despite the significant investments we have made in them (e.g., education, emergency health care) — and they in us.

Do we need quantifiable numbers before we act? No. Agencies working with migrants and young people know of enough people like Marla to know their predicament is real.

If the Canadian government finally decides to provide protections to this special group, we must not blindly accept a DACA-like model. Despite applauding Thursday’s decision, we know that DACA is insufficient. It defers removals but does not provide a pathway to citizenship, effectively leaving young people in limbo. It also creates a hierarchy of entitlement due to strict inclusion criteria. A made-in-Canada solution would need to address these glaring deficiencies and embrace childhood arrivals as equal and welcome members of our society.

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Trump administration extends work visa ban, creating uncertainty for Canadians

2020/06/24 Leave a comment

The Canadian angle (applies more broadly of course, with India likely being the country most affected):

The Trump administration said Monday that it is extending a ban on green cards issued outside the United States until the end of the year and adding many temporary work visas to the freeze — including those used heavily by technology companies and multinational corporations — tossing a cloud of uncertainty over thousands of Canadians, including cross-border workers and their families.

The administration cast the effort as a way to free up jobs in an economy reeling from the coronavirus. A senior official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity estimated the restrictions will free up to 525,000 jobs for Americans.

The ban, while temporary, would amount to major restructuring of legal immigration if made permanent, a goal that had eluded the administration before the pandemic. Long-term changes targeting asylum seekers and high-tech workers are also being sought.

Business groups pressed hard to limit the changes, but got little of what they wanted, marking a victory for immigration hardliners as Trump seeks to further solidify their support ahead of the November election.

The ban on new visas applies to H-1B visas, which are widely used by major American and Indian technology company workers and their families, H-2B visas for nonagricultural seasonal workers, J-1 visas for cultural exchanges and L-1 visas for managers and other key employees of multinational corporations.

There will be exemptions for food processing workers, which make up about 15 per cent of H-2B visas, the official said. Health care workers assisting with the coronavirus fight will continue to be spared from the green-card freeze, though their exemption will be narrower.

“In the administration of our nation’s immigration system, we must remain mindful of the impact of foreign workers on the United States labour market, particularly in the current extraordinary environment of high domestic unemployment and depressed demand for labour,” Trump wrote in his presidential proclamation.

Potential effect on Canadians

These moves could affect thousands of Canadians. They are far more severe than an earlier immigration announcement from Trump in April, which affected only applications for permanent immigration visas.

The new provisions touch work visas used by many Canadians. Canadians filed more than 4,000 H-1B applications in each of the last two years, and numerous others would get L1 business visas in a normal year, including executives working for cross-border companies.

Source: Trump administration extends work visa ban, creating uncertainty for Canadians

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Police Researcher: Officers Have Similar Biases Regardless Of Race

2020/06/24 Leave a comment

Interesting study. But watching the visible minority officers doing nothing during the Floyd killing …:

One common recommendation for reducing police brutality against people of color is to have police departments mirror a given area’s racial makeup.

President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommended that law enforcement “reflect the demographics of the community”; the Justice Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said diversity on police forces can help build trust with communities.

Rashawn Ray, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, studies race and policing. He says that diversity helps but that “officers, regardless of their race or gender, have similar implicit biases, particularly about Black people.” Ray says it’s not enough to have Black cops in a Black neighborhood if they don’t know the area.

Ray and his University of Maryland colleagues have amassed policing data through tests and interviews with hundreds of officers. He talked with Morning Edition‘s Noel King about this research. Here are excerpts of that interview:

What kind of biases do police officers — implicit, explicit — say that they have?

The first big thing is that when officers take the implicit association test, they exhibit bias against Black people. They are more likely to make an association between Black people with weapons than they are with white people with weapons. We also know that officers speak less respectfully to Black people during traffic stops as well as during other sorts of settings. And they are particularly less likely to respect Black women in these encounters, even if they’re more likely to slightly use more force on Black men relative to other people.

I was talking to a former police officer whose job is now to recruit more Black and brown police officers into [the Minneapolis] force. It sounds like what you’re saying is if she is recruiting Black and brown officers from Phoenix or from Houston and bringing them over to Minneapolis, that is not likely to solve the problem.

