Canada must look beyond STEM and diversify its AI workforce

2020/01/29 Leave a comment

From a visible minority perspective, based on STEM graduates, representation reasonably good as per the chart above except for engineering and particularly strong in math and computer sciences, the closest fields of study to AI.

With respect to gender, the percentage of visible minority women is generally equivalent to that on non-visible minority women or stronger (but women are under-represented in engineering and math/computer sciences):

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to add US$15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, according to a recent report from PwC, representing a 14 percent boost to global GDP. Countries around the world are scrambling for a piece of the pie, as evidenced by the proliferation of national and regional AI strategies aimed at capturing the promise of AI for future value generation.

Canada has benefited from an early lead in AI, which is often attributed to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) having had the foresight to invest in Geoffrey Hinton’s research on deep learning shortly after the turn of the century. As a result, Canada can now tout Montreal as having the highest concentration of researchers and students of deep learning in the world and Toronto as being home to the highest concentration of AI start-ups in the world.

But the market for AI is approaching maturity. A report from McKinsey & Co. suggests that the public and private sectors together have captured only between 10 and 40 percent of the potential value of advances in machine learning. If Canada hopes to maintain a competitive advantage, it must both broaden the range of disciplines and diversify the workforce in the AI sector.

Looking beyond STEM

Strategies aimed at capturing the expected future value of AI have been concentrated on innovation in fundamental research, which is conducted largely in the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But it is the application of this research that will grow market share and multiply value. In order to capitalize on what fundamental research discovers, the AI sector must deepen its ties with the social sciences.

To date the role of social scientists in Canada’s strategy on AI has been largely limited to areas of ethics and public policy. While these are endeavours to which social scientists are particularly well suited, they could be engaged much more broadly with AI. Social scientists are well positioned to identify and exploit potential applications of this research that will generate both social and economic returns on Canada’s investment in AI.

Social scientists take a unique approach to data analysis by drawing on social theory to critically interpret both the inputs and outputs of a given model. They ask what a given model is really telling us about the world and how it arrived at that result. They see potential opportunities in data and digital technology that STEM researchers are not trained to look for.

A recent OECD report looks at the skills that most distinguish innovative from non-innovative workers; chief among them are creativity, critical thinking and communication skills. While these skills are by no means exclusively the domain of the social sciences, they are perhaps more central to social scientific training than to any other discipline.

The social science perspective can serve as a defence mechanism against the potential folly of certain applications of AI. If social scientists had been more involved in early adaptations of computer vision, for example, Google might have been spared the shame of image recognition algorithms that classify people of colour as animals (they certainly would have come up with a better solution). In the same vein, Microsoft’s AI chatbots would have been less likely to spew racist slurs shortly after launch.

Social scientists can also help meet a labour shortage: there are not enough STEM graduatesto meet future demand for AI talent. Meanwhile, social science graduates are often underemployed, in part because they do not have the skills necessary to participate in a future of work that privileges expertise in AI. As a consequence, many of the opportunities associated with AI are passing Canada’s social science graduates by. Excluding social science students from Canada’s AI strategy not only reduces their career paths but restricts their opportunities to contribute to fulfilling the societal and economic promise of AI.

Realizing the potential of the social sciences within Canada’s AI ecosystem requires innovative thinking by both governments and universities. Federal and provincial governments should relax restrictions on funding for AI-related research that prohibit applications from social scientists or make them eligible only within interdisciplinary teams that include STEM researchers. This policy has the effect of subordinating social scientific approaches to AI to those of STEM disciplines. In fact, social scientists are just as capable of independent research, and a growing number are already engaged in sophisticated applications of machine learning to address some of the most pressing societal challenges of our time.

Governments must also invest in the development of undergraduate and graduate training opportunities that are specific to the application of AI in the social sciences, using pedagogical approaches that are appropriate for them.

Social science faculties in universities across Canada can also play a crucial role by supporting the development of AI-related skills within their undergraduate and graduate curriculums. At McMaster University, for example, the Faculty of Social Sciences is developing a new degree: master of public policy in digital society. Alongside graduate training in the fundamentals of public policy, the 12-month program will include rigorous training in data science as well as technical training in key digital technologies that are revolutionizing contemporary society. The program, which is expected to launch in 2021, is intended to provide students with a command of digital technologies such as AI necessary to enable them to think creatively and critically about its application to the social world. In addition to the obvious benefit of producing a new generation of policy leadership in AI, the training provided by this program will ensure that its graduates are well positioned for a broader range of leadership opportunities across the public and private sectors.

Increasing workplace diversity

A report released in 2019 by New York University’s AI Now Institute declared that there is a diversity crisis in the AI workforce. This has implications for the sector itself but also for society more broadly, in that the systemic biases within the AI sector are being perpetuated via the myriad touch points that AI has with our everyday lives: it is organizing our online search results and social media news feeds and supporting hiring decisions, and it may even render decisions in some court cases in future.

One of the main findings of the AI Now report was that the widespread strategy of focusing on “women in tech” is too narrow to counter the diversity crisis. In Canada, efforts to diversify AI generally translate to providing advancement opportunities for women in the STEM disciplines. Although the focus of policy-makers on STEM is critical and necessary, it is short-sighted. Disciplinary diversity in AI research not only broadens the horizons for research and commercialization; it also creates opportunities for groups who are underrepresented in STEM to benefit from and contribute to innovations in AI.

As it happens, equity-seeking groups are better represented in the social sciences. According to Statistics Canada, the social sciences and adjacent fields have the highest enrolment of visible minorities. And as of 2017, only 23.7 percent of those enrolled in STEM programs at Canadian universities were women, whereas women were 69.1 percent of participants in the social sciences.

