One of the great levellers that brings different people together.
Even celebrities have to go through the standard process (when I was posted to LA, the consular staff regularly had to help the Canadian Hollywood crowd with their passport renewals):
John Oliver opened up about becoming a U.S. citizen when he stopped by CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Monday.
The Last Week Tonight host made a grand entrance and was carried onto the stage by four shirtless men dressed as Uncle Sam. “Yankee Doodle” played as Oliver shot a shirt out of a cannon. The theatrical entrance follows Jim Carrey’s appearance last week, in which Carrey parade onto the stage with a New Orleans-style second line band in tow and a purple umbrella in hand.
While talking to host Stephen Colbert, Oliver admitted that his journey to becoming a U.S. citizen has been a long time coming. “I came here in 2006, and so I’ve kind of been wanting this to happen pretty soon after that, so it’s been over a decade,” he said.
Oliver recapped the process, which included having to “go through a number of visas. I had to go through a green card, then I started applying for citizenship and now it takes longer because there’s sand in the gears of the system.” After his first green card expired, he had to apply for a second one.
Oliver said that the process was “unbelievably tense,” but added that he’s “incredible relieved” to now be a legal U.S. citizen.
He later explained the testing process, which includes “a hundred different questions and they kind of select 10 of them to fire at you.” Some examples of the questions Oliver could have been asked included naming state capitals and identifying the president.
“It’s incredibly nerve-wracking and the first question they asked me was, ‘What is your phone number?’ And I was so scared, I forgot,” he said. “She said, ‘Okay, let me just check your Social Security number,’ and I went, ‘I don’t know what that is, either. Oh, this isn’t going at all well.’ It was utterly petrifying.”
Oliver admitted to being “anxious” about becoming a citizen for over a decade. “Even the day of the ceremony, I kind of thought it was going to be a trap. There was part of me that literally thought they would open the door and there’d just be plastic sheeting on the ground like in Goodfellas and just Jared Kushner sitting in a swivel chair stroking a hairless cat,” he said. “That would’ve made more sense to me than the thing I wanted happening.”
When asked if he had to renounce the queen, Oliver responded, “I did that years ago, anyway.”
He then spoke about the “incredibly moving” experience of seeing other people become U.S. citizens during the ceremony. “It was 150 people from 49 different countries. All of us had been waiting a long time for this,” said Oliver. “There’s something very inspiring about the idea of these people choosing America — not just choosing America, but choosing America now when the country’s not at its best.
“Choosing America now is like falling in love with someone who’s vomiting all over themselves,” he continued. “‘I’m taking a flier. There’s a great human being under here.'”
The HBO host added, “It was very inspiring to watch people buy into the idea of America, which obviously outlasts any president. The idea is still sound.”
Oliver previously spoke about becoming a U.S. citizen in a recent Hollywood Reporter cover story. “The feeling you get at the end of that process is overwhelming relief,” he said during the interview. “And that it’s nothing to do with the current president.”
The men behind the draconian immigration policies of the Trump administration skillfully mimic the president’s invective and ahistorical logic. Matthew Albence, the acting director of ICE, once compared the crowded and filthy family detention centers to “summer camp.” Ken Cuccinelli, second in command at the Department of Homeland Security, sarcastically reworded Emma Lazarus’s famous poem in an attempt to justify Trump’s harsh new public-charge rule: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet.”
Along with the engineer of Trump’s foreign policy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, these men share something else: They are the grandsons and great-grandsons of Italian immigrants who arrived here around the turn of the century. Indeed, hearing the surnames of these architects of indifference is like listening to a night at the opera: Pompeo, Cuccinelli, and Albence (who replaced the not-tough-enough Ron Vitiello).
What an extraordinary irony. The men implementing one of the cruelest immigration policies of the last 100 years are just two generations removed from men who were similarly victimized by the Anglo-Saxon elite.
A 1903 political cartoon from Judge, a Republican magazine, sums up yesterday’s nativism in a way that looks remarkably familiar. The cartoon, titled “The Unrestricted Dumping Ground,” pictures poor Uncle Sam standing on a dock, his arms wrapped around an American flag, while the “rats” of Europe swim to the shore. They have giant rat bodies with faces of swarthy, dark-haired men who could be confused today for Mexican and Central Americans.
The rats wear headbands marked “Mafia,” “Anarchist,” “Socialist” — all labels associated with the millions of Italian migrants. A ghostly image of the late President William McKinley, assassinated by the son of an immigrant, haunts Uncle Sam. The message is clear: Immigrants from the slums of Europe are dangerous and must be stopped from entering our borders.
The cartoon played into another nativist prejudice, that the blood of Italian Americans was “polluting” the finer American stock. People wanted the immigrants out, and the Anglo-Saxon elite worked hard to deliver that goal. A group of Harvard sociologists pressed for a literacy test closing the doors to any immigrant who couldn’t read or write.
Southern Italians — who made up about 85% of the Italian-American immigrant population — were by many formal standards severely ill-prepared for life in the United States. Coming from an impoverished land, they were mostly illiterate, and Italy’s illiteracy rate was higher than elsewhere in Europe. Yet America’s public schools educated these children — and some of their progeny even grew up to be secretary of state.
