Dual nationality Turks being stripped of citizenship by far-Right in Austria’s ‘Windrush’ scandal

2018/11/27 Leave a comment

More dispiriting news from Europe and Austria:

Thousands of people could be stripped of their Austrian citizenship in what is being called the country’s version of the Windrush scandal.

In a campaign orchestrated by the far-Right Freedom Party (FPÖ), hundreds of Austrians of Turkish heritage are currently under investigation by the authorities on suspicion of illegally holding dual citizenship – and authorities say they may widen their investigations to thousands more.

Eighty-five have so far been stripped of their citizenship, but human rights campaigners say the case against them rests on suspect evidence.

Much as the UK invited the Caribbean immigrants of the Windrush Generation, in the sixties and seventies Austria encouraged Turkish people to move to the country, and many eventually became citizens.

But the Freedom Party, which is junior partner in the Austrian coalition government and controls the interior ministry, claims to have obtained a copy of the Turkish electoral register which it says proves thousands of secretly retained their Turkish citizenship as well.

Except for rare cases dual citizenship is illegal in Austria, and the authorities are pursuing the cases in court. But lawyers say the evidence is unreliable.

The Freedom Party has refused to say where it got its list of Turkish voters — and it has already been proved that some of the names on the list are not Turkish citizens.

Cigdem Schiller, who was born in Austria to immigrant parents, was able to prove that she had legally renounced her Turkish citizenship.

“We were shocked when we got a letter about this. My wife burst into tears,” Ms Schiller’s husband, Ingo, said. “We went round to sort it out right away. But the official told us the Turkish electoral list was proof she had a Turkish passport.”

After repeated visits to the Turkish consulate, Ms Schiller was able to provide proof she had renounced Turkish citizenship. And she is not the only one: according to Austrian press reports 72 people named on the Freedom Party’s list have proved they are not Turkish citizens.

That hasn’t stopped the courts accepting the list as evidence. In one case earlier this year a court upheld the decision to strip one man of citizenship on the basis such a list could only have been drawn up by the Turkish authorities.

That has raised fears some people may end up being made stateless. Lawyers say their clients are being forced to prove they are not Turkish citizens, rather than having a case proved against them.

Some have found themselves left in a Catch-22 situation. Peter Weidisch, a laywer for a man named on the list, told Germany’s Welt newspaper the Turkish consulate had refused to help his client obtain the proof he needed — because he wasn’t a Turkish citizen.

Source: Dual nationality Turks being stripped of citizenship by far-Right in Austria’s ‘Windrush’ scandal

Filed under Citizenship, Dual Citizenship, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Trump’s Christian Apologists Are Unchristian

2018/11/27 Leave a comment

Interesting public opinion research findings:

Ed Stetzer is grappling with a moral crisis. Stetzer, the director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, is preaching the Gospel to his fellow Christians. And they’re not listening. “White evangelicals are highly motivated to support President Donald Trump around the issue of immigration,” Stetzer, a Trump critic, wrote in Vox on the morning of the midterms. The next day, after reading exit polls, Stetzer lamented that the president’s scare talk about migrants had proved once again to be a winner with white evangelicals. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t be,” Stetzer told NPR. “But it was.”

Stetzer and other evangelical leaders are in the business of saving souls. But today, the souls in peril are in their own flock. Nationalism, tribalism, and a corrupt, ruthless Republican president are reviving old demons and summoning new ones. The “family values” concerns of 10, 20, or 30 years ago—homosexuality, premarital sex, women in the military—have been overtaken by a different set of moral issues, often derided by the right as “social justice.” On these emerging issues, white evangelical Protestants—for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them WEPs—are, more than any other religious constituency, standing on the wrong side. The problem isn’t that they’re imposing their morality on others. The problem is that what they’re imposing isn’t morality. It’s wickedness.

This isn’t true of all white evangelicals, much less all Christians. It would be false and reckless to condemn all WEPs, just as it’s false and reckless to condemn all Muslims or Jews. The people doing the best work against perversions of Islam are Muslims, and the people doing the best work against perversions of evangelical Christianity are evangelicals like Stetzer. I’ve met some of them through the Faith Angle Forum, a project of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. At a conference last week, I sat with them as we studied surveys of religious voters. Stetzer is right to worry. The numbers are bad.

WEPs are one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies. Eighty-one percent of them voted for him in 2016. That’s 20 percentage points higher than Trump’s vote share among any other religious group. It’s higher than the percentage of WEPs who voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. The wide gap between WEPs and other faith communities in support for Trump persists to this day. Every other group, on balance, views Trump unfavorably. WEPs, by a ratio of 2 to 1, view him favorably.

Many Americans reject Trump because of his meanness, his misogyny, his ethnic demagoguery, and his squalid and abusive personal behavior. But most WEPs don’t. In a September poll for the Public Religion Research Institute, two-thirds of white Catholics and white mainline Protestants agreed that Trump had “damaged the dignity of the presidency.” Most WEPs said he hadn’t. In an ABC News/Washington Post survey taken in August, most whites agreed that Trump was guilty of a crime if it was true that he had directed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to “influence the 2016 election by arranging to pay off two women who said they had affairs with Trump.” Trump’s core constituency, white men without a college degree, also agreed. But most WEPs didn’t.

To accommodate Trump, white evangelicals have retreated from moral judgment of him.
In 2011, a PRRI survey asked whether “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” At that point, two years into Barack Obama’s presidency, only 30 percent of WEPs said yes. But in October 2016, after the release of Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape, 72 percent of WEPs said yes. The reversal among WEPs was twice as big as similar shifts among Catholics and white mainline Protestants. In a May poll commissioned by the Billy Graham Center, nearly half of black evangelicals said personal character had influenced their voting decisions in the 2016 presidential election. Fewer than 30 percent of white evangelicals said the same.

Many WEPs haven’t just surrendered moral judgment. They’ve abdicated social responsibility. Compared with other whites, they’re more resistant to federal spending on poor people. The charitable explanation for this gap is that white evangelicals are skeptical about federal spending, not about helping the poor. But even when survey questions focus on help, not on spending, they’re unmoved. The BGC poll asked respondents to choose, from a list of 12 issues and traits, which was most important in determining how they voted in 2016. Among black and Hispanic evangelicals, a candidate’s “ability to help those in need” was the second or third most commonly named factor. Among white evangelicals, it ranked almost dead last.

