International Metropolis 2019 Ottawa and 2020 Beijing

2019/07/02 1 Comment

As my last International Metropolis was some 10 years ago, was curious to see how the conference has evolved since then. The overall format remains the same, plenaries in the morning, workshops in the afternoon.

My impression was that of a more interesting and thought provoking conference than those that I remember, a tribute to the IRCC team and advisory committee that developed the program.

The sessions that I found particularly of interest were:

The Indigenous acknowledgement and presence that opened Metropolis was substantive, with a strong statement by Gilbert Whiteduck, with Metropolis also having an Indigenous closing ceremony.

The plenaries that I found most interesting were: Quest for global governance: Compacts and sustainable development goals (Global Compact), Non-state actors and the migration industry, The effects of technology on migration and integration, Cities and migration, and Public confidence in migration.

These daily briefs by Munk school students are good summaries of the presentations and discussions:

June_27_Munk_School_Daily_Brief.original.1561728696 June_26_Munk_School_Daily_Brief.original.1561640630 June_25_Munk_School_Daily_Brief.original.1561555064

For the last half day, not covered by Munk, the more interesting presentations at the Cities and Migration plenary were the effects of South American migrants (e.g., Venezuela) in Ecuador, services for families remaining in the Philippines when breadwinners worked abroad, A puff presentation on the Mayors Migration Council, and to liven things up, OCASI’s Debbie Douglas on some of the uncomfortable truths on racism.

The plenaries ended strongly with the Public Confidence in Immigration session, withPew Research international comparisons, Compas on UK attitudes and that media need to recognize that they are not neutral players but play a role in public and policy debates, Canada’s Environics on Canadian distinctiveness, South African attitudes towards immigrants and the limitations of surveys based on self-reporting with respect to attitudes.

The major tech innovation since my last Metropolis is of course smart phones and apps. While the conference app had login issues for many participants (i.e., for creating individual programs etc), it had a great feature that allowed questions to be submitted, displayed on screens and “voted” upon to allow moderators to choose those questions of greatest interest. An additional advantage was that it virtually eliminated the tendency of some to abuse microphone time and ensure greater focus.

In terms of other conference management notes, some of which may reflect my circumstances, were that some data based presentations (i.e., economic impact) were done without decks making them hard to follow.

2020 International Metropolis in Beijing

The next conference will be held in Beijing under the theme: New Narratives on Global Migration: Open, Fair and Sustainable Development.

Given the ongoing suppression of Uyghur Muslims and other human rights abuses, a curious choice given that the local organizers will certainly make every effort to ensure a controversy-free event.

In terms of historical parallels, and mindful of Godwin’s law, this is comparable to the holding of an international conference on immigration and integration in Germany following the passage of the Nuremberg Race Laws  (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor).

The dilemma for governments, academics and service provide organizations is whether they wish to participate against this backdrop. Historically, of course, countries and atheletes participated in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 despite the passage of these laws (and only saved by the medals won by Jesse Owens).

For Canadians, an additional issue remains the arbitrary detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who hopefully will be released well before then.I suspect that will be a challenge.

Source: International Metropolis Conference, Presentations

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George Will: Last century’s immigration debate makes today’s seem enlightened

2019/07/02 Leave a comment

Good reminder. But of course, does not excuse the present immigration debate:

If you think we have reached peak stupidity — that America’s per-capita quantity has never been higher — there is solace, of sorts, in Daniel Okrent’s guided tour through the immigration debate that was heading toward a nasty legislative conclusion a century ago. “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America” provides evidence that today’s public arguments are comparatively enlightened.

Late in the 19th century, immigration surged, as did alarm about it, especially in society’s upper crust, particularly its Boston portion, which thought that the wrong sort of people were coming. Darwinian theory and emerging genetic science were bowdlerized by bad scientists, faux scientists and numerous philistine ax-grinders with political agendas bent on arguing for engineering a better stock of American humans through immigration restrictions and eugenics — selective breeding.

Their theory was that nurture (education, socialization, family structure) matters little because nature is determinative. They asserted that even morality and individuals’ characters are biologically determined by race. And they spun an imaginative taxonomy of races, including European “Alpine,” “Teutonic” (aka “Nordic”) and “Mediterranean” races.

Racist thinking about immigration saturated mainstream newspapers (the Boston Herald: “Shall we permit these inferior races to dilute the thrifty, capable Yankee blood … of the earlier immigrants?”) and elite journals (in The Yale Review, recent immigrants were described as “vast masses of filth” from “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe”). In The Century monthly, which published Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, W.E.B. Du Bois and H.G. Wells, an author informed readers that “Mediterranean people are morally below the races of northern Europe,” that immigrants from Southern Italy “lack the conveniences for thinking,” that Neapolitans were a “degenerate” class “infected with spiritual hookworm” and displaying “low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins … and backless heads,” and that few of the garment workers in New York’s Union Square “had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the west or south.” The nation’s most important periodical, The Saturday Evening Post, devoted tens of thousands of words to the braided crusades for eugenics and race-based immigration policies. Popular poet Edgar Lee Masters (“Spoon River Anthology” ) wrote “The Great Race Passes”:

On State Street throngs crowd and push,

Wriggle and writhe like maggots.

Their noses are flat,

Their faces are broad …

Eugenics was taught at Boston University’s School of Theology. Theodore Roosevelt, who popularized the phrase “race suicide,” wrote to a eugenicist that “the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” Woodrow Wilson warned against the “corruption of foreign blood” and “ever-deteriorating” genetic material.

Amateur ethnologists conveniently discovered that exemplary southern Europeans (Dante, Raphael, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci) were actually from the north. One wrote, “Columbus, from his portraits and from his busts, whether authentic or not, was clearly Nordic.” (Emphasis added.) Okrent writes: “In an Alabama case, a black man who married an Italian woman was convicted of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law, then found surprising absolution when the conviction was vacated by an appellate court’s provocative declaration: ‘The mere fact that the testimony showed this woman came from Sicily can in no sense be taken as conclusive evidence that she was therefore a white woman.’”

