High-Skilled Immigrants Call Out The Trump Administration’s ‘Hypocrisy’

2018/09/26 Leave a comment

Great advantage for Canadian immigration and Canadian efforts to encourage US tech investment in Canada:

The Trump administration says it wants to move to a “merit-based” immigration system — one that gives priority to immigrants who speak English and are highly educated.

But critics say that rhetoric is at odds with the administration’s actions.

“Show me any policy that’s come out so far that has actually made it easier for highly skilled immigrants,” says Doug Rand, who worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama.

“I haven’t seen any,” Rand said.

In practice, critics say the administration is making high-skilled immigrants’ lives harder, in all sorts of ways. It has gotten tougher to get or renew an H-1B visa, a program that brings in tech workers, doctors and other professionals. And the administration is getting rid of other visa programs altogether.

That includes a special program for the spouses of H-1B guest workers that has been widely embraced by immigrants like Neha Mahajan. She hosts and produces a TV talk show in Edison, N.J., that’s targeted mainly at Indian expats like her.

“This is the kind of work I always wanted to do,” said Mahajan. “I am picking up topics that typically don’t get talked about in the South Asian community. So I’m trying to be a change-maker in my community.”

Mahajan has a master’s degree in English literature and worked as a journalist in India. It never occurred to her that she would have trouble finding opportunities in the U.S. But Mahajan was not allowed to work when she first got here.

“So here I am in the U.S., the most advanced nation on this Earth,” Mahajan said. “But I’m in a cage. A metaphoric golden cage.”

Mahajan moved here with her husband and daughter in 2008 when he secured an H-1B visa to work as a software developer. But she wasn’t able to work legally until 2015, when the Obama administration launched the H-4 EAD program. It allows the spouses of H-1B guest workers to get work permits once they’ve been approved for a green card. About 100,000 people have signed up — mostly women, and mostly from India, which has a years-long waiting list for green cards.

Now the Trump administration is poised to end the program, which it considers an overreach.

“For me, one of the main reasons for proposing to rescind that is because I don’t think it’s appropriate,” said Lee Cissna, the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of legal immigration. “I don’t think that Congress intended for the spouses of H-1Bs to work.”

Cissna did not respond to requests for an interview. But he did speak last month to the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower levels of immigration.

“Everything we do is guided by the law,” Cissna said. “That’s all we’re doing.”

The administration is also trying to kill another Obama-era program known as the International Entrepreneur Rule, which Doug Rand helped create.

“This was designed for entrepreneurs from other countries to more easily come to the U.S., or stay in the U.S., build companies here, create jobs for U.S. workers,” said Rand, who now runs a firm called Boundless Immigration.

All of this has infuriated corporate America. The CEOs of Apple, Pepsi and other U.S. companies say the administration is scaring away high-skilled workers, which could hurt the economy.

“What the administration is saying is, we want to make it difficult for companies to employ anyone who is not an American citizen,” said Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council.

But the head of Citizenship and Immigration Services dismisses that.

“The idea that we are intentionally, mischievously, impishly, malevolently trying to build an invisible wall on purpose because we don’t want foreign workers to come is false,” said Cissna.

Nonetheless, immigrants like Neha Mahajan wonder whether the administration is serious about “merit-based” immigration.

“I don’t know what to think,” Mahajan said. “Hypocrisy, maybe? They want us to stay. They don’t want us to stay. Why put people’s lives into a limbo?”

Mahajan and other spouses of guest workers are pushing to save the H-4 EAD program that allows them to work. The Trump administration is expected to announce the official end of that program any day.

Source: High-Skilled Immigrants Call Out The Trump Administration’s ‘Hypocrisy’

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How Trump Can Use Welfare To Stymie Immigration — And Vice Versa

2018/09/26 Leave a comment

Yet another restrictive measure:

The Trump administration is following through on a long-rumored plan to make it harder for immigrants to get green cards if they’re poor or might become poor.

The proposal is a double whammy that could scare people away from safety net programs and keep immigrants out of the country ― with the added benefit of simultaneously demonizing both immigrants and welfare.

″It’s an opportunity to fuel the nativist fire and scapegoat immigrants as a drain on our economy,” said Wendy Cervantes, senior policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonpartisan organization that works to improve the lives of low-income people.

The U.S. government has almost always had a rule against legal permanent resident status for anyone who might become a “public charge,” meaning someone who is likely to wind up on welfare. The proposed rule, which will not take effect for at least 60 days and is subject to change, would broaden the criteria the government can use to deny applicants.

The proposal will likely scare immigrants out of applying even for benefits that wouldn’t hurt their green card chances, Cervantes said, such as food stamps for their children. Already, officials in several states have reported sharp declines in child nutrition program enrollment that they attribute to earlier news reports about the possibility of a new “public charge” rule. (The final proposed rule considers only an individual’s use of public benefits, not any use by their dependents.)

Experts said it’s impossible to estimate how many people will be affected by the rule, but some said it could be in the millions ― some directly because they would be denied a green card, others indirectly because they declined to use a benefit out of fear or because a family member was kept away.

The Department of Homeland Security said in its proposal that it estimated more than 324,000 people would disenroll from safety net benefits “due to concern about the consequences to that person receiving public benefits and being found to be likely to become a public charge,” saving the federal government more than $2 billion annually. (That’s less than 1 percent of what the government spends on food and health benefits for the poor each year.) The proposed rule wouldn’t make those individuals ineligible for public benefits ― the administration is predicting it would cause people to not use help even if they were qualified for it.

Cervantes said the proposal as written would affect several million people if you count a program beneficiary’s family members. More than 40 percent of the nearly 40 million food stamp recipients in the U.S., for instance, are children whose parents receive the benefits on their behalf.