That’s exactly right. So the optics look good, but we can’t make the assumption that simply because a person is Black that they’re going to know about the neighborhood. Part of the fundamental problem when it comes to policing that I’ve noticed is that when police officers interact with a white person, there is a pause, a slight pause, a slight benefit of the doubt. The reason why that exists is because subconsciously, implicitly, when they interact with that person, they see their neighbor, a parent at their kids’ school, and when they interact with a Black person, they are less likely to have what we call in sociology those “social scripts” that allow them to view people in those multitude of ways.

And if we’re going to change this, one big recommendation I have: Police officers need housing assistance that mandates that they live in the metropolitan area where they are policing. Because community policing isn’t about getting out, playing basketball with a kid in uniform. Community policing oftentimes is what you do when you’re not on duty. The way that you’re investing in a neighborhood.

Source: Police Researcher: Officers Have Similar Biases Regardless Of Race

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Construction of Austrian Holocaust victims’ memorial begins

2020/06/24 Leave a comment

Long overdue:

Construction of Austria’s first public monument naming all the country’s Holocaust victims began on Monday, a further step by Adolf Hitler’s native land towards confronting an issue it has long struggled with.

For decades after World War Two, Austria denied responsibility for crimes committed by the Nazis, arguing that it was their first victim despite the enthusiasm with which many citizens had welcomed annexation by Hitler’s Germany in 1938.

The country now recognises that Austrians were perpetrators as well as victims of Nazi crimes but it has not confronted that chapter of its history as openly or directly as Germany.

“Berlin has one. Paris has one. Vienna had none. But the day has finally come today,” Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Community (IKG), the body officially representing Austria’s Jews, said at a ceremony marking the start of construction work.

The new monument, located in a park next to Austria’s central bank, will comprise a ring of upright stone slabs around an island of trees, and will name all 64,259 Austrian victims of the Holocaust. It is due to be inaugurated in a year’s time.

“Remembering means commemorating the victims of the Shoah. This remembering and our history increase our responsibility, the responsibility daily and together to do everything to ensure that something like this never happens again,” said Deutsch.

Ironically, the project was first backed in 2018 by a previous coalition government of current Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s conservatives and the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), which was founded in the 1950s by former Nazis and whose first leader had been an SS officer.

Although the FPO says it has abandoned its anti-Semitic past and now denounces the Holocaust, it has been plagued by racism and anti-Semitism scandals, and the IKG still refuses to deal with party officials. The FPO crashed out of government last year and Kurz now governs in coalition with the Greens.

There are Holocaust memorials in Vienna but the only one naming the Jews who lived in Austria and were murdered is in the city’s main synagogue.

Source: Construction of Austrian Holocaust victims’ memorial begins

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Pauline Hanson built a political career on white victimhood and brought far-right rhetoric to the mainstream

2020/06/23 Leave a comment

Of note. Bernier tried (and continues to try) to play a similar game:

Pauline Hanson and her party have only achieved modest electoral successes. Yet, she is undoubtedly Australia’s most successful populist politician and has had a profound impact on the way the country talks about issues like multiculturalism and immigration.

Hanson’s entire political career can be seen as a denial and rejection of the realities of whiteness in Australia – that is, the unearned benefits and privileges afforded to white people in settler-colonial countries.

Hanson has benefited from – and helped to shape – the normalisation of racism and xenophobia in Australia. She has pushed the boundaries of what can be “acceptably said” in public discourse and has had a disproportionate influence on the national debate.

In doing so, she has also created the political space for other far-right figures like Fraser Anning to emerge and become more a part of the political mainstream.

The birth of One Nation

Hanson first emerged on the political landscape in 1996 when she was disendorsed as the Liberal Party candidate for Oxley following racist comments she made about Indigenous people in a letter to the Queensland Times.

She contested the election anyway, running as an independent on a self-described nationalist, populist and protectionist platform, and won the seat with a large swing against the Labor incumbent.

In her maiden speech to the House of Representatives, Hanson claimed to speak on behalf of “mainstream Australians” and promised a “common sense” approach to politics.