WEPs are also reluctant to acknowledge racism. The September PRRI poll asked whether recent police shootings of black men were “isolated incidents” or “part of a broader pattern of how police treat African Americans.” Seventy-one percent of WEPs said such killings were isolated incidents, compared with 63 percent of white Catholics and 59 percent of white mainline Protestants. In the BGC survey, 59 percent of non-evangelical whites agreed with the statement, “I am disturbed by comments President Trump has made about minorities.” But a plurality of white evangelicals disagreed with it.

Trump’s connection with WEPs on racial issues goes deeper than indifference. It’s based on shared identity. In the words of Christian essayist Michael Gerson, evangelicals have degenerated into an “anxious minority,” defining themselves as “an interest group in need of protection and preferences.” Stetzer, based on his analysis of survey data, finds that race and ethnicity, not faith, are driving much of this process. Many white evangelicals see their religion not as a universal calling but as a heritage that sets them apart. They fear people of other creeds, colors, and languages.

The conventional explanation for Trump’s support among WEPs is that they like what he gives them on social policy: conservative judges, opposition to abortion, and a bulwark against transgender rights. But that doesn’t explain why they’ve supported Trump more than they supported Bush, McCain, or Romney. If anything, you’d expect them to support Trump less, given his history of accepting gays and abortion rights.

The mystery dissolves when you look more closely at their priorities. In the BGC survey, when white evangelicals were asked to name all the factors that influenced their votes in 2016, fewer than half mentioned abortion or the Supreme Court. Their top issues were the economy, health care, national security, and immigration. The biggest gap between pro-Trump evangelicals and other evangelicals, when they were pressed to name the most important voting issue, was on immigration. That issue was more important to Trump supporters in the BGC survey, and it’s a big winner for Trump among WEPs in other polls. “White evangelicals overwhelmingly back more hardline positions on immigration, with three-fourths wanting a reduction in legal immigration,” Stetzer reports.

The enthusiasm for Trump’s hard line on immigration isn’t just about terrorism or enforcing laws. It’s about fear of immigrants per se. In the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study, non-evangelical Republicans and Republican leaners said, by a margin of 35 percentage points, that “a growing population of immigrants” was “a change for the worse,” not for the better. Among Republicans who identified themselves as evangelical or born-again, the margin rose to 48 points. In a survey taken after the 2016 election, 50 percent of white evangelicals, compared with 33 percent of white non-evangelicals, agreed that “immigrants hurt the economy.” The 2018 PRRI survey asked whether “the growing number of newcomers from other countries … strengthens American society” or “threatens traditional American customs and values.” Only one religious group said the newcomers were a threat. You guessed it: WEPs.

Muslims, in particular, are a target of white evangelical suspicion. In a February 2017 Pew survey, WEPs were more likely than white Catholics or white mainline Protestants to worry about Islamic violence in the United States. Most WEPs, unlike members of other religious groups, said they believed that among U.S. Muslims, there was a great deal or a fair amount of support for extremism. Fifty percent of white Catholics and white mainline Protestants endorsed Trump’s executive order to “prevent people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S.” Among WEPs, 76 percent endorsed it. The 2018 PRRI poll found a similar discrepancy.

Initially, when Stetzer diagnosed race and ethnicity as sources of the white evangelical backlash against immigration, he was talking about gaps between white and nonwhite evangelicals on poll questions that were open to interpretation. But PRRI, in its 2018 survey, proved that race and ethnicity were factors. The survey informed respondents that “by 2045, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other mixed racial and ethnic groups will together be a majority of the population.” Then came the query: “Do you think the likely impact of this coming demographic change will be mostly positive or mostly negative?” After listening to this question, most white Catholics and most white mainline Protestants said the change would be positive. Most WEPs said it would be negative. A PRRI/Atlantic poll taken in June found the same result.

In his warning on Election Day, Stetzer faced the bitter truth: “It is hard not to conclude that far too many white evangelicals are motivated by racial anxiety and xenophobia.”

Trump has signaled, through references to Norway, Haiti, and Africa, that he wants to let more whites and fewer nonwhites into the United States. He has advocated political violence and war crimes, and he has tried to consolidate power by firing or attempting to fire officials who investigate him. As he works to corrupt the country, there’s reason to worry that WEPs will stick with him. The BGC survey offered respondents this statement: “When a political leader is making important decisions I support, I should also support the leader when they say or do things I disagree with.” Non-evangelical whites overwhelmingly rejected the statement, but a plurality of white evangelicals endorsed it. In the September PRRI survey, 19 percent of white Catholics and 22 percent of white mainline Protestants said there was nothing Trump could do to lose their support. Among WEPs, the number was 25 percent.

Trump has already proved, by breaking up immigrant families explicitly to frighten other families, that more than a third of WEPs will stand with him, and others will stay neutral, as he attacks basic values. In a PRRI poll taken in June, 74 percent of Catholics and 60 percent of white mainline Protestants said they opposed “an immigration border policy that separates children from their parents and charges parents as criminals when they enter the country without permission.” Only 51 percent of WEPs said they opposed that policy; 36 percent supported it.

Some analysts are skeptical that Trump has a particular hold on WEPs. At the Faith Angle Forum, Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at the Pew Research Center, argued that what attracts white evangelicals to Trump is their Republican partisanship, not their faith. That’s a good point, and a lot of data support it. But in some ways, it’s a restatement of the problem. Christianity says you should love the stranger, respect families, honor your wife, and treat all people as children of God. WEPs, more than any other constituency, are choosing to ignore those values at the ballot box.

I take two lessons from these studies of white evangelicals. One is that the “Christian right,” as represented by Trump apologists, has betrayed Christianity. Trump presents a new, or in some cases newly revived, set of moral issues. Theft, open bigotry, race-baiting, explicit discrimination, boastful misogyny, sexual abuse of minors, the promotion of political violence, and the deliberate killing of innocent people are now on the table. Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, and others who stand with Trump in these fights should no longer be taken seriously as spokesmen for a faith. They’re purveyors of evil.

The other lesson is not to condemn all evangelicals. Like other faith communities, they have moral sickness in their ranks, and they’re working to heal it. For every Falwell, there’s a Stetzer, a Gerson, a Michael Cromartie. Evangelicals specialize in reflection, reform, and revival. There’s nothing wrong with evangelicalism that can’t be cured by what’s right with it.

