Change is Hard: Managing Fear and Anxiety about Demographic Change and Immigration in Polarized Time

2020/04/15 Leave a comment

Some good ideas to help people adapt to change, particularly relevant during these surreal times:

What does the research suggest we should do?

  • Protect democracy first. Immigration is being used as the perfect wedge to divide Americans and weaken our pluralistic democracy. This creates a responsibility for its proponents to acknowledge that how we advance immigrant justice has an impact on how opponents of democratic pluralism and supporters of authoritarianism conduct their assault on democracy.

  • Learn from history. America has seen this movie before, a century ago. We should devise solutions to the current stress caused by decades of immigration and rapid demographic change by modeling what good change management looks like and leading our communities and our nation through this difficult period of adjustment with honesty, nuance, respect and empathy.

  • Focus on narrative and culture change strategies. Since the immigration debate is about culture and identity, we must engage in culture change work to promote norms, values and behaviors that affirm shared ideals of freedom and opportunity, as well as human dignity. We must also adaptthe narrative to affirm unity and interdependence, create space for complexity, and connect immigration to broader aspirations about how to uplift all Americans.

  • Use framing to inoculate rather than alienate. Immigration proponents may use narrative frames that unwittingly pit Americans against immigrants, thus alienating them. It’s best to avoid deifying immigrants as better than Americans (immigrant exceptionalism), focusing too narrowly on immigrants rather than on shared identities or shared values (making it about them rather than us), elevating the value of diversity as an inherent good (promoting the notion that we are more different than the same), and making people who are immigrant agnostic or skeptical feel judged, irrelevant or ignored. It’s preferable to use approaches that inoculate long-term residents against fear-based narratives.

  • Work side by side to build a more just America. Efforts to build bridges and bonds must exist alongside and support longstanding efforts to build power for marginalized people and eliminate structures of oppression, including racism and inequality. These efforts need to actually shift the views and systems that uphold racism and othering.

  • Strengthen capacities to build bridges and promote social cohesion, community by community. New funding streams need to support social cohesion all around the country at this critical time. In particular, organizations dedicated to bridging and dialogue work need to be funded and scaled, related efforts need to be expanded in social change and service organizations to influence their organizational culture and impact more broadly, and corporations and government need to recognize that this type of work merits significant engagement and investment.

  • Grow the base of support. Supporters of immigration cannot win by staying on one pole of the ideological debate and relying on a small, activated base of supporters. They must compete for some meaningful segment of white Americans and immigrant skeptics, and fight the gravitational pull of white nationalism, which is targeting this population. There are no shortcuts around the hard work of listening to the public at neither pole.

  • Build relationships across difference. Research shows that meaningful contact between long-term residents and newcomers improves the former’s perceptions of immigrants or of people they consider “other” and that deliberative dialogue and deep listening are effective in changing opinions. Contact and dialogue work, along with robust multi-stakeholder civic and community engagement, are the foundations of strong, cohesive and resilient communities.

  • Invest in vulnerable places. Rural areas, exurbs and suburbs that are more homogeneous are more prone to react with discomfort to demographic change, such as recent immigrant or refugee arrivals. This makes them more likely to feel the lure of xenophobia and white nationalism. It is precisely in these places that proactive investment and intervention are needed to address the anxiety about demographic change and immigration and push for the adoption of welcoming initiatives.

Source: Change is Hard: Managing Fear and Anxiety About Demographic Change And Immigration In Polarized Time 

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

What policy issues will define our next 40 years of publishing? Policy Options at 40

2020/01/07 Leave a comment

Good and useful contrast by Jennifer Ditchburn between what has changed and what has remained the same:

Flipping through back copies of Policy Options from 1980, the year the magazine was founded, there’s a distinct feeling of déjà vu.

There are headlines such as,

“How Best to Live with the United States;”

“The Liberal Vacuum in the West;”

“Canada Needs to be Self-sufficient in Oil.”

“The State of the Legislative Process in Canada”

“Since the election there has been more bemoaning than ever of the structural malformation of the Canadian body politics, with one main party rootless in Quebec and the other almost alien to Western Canada,” wrote founding editor-in-chief Tom Kent, the legendary public policy thinker and journalist, of the two main parties.

“What is worrisome is the strengthened fear that the fundamental reason why it seems unchangeable is that people in both those regions increasingly doubt whether federal politics matter much anyway.”

In 1980, as in 2020, the country was in a period of intergovernmental malaise and coming out of an election. The first referendum on Quebec sovereignty was held in May 1980. The notorious National Energy Program was inaugurated that year, and Pierre Trudeau, prime minister at the time, opened the 32nd Parliament with not a single Liberal MP from BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and only two in Manitoba.