Most controversially, Hanson warned Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”, called for the abolition of multiculturalism and railed against Indigenous rights, so-called “political correctness” and “reverse-racism”.

The times suited Hanson. After 13 years of Labor government, John Howard and the Liberal Party looked to exploit a sense of resentment and grievance on the issues of multiculturalism and immigration, which arguably opened up the space for Hanson and helped to legitimise her views.

Indeed, in a 1996 speech delivered to the Queensland Liberal Party, Howard celebrated the idea people felt able to speak a little more freely and could do so without living in fear of being branded as a bigot or racist.

Hanson’s One Nation party was formed the following year and performed well at the 1998 Queensland state election, winning 11 seats.

Hanson’s downfall and political resurrection

One Nation’s initial success, however, was short-lived. Hanson failed to win the newly redistributed seat of Blair at the 1998 federal election. Her party then began to suffer from internal divisions, poor leadership and Hanson’s personal and financial scandals.

She was subsequently convicted of electoral fraud in 2003. (It was later overturned on appeal.)

After a number of failed federal and state campaigns (including under the rebranded Pauline’s United Australia Party), Hanson finally succeeded in being elected to the Senate in 2016, along with three other One Nation candidates.

This represented a high point for the party at the federal level and gave it considerable influence over government policy.

Hanson’s populist, nativist beliefs

Hanson can best be described as a populist radical right politician, alongside such figures as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán.

For populist figures, politics are seen as a struggle between everyday, ordinary people and a corrupt, illegitimate and out-of-touch elite.

But more importantly, the populist radical right also uses the language of “us-versus-them” and portrays immigrants and refugees as existential threats to the safety, security and “culture” of a particular society.

In Hanson’s view, non-natives must either assimilate and embrace “Australian culture and values” or “go back to where they came from”.

Hanson has consistently drawn on a sense of grievance and victimhood – in particular, white victimhood. She has espoused a belief in the existence of so-called “reverse-racism” or “anti-white” racism since the outset of her political career.

Hanson has even gone so far as to claim the most downtrodden person in this country is the white Anglo-Saxon male.

The mainstreaming of the far-right

Hanson’s resurgence in 2016 occurred in a very different political climate than her first stint in parliament in the late 1990s.

Political scientist Cas Mudde refers to the 21st century as the “fourth wave of the far-right”. It is a time when far-right ideas are becoming increasingly tolerated, debated and normalised in the mainstream and the boundaries of what can be said are shifting.

Emboldened by years of normalised Islamophobia in Australia and the electoral successes of far-right parties globally, Hanson’s maiden Senate speech warned Australia was now in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.

She called for a “Trump style” immigration ban, a Royal Commission into Islam and the “banning of the burqa”.

Hanson’s resurgence has clearly cemented Muslims as the new “dangerous other”, though her racist attitudes towards First Nations people and Asian immigrants have also remained a constant.

Her claims of “anti-white racism” have also gained traction in the mainstream. For example, when Hanson put forth a Senate motion declaring “it’s OK to be white” in 2018, a surprising number of Coalition members voted for it and later defended it on Twitter.

It was only later, after a vocal outcry, that the Coalition backed down and claimed the votes were made in error.

The media have played a key role in the mainstreaming of Hanson and One Nation by consistently giving them a platform to voice far-right ideas.

Hanson’s legacy and impact on society

There are a couple of ways to think about Hanson’s legacy and impact on society.

The first is to gauge her direct influence on government policy through her role as a parliamentarian. There’s no doubt she has wielded considerable influence as one of a number of senators to hold the balance of power in recent years.

Yet, despite some success in influencing legislation and her recent appointment as deputy chair of the family law inquiry, Hanson has been largely unsuccessful in seeing her signature policies realised.

And while acknowledging Hanson’s role in mainstreaming far-right ideas, it’s important to note these ideas have existed before her maiden speeches and will exist well beyond her time in politics.

Exclusively focusing on Hanson’s individual acts ignores the systemic nature of racism and the role of the mainstream political class in reproducing and upholding these racist structures.

When assessing Hanson’s legacy, it may be comforting to view her as an aberration and reflection of a bygone era, but she remains very much a product of the Australian settler-colonial story.

