ICYMI – Saunders: A better way to manage the border after the collapse of the Safe Third Country Agreement

2025/12/16 Leave a comment

More practical than most of the other ideas floated. The Biden administration’s similar approach was starting to deliver results:

…A new, simplified and better-designed version of Safe Mobility should be launched, in the hands of Canadians in partnership with our southern neighbours who share the same problems. It might be online-only or phone-based at first, and widely publicized among migrant communities.

It would allow prospective migrants and refugees, including those living in the United States and along the road in the Americas, to have their case considered and their background screened before coming to the border. Worldwide experience shows that most migrants prefer to apply for legal programs even if there’s only a slight chance of succeeding, rather than the vast expense and mortal danger of overland migration and smuggling. If rejected, they mostly apply for somewhere else, rather than trudge further north.

A new study by the Denmark-based Mixed Migration Centre proposes Safe Mobility schemes as one of the best ways to end human smuggling. They’re considered the best solution to Britain’s and Europe’s boat-migration crises. I recently conducted a study of migration-governance initiatives for a report by the Canadian Council for the Americas on improving Canada-Latin America relations, and found a big appetite for Safe Mobility schemes across the hemisphere.

Best of all, they could be launched without the participation of the United States – even while the STCA still exists. They’re the best way to take pressure off our border, now that Washington isn’t helping.

Source: A better way to manage the border after the collapse of the Safe Third Country Agreement

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , ,

Saunders: No, politics haven’t become polarized. Only one side has moved to the extremes 

2025/07/29 Leave a comment

Indeed:

…What has especially caused Ms. Harris – and other moderate leaders after her – to be falsely associated with the far left is the constellation of issues and hysterias known on the right as “gender,” as well as the memory of mass protests and riots against police violence during the pandemic years. Although there definitely are far-left activists on both subjects, Mr. Harris had absolutely nothing to do with them; instead, she said little about either, and quietly took mainstream positions on both issues.

But the mainstream has become measurably more tolerant. Same-sex marriage, for example, has become so acceptable to the majority of voters that even Mr. Trump doesn’t publicly attack it. It’s moderate, centrist views, not far-out radical ones, that have come under attack.

This week a study by Vancouver-based polling firm Research Co. asked Americans and Canadians what they thought about “political correctness.” They weren’t asking about Mr. Trump’s ultra-PC desire to, for example, consider removing mentions of slavery from national parks; rather, they asked about “language and/or behaviour that seeks to minimize possible offences to racial, cultural and gender identity groups.”

The results were very pro-PC: Six out of 10 Canadians, and a majority of Americans, said they support political correctness – and in both countries, the pro-PC proportion of the population has increased since 2022.

That doesn’t mean that middle-of-the-road voters are drifting to the far left. It means that moderate, mainstream political views have become more open and tolerant – and therefore hated by Trump-like figures on the rightward extreme. For all the noise they throw at these normal views, it’s worth remembering that they’re the only ones who are polarized.

Source: No, politics haven’t become polarized. Only one side has moved to the extremes

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Saunders: Mexico and Canada fell apart over migration. Could it bring us back together?

2025/06/12 Leave a comment

While regular pathways for workers are preferable to irregular ones, don’t think eliminating visitor visa requirements is the right way to go. Invites perceived abuse and thus contributes to less support for immigration compared to work visas (which of course can also be abused):

…Mr. Carney’s “nation-building” agenda – the accelerated construction of millions of homes and transportation and energy infrastructure projects – will require unprecedented numbers of skilled-trades and construction workers, many from abroad. It’s an opportunity to forge a migration co-operation agreement with Mexico that could provide the incentives and processes needed to restore visa-free travel. 

The G7, given the elephant in the room, is probably not the place to start mending this rift. But the two heads of government should meet soon, and in person, to restore both human mobility and political cooperation between two countries that have more in common with each other than with the untamed animal lying between them.