The first step is to puncture the racial bubble around WEPs. That’s what Stetzer learned in his research: Perspectives that white evangelicals need to hear can be found in evangelicals of other colors. “White evangelicals would do well to turn off cable news and listen to their sisters and brothers in the increasingly diverse pews of evangelical churches,” Stetzer wrote in his Election Day message. By connecting with others who look different but share a common faith, white evangelicals will learn to reject Trump’s message “that our love for others is conditioned by country, race, or ethnicity.” They will come to “see this culture of fear of others for what it is: un-Christian.”

Source: Trump’s Christian Apologists Are Unchristian

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

Australia: Don’t push the immigration ‘panic button’, leading demographer tells Gladys Berejiklian

2018/11/27 Leave a comment

Although Australia and Canada share many similarities with respect to immigration-related policies and histories, the divergence in approach and political discourse continues to widen:

The man Malcolm Turnbull once dubbed “the world’s leading demographer” has warned Premier Gladys Berejiklian against “pushing the panic button” on immigration, saying it could undermine Sydney’s economic success.

University of Melbourne Professor of Demography Peter McDonald, whose views were specifically sought by the premier’s special panel on migration, said Ms Berejiklian’s goal of halving overseas migration to NSW would require cutting the skilled migrant intake to zero.

His detailed submission to the inquiry, seen by Fairfax Media, concluded: “My view is that NSW needs to think carefully before pushing the panic button on migration.”

Professor McDonald told the panel the government’s own massive infrastructure commitments – such as Western Sydney Airport – made it a “difficult time” to cut back on skilled labour supply.

In the case where investment contracts were signed and irreversible, firms may be forced to draw labour from elsewhere in Australia, Professor McDonald said. “If the investment contracts are not signed, then the firms facing a labour supply shortage may opt to invest elsewhere,” he warned.

Ms Berejiklian tasked the panel – which includes Peter Shergold, formerly the country’s top public servant – with devising a NSW population policy. So far she is the only state premier to call for a migration cut, and wants to halve the state’s net overseas migration level to 45,000.

But Professor McDonald’s written advice to Professor Shergold noted the vast majority of extra migrants to NSW in this decade were temporary, such as international students and visitors.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that in 2010, net overseas migration to NSW was 50,000 – comprising about 20,000 permanent migrants and 30,000 temporary.

Last year, the total intake was 93,000 – but only 26,500 of those were permanent migrants. Another 72,000 were temporary visa holders, including nearly 40,000 students. Some of those – about one in five, according to Professor McDonald – will go on to become permanent residents.

The bureau also released new figures this week projecting slightly slower population growth than previously thought. Melbourne was expected to overtake Sydney as Australia’s largest city around the year 2037.

Professor McDonald said that while Melbourne was growing faster (2.7 per cent in 2016-17) than Sydney (2.1 per cent), politicians were “not talking about cutting migration to Victoria”, even in the heat of a state election campaign.

He also cautioned against blaming surging numbers of international students for clogged roads or packed trains. “As most international students live close to the campus where they are enrolled, they are unlikely to contribute heavily to congestion in Sydney,” Professor McDonald wrote.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison turbocharged the population debate this week by vowing to slash Australia’s migration intake, declaring voters had had “enough, enough, enough”.

He did not name a new figure, but last financial year the government took in a little more than 160,000 permanent migrants, compared to the annual cap of 190,000.

Mr Morrison said he wanted to give the states and territories a greater say in immigration policy, because different states had different needs and knew their own “population carrying capacity”.

Professor McDonald said policymakers in NSW should focus on Sydney’s satellite cities such as Newcastle and Wollongong, which offered a “better long-term proposition to relieve population pressure” in the capital.

Melbourne and Brisbane’s satellite cities – Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast – were all among the top 10 fastest growing urban centres in Australia, unlike Newcastle and Wollongong.

Professor McDonald previously sat on the federal government’s skilled migration advisory council, was named a Member of the Order of Australia in 2008 and helped oversee the census in 2016. In a 2013 speech, Mr Turnbull described him as “arguably the world’s leading demographer”.

The expert panel, headed by Professor Shergold alongside Infrastructure NSW chief Jim Betts and planning department boss Carolyn McNally, is due to report to Ms Berejiklian this year.

Source: Don’t push the immigration ‘panic button’, leading demographer tells Gladys Berejiklian

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

PATEL: Don’t use Islam as excuse to carry out horrors of female genital mutilation

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Good column:

Earlier this week, a federal judge in the United States dismissed charges against two doctors and six others involved in the genital mutilation of nine girls at a suburban Detroit clinic.

While many are disappointed the case had to be dropped because of state-federal complications, what outraged me the most was that the accused in this case claimed female genital mutilation (FGM) was a ‘religious’ act and that it should, therefore, be above the law.

As a young Muslim woman, I am tired of hearing about medieval and regressive social behaviour that supposedly has some kind of religious justification; especially when it concerns my faith of Islam.

Muslim women like me are caught between Islamophobes who condemn Islam and every Muslim for anything that moves – and our own medieval zealots who use Islam to justify practices like FGM, forced marriages and domestic violence.

It should be clear to all that FGM has absolutely no basis in any of the Abrahamic religions – and there is no mention of it in the Quran. In fact, we find quite the opposite: That the Quran strongly condemns ‘mutilating the fair creation of God’ as being something inspired by the Devil himself.

But, despite this clear directive, FGM continues to persist in many countries around the world.

The UN estimates that around three million girls are mutilated every year – with a sizable portion of these being Muslim women and girls; (the others being mostly Christian or animist communities).

This is because some communities and individuals prefer to ignore their own revealed book and follow cultural dogmas disguised as religion instead.

These spurious ‘religious’ arguments are also buttressed by dozens of other oppressive reasons, as to why a community will persist with the abomination of FGM – such as poverty, patriarchy and culture. But the supposed religious justifications may, in fact, be the bedrock upon which all the other causes depend.

Debunk that and the other justifications may well fall away.

That’s why in my work with the international NGO, Islamic Relief Canada – we feel it is our duty to counter these cultural and pseudo-religious justifications.

This is done through, for example, our advocacy work to end FGM here in Canada and all around the world with our sister offices and partner organizations.