So, engaging the social sciences more substantively in research and training related to AI will itself lead to greater diversity. While advancing this engagement, universities should be careful not to import training approaches directly from statistics or computer science, as these will bring with them some of the cultural context and biases that have resulted in a lack of diversity in those fields to begin with.

Bringing the social sciences into Canada’s AI strategy is a concrete way to demonstrate the strength of diversity, in disciplines as well as demographics. Not only would many social science students benefit from training in AI, but so too would Canada’s competitive advantage in AI benefit from enabling social scientists to effectively translate research into action.

Source: Canada must look beyond STEM and diversify its AI workforce

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Richmond councillor urges action on birth tourism

2020/01/28 Leave a comment

Might be more productive for municipal councillors to have staff review possible zoning and other local regulatory options to help reduce the practice and the supporting “cottage industry” of consultants and residences than “virtue signalling” for a federal government policy change:

Birth tourism will be on the agenda for Richmond city council again.

Coun. Carol Day has brought forward a motion for the next general purposes committee meeting (Feb. 3) asking council to write to the new federal minister of immigration, Marco Mendicino, to urge changes to immigration laws in order to stop birth tourism.

About a quarter of the women giving birth at Richmond Hospital are non-residents, and in the last fiscal year, this translated to 458 babies being eligible for Canadian citizenship even though their parents weren’t Canadian.

Day’s motion suggests writing to the federal government to ask for permanent changes to Canadian immigration laws to end automatic citizenship for babies born to non-residents.

On Friday, the U.S. State Department implemented a new rule banning tourists if their intention is to give birth in the U.S. The new regulation allows consular officials to deny visas to pregnant women whose primary purpose is to give birth in the U.S. to obtain citizenship for their baby.

Ads are prolific on the Internet for birth tourism services in Richmond, and they are all in Chinese. However, anyone coming from China to Canada as a tourist must obtain a tourist visa before arriving.

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ICYMI: African Immigrants May Be Trump’s Next Target

2020/01/28 Leave a comment

Of note, with possible impact on future asylum seekers in Canada:
Last week, Politico reported that the Trump administration was considering adding seven new countries to its travel ban. A majority of them—Eritrea, Sudan, Tanzania, and Nigeria, which is by far the most populous of the seven—are in Africa. The rationalization appears to involve terrorism. In the “counterterrorism” section of a January 17 speech, Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, declared, “We’re establishing criteria that all foreign governments must satisfy to assist DHS in vetting foreign nationals seeking to enter our country … For a small number of countries that lack either the will or the capability to adhere to these criteria, travel restrictions may become necessary to mitigate threats.”Because the Supreme Court upheld Donald Trump’s travel ban in 2018 on national-security grounds, it’s not surprising that administration officials would cite that same rationale to expand the ban now. But the argument is weak. According to numbers crunched by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh when Trump first imposed the ban three years ago, not a single person born in Eritrea, Tanzania, Nigeria, or Sudan killed a single American in a terrorist attack on American soil from 1975 to 2016. (The same is true of Belarus and Myanmar, two of the other three countries Trump may add to the travel-ban roster. Two people from Kyrgyzstan, the final country, were implicated in deadly anti-American terrorism incidents during the period, according to Nowrasteh’s tally.)
A Wall Street Journal article on the potential travel-ban expansion suggests a different justification: Travelers from Eritrea, Sudan, and Nigeria are more likely than travelers from other countries to overstay their visas. But if that’s the case—as Tom Jawetz, an immigration expert at the Center for American Progress, explained to me—the answer is to train the U.S. consular officers who give out those visas to better determine who won’t return home, or to actually increase visas to meet legitimate demand. The answer is not to collectively punish the population of an entire country.But if the Trump administration’s real motivation is to decrease immigration from Africa, then collective punishment has a certain logic to it. For several years now, Trump has trained his nativist ire on Muslims and Latinos. The travel ban suggests he’s adding a new target, just in time for the 2020 elections: Africans.According to the Pew Research Center, the number of black immigrants in the United States has grown fivefold over the past 40 years. America’s immigrant population from sub-Saharan Africa more than doubled from 2000 to 2016 alone. Trump’s allies have noticed. In her book Adios America, which Trump publicly praised, and parroted, when he launched 2016 campaign, Ann Coulter claims, “There were almost no Nigerians in the United States until the 1970s. Today there are 380,000.” This is a problem, she declares, because “in Nigeria, every level of society is criminal.” When 500 Congolese and Angolan immigrants showed up at the Texas border last June, Tucker Carlson warned that, because of “population growth … on the continent of Africa,” African immigration “could become a torrent” that could “overwhelm our country, and change it completely and forever.”

Trump himself, according to The New York Times, vented in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that on his watch the United States had admitted 40,000 Nigerians who would never “go back to their huts.” (Nigerian immigrants are actually twice as likely to have at least a bachelor’s degree as Americans as a whole.) During an immigration meeting in 2018, The Washington Post reported, Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa as “shithole countries.” Soon afterward, the White House unveiled a proposal to remake America’s immigration system. According to the Center for American Progress, it would have reduced immigration from sub-Saharan Africa by 46 percent, more than any other region of the world.

But while Trump’s animosity to African immigration isn’t new, it has never before taken center stage in his administration’s policies or his public rhetoric. Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign talking about Mexican rapists. He made building a wall on America’s southern border his campaign’s rallying cry. He responded to the December 2015 jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, by demanding a ban on Muslim immigration. He made Central American immigrant “caravans” the heart of his get-out-the-vote strategy in 2018.