It’s perhaps more accurate to think of Hanson as a symptom of racism and xenophobia in Australia, rather than its cause.

Source: Pauline Hanson built a political career on white victimhood and brought far-right rhetoric to the mainstream

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A lesson learned early: How B.C. has avoided major COVID-19 outbreaks among migrant farm workers

2020/06/23 Leave a comment

British Columbia seems to have gotten virtually everything right compared to the other larger provinces:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to grapple last week with the treatment of migrant farm workers after hundreds of agricultural labourers, mostly in Ontario, tested positive for COVID-19, prompting the Mexican government to suspend the annual exodus of its workers to Canadian farms.

But planeloads of temporary foreign workers from Mexico are still expected to arrive in British Columbia, because of a unique program the province implemented in April designed to avert the kind of outbreaks Mr. Trudeau now promises to address in other provinces.

An investigation by The Globe and Mail has shown that the living and working conditions of some of the country’s most vulnerable workers allowed the pandemic to spread.

As Mr. Trudeau promises to find ways to do better by the migrant workers who are essential to Canada’s food system, he could look to B.C. for at least part of the answer.

British Columbia, like Ontario and Quebec, relies heavily on temporary foreign workers for farm labour.

The difference is that B.C. responded to a single COVID-19 outbreak at a plant nursery early in March with a plan designed to prevent a repeat. The cost of the program is not known yet, but it is expected to be tens of millions of dollars.

Since April 13, the B.C. government has organized and paid for quarantine services for migrant workers who arrive in B.C. to take seasonal farm jobs. The employers must pay wages during this time. So far, 2,800 people have been housed in Vancouver-area hotels, where they are provided meals, health care and other supports during their two week isolation. Of those, 23 have tested positive for COVID-19 while in quarantine.

Because of the pandemic, new arrivals to Canada are legally required to self-isolate for two weeks. But housing on the farms is typically crowded, with shared kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms.

Providing these services is a tacit admission that those operations relying on migrant workers cannot effectively provide quarantine in their housing.

David Geen, owner of Jealous Fruits, a cherry producer in B.C.‘s Okanagan Valley, said he has invested millions of dollars in housing for the migrant workers who make up the majority of his workforce at harvest time. But even with that, he said, he could not imagine how to safely provide quarantine facilities.

“We were seriously contemplating sitting out the year. We could not figure out how to properly do this,” Mr. Geen said in an interview. “We’re farmers, we’re not epidemiologists.”

His cherry farms and packing facility employ 150 local and 500 migrant workers at peak times. “We have spread people out in the dorms, and in the fields, but if you have an infected person arrive in your dorms, it’s difficult to keep [the virus] out.”

So far this year, he has 155 temporary foreign workers on site, and another 130 are in quarantine. He expects another group later in June, and still more in early July. Even after their quarantine, the farm provides the workers with groceries and amenities so that they can remain isolated while working.

There have been no reports of COVID-19 cases on B.C. farms since the quarantine housing program began. Mr. Geen said B.C. deserves credit for that success, but he believes Ottawa should have stepped up to ensure farmworkers and farms across the country were similarly protected.

“I feel ill reading about the tragic situation in Ontario,” he said.

Still, the living and working conditions for migrant workers remain an ugly aspect of food production in Canada, including in B.C. The fact that many farms cannot recruit local workers, even as unemployment spikes due to the pandemic, is telling.

Weeks before B.C. unveiled its quarantine plan, the Dignidad Migrante Society, a Vancouver-based non-profit organization that provides services, support, representation and assistance to migrant workers, called attention to those working conditions.

Raul Gabica, a former farm worker who is now a Canadian citizen, said B.C.‘s response has been a very good step. “But the workers are still in overcrowded housing, with no space for social distancing.”

Typical accommodations on B.C. farms provide one bathroom and one kitchen for every 10 workers, he said, with two or three people in each bedroom. “The housing standards have to change,” he said.

The pandemic has exposed that putting cheap food on the table comes at a high price for some.

