A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews: Stephens – The New York Times

2018/01/19 1 Comment

Good column and reminder:

Until his dying day, my dad’s Uncle Bern was a communist sympathizer. I remember him as an affable old man with a gracious wife who made a modest living selling antique lace. He probably wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Yet he found much to admire in the most murderous ideology of the 20th century, responsible for tens of millions of deaths from the killing fields of Cambodia to the gulags of Murmansk.

If you’re Jewish in America, chances are there’s at least one Uncle Bern somewhere in your family tree. As the scholar Ruth Wisse noted last year in Tablet magazine, Jewish intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s was largely defined by one’s stance toward one thing: The Party. Historians reckon that Jews accounted for nearly half the Communist Party’s total membership in those years, while many other Jews were close fellow travelers.

Most of these people, like my great-uncle, were deeply misguided idealists who otherwise led quiet and decent lives. A tiny handful of others — including atomic spies Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass, Harry Gold and Morton Sobell — betrayed America’s most important military secrets to Stalinist Russia and did incalculable damage to the country and the world.

Here’s a thought experiment: Would the United States have been better off if it had banned Jewish immigration sometime in the late 19th century, so that the immigrant parents of Rosenberg and Sobell had never set foot here? The question is worth asking, because so many of the same arguments made against African, Latin-American and Muslim immigrants today might have easily been applied to Jews just over a century ago.

Consider some of the parallels.

Crime? In 1908, the New York City police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, caused a public uproar (for which he later apologized) when he claimed that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The truth was closer to the opposite: Jewish crime rates, at about 16 percent, were considerably lower than their roughly 25 percent share of New York’s overall population. The same goes today, when, contrary to much Trumpian propaganda, incarceration rates for immigrants are nearly half what they are for native-born Americans.

Racial desirability? Just as Donald Trump wants more Norwegian immigrants and none from “s-hole countries,” the early 20th-century eugenicist, conservationist and immigration restrictionist Madison Grant was obsessed with protecting the “Nordic” races against those he termed “social discards” — including “the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew.”

Assimilation? This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked, in an interview with Fox News, “What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” That seems to be the general way of thinking in this administration.

Now compare that to a 1907 article in McClure’s magazine, titled “The Great Jewish Invasion,” which observed of Russian Jews, “no people have had a more inadequate preparation, educational and economic, for American citizenship.” Henry Adams, the great American patrician, wrote of “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish.” In 1914, Edward Alsworth Ross, the famous progressive sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, called Jews “moral cripples” whose “tribal spirit intensified by social isolation prompts them to rush to the rescue of the caught rascal of their own race.”

Subversion? During the campaign, Donald Trump said at a New Hampshire rally that Syrian refugees “could make the Trojan horse look like peanuts.” His campaign then infamously called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Similar charges have long been leveled at Jews. Henry Ford accused Jews of causing the First World War. A generation later, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh charged Jews with trying to inveigle the United States into war. Lindbergh was the leading champion in his day of “America First.” Still later, Jewish “neocons” somehow became the shadowy instigators of America’s wars in the Middle East.

O.K., you get the idea. And it’s worth acknowledging there are often kernels of anecdotal or statistical truth for nearly every ethnic stereotype. Jews were indeed overrepresented in radical political circles. Jewish gangsters — a.k.a. the “Kosher Nostra” — were nearly as notorious as their Irish and Italian peers in the early 20th century. There were Jewish students who rallied against the draft during the First World War, just as many more would rally against it over Vietnam.

Yet imagine if the United States had followed the advice of the immigration restrictionists in the late 19th century and banned Jewish immigrants, at least from Central Europe and Russia, on what they perceived to be some genetic inferiority. What, in terms of enterprise, genius, imagination, and philanthropy would have been lost to America as a country? And what, in terms of human tragedy, would have ultimately weighed on our conscience?

Today, American Jews are widely considered the model minority, so thoroughly assimilated that organizational Jewish energies are now largely devoted to protecting our religious and cultural distinctiveness. Someone might ask Jeff Sessions and other eternal bigots what makes an El Salvadoran, Iranian or Haitian any different.

via A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews – The New York Times

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Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

Interesting study comparing attitudes in New Mexico and Arizona:

Immigration policy in the US has grown increasingly contentious, seemingly pitting different communities and ideologies against each other. But a new study suggests that a large majority of Americans appreciate a welcoming policy toward immigrants. Only a specific minority—white conservatives—generally feels otherwise. And the effect isn’t limited to policy, as it influenced whether citizens felt welcome in the place that they lived.

The research, performed by a collaboration of US-based researchers, focused on New Mexico and Arizona. These states have similar demographics but radically different policies toward immigrants. Arizona has state policies that encourage police to check the immigration status of people they encounter; controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio ended up in trouble with the court system in part due to how aggressively he pursued this program. New Mexico, by contrast, will provide state IDs and tuition benefits to immigrants regardless of their documentation status.

The researchers reasoned that these states would provide a reasonable test as to how immigration policies align with the feelings of the public. So they surveyed nearly 2,000 residents of the two states, including immigrants, naturalized US citizens, and people born in the US, focusing on the states’ Caucasian and Hispanic populations.