So Trump is diversifying his array of immigrant threats. Singling out African countries could spark a public battle with the Congressional Black Caucus, Somalian-American Representative Ilhan Omar, and African American celebrities—just the sort of foes who rouse Trump’s base. Expect presidential tweets and Tucker Carlson monologues about Nigerian email scammers and crime rates in Lagos. In Trump’s ceaseless battle to terrify Republicans with the specter of an America no longer controlled by white men, a new front may be opening up.

Source: African Immigrants May Be Trump’s Next Target

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Migration committee advises against full points-based system for UK

2020/01/28 Leave a comment

Will see what the final policy and program changes are and their likely impacts:

The independent migration advisory committee does not recommend a full shift to an Australian points-based system in research giving the first detailed insight into how a reformed immigration system might look after Brexit and the ending of freedom of movement for EU nationals.

In a report published on Tuesday, the independent committee, which provides research-based advice to the government, recommends a mixed system, which would rely on a minimum salary threshold for those people coming to the UK with a job offer, and a points-based system for those coming to the UK without a pre-arranged job.

“Talented individuals” would be able to apply for a work visa under the points-based system.

Its recommendations would reduce levels of immigration, the size of the UK population and total GDP. “We expect the changes to very slightly increase GDP per capita, productivity and improve public finances, though these estimates are more uncertain,” the report states.

“The changes are also expected to reduce pressures on the NHS, schools and on social housing, though they will increase pressure on social care.”

Source: Migration committee advises against full points-based system for UK

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U.S. Supreme Court lets hardline Trump immigration policy take effect

2020/01/28 Leave a comment

Sigh:

The U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead on Monday for one of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, allowing his administration to implement a rule denying legal permanent residency to certain immigrants deemed likely to require government assistance in the future.

The justices, on a 5-4 vote, granted the administration’s request to lift a lower court’s injunction that had blocked the so-called public charge policy while litigation over its legality continues. The rule has been criticized by immigrant rights advocates as a “wealth test” that would disproportionately keep out non-white immigrants.

The court’s five conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts and two justices appointed by Trump, carried the day. The court’s four liberal justices said they would have denied the administration’s request. The action was announced even as Roberts sat as the presiding officer in Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate.

Lawsuits aiming to block the policy were filed against the administration by the states of New York, Connecticut and Vermont as well as by New York City and several nonprofit organizations.

In imposing an injunction blocking it, Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge George Daniels on Oct. 11 called the rule “repugnant to the American Dream” and a “policy of exclusion in search of a justification.”

The administration asked the high court to let the rule go into effect even before the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules on Trump’s appeal of the injunction. The 2nd Circuit is considering the matter on an expedited basis, with legal papers to be submitted by Feb. 14 and arguments expected soon afterward.

The administration can now enforce the rule nationwide except in Illinois, where a lower court has blocked its implementation.

Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), praised the high court.

“It is very clear the U.S. Supreme Court is fed up with these national injunctions by judges who are trying to impose their policy preferences instead of enforcing the law,” Cuccinelli told reporters.

GREEN CARDS

At issue is which immigrants will be granted legal permanent residency, known as a “green card.” Under Trump’s policy, immigration officers would consider factors such as age, educational level and English proficiency to decide whether an immigrant would likely become a “public charge” who would receive government benefits such as the Medicaid health insurance program for the poor.

The administration has said the new rule is necessary to better ensure that immigrants will be self-sufficient. Critics have said the rule would disproportionately bar low-income people from developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia from permanent residency.

“Limiting legal immigration based on an applicant’s wealth is shameful and entirely un-American,” Democratic Senator Dick Durbin wrote on Twitter.

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes visa applications, said it would “determine the most appropriate method to implement the public charge rule” and would release additional information soon.

Trump has made his tough immigration stance a hallmark of his presidency and 2020 re-election campaign.

U.S. immigration law has long required officials to exclude people likely to become a “public charge” from permanent residency. U.S. guidelines in place for the past two decades had said immigrants likely to become primarily dependent on direct cash assistance or long-term institutionalization, in a nursing home for example, at public expense would be barred.

The new rule expands the “public charge” bar to anyone deemed likely to receive a much wider range of public benefits for more than an aggregate of 12 months over any 36-month period including healthcare, housing and food assistance.

The vast majority of people seeking permanent residency are not eligible for public benefits themselves. A 2019 Urban Institute survey found that the administration’s rule was already deterring people from seeking benefits for U.S. citizen children for fear of harming their own future immigration status. Benefits for family members are not considered under the rule.

Claudia Center, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the rule targets disabled people applying for green cards and “enshrines the false stereotype that people with disabilities do not contribute to our society.”

The high court could give Trump more victories on immigration policy. The conservative justices signaled support in November for Trump’s bid to kill a program that protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants – dubbed “Dreamers” – who entered the United States illegally as children. A ruling is due by the end of June.

The court in 2018 upheld Trump’s “travel ban” targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee who voted to lift the injunction, issued an opinion criticizing lower courts’ “increasingly common” use of nationwide injunctions to halt government policies. Gorsuch urged the court to confront the issue.

“What in this gamesmanship and chaos can we be proud of?” Gorsuch asked.

Two other federal appeals courts previously lifted nationwide injunctions ordered by lower courts blocking the rule.

Source: U.S. Supreme Court lets hardline Trump immigration policy take effect

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Fear over coronavirus prompts school board in Ontario to warn parents about racism against Chinese community

2020/01/28 Leave a comment

Not unexpected and always the challenge in communicating the origins of a specific risk and the impact on the community, irrespective whether historical tropes are involved or not. And I assume that some of these fears are shared by many Chinese Canadians:

The message York District School Board staff had been sending to parents on the coronavirus was pretty standard: Wash your hands; stay home if you’re sick; cover your mouth and nose when you sneeze. Then they saw the petition.