Today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric asserts that the early immigrants came here “legally.” But with the exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act, there were no immigration laws then. The cross-Atlantic journey was harrowing, but if you arrived on America’s shores and weren’t sick, you were let in. Not exactly warmly embraced, but given the chance to establish a life in the United States.
The Anglo-Saxon elite, however, were determined to put an end to this dangerous influx of people, who were crowding America’s schools and streets, and unable to stand on their own two feet. In 1924, when the immigrant population was nearly 15% of the American population, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act. The law imposed large-scale quotas that effectively ended Italian immigration. An expert Congressional witness, and the man largely responsible for getting the legislation passed, was Harry Laughlin, an avowed proponent of eugenic sterilization.
Today, the immigrant population hovers around this same percentage. Enter the grandson of Bernardino Albence Sr., Matthew, who ordered immigration officers to act every time they encounter an immigrant in the country illegally.
Enter the great-grandson of the illiterate Domenick Luigi Cuccinelli, Ken, who expects his plan to fast-track the deportation of asylum-seekers — denying victims of horrendous violence essential access to counsel — to reach full gear this month.
Is this the tragic ending to the American immigrant success story — the grandchildren of determined peasants turning their backs on another generation of masses yearning to breathe free?
The latest from ADL. Correlates with the Trump presidency and the license it provides:
Incidents of white supremacist propaganda distributed across the nation jumped by more than 120% between 2018 and last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League, making 2019 the second straight year that the circulation of propaganda material has more than doubled.
The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism reported 2,713 cases of circulated propaganda by white supremacist groups, including fliers, posters and banners, compared with 1,214 cases in 2018. The printed propaganda distributed by white supremacist organizations includes material that directly spreads messages of discrimination against Jews, LGBTQ people and other minority communities — but also items with their prejudice obscured by a focus on gauzier pro-America imagery.
The sharp rise in cases of white supremacist propaganda distribution last year follows a jump of more than 180% between 2017, the first year that the Anti-Defamation League tracked material distribution, and 2018. While 2019 saw cases of propaganda circulated on college campuses nearly double, encompassing 433 separate campuses in all but seven states, researchers who compiled the data found that 90% of campuses only saw one or two rounds of distribution.
Oren Segal, director of the League’s Center on Extremism, pointed to the prominence of more subtly biased rhetoric in some of the white supremacist material, emphasizing “patriotism,” as a sign that the groups are attempting “to make their hate more palatable for a 2020 audience.”
By emphasizing language “about empowerment, without some of the blatant racism and hatred,” Segal said, white supremacists are employing “a tactic to try to get eyes onto their ideas in a way that’s cheap, and that brings it to a new generation of people who are learning how to even make sense out of these messages.”’
The propaganda incidents tracked for the Anti-Defamation League’s report, set for release on Wednesday, encompass 49 states and occurred most often in 10 states: California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, Washington and Florida.
Last year’s soaring cases of distributed propaganda also came as the Anti-Defamation League found white supremacist groups holding 20% fewer events than in 2018, “preferring not to risk the exposure of pre-publicized events,” according to its report. That marks a shift from the notably visible public presence that white supremacist organizations mounted in 2017, culminating in that summer’s Charlottesville, Va., rally where a self-described white supremacist drove into a crowd of counterprotesters.
About two-thirds of the total propaganda incidents in the new report were traced back to a single white supremacist group, Patriot Front, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as “formed by disaffected members” of the white supremacist organization Vanguard America after the Charlottesville rally.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism as well as other biases, has tracked Patriot Front propaganda using messages such as “One nation against invasion” and “America First.” The report to be released Wednesday found that Patriot Front played a major role last year in boosting circulation of white supremacist propaganda on campuses through a push that targeted colleges in the fall.
Segal said that his group’s research can equip community leaders with education that helps them push back against white supremacist groups’ messaging efforts, including distribution aimed at students.
University administrators, Segal said, should speak out against white supremacist messaging drives, taking the opportunity “to demonstrate their values and to reject messages of hate that may be appearing on their campus.”
Several educational institutions where reports of white supremacist propaganda were reported in recent months did just that. After white supremacist material was reported on campus at Brigham Young University in November, the school tweeted that it “stands firmly against racism in any form and is committed to promoting a culture of safety, kindness, respect and love.”
The school went on to tweet a specific rejection of white supremacist sentiment as “sinful” by its owner, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, without naming the identity of the group behind the propaganda.
While some of the propaganda cataloged in the Anti-Defamation League’s report uses indirect messaging in service of a bigoted agenda, other groups’ activity is more openly threatening toward Jews and minority groups. The New Jersey European Heritage Association, a smaller white supremacist group founded in 2018, “contains numerous anti-Semitic tropes and refers to Jews as ‘destroyers’” in its most recent distributed flier, according to the report.
The Anti-Defamation League’s online monitoring of propaganda distribution is distinct from its tracking of white supremacist events and attacks, and that tracking does not include undistributed material such as graffiti, Segal explained.
No signalling of change or new studies or initiatives as expected (need to await the results of the IRCC, CIHI, StatsCan analysis of those non-resident self-pay on visitor visas compared to other temporary residents):
Marco Mendicino, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, told the Richmond News the federal government wants to “weed out” abuses of the immigration system, but he added the principle of “jus soli” – birthright citizenship – has served Canada well.