From our research here in Canada, we know that FGM is carried out in both Muslim and non-Muslim communities, and we have anecdotal evidence that children are being taken abroad and even across the border to the U.S. to be forcibly subjected to FGM procedures.

We also know that there is a lack of resources available to families who have undergone the trauma of FGM and are in need of education and support.

We welcome the Canadian government’s investment and commitment towards ending FGM, both overseas and here in Canada.

But we also recognize that more needs to be done to understand the extent and context of the problem in Canada, so that organizations like ours can work alongside other agencies and communities to build awareness of the extremely harmful effects of this totally anti-Islamic practice.

Reyhana Patel is the head of Communications at Islamic Relief Canada. She’s a former BBC journalist and former writer for The Huffington Post U.K. and The Independent newspaper in the U.K.

Source: PATEL: Don’t use Islam as excuse to carry out horrors of female genital mutilation

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Why Big Law Is Taking on Trump Over Immigration

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Corporate lawyers at Paul Weiss, a prestigious Manhattan law firm, often spend their days scouring the fine print of client documents and government regulations. But for the past few months, they have been on a different search.

In the firm’s Midtown offices, about 75 lawyers have been trying to find more than 400 parents who were separated from their families at the southern border this year and then deported without their children.

Paul Weiss, where partners charge more than $1,000 an hour and clients include the National Football League and Citigroup, is looking for these parents, pro bono, as part of a federal American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the Trump administration over its family separation policy.

Big Law — a nexus of power where partners are often plucked for top government posts — has emerged as a fierce, and perhaps unexpected, antagonist to President Trump’s immigration agenda. While pro bono work is nothing new, over the past two years, major law firms have become more vocal and visible in pushing back against the administration’s policies.

Top firms have a well-earned reputation as cautious defenders of the establishment, and immigration is generally considered a safe area for pro bono work because it rarely conflicts with corporate clients. Still, both supporters and critics of the president’s agenda have noticed that large firms have been behind several of the biggest court battles.

“What’s different here is that the firms are on a wholesale basis, and dramatically, challenging the behavior of the White House,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an expert in legal ethics.

Hogan Lovells, which has more than 2,500 lawyers and revenues that topped $2 billion last year, challenged the travel ban and is one of several firms opposing the administration’s plan to cut federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities.

Covington & Burling, a century-old Washington firm with clients such as Uber and JPMorgan Chase, has fought to preserve Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. WilmerHale, another prestigious Washington firm whose top clients include Facebook, represented Chicago in its own successful sanctuary cities case and filed a lawsuit to compel the administration to disclose data on family separations.

This month, Arnold & Porter, an international firm that has advised clients such as the World Bank, represented nonprofits in New York to block the administration’s plan to add a citizenship status question to the United States census.

“Major law firms have really stepped up,” said Becca Heller, the executive director of the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project.

Paul Weiss became involved in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit this summer, after the government revealed that among the more than 2,500 families separated at the border were hundreds of cases where parents had been sent home while their children stayed behind in the United States.

The Department of Justice, which has defended the administration in court challenges, declined to comment.

Lawyers at the firms say they are trying to defend the rule of law, not oppose the Trump administration. But critics have been quick to point out that major law firms, like elite law schools, tend to lean left. Their lawyers disproportionately support Democratic candidates, contribution records show.

“I can virtually guarantee you that if Hillary Clinton had won the White House, you would not see these same law firms filing numerous lawsuits against her administration in the name of the rule of law,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.

Republican partners, Mr. von Spakovsky said, seldom find support for cases with a conservative bent.

Some firms filing suits are also home to vocal opponents of the Trump administration’s policies, such as Eric H. Holder Jr., a partner at Covington and the attorney general under former President Barack Obama.

On the for-profit side, however, some have represented members of the Trump administration and the president’s associates. Covington defended Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser. WilmerHale, the former firm of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was retained last year by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Mr. Trump.

More firms started turning their pro bono efforts toward immigration under Mr. Obama, when large numbers of unaccompanied minorsbegan streaming across the border, said Gary M. Wingens, the chairman of Lowenstein Sandler, a firm in New Jersey. “It was not viewed as particularly controversial or left-wing, bleeding-heart work,” he said.

But since Mr. Trump’s election, immigration has grown into a much more divisive and high-profile issue.

Major law firms have taken on sensitive cases before, notably when they provided pro bono representation to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Still, there are limits. “You don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize your corporate client,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School. During the 2008 housing crisis, for example, many major firms did not represent foreclosure victims because they represented banks.

Immigration does not generally present such conflicts, but tangling with the White House in a public way comes with its own risks. It can rankle clients, who are sensitive to their public image and might have cases before the government.

Several of Paul Weiss’s top clients declined to comment. A spokesman for Citigroup, Edward Skyler, said jokingly, “Given how valuable their time is, which we can attest to, it’s very admirable.”

Paul Weiss, among the firms known to lean left, has a reputation for public interest work, including the 2013 Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage. Brad S. Karp, its chairman since 2008, has recently emerged as an outspoken leader. Thirty-four firms signed onto an op-ed he wrote with Mr. Wingens in The New York Times this summer denouncing family separations.

To date, Paul Weiss lawyers have spent more than $2 million in billable hours on the A.C.L.U. project, the firm said. Paul Weiss is not litigating the case but was appointed by the court to help the nonprofit find and represent deported parents. Jeh C. Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security under Mr. Obama, is a partner at the firm but is not involved in the effort.

“We’re reuniting families destroyed by the administration,” Mr. Karp said in an interview.

Emily Goldberg, pro bono counsel at Paul Weiss, orchestrated the firm’s response to family separations.

In June, Ms. Goldberg received a list of about 175 separated children who had been sent to agencies in New York. Catholic Charities, the organization assigned to provide the children with legal representation, could not find their parents. Ms. Goldberg enlisted the help of lawyers at several major firms, and when they could not find a number of the parents, they concluded the parents had been deported. She contacted Dentons, an international firm with offices in Central America, and its employees started looking for parents there.

Weeks later, the government revealed the existence of the deported parents. The judge in the suit, Dana Sabraw, ordered the government to reunite these families but asked the A.C.L.U. to lead the effort. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U. national Immigrants’ Rights Project, turned to Paul Weiss, which became the head of a committeethat would work with three nonprofits to find the parents, he said.