Source:    A lesson learned early: How B.C. has avoided major COVID-19 outbreaks among migrant farm workers    

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Anti-Chinese racism is Canada’s ‘shadow pandemic,’ say researchers

2020/06/23 Leave a comment

Disturbing that so many appear not to be able to distinguish between the Chinese regime, with all its abuses, and Chinese Canadians:

Many Chinese Canadians fear that Asian children will be bullied when they return to school due to racial tension arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.

A survey of more than 500 Canadians of Chinese ethnicity by the Angus Reid Institute and the University of Alberta has found that anti-Chinese racism is rife in our society, what the researchers call a “shadow pandemic.”

That parents are afraid to send their children to school is “heartbreaking,” said ARI executive director Shachi Kurl. “Racism is the secondary virus that has had an outbreak since the pandemic was declared.

“We have this notion of Canada as an endlessly accepting, embracing country because we are multicultural,” she said. “It’s not the case and it’s never been the case.”

“The data show that these micro-aggressions are frequent and plentiful,” said Kurl. “People say they are being treated as though they are somehow carriers of COVID-19.”

More than 60 per cent of those surveyed said they have adjusted their daily routines because of the threat of racial backlash and about half fear that Asian children will be bullied if they return to school.

Vancouver-born Gloria Leung says her daughter of mixed race has been jeered by other children for her Chinese ancestry just steps from their home.

“We have informed our daughter’s teacher without naming any names and her teacher has shared that information with school staff so they can increase awareness of racism and bullying,” she said.

Her daughter’s harassers are from just two families in an otherwise diverse and welcoming neighbourhood, but the seven-year-old has felt anxious and stressed since the incident.
“We understand that everyone is struggling and hurting in this pandemic,” Leung said. “Our hope in sharing these lived and uncomfortable experiences is not to shame people, but to provide insight into systemic racism and shed light on how we can learn from these experiences.”

The survey also found that just 13 per cent of respondents feel that people in Canada view them as fully Canadian “all the time.”

“There’s a notion that because our schools are diverse and our workplaces are diverse that racism isn’t a thing anymore,” said Kurl. “It’s one thing to hear about this anecdotally, but it’s important to ask these questions to see just how widespread this is.”

About 30 per cent of the respondents say they have been exposed to anti-Chinese sentiment in the news, on social media or through graffiti.“Just this weekend (U.S. President Donald) Trump used a pejorative term for the virus, calling it the ‘kung flu,” noted Tung Chan, a former Vancouver city councillor and former chair of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

“The parents learn from the media, the children learn from the parents and you have this fear that extends into schools,” he said.

Chan was particularly discouraged to learn that 60 per cent of people surveyed changed their daily routine to avoid negative interactions and “unpleasant encounters.”

“I have always chosen my words carefully when talking about racism, because I don’t want to make people feel insecure,” said Chan. “But looking at these numbers I think that I was too mild in my remarks. This is far worse than I thought in terms of people fearing for their personal safety.”While it is important to hold the government of China to account for its belligerence and human rights abuses, news media need to distinguish between the actions of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist party of China, and the Chinese people.

“The term Chinese is too all-encompassing and it reflects the actions of the Chinese government back on the people in our community,” said Chan.

“I am proud of my Chinese heritage and I won’t walk away from that, but if you ask me who I am I always say I am Canadian,” he said.

The survey was conducted online between June 15 and 18 among a randomized representative sample of 516 adults who identify as ethnically Chinese. The margin of error is +/- 4.3 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Source: Anti-Chinese racism is Canada’s ‘shadow pandemic,’ say researchers

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Editorial: Tightening Japan’s immigration regs no excuse to trample human rights

2020/06/23 Leave a comment

Of note:

A government expert committee has submitted its recommendations for dealing with the problem of foreign citizens being held for months, and in some cases years, at Japan’s immigration detention centers.

The committee has called for a system of penalties for foreigners who ignore deportation orders, as well as for the government to consider how to handle people who make repeated refugee claims. The proposed rules are notable for their severity.

As of the end of 2019, there were 1,054 people being held at Immigration Service Agency of Japan detention facilities. Of those, 462 had been locked up for six months or more. According to the agency, the long-term detentions are due to people refusing to be repatriated. However, most foreigners without a legal residency status have left Japan after being ordered to do so. In a great many cases where a person has refused to go, it is because their lives would be endangered if they went home, or because they have families in Japan.