Birthright citizenship has been in existence in Canada since 1947 and it is also a common practise in other countries, like the U.S. and some Commonwealth countries, Mendicino pointed out.
“There are families who do come to Canada and do avail themselves of this principle and they’re able to bestow upon their children Canadian citizenship as a result of this principle – along with that a number of rights and privileges,” he said, adding “it’s a principle that has absolutely served the country well.”
But Richmond has become known as the “epicentre” of birth tourism, attracting people who come to give birth here in order to secure Canadian citizenship for their baby. In the past year, 23 per cent of babies born at Richmond Hospital were born to non-residents.
Several businesses advertise – exclusively in the Chinese language – for birth tourism services, saying they will provide accommodations for pregnant women and help with after-care and paperwork.
Richmond council passed a motion on Monday to push the minister to end automatic citizenship for babies born to non-residents.
Mendicino said he “commends” the mayor and council of Richmond for having a discussion about the birth tourism and he will reflect on the motion that was passed. The issue needs to be monitored and tracked “very closely,” he said.
“I think we should express some gratitude to the City of Richmond and the council for examining the issue and advocating what the issues are within the context of the concern,” he said. “It’s more about determining and finding where the abuses are within the system rather than getting rid of the principle.”
Mendicino said the federal government is taking “concrete steps” to strengthen the oversight of immigration consultants “to really hold accountable any individuals who are trying to backdoor or take advantage of the system.”
He added the federal government wants to work with provincial partners and municipalities like Richmond to “weed out any abuse of our immigration system.”
There was a level of frustration at Richmond council on Monday – directed somewhat at Vancouver Coastal Health, the provincial government and the federal government – as councillors debated the merits and wording of a letter to push the federal minister of immigration to tackle birth tourism.
Voting against the motion were Couns. Alexa Loo, Kelly Greene and Michael Wolfe.
While Greene said she’s 100 per cent against birth tourism, she felt the motion was worded so that it could cause “disproportionate harm” to “vulnerable people such as refugees and stateless people.”
She said the harm would be exclusively to people of colour and she didn’t want to see at-risk people further marginalized.
“The motion should be to stop birth tourism,” Greene said. “It’s not – it asks to stop birthright citizenship for a broad swath of people.”
Coun. Bill McNulty said he sees birth tourism in his neighbourhood and called on senior governments to take action.
“I think this is an issue that really has put us in a vulnerable position – the two levels of government are totally out of touch with what’s happening in the communities,” McNulty said.
He also suggested the city needs to push Vancouver Coastal Health into action, considering 66 per cent of non-resident births in B.C. take place at Richmond Hospital.
Au echoed the sentiment that VCH should look into the issue, saying the health authority is “not willing to touch this.”
However, VCH spokesperson Catherine Loiacono pointed out this is a federal issue and health care professionals have a duty to provide care to anyone who needs it.
“Care is always triaged according to the safety of the mother and baby – mothers needing immediate care are seen first,” she added.
Nursing baseline staffing is based on patient volumes – not on census data. A staffing review in 2019 found that Richmond Hospital is staffed “appropriately” for patient safety and quality care, Loiacono said. Because the nature of giving birth is unpredictable, if there are increased numbers of patients, more resources are brought in, she added.
Citizenship is an important part of the modern world. Most of us are a citizen of at least one country. Having citizenship confers special privileges: the right to vote, the right to receive certain social assistance, the right to work, and a feeling of belonging. It should not be dismissed or used frivolously.
A lot of countries also grant citizenship to those who emigrate from their homelands to a new one (sometimes called ‘naturalized’). This process often takes some time – years in most cases – and is accompanied by all sorts of checks and reviews. After all, no state wants to bring in people with shady backgrounds who are capable of causing mayhem once they become ‘one of us.’
In my experience in Canada, the citizenship pathway is as good as it can be. The necessary agencies, including intelligence and law enforcement, are part of the decision-making process, ensuring to the greatest degree possible that we prevent ‘undesirables’ from making their new home in our nation. Is the system perfect? No, but it is very robust.
Under what conditions, then, should citizenship be revoked? We should assume here that the only type that can be removed is that which has been granted by the state: ordinarily those born in a country automatically receive it at birth (children of foreign diplomats may be an exception), and it far from clear whether there is anything that could – or should – lead a state to rescind birth citizenship (NB Canada is currently dealing with the phenomenon of ‘birth tourism’ whereby pregnant women, often from Asia, travel to give birth in Canadian hospitals. Where all this goes is under debate now.)
Modern terrorism has thrown a wrench into all this. In hundreds of countries citizens have radicalized to violence in accordance with an ideology, left the confines of their homeland, joined a group abroad and become part of it, committed atrocities in the group’s name on occasion and eventually seek to come home. Not surprisingly, few states want these individuals back as they could very well organize or commit acts of terrorism in their backyards. What can we do to prevent their return?