Immigrants could be fearful of enrolling their families in certain benefits even if they wouldn’t have an adverse effect on a future immigration decision, either because of confusion about what is included or fear that it could be expanded in the future, said Melissa Boteach, senior vice president at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, who works on poverty issues.

“People are confused, and the stakes are too high for them to make an educated guess,” Boteach said. “I think there’s a sense that even if you are technically exempt, who knows what they’ll do next?”

Undocumented immigrants and people on work visas are ineligible for most federal benefits in the first place, and green card holders are only eligible after five years. The proposal would not affect people applying to become U.S. citizens. It primarily targets people abroad hoping to be reunited with family members living in the U.S. and those already living here and seeking green cards.

In fiscal 2017, the State Department initially denied more than 280,000 immigrant visa applications. Of those, only 3,200 were refused on public charge grounds, according to the Congressional Research Service (most of those refusals were overcome on appeal). Cervantes said the number of public charge refusals would likely skyrocket under the new proposal.

The current public charge guidance considers a person’s age, education, assets and employment status, as well as his or her current enrollment in a small number of state and federal programs. Republicans have long complained that the biggest programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid, were excluded. The Trump administration’s rule would broaden the criteria to include most federal safety net benefits.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement announcing the proposal that it would “implement a law passed by Congress intended to promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers.”

The current guidance says an immigrant would only count as a public charge if he or she is likely to depend “primarily” on government assistance, meaning for more than 50 percent of his or her income. The new rule would lower the threshold to receipt of government benefits totaling 15 percent of the poverty line in a given year.

The meaning of “likely” is entirely up to immigration officials, said David Bier, an expert at the libertarian Cato Institute who wrote in an analysis of the proposal.

“They just are very vague about how this whole thing is going to go down,” Bier said in an interview. “So inevitably what we’re going to see when this rule is enforced is just wildly varying outcomes depending on who’s adjudicating applications.”

Source: How Trump Can Use Welfare To Stymie Immigration — And Vice Versa

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Globe editorial: Ottawa is missing the point when it comes to the border issue

2018/09/25 Leave a comment

Kind of revealing that after two full-page editorials, all the Globe can come up with is the need for more funding for the refugee determination process and no legal analysis of its legitimate question regarding possible streamlining of the refugee determination process for irregular arrivals and limiting appeals for those refused.

Thin gruel, highlighting the difficulties in finding solutions that address legitimate public concerns regarding numbers and perceive abuse in a manner that will withstand legal challenge.:

….That won’t be easy, since every person who makes a refugee claim in Canada is legally entitled to an oral hearing. As well, courts in Canada have repeatedly protected the rights of refugee claimants, including those coming from countries deemed to be safe.

But there must be a way to find a compromise between respecting those rights while giving the government the ability to limit abuses of the refugee system and to show determination in controlling our borders. For instance, could Ottawa pass legislation that gives it the discretion to deny appeals to people whose refugee claims are refused, and who didn’t come into the country at a legal port of entry?

At the very least, the government needs to signal that it is looking at long-term solutions. What Mr. Trudeau fails to understand, and politicians in Germany have come to rue, is that dismissing concerns about border security is unwise. The Prime Minister needs to demonstrate that he is willing to act decisively and take away the incentives that have led to this moment.

Source: Globe editorial: Ottawa is missing the point when it comes to the border issue

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Taiwan may expand citizenship to Southeast Asia to staunch brain drain to the mainland

2018/09/25 Leave a comment

Interesting to learn about Taiwan’s demographics and the factors underlying its need for a more open approach to immigration and citizenship for skilled workers:

Taiwan’s lawmakers are expected to decide next month on whether to offer citizenship to students and skilled workers from Southeast Asia to help cope with a severe brain drain to the mainland.

The legislators will vote on the island’s economic immigration bill, Taipei’s response to Beijing’s efforts to lure talent away from Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a wayward province to be brought back into the fold – if necessary, by force.

If passed, the bill would open the door to professionals from Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).

Besides tackling the brain drain, the bill was a way for Taiwan to address its shrinking labour force, officials and analysts said.

“By 2026, 20 per cent of the population will be over 65 years old, and in the following year, there will be an insufficient working-age population,” National Development Council Minister Chen Mei-ling said.

“If the current trend continues, by 2065, the population of Taiwan will fall to between 16 million and 18.8 million from 23.57 million in 2018.”

And that was why the council was looking to the economic immigration bill to recruit foreign professionals and make Taiwan more friendly to immigrants, Chen said.

Under the legislation, people with special skills would be able to apply for permanent residency after working in Taiwan for three years; foreign professionals would be able to do the same after working on the island for five years, and mid-level technicians or skilled workers after seven years.

Foreign students who graduated and worked in Taiwan for five to seven years would be eligible to apply too, the council said. The new law also would apply to skilled foreign workers who had worked in Taiwan for seven years.

Although Asean nations are a priority recruiting target, the laws also are open to professionals and students from countries outside the bloc.

The proposed bill has generally been well received by industry leaders but critics point out that prospective new Taiwanese citizens would no longer be required to invest either in government bonds or a for-profit enterprise to spur local job creation. The council originally included an investment immigration clause that allowed foreigners investing at least NT$15 million in a profit-oriented enterprise or at least NT$30 million in government bonds, and who creates work opportunities for five Taiwanese, to get permanent residency after staying in Taiwan for three years.

The requirement was removed because it was seen as too onerous.

“There is a drawback [in] that the government has taken out the investment immigrant part, which could have helped increase foreign investment in Taiwan,” said Tsai Lien-sheng, secretary general of the National Federation of Industries.

“The biggest problem in Taiwan is not just [its shrinking] talent pool, but also stagnant investment.”

Tsai said Taiwan’s leaders needed to learn from Singapore and the United States, which allowed investors to acquire citizenship if they met their investment immigration requirements.

In the US, for instance, the EB-5 investor visa programme offers green cards to potential new citizens who put at least US$500,000 into US businesses in high-unemployment or rural areas that have been found to generate at least 10 jobs per investor.