The work used a phone-based survey that suggested that the state’s representatives were considering new immigration-focused legislation. Participants were randomly given a description of one of two types of legislation, either pro- or anti-immigrant (examples included English-only laws and bilingual state documents). Those surveyed were asked how they felt about the proposed legislation but were also asked questions about how they felt about the state—whether they felt at home there and whether they intended to move elsewhere. The intent was to get at whether immigration-focused policies in a state made people feel more or less at home.

Perhaps the clearest and most striking result is that the state where the participant resided didn’t have a significant effect on the main findings. That’s quite striking, given that state policy should in theory represent the desires of its citizens.

Beyond that, people responded to the proposals as you’d expect. Foreign-born Hispanics, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, viewed the immigrant-hostile legislation negatively and felt positively about the immigrant-friendly proposal. Hispanics born in the US were similar, but ideology seemed to creep in as an influence: conservatives were more likely to view the hostile legislation favorably. Liberal whites also strongly favored the pro-immigration proposal, while moderates were nearly evenly split. White conservatives, however, were the only group that on average favored an anti-immigration measure.

A nearly identical pattern emerged when the researchers analyzed how the proposals influenced people’s sense of being welcomed into the community. Foreign-born Hispanics uniformly felt more welcome when primed with immigrant-friendly proposals, as did liberal and moderate native-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic liberals. Conservative native-born Hispanics and moderate whites had a mixed response, while conservative Caucasians were the only group that clearly felt less welcome in their community when told that the legislature was considering a pro-immigration policy.

It’s not much of a surprise to see confirmation that policies that are hostile to a group make members of that group feel less welcome in their communities. In this case, the non-immigrant Hispanics surveyed shared a geographic origin and likely some culture with the people targeted, so it’s not much of a surprise that they felt less welcome as well. It would be useful to perform a similar experiment in New York City or Northern California, where there are more diverse groups of immigrants, to see if these feelings crossed cultural boundaries.

But there was at least one case in this study where the feelings clearly did cross cultural boundaries: liberal Caucasians felt more at home in their communities if they felt the communities welcomed immigrants.

White conservatives, however, were unique in this study in that they were the only group who felt that an immigrant-friendly community was hostile to them. While that might not be a problem in the more homogeneous areas of the country, this group is a shrinking minority—which may both explain the response and suggest that it will become an increasing issue going forward. Finding a way to moderate this sense of hostility may thus be essential to keeping US society functional in the face of demographic change.

Source: Immigrant-friendly policies make most whites feel welcomed, too

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The lessons Canada should learn from Britain’s anti-immigrant politics: Julia Rampen

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

IMO, Rampen’s piece shows a limited understanding of Canada and Canadian federal politics. Given the large number of ridings in which immigrants form a significant number of voters, all major parties are essentially pro-immigration as I have argued elsewhere (The growing diversity within federal ridings), which essentially explains why Canada does not have an equivalent to UKIP in terms of popular support.

And she conflates anti-EU origin migration with immigration in general and overstates the importance of Rebel Media given the electoral realities (Sun Media is more representative of those with immigration-related concerns).

And while there are significant number of Canadians with concerns about number of immigrants (about one third), this group is not monolithic, ranging from those who are xenophobic to those who have legitimate concerns:

Nigel Farage, then the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), poses for photographers holding a British passport at the launch of the party’s open-top bus that will be touring the UK for the campaign to leave the European Union, ahead of the referendum, in London on May 20, 2016. (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images)

On Jan. 29, 2017, the newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump got to work and announced a ban on travel and migration from a number of Muslim-majority countries—and in the world’s airports, chaos ensued. Passengers who boarded planes confident of their U.S. itinerary found themselves blocked on landing. Protesters and human-rights lawyers gathered outside airports. Security officials, surprised as everyone else, floundered.

Justin Trudeau, though, was quick to respond. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he tweeted. “Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” To date, the tweet has been shared nearly 418,000 times.

It’s the kind of message that has helped Canada become a byword in the international community for a sensible, progressive attitude to immigration. In Britain, too—where 3.7 million European Union citizens spent 2017 waiting to hear whether they could continue to live in the country they had made their home, and where, after a rancorous Brexit vote that many saw as hinging on the issue of immigration, British Prime Minister Theresa May declared that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”—the message was received.

Yet not so long ago, Britain also celebrated diversity, and a U.S. president depicted his Kenyan father and Indonesian childhood as a modern version of the American Dream. Trudeau might declare, as he did in June, that “our differences make us strong,” but there are signs that not everyone agrees—signs that we missed in Britain, until the morning of Jun. 24, 2016, when the cost of missing them became impossible to ignore.

Multiculturalism, Trudeau said in that June statement, “is at the heart of Canada’s heritage and identity.” This may be true, but when it comes to views on immigration, Canada is almost indistinguishable from a European country. A 2017 study by University of Toronto political scientist Michael Donnelly found that seven in ten Canadians would only accept “a few” or “some” poor immigrants, a view most similar to public opinion in France. Most people were willing to be generous to refugees, but only to the extent that British people were. While Canadians were generally positive about the impact of immigrants on the economy—and here, it’s worth noting Canada did not have as bad a financial crisis as many European countries—one in five would support stopping all immigration to the country.