The canonical text of the immigration-eugenics complex, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race,” is available today in at least eight editions and is frequently cited in the internet’s fetid swamps of white supremacy sites. At the 1946 Nuremberg “Doctors’ Trial,” Nazi defendants invoked that book as well as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision upholding states’ sterilization of “defectives” (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a eugenics enthusiast: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”) and America’s severely restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. It based national quotas on 1890 immigration data — before the surge of the “motley throng.” Okrent writes, “These men didn’t say they were ‘following orders,’ in the self-exonerating language of the moment; they said they were following Americans.”

Four years before the 1924 act, 76% of immigrants came from Eastern or Southern Europe. After it, 11% did. Some of those excluded went instead to Auschwitz.

Source: Will column: Last century’s immigration debate makes today’s seem enlightened

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Eastern Europe’s Emigration Crisis

2019/07/02 Leave a comment

Not sure how this differs from previous emigration waves from Italy and Spain or indeed Eastern Europe, except that it is facilitated by the EU’s freedom of movement. The same critique has been made with respect to emigration from developing countries to the West and the effective brain drain. Canadians have also worried about those who left Canada for the USA.

While the effect is real on emigration countries, hard to see if there are any effective or acceptable policies to counteract emigration. Does one really want to restrict freedom of movement in the EU and if so, how?

In recent years, most of the debate around the global migration of people has focused on the movement into developed countries and the political battles that ensue. Most famously, Trump has overturned the wisdom of the American political establishment by saying the unsayable on immigration. Politicians from Riga to Rome have won votes (and office) by exploiting similar anxieties. But we seldom talk about the places which, year after year, see more people leave than arrive, and the consequences of countries saying goodbye to some of their best and brightest—often for good.

Nowhere is this concern more pressing than in Eastern Europe. According to the UN, of all the countries that are expected to shrink the most in the coming decades, the top 10 are all in the eastern half of the continent, and seven of those are in the European Union. One cause for concern among many of these countries is the EU’s freedom of movement, one of the four “fundamental freedoms” of goods, capital, services, and people that bind the 28. Although most press coverage of the bloc’s easternmost nations has focused on the rise of anti-immigration populism, there is mounting concern about the brain drain of its most highly qualified citizens to better jobs abroad. In at least six of the EU, the people leaving have become as controversial as those arriving, with some countries now favouring emigration controls.

In essence, the EU’s freedom of movement guarantees an absence of barriers for anyone looking for a job within the 28 countries and makes discrimination based on nationality in work or employment illegal. For many of the EU’s new entrants in the East—including Poland, Hungary and Romania—a future where capital and people could move more freely between themselves and France, the UK, or Germany looked like a fast-track to the top-tier of developed nations. But somewhat ironically, it has only accelerated the departure of those who are crucial to getting there.

In the last century, Eastern Europe has suffered the most dramatic population decline in recent history. According to one study, between 2013 and 2016, approximately 230,000 people left Croatia—a country with a population of only four million—for the 11 “core EU countries” of Western Europe. In the United States, this would be the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago leaving every year. This mass exodus of people is not lost on the country’s politicians; last year the Croatian President called the freedom of movement the “biggest drawback” of the EU. “Mobility is good, as long as people come back. But Croatia is now recording strong negative demographic trends,” she said during a visit to Brussels.

Since Latvia joined the EU, it has lost one-fifth of its population. Romania, a country that according to one organisation is due to see the most drastic population decline, has seen over three million leave the country since it joined the EU in 2007. It lost half of its doctors between 2009 and 2015, the vast majority to better-paid employ in the richer hospitals and surgeries of Western Europe, leaving its health service poorly staffed and on the brink of collapse. High mortality (including infant mortality) and low birthrates are only accelerating the decline.

Large-scale migration of healthcare workers from East to West has been an uncomfortable reality for over a decade, and the young needn’t travel long distances to drastically increase their standard of living. One Estonian doctor who graduated from medical school in 2001 was able to quadruple his salary by moving only 200 kilometres to Finland. In 2018, Denmark enjoyed the EU’s highest average gross annual pay at nine times that of the continent’s lowest in Bulgaria. Who can blame those who head for the greener pastures on the other side?

One solution, that may seem obvious to many, is to increase inward migration from overseas. There is one big problem, however. Eastern European attitudes are  less favourable to immigration than they are in countries in the north and west. Cultural preferences, like sharing a religion, are also more important. According to 2017’s Gallup’s Migration Acceptance Index, all but two of the top 10 countries least accepting of immigration were from Eastern Europe (the others being Israel and the Czech Republic, which is considered Central Europe). Even Japan, a country that has also suffered from population decline—although for different reasons—and is reluctant to accept any large-scale immigration, has now begun to implementmeasures that will open itself up to labour from foreign countries.

The reasons people leave countries in the former Eastern bloc are numerous. Many are concerned about corruption and the limits it places on their country’s future. Others already have family living elsewhere on the continent. Most simply are looking for better prospects for themselves, their children, and their children’s children. Those taking part in the immigration debate in the West should be careful not to forget this fact. The drive to achieve a better life is the most human of instincts and we should not cast blame on those who act on it, lest we throw away our own humanity.

Equally, liberals and progressives in the West should stop viewing the immigration debate solely as an opportunity to flaunt their tolerance and “openness.” A welcoming nature and a desire to help those less fortunate than ourselves are admirable traits, but we mustn’t forget that by welcoming the world’s premier doctors, entrepreneurs, academics, and engineers—with few restrictions—we are depriving the places they come from of their potential; robbing them of the chance to make emigration an option, rather than a necessity—as many feel it is today.