Under these circumstances, is citizenship revocation OK? Normally, no. Our governments take away what they have granted only if it can be demonstrated the process in place at the time of application was fraudulent. In other words, if so-and-so lied on a form and tried to hide certain facts from those investigating the claim, that application can be subsequently voided. This should not be controversial as all the relevant facts were not made available when needed and as a result the individual does not deserve to become one of us.
What, then, do we do in cases of terrorists, some of whom were born in our countries, some of whom got citizenship after having moved, but became terrorists later (sometime much, much later)? After all, the vast majority of terrorists are made not born. Can we take away their birthright/gift?
In the former case, no. Few if any countries have tried to do this and where they have they have tied themselves in legal knots. The UK has taken away the citizenship of ISIS member Shamima Begum despite the inconvenient fact that she was born in England. The government has tried to argue that she is ‘entitled’ to Bangladeshi citizenship as her ancestry lies in that country; hence, she has not been rendered stateless. Bangladesh sees the matter quite differently.
Then we have the case of Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda terrorist who was found guilty and sentenced in 2003 for his role in a plot to cut the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge. A federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, stripped him of his naturalized U.S. citizenship after ruling that he had lied on immigration papers before becoming a citizen in 1999 (he entered the U.S. using the passport and visa of someone he’d met in Bosnia). The official also ruled that Faris’ terrorist affiliations demonstrated a lack of commitment to the U.S. Constitution.
Two years earlier another judge had rejected a similar request by the government, saying at the time there wasn’t enough evidence to prove Mr. Faris’ misrepresentations influenced the decision to grant him citizenship.
Where does this leave us? In a legal quandary, that’s where. The UK handling of Ms. Begum beggars disbelief as she is the citizen of one and only one country. The U.S. strategy in the case of Faris suggests that anyone who does anything illegal at any point in their life is at risk of having their citizenship clawed back. Neither case is ideal.
The bottom line is that Ms. Begum, and perhaps Mr. Faris, were radicalized where they lived and worked. They are a product of a part of our society – not a proud part, but a part nonetheless. Recalling citizenship merely displaces the problem: it does not solve it.
Interesting reflections on identity and who is Latino or Hispanic.
Same issues emerge with respect to Canadian visible minority classifications: Argentine and Chilean are not formally classified as Latin American by StatsCan yet ethnic media regularly portrays Canadian politicians of Argentine and Chilean origin as Latino (e.g., Heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez):
As Oscars night approaches on Sunday, movie fans are being reminded of a persistent diversity problem in the film industry’s most anticipated awards event: Few nominees aren’t white.
Only one person of color was nominated in the acting categories: Cynthia Erivo for her role as Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet.
Some media, however, also alluded to another actor as an exception to the #OscarsSoWhite dilemma: Outlets called Antonio Banderas, nominated for best actor for his role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, an actor of color.
The thing is, Banderas is from Málaga, Spain, and does not identify as a person of color. There are nonwhite Spanish people, but this isn’t the case for him.
In an interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos in January, Banderas was asked about the controversy. He chuckled and said he prefers to take it with a bit of humor.
“I don’t know what I am,” he told Ramos. “When I’ve gone to the U.S., I’ve considered myself Latino, because those are the people I’ve connected with the most.”
Banderas then recalled filling out an official form in the U.S.: When he went to check the box for “white” under race, he was told that was wrong, that he was Hispanic.
“I said, ‘Hispanic isn’t actually a race,’ ” Banderas told Ramos, but he went ahead and checked the Hispanic box. “Great, I’m happy to be Hispanic, Spanish, Latino, and if I’m a person of color, well then I’m a person of color.”
The idea that Banderas is a white European may be obvious to many, especially those in the Latinx community, but it’s not the first time a white Spaniard has been referred to in the U.S. as a “person of color” or Latinx.
After all, Spaniards are technically considered Hispanic by the U.S. Census Bureau, which defines the term as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.”
Banderas has often taken on Latin American roles in movies, including a Mexican mariachi assassin in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado.
A person of color?
After the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees last month, the news site Deadline wrote that the men’s acting categories “were dominated by white actors with Antonio Banderas being the lone person of color” and later tweeting that “only two actors of color were nominated in the major acting categories.” The publication eventually deleted both comments, although the previous version of the article is on other sites.
Vanity Fair wrote — and eventually deleted — that “while Spaniards are not technically considered people of color, it should be noted” that Banderas was also nominated.
To make things more confusing, Spanish media translated “person of color” literally — persona de color — a phrase that, in Spain, isn’t used in the same way as in the United States. While different Spanish-speaking countries have variations of the concept, in Spain the term personaracializada is usually used instead.
To many Spaniards’ ears, persona de color made it sound like Americans were saying Banderas was black. Twitter users made jokes about the term, saying Banderas is a person of color — the color white.
Putting Spanish in the same box
But others thought the term offensive and called it racist.
Juan Pedro Sánchez, 25, who lives in Madrid and weighed in on the Twitter discussion, criticized those who responded negatively, saying the concept of race and ethnicity varies according to where you are. He said Spaniards were all too quick to point out that they’re white.
“A lot of people in Spain are bothered if others confuse them for Latin American because Spaniards see Latinos as people of color, and they don’t want to be associated with that,” Sánchez tells NPR.
He says this confusion happens often to Spaniards traveling outside Spain. He experienced it firsthand when he spent a summer in Chicago in 2017.