So far, it has been possible for Canada’s political establishment to ignore this awkward squad on immigration. But this may say more about their opponents’ organizational skills than Canadian exceptionalism. “Both countries have large blocs of people who are genuinely upset about immigration alongside many who are quite comfortable with it,” Donnelly said in an interview with Maclean’s, when asked about the U.K. and Canada. “Perhaps the anti-immigrant group is a bit larger in the U.K. than in Canada, but I’d say the major difference is the lack of a British National Party, or the UK Independence Party, to attract and, to an extent, legitimize the fringe right, which is present in both countries.”

The British National Party—a far-right group that, at its high point in the mid-2000s, managed to elect some local councillors—is unlikely to keep Canadian liberals up at night. UKIP, however, is a different story. Under the leadership of the beer-swilling, hat-doffing Nigel Farage, the party charmed its way into TV studios and foxtrotted a fine line between respectable, if anti-European Union, political rhetoric, and far-right xenophobic dog whistles. By 2015, Farage had still not managed to get elected to the Westminster Parliament, but two Conservative MPs had defected to UKIP, immigration was a dirty word, and a rattled David Cameron, then the Conservative prime minister, promised a referendum on EU membership.

Defenders of Britain’s anti-immigration turn will point out that there is one stark difference to Canada: the free movement rules which allowed up to 190,000 EU citizens a year to come to the U.K. and indeed, admiration for Canada’s immigration system is shared by some British Eurosceptics, who say they are in favour of control rather than ending immigration per se. Still, immigration was an issue that united voters across party lines, and against their own party leadership. The Lincolnshire town of Boston—christened Britain’s “most Brexit town” because of the high Eurosceptic vote—experienced a 460-per-cent rise in immigration between 2004 and 2014.

British liberals who reject anti-immigration sentiment, yet accept that after Brexit it has to be taken seriously, often argue that this is because immigration has become a proxy for economic concerns. It is true that in the years between the financial crisis and Brexit, Britain’s Conservative-led government inflicted a series of cuts on public services. Between 2007 and 2015, the U.K. was the only advanced country to see wages shrink while the overall economy grew. For older residents of post-industrial provincial towns, far from the cosmopolitan splendours of London, it would not take a great leap of imagination to believe that there were too many people in the country willing to work for too little. Although at first glance Canada is not plagued with these problems, liberals might want to take note of the fact that in 2014, the country was ranked third worst for regional economic disparity among countries in the OECD. 

Yet there is another bulwark against anti-immigration sentiment in Canada, and this one is far easier to overcome. While the majority of British MPs were in favour of remaining in the EU, the two biggest-selling newspapers in the U.K., The Sun and The Daily Mail, backed Leave. This was no surprise, not least given the same papers had already successfully been blurring the lines between immigrants, refugees and criminals for years. In the spring of 2015, after roughly 1,600 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean in at the beginning of what would later be called “Europe’s refugee crisis,” Sun columnist Katie Hopkins wrote a piece entitled “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants.” The Daily Mail published a front page declaring: “MIGRANTS: HOW MANY MORE CAN WE TAKE?”

Hopkins, who also compared refugees to cockroaches, ultimately proved too much for mainstream British audiences after she called for a “final solution” in the wake of a domestic terror attack. But she quickly found a new job—with the Canadian-based Rebel Media, where she hosts her own website, Hopkins World. (Her discussion of “shithole countries” has already prompted one Canadian reader to lament the “Clown Prince” of the liberals, “Justin Mohammed Trudeau.”)

According to Ryan Scrivens, an academic at Concordia University who has spent six years studying far-right extremism, some Canadians are receptive to a “traditional” racist skinhead message. More common, though, is the trend of being drawn to the alt-right, which inhabits the same, ambiguous area as UKIP and columnists like Hopkins. “The alt-right is watered-down hate,” said Scrivens. “It’s the more mainstream, palatable, and acceptable form of hatred, which seems to resonate with more people.”

While Scrivens echoes Donnelly’s view that the far right struggles to co-operate in Canada, he does identify one issue they can unite behind: immigration. Here, the concerns resemble those in Europe, with the focus on refugees from Muslim countries. “With that comes a (mis)perception that, with an increase in Muslim immigrants, Sharia law will be imposed on Canadians and terrorists will sneak into the country and cause harm.”

One year on from his tweet, Trudeau does not face an obvious ideological opponent on immigration, at least so long as Andrew Scheer, focussed on a message of inclusion, leads the Conservatives; Kellie Leitch, who brought anti-immigration ideas to the Tories’ leadership campaign, now faces a nomination challenge for her seat from within her own party in 2019. But the lesson from Europe and the U.S. is that anti-immigration movements do not come from within the establishment. Sites like Rebel Media have seized on the implications of Trudeau’s “Welcome to Canada” message, calling the movement of people from U.S. to Canada since Trump took power a “border invasion.” Leitch and movements like Canada First continue to depict welcoming refugees and Canadian values as incompatible, and despite her loss, a poll during the Conservative leadership campaign found that a majority of Canadians supported some form of values test.