On the liberal Left, acceptance of large-scale immigration is increasingly framed as a moral issue: are you a racist, or a xenophobe? If the answer is “neither,” what’s the problem? This forced dichotomy of good/bad or closed/open is unhelpful and obscures rather than illuminates. Ironically, while liberal immigration policies in general, and freedom of movement in particular, undoubtedly help those who leave, for the vast majority left behind, the result is a country that, in the long term, is measurably worse off. More often than not, those who frame the immigration debate in the starkest terms have little to say about this poaching of skills and talent from elsewhere.

In Europe, a conundrum we will increasingly have to confront is how to embrace openness whilst avoiding the erosion of another country’s social fabric. This may mean fundamentally reevaluating the freedom of movement, or at least restricting it to economies with comparable pay and conditions. Another solution may come in the form of increased cash transfers, and investment in smaller economies by bigger ones to try and level out standards of living. Something must be done soon, or populations in eastern Europe will continue to disappear.

History shows us that mass emigration can change a country forever. In an upstairs window of the Irish president’s official residence, one lamp flickers constantly. Lit by President Mary Johnson in 1990, it is a beacon to light the way home for the millions of descendants of the Irish who left their homeland over the centuries. (Ireland’s population peaked at more than eight million people in around 1840 and hasn’t yet recovered almost two centuries later.) One wonders whether the less prosperous countries of the European Union hit hardest by emigration may light their own lamps soon enough.

Source: Eastern Europe’s Emigration Crisis

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There’s a debate over Canada’s new definition of anti-Semitism, and it might sound strangely familiar

2019/07/02 Leave a comment

Needed raising of some parallels:

You could be forgiven for having missed the fact that Canada has adopted a formal definition of anti-Semitism. It was included as part of the government’s new anti-racism strategy, announced by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez earlier this week, in a list of terminology toward the end.

“Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” it reads. “Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

This is a relatively recent definition, adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental body with 31 member countries, including Canada. It’s since been adopted by a handful of countries, including the U.K. and Germany.

But controversy has bubbled up around the IHRA definition, fuelled by those who believe it’s over-broad and could chill legitimate criticism of the Israeli state. Though Canada isn’t passing any new laws to curtail debate about Israel, some believe the IHRA definition is a threat to free speech.

If this sounds strangely familiar, that’s because the debate bears a certain resemblance to the controversy that raged for months over M-103, the Liberals’ anti-Islamophobia motion that Conservatives claimed would threaten people’s right to criticize Islam. The arguments in both cases are oddly similar — they’re just coming from very different quarters.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is brief, but includes a list of 11 contemporary examples, such as “the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy,” and the claim that Jews invented or exaggerated the Holocaust. It also lists as anti-Semitic “applying double standards by requiring of (Israel) a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

Aidan Fishman, former national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s league for human rights, said his organization pushed for Canada to adopt the IHRA definition because of a “really alarming rise” in anti-Semitic incidents in recent years.

“It’s a very comprehensive definition, which really encapsulates anti-Semitism in its modern form,” he said. Canada’s decision comes in the midst of an international effort by Jewish organizations to urge governments and political parties to formally adopt the IHRA definition.

Anthony Housefather, a Liberal MP from Montreal and chair of the House of Commons justice committee, said defining anti-Semitism is key to fighting it. “Most people just need to be educated and understand where something crosses the line,” he said.

Still, the IHRA definition has not been universally embraced. Last week, just days before the anti-racism strategy was released, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) released a statement saying the definition is “extremely vague,” “open to misinterpretation” and could undermine Charter rights to free speech. “We fear that if adopted, the IHRA definition will serve to severely chill political expressions of criticism of Israel as well as support for Palestinian rights,” the association said.

In a statement to the National Post on Thursday, the NDP said the party supports the anti-racism strategy, but likewise raised concerns about the IHRA definition, saying it “could be a threat for people who legitimately denounce grave human rights abuses by the government of Israel against Palestinians.”

Independent Jewish Voices, an organization that supports the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, is urging Ottawa to reconsider. “The full definition’s examples conflate fundamental criticisms of Israel and/or Zionism with anti-Semitism — a position IJV strongly rejects,” the organization said in a statement, adding its adoption “would pose a serious threat to freedom of expression and academic freedom in Canada.”

Fishman and Housefather both denied this, pointing out that the definition states that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” But Fishman said support for the BDS movement does constitute anti-Semitism under the IHRA definition to the extent that supporters also, for example, call for the lifting of sanctions against Iran — a double standard, he argued.

“There are many parts of BDS which are indeed a new form of anti-Semitism when you single out Israel,” Housefather said.

Canada’s anti-racism strategy does not propose any new penalties for anti-Semitism, nor does it propose new legislation — it provides only a definition. But Meghan McDermott, staff counsel for the BCCLA, said she worries it could eventually be incorporated into the Criminal Code. “It’s kind of what we would call soft law for now,” she said. “We just worry about that whole floodgates argument.”

That “floodgates argument” is strikingly similar to the concerns raised by Conservatives and other critics of M-103, the 2017 motion that called on the government to condemn Islamophobia and all forms of racism and religious discrimination. Though M-103 was not a government bill and proposed no changes to legislation, critics claimed that because Islamophobia was not precisely defined, the motion could restrict legitimate criticism of Islam.

B’nai Brith was among those critics. At a 2017 meeting of a parliamentary Heritage committee conducting a study of systemic racism as required by M-103, Michael Mostyn, CEO of B’nai Brith, called Islamophobia a “confusing” term with competing definitions. “We must ensure that no one can hide behind the idea that any criticism of Islam represents Islamophobia, or a vague definition to this effect,” he said.