“I think we did quickly realize that this was going to be an enormous task,” Mr. Gelernt said. The parents were in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil and Romania.

For more than three months, Paul Weiss associates have been searching for parents and making calls to ask parents if they want their child sent home or placed with a sponsor in the United States.

There have been obstacles, said Steven C. Herzog, a senior lawyer. Some parents are from rural areas and do not have phones. About a third speak indigenous languages.

A few families have promised to fax forms, only to disappear, revealing later that the nearest town with a fax machine was several hours away, said BJ Jensen, the pro bono associate co-leading the search.

When a family cannot be found, or disappears, the lawyers send an investigator with the nonprofit Justice in Motion to look for them. Eriberto Pop Can, an investigator in Guatemala, said he can often guess where parents might be from their indigenous last names such as Choc, Pop and Pec.

The first family he found lived in Cobán, a city in the central highlands. The family had not heard anything about their 7-year-old son in three months, he said.

The involvement of large law firms in immigration-related lawsuits has not gone unnoticed by supporters of tighter restrictions.

“They view the influx of asylum seekers as some kind of humanitarian project,” Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, said of the lawyers. “Whereas a regular American sees it as an affront to our legal system.”

As of this month, Paul Weiss lawyers have contacted all but a handful of the roughly 400 deported parents. The government has released the children of about 260, half to parents in their home countries, half to sponsors in the United States.

But the work may continue.

The A.C.L.U. plans to use the lawyers’s case notes to try to show Judge Sabraw that a number of families were coerced into signing deportation orders, even though they faced danger at home, Mr. Gelernt said. If the judge agrees, those families should be allowed to come back to the United States and apply for asylum, he said.

“That’s our hope,” Mr. Herzog said. “It’s not just our hope,” he added. “It’s our job.”

Filed under Multiculturalism

Supporters of public faith in Canada are young, educated, Liberal, and ‘quite dug in’: pollster

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Interesting findings but note the methodology used is not random selection, and thus likely cannot be considered a reliable reflection of the population:

Proponents of religious faith in public life in Canada tend to be younger, more highly educated, and more likely to have voted Liberal, according to a new survey.

The counter-intuitive discovery puts the lie to the common impression that support for public religiosity in areas like health care, social services and education is driven by evangelical church goers and deeply observant, older, conservative “holy rollers,” said Angus Reid, chairman of Angus Reid Institute.

“What we find is exactly the opposite,” Reid said.

He said there is a “mythology” on the political left that says declining church attendance goes hand in hand with support for what he calls “uber-secularization” of society, or the “extinguishment of faith and religion from any portion of the public square.”

Not so, according to the report, Faith in the Public Square, done in partnership with Cardus, which describes itself as a non-partisan, faith-based think tank and registered charity dedicated to promoting a flourishing society.”

“The largest segment of Canadian society (at 37%), quite independent of whether they have any religious views or not, sees an important role for religious and faith groups across many dimensions of Canadian society. They strongly support religious freedom. They see religious and faith groups playing an important role in health, in social services, social justice issues. They believe that faith and religion are critical for the formation of citizenship and strong values,” Reid said in an interview. “There is a very significant segment that is alive and well and quite dug in, in many respects, on this question.”

When asked about how faith operates in their own lives, Canadians tend to break down roughly like this: 20% are atheist, 20% are religiously committed, 30% are privately faithful, and 30% are spiritually uncertain.

But the pie chart looks different when the emphasis shifts to the role faith should play in public life, this survey suggests. It found that there are more proponents of faith in the public square (at 37%) than there are opponents (32%) or those who are uncertain (32%).

The survey describes these groups using what it calls a Public Faith Index, based on responses to 17 questions.

Public faith is a topic of frequent and intense public debate, from niqabs and religious symbols in the public services in Quebec, to the funding of religious schools and the appropriateness of Christian prayers at local council meetings. In the past, it has coloured political debate on everything from abortion access to whether Canada should participate in war.

This survey sought to measure opinion on, for example, whether faith is good for citizenship, whether the tenets of various faiths should be taught in high schools, and whether politicians ought to be conversant in the basics of the various religions in Canada.

It found, for example, that 38% of Canadians thought religious and faith communities were making a positive contribution to health care, while 15% felt the contribution was negative. There were similar results for social justice causes, such as poverty and overseas development. But in social services, fully 51% thought the contribution was positive, and just 11% felt it was negative. In education, the numbers were more evenly split, 28% positive and 25% negative.

It also found deep divisions between the three segments. For example, 93% of public faith proponents agree that religious and faith communities strengthen Canadian values such as equality and human rights. But 81% of public faith opponents disagree with this proposition.

In education, a solid majority, 57%, of opponents thought the beliefs of the world’s major religions should not be taught public high schools, while 36% thought just the basics should be taught.

Another curious finding is that fully 25% of public faith proponents say they have never read a religious text.

A key caveat to the general conclusion about a strong segment of young, educated, Liberal proponents of public faith is the province of Quebec. For example, if you exclude Quebec, the percentage of Canadians who are proponents of public faith rises to 42%.

“Quebec, on any issue associated with religion or faith, is a totally distinct society,” Reid said.

The survey of 2,200 Canadians was conducted in early November, via the Angus Reid Forum, an online community in which people can participate in surveys in exchange for reward points and prizes. Because they were not randomly selected, a true margin of error cannot be calculated, but a randomized poll of similar size would have a margin of error of 2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Source: Supporters of public faith in Canada are young, educated, Liberal, and ‘quite dug in’: pollster

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Why Canada’s immigration system has been a success, and what Australia can learn from it

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Canada and Australia often learn from each other on immigration and related policies (e.g., Express Entry, the point-based system for speeding up the selection process for selecting economic class immigrants) but there are significant differences as this article attests. The author argues that Australia should learn from Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program to diversity where immigrants settle.

Of course, Australian political discourse on immigration is much more polarized, and while Canada is increasing its levels, the current Australian government is reducing them:

Immigration policy will be a critical issue in forthcoming state (Victoria, NSW) and federal elections. The disproportionate impact of immigration on population growth and public infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne is the key issue.

If we look to the example of another immigrant-friendly country, Canada, however, we can see how giving states and territories a greater role in immigration target setting and selection can help take the pressure off major cities without drastically reducing immigration rates.