With his personal popularity ratings slipping, and the influence of online media growing, Trudeau needs to beware an insurrection from below. Otherwise, he may be surprised about how quickly a country’s reputation can change.

Source: The lessons Canada should learn from Britain’s anti-immigrant politics

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Foreign spouses hit snags with ‘streamlined’ sponsorship program

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

As happens with so much reporting, the focus is on the personal anecdotes with minimal evidence as to the degree that the problems are widespread (20 cases flagged by the Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants (CAPIC) compares to January-June 2017 numbers of some 32,000 – number includes children). This does not, of course, some of the apparent slip ups in processing as described in the article and the consequent hardship on applicants:

The federal government’s streamlined spousal-sponsorship program was supposed to fast-track the immigration process for the foreign-born husbands and wives of Canadians.

But for a Swedish woman living in Ottawa, the process has been anything but smooth, with her application being sent back not once, but twice. Her immigration lawyer blames government error. Each time, Alexandra Dickenson’s application went back to the bottom of the pile.

“It’s just ridiculous,” said Dickenson.

In 2011, Dickenson married professional hockey player Lou Dickenson who had spent a decade playing in Europe. They had two children and decided to move to Canada when Lou hung up his skates and retired. In September 2016 they arrived in Ottawa to start the next chapter of their life.

Their children had no problems with their immigration paperwork. But for Alexandra, it’s been another story.

In one case, an officer with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) wrote that Dickenson didn’t include her birth certificate and passport photos in the application. However, her immigration lawyer who compiled the documents, says that’s not true. The returned application contains proof — the birth certificates and photos — remain clipped inside, said her lawyer.

“You should look through the whole application before you send it back,” said Dickenson.

It’s a problem that her lawyer, Kristen Dunbar Tobin, says she’s seeing more often since the government announced in December 2016 it was speeding up the processing time for spousal sponsorships — capping it at 12 months. The average wait time before that was two years. The changes were supposed to streamline the process to make it simpler for families.

‘This wasn’t happening before’

Tobin says her office dealt with multiple cases last year in which IRCC sent back applications erroneously.

The government said documents were missing that were actually there, according to Tobin. She knows because she made copies of the application packages before sending them in. And because, when those same packages were returned by IRCC, the “missing” documents were still there.

That said, in some cases, other key documents were not returned, she said.

“This wasn’t happening before,” said Tobin. “Ever since the processing times changed, something that was supposed to be easier and faster, got more difficult actually. Families are being lost in the process.”

Tobin first sent Dickenson’s application in January 2017. Both times it was sent back — over errors her lawyer said didn’t exist — it meant up to three months of delay. They had to start from scratch to re-apply.

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on Dickenson’s visitor status that was only valid for half a year after entering Canada. It had expired by the time her second application was returned.

‘You want to start working’

For more than 10 months, Dickenson couldn’t work and her family had to live off one paycheque.

“You want to start working,” said Dickenson. “It’s hard not to know what your future looks like.”

It was only after Tobin complained to the government that it gave Dickenson a work visa in November 2017. But she’s still waiting for permanent residency and expects it’s likely to take longer than the government’s self-imposed one-year deadline since she’s already behind in the process.

The family is living in limbo while they wait.

It’s “definitely a frustrating process,” said Dickenson. “Something’s got to change. It feels like something’s wrong.”

Alexandra Dickenson, a Swedish woman living in Ottawa, says the government erroneously returned her spousal sponsorship application twice, forcing her to re-apply all over again. 0:32

Push to submit applications online

The CEO of the Canadian Association of Professional Immigration Consultants (CAPIC), Dory Jade, says he received up to 20 complaints this past fall about IRCC and “missing” documents.

CAPIC complained to the government and says, in some cases, work permits for spouses were expedited. But the delays remain for permanent residency.

“You are in a pending situation,” he said. “The longer this pending situation remains the more stressed, the more unstable situation you are in.”

Jade says he’s been pushing the government for two years to create an online application system for spousal sponsorships to help eliminate mistakes like this. Other types of applications are accepted online.

“Either you upload the right documents in the right box or you can’t click submit,” said Jade. “This makes it very difficult to submit an incomplete application.”

IRCC did not make anyone available for an interview and has yet to comment on lawyer concerns over applications being erroneously returned.

The department did however say that IRCC has no immediate plans to accept spousal sponsorship applications online.

In a statement to CBC News, IRCC says that despite spousal applications being submitted via hard copy, it has been working to improve the process.

“That’s why we made updates to the new checklists and guides in June 2017,” IRCC wrote. “With the changes introduced to the application kit in December 2016 and June 2017, the Department has received fewer incomplete applications than when the old kit was being used. These changes demonstrate our ongoing commitment to enhancing client service.”