The bill comes amid rising cross-strait tensions. Beijing has put the squeeze on the island since President Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party took office in 2016 and refused to accept the one-China principle, which Beijing regards as the foundation for dialogue.

Beijing has suspended official talks and exchanges with Taiwan to force Tsai to accept the principle.

Lee Ming-chang, deputy principal of the Lashio Holy Light Chinese Language School in Myanmar, told the Central News Agency that Beijing’s sweeteners to Taiwanese professionals and companies were hampering Taiwan’s ability to recruit talent.

Analysts said Taiwan struggled to retain talent because of low salaries and struggled to attract professionals from places such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan because of the incentives already in those places.

“The bill is well-intended, but employers might not want to raise the salaries to keep those workers,” said Cheng Chih-yu, a professor with the Labour Research Institute at National Chengchi University.

Cheng said the average salary for foreign workers amounted to just over more than NT$30,000 (US$979) per month. Under the government plan, the payment for skilled workers would be between NT$32,000 and NT$41,393.

Chayaphon Mulasar, a Thai worker for a Taiwanese electronics company based in Taoyuan, said he was willing to do what was necessary to get permanent residency in Taiwan.

“But according to the regulations, if I want to apply, I need to start it all over again, meaning I have to deduct the six years I have worked in Taiwan since 2012, which is unfair,” he said.

The council said the proposed legislation was new and revisions would be made accordingly over time.

Source: Taiwan may expand citizenship to Southeast Asia to staunch brain drain to the mainland

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The New Collateral Damage in Trump’s War on Refugees

2018/09/25 Leave a comment

While true that settlement and refugee agencies and organizations will suffer, the main issue is the impact of refugees and asylum seekers:

When the Trump administration announced its intention to slash the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States to the lowest level in nearly four decades, the decision sparked worry among thousands of displaced persons who feared that the nation’s doors were now closed to them. But in addition to the record number of global refugees seeking safety from unrest in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the admissions cap will likely also harm organizations designed to help the thousands of displaced people who do make it safely to the United States.

As the U.S. government slows the number of legal refugees who can enter the country to a trickle, the nine private voluntary agencies with cooperative agreements with the State Department to help settle those refugees must now contend with a potentially devastating budget crunch.

“It’ll have a tremendous impact on the number of people who are able to access these life-saving services,” Nazanin Ash, vice president of policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee, told The Daily Beast. “There’ve been over 150 office closures over the last two years, and that shutters a vital resource in many communities across the country.”

An estimated 25.4 million refugees have fled their homelands worldwide, according to the United Nations—the highest recorded number of displaced people in history. As of 2019, the U.S. will only allow an annual maximum of only 30,000 refugees to legally settle in the U.S., down from the previous record low of 45,000.

“This is heartbreaking for us,” said Melanie Nezer, the senior vice president of public affairs at HIAS, a non-profit that has helped settle refugees in the United States for nearly 140 years. “We have so many layers of uncertainty right now, it’s just unprecedented really… there’s no way that this decision makes us a stronger, more prosperous nation.”

Government grants, provided on a per capita basis tied to the number of refugees assisted, account for as much as 97 percent of the resettlement grants for these organizations. Lower resettlement admissions therefore mean fewer federal dollars—and program funding is now set to plummet as precipitously as the number of admitted refugees.

That loss in grant money threatens a funding shortfall that could endanger community-based resettlement offices nationwide, as well as programs intended to help those who have fled their homes to establish a life in the United States, from housing placement and food support to professional support, English classes and community integration.

“If we don’t have cases for case managers to manage, of course we’ll be reducing staff,” Eskinder Negash, CEO of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, told The Daily Beast. Negash, who served as director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement for six years under President Barack Obama, said that his organization’s main concern wasn’t its financial standing, but its ability to do its job on behalf of vulnerable refugees.

“Our commitment to refugee services and immigrants in this country goes back to 1911,” Negash said. “It’s not about preserving our institution—it’s about not being able to serve those people who need our services.”

When he announced the administration’s refugee policy for 2019 in a press conference on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the 30,000 refugee figure as “expansive,” and said it befitted the United States’ “longstanding record of the most generous nation in the world when it comes to protection-based immigration and assistance.”

Under the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, the president has the sole authority, following consultation with Congress, to determine the maximum number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States, called the Presidential Determination. Under President Donald Trump, the Presidential Determination was decreased from 110,000 in 2017 to 45,000 refugees in 2018, one-seventh of its peak. Even then, the cap is a limit, not a requirement—so far, only 20,918 refugees have actually been admitted to the United States this year.

By comparison, the average annual ceiling has been set at 96,229 refugees since the program’s creation in 1980.

The policy is in keeping with the Trump administration’s goal of discouraging both legal and illegal immigration into the United States, in part due to concerns that immigrants from certain parts of the world would fail to properly integrate into American society. In May, White House chief of staff John Kelly prompted criticism when he told NPR that undocumented immigrants are, by and large, “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society… they don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills.”

But slashing government grants tied to refugee admissions would only undermine the objective of quickly assimilating new residents into American society, advocates told The Daily Beast.

“If your goal is to help immigrants and refugees contribute as much as they can to America society, then you would fund these programs,” said Nezer. The motivation behind these reductions, Nezer inferred, isn’t integration. “The goal is to keep people from coming.”

Advocates dismissed the notion—held firmly by the president—that refugees are a cultural or financial burden on the country, pointing to the government’s own studies that have shown refugees to be singularly beneficial to the U.S. economy.

“The opportunities that they are provided here is received with gratefulness and ambition—you get a chance to restart and rebuild in safety and security—and refugees pay back that opportunity in spades,” said Ash. “The administration has characterized refugees as burdensome, when in fact the opposite is true.”