Source: Mexico and Canada fell apart over migration. Could it bring us back together?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Saunders: Immigration bans worsen the problem they’re meant to solve

2025/06/09 1 Comment

Manage, not ban:

…A complete ban of a country’s people, or a closure of legal border crossings to significant populations, does the opposite. It inverts the risk equation by reducing the odds of a legal, controlled application succeeding to zero. And therefore the comparative benefit of sneaking in or simply showing up or overstaying rises infinitely. In other words: bans strongly incentivize illegal immigration.

That should be well known to American leaders by this point. Despite the walling-off of the southern border and closure of most forms of legal entry and asylum at its crossings under Mr. Trump in his first term and continuing under Joe Biden, the proportion of irregular entries and dangerous smuggled crossings rose. They were reduced to negligible levels in 2024, mainly through judicious use of limited legal pathways. 

The Safe Third Country Agreement has the same effect in Canada: By completely banning entire categories of people from any regular-entry application, however unlikely its success, it creates a powerful incentive structure to make dangerous irregular walks across the border. Therefore, when people seek to flee Mr. Trump’s policies, as they did in his first term, they seek to come through fields, forests and lakes, at great risk.

A restricted, controlled immigration system is good for everyone, including immigrants. But restriction becomes a perverse incentive to illegality, as Mr. Trump keeps failing to learn, if you reduce the target to zero.

Source: Immigration bans worsen the problem they’re meant to solve

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Saunders: Canada’s border is broken, but not the way Trump thinks. Here’s how the next government can fix it

2025/02/24 Leave a comment

Good long and thoughtful commentary:

…There has to be a sensible Canadian space between Trumpist mass deportations and closed borders on one hand, and on the other the current reality of a set of policies and institutions that make Canadian governments unable to control who enters the country.

Luckily, there seems to be an awkward political consensus around this. Both the federal Conservatives and the major Liberal leadership candidates appear to be united (though they might not admit it) around a common set of aspirations: a return to a focus on permanent, citizenship-focused immigration of intact families and a reduction of temporary migration to a minimum; immigration targets tied to economic conditions and population-growth needs; a refugee policy driven by genuine humanitarian need and not by irregular border crossings or opportunism.

Those goals won’t easily be attained with mere tinkering of the sort that governments this century have engaged in. Rather, they require a set of systemwide reforms. After interviewing a dozen former immigration officials and experts, I found a strong consensus on the changes that would make the system work:…

Source: Canada’s border is broken, but not the way Trump thinks. Here’s how the next government can fix it

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Saunders: What’s splitting Germany isn’t ‘anti-immigration’ politics. It’s worse

2024/09/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

…The AfD has campaigned angrily against their presence, and against any German role in supporting Ukraine in its fight against Vladimir Putin’s invasion. In fact, they are explicit admirers of Mr. Putin and his policies, and they have called for a renewed alliance with Moscow; Mr. Höcke proudly shows his loyalty by driving a Lada car. Those views are shared by Germany’s two far-left parties – dominated by former officials from East Germany’s Soviet-backed communist government – which together won almost 29 per cent of the Thuringia vote this past weekend.

Data suggest that Ukraine, and the larger question of loyalty to Mr. Putin or to the EU, has become a bigger issue for many AfD voters than immigration. For example, a poll this year showed that 84 per cent of AfD supporters are opposed to providing tanks and other military hardware to Ukraine.

The AfD likely won’t be part of any government. But they have succeeded in changing Germany’s political temperature. Germany is the largest European aid and arms contributor to Ukraine, but Mr. Scholz recently backed off on these commitments, shifting spending to domestic matters. He’s announced a rise in deportations. And he’s devoting himself to the Sept. 22 election in nearby Brandenburg, where pro-Putin parties, including the AfD, are expected to dominate.

Many of us would prefer a more steadfast and less accommodating response. But we should realize that, in some parts of Europe, Mr. Putin’s invasion has breached the walls of domestic politics.