Source: Foreign spouses hit snags with ‘streamlined’ sponsorship program

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UK’s Falling Immigration Is a Boon for May, But Not for Business

2018/01/19 Leave a comment

Not surprising given Brexit and the related uncertainty:

Net immigration to the U.K. is likely to fall to 180,000 in 2018, the closest the government has come to meeting its longstanding target of a reduction to the “tens of thousands.”

That’s the forecast on Tuesday from the Institute of Directors. The decline by at least 50,000 is good news, on the face of it, for Prime Minister Theresa May, who failed to get anywhere close to the goal during her six years in charge of immigration policy as home secretary and, latterly, 18 months as premier.

But business doesn’t see it the same way.

Small and medium-sized ones in particular, “will find it more difficult to recruit the people they need for our economy to prosper, resulting in a labor market tightening,” the institute said. “Some firms will feel pressure to raise wages but others will struggle to cope and will consequently stagnate or downsize.”

That’s hardly the picture of a vibrant economy that May’s seeking to project as Britain negotiates its departure from the European Union. But for May, meeting the target — which dates back to 2010 — is one of the keys to delivering on the verdict of the Brexit referendum in 2016.

Her Conservatives have stuck doggedly to their immigration target even as net migration soared as high as 336,000 in the year through the end of June 2016. Since the referendum, quantities have been falling, a combination of EU workers feeling less welcome and less secure, and net immigration for the year through June 2017 was 230,000.

Source: UK’s Falling Immigration Is a Boon for May, But Not for Business

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‘Racial Impostor Syndrome’: Here Are Your Stories

2018/01/18 Leave a comment

Have just included a few of the mixed identity anecdotes but as mixed union rates increase, more people will be grappling with these identity issues:

It’s tricky to nail down exactly what makes someone feel like a “racial impostor.” For one Code Switch follower, it’s the feeling she gets from whipping out “broken but strangely colloquial Arabic” in front of other Middle Easterners.

For another — a white-passing, Native American woman — it’s being treated like “just another tourist” when she shows up at powwows. And one woman described watching her white, black and Korean-American toddler bump along to the new Kendrick and wondering, “Is this allowed?”

In this week’s podcast, we go deep into what we’re calling Racial Impostor Syndrome — the feeling, the science and a giant festival this weekend in Los Angeles that’s, in some ways, all about this.

All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?

Here’s how we got started down this track. A couple months ago, listener Kristina Ogilvie wrote in to tell us that “living at the intersection of different identities and cultures” was like “stumbling around in a forest in the dark.”

She asked, “Do you hear from other listeners who feel like fakes?”

Good question. So we took it to our audience, and what we heard back was a resounding “yes.”

We got 127 emails from people who are stumbling through that dark, racially ambiguous forest. (And yes, we read every single one.)

Here are excerpts drawn from a few of the many letters that made us laugh, cry and argue — and that guided this week’s episode.

Let’s start with Angie Yingst of Pennsylvania:

“My mother is a Panamanian immigrant and my father is a white guy from Pennsylvania. I’ve always felt liminal, like I drift between race and culture. When I was young (20s) and living in the city, I would get asked multiple times a day where I was from, where my people were from, because Allentown, Pennsylvania, clearly wasn’t the answer they were looking for … It always felt like the undercurrent of that question was, ‘You aren’t white, but you aren’t black. What are you?’

“But truthfully, I don’t feel like I fit with Latinas either. My Spanish is atrocious and I grew up in rural PA. Even my cousin said a few weeks ago, ‘Well, you aren’t really Spanish, because your dad is white.’ Which gutted me, truly. I identify as Latina. I identify with my mother’s culture and country as well as American culture. In shops, I’m treated like every other Latina, followed around, then ignored at the counter. I married a white guy and had children who are blonde and blue eyed, and I’m frequently asked if I’m the nanny or babysitter. And white acquaintances often say, ‘You are white. You act white.’ And I saltily retort, ‘Why? Because I’m not doing your lawn, or taking care of your kids? You need to broaden your idea of what Latina means.’ ”

Jen Boggs of Hawaii says she often feels like a racial impostor, but isn’t quite sure which race she’s faking:

“I was born in the Philippines and moved to Hawaii when I was three. … I grew up thinking that I was half-Filipina and half-white, under the impression that my mom’s first husband was my biological father. I embraced this ‘hapa-haole’ identity (as they say in Hawaii), and loved my ethnic ambiguity. My mom wanted me to speak perfect English, so never spoke anything but to me. After she divorced her first husband and re-married my stepdad from Michigan, my whiteness became cemented.

“Except. As it turns out, my biological father was a Filipino man whom I’ve never met. I didn’t find out until I tried to apply for a passport in my late twenties and the truth came out. So, at age 28 I learned that I was not half white but all Filipina. …

“This new knowledge was a huge blow to my identity and, admittedly, to my self esteem. ‘But I’m white,’ I remember thinking. ‘I’m so so white.’ After much therapy, I’m happy and comfortable in my brown skin, though I’m still working out how others perceive me as this Other, Asian person.”