In light of this, it is questionable whether imposing penalties for those refusing deportation orders would have a significant impact on repatriation. We rather worry that the move will result in shrinking support for foreigners who cannot go home.

The committee’s recommendation that measures be considered to deport refugee claimants mid-application in exceptional cases was apparently based on the recognition that there are quite a few people abusing the system by filing repeated claims to avoid leaving Japan. However, deporting a person who may be a refugee is forbidden under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

We must wonder if, considering the scant few people granted refugee status here compared with global norms, this country’s refugee system isn’t too strict already. A total of 10,375 people applied for refugee status in Japan last year. Of those, only 44 were accepted. Perhaps the government had best rethink its evaluation process before talking about mid-application deportations.

Taking a foreigner to an immigration detention center is supposed to be preparation for them to be deported. Many other places have legal maximums for how long a person can be detained in this way. For example, the upper limit in the European Union is six months. There is no such rule in Japan. However, the expert committee report does not address limiting detention times in a concrete way. It does call for a review mechanism to be created for cases where a person has been held for a certain length of time, to evaluate whether continued detention is appropriate. However, we believe these reviews should not be conducted by the immigration agency or its parent, the Justice Ministry, but by the courts.

The United Nations has expressed concerns about Japan’s immigration system on multiple occasions. Last year, a Nigerian man who had been held at a detention center for three and a half years died of starvation following a hunger strike.

To avoid long-term detentions, the government should consider a flexible approach to granting temporary leave permission to detainees, allowing them back out into the world for a set time. Special consideration is also needed for those detainees with families and well-established lives in Japan.

Strengthening immigration management in this country cannot be made an excuse to obviate the human rights of foreign citizens.

Source: Editorial: Tightening Japan’s immigration regs no excuse to trample human rights

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Social Media Giants Support Racial Justice. Their Products Undermine It. Shows of support from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube don’t address the way those platforms have been weaponized by racists and partisan provocateurs.

2020/06/22 Leave a comment

Of note. “Thoughts and prayers” rather than action:

Several weeks ago, as protests erupted across the nation in response to the police killing of George Floyd, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a long and heartfelt post on his Facebook page, denouncing racial bias and proclaiming that “black lives matter.” Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, also announced that the company would donate $10 million to racial justice organizations.

A similar show of support unfolded at Twitter, where the company changed its official Twitter bio to a Black Lives Matter tribute, and Jack Dorsey, the chief executive, pledged $3 million to an anti-racism organization started by Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback.

YouTube joined the protests, too. Susan Wojcicki, its chief executive, wrote in a blog post that “we believe Black lives matter and we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism.” YouTube also announced it would start a $100 million fund for black creators.

Pretty good for a bunch of supposedly heartless tech executives, right?

Well, sort of. The problem is that, while these shows of support were well intentioned, they didn’t address the way that these companies’ own products — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — have been successfully weaponized by racists and partisan provocateurs, and are being used to undermine Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements. It’s as if the heads of McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell all got together to fight obesity by donating to a vegan food co-op, rather than by lowering their calorie counts.

It’s hard to remember sometimes, but social media once functioned as a tool for the oppressed and marginalized. In Tahrir Square in Cairo, Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize demonstrations and get their messages out.

But in recent years, a right-wing reactionary movement has turned the tide. Now, some of the loudest and most established voices on these platforms belong to conservative commentators and paid provocateurs whose aim is mocking and subverting social justice movements, rather than supporting them.

The result is a distorted view of the world that is at odds with actual public sentiment. A majority of Americans support Black Lives Matter, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it by scrolling through your social media feeds.

On Facebook, for example, the most popular post on the day of Mr. Zuckerberg’s Black Lives Matter pronouncement was an 18-minute video posted by the right-wing activist Candace Owens. In the video, Ms. Owens, who is black, railed against the protests, calling the idea of racially biased policing a “fake narrative” and deriding Mr. Floyd as a “horrible human being.” Her monologue, which was shared by right-wing media outlets — and which several people told me they had seen because Facebook’s algorithm recommended it to them — racked up nearly 100 million views.