“It’s a reoccurring problem — they put Spaniards in the same box as Latinos,” says Sánchez. “What bothers me is not being considered a person of color, but that people ignore that Spain was a colonizer country. It erases that history.”
There’s another part of history that’s sometimes overlooked. Whiteness within Spain itself is complicated. There have been historically marginalized communities, including people with Roma or North African ancestry, who are often considered nonwhite. At times in history, many Spaniards have also felt like the “other” in Europe.
Not just about language
Spanish-speakers have a variety of backgrounds. Many people labeled Hispanic also identify as white, black, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, Asian or any mix of these. But many Hispanic and Latinx people don’t speak Spanish.
Confusion around labels can lead people to assume that someone identifies as Latinx or as a person of color simply because Spanish is their mother tongue, according to sociologist Jennifer Jones at the University of Illinois.
“There’s just a presumption that anyone who speaks Spanish is of a certain background,” says Jones. “I think there’s this interesting slippage, which has happened from the beginning of the invention of the so-called Hispanic category, that it was primarily understood by a lot of folks as about language and less about country of origin.”
Jones says there’s a reason the term Hispanic is so vague. When it was first introduced into the U.S. census in 1980, the idea was to be as inclusive and all-encompassing as possible, so as to not leave out any groups. Before 1980, people of Latin American descent were labeled white by the U.S. government — but by being grouped with whites, there were few statistics on the Latinx community and therefore no way of knowing what its concerns and needs were.
“There wasn’t a lot of consensus about what it meant to be Hispanic in the first place, and so [those lobbying for the term to be created] were kind of reluctant to give very clear parameters around that,” says Jones. “But they realized there was power in numbers to be able to make claims to the state, in terms of resources and support, to create a voting bloc and to get lawsuits around these kinds of issues. So they sort of banded together as a way of asking for a category.”
Linguistic anthropologist Jonathan Rosa at Stanford University says it’s precisely because of this inclusive language that people from Spain can now strategically access certain political and economic markets — and benefit from the ambiguity of the definition of Hispanic.
“People fought really hard to have these categories or to make recognition possible for artistic or athletic or intellectual prowess,” Rosa says. “And I think there’s legitimate concern when someone who isn’t associated with the kinds of histories of marginalization and exclusion … is benefiting.”
Latin music?
He gives the example of Spanish flamenco-trap singer Rosalía, who has won various Latin music awards since her career took off internationally in late 2018: an MTV award for best Latin video, five Latin Grammys and, just last month, a Grammy for best Latin rock, urban or alternative album.
“She then ends up being a sign of these really troublesome layered forms of marginalization where not only is there only one category [for Latinx music] but the only person who can be honored within that category isn’t even associated with the experience that that category was allegedly created to recognize,” says Rosa.
But that experience can be hard to define. Even within the Latinx community itself, people face different kinds of marginalization. Many factors are at play, including race, socioeconomic class and education level. A white, middle-class person from Chile may be treated differently in the U.S. from a working-class person from El Salvador with Indigenous roots.
“Things need to be complicated”
And then there are the different experiences between new immigrants and Latinx people born in the U.S. or whose families have been stateside for generations. What’s more, the terms Hispanic and Latinx have frequently fluctuated to include or exclude different communities and nationalities.
As Banderas notes, in the U.S., Spaniards are considered Hispanic. That may mean that they receive similar treatment to those in the Latinx community.
In Rosa’s view, that’s not as much a problem as the risk of overlooking Spain’s history of colonialization.
“People say you’re making things more complicated, but things need to be complicated,” says Rosa. “I just worry that we end up flattening out history. My goal here is not to police Latinidad [Latin-ness],” he says. “My goal is to draw attention to these power dynamics.”
Australia’s highest court ruled Tuesday the government can’t deport Aboriginal people as part of its policy of ridding the country of foreign criminals.
The High Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that indigenous Australians cannot be deported even if they do not hold Australian citizenship.
The court had heard the case of two men who were born overseas but identified as being from indigenous tribes.
The government attempted to deport them after they served prison sentences for violent crimes. The government has been criticized for deporting some criminals who have lived in Australia since where were children but had never become citizens.
The court found that Brendan Thoms, 31, who was born in New Zealand to an indigenous Australian mother, was an Aboriginal Australian.
Thoms had lived in Australia since he was 6, is accepted as a member of the Gunggari tribe and is recognized as a native title holder of their traditional land.
But a majority of judges was not convinced that Daniel Love, 40, was indigenous and was accepted as a member of the Kamilaroi tribe.
He was born in Papua New Guinea to an indigenous Australian father and has lived in Australia since he was 5.
His lawyers say he will provide more evidence of his Aboriginality and another trial could be held to decide the issue.
Both Love and Thoms were placed in immigration detention and threatened with deportation on their release from prison after serving sentences for unrelated crimes.
Love has had his visa restored since his lawyers initiated court action and lives on the Gold Coast.
Thoms has been in immigration detention in Brisbane for the 16 months since he completed a six-month prison sentence.
Their lawyer Claire Gibbs demanded that Thoms be immediately released.
“He’s very anxious to be released and to be reunited with his family after all this time,” Gibbs said outside court.