Source: ‘Racial Impostor Syndrome’: Here Are Your Stories

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Religious groups meet to discuss concerns over abortion clause in summer jobs grant application

2018/01/18 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see how this continues to play out, and whether the requirement is interpreted broadly, as some faith groups fear, or narrowly as the government is trying to signal:

On a wintry Tuesday afternoon, in a small conference room at the back of a Pentecostal office building in the Toronto suburbs, 60 people representing Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Christian and other faiths spent two hours debating whether the government is violating their religious freedoms — and if so, what to do about it.

The concern arises out of the Canada Summer Jobs program, which this year comes with a new “attestation” box that all applicants must check off before submitting. The wording of the attestation, which many still find confusing, seems to require a declaration that the applicant does not advocate an anti-abortion position.

A growing number of faith-based groups see the attestation as a threat to the principle of religious freedom in Canada. While some of them are staunchly pro-life, others don’t take a firm stance on abortion rights but don’t want to be forced to take a side in order to apply for a grant.

Tuesday’s discussion was closed to the media, but a few of the attendees spoke to reporters afterward.

Ibrahim Hindy, an imam at the Dar Al-Tawheed Islamic Centre in Mississauga, said his mosque is struggling over what to do.

“I came to take it all in and hear the concerns that people were having,” he said. “We were going to apply this year, and we’re still discussing whether or not we will…Some people are asking, does this conflict with our beliefs? If the person has an orthodox understanding of scriptures, is this asking the person to contradict those?”

Father Niaz Toma, a Chaldean Catholic priest, said his community of Iraqi Christians won’t be able to apply for the grant, and referred to the attestation as a “persecution” of his people.

“We will never compromise our faith for the sake of grants to be received from the Canadian government,” he said. “Seemingly, the attempt is to be inclusive. But the end result is exclusivity, blocking certain groups.”

The meeting, which was spearheaded by Conservative MP Alex Nuttall, featured a panel of speakers from Islamic, Catholic and evangelical organizations outlining their interpretation of the attestation, taking questions from the crowd, and moderating a discussion of what should be done in response.

Nuttall — who got involved due to his role as Conservative critic on the youth portfolio — said those in attendance included representatives from Baptist churches, Hindu temples, Sikh temples, Coptic Christians, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, and many others.

Concerns over the attestation have been popping up around the country, as religious groups grapple with the implications of signing a grant application that includes an attestation about reproductive rights. Some have decided to send in paper applications with their own attestation, rather than sign the government’s.

The attestation requires stating that the organization’s core mandate respects individual human rights as well as the “values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” going on to say this includes “reproductive rights.” The accompanying Applicant’s Guide identifies “the right to access safe and legal abortions” as a human right that the attestation is referring to.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Employment Minister Patty Hajdu have both made it clear the aim is to block federal grants from going to organizations that have the explicit purpose of anti-abortion political activism. They have encouraged faith-based organizations to still apply for the grants.

But religious groups are left with the question of what “core mandate” means, and whether signing the attestation compromises their own religious beliefs. And compounding this is the concern the attestation requirement will spread to other federal programs.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that the new federal youth volunteer program, the Canada Service Corps, also has similar strings attached to it.

The program provides funding for volunteer projects around the country, but the guidelines say the government won’t approve funding for any projects deemed not to respect individual human rights — including reproductive rights. In this case, instead of applicants having to sign an attestation, it will be up to the government department reviewing the applications to decide if the qualifications are met.

Hindy said many of the attendees at Tuesday’s meeting worried that attestations would start to become the norm in Canada, and “values tests” would be applied to more federal programs.

“For example, we’ve seen in Quebec with the niqab issue where the government there said, ‘We don’t like the niqab, so if you wear the niqab you don’t get access to any public service,’” he said. “We’ve seen these kind of values tests before, and they’re not in the spirit, I believe, of what Canada’s all about.”

Source: Religious groups meet to discuss concerns over abortion clause in summer jobs grant application

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Trump’s revenge on California: The Census – POLITICO

2018/01/18 Leave a comment

The US Census and the fear regarding the possible  impact of the addition of a citizenship question on California and other states:

Fear is rising among Democrats over the prospect that President Donald Trump’s hard line on immigration might ultimately cost California a seat in Congress during the upcoming round of reapportionment.

Top Democrats here are increasingly worried the administration’s restrictive policies — and the potential inclusion of a question about citizenship on the next U.S. census — could scare whole swaths of California’s large immigrant population away from participating in the decennial count, resulting in an undercount that could cost the state billions of dollars in federal funding over the next decade and, perhaps, the loss of one of its 53 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The fears are well-founded: According to the population formula used by Congress to distribute House seats every 10 years, California is currently on the bubble in 2020, on the verge of losing a seat for the first time in its history.

California’s Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, on Wednesday proposed spending more than $40 million on the state’s own census-related outreach efforts to avoid that fate.

“There’s a lot of fear” about the census count, said Paul Mitchell of Political Data Inc., the voter data firm used by both Republicans and Democrats in California. “The state is starting to get together resources, because it does have an actual direct impact … on state revenues if we have a severe undercount.”

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla told POLITICO the Trump administration’s management of the census could have “devastating effects” on his state.

“The citizenship question is just the latest red flag — maybe one of the biggest — but just the latest red flag,” Padilla said.