Source: What’s splitting Germany isn’t ‘anti-immigration’ politics. It’s worse

Filed under foreign policy, Immigration Tagged with , ,

Articles of interest: Immigration

2023/12/08 Leave a comment

Additional polling on souring of public mood on current high levels, related commentary on links to housing availability and affordability among other issues:

‘There’s going to be friction’: Two-thirds of Canadians say immigration target is too high, poll says

Worrisome trend but understandable:

Two-thirds of Canadians say this country’s immigration target is too high, suggests a new poll that points to how opinions on the issue are taking shape along political lines — a shift that could turn immigration into a wedge issue in the next federal election.

A poll by Abacus Data has found the percentage of people who say they oppose the country’s current immigration level has increased six points since July, with 67 per cent of Canadians now saying that taking in 500,000 permanent residents a year is too much.

“The public opinion has shifted in Canada to a point where if a political leader wanted to make this an issue, they could,” said Abacus chair and CEO David Coletto.

“We’re headed into a period where there’s going to be friction.”

Source: ‘There’s going to be friction’: Two-thirds of Canadians say immigration target is too high, poll says

Affordability crisis putting Canadian dream at risk: poll

Yet another poll, focussed on immigrants:

The Leger-OMNI poll, one of the largest polling samples of immigrants in recent years, surveyed 1,522 immigrants across Canada between Oct. 18 and 25. It is one of the few polls specifically surveying immigrants.  

The research finds the cost-of-living crisis is hitting immigrants hard. Eighty-three per cent polled feel affordability has made settling more difficult. While financial or career opportunities were the motivating factor for 55 per cent of immigrants’ journey to Canada, just under half surveyed think there are enough jobs to support those coming in. 

A quarter (24 per cent) feel their experience in Canada has fallen short of expectations.

Source: Affordability crisis putting Canadian dream at risk: poll

Kalil: We simply don’t have enough money to solve Canada’s housing crisis 

Reality:

Housing does not magically appear when there is demand for it. It takes time, infrastructure needs to be built to support it, the construction industry needs to have the capacity to deliver it, and our housing economy needs to hold enough money to fund it – which it does not.

Source: We simply don’t have enough money to solve Canada’s housing crisis

Burney: Trudeau, please take a walk in the snow

Burney on immigration and his take on the public service:

A rapid increase in immigration numbers was touted until it was seen simply as a numbers game, lacking analyses of social consequences, notably inadequate housing, and unwelcome pressures on our crumbling health system. Meritocracy is not really part of the equation, so we are not attracting people with needed skills. Instead, we risk intensifying ethnic, religious and cultural enclaves in Canada that will contribute more division than unity to the country.

The policy on immigration needs a complete rethink. But do not expect constructive reform to come from the public service, 40 per cent larger now than it was in 2015 and generously paid, many of whom only show up for office work one or two days per week. Suggestions that they are more productive or creative at home are absurd.

Source: Trudeau, please take a walk in the snow

Keller: The Trudeau government has a cure for your housing depression

Here’s what Stéfane Marion, chief economist with National Bank, wrote on Tuesday. It’s worth quoting at length.

“Canada’s record housing supply imbalance, caused by an unprecedented increase in the working-age population (874,000 people over the past twelve months), means that there is currently only one housing start for every 4.2 people entering the working-age population … Under these circumstances, people have no choice but to bid up the price of a dwindling inventory of rental units. The current divergence between rental inflation (8.2 per cent) and CPI inflation (3.1 per cent) is the highest in over 60 years … There is no precedent for the peak in rental inflation to exceed the peak in headline inflation. Unless Ottawa revises its immigration quotas downward, we don’t expect much relief for the 37 per cent of Canadian households that rent.”

What are the odds of the Trudeau government taking that advice?

Source: The Trudeau government has a cure for your housing depression

Conference Board: Don’t blame immigration for inflation and high interest rates – Financial Post

Weak argumentation and overall discounting of the externalities and wishful thinking for the long-term:

Of course, immigration has also added to demand. Strong hiring supported income growth, and immigrants coming to Canada need places to live and spend money on all the necessities of life. This adds to demand pressures and is especially concerning for rental housing affordability. Such strength in underlying demographic demand is inflationary when there is so little slack in the economy. Taking in so many in such a short period of time has stretched our ability to provide settlement services, affordable housing  and other necessities. But there is also no doubt that the surge in migrants has alleviated massive labour market pressure and is thus deflationary. Without immigration, Canada’s labour force would be in decline, especially over the next five years as Canada’s baby boomers retire in growing numbers. Steady immigration adds to our productive capacity, our GDP and our tax take — enough to offset public-sector costs and modestly improve government finances.