“The High Court has found that Aboriginal Australians are protected from deportation. They can no longer be removed from the country that they know and that they have a very close connection with,” she added.
The Home Affairs Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gibbs said both Love and Thoms would sue the government for wrongful detention.
“Both of my clients have suffered severe embarrassment about being Aboriginal men in immigration detention and they’ve been subject to a lot of ridicule,” Gibbs said. “So it’s been a very, very tough time for them both.”
The court found Aboriginal Australian have a special cultural, historic and spiritual connection to Australia which is inconsistent with them being considered “aliens” in the meaning of the Australian constitution.
Indigenous Australians make up 3% of the population and are the most disadvantaged minority group in a range of measures. Indigenous Australians die younger than other Australians and are overrepresented in prisons.
Although currently not quite in the very centre of attention of the global Islamic finance industry, the Canadian Islamic finance scene in the recent past has experienced growing interest from domestic and international investors, as it developed a rising number of Shariah-compliant investment and financing offerings. The reason is that more Muslims are seeking halal banking and finance products and – in general – an open-minded and progressive society is looking for alternative and socially conscious ways of investing.
Canada is home to an estimated 1.5mn people following the Islamic faith, or around 4% of the population, which makes Muslims the second largest religion in the country, while it is also the fastest-growing. Most of them are immigrants, but there is also a growing percentage of Muslims born in Canada and a smaller, but increasing number converting from other religions to Islam. Most of them live in the Greater Toronto and Greater Montreal area and are generally middle-class and well educated with considerable grades of financial literacy. Overall, it is estimated that the number of Canadian Muslims will double in the coming decade. Besides, the Muslim community in Canada is quite young, so there is definitely a large potential for mortgage, car, house and personal insurance, credit cards and consumer loans. Multiple-language offerings, personalised services and modern technology-based banking and investment products further create demand in Islamic banking.
These facts, paired with Canada’s global competitiveness and ease of doing business, its AAA credit rating, its well-supervised financial market with strong risk management mechanisms, a sound banking system and a financial regulatory regime which has shown to be compatible with many Islamic finance instruments make a solid background for a thriving Islamic banking and finance landscape.
This situation, together with open-minded non-Muslims on the outlook for ethical and sustainable investment, has raised particular demand for halal mortgages and sukuk and Islamic mutual funds, Islamic insurance, or takaful, as well as commodity- and infrastructure-backed investment. Notably, Canada’s wealth in natural resources, which ranges from mining to hydrocarbons, combined with its ambitious infrastructure development agenda provide countless investment opportunities for investors looking for Shariah compliance in accordance with the asset-backed product requirements of Islamic finance.
There are already a number of Islamic finance players, with the most established being United Muslim Financial, Habib Canadian Bank, Al-Ittihad Investment, Al Yusr, Manzil Bank, Ijara Community Development Corp, Islamic Co-Operative Housing Corp, Ansar Co-operative Housing Corp, Qurtuba Housing Co-op, An-Nur Housing Cooperative, Amana Auto Finance Canada, Assiniboine Credit Union, newer players such as Iana Financial, Wealthsimple Halal, ShariaPortfolio Canada, Global Iman Fund, as well as a number of other medium-sized and smaller player and mortgage cooperatives. Besides, there are a growing number conventional banks and financial institutions opening Islamic windows or planning to do so, among them Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce or the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.
According to the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, a public-private entity seeking to turn Toronto into a global financial center, the Canadian banking sector currently has around $18bn worth of Shariah-compliant mortgages, while international sukuk could generate $130bn in domestic infrastructure investment managed using a combination of both Islamic and environmentally and socially responsible investing methodologies.
Another area where Canada is likely to expand its Islamic finance sector is takaful. Large insurance companies such as Manulife Financial and Sun Life Financial are currently gaining experience from their takaful-based insurance subsidiaries they have opened in Malaysia and Indonesia and are also developing ethical mutual insurance products bearing in mind that mutual insurances policies are very similar to takaful as they provide a fair and transparent relationship between policyholders and insurer.
In a nutshell, three are plenty of opportunities for Islamic banking in Canada with a Muslim population that will increase substantially in the future and with a growing interest of foreign investors noticing that Canada is developing into an Western hub for Islamic investment and finance, following the footsteps of the UK.
A planned deportation flight to Jamaica has taken off but with only around half of those due to have been on board after a court last night upheld a legal challenge.
As the government came under fire for proceeding with the flight, it was defended on Tuesday by the Chancellor, Sajid Javid, who said those onboard were not members of the Windrush generation but offenders who posed a risk to the public.
“These are all foreign national offenders – they have all received custodial sentences of 12 months or more. They are responsible for crimes like manslaughter, rape, dealing in class A drugs,” he told BBC Radio 5 live.
Asked how many people were onboard, he said he did not know the exact number but believed it was “around 20 – or above 20.” Around 56 people were originally thought to have been due to be deported.
On Monday night, a court of appeal judge ordered the Home Office not to carry out the scheduled deportation amid concerns mobile phone outages had prevented detainees from having access to legal advice.
Lady Justice Simler said those detainees should not be removed unless the Home Office was satisfied they “had access to a functioning, non-O2 Sim card on or before 3 February”.