Angst about the 2020 census took hold nationally long before the Justice Department urged the U.S. Census Bureau last month to ask people about their citizenship, a request first reported by ProPublica. The bureau has been hampered by management questions and funding shortages that voting-rights advocates fear could hinder efforts to reach immigrants and other hard-to-count groups.

Those populations are especially prevalent in California. And even before Trump’s latest broadside at immigrant communities — asking why the United States should admit people from “shithole countries” — Democrats and voting-rights advocates warned that Trump’s rhetoric on immigration could chill participation.

“It’s already a toxic environment coming forward from D.C.,” said Daniel Zingale, of the nonpartisan advocacy group The California Endowment. “When you add up all of these things — the abandonment of competent leadership, the proposed citizenship question, the hostile environment toward a state like ours and our diverse population, it is perceived here as a less than act of good faith coming from Washington, D.C.”

Zingale added, “I think Californians have never felt less represented in the national capital than we’re feeling right now.”

According to a study last month by Virginia-based Election Data Services, California could come “very close” to losing a congressional seat following the 2020 census regardless of immigrant participation in the count, a result of the state’s flattening population growth.

Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and Texas could all gain seats, according to the study, while eight or nine states, including New York, Illinois and West Virginia, could each lose one.

Yet uncertainty about demographic changes and the Trump administration’s handling of the census continues to cloud those projections. Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, cautioned in a prepared statement that “the change in administration and the lack of a Census Director could have a profound impact on how well the 2020 Census is conducted, and therefore the counts that are available for apportionment.”

The prospect of losing a congressional seat is a familiar predicament in Rust Belt states. But it’s unheard of in California, which has added 42 House seats since 1920 due to nearly nonstop population growth. In such a solidly blue state, the loss of a seat would have a disproportionate impact on the Democratic Party.

“If millions of non-citizens refuse to participate in the US Census, the Democrats will take [a] massive political beating,” Tony Quinn, a political analyst and former Republican legislative aide, wrote in the Fox & Hounds political blog last week. “That’s because electoral districts must be drawn based on population. The non-citizen population resides in heavily Democratic areas; if they are not counted, those areas will not have sufficient population to support Democratic congressional and legislative districts, especially in the big cities.”

Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist, accused the White House of “trying to turn [the census] into essentially a gerrymandering process.”

The Trump administration has not yet moved to add a citizenship question to the census. And many Republicans, who have long called for its inclusion, downplayed concerns about a significant undercount in California or any other state.

Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney and member of the Republican National Committee, said that “by the time we have to get closer to actually performing [the census] … this is the type of thing where there’s a legion of bureaucrats who are tasked with doing this” and “it gets done somehow.”

In a state where Democrats control every statewide office and overwhelming majorities in the Legislature, Dhillon said Democrats can only blame themselves if California loses a House seat. More people would come to California or stay here, she said, if taxes and other regulatory burdens were not so high.

Taking aim at one liberal firebrand, Dhillon said, “My only request is if we end up losing a seat, if it could be taken from Maxine Waters’ congressional district.”

The results of the 2020 census on California’s congressional representation (which could also mean the loss of a vote in the Electoral College) will not be felt until after the next presidential election — an eternity in politics. But California politicians are acutely aware of the significance of the count, having been stung by the census before.

Following the 1990 census, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that a higher undercount in California than in other states — with difficulty counting non-white people, young people and renters, among others — “likely cost California one seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and at least $2 billion in federal funds during the 1990s.”

Ten years later, the state undertook a more aggressive outreach effort of its own. In an effort similar to what California Democrats are contemplating today, the state employed local organizations to promote the census in their communities and financed a multilingual, multimedia advertising campaign.

via Trump’s revenge on California: The Census – POLITICO

 

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Toronto Sun editorial: Learning from the hijab hoax

2018/01/18 Leave a comment

Unfortunately in the era of social media, immediate responses are required. However, the suggested disclaimer – “If what has been alleged is true” – is sound advice:

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and Toronto Mayor John Tory didn’t say it, we will.

The problem with Toronto’s now infamous hijab hoax is that it will make Muslims and others who are actual victims of hate crimes more afraid to come forward for fear of not being believed.

And it will make the public more cynical about the reporting of hate crimes.

We aren’t going to fault the prime minister, the premier or the mayor for assuming the initial report of an 11-year-old child describing how she had been attacked by an “Asian man” who twice tried to cut her hijab with scissors was true.

Many people believed it was true. We reported it on our front page.

But once Toronto police said, following their investigation, that no attack had occurred, it was incumbent on Trudeau, Wynne and Tory to stress the dangers of anyone falsely claiming to be the victim of a hate crime, or for that matter any crime.

Instead, they ran for cover, saying only that they were glad that no attack had occurred but that it was important to continue to be vigilant about fighting hatred and racism.

Of course it’s important to fight hatred and racism, but that’s not the lesson to be learned from what happened in this case.

The lesson in this case is that when a school board and municipal, provincial and federal politicians leap to conclusions before all the facts are known, the revelations of those facts can lead to the very thing they hoped to avoid — public cynicism about the reporting of hate crimes.