More than 8,000 people were calling for school boards in the region north of Toronto – a region in which the top reported ethnic origin is Chinese – to not allow students whose family members had travelled to China within 17 days to come to school.

On Monday, the York board released a note to parents to address another virus: anti-Chinese xenophobia.

“We are aware of an escalated level of concern and anxiety among families of Chinese heritage,” wrote Juanita Nathan, the board’s chair, and Louise Sirisko, its education director. “Individuals who make assumptions, even with positive intentions of safety, about the risk of others, request or demand quarantine can be seen as demonstrating bias and racism.”

Though public-health officials across the country have urged Canadians to take a measured response to the coronavirus, a panic akin to the one from 2003’s SARS outbreak has already taken hold. To date, there is one confirmed and one presumptive case of the new virus in Canada.

Avvy Go felt a tickle in her throat on the subway ride to work Monday, but willed herself to suppress the cough. She feared coughing on public transit as a Chinese woman might make her a pariah as it did for so many other Asian-Canadians during the SARS outbreak.

In Yellow Peril Revisited, a 2004 report about the impact of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) on Canada’s Chinese community, Ms. Go, the director of the Metro Toronto Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, detailed the myriad ways SARS affected her clients: Many suffered job losses after Chinese restaurants saw a steep drop in business; Asian claimants who appeared before the Immigration and Refugee Board faced staff wearing masks; and tenants reported being threatened with eviction by their landlords because they were Chinese.

Ms. Go shared much of this when she testified at Ontario’s public hearings on the SARS crisis but she was disappointed to find nothing about racism in the inquiry’s 2007 report. Recommendations on how to respond to racist rhetoric would have been helpful for future outbreaks such as this one, she said.

“As they prepare for the virus, they [should] also prepare for the virus of racism and have everything in place at the same time,” she said.

When Toronto Chinatown Business Improvement Area chair Tonny Louie addressed the crowd at Saturday’s Lunar New Year parade, he felt the need to explain his sore throat.

“I reminded everybody there that I do not have the virus. I just happen to have a cold,” he said.

The next day, he noticed a drop in business throughout downtown Toronto’s Chinatown and its dozens of restaurants – something he blames on fears about the virus. He repeated the message that the district was safe, as was the food, and called on politicians to have meals in Chinese restaurants as then-prime minister Jean Chrétien did during the 2003 SARS outbreak to signal to Canadians that doing so was safe.

But that sort of PR move might not be enough to counter racist messaging, given the power of social media.

In the past few days, video of a woman eating a bat with chopsticks in a restaurant has gone viral, with many suggesting, in posts heavy with racist rhetoric, that Chinese people eating foods seen as unusual to a Western palate has contributed to the outbreak.

The way in which the video has been shared has vilified and othered Chinese people, says Kevin Huang, executive director of the Hua Foundation, a Vancouver-based non-profit that promotes racial equity.

Rather than thinking of the coronavirus as an us-versus-them situation, Mr. Huang suggests using a global lens.

“Removing our Western exceptionalism and … humanizing [Chinese people] allows us to think about a more global concerted effort to try and contain this virus,” he said.

Why people would share misinformation like that while ignoring facts from public-health agencies speaks to how racist content “feeds into already pre-existing underlying biases or prejudices,” York University sociologist Harris Ali said.

In a research paper about SARS and the stigmatization of the Chinese population in Canada, he found that racist sentiments that had previously been internalized or only shared during private conversations “found explicit expression during the outbreak.”

Mr. Huang says the way some have drawn a connection between the virus and Chinese food is part of a long history of “yellow peril” or anti-Chinese sentiment.

Government policy that disenfranchised Chinese people, such as the head tax (an immigration tax imposed on Chinese arrivals), “fed into these tropes of this disgusting, uncivilized cultural grouping,” he said.

He has seen rampant misinformation and panic spread among Chinese-Canadians, too, some of whom are reacting to alarmist Chinese media reports. Last weekend, two Lunar New Year events in Vancouver were cancelled because of fear of the virus’s spread.

Ms. Go feels confident the Canadian health-care system is much better equipped to deal with containing coronavirus than it was with SARS, but she has little optimism about how it will contain the public’s fears.

“Unfortunately, because of the underlying racist attitudes that exist in Canadian society, it doesn’t matter what scientific evidence is there of how the disease has been contained, people will still believe what they believe,” she said.

Source: Fear over coronavirus prompts school board in Ontario to warn parents about racism against Chinese community Though public-health officials have urged Canadians to take a measured response, a panic akin to the one during 2003′s SARS outbreak has already taken hold
Fear, fear, fear.

The word appears repeatedly in the headlines and stories about the new coronavirus.

But what is fear? What causes us to be fearful? How can we assuage the public’s distress?

The dictionary definition of fear, the noun, is “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat;” and the verb, “to be afraid of (someone or something) as likely to be dangerous, painful, or threatening.”

In public health terms, “fear” is our perception of risk, of danger.

We tend to be more fearful of new threats to our health, such as coronavirus, than of well-established ones, such as influenza, no matter how irrational that is.

To date, there have been about 4,500 recorded cases of Wuhan coronavirus and 106 deaths. By comparison, three to five million people contract serious flu cases requiring hospitalization annually and somewhere between 290,000 and 650,000 die. Yet, both are respiratory illnesses spread in a similar fashion.

When it comes to being fearful, better the devil we know than the one we don’t, apparently.

If the unknown fuels fear – and it does – then our best weapon against coronavirus is knowledge.