Ultimately, the Heritage committee recommended Canada update its national action plan against racism, a commitment that’s now been fulfilled with the release of the new anti-racism strategy, which defines both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Its definition of Islamophobia “includes racism, stereotypes, prejudice, fear or acts of hostility directed towards individual Muslims or followers of Islam in general.”

The Conservatives did not respond to a request for comment about the new strategy and its definitions.

McDermott insisted the two debates — about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia — are not analogous, as the controversy over the IHRA definition centres around criticism of a foreign nation. The debate over M-103, she said, wasn’t “grounded in reality.”

“It seemed to me that it was… people who were Islamophobic who were making those arguments,” she said.

For his part, Fishman said criticism of the IHRA definition is ill-founded. “And I think some of it is actually motivated by a desire on the part of certain groups… to keep pushing anti-Semitism,” he said.

Cara Zwibel, director of the fundamental freedoms program of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said she’s concerned about any definition of racism that’s too broad, because of the importance of freedom of expression. Still, she pointed out, nothing in Canadian law has actually changed.

“There’s nothing in that strategy at the moment that seems to restrict rights in any way,” she said. “It’s more about empowering people to respond.”

Source: There’s a debate over Canada’s new definition of anti-Semitism, and it might sound strangely familiar

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On Canada Day, let’s reconsider the high cost of citizenship

2019/07/02 Leave a comment

While I have long advocated for a decrease in citizenship fees, given the mix of personal and public benefits of citizenship, her points on permanent residency fees miss the fact that these only cover processing costs, not the more than $1 billion the government spends on settlement services such as language training.

Both Conservative and Liberal governments in their substantial funding for settlement services demonstrate their recognition of the public, not just personal, benefits of immigration.

Similarly, while citizenship data (administrative and Census) show some groups adversely affected by the 2014-15 fee increases and other changes, visible minorities form close to 80 percent of all immigrants, so hard to make the case that this is a major barrier:

At any international airport, the passport of those making their way through customs could be a source of envy or a source of pity, quietly communicating the perceived quality of life lived by its holder. Voluminous emigration and immigration have turned citizenship into the “most significant class lottery remaining in the modern world,” in the words of one journalist. Perhaps recognizing this, many countries including Canada have successfully capitalized on immigration.

The path to Canadian citizenship has gone through a series of changes. In the past, in addition to being able to marry into citizenship, one could literally buy citizenship – a program Quebec continues to this day. Currently, the journey to citizenship begins with permanent residency. Apart from transitioning from a student or worker to a permanent resident, other options include using foreign entry programs such as Family Sponsorship, Economic, and Business Immigration.

Regardless of the option, in addition to the application cost comes a payment of $490 for the right of permanent residence fee, without which permanent residence status is not granted. Protected persons are exempt from this expense.

Introduced in 1995 and levied on individuals seeking permanent residency,first at a hefty price of $975, the fee is seen as “a partial compensation for benefits which accrue to the person who acquires permanent resident status and helps to defray various costs incurred in delivering the immigration program.” But this may not have been the only reason for its introduction.

The right of permanent residence fee (then called right of landing fee) came at a time when there was an increase in immigrants from Asia and the Middle East and a plummet in the numbers originating from the U.S. and Europe.

In a world where economic parity is heavily influenced by gender and colour, this fee continues to be a major impediment for many and is especially intensified if one is a woman of colour. Exceptions made for protected persons aside, and though levied regardless of the country of origin, it favours those with economic stature, which in today’s world continues to be withheld from women and people of colour, thereby contributing to inequities in education and employment opportunities.

After proving one’s worth as an upstanding permanent resident, if financial means allow, then the next step toward active civic engagement is in the form of an application for citizenship (bumped to $530 from $100 in 2015) which, once again, could be loaded with added costs.

In total, the price paid to acquire Canadian citizenship quickly escalates, approximately amounting to between $3,000 and $4,000 (or more) and may include translation fees; lawyer’s fees that could be as steep as $400 for a consultation; medical exams and diagnostic testing, which aren’t covered by provincial health care plans; official language testing by a third party; miscellaneous costs such as citizenship certificates; permanent resident card renewal; photographs, conveyance and mailing. And this is without factoring the expenses associated with holding the status as an international student or worker (before applying for permanent residency) within Canada.

In 2017, Canada should have received more than $78-million from 159,262 economic immigrants, solely based on the right of permanent residence fee, many of whom pay this amount even before arriving to Canada. Once here, if these individuals choose to pursue citizenship, then once again it translates into millions of dollars wending their way to government coffers.

There is privilege attached to becoming a Canadian citizen. But it isn’t something that is easily afforded for many. Of the total cost of the arduous, emotional and financially stressful path to citizenship, approximately 15 per cent to 20 per cent is directed toward buying the permanent residence and citizenship rights – to be able to belong, to be able to vote, and most importantly, to be able to call oneself Canadian. The fact remains that, today, the current immigration system, consciously or unconsciously, promotes gender and economic disparity globally. In a world where immigration is more than just a means to move from one country to another, it is time to recognize what this has evolved into – a booming business that only profits certain countries.

Source: On Canada Day, let’s reconsider the high cost of citizenship

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Why Trump Lost the Census Case

2019/06/29 Leave a comment

Good analysis from the right:

I’ll freely admit, I’m surprised. In April I predicted that the Trump administration would prevailin its effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census form. I based my conclusion on the combination of Congress’s broad delegation of authority to the executive branch to conduct the census in the “form and content” that the secretary of commerce determines, the historical norm of including citizenship questions, and the traditional leniency of so-called arbitrary and capricious review.

Against this legal background, I believed that — like with the travel-ban case — a chaotic process would matter less than the very broad discretion granted the president by existing law. I was wrong.