When the media wrongly identify a member of a minority group as the perpetrator of a crime, politicians are the first to condemn them.

Why then their silence when they wrongly identify a member of minority group as the victim of a crime?

The next time a crime of this nature is alleged, we suggest our political leaders say words to the effect of: “If what has been alleged is true, it’s completely unacceptable in our city (or province, or country) and we are confident the police will treat this matter seriously and investigate it thoroughly.”

Which, by the way, is exactly what happened.

Source: EDITORIAL: Learning from the hijab hoax

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‘No longer a citizen’: Government letter tells mom of 4 she’s not Canadian | CBC News

2018/01/18 2 Comments

IRCC has to do better in these cases, both substantively as well in their communications with those who fell between the cracks. The Mennonite Central Committee, referred to in the article, has been productive and helpful in resolving comparable cases:

Anneliese Demos thought she was a Canadian until she got a letter in the mail last Friday.

The 39-year-old Winnipeg woman has four kids, has been married for 19 years, works two full-time jobs and pays taxes every year.

“My life is here.”

She came to Canada when she was just two years old and still has the government-issued citizenship card she received when her parents moved to Steinbach, Man. from Paraguay in 1980.

“This is my home. It’s Canada. I’ve lived here all my life,” she said.
But the government has informed Anneliese she’s in fact not a Canadian citizen and has cancelled the certificate that had proved she was.

“I have determined that you are not entitled to hold a Canadian citizenship certificate,” reads a letter from Citizenship and Immigration Canada dated Dec. 22, 2017.

The letter from the registrar of citizenship then asks for Demos to return her citizenship certificate to the citizenship and passport division in Ottawa.

“It kind of makes you worry, like what are they going to do to me?” Demos said.

2009 law repeal wasn’t retroactive

Anneliese is a so-called “Lost Canadian” due to a law that required second-generation Canadians who were born outside Canada to re-apply for citizenship before turning 28.
The Harper government repealed the law in 2009 but didn’t make it retroactive, meaning it was too late for anyone who missed the deadline before their 28th birthday. It is an issue that has affected many Mennonites such as Anneliese.

Many people, including Anneliese, weren’t even aware of the law.

Advocate says hardship ‘so unnecessary’

Bill Janzen, ​retired ​director of the Ottawa office of the Mennonite Central Committee, said ​he’s worked on more than 200 Lost Canadian cases since retiring in 2008.

​That’s usually meant doing extensive research into a person’s past, searching for records that prove where they went to school and lived and then taking the case with a plea to Canada’s immigration minister asking citizenship be granted due to unusual or special hardship.

To do that, it’s meant looking for documentation that doesn’t always exist anymore, especially for Mennonites who went to school in one-room country schools. “It just seemed so unnecessary that one had to deal with this on an individual basis in such detail when there could have been and should have been a global solution,” Janzen said.

Anneliese’s problems began in 2012 when she tried to get a passport to travel as a celebration of beating breast cancer. Anneliese said a clerk advised her she might have an issue because of her birth year and home country.

Officials denied her passport application and sent her a proof of citizenship form to fill out. She completed it and received a certificate and letter in the mail telling her she was a Canadian citizen, and allowing her to get a passport. She thought the issue was resolved until last Friday.

“Just when you thought it was fixed then you’re like, ‘oh now you’re like no longer a citizen.'”

Anneliese said two out of her six siblings have also had the same problem. Her sister was able to get it fixed after three years but her brother is still in limbo and she said a cousin was deported for two months because of similar circumstances. “It’s stupid,” she said.

Anneliese worries she may now be deported back to Paraguay even though she hasn’t been there since she was two. “We don’t know that family from a hole in the wall.”

‘I don’t even dare try to leave the country’

Her passport is set to expire in April but she fears she wouldn’t even be able to get back in Canada if she tried to use it.

“I don’t even dare try to leave the country.”

Her husband is worried, too.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do [if Anneliese is deported], like who would drive the kids to school?” said John Demos.

Anneliese is planning on holding on to the proof of citizenship document issued in 2012 the government now wants back. “I’m tempted to keep it.”

​Janzen said he had hope the Liberal government would fix the problem but nothing changed.

“I thought we could go somewhere but we didn’t.”​

Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, holds a news conference to update Canadians on the possible impacts of recent immigration-related decisions made by President Donald Trump, in Ottawa on Sunday, January 29, 2017. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

Janzen has spent years working on this issue and said government staffers were aware of the problem — and hoped to fix it years ago — but they were too late.

​”The officials then told me that ‘we know it would be a mess and we hope to abolish this provision before anyone turns 28 under it.'”

Government aware of problem

The Liberal government is aware of people who have lost or never been able to get citizenship due to the issue and is considering making legal changes, said Jaswal Hursh, a spokesperson for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen.

Hursh said “a small number of affected individuals remain” and the government encourages people with similar stories to come forward as they are being dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The government didn’t respond to questions about how Anneliese was able to obtain a Canadian passport if she wasn’t considered a Canadian citizen.

via ‘No longer a citizen’: Government letter tells mom of 4 she’s not Canadian | CBC News

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