The good news is that the science is advancing at breakneck speed and with an unprecedented level of co-operation.

The coronavirus genome was decoded in fewer than 10 days and the results shared publicly. As a result, researchers are already working on novel treatments and potential vaccine targets.

Scientific journals, normally highly protective of their papers, have agreed to share them with public-health officials prior to publication and lifted their paywalls for articles about coronavirus.

That means we already have a sense of how infectious coronavirus is (moderate) and a sense of who is being infected (a broad range of people) and who is dying (largely patients with underlying chronic conditions).

But, of course, good science alone cannot assuage fear.

The way public-health officials and the media communicate information is key to shaping perceptions. Increasingly, there is a wild card in this equation – social media.

The mainstream media fearmongers, however inadvertently, by using exaggerated language like “killer virus” and by fixating on body counts. When you constantly update the number of cases and deaths, you wildly amplify incremental change. Of course people will be scared. Imagine if we sent out push alerts for every tuberculosis death (1.5 million a year) and every measles death (140,000 annually).

Finding the balance between providing up-to-date information on a new threat and putting that threat into context is not easy.

On social media, there is too often little attempt to do so. From WeChat to Twitter, wild rumours and outright falsehoods fly routinely, as do unhinged demands such as shutting down all air traffic from China, quarantining all travellers and so on, with many of these purported measures driven by thinly veiled racism and xenophobia rather than science. (For the record, there is little evidence that massive quarantines or thermal screening of passengers has any benefit in stemming transmission of diseases like coronavirus.)

The most difficult communications challenge, however, lies with public-health officials who have to simultaneously track the shifting science, ratchet up preparedness and calm public fears.

Peter Sandman, a former professor of journalism at Rutgers University and a risk-communications guru, says the one thing public officials (or the media) should never do is tell people not to panic. That’s because, in crisis situations, people rarely do panic.

Prof. Sandman actually has a brilliant list of tips for those who need to calm people’s fears about unknown threats such as the coronavirus:

  • Don’t over reassure; talk about most likely scenarios rather than worst case ones;
  • Acknowledge uncertainty; paradoxically, saying “I don’t know” reassures the public;
  • Deliver clear, consistent messages;
  • Don’t be dispassionate; when experts speak of their personal fears, it makes them more relatable;
  • Give people things to do to protect themselves, such as urging handwashing; what fuels fear is powerlessness;
  • Don’t worry about panic, as was already mentioned.

What each of these elements has in common is that they are about building trust. What calms people’s fears is not just having information, but trusting the source of that information.

Risk communication is fraught with peril – and more often than not, we won’t get it quite right – but it is also essential.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is … fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Source: What should we fear more: Coronavirus or fear itself? During an outbreak such as the coronavirus, building trust through communication is key: André Picard

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Canada Wins, U.S. Loses In Global Fight For High-Tech Workers

2020/01/27 Leave a comment

The latest article on the “Canadian advantage:”

Hundreds of tech workers pack an auditorium for a recent networking event in Toronto. The evening’s host glides around the room on a hoverboard, equal parts game show host and tech bro.

“Who here is new to Canada?” asks Jason Goldlist, the co-founder of TechToronto, an organization that helps newcomers navigate the city’s fast-growing tech ecosystem.

Dozens of hands shoot up in the air — one belonging to Alok Chitnis, who moved to Canada last year. Chitnis is originally from India. He went to graduate school in the U.S. and found a job in Colorado. But last May, he moved to Canada to launch his own startup.

“It’s vibrant. It’s very welcoming for immigrants,” Chitnis says. “There are a lot of services by the government to help newcomer entrepreneurs especially. So the whole ecosystem is pretty welcoming compared to the U.S.”

If there is a war for global tech talent, right now Canada is winning — and the U.S. may be losing its edge. Toronto saw the biggest growth in technology jobs of any North American city over the past five years, outpacing San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Vancouver also made the top five.

The tech industry across Canada is booming. And one of the biggest reasons is U.S. immigration policy. The Trump administration has made it harder for high-skilled workers to get visas. It also has blocked entrepreneurs from some majority-Muslim countries altogether under the travel ban, which it’s moving to expand to more countries.

Canada, meanwhile, has been making it easier for tech workers to immigrate there. A new streamlined visa in Canada has brought in more than 40,000 tech workers from around the world in the past two years alone.

“While the States has gone, ‘Let’s make it difficult to get the employees here on a visa,’ Canada’s gone the exact opposite, and it’s beneficial for Canada,” says Alex Norman, the other co-founder of TechToronto. “You had a fast-growing ecosystem here that’s been getting a shot of steroids.”

Under the Trump administration, high-skilled workers are getting rejected at a higher rate. In 2015, 92% of new H-1B visa applications were approved. But in the last two years, the approval rate dipped to only 75%.

Immigration authorities say they’re trying to ensure that companies follow the rules. Employers are required to show that hiring a foreign worker will not hurt Americans.

“You know, I have a high regard — as does the president — for protecting U.S. workers,” said Ken Cuccinelli, who was then the acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in an interview last year.

Cuccinelli was asked about the need to crack down on fraud and abuse. “The H-1B program has been controversial in this regard,” he said. “And it is concerning.”

Meanwhile, U.S. tech companies complain that they can’t find enough qualified candidates to fill all their open jobs.

More than a dozen hiring managers from tech startups recently squeezed into a private dining room at Del Posto, a high-end New York City restaurant. One of them was Susan Riskin, the head of human resources at Bitly, which is well-known for making Web addresses shorter.

“We doubled the size of our technology team in the last year,” Riskin said. “And we feel like we have exhausted New York and Denver. And now it’s like we’re trying to figure out where to go next, what we need to do.”