Today, Justice John Roberts joined the four more progressive judges to reach a legal conclusion (articulated in a complex series of interlocking and competing concurrences and dissents) that roughly goes as follows: Including a citizenship question in the census is not “substantively invalid.” However, the Administrative Procedure Act applies, and it is “meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public.” Since the administration’s explanation for its agency’s action was “incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process,” the administration failed to meet its APA obligations.

The secretary of commerce had pointed to an assertion from the Department of Justice that the question would assist in voting-rights enforcement. To put it simply, the majority did not buy that explanation, finding that it was more of a rationalization: The secretary of commerce decided to include the question, went hunting for a reason, and eventually got the DOJ to help.

Quite frankly, this sounds about right. As the Court put it, “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.” This section of the opinion is instructive:

“The record shows that the Secretary began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA [Voting Rights Act] enforcement in connection with that project. The Secretary’s Director of Policy did not know why the Secretary wished to reinstate the question, but saw it as his task to “find the best rationale.”

A different way of putting the opinion is that the APA, at the very least, requires an honest process.

Why was this outcome different from that of the travel-ban case? In that case, the president himself offered evidence that the stated reasons for the administration’s actions were pretextual. The president himself provided evidence that anti-Muslim animus provided at least part of the justification for his order. Yet in that case the statue at issue was different. If the census statutes granted the president considerable discretion, the statute at issue in the travel ban granted him truly immense discretion, unbounded by the APA. Different statutes yield different outcomes.

So now what? There is much speculation on Twitter that the administration may have time to go back to the drawing board, conduct a proper process in accord with truthful, justifiable reasoning, and obtain legal approval in time to print the census forms.

It’s possible, but I’m skeptical. First, there are now real questions as to whether the process was improperly influenced by arguments by deceased Republican redistricting expert Thomas Hofeller that adding the citizenship question would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” Evidence of racial animus would almost certainly alter the legal calculus and require the administration to go to great lengths to show that any new process has been cleansed from any racist taint.

Plaintiffs will again challenge any effort to include the question, they’ll likely obtain injunctions in favorable jurisdictions, and then the clock will become the administration’s enemy. I could well be wrong, but I’m doubtful SCOTUS will have an opportunity to opine before that clock runs out.

There is a lesson here, one that the administration (and indeed, all litigants) would do well to remember. When engaged in conduct that’s likely to lead to litigation, make it easy for the court to rule for you. Chaos can lose cases. Evidence of disingenuousness alienates judges.

Process matters, and you always want to appear to be the most reasonable party before the court. The Trump administration has gotten away with chaos before. It did not today, and as much as conservatives may once again grow angry at Justice Roberts for joining the Court’s progressive wing, if they want to place real blame for today’s Supreme Court setback, look to the administration. Its lack of candor caught up to it, and honesty may now come too late.

Source: Why Trump Lost the Census Case

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RCMP launch hate crime probe of leader of nationalist group vying for party status in federal election

2019/06/29 Leave a comment

We have always had some extremist parties running in elections:

RCMP in Saskatchewan have launched an investigation into an online video featuring the head of an extremist group that’s poised to become Canada’s next official political party.

The Canadian Nationalist Party, which promotes anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ views — and calls for the removal of “globalists” from the country “once and for all” — is in the final stages of applying to be able to collect tax-deductible political donations and run a slate of candidates in the upcoming federal election.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a non-profit watchdog group, has filed a formal complaint with both the RCMP and Elections Canada to try to derail the effort.

“This is a group that is pure and simple a hate group,” said Bernie M. Farber, the anti-hate network’s chair and a human rights consultant. “The way our laws stand today, there is nothing standing in their way save, right now, maybe 37 signatures to become an official political party here in Canada.”

Canadian Nationalist Party leader Travis Patron told CBC News there are no grounds to bar his group from official party status and that his members have not violated hate speech laws.

“To date, our party has not said a hateful word, we’ve caused no violence, and we’ve done nothing illegal,” he said in an email from Redvers, Sask., where he plans to run as a CNP candidate in October’s federal election.

‘Parasitic tribe’

RCMP in Saskatchewan confirmed they opened an investigation Wednesday into a video featuring Patron posted on the CNP website.

In it, Patron denounces what he describes as “the parasitic tribe” or “black sheep,” who he claims control the media and the central bank in Canada.

“What we need to do, perhaps more than anything, is remove these people once and for all from our country,” Patron says, speaking directly to the camera.

Farber acknowledged Patron makes no explicit reference to Jews but called the video hateful and “clearly” anti-Semitic.

“The kind of tropes that Jews have been subject to for much of our collective lives have been exactly the words used by Mr. Patron in this video — controlling the media, controlling the entertainment business,” said Farber, who is a former chief executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

“So, instead of using the word ‘Jews,’ which would immediately not just raise the ire of Canadians but would, I think, shine a spotlight for law enforcement … they’re trying to walk this fine line. They just don’t, in my view, do a very good job about it.”

Patron told CBC News his statements are directed at “globalists.”

“They go by many different names,” he said. “We refer to them simply as the globalists because they conduct their business everywhere while simultaneously calling no place in particular home. We would remove [them] from our country. We have no use for them.”

The RCMP say they are consulting hate crime specialists to determine whether Patron’s comments in the video contravene criminal laws against advocating genocide or hatred against an identifiable group.

Tax-supported party funding

Elections Canada has given the CNP until July 15 to provide 250 signed declarations from its members to become officially eligible as a federal political party.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network filed a complaint with Elections Canada last week denouncing the CNP as a hate group.

“For obvious reasons, we don’t want to see the CNP become a tax-supported (via contribution reimbursements) and officially recognized party,” the network’s complaint says.

“What can be done to prevent this neo-Nazi party from becoming an official party?”

Under the existing laws, not much.

Farber says Canada should follow countries like Germany that bar groups promoting anti-democratic views from registering in the political process.