Ms. Owens is a serial offender, known for spreading misinformation and stirring up partisan rancor. (Her Twitter account was suspended this year after she encouraged her followers to violate stay-at-home orders, and Facebook has applied fact-checking labels to several of her posts.) But she can still insult the victims of police killings with impunity to her nearly four million followers on Facebook. So can other high-profile conservative commentators like Terrence K. Williams, Ben Shapiro and the Hodgetwins, all of whom have had anti-Black Lives Matter posts go viral over the past several weeks.

In all, seven of the 10 most-shared Facebook posts containing the phrase “Black Lives Matter” over the past month were critical of the movement, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data platform. (The sentiment on Instagram, which Facebook owns, has been more favorable, perhaps because its users skew younger and more liberal.)

Facebook declined to comment. On Thursday, it announced it would spend $200 million to support black-owned businesses and organizations, and add a “Lift Black Voices” section to its app to highlight stories from black people and share educational resources.

Twitter has been a supporter of Black Lives Matter for years — remember Mr. Dorsey’s trip to Ferguson? — but it, too, has a problem with racists and bigots using its platform to stir up unrest. Last month, the company discovered that a Twitter account claiming to represent a national antifa group was run by a group of white nationalists posing as left-wing radicals. (The account was suspended, but not before its tweets calling for violence were widely shared.) Twitter’s trending topics sidebar, which is often gamed by trolls looking to hijack online conversations, has filled upwith inflammatory hashtags like #whitelivesmatter and #whiteoutwednesday, often as a result of coordinated campaigns by far-right extremists.

A Twitter spokesman, Brandon Borrman, said: “We’ve taken down hundreds of groups under our violent extremist group policy and continue to enforce our policies against hateful conduct every day across the world. From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo and #BringBackOurGirls, our company is motivated by the power of social movements to usher in meaningful societal change.”

YouTube, too, has struggled to square its corporate values with the way its products actually operate. The company has made stridesin recent years to remove conspiracy theories and misinformation from its search results and recommendations, but it has yet to grapple fully with the way its boundary-pushing culture and laissez-faire policies contributed to racial division for years.

As of this week, for example, the most-viewed YouTube video about Black Lives Matter wasn’t footage of a protest or a police killing, but a four-year-old “social experiment” by the viral prankster and former Republican congressional candidate Joey Saladino, which has 14 million views. In the video, Mr. Saladino — whose other YouTube stunts have included drinking his own urine and wearing a Nazi costume to a Trump rally — holds up an “All Lives Matter” sign in a predominantly black neighborhood.

A YouTube spokeswoman, Andrea Faville, said that Mr. Saladino’s video had received fewer than 5 percent of its views this year, and that it was not being widely recommended by the company’s algorithms. Mr. Saladino recently reposted the video to Facebook, where it has gotten several million more views.

In some ways, social media has helped Black Lives Matter simply by making it possible for victims of police violence to be heard. Without Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we might never have seen the video of Mr. Floyd’s killing, or known the names of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery or other victims of police brutality. Many of the protests being held around the country are being organized in Facebook groups and Twitter threads, and social media has been helpful in creating more accountability for the police.

But these platforms aren’t just megaphones. They’re also global, real-time contests for attention, and many of the experienced players have gotten good at provoking controversy by adopting exaggerated views. They understand that if the whole world is condemning Mr. Floyd’s killing, a post saying he deserved it will stand out. If the data suggests that black people are disproportionately targeted by police violence, they know that there’s likely a market for a video saying that white people are the real victims.

The point isn’t that platforms should bar people like Mr. Saladino and Ms. Owens for criticizing Black Lives Matter. But in this moment of racial reckoning, these executives owe it to their employees, their users and society at large to examine the structural forces that are empowering racists on the internet, and which features of their platforms are undermining the social justice movements they claim to support.

They don’t seem eager to do so. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that an internal Facebook study in 2016 found that 64 percent of the people who joined extremist groups on the platform did so because Facebook’s recommendations algorithms steered them there. Facebook could have responded to those findings by shutting off groups recommendations entirely, or pausing them until it could be certain the problem had been fixed. Instead, it buried the study and kept going.