Refugees, Ash noted, have higher rates of employment than many other immigrant populations, their entrepreneurship rates are 40 percent higher—“so they’re job creators”—and are estimated by the Department of Health and Human Services to have contributed a net $63 billion to the U.S. economy over the past decade. (The Trump administration has rejected the validity of that study.)

“Over 80 percent of the refugees who participate in employment programs are self-sufficient in six months,” Ash said proudly. “Show me the evidence that refugees aren’t assimilating! Show me the evidence that they are not economic contributors!”

A decrease in the number of resettlement offices may even even reignite a family separation crisis, warned Nezia Munezero Kubwayo, a community relations officer with the Ethiopian Community Development Council.

“A reduction in numbers and funding could mean that long-awaited family reunifications will never happen,” Kubwayo told The Daily Beast. “Children who have been languishing in refugee camps waiting for an opportunity for a better future will be affected. Every number that is reduced from resettlement represents a person whose hope is taken away.”

Nezer cautioned that the grant reduction won’t just negatively affect the refugees they’re intended to serve, but may foster a sense of isolation and complacency among native-born Americans.

“Fewer resettlement offices means fewer opportunities for people to volunteer and work with refugees,” Nezer explained. “If fewer refugees come, and fewer Americans get to engage directly with refugees, that kind of starts a cycle where there’s less direct connection” with refugee populations.

“As fewer comes and fewer Americans get to have that relationship, then there’s less support for letting refugees in at all.”

Criticism of the lowered refugee admission cap hasn’t just come from refugee resettlement organizations and advocacy groups. In a blistering statement released Tuesday evening, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) lambasted—his words—the Trump administration’s decision to announce the admissions cuts without consulting Congress, as is legally required.

“It is imperative the agencies abide by their statutory mandate to consult with Congress before any number is proposed,” Grassley said. “Yet, for the second year in a row, the administration has willfully ignored its statutory mandate to inform and consult with Congress.”

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, echoed Grassley’s condemnation on Thursday. “The law is clear: the administration must consult with Congress prior to the president’s determination of the annual refugee ceiling,” Goodlatte, a staunch Trump ally on most issues but is retiring after the midterm elections, told reporters. “But this did not happen this year, and the Trump administration has no excuse for not complying with their obligation.”

Grassley, who on issues ranging from the legitimacy of the Russia investigation to the president’s frustration with Attorney General Jeff Sessions has normally been a staunch Trump ally, has criticized the Trump administration for its rogue determination of refugee admission levels before. In 2017, Grassley joined Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, in declaring that the committee’s leadership was “incredibly frustrated” with Trump’s refusal to consult with Congress when White House announced that it would slash refugee admission numbers by more than half.

This time, Grassley’s condemnation came with an implied threat. Noting that presidential determinations can’t be issued without in-person consultation with Congress by a member of the Cabinet, Grassley let slip that the draconian cuts to refugee admissions might now face opposition from an unconsulted Republican-held Congress.

“It is clear by the administration’s action that Congress should take action to ensure the required discussions occur in the future,” Grassley said.

Grassley’s frustrations have rare backing on the Democratic side of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well.

“This is one of the few areas—consultation with Congress—where there is some bipartisan agreement about the fact that the White House is abandoning past practice of genuinely consulting with Congress on refugee caps,” David Carle, a spokesperson for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), told The Daily Beast.

Grassley’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment as to what that “action” might look like, but Mary Giovagnoli, the executive director of Refugee Council USA, said that there are many options available if Congress is willing to take on the president.

“Congress can push right now for the President to increase the cap—since the president hasn’t actually signed this year’s Presidential Determination or held the annual consultations as required by law,” Giovagnoli told The Daily Beast. “We need to hold the administration accountable for its failure to meet this year’s cap, its policy reasons for further cutting the admissions goal this year, as well as ensuring that the number, whatever it ultimately is, is actually met.”

Historically, Giovagnoli said, Congress has given the president significant flexibility to set a refugee admission figure that reflected worldwide needs and foreign policy considerations. But when the president refuses to use that authority responsibly, Giovagnoli said, “it makes sense for Congress to revisit the process.”

In the meantime, refugee resettlement organizations are focusing on their mission, at a time when there are more refugees and internally displaced persons than ever before.

“The real issue is that refugees—single moms, children—will not be able to come to this country,” Negash said. “It’s the people that matter—not the finances.”

Source: The New Collateral Damage in Trump’s War on Refugees

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Civil genocide: Why threats to citizenship must not be ignored

2018/09/25 1 Comment

While the term genocide should not be invoked here, the fundamental point regarding citizenship rights being under threat in a number of countries is correct:

It’s hard to imagine that something as integral to our identity as our nationality could be taken from us at the stroke of a legislator’s pen or the bang of a judge’s gavelFive years ago today, families across the Dominican Republic woke up to the news that they had lost their citizenship overnight. On 23 September 2013, the country’s Constitutional Court passed a ruling that stripped nationality from tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Long-standing stigma and discrimination against this population had devolved into their complete exclusion from the political community. It has been described as a “civil genocide”.

It’s hard to imagine that something as integral to our identity as our nationality could be taken from us at the stroke of a legislator’s pen or the bang of a judge’s gavel. Yet history is littered with examples. Russian exiles under the Soviet laws of the 1920s, Jews under the Reich citizenship laws enacted by Nazi Germany in the 1930-40s, Kurds in Syria under the “Arabisation” policy of the 1960s, Rohingya in Myanmar after the passing of an ethnicity-based citizenship law in the 1980s, and the list continues. Today, there are an estimated 15 million stateless people in the world – individuals and communities who are not recognized as citizens by any country.

Coming just as the international community was increasing its efforts to address statelessness, the Dominican Constitutional Court decision drew significant attention. Rosa, a lawyer and activist for the rights of Dominicans of Haitian Descent, recalls how “this day gave us the evidence of something that for years we had already felt, but that many disbelieved – the political games of some, the hate and discrimination of others, was proven.”