All of the hiring managers at the table were confronting a similar problem. They came for the New York strip steak and Italian wine — but also to hear a business pitch from Irfhan Rawji, the founder of a Canadian company called MobSquad.

“If you’d rather fill a job than go without, call us,” Rawji said. “We’ll open a virtual subsidiary for you in Canada. You get access to the world.”

Rawji’s pitch, in a nutshell, is this: Say your firm wants to hire an international tech worker, but the worker’s visa application is rejected or the application process is dragging on for months.

“The next-best solution to keeping them here in the U.S., if you can’t do that, is to put them in Canada,” Rawji said. “The flights are an hour and a half to two hours. It’s the same business culture. And we try to match or beat the total cost for you here.”

U.S. tech companies have long relied on a steady stream of engineers and software developers from China, India and elsewhere. The process of getting an H-1B visa was often expensive and slow, says Meagan Soszynski, the head of human resources for an advertising app called Yieldmo. But at least it was predictable.

“You followed a certain process, you paid a premium, but you pretty much always got the outcome that you wanted,” says Soszynski.

She says that’s not the case anymore.

“In the last year, I would say every one of my H-1B cases have been met with some sort of delay,” Soszynski says. “So the immigration changes are certainly being felt by us on the front lines.”

The U.S. remains a popular destination for international workers. The number of applicants for H-1B visas stills exceed the annual cap of 85,000. But in recent years, fewer are applying.

“The biggest thing that’s going to hurt the U.S. competitiveness is the overall rhetoric or tone” on immigration, says William Kerr, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of The Gift of Global Talent, who also serves on the board of MobSquad.

“If you think about migration, people are making a choice to come and invest in their lives, whether for school or for work, and they want to have long-term opportunities,” Kerr says. “And the uncertainty and the hostility really dampen that enthusiasm.”

President Trump says he understands the problem.

“We have to allow smart people to stay in our country,” Trump said in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News this month.

“We don’t have enough of them. And we have to be competitive with the rest of the world too,” Trump said.

But global tech workers say the Trump administration’s policies make the U.S. less attractive.

Ozge Yoluk started a new job in Toronto this month. She was born in Turkey and studied in Europe. Yoluk worked as a postdoctoral researcher in computational biology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. She says the field is “like playing video games” — except in these games, the characters are proteins and experimental drugs.

The company she joined, ProteinQure, is using tech to design new treatments. Pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. are doing similar work. But Yoluk says she didn’t even bother applying for those jobs.

“Getting a visa in the U.S. is not easy,” Yoluk says. “And it’s really costly, not just for the companies but also for the person itself.”

Yoluk says the higher rejection rate for work visas has made U.S. companies more reluctant to sponsor foreign workers — and foreign workers more reluctant to go through the process.

“I said I will not waste my time applying for positions in the States,” Yoluk said. “Whereas in Canada, the process was easy.”

Yoluk says she got her Canadian visa approved in about two weeks. She didn’t even need a lawyer to navigate the process.

A few blocks away, I met Milad Zabihi at a coffee shop in downtown Toronto. Zabihi is the CEO of a startup called Peekage, which helps companies target customers. Zabihi immigrated to Canada from Iran. Several of the company’s other co-founders are also Iranian.

“We are a bunch of friends from university time,” Zabihi says. “We were thinking of like, you know, starting something new.”

Zabihi says they wanted to locate this new venture in the United States. But then, Trump’s travel ban blocked most immigrants and visitors from Iran and several other Muslim-majority countries.

“Everyone’s like, OK, the U.S. is not an option,” Zabihi says. “Especially we like, you know, what is happening right now with the new administration and Islam. So we were basically thinking of, like, what would be the best next option.”

Now big U.S. tech firms are following global tech workers north of the border.

Google, Microsoft, Intel and Uber have either opened or announced plans for new offices in Canada.

“Toronto’s now the fastest-growing tech city in North America,” said Yung Wu, the CEO of the MaRS Discovery District, a technology hub in Toronto that’s home to 150 tech startups. It takes up most of a city block, with multiple buildings connected by a soaring glass atrium.

Wu says the Toronto tech industry has been growing for a while. But the U.S. immigration crackdown accelerated that growth.

“Look, every time Trump tweets, we get another sort of injection, which is all good from my perspective,” Wu says. “Companies are locating here because they can get access to foreign talent faster.”

Wu says hiring the right people at the right time can be the difference between a company that succeeds and one that doesn’t.

Canada is betting on it.

Source: Canada Wins, U.S. Loses In Global Fight For High-Tech Workers

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

‘Mexico has become Trump’s wall’: how Amlo became an immigration enforcer

2020/01/27 Leave a comment

Of interest (just as the Safe Third Country Agreement acts as a wall with the USA):

When a group of Central American families forded the Suchiate River into Mexico last week, they were greeted by a wall of national guardsmen who locked riot shields and fired teargas into the crowd.

Questioned about the incident, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, dismissed it as “an isolated case” and said such scenes were “not the style of this government”.

The very next day, the national guard once again teargassed migrants near the border with Guatemala. News footage showed women and children howling in distress as guardsmen rounded them up and loaded them on to buses.

The president, generally referred to as Amlo, once railed against the abuse visited on migrants. In opposition, he pleaded for Mexico to provide safe passage to people heading for the US border.

But 13 months into his presidency – and under the looming threat of US tariffs – Amlo has assumed a new role: immigration enforcer.

The president his struggled to reconcile his past rhetoric with current actions, claiming good intentions at every turn, invoking human rights and even citing scripture to call for the proper treatment of migrants.