As a result, Facebook groups continue to be useful for violent extremists. This week, two members of the far-right “boogaloo” movement, which wants to destabilize society and provoke a civil war, were charged in connection with the killing of a federal officer at a protest in Oakland, Calif. According to investigators, the suspects met and discussed their plans in a Facebook group. And although Facebook has said it would exclude boogaloo groups from recommendations, they’re still appearing in plenty of people’s feeds.Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a civil rights group that advises tech companies on racial justice issues, told me in an interview this week that tech leaders needed to apply anti-racist principles to their own product designs, rather than simply expressing their support for Black Lives Matter.

“What I see, particularly from Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, it’s kind of like ‘thoughts and prayers’ after something tragic happens with guns,” Mr. Robinson said. “It’s a lot of sympathy without having to do anything structural about it.”

There is plenty more Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dorsey and Ms. Wojcicki could do. They could build teams of civil rights experts and empower them to root out racism on their platforms, including more subtle forms of racism that don’t involve using racial slurs or organized hate groups. They could dismantle the recommendations systems that give provocateurs and cranks free attention, or make changes to the way their platforms rank information. (Ranking it by how engaging it is, the way some platforms still do, tends to amplify misinformation and outrage-bait.) They could institute a “viral ceiling” on posts about sensitive topics, to make it harder for trolls to hijack the conversation.

I’m optimistic that some of these tech leaders will eventually be convinced — either by their employees of color or their own conscience — that truly supporting racial justice means that they need to build anti-racist products and services, and do the hard work of making sure their platforms are amplifying the right voices. But I’m worried that they will stop short of making real, structural changes, out of fear of being accused of partisan bias.

So is Mr. Robinson, the civil rights organizer. A few weeks ago, he chatted with Mr. Zuckerberg by phone about Facebook’s policies on race, elections and other topics. Afterward, he said he thought that while Mr. Zuckerberg and other tech leaders generally meant well, he didn’t think they truly understood how harmful their products could be.

“I don’t think they can truly mean ‘Black Lives Matter’ when they have systems that put black people at risk,” he said.

Source: Social Media Giants Support Racial Justice. Their Products Undermine It.

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UK: Home Office ‘uses racial bias’ when detaining immigrants

2020/06/22 Leave a comment

Of note. Haven’t seen comparative Canadian analyses but may have missed:

Black people are detained significantly longer than white people inside the UK’s immigration detention system, prompting fresh claims of “institutional racism”.

Although the Home Office does not record ethnicity data for detainees, analysis of nationalities of those recently held within the immigration detention estate found that citizens from countries with predominantly black and brown populations are held for substantially longer periods than those from predominantly white countries.

New data, released by pressure group Detention Action, found that during 2019 90% of Australian nationals were released before spending 28 days in detention compared with 40% of Jamaican nationals and 60% of Nigerian nationals.

Bella Sankey, director of the group, said that the disparity indicated a racial bias in the approach of the Home Office. “Our immigration detention and deportation systems are institutionally racist,” she said. “Indefinite detention was invented as part of an explicit government effort to reduce black and brown migration to the UK.”

Sankey added: “In 2020 black people are detained in wildly disproportionate numbers and for longer periods than white people. We urgently need a universal time limit on detention to end this endemic dehumanisation.”

The UK is the only European country that does not impose a time limit, with some held for years before being released. A parliamentary committee is one of many groups demanding that ministers introduce a 28-day time limit on immigration detention.

The new analysis found that of 44 Canadians detained, 40 were released from immigration detention within seven days compared with 17 of 100 Zimbabweans.

The Home Office uses detention centres to hold people before they are deported for immigration offences or released into the community. Although they are meant to be used sparingly, around 24,000 people were held in detention centres last year.

In a report issued last Wednesday, auditors also pointed out that the Home Office has not changed its estimated size of the illegal population for 15 years, and that nearly two-thirds of immigration enforcement detainees are released from detention without removal.

Source: Home Office ‘uses racial bias’ when detaining immigrants

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

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