Five years on however, the problems endure. As Rosa explains, “the majority of those affected by the ruling remain stateless – some are waiting for their documents to be “returned” to them, while others have been forced as “foreigners” into an undefined naturalisation process”. Sadly, this is not unexpected. If there’s one thing that history makes very clear, it is that once you are cast out, it is a tremendous struggle to make your way back in. And those who are made stateless are almost always condemned to pass that on to their children, perpetuating exclusion for generations to come.

For those of us working to protect the right to a nationality, the five-year anniversary of the Dominican ruling is significant – not only for what it says about how readily the situation in that country has become entrenched, but because it is worryingly emblematic of a new generation of global threats to citizenship. Our work today is no longer just about finding ways to “correct” mistakes made in the past and promote inclusion for existing stateless communities. More and more, it is about trying to prevent what could perhaps be described as “citizenship creep”: newly emerging situations around the world where a long-standing claim to nationality is called into question. People who were once sure of their status as citizens are increasingly treated as suspect, included in a narrative about outsiders, asked to provide ever-more thorough proof of belonging and finding themselves teetering on the edge of the political community, with a very real risk of being removed altogether.

A pensioner caught up in the “Windrush” situation in the UK who needs cancer treatment is asked to produce documents issued more than half a century ago before he will be assisted under the National Health Service… A Hispanic man in Texas, USA, who tries to renew his passport is turned away until he can produce further proof of her birth in the country because the authenticity of his birth certificate is suddenly being questioned… Families in Assam, India, who are desperately hunting for evidence to demonstrate that they were present in the country before 1971 in order to get their names onto the new National Register of Citizens – with 4 million people at risk of losing their citizenship by the year’s end…

We follow these and other situations of “citizenship creep” with a dire sense of foreboding. How can we arrest progress down the slippery slope of alienation and ultimately dehumanisation that can, at its worst, open the door to unimaginable horrors, as it has for the stateless Rohingya in Myanmar?

Looking back to 23 September 2013, Rosa says “this day, they buried us alive: it (was) … turned us into stateless persons in our country, the ultimate form of rejection.” As ever more cracks become visible in citizenship around the world, we must pay close attention. As with so many things in life, when it comes to nationality, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Source: Civil genocide: Why threats to citizenship must not be ignored

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Getting refugee decisions appealed in court ‘the luck of the draw,’ study shows

2018/09/24 Leave a comment

Sean Rehaag continues his important work in revealing inconsistencies in decision-making depending on the federal court judge hearing the application. Virtually all reviews of decision-making processes highlight how perspectives and biases (and Kahneman’s ‘automatic thinking’) can lead to such results:

It is a crapshoot whether refugee claimants can get a second chance from the Federal Court to review and appeal a decision that potentially determines their life and death, according to a new study.

“Outcomes in Federal Court applications for judicial review of refugee determinations depended all too often on the luck of the draw — on which judge decided the case,” said York University law professor Sean Rehaag, author of the report released by the Social Sciences Research Network this month.

“Refugee claimants whose applications for judicial review are denied continue to have good reason to wonder whether this was because of the facts of their case and the law, or whether they simply lost the luck of the draw.”

Both failed refugees and the federal government can appeal a refugee board decision to the court but must first get a nod — or leave — from a judge before the case can proceed to a full hearing. If the first judge denies leave, the appeal will not be heard. Sometimes, the court is the last resort before a failed refugee claimant is deported from Canada to face potential risks back home.

Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton acknowledged Rehaag’s study raises some important questions.

“There is a very real fairness dimension to the wide variation in the rates at which individual judges grant leave,” Crampton told the Star in a statement. “This is so despite the element of subjectivity in making judicial determinations, especially on judicial review, where the standard that the court is called upon to apply in most cases is whether the decision under review was ‘unreasonable.’”

Based on 33,920 Federal Court leave applications involving refugees, the study found only 16.8 per cent of the requests were granted to proceed to an appeal hearing and just 7.8 per cent of them were ultimately successful in getting an asylum decision stayed and having the cases reopened.

The study is the sequel to one conducted by Rehaag in 2012 when he found individual judges varied tremendously in their grant rates for leave and judicial reviews.

Since the release of the first study, Crampton has raised awareness of the issue among judges and even considered amending rules to include a list of factors for judges to weigh in applying the existing leave test, but decided it would be better to include this in legislation.

“Given the important principle that individual judges must decide cases before them on the merits, completely independently of any influence by other persons, the court has continued to wrestle with how to reduce the variation in leave grant rates,” Crampton said.

According to the study, from 2008 to 2011, some judges only allowed 1.5 per cent of the appeal requests they handled to proceed to a full hearing while others approved more than 30 per cent of those requests. One judge, Justice Douglas Campbell, actually granted leave to 95.9 per cent of his cases.

Wide gaps were also identified in the outcomes of the appeals, with some rejecting almost every appeal before them and others reopening 33.8 per cent of the cases and sending them back for a new assessment.

However, despite the court’s effort to address the issue, the gaps among judges’ approval rates persisted after 2012.

From 2013 to 2016, the leave grant rates varied from 5.3 per cent by Justice Judith Snider on the low end to 49.2 per cent by Justice Elizabeth Heneghan on the high end. Appellants, who got leave to proceed to a full hearing, had a 1.8 per cent success rate if they appeared before Justice Richard Boivin but a 22.8 per cent chance to succeed in reopening their cases if they were before Justice Leonard Mandamin.

The report recommends the court allow all appeals a full hearing or at least have two judges to decide on leave to counterbalance any potential bias.