By the fall of 1980, Trudeau had announced his intention to approach the United Kingdom unilaterally to seek the patriation of the Constitution – sparking more than a year of constitutional negotiations with premiers, and mobilizing Indigenous leaders to make sure their treaty and inherent rights were respected.

There is always something bizarrely comforting about spotting familiar patterns in Canada’s past: How many times do we hear the phrase “plus ça change, plus c’est pareil” in reference to our political history? Meanwhile, people who weren’t yet born during the years of the National Energy Program or The Night of Long Knives can reference those grievances and find the echoes in our contemporary frictions. Yes, old policy and political mistakes can cast long shadows.

But here’s the thing: Canada in 2020 is nothing like the Canada of 1980, and we should be careful not to use old maps to orient ourselves as we move into the next decade. Our country is more urban and suburban, more ethnoculturally diverse, and also getting proportionately older.

Susan Gibson, then with Ontario’s Status of Women Council, wrote in 1980 about the hiring and promotion of women in the public service that, “it is clear that substantive improvement in the status of women Crown employees still lies in the future.” At the time, Gibson said there were no women deputy ministers in Ontario, and only 1.38 percent in senior positions. By 2017, women accounted for 30.4 percent of Ontario deputy ministers and about half of other executive levels, according to an employee survey from that year.

Reading through those issues of Policy Options from 1980, a few things were notably absent.

John F. Graham, the late Dalhousie University professor and economist, was the only person that year to discuss environmental concerns.

“We now…face the prospect in the not very distance future of very low, zero, or negative economic growth resulting from a combination of exhaustion of natural resources and suicidal environmental damage,” he wrote.

The impact of technology is referenced, but in the “boob tube” style of the 1980s – which was to bemoan the impact of television on Canadian public discourse. Who could have envisioned the way our lives and our economy would change with the advent of the smartphone, social media platforms and advancing artificial intelligence?

Indigenous rights and the Crown’s treaty obligations do not figure in the numerous articles about federalism and intergovernmental affairs. Although a vast amount of work remains to be done to fulfil the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and to restore a true nation-to-nation relationship, decolonization was simply not a topic of policy conversation in non-Indigenous circles 40 years ago.

Plus ça change, well, ça change.

Yes, we are in another phase of discontent within the Canadian federation, but it is impossible to consider this time in Canadian history without also looking outside of our borders. Where the issues eloquently explored in this magazine in 1980 dealt principally with federal-provincial, industrial and Canada-US policy, almost all the challenges before us today have a global dimension.

While the federal government and the premiers tussle over carbon pricing and support for the energy sector, the overarching question is whether the world’s nations collectively will act quickly enough to curb the catastrophic rise in global temperatures. (The results of the COP 25 conference in Madrid last month bode poorly.)

The suitability of the equalization program and stabilization fund are on the First Ministers’ agenda, but the bigger picture about the Canadian economy hinges on the disruptive forces of automation, artificial intelligence and the impact of climate change down the road. As the federal government’s foresight agency Policy Horizons pointed out in a recent report, it’s unclear what skills workers will need in the future, and also how taxes will be collected as jobs becoming increasingly virtual.

Yes, Canada’s relationship with the United States remains a perpetual policy preoccupation, but now it is overlaid with concerns over how to fill the vacuum Washington has left in international multilateral institutions and counterbalance the growing influence of China.

Even when we talk about the health of our democracy, the future leadership of the Conservative Party, and other Canadian political issues, we have to consider the wider context of disinformation and borderless social media platforms, populist trends worldwide, and the microtargeting of voters through the use of their own data.

Over the next year, we will be re-publishing some of the articles that appeared in 1980, along with responses to the material from 2020. As the current editor-in-chief, I can’t help but wonder which issues just barely appearing on our radar now will be fundamentally shaping Canada in the years to come.

Source: What policy issues will define our next 40 years of publishing?Policy Options at 40

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The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Right Rage

2019/12/10 Leave a comment

Good long read and analysis of populism and the far right. Always better to have some fears for the future than not:

Like everyone in her family and most of the people in the factories where she labored in this town nurtured by the textile trade, Roberta Travaglini counted herself an unwavering supporter of the political left.

During her childhood, her father brought her to boisterous Communist Party rallies full of music, dancing and fiery speeches championing workers. When she turned 18, she took a job at a textile mill and voted for the party herself.

But that was before everything changed — before China emerged as a textile powerhouse, undercutting local businesses; before she and her co-workers lost their jobs; before she found herself, a mother of two grown boys, living off her retired parents; before Chinese immigrants arrived in Prato, leasing shuttered textile mills and stitching up clothing during all hours of the night.

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