“We have to be very careful in between finding that balance of our rights in a free and democratic society to gather and to create political parties and then balance that with hate speech and hate groups that are out there who are trying to destroy society.”

Pauline Beange, an Elections Canada expert at the University of Toronto, believes Canadian governments would be “very reluctant” to pass legislation restricting access to political participation.

“Basically anybody can apply to be registered,” she said. “They have to choose a name. They have to have a certain number of signatures. But after that, it is not Elections Canada’s job to decide who should or who should not become a political party.”

There is always a risk of extreme views on the left or right, she said, but whether the groups that espouse those views actually gain a political foothold is another matter.

“We have had parties on the extreme left like the Marxist-Leninist Party, the Communist Party of Canada. So, we have tolerated those. They have not hijacked democracy in any way, shape or form. And again, I rely on Canadian voters and their judgment.”

Anti-Pride

Members of the CNP, and supporters wearing party T-shirts, appeared at recent Pride celebrations in Hamilton and Toronto.

Patron says he’s reviewed numerous videos of violent clashes between protesters at those events and insists his supporters adhered to his party’s code of conduct, which prohibits incitement of violence and use of hateful language.

“Taking a look at the video footage [from Pride events], at least what has been released, I’m happy to see that our members acted with professionalism, and they stood by, and they did not cause any violence,” he told CBC News.

However, one video being circulated on social media from Toronto last weekend shows two men wearing CNP shirts taking part in the violence.

The clip, shot inside the Eaton Centre mall in downtown Toronto, shows one of the men pummelling a downed protester with a bike helmet.

Moments later, a different man wearing a CNP shirt is seen shoving a security guard.

In a video on the party’s YouTube channel, Patron calls for the defunding of Pride parades across the country. He criticizes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for “normalizing homosexuality” by appearing at Pride events.

When asked by CBC to explain his views on LGBTQ issues, he replied that homosexuality “leads to self-destruction.”

“A prerequisite for the continuity of our nationhood is that of future generations, progeny and fertility … In regards to same-sex couples, there is no biological progeny, and therefore, a nationalist government would not support such a lifestyle choice by publicly financing it.”

In a statement to CBC News, Elections Canada says the Canada Elections Act has no restrictions to bar political parties with extreme views, nor can it bar candidates or parties that are under police investigation or have a criminal record.

Only prisoners are prohibited from running for office.

Source: RCMP launch hate crime probe of leader of nationalist group vying for party status in federal election

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This Canada Day, we need a new citizenship oath – The Conversation

2019/06/29 Leave a comment

Given the government’s failure to issue a new version of the citizenship guide, we do not know the degree to which the revisions would address these somewhat unrealistic concerns.

The revised version of the Oath proposed in C-99 was overall wordy compared to the TRC recommendation:

This Canada Day might be a good time for Canadians to think about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Calls to Action. At least three of those (No. 46, 47 and 49) call on Canadians, including newcomers to Canada, to reject concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples.

But my preliminary research shows that concepts taught in the process of acquiring citizenship continue to teach new Canadians colonial relations with the land and with Indigenous peoples.

To become Canadian, immigrants to Canada have to swear or affirm allegiance to the British royal monarch:

“I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors.”

In learning about Canada, new immigrants are taught that the Queen runs through all things Canadian. She is everywhere. Put your hands in your wallet, she is there. Walk onto any land that is outside of city boundaries, it is largely called “Crown” land.

But the Queen is a symbol of the colonization of Indigenous land, a colonization that is ongoing and is reproduced by the citizenship process.

Despite what many would like to believe, ideas of what Canada stands for are not all equitable.

What would it mean to follow the TRC calls, and study, learn and live Indigenous ways of relating to land?

Colonial citizenship

Canadian citizenship is a social construct — a concept that seems fixed but is actually created by the changing cultures and people in a society. The idea of Canadian citizenship carries ideologies and power relations that are perpetuated through forms of public pedagogy — like popular culture, education and gate-keeping systems such as the citizenship process.

To become a Canadian citizen, immigrants have to study Discover Canadaand score at least 15/20 on an exam that teaches them ways of imagining Canada. It details their expected practices and behaviours as citizens. It teaches them Canadian history.

For example:

“The arrival of European traders, missionaries, soldiers and colonists changed the native way of life forever. Large numbers of Aboriginals died of European diseases to which they lacked immunity.”

In this version of history, we are told that Indigenous people merely died from disease, not that these diseases were purposely spread by the British. We are not told that the colonizers practiced race-based genocide, starvation policies and the separation of children from their parents, through the Indian Residential Schools, the Sixties Scoop and the continuing removal of Indigenous children from their families.

Another excerpt has to do with Canada’s first prime minister:

“After the first Metis uprising, Prime Minister Macdonald established the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in 1873 to pacify the West and assist in negotiations with the Indians.”

Actually, one of the first assignments given to the North West Mounted Police was to forcibly relocate Indigenous communities in the path of the Canadian railway and Macdonald is the architect of the Indian Residential School system.

A third excerpt uncritically explains:

“Mining remains a significant part of the Canadian economy.”

A history of death and neglect

Colonial ways of imagining and belonging to Canada and colonial relationships with Indigenous people are at the heart of injustices that Canada continues to perpetuate.

Colonization is a key driver of how the federal government continues to neglect the health and education of Indigenous children. And the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women report directly links the ongoing deaths of Indigenous women, girls and trans-people to colonial structures.

This colonial history presents a unique set of challenges for immigrants who have pledged their allegiance to a colonial queen. The citizenship exam attempts to bring new immigrants into Canada as allies of colonialism and frames Canada as a benevolent nation. How can immigrants decolonize their relationship to Canada?

Honoring indigeneity for immigrants is not just about saying we are all settlers — a term that assumes we are all white and relate to Canada in identical ways. And honouring indigeneity is not just a land acknowledgement in a ceremony — though that can be a starting point.