Immigration certainly impacts on Australia’s population to a greater degree than most Western nations. Among OECD countries, only Switzerland and Luxembourg have a higher percentage of foreign-born people than Australia.

Today, 28 per cent of the Australian population was born overseas. The key issue for Australia is that immigrants are more likely to live in large cities than smaller cities or regional areas. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 85 per cent of immigrants live in major urban areas, compared to just 64 per cent of Australian-born people.

Indeed, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Sydney is now equal-fourth in the world (with Auckland and Los Angeles) with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents (39 per cent), while Melbourne is not far behind (35 per cent). Nearly two-thirds of residents in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth have at least one parent who was born overseas.

A new state-based approach?

The stress that rapid population growth has placed on Melbourne and Sydney has recently become a topic of much debate. This week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison pledged to reduce the annual permanent immigration cap of 190,000. Australia accepted just 162,417 immigrants last year, the lowest level in a decade.

Morrison has also called for a major rethink of the “top-down” approach to immigration in Australia, allowing states and territories to request the number of skilled migrants they’d like to admit each year.

The states and territories currently have a limited ability to nominate applicants for certain skilled visas. But state-nominated and regional visa approvals have fallen in recent years to just over 36,000 last fiscal year following tighter restrictions.

Morrison wants to see a bigger role for states and territories:

This is a blinding piece of common sense, which is: how about states who plan for population growth and the Commonwealth government who sets the migration levels, actually bring this together?

What we can learn from Canada

The Canadian government gave provinces a say in setting targets and selecting economic immigrants – similar to Australia’s skilled migration intake – in the early 1990s. Quebec was first to receive a high degree of autonomy in the process – it was given the right to set its own level and selection criteria for all economic immigrants. (The ability to speak French was a must.)

Quebec was also granted the right to set all of its integration programs, funded by Ottawa every year. The payments reached C$540 million this fiscal year, or C$13,500 for each newcomer.

After Quebec was given this authority, the other Canadian provinces demanded the same. But they received far more limited rights than Quebec. They can nominate the number of economic migrants they need as part of the national immigration target set by the federal government, but they can’t independently set their intake target and selection criteria like Quebec.

While provinces nominate – or in Quebec’s case, decide – annual intakes, all cases are still routed through Ottawa for application integrity testing and vetting for criminality, health and security. Ultimately, final approval rests with Ottawa.

Last year, the Canadian government set an ambitious target of admitting 1 million total immigrants from 2018-2020. The target for next year is 330,000 immigrants, of which about 190,000 will be economic migrants. The remainder will enter under the family reunification category and the refugee, humanitarian and protected category.

About one-third of the economic migrants (61,000) will be admitted through the Provincial Nominee Program. This figure excludes Quebec, which will set its numbers separately.

How the Canadian system encourages rural immigration

Giving the provinces a greater immigration policy role has helped to dramatically shift the settlement of immigrants beyond Canada’s biggest cities.

According to immigration statistics, 34% of economic migrants in 2017 landed in destinations outside Canada’s three most populous provinces, Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia – compared to just 10 per cent in 1997.

After immigrants arrive, the key issue for the provinces is retention, since immigrants can leave at any time. The provinces put a strong emphasis on ensuring that economic migrants receive a strong welcome on arrival and are provided with support programs, including education, access to local migrant community networks and assistance finding a job for those who are not sponsored by employers.

One of the biggest success stories of the Provincial Nominee Program is thinly populated Manitoba, which has added 130,000 migrants since 1998. Ninety per cent have gotten a job within a year of arriving and nearly the same number has ended up staying in Manitoba permanently. New arrivals also express some of the greatest feelings of belonging of all immigrants in western Canada.

Why this could work in Australia

South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory – as well as other regional and rural areas across Australia – want more immigrants and refugees.

Attracting immigrants to less-populated states is the easy part: those willing to settle outside Sydney and Melbourne can receive more points if they are skilled migrants, possibly making the difference as to whether they come to Australia or not. The key issue is retention.

My fieldwork with refugees in Australia has shown that the majority of these migrants love living in regional communities and have received a warm welcome from locals. Our research also found they are willing to stay in regional areas if they can get jobs there. Another way of encouraging more immigrants to settle in regional areas could be to offer them priority in the family reunion process.

Importantly, Canada also doesn’t politicise immigration policy. Australia should follow Canada’s lead by giving the states a bigger seat at the immigration policy table and resisting the temptation to blame immigration for complex growth problems in our overcrowded cities.

Reducing the immigration intake cap will have no significant impact on reducing congestion or strain on public infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne, but it could severely constrain economic growth.

The ConversationJock Collins currently receives research funding from the Australian Research Council for one Discovery Project, two Linkage Projects and one Indigenous Discovery Project.

Source: Why Canada’s immigration system has been a success, and what Australia can learn from it

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USA: Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous

2018/11/26 Leave a comment

Always a challenge how to present data and trends in a manner that will not inflame debate. Even when presented with appropriate nuance, the risk remains.

Struggled a bit with this in my recent article, Hospital stats show birth tourism rising in major cities, and judging by the reaction on Twitter, appears I got the balance right, although of course there were critiques by those on the left and right:

The graphic was splashy by the Census Bureau’s standards and it showed an unmistakable moment in America’s future: the year 2044, when white Americans were projected to fall below half the population and lose their majority status.

The presentation of the data disturbed Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director, who saw it while looking through a government report. The graphic made demographic change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing, he thought, and could provoke a political backlash.

So after the report’s release three years ago, he organized a meeting with Katherine Wallman, at the time the chief statistician for the United States.

“I said ‘I’m really worried about this,’” said Dr. Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. He added, “Statistics are powerful. They are a description of who we are as a country. If you say majority-minority, that becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”

In a nation preoccupied by race, the moment when white Americans will make up less than half the country’s population has become an object of fascination.

For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.

But many academics have grown increasingly uneasy with the public fixation. They point to recent research demonstrating the data’s power to shape perceptions. Some are questioning the assumptions the Census Bureau is making about race, and whether projecting the American population even makes sense at a time of rapid demographic change when the categories themselves seem to be shifting.

Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, spotted the risk immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she knew that group size was a marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller could feel threatened. At first she thought the topic of a declining white majority was too obvious to study.