The action had been brought because there has been a problem with the O2 phone network in the Heathrow detention centres since last month, meaning many detainees had been unable to exercise their legal right to contact their lawyers.
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham who called in the House of Commons on Monday for the flight to be halted amid concerns some onboard may have arrived in the UK as children and that more than 40 British children could be separated from their fathers, described the departure of the flight as an “outrage”.
“The government is deporting people who arrived in the UK as young as two, often for one-time drug offences,” he tweeted, linking to an article written by him for the Guardian.
“The lessons from Windrush have not been learned. Lives are being ruined because we don’t remember our history.”
On Sky News’s Kay Burley at Breakfast show, the chancellor had been asked if he was sorry about one of the cases being a 23-year-old who spent 15 months in jail after being convicted age 17 for drug offences. He had come to the UK age five years old.
“We’re not even saying sorry,” the chancellor said.
Bella Sankey of Detention Action said the campaign group believed that some of the people who were due for deportation were not on the flight because they were covered by a court of appeal order.
She said: “We understand that some, possibly all, of these individuals may have been ultimately removed from the flight but we are currently trying to clarify this.
“We are trying to ensure that all of those covered by the protection of the court were not removed and that the government did not breach the court order.
“We think that what is most likely is that people were taken from [immigration removal centre] Brook House and put on the flight and those are the people who have probably gone because that detention centre was not covered by the order.”
The Home Office had argued the flight was “specifically for deporting foreign national offenders”, adding that “those detained for removal include people convicted of manslaughter, rape, violent crime and dealing class A drugs”.
The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) said: “Our thoughts are with the families who have just been forced apart by the government, with the children who have lost their fathers, with the women who’ve become single mothers overnight.
“It’s deeply unjust if people who grew up here, whose lives and families are here, can be exiled to a country which is totally foreign to them. They are British in every meaningful way and if the law allows those people to be exiled, it needs to change.”
Earlier, Sankey said removing those detainees would have meant the Home Office was breaking the law.
She tweeted: “We are speaking to individuals clearly covered by the court of appeal order prohibiting their deportation who have been removed to the airport and told they are being deported. ukhomeoffice are you really going to try and break the law tonight?”
In 2018, Saudi women took to the streets around the country, permitted to drive cars themselves for the first time. That same year, unrelated men and women were allowed to mix at a Formula-E car race and concert extravaganza, listening to DJ David Quetta and the Black Eyed Peas—unthinkable not long ago in a country where religious police used to enforce a strict separation of the sexes.
That’s part of the raft of highly visible social reforms that Saudi Arabia has launched in recent years as the Kingdom tries to reposition itself as a modern global economic powerhouse. But you don’t have to look far to see a very different country, where officials plotted the violent murder of The Washington Post’sJamal Khashoggi, where a young Saudi Air Force officer studied before deploying for training in Florida where he shot three U.S. Navy Airmen last fall, and where millions of children go to school every day and read state-sanctioned hate speech in their text books.
For a White House that seems to have given Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a wide berth on the first two incidents, the Trump Administration has been pushing hard behind the scenes for the last one to change. Since 2017, when President Donald Trump marked Saudi Arabia as a key regional ally, the Administration has seen the state’s textbooks — which teach a version of fundamental Islam so extreme it was used by the Islamic State — as a security threat and a key part of its efforts to fight terrorism.
Two new reviews of Saudi government textbooks show not much has changed, despite these efforts. In 2019, Saudi students were still being instructed to keep westerners at a distance, to consider Jews “monkeys” and “assassins” bent on harming Muslim holy places, and to punish gays by death. All those sentiments are included in text books that are required reading for Muslim children in Saudi Arabia from kindergarten through high school, according to a review by Jerusalem-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT SE, a nonprofit whose research has been cited by the UN and the Anti-Defamation League.
A second organization highlighted similar disturbing material. “Students are being taught that Christians, Jews and other Muslims are ‘enemies’ of the true believer, and to befriend and show respect only to other true believers, specifically the Wahhabis,” the strict sect of Islam upon which Saudi Arabia was founded, says Ali Al-Ahmed of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Gulf Studies, in a preview for TIME of his own meticulous review of the 2019 textbooks due out in March. The two groups have shared their results with U.S. government officials.
Both reviews acknowledge there have been some changes to the Saudi curriculum, designed to appease the Kingdom’s western critics. Al-Ahmed notes that in one passage, the phrase “Christians and Jews” has been replaced with phrase “the enemies of Islam,” but says other parts of the same textbook make clear that Christians and Jews remain in the ‘enemies’ camp. Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT SE, says some of the most notable changes in the curriculum fit in the Crown Prince’s ambitious modernization plan for the country, called Vision 2030, such as depicting women as entrepreneurs. “But they are encouraged to be entrepreneurs while not befriending westerners they would do business with,” Sheff adds.