But Amlo has staunchly defended the national guard, a militarised police forced he created last year ostensibly to fight organized crime. Its first deployment was against migrants, even as violence continues to wrack the country.

“The national guard resisted a lot because there was aggression, on the part of the migrants,” he told reporters. “They didn’t fall in the trap of responding with violence, which is possibly what the leaders of these caravans and our political adversaries were looking for.”

Cabinet ministers parroted the same line: “In no way was there an act of repression,” said the interior minister, Olga Sánchez Cordero. “A tragedy was avoided,” said the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard.

The National Immigration Institute, meanwhile, said that it had “rescued” 800 migrants – using the word as a euphemism for “arrested”.

As he swept to power in 2018, Amlo promised to end a bitter history of government repression: under successive administrations, soldiers and police have often been deployed to disperse – and disappear – protesters and opposition activists.

“Mexico has a long history of its government acting out against its citizens,” said Esteban Illades, editor of the magazine Nexos.

But the arrival of migrant caravans from Central America has exposed the extreme ideological promiscuity of Mexican politics. Like his ministers, members of Amlo’s coalition have followed the president’s lead and turned against the caravans.

Source: ‘Mexico has become Trump’s wall’: how Amlo became an immigration enforcer

Filed under Refugees Tagged with , ,

Administrative law just got a new ‘standard of review’

2020/01/27 Leave a comment

More on the Vavilov decision and possible implications for refugee claimants and others (a Citizenship Act amendment would be needed to prevent future Vavilov-type situations):

A Supreme Court of Canada judgment made headlines around the world in December by deciding that Alexander Vavilov, born in Canada to “deep cover” Russian spies, was entitled to Canadian citizenship. Lawyers and scholars took to Twitter to joke that reporters had missed the really exciting part: the Supreme Court of Canada had just redefined the “standard of review” in administrative law.

The terms confuse even lawyers in other fields, but the stakes are high: administrative law concerns how all levels of government — from a municipality granting construction permits to the governor general making someone a member of the Order of Canada — reach their decisions; the standard of review is how much scrutiny the courts will apply if someone challenges those decisions. The Court has given new directions in the Vavilov case on how the lower courts determine what makes a decision legal or reasonable — directions that will help vulnerable individuals who bear the brunt of government decision-making.

For years, courts have debated how much deference they owe. On the one hand, if Parliament or a legislature has delegated a decision to an official, board or tribunal, courts should be reluctant to interfere. On the other hand, the rule of law means the courts must ensure that government action is consistent with legal rules, including the Constitution, and is neither arbitrary nor unfair.

These issues mattered to Vavilov because just after his 20th birthday, the Canadian Registrar of Citizenship cancelled his citizenship certificate, based only on written submissions. The issue was his parents’ status when he was born: they were foreigners living under false identities and working for Russia as spies. He learned their story only just before his 16th birthday, when they were arrested in their Boston home. The family was sent to Russia in a “spy swap,” but for Alexander, it was a move to a country he had never known.

Canada grants citizenship to almost everyone born here, but the Registrar of Citizenship relied on a few words in the Citizenship Act that create an exception for the children of “a diplomatic or consular officer or other representative or employee in Canada of a foreign government”; she argued that Alexander fell into this exception and was ineligible for citizenship.

The underlying issue — the kind that makes non-lawyers shake their heads — was whether the exception applies to any “employee of a foreign government” or whether those few words take their meaning from the larger context and apply only to foreign government employees with diplomatic status, which the Vavilovs were not. Alexander’s lawyers pointed out that restricting the exception to diplomatic employees was the only interpretation consistent with international treaties and with a generous view of citizenship; on their reading, Alexander’s parents were not diplomatic or similar employees, and he would be outside the exception and eligible for citizenship by birth.

The procedural issue was just how much deference the courts had to show to the Registrar’s own interpretation of the Citizenship Act. Vavilov argued that she had to make a decision that was correct: that is, there could be only one valid interpretation of the statute, and the Registrar had to get it right. Government lawyers argued the opposite: officials need only render a decision that appears reasonable, even if the courts might disagree.

The Supreme Court of Canada announced that it would use the case to reconsider the standard of review for government decision-making in general. The judgment decided that the category of cases in which administrative decisions must be correct — where the courts have the final word on interpreting the law — will continue to be limited: where a formal appeal is provided for or where the issues are constitutional or of fundamental importance to the legal system. All other decisions are entitled to deference and must only be reasonable.

But all nine judges decided the decision to cancel Alexander Vavilov’s citizenship was notreasonable: his parents did not benefit from any diplomatic privilege or immunity, so the exception from citizenship by birth was not meant for Alexander; and the Registrar did not consider the harsh consequences that her decision would have for him.

The majority defined what reasonableness means. Among other things, for a decision to be reasonable, it must be consistent with Canada’s international law obligations. In addition, a decision’s impact matters: an individual whose “life, liberty, dignity or livelihood” will be affected deserves greater procedural protection.

This is good news for individuals like refugee claimants facing a return to danger or tenants facing evictions: “ordinary people, including the most vulnerable among us,” in the Supreme Court’s words. They can rely on Canada’s international promises to protect refugees from harm or to ensure the right to adequate housing, along with other economic and social rights. They can also demand that government decision-makers take into account the real-life consequences for them.

Source: Administrative law just got a new ‘standard of review’

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Five times immigration changed the UK

2020/01/27 Leave a comment

Nice background and some overlap with Canada (with the exception of the Vietnamese and other boat people):

After the war, fewer than one in 25 of the population had been born outside the country; today that figure is closer to one in seven.

Many moments have contributed to this transformation in net migration. Here are five key turning points.