But she did, together with a colleague, Maureen Craig, a social psychologist at New York University, and they have been talking about the results ever since. Their findings, first published in 2014, showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about the racial shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial minorities than those who were not. They were also more likely to support restrictive immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose status and face discrimination in the future.

Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University, remembered being stunned when she saw the research.

“It was like, ‘Oh wow, these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she said.

Beyond concerns about the data’s repercussions, some researchers are also questioning whether the Census Bureau’s projections provide a true picture. At issue, they say, is whom the government counts as white.

In the Census Bureau’s projections, people of mixed race or ethnicity have been counted mostly as minority, demographers say. This has had the effect of understating the size of the white population, they say, because many Americans with one white parent may identify as white or partly white. On their census forms, Americans can choose more than one race and whether they are of Hispanic origin.

Among Asians and Hispanics, more than a quarter marry outside their race, according to the Pew Research Center. For American-born Asians, the share is nearly double that. It means that mixed-race people may be a small group now — around 7 percent of the population, according to Pew — but will steadily grow. Are those children white? Are they minority? Are they both? What about the grandchildren?

“The question really for us as a society is there are all these people who look white, act white, marry white and live white, so what does white even mean anymore?” Dr. Waters said. “We are in a really interesting time, an indeterminate time, when we are not policing the boundary very strongly.”

The Census Bureau has long produced projections of the American population, but they were rarely the topic of talk shows or newspaper headlines.

Then, in August 2008 at the height of Barack Obama’s campaign for president, the bureau projected that non-Hispanic whites would drop below half the population by 2042, far earlier than expected. (The projections, which change with birth, death and migration rates, have also placed the shift in 2050 and in 2044.)

“That’s what really lit the fuse,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, referring to the 2008 projection. “People went crazy.”

It was not just white nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. He said it was hard to interest them in his work on ways to make the change seem less threatening to fearful white Americans — for instance by emphasizing the good that could come from immigration.

“It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”

Dr. Myers and a colleague later found that presenting the data differently could produce a much less anxious reaction. In work published this spring, they found that the negative effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people through intermarriage.

It is unclear exactly when the idea of a majority-minority crossover first appeared, but several experts said it may have surfaced in connection with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Ms. Wallman, the chief statistician for the United States from 1992 to 2017, who helped develop the first governmentwide standard for data on race and ethnicity that came into use in the late 1970s, said she did not like having to categorize by race, but that the government had to for oversight.

“I wish we didn’t have to ask,” she said. “But to me, that’s the rock and the hard place.”

Race is difficult to count because, unlike income or employment, it is a social category that shifts with changes in culture, immigration, and ideas about genetics. So who counts as white has changed over time. In the 1910s and 1920s, the last time immigrants were such a large share of the American population, there were furious arguments over how to categorize newcomers from Europe.

But eventually, the immigrants from eastern and southern Europe came to be considered white.

That is because race is about power, not biology, said Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University.

“The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness,” said Dr. King, author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial difference. The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans, he said — the long-term legacy of slavery.

To Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, the Census Bureau’s projections seemed stuck in an outdated classification system. The bureau assigns a nonwhite label to most people who are reported as having both white and minority ancestry, he said. He likened this to the one-drop rule, a 19th-century system of racial classification in which having even one African ancestor meant you were black.

“The census data is distorting the on-the-ground realities of ethnicity and race,” Dr. Alba said. “There might never be a majority-minority society; it’s unclear.”

Asked for a response to Dr. Alba’s critique, a Census Bureau spokesman said in an email that “we constantly consult with stakeholders, and scholars, including Richard Alba and other federal agencies to improve our techniques, methodologies, and testing of population projections.”

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, argued that the Census Bureau was doing the best that it could at a time whensociety was changing quickly. He was skeptical that today’s Asians and Hispanics were analogous to the white ethnic Americans of the 20th century, and believed that a less conservative count would not do much to change the bigger picture. Besides, it is not the job of academics to protect people from demographic change, he said.

“Irrespective of the year, or the turning point, the message needs to come out about what the actual facts are,” Mr. Frey said. “We are becoming a much more racially diverse society among our young generation.”

Others say they are not sugarcoating statistics, but showing that the numbers have many interpretations, and that white-versus-everyone-else is only one. It not only reduces the American patchwork to a crude, divisive political formula, they say, but perhaps more important — with the categories in flux — it might not even be true.

The Census Bureau released new projections this year in March filled with data about the country’s future. In the coming decades, adults 65 and older will outnumber children for the first time in the country’s history. The share of mixed-race children is set to double.

But there was no mention of a year when white Americans would fall below half the population.

When asked about the change, a spokesman for the Bureau said: “It was just us getting back to sticking to data.”

Source: Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers NervousThe moment when white Americans will make up less than half the population has become an object of fascination. Some researchers question whether the projections provide a true picture.

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Birth Tourism: Media interest following my Policy Options piece (updated)

2018/11/24 5 Comments

While I had expected considerable media interest, given the substance and the politics of the issue, yesterday had me doing TV interviews on all major networks and a radio interview with Rob Breakenridge of Global news in Calgary.

The most in-depth TV interview was on Power and Politics at the 1:13 mark: Power and Politics 23 Nov 2018.

Global TV:  New numbers show more ‘birth tourism’ in Canada than thought

CTV: New data shows birth tourism on the rise on Canada

Later interviews

On Radio Canada Vancouver (in French):

Boulevard du Pacifique: La Colombie-Britannique, chef de file du tourisme des naissances

CTV’s Your Morning:

Shocking new study reveals “birth tourism” in Canada is steadily increasing

The Sunday Edition, with Michael Enright, featuring mmigration lawyer Jamie Liew and Jas Johal, MLA for Richmond-Queensboroug: Birth tourism may be a hot button issue in the next federal election

 

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Richmond Hospital is ground zero for the skyrocketing number of ‘anchor babies’ born in Canada, study indicates

2018/11/24 Leave a comment

Good report from the Vancouver Star:

More than one in five babies born in Metro Vancouver’s Richmond Hospital could be so-called “anchor babies” — children born to non-residents in order to gain Canadian citizenship — according to a new study.

The study, authored by the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) and published Thursday in Policy Options magazine, suggests 21.9 per cent of the children delivered in Richmond Hospital are born to non-resident mothers — more than double the percentage born in any other Canadian hospital.

The IRPP study also shows the number of such children born in Canada is far higher than previously estimated.