Source: Getting refugee decisions appealed in court ‘the luck of the draw,’ study shows

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People Leave Footprints: Millions More Unauthorized Immigrants Cannot Be ‘Hidden’ in Data Estimates

2018/09/24 Leave a comment

For data and methodology geeks, this analysis of different estimates of the number of illegal immigrants of the US is worth reading. But whether the more sound approach will be listened to in the current political climate is uncertain at best:

Amid the current roiling political debate in the United States around immigration, and particularly illegal immigration, there is little doubt that an academic article out today in PLOS Onecontending the unauthorized immigrant population is millions larger than has long been estimated will attract widespread attention.

It is deeply unfortunate, therefore, that this thought experiment from a team of academics who specialize in management studies is based on seriously flawed assumptions leading them to the conclusion that there were at least 16.2 million, and as many as 29.5 million, unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2016.

This accounting exercise departs dramatically from the estimates generated independently by several organizations in and out of government, using variations of a method whose accuracy has been proven successful in a real-world setting. These estimates, tested against other datasets to ensure their accuracy, range from a low of about 10.8 million to a high of 12.1 million, the latter the most recent estimate from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Even researchers in immigration restrictionist groups have concurred there cannot be millions upon millions of extra unauthorized immigrants hidden in the United States, because, in short, people leave footprints that are seen in statistical records—namely in birth, death, school enrollment, housing, and other records.

We believe these new numbers represent at most an interesting academic exercise, but are ultimately greatly off-base and thus counterproductive to the public’s very real need to understand the true scope of illegal immigration and how best to address it.

Where This Thought Experiment Goes Wrong

While we welcome fresh thinking and creative new methods to estimate a population that is by definition difficult to count, the theory articulated in the article has serious flaws, as we explain here and in greater detail in a formal response, also published today in PLOS One. The journal’s editors invited us to write this response, after we served as peer reviewers for the article.

In brief, we believe that the method:

Fails to sufficiently account for circular migration patterns prevalent in the 1990s. Because the government did not estimate the rate of successful illegal border crossings in the 1990s, the authors apply 2005-10 DHS estimates of detection rates to the 1990s. These rates estimate how many people successfully snuck across the border for each person apprehended.

However, crossing patterns were very different in the 1990s than in the mid- to late 2000s. In the 1990s, many migrants crossed multiple times in the same year, or they came for just a year or two before permanently leaving. Back then, illegal crossers faced few consequences, so little deterred them from coming, leaving, and returning again. As border enforcement increased strongly over the 2000s, resulting in higher smuggling costs and growing consequences for illegal entry (and in particular illegal re-entry), people who crossed illegally tended to remain in the United States. Therefore, in the 1990s, far more individuals were apprehended repeatedly than was the case in the 2000s. Applying 2005-10 apprehension rates to the 1990s leads the researchers to overestimate how many people crossed the border illegally in the 1990s.

Separately, they also overestimate how many of those who came actually stayed, by applying departure rates from studies of immigrants overall—not just unauthorized immigrants—to border crossers. The result of both of these flawed assumptions: the authors vastly overcount how many unauthorized immigrants came and stayed during the 1990s. They conclude the unauthorized population numbered at least 13.3 million in 2000, while DHS put the total at 8.5 million. By overestimating the number who arrived in the 1990s, the researchers’ estimates into later years thus build on a shaky foundation.

Is misaligned with Census data. Demographers have long agreed that the decennial Census undercounts unauthorized immigrants. But the 13.3 million number is highly implausible. It would imply that the 2000 Census missed almost 5 million more unauthorized immigrants than demographers thought, for an undercount rate of 42 percent. That is well in excess of even the highest assessment of the Census undercount. When demographers compared the U.S. Census data to U.S. birth and death records and data from the Mexican Census on changes in the Mexican population, they concluded that the 2000 Census could have undercounted unauthorized Mexican immigrants by at most 26 percent—a far cry from 42 percent. Other assessments were far more modest, including one survey of unauthorized immigrants in Los Angeles, which found that just 10 percent said they had not taken the 2000 Census.

Allows mistakes to snowball over time. Beyond flawed assumptions, the authors also use a flawed process. While they begin with the widely accepted estimate of the size of the unauthorized population in 1990—3.5 million—their method for extrapolating its future size quickly falls apart. From the 1990 number, they estimate the size of the unauthorized population for the following years by adding in their estimates of each year’s illegal border crossers and visa overstayers and subtracting those who die, leave the country, or transition to legal status in that year. But in this accounting method, any error in estimating border crossers or those who leave the country—as explained above—gets compounded over time, leading their mistakes to snowball. By the time they build their estimate of the unauthorized population in 2000, their number is far higher than could be validated by any other means. And building from that highly questionable estimate for later years only leads to even higher, and more flawed, numbers for 2016.

What the Traditional Method Gets Right

The demographers who use the traditional method for estimating the unauthorized population—known as the residual method—start fresh each year, looking at Census data and government data on visas granted to legal immigrants. And then these demographers, who work independently at DHS, the Pew Research Center, and the Center for Migration Studies of New York, to mention the most notable users of this method that MPI also employs, double check their estimates against other sources: Data from Mexico, birth and death records, school enrollment records, and other datasets. In this way, traditional estimates have guardrails: They stay aligned with the best Census and administrative data available on immigrant populations in the United States.

The residual method was put to the real-world test successfully in the 1980s, with estimates generated with this methodology largely similar to the actual number of unauthorized immigrants who came forward to get legalized under a broad legalization offered in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

It is also worth noting that while several organizations use the residual method, each has its own proprietary methodology for developing datasets on the unauthorized, and that while these have some variations, their results fall within the same relatively narrow range. That is a far cry from the 13 million swing that the Yale researchers generate in their exercise, depending on which of their assumptions they use.

Over several years, MPI carefully developed its methodology with demographers at The Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute and Temple University. Together, we have been transparent about the assumptions undergirding our methodology, sharing them in leading demographic journals, through presentations at academic conferences, and inviting critiques from others in the field.