1948: The Windrush Generation

In the aftermath of the war, the UK saw huge investment in public infrastructure. Bombed cities were rebuilt, transport systems expanded and new institutions, such as the NHS, had to be staffed.

Employment opportunities abounded, and people from all over the Commonwealth came to the UK to help fill the labour shortage.

Some of the first to arrive in 1948 were a group of 500 or so Caribbean migrants, who arrived on former troopship the Empire Windrush. Consequently, they and the 300,000 West Indians who followed them over the next 20 years, were known as the Windrush generation.

Alongside those from the Caribbean came some 300,000 people from India, 140,000 from Pakistan, and more than 170,000 from various parts of Africa.

Windrush in numbers

  • 492passengers docked in Essex on the Empire Windrush in 1948
  • 910,000 peoplefrom the West Indies, India, Pakistan and Africa followed
  • 500,000current UK residents were born in the Commonwealth pre-1971
  • 18were apologised to for being wrongfully deported or detained

Source: ONS, UK census, UK Government, BBC

Immigrants from the Republic of Ireland had the same rights, and also flocked to the UK. Between 1948 and 1971, one-third of 18 to 30-year-olds left the country in search of work, about half a million people. The overwhelming majority of them were bound for the UK.

In the 1940s and 50s, none of these people required visas; as “citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies”, they were automatically given the right to reside in the UK.

However, the Home Office did not keep a record of those granted leave to remain. Despite living and working in the UK for decades, it emerged in 2018 that some Windrush migrants and their families had been threatened with deportation and even removed. The UK government was forced to apologise.

1956: The Hungarian Revolution

The end of World War Two also brought huge political changes in eastern and central Europe.

After liberating the region, the Soviet Union installed Communist regimes here that were deeply unpopular with many people. It also annexed the Baltic States and parts of Poland.

In reaction, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to the West. The first to arrive in the UK were about 120,000 Poles, who arrived in 1945; the substantial Polish communities in Manchester, Bradford and west London date from this time. About 100,000 people from Ukraine and the Baltic States also came to the UK for similar reasons.

At the time, these population movements were considered the final consequences of World War Two. In fact, they were the symptom of a new Cold War.

This was confirmed in 1956, when the people of Hungary rose up against their Communist rulers. After Soviet tanks drove into Budapest to crush the uprising, almost 200,000 Hungarians fled the country.

Britain took in 30,000 of these political refugees, setting a precedent for the years to come. From 1956 onwards, political dissidents from eastern Europe were routinely accepted and integrated into British society.

Presentational grey line
Banner image: BBC Briefing

Some of the data in this article is drawn from BBC Briefing, a mini-series of downloadable in-depth guides to the big issues in the news, with input from academics, researchers and journalists. It is the BBC’s response to audiences demanding better explanation of the facts behind the headlines.

1971: Immigration Act

The post-war boom in immigration from Commonwealth countries was not welcomed by everyone.

In the late 1950s, racial tensions erupted in a series of riots, most famously in 1958 in Notting Hill and Nottingham.

And in 1968, the Conservative politician Enoch Powell spoke out against continued immigration, in his divisive “Rivers of Blood” speech.

Under considerable pressure, the British government eventually cracked down on all forms of racial discrimination.

But it also introduced a series of laws limiting immigration.

The most important of these was the Immigration Act of 1971, which decreed Commonwealth immigrants did not have any more rights than those from other parts of the world. This effectively marked the end of the Windrush generation.

1972: The Ugandan Asian Crisis

The first major test of the new immigration rules came the following year when war-torn Uganda, a former British colony, announced the immediate expulsion of its entire Asian community.

Prime Minister Edward Heath declared the country had a moral and legal responsibility to take in those who had UK passports. Of the 60,000 people expelled, a little under half came to the UK.

This highlighted a change of emphasis in immigration policy. The UK was now wary of people coming in search of jobs, but it would continue to welcome those coming in search of asylum.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fewer than 5,000 asylum seekers came to the UK each year, on average. But in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, applications for asylum rose suddenly to more than 16,000 people. In the following two years this figure doubled, and then doubled again.

This trend would continue over the following decade, as instability in countries like Yugoslavia, Somalia and Iraq brought more refugees to the UK’s door.

1992: The EU expansion

In 1992, the UK joined other EU nations in signing the Maastricht Treaty on European integration. This granted all EU citizens equal rights, with freedom to live in any member state they chose.

In the following decade, tens of thousands of EU citizens came to live and work in Britain.

Few people protested, possibly because these newcomers were balanced out by the tens of thousands of British people who moved away to other parts of the EU.

Nevertheless a new principle had been set. Just as the country had once held an open door to the Commonwealth, so it now held an open door to the European Union.

graph: eea migrants as a proportion of the population

In 2004, the EU was expanded to include seven nations from the Eastern Bloc- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary – while Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus also joined at the same time.

Unlike Germany or France, the UK put no temporary restrictions on arrivals from these new member states.

Tony Blair’s Labour government had a positive stance on immigration: it argued a growing economy required a larger workforce and, as in the 1950s, people from other countries were considered a good source of new labour.

In any case, the government predicted that EU enlargement would only cause a rise of up to 13,000 people a year in immigration.

In the event, more than a million people from these countries arrived and stayed over the next decade. It was one of the biggest influxes in British history.

Since 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum, EU immigration has fallen – although more EU citizens still arrive in the UK than leave.

The current government plans to end the free movement of EU citizens to the UK once the Brexit transition period ends.

In the meantime, however, immigration from other parts of the world has increased to fill the gap. Despite government targets to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands”, the UK’s net migration figures remain historically high in the context of the past century.

Source: Five times immigration changed the UK

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

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