A new oath of citizenship

In her book, Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education, University of Toronto Prof. Sandra D. Styres explains that Indigenous ways of relating to land centre on three practices: learning whose traditional lands we are on; committing to understanding stories and knowledges of those lands; and choosing to respect these stories of the land.

These Indigenous ways of relating to land are different from the colonial ones most Canadians are taught. These ways do not fit neatly with Canada’s colonial relations to the Queen to whom Canadians have pledged allegiance.

The TRC has called for a new oath of citizenship:

“I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada including Treaties with Indigenous Peoples, and fulfill my duties as a Canadian citizen.”

Learning Indigenous philosophies

Such an oath is in the works, and would highlight immigrants as treaty people and their treaty obligations. But what of the history of colonial relations that immigrants are asked to learn and subscribe to so they can become citizens?

In 1974, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, also known as the Berger Inquiry, sought input from Indigenous nations about opening up their lands of the Yukon and the Northwest territories to a pipeline. Phillip Blake, a Dene and social worker, testified at a community hearing in 1975. His words offer a powerful philosophy for relations of belonging for those who come to settle on Indigenous land:

“We have always tried to treat our guests well, it never occurred to us that our guests would one day claim that they owned our whole house. Yet that is exactly what is happening.…White people came as visitors to our land. Suddenly they claim it as their land. They claim that we have no right to call it Indian land, land that we have occupied and used for thousands of years.…

I strongly believe that we do have something to offer your nation, however, something other than our minerals. I believe it is in the self-interest of your own nation to allow the Indian nation to survive and develop in our own way, on our own land. For thousands of years we have lived with the land, we have taken care of the land, and the land has taken care of us…

It is our greatest wish to be able to pass on this land to succeeding generations in the same condition that our fathers have given it to us.…I believe your nation might wish to see us, not as a relic from the past, but as a way of life, a system of values by which you may survive in the future. This we are willing to share.”

Source: This Canada Day, we need a new citizenship oath – The Conversation

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‘Shame and humiliation’: Aceh’s Islamic law violates human rights

2019/06/29 Leave a comment

The part of Indonesia which belies its otherwise more moderate Islam:

Hendra, an academic in Indonesia’s semi-autonomous region of Aceh, vaguely remembers the first time he saw a public caning take place in his 20s. It was years ago and it didn’t faze him much.

The 35-year-old cannot even remember what the people were accused of – just that they were taken to a public square at a local mosque and flogged with a rattan cane in front of a crowd of onlookers.

But in recent years, Hendra, a lecturer in communications at Ar-Raniry University in Banda Aceh, has started to feel differently.

Now he avoids public canings. “I always think, ‘Imagine if that was a member of my family’,” he told Al Jazeera. “Do these people really deserve this?”

Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, is one of Indonesia’s most religiously conservative areas, and is the only part of the archipelago to impose penalties on its residents under Islamic law.

Once one of the most powerful Islamic sultanates in Southeast Asia, the area had long used an informal kind of Islamic law mixed with local laws, known as “hukum adat”. But the legislation was enhanced when Aceh’s long-running separatist conflict ended in 2005. The laws have been gradually expanded to more offences, most recently in 2014.

Advising Brunei

“Sharia police monitor public behaviour and enforce the rules, including in relation to the clothing women choose to wear,” Usman Hamid, the executive director of Amnesty Indonesia, told Al Jazeera.

“People can be subjected to public canings for a range of offences, including gay sex, which carries a penalty of up to 100 lashes, sex before or outside marriage, gambling and the sale and consumption of alcohol.”

The practice had already caused shock among the international community, and after Brunei attracted global condemnation over its plan to step up punishments under Islamic law, attention also turned to Aceh.

Officials from Brunei had travelled to the area for advice on implementing the punishments. Initially, the plan was to impose the death penalty for gay sex, but Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Brunei’s absolute monarch, then announced that a moratorium on capital punishment would be extended.

Those who had picketed the sultan’s luxury hotels and called for a boycott of the country claimed the decision as a victory.

“Sharia law in Aceh is Aceh’s Islamic Criminal Code or the usage of corporal punishment upholding Islamic views in Aceh,” Amnesty’s Usman told Al Jazeera. “But in actuality, the many provisions of the law [are] a breach of international human rights law and standards that create serious barriers for women and girls to report rape or other forms of sexual violence.”

In 2016, the first full year when Islamic laws were implemented in Aceh, 339 people, including 39 women, were caned, according to Human Rights Watch.

‘Not my concern’

No one who had been whipped was prepared to talk about what had happened to him, even anonymously. Many choose to move elsewhere after the punishment – to a new village or town where they can start afresh – due to stigma.

Hamid says caning in public violates international law prohibiting torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment set out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment to which Indonesia is a state party.

He adds the punishment is severer than a “light tapping with a cane” as it is often described by its supporters.

Hendra, the academic, says that while there are people who oppose Islamic law punishments, few are willing to discuss the issue publicly.

“People are scared of speaking out to say they don’t support public canings,” he said. “They take the attitude that they see them, but that they don’t know anything about the cases or the law. ‘It’s not my concern’ is how many people view it.”

Sense of shame

Aryos Nivada, an activist and researcher based in Banda Aceh, said shame and humiliation was the main force behind Islamic law.

The shame factor is why the punishments take place in public, usually in front of a local mosque, where those watching take photos and videos of the event. Some are then uploaded to the internet.

“With the rise of social media,” Hendra added, “people can see your face within five minutes [of the punishment being carried out].”

Last year, the then Governor Irwandi Yusuf stopped the practice of public caning. But after he was arrested for corruption last July, the punishments resumed and the issue barely rated a mention in this year’s regional elections.

Yusuf became Aceh’s second governor to be convicted with economy and corruption topping people’s concerns.