The slow pace of change and the Saudi government’s refusal to do more has been a source of disappointment to Trump, a senior administration official tells TIME. Trump joins a long line of U.S. leaders, UN bodies and human and civil rights groups that have been pressuring the Saudi government for decades to stop proselytizing its harsh version of Wahhabi Islam, spread inside and outside the Kingdom by its clerics’ sermons online or given in mosques that Saudi money built. The government freely distributes hundreds of thousands of Wahhabi Qurans around the world, and makes its school textbooks freely available on the internet. Since the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., largely by Saudi-born jihadists, every administration that has occupied the White House has asked the Saudi government to revise what it teaches its children, with only glacial change as a result.
Trump Administration officials say they’ve been working in private to point out the dangers of this kind of hateful language to Saudi officials, but they are reluctant to publicly criticize Riyadh’s foot-dragging. “We can’t just demand from a sovereign nation ally an immediate fix,” a second senior administration official told TIME. “The Saudis are crucial to our national security efforts in the region, mainly those in places like Yemen… They have provided us a lot of support in those fights that we share.”
The Bush and Obama Administrations also kept similar critiques behind closed doors, according to Farah Pandith, who served in both administrations and was appointed first-ever Special Representative to Muslim Communities. “They were our partners in the post-9/11 context in fighting al Qaeda. We wanted to do this in a way that allowed them to keep a little bit of dignity but also show leadership,” she told TIME. “It should not be others forcing them to do the right thing.” She says the Saudi government has dismissed some of the more extreme preachers and taken some of their most hate-filled sermons off the internet, but much of the material is still accessible, including in the national curriculum. “It’s a question of scale. I traveled to 80 countries as representative to Muslim communities. None has more influence than the Saudis.”
Saudi critics like say the curriculum is perpetuating extremist violence, including the actions of Saudi Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, 21, who is accused of opening fire on U.S. personnel at Naval Air Station Pensacola on December 6th, killing three Navy Airmen and injuring eight. Alshamrani, an officer of the Royal Saudi Air Force, had armed himself with a legally purchased 9mm Glock handgun, only days after reportedly showing videos of mass shootings to other Saudi students training at the base as part of a longstanding U.S. military training program.
Terrorism expert Mia Bloom says the material Alshamrani would have ingested at school back home was so extreme that the State Department found it was used by the Islamic State during its reign of terror in Iraq and Syria. “Until ISIS started publishing their own ‘Al-Harouf’ series of children’s textbooks, ISIS used Saudi textbooks in their schools to train the cubs of the caliphate,” Bloom told TIME, a subject she detailed in her 2019 book, Small Arms: Children and Terrorism. “The Saudi textbooks promoted a view of the world that was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS ideology: hatred of the west; hatred of other Muslims, that are not Sunni; hatred of Jews and antagonism towards women.” Al-Ahmed says the Saudi officer would have had to prove mastery of such malevolent material to rise in the military ranks.
None of the Trump Administration officials would go so far as to blame such lessons for the Saudi officer’s alleged actions, but they concede if the education had been reformed shortly after 9/11 in 2001, when Alshamrani would have been around two years old, it may have helped. “Unfortunately, Pensacola is a reminder — a harsh one — of work left undone,” an administration official said.
“You could go back to 2001,” a second senior official added, referring to the attacks that killed more than 3,000 Americans. “If they had changed their textbooks in 1975, we’d be in a better spot.” The administration officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to brief TIME on their sensitive discussions with the Saudi Kingdom over the issue.
Among the gradual changes IMPACT SE notes in the 2019 Saudi textbooks include striking several references of Christians as “pure infidels” or unbelievers, and removing the statement that “Christianity in its current state is an invalid and perverted religion.” The Christian faith is no longer defined as a “colonial religious movement that subjected Muslims to Western ideas and stopped the spread of Islam,” the report said, all of which are positive changes if your number one supporter is President Trump, whose base is largely made up of evangelical Christians.
Also deleted is the claim that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” are “a secret Jewish plan to take over the world,” and that Jews believe the world was promised to them and that it’s their right to control it. But Zionism is still described as a racist movement that uses money, the media, drugs, and women to achieve its goals, according to IMPACT SE’s review.
A Saudi official told TIME that the Kingdom “is implementing a comprehensive program to reform and improve all its educational institutions,” which include “ongoing” reforms to the textbooks. The official declined to comment on an advance copy of IMPACT-SE’s report made available to him by TIME.
Amb. Nathan Sales, the State Department’s Acting Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, asked the Saudi government to make further changes to the textbooks, but was rebuffed, a senior administration official told TIME. The State Department declined to comment on Sales’ interaction, but a senior State Department official said that “the Saudi government has worked to modernize the educational curriculum in public schools” but that “some textbooks containing derogatory and intolerant references to Shia and non-Muslims remained in use.” Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the friction with the Kingdom.
Administration officials are still hoping for bigger reforms this summer, when the government publishes the 2020 edition of the K through 12 textbooks.
Pandith says the textbooks aren’t the only thing that needs changing, as the hundreds of thousands of Saudi Korans distributed around the world also portray Wahhabism as the only true version of Islam. “If you want to demonstrate that you see the folly of what you did before…let’s do a buyback program,” she says, an idea she outlines in her 2019 book, How We Win.
“If MBS (the Crown Prince) wanted to overhaul the viewpoint that they are the only Muslims that matter, he could do it in a minute with the kind of government they have,” she says. “The choice to do it piecemeal means their heart isn’t in this endeavor.”