It is imperative for the public and decisionmakers alike to know how many unauthorized immigrants are in the country, so that we can determine the effectiveness of our immigration and border-control policies and make any necessary adjustments. Inaccurate, inflated estimates only serve to inflame and confuse the debate, and could lead to poorly designed and wasteful enforcement and policy overreactions.

Source: People Leave Footprints: Millions More Unauthorized Immigrants Cannot Be ‘Hidden’ in Data Estimates

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Maxime Bernier explains what he means by ‘extreme multiculturalism’

2018/09/24 Leave a comment

Worth reading in its entirety for the shallowness of his replies. There are public concerns regarding the values of immigrants yet the evidence we have from the General Social Survey and public opinion research indicates these are over-stated.

But I agree with Bernier that naming parks after other country founders or celebrating national days of other countries, save for exceptional leaders who transcended national politics or overcame divisions (e.g., Nelson Mandela):

When Maxime Bernier quit the Conservatives to strike out on his own, he vowed his new party would tackle, among other things, “extreme multiculturalism.”

Bernier sat down in studio this week with As It Happens host Carol Off to discuss his plan to create the People’s Party of Canada, which he says rejects Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mantra that “diversity is our strength.”

Here is an excerpt from their conversation. For the full interview, listen in the player above.

In the middle of August, you began to talk about immigration policies and what you call “extreme multiculturalism.” Did you do that because you hoped it would generate excitement about your movement?

No, it wasn’t new.

The platform of our party, it’s based on the platform that I had during the leadership campaign for the Conservative Party of Canada.

So I said that at the time that we must question the level of new Canadians that we’re having every year. It’s always more and more and more. I don’t want our country to be like other countries in Europe in having a challenge to integrate their new immigrants.

You were talking about that Trudeau says diversity is our strength, “but where do we draw the line?” … What is the line that you want to draw?

Diversity, it is good. This country has been built by diversity. But diversity in sharing of values? For me, it’s not good. A person that wants to come to our country must share our Canadian values.

What are these values?

Equality between men and women. Equality before the law. Democracy and respect. Tolerance and the diversity.

I’ll give you an example. If you have two new Canadians who are coming to Canada and one wants to kill gay people because they think gay people, it’s not OK, and the other one says “No, it’s OK, they can believe what they want.”

So is it good to have two people having different point of view on that subject?

I mean, do you have an example of somebody who we said, “Oh, well you want to kill gay people, you can come in”?

It would be better to have people who share our values.

We’re not going to move on before you tell me where this comes from —  this idea that somehow we’re letting in people who say, “I’m coming here to kill gay people.”

I’m not saying that. The people who are coming are sharing our Canadian values. I don’t want that example to happen.

Who is it that you’re trying to keep out?

Justin Trudeau is always saying diversity’s our strength. It is not our strength.

Well, killing gay people isn’t diversity. That’s crime.

But that’s diversity of values.

And you think if we had diversity, we end up letting in people who kill gay people?

No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying we must promote what unites us, not always what divides.

I believe in this country, and I want people to come here and to celebrate our country, and what’s happening right now is the celebration, it’s always our diversity. We are spending a lot of money. If people want to keep a part of their own culture, that’s OK.

That’s multiculturalism. You said that’s wrong. You don’t want that.

No no, I said extreme multiculturalism is wrong. Extreme.

What is extreme multiculturalism?

When you’re always doing the promotion of the diversity. For me that’s extreme. We must do the promotion of what unites us.

So where does it cross the line for you?

When you have 49 per cent of Canadians that are saying that we have too much immigration in this country, we must listen to that. And I’m the only politician who was listening to that.

I’m saying to these people: Immigration is good. Let’s be sure that the new Canadians that will come in tomorrow, next year, in 10 years from now, will always share our Canadian values.

What is your evidence that people coming to this country don’t share those values?

I’m not saying that.

Well, you are in those tweets. …  Here’s another quote: “Having people live among us who reject basic Western values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and openness doesn’t make us strong.” They want to live in “a ghetto.” That’s “balkanisation.” These people bring “distrust, social conflict, potentially violence.” Who are these people, Mr. Bernier?

It’s people who don’t share Canadian values.

There is a lot of things that’s happening in Europe right now. … Do you want that? No, I want my country like it is right now, being the same in 20 years from now.

One million people in the course of about 18 months walked into [Germany]. This is something that’s happened because they share a border with refugee-producing areas. We don’t. It’s very, very difficult to come to this country. It’s very controlled.

No, is not it is. We have refugees coming from the U.S.  … In two years from now, we’ll know if they’re real refugees or not. The government is telling us that half of them won’t be real refugees, they will have to go back to their country.

OK, so 20-30,000 come and 10,000 get accepted. That’s a crisis?

That shows that people want to come to this country. I want them to come to this country for the real reasons.

That’s unfair for the real refugees that are waiting in camp and their life is in danger. And these people has to wait because the system has to process these people that are coming from the U.S.

It is not a dangerous country, the United States of America. So that’s not fair. That’s not fair for the real refugees waiting.

You know there’s two processes you’re referring to. One, people coming across the border, they go before the refugee board for an assessment. The people in the camps, the people in other countries, are part of a resettlement program that Canada runs through the United Nations.

I want more real refugees. I want to help the people who need to be helped.

You tweeted … “If you can buy a plane ticket from Nigeria to New York, you’re not a real refugee.” Why not?

I’m showing to people that people who are crossing the border, they are not in danger.

How do you know that’s the case? I mean, we know the United States is hostile toward refugees, so maybe he really is …

What are you saying? Hostile?

Absolutely. We know that Mr. Trump has made that clear that he doesn’t want people from certain counties.

That’s your point of view. The United States, they are welcoming some refugees.

They have reduced their numbers considerably.

So are they hostile because they reduce it?