Aryos said there was no chance punishments under Islamic law would be abandoned given the close links with traditional Acehnese culture. “Ten years in the future, Aceh will still have Sharia law,” he told Al Jazeera. “It’s part of the character of Aceh.”

Source: ‘Shame and humiliation’: Aceh’s Islamic law violates human rights

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Dirty Hands: Scholar calls for solidarity with neo-Nazis in the new ‘immoral anthropology’

2019/06/29 Leave a comment

Weird:

Canada’s decision to list far-right racist groups for the first time as terrorist organizations has grave criminal consequences for anyone who would provide them support.

What is less obvious is the risk this law might pose to anthropologists, ethnologists and other social scientists who study them up close.

For a scholar who studies violent fringe movements with a coolly critical air of objective detachment, or with outright hostility to their ideology, there are no obvious problems. But a provocative new article in a leading anthropology journal by an American ethnographer of Nordic white nationalists says these approaches are misguided and moralistic.

In “Collaborating with the Radical Right: Scholar-Informant Solidarity and the Case for an Immoral Anthropology,” Benjamin Teitelbaum argues that detached observation is the wrong way to seek deep insight about fringe communities, just as it was for the pith helmeted colonial scholars who looked on their subjects with condescension and arrogance.

Today’s anthropologists have strayed from their foundational ideal of solidarity with their subjects, he argues. He urges them to rediscover it, to collaborate with their subjects, as he has, and even advocate for them.

“We should not think that in doing that we can maintain moral purity,” Teitelbaum, assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in an interview. “We inevitably become accomplices.”

It may be immoral, he said, but it is “an immorality born of commitment to the people you are studying,” he said.

This week, claiming to collaborate with and advocate for figures on the extreme right just got a lot more risky in Canada. But is it good anthropology? Can anthropologists study the far-right without helping their cause? Should scholars have solidarity with their subjects when their subjects are neo-Nazis?

Teitelbaum described how the American Anthropological Association, the field’s leading authority, has lately been “striving to make space for researchers who want to work in open opposition to those they study.” He sees this as wrongheaded because it has made solidarity seem optional. His view, roughly, is that if your morals are irreconcilable with good anthropological practice, then your morals have to go.

This new “immoral anthropology” has caused consternation in the normally staid pages of the University of Chicago Press’s journal Current Anthropology.

One peer reviewer calls it “thought-provoking and challenging,” but accuses Teitelbaum of “sanitizing and white-washing” his subjects by adopting their own preferred terminology, and finds his “immoral” approach “unsustainable.”

One suggested he was “dancing with wolves” by helping to edit and revise a white nationalist’s novel. Others called his argument bold, honest, useful, timely and important, or “utterly confusing and contradictory.” One called him an “apologist” who is using ethnography as an “excuse” for solidarity with extremists.

Solidarity with the subjects of social science research is an easy sell when those subjects are oppressed minorities, isolated, colonized, or otherwise vulnerable populations. It is a harder sell when the subjects are skinheads, neo-Nazis and white supremacists with a tendency to violence. Teitelbaum’s paper is an effort to come to terms with this awkward position, and his solution is to simply accept it.

Working in solidarity with one’s subjects is “morally compromised but epistemologically indispensable,” he wrote. It is not the only way to do anthropology, but it is “our signature way.”

So he is “friends” with the Nordic white nationalists he has studied over the last 10 years. He has gone to their concerts, meetings, and demonstrations, and “laughed, drank, dined and lived with them.”

He said he started his field work intending to be a “neutral, dispassionate observer.” And he was for a while, but could not keep it up as he and his subjects “became interested in each other as people.”

“I was aligning with them as a scholar and a person, and my work grew more penetrating, informed, and sinister in the process,” he wrote. He found himself publicly defending his subjects against unfair criticisms as the “ultimate political pariahs.”

“And when I do criticize them, it feels like a defeat, as though I failed an opportunity to defy expectations, to uncover deeper complexities, and to prompt new learning,” he wrote. “In no way is it amusing or gratifying: it is to highlight and publicize the flaws of friends.”

These friends include the Swedish white nationalist singer Saga, who was favourably mentioned in spree killer Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto. They include the former neo-Nazi skinhead Daniel Friberg, who has worked to create and “identitarian” alliance with the American alt-right, and John Morgan, who cofounded Arktos publishing with Friberg, to promote anti-liberalism.

“My aim has been to cultivate close long-term relationships with nationalists fed by honesty, personal exchange and trust. Friendships were both preconditions and by-products of such contact, as were instances of collaboration, reciprocity, even advocacy,” he writes.

One particularly controversial and troubling anecdote involves Teitelbaum helping Magnus Soderman, a skinhead with Third Reich tattoos, a self-identifying National Socialist, whom Teitelbaum found to be also “an exceptionally curious person, witty and articulate, with a sense of irony and humility rare in nationalist circles.”

Teitelbaum made editorial revisions to the writing style and plot development of Soderman’s novel The Defiant One, which Teitelbaum describes as “an allegorical treatment of ‘white genocide’ narratives,” focused on the life of a young white Swedish woman whose high school is dominated by Muslims and Africans.

In effect, he was close to producing hate propaganda. At times he felt like a “volunteer editor,” and he noted an improvement in Soderman’s writing.

“We need to let go of the notion that we are going to be appreciably righteous champions of the just in our research,” he said in the interview. “You’re going to get your hands dirty.”

Anthropologists should follow his lead, he said, and preserve the special perspective that comes with close collaboration, friendship and solidarity. To do so, he said they must sacrifice their “ego.”

Moral compromise is a necessary part of modern ethnography because “it is through exchange and partnership that we gain our signature claims to knowledge,” he said. “Good scholarship teaches us new things.”

Source: Dirty Hands: Scholar calls for solidarity with neo-Nazis in the new ‘immoral anthropology’

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