While a Statistics Canada report found roughly 312 babies are born in the country each year to mothers whose place of residence is officially listed as outside of Canada, IRPP’s study put that number at closer to 1,500 or 2,000 children annually. The data shows the number of births to non-resident mothers — including all provinces but Quebec, which refused to release the data — skyrocketed to 3,628 last year from just 1,354 in 2010.

The issue of birth tourism — when pregnant women fly to Canada to give birth — is divisive because children born under such circumstances are automatically granted Canadian citizenship. They therefore enjoy all the attendant rights and privileges, such as access to domestic university fees as well as subsidized education and health care, even though their parents aren’t taxpayers and the children themselves will not necessarily be raised in Canada.

Joe Peschisolido, Liberal MP for Steveston-Richmond East, believes the revelation provided by the study has some troubling implications.

“Even though I believe the (birth tourism) epicentre is in Richmond — and at the hospital in Richmond — I think you’re starting to see birth tourism as an institution,” Peschisolido told StarMetro in a Thursday phone interview.

“There are individuals that are profiting from this. And I think that’s the most heinous thing. You’re getting individuals that are abusing … the immigration and citizenship system … and are profiting off of an illegitimate — and the government has said unethical — system.”

A Thursday statement from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) confirmed the numbers in the IRPP study, though slightly more children were actually born to non-resident mothers in Richmond Hospital than the IRPP study accounted for.

While the IRPP study showed 469 non-resident births occurred in Richmond Hospital in 2017-18, VCH’s figures show 474 children were born to 469 resident mothers. The disparity, the statement explained, comes from the number of twins born in that time period.

And while the number of babies born to non-resident mothers has been increasing over the past several years — from 15.4 per cent of the total in 2014-15 to 22.1 per cent of the total in 2017-18 — the total number of babies born to all mothers decreased slightly this year, according to VCH.

The health authority also noted that non-residents are required to pay all hospital and medical-care costs for the mother and baby, including a prepayment deposit of $8,200 for a vaginal birth and $13,300 for a caesarean birth.

In March, Peschisolido sponsored a petition spearheaded by Richmond resident Kerry Starchuk calling on the federal government to condemn the “abusive and exploitative practice” of birth tourism.

Birth tourism, the petition said, fundamentally debases the value of Canadian citizenship; costs taxpayers money, since children of non-residents have access to services such as health care and subsidized education; and displaces residents from local hospital beds.

On Monday, the federal government tabled its response to Peschisolido’s petition, saying Canada does not currently collect information on whether a woman is pregnant when she enters Canada.

“A person is not inadmissible nor can they be denied a visa solely on the grounds that they are pregnant or that they may give birth in Canada,” the response reads.

And while misrepresenting the purpose of a visit to Canada to a federal officer carries “significant consequences,” the statement points out citizenship acquired through birth on Canadian soil has been policy since 1947.

Ottawa’s response, however, refers back to 2016 data from Statistics Canada, saying only about 300 of the 385,000 children born in Canada each year are born to non-resident mothers.

“This constitutes less than 0.1 per cent of the total number of births in Canada,” the response says, adding these numbers show the practice is not widespread but that the government has nevertheless commissioned research from the Canadian Institute for Health Information to look into the issue. It also committed to developing measures to address the institute’s findings.

Peschisolido said he was satisfied with the response. He said he hopes to participate in the review process once more granular data has been collected and responsible decisions can be made about the extent of birth tourism and what can be done to stop it.

But Will Tao, a Vancouver immigration lawyer, said he worries that focusing purely on statistics risks unnecessarily casting aspersions on all non-resident mothers.

“I don’t think (birth tourism) is the problem itself, so much as a symptom of the problem,” Tao told StarMetro. “I think the real problem is the unregulated nature of immigration advice.”

There are most certainly practitioners abroad who advise mothers to come to Canada to give birth as a kind of backdoor to citizenship, he said. And the federal government could do a better job providing a narrative — much in the way it has for individuals seeking refugee status — that would discourage abuses of the birthright policy, he said.

But there are countless non-residents who have children while in Canada for many other reasons. Those people, he said, should not be painted with the same brush as those who wilfully exploit the path to Canadian citizenship.

The IRPP study reflects that concern, noting its figures are not exact because they don’t express how many children were delivered by mothers with temporary status in Canada — a bracket that includes Canadian expatriates returning to give birth, corporate transferees and international students.

But researcher Andrew Griffith told The Star that a conservative estimate would suggest roughly 40 or 50 per cent of the non-resident mothers were birth tourists.

The study mined the Canadian Institute for Health Information discharge database, and according to Griffith, the IRPP’s figures — based on hospital financial data that codes services provided to non-residents under “other country resident self-pay” — more accurately reflect the number of non-resident births in Canada.

The IRPP study offered several options to address the problem of birth tourism, including:

  • Amending immigration laws to make it an offence if a woman fails to disclose the delivery of a child as the purpose of a visit to Canada and make that child’s citizenship fraudulent due to its procurement through misrepresentation
  • Adopting a “qualified” birthright approach by which a child is granted citizenship only when at least one parent is either a Canadian citizen or permanent resident and the child resides in Canada for at least 10 years after birth

Tao, the immigration lawyer, said he understood why people are shocked by how far above the national average the number of children born to non-resident mothers in Richmond Hospital are.

But through his interactions with clients, he said, he has encountered many families who could technically be called “birth tourists,” were that definition applied loosely enough. He said he was concerned that forthcoming regulations could encompass non-resident families or individuals whose children were born in Canada for legitimate reasons.

Tao also suggested a policy requiring immigration officials to question the motives of pregnant women as a matter of course could be “a very slippery slope into prejudice and background checking of other types.”

Griffiths, the researcher, agreed that birth tourism at the national level, currently accounting for roughly 0.5 per cent of the total annual live births in Canada according to the IRPP, is not a huge problem but suggested it should be monitored closely.

“Using this as a starting point, if we see any further increase or a trend line, then we need to take another fresh look at it,” he said.

But Peschisolido said that in a city like Richmond, where birth tourism appears to be a far more pervasive trend, every level of government has a responsibility to investigate how it can be slowed or stopped and what, exactly, may be driving it.

Source: Richmond Hospital is ground zero for the skyrocketing number of ‘anchor babies’ born in Canada, study indicates

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