At a time when the United Nation is asking Canada and countries…

They have the rights of a sovereign country. They have the right to do what they want to do. And we have the right in Canada to decide our immigration policy.

So what are you proposing?

We just want to fix the loophole. But to do that, you have to sit with the American government. And this government right now? The relationship with U.S. is not so good.

In August, you targeted this park in Winnipeg. You said that this is “extreme liberal multiculturalism” because a park was named after the founder of Pakistan.

Why celebrating a father of Pakistan when we have a lot of people? That’s an example of celebrating diversity. We must celebrate what unites us. At the same time, destroy a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald?

This [park sign] was vandalized.

You’re saying that I did that tweet and I’m responsible for that?

The people in the Pakistani community believe that that tweet led to the vandalism. You know that. I’m not telling you something new.

Are you serious?

There’s lots of parks in Canada. Why can’t they be named after people that represent the communities who are here?

They can be named. I’m just saying that it’s an example of celebrating extreme multiculturalism.

The one thing that matters to you a great deal is that you don’t like the policies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and what he’s doing to Canada. And yet many Conservatives are saying that you’ve given such a gift to Trudeau because now you’re going to split the votes of conservatives.

I think that Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau is about the same. That’s what I think.

Source: Maxime Bernier explains what he means by ‘extreme multiculturalism’

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‘If they attack me, they attack other people’: Italy’s first black cabinet minister stands trial against populists she deemed ‘racist’

2018/09/24 Leave a comment

Court case and political debate to watch:

In 2013, bananas were hurled at Italy’s first black cabinet minister, Cécile Kyenge. The same year, a local councilor for the Northern League, a regionalist party, said she should be raped, and a senator for the same party likened her to an orangutan.

It was once easier for Kyenge, an eye surgeon who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to brush off these attacks. During her speech in the seaside town of Cervia, she pretended not to notice the fruit flying toward her, later tweeting, “With so many people dying of hunger, wasting food like this is so sad.”

The Northern League used to be a minor faction netting about 5 to 10 percent of the national vote. In 2014, Kyenge gave an off-the-cuff assessment at an annual social-democratic political event in the northern city of Parma, calling the party “racist.”

Now, that party, rebranded simply as the League, is in power, governing in a populist coalition after winning nearly 18 percent of the vote in March. Its leader, Matteo Salvini, is Italy’s interior minister and deputy prime minister, working to make good on his nativist promises.

Not lost in Salvini’s portfolio is his long-standing effort to obtain a legal judgment against Kyenge for criticizing his party. Kyenge, who is now a member of the European Parliament, said in an interview this week with The Washington Post that she is happy to defend herself in court. She chose to give up the enhanced protection for freedom of expression enjoyed by lawmakers in Brussels in order to stand trial, she said.

“If they attack me, they attack many other people,” she said. “It’s important for me to be there, and to make sure that the court doesn’t accept these accusations, not just for me but for all people who stand up against racism in Italy.”

Kyenge said there is a simple reason she is targeted by the League: “They want me to shut up.”

“I’m a symbol in Italy,” she said. “I’m a symbol for migration, for diversity.”

The League maintains that its opposition to immigration, put on vivid display last month when Salvini refused to allow 177 migrants to disembark from a coast guard vessel at a Sicilian port, is not racist.

After two unsuccessful attempts to open a case against her, Salvini convinced a judge in the northern city of Piacenza this year to order Kyenge to stand trial for libel. The proceedings began last week and will yield a judgment by 2021. If she loses, the former minister for integration could be fined. Part of the judge’s reasoning, according to Italian news agency ANSA, was that the former cabinet minister had implicitly linked the League to Nazis, maligning not just the party name but its members.

Italy, like many European countries, doesn’t collect data on race and ethnicity, though it uses proxies of citizenship and place of birth that indicate that native Italians remain the overwhelming majority.

Still, Italy has been on the front lines of some of the migration pressures buffeting Europe and elevating far-right parties over the last several years. There were 370,000 immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa living in Italy as of 2017, according to Pew.

The postwar taboo surrounding race, a response to Fascist-era laws discriminating against Jews and other groups, doesn’t make race a nonissue, Kyenge said. Rather, she argued, it makes racial prejudice harder to root out.

“I think that racism has a strong place in many of the developments we are seeing now in Italy,” she said. “The racial resentment is the only political agenda of the right wing. They have nothing to talk about if … they weren’t afraid. Because they don’t have any suggestions when it comes to the economy or the international role of Italy.”

Kyenge said she has seen racist attitudes take increasing hold with the passing of the generation that experienced the racial laws promulgated between 1938 and 1943.

“It’s already forgotten by the younger generation,” she said.

Racial tensions have also been exacerbated by the country’s ongoing financial turmoil, she said, as politicians blame social changes for their own failure to stimulate growth and get public debt under control.

But she said she remained “proud” to be Italian.

Kyenge, 54, was born in the mining town of Kambove. She was 19 when she moved to Italy in 1983 to continue her studies. She worked as a maid to support herself while attending the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome and became a naturalized citizen in the ’90s, as well as a certified doctor. Married to an Italian engineer, she has two daughters.

Her political work began in the early 2000s, when she founded an intercultural group called DAWA, Swahili for “medicine,” to smooth tensions associated with African immigration to Italy. She first ran for local office in 2004 and entered the Italian Parliament representing the center-left Democratic Party in 2013. That year, she was named minister of integration by Prime Minister Enrico Letta. The day she entered government, Kyenge said, she began receiving racist attacks.

Now, Kyenge said she is thinking of leaving her post in the European Parliament to pursue legal advocacy related to racial discrimination.

“If I can do this for myself, I can do this for others,” she said. “Racism is a crime. Racism must be erased.”

Source: ‘If they attack me, they attack other people’: Italy’s first black cabinet minister stands trial against populists she deemed ‘racist’

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

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