One thing is certain, if immigration is aligned with our capacity to welcome those who are arriving, it will continue to drive economic growth and enrich our society through diversity, as it has through most of our history.

Mike Burt is vice president of The Conference Board of Canada and Pedro Antunes is the organization’s chief economist.  

Source: Opinion: Don’t blame immigration for inflation and high interest rates – Financial Post

More international students are seeking asylum in Canada, numbers reveal

Another signal that our selection criteria and vetting have gaps:

The number of international students who seek asylum in Canada has more than doubled in the past five years, according to government data obtained under an access-to-information request.

The number of refugee claims made by study permit holders has gone up about 2.7 times to 4,880 cases last year from 1,835 in 2018, as the international student population also surged by approximately 1.4 times to 807,750 from 567,065 in the same period.

Over the five years, a total of 15,935 international students filed refugee claims in the country.

While less than one per cent of international students ended up seeking protection in Canada, the annual rate of study permit holders seeking asylum doubled from 0.3 per cent to 0.6 per cent between 2018 and 2022.

Source: More international students are seeking asylum in Canada, numbers revea

‘It’s unfair’: Haitians in Quebec upset province has opted out of federal family reunification program

Well, Quebec has the right to opt-out and face any resulting political pressure:

The federal program, announced in October by Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller, will open the door to 11,000 people from Colombia, Haiti and Venezuela who have immediate family members living in Canada either as citizens or permanent residents.

But when it launched on Nov. 17, it made clear that only those who “reside in Canada, outside the province of Quebec,” would be eligible to sponsor relatives.

The province of Quebec had opted out of the program.

Source: ‘It’s unfair’: Haitians in Quebec upset province has opted out of federal family reunification program

Douglas Todd: Californians taken aback by vast gap between wages and housing costs in Vancouver

More evidence of the disconnect between housing affordability, income and population:

Last month, scholars at the University of California, Berkeley invited a Canadian expert to offer his analysis of the riddle that is crushing the dreams of an entire generation.

“What really surprised them in California was the sharp decoupling there is in Metro Vancouver between incomes and housing prices,” said Andy Yan, an associate professor of professional practice at Simon Fraser University who also heads its City Program.

It’s relevant that Yan was invited to speak to about 75 urban design specialists in the San Francisco Bay area, since it also has prices in the same range (adjusted to Canadian dollars) as super-expensive Metro Vancouver.

But there is a big difference. Unlike Metro Vancouver, the San Francisco region also has the fourth-highest median household incomes in North America.

Indeed, median wages in the California city come in at the equivalent of about $145,000 Cdn., 61 per cent higher than $90,000 in Vancouver.

In other words, while things are rough for would-be homeowners in the San Francisco area, they are horrible for those squeezed out of the Metro Vancouver market.

Why is that? In his California presentation, Yan talked, quite sensibly, about the three big factors that normally determine housing costs: supply, demand and finance.

Source: Douglas Todd: Californians taken aback by vast gap between wages and housing costs in Vancouver

Glavin: Is there a triumphant Geert Wilders in Canada’s future? Not yet, but …

The risk exists but overstated:

….To object to this state of affairs doesn’t make Canada a racist country, and state-sanctioned rejection of the very idea of mainstream Canadian values, coupled with the catastrophic mismatch between immigration levels and Canada’s capacity to accommodate them all, doesn’t mean there’s some hard-right turn just around the corner with a Geert Wilders figure coming out of nowhere.

But it does mean that Canada is barrelling towards a brick wall, and we should stop and turn around.

Source: Glavin: Is there a triumphant Geert Wilders in Canada’s future? Not yet, but …

Antiquated U.S. Immigration System Ambles into the Digital World

Similar challenges as Canada:

Notorious for its reliance on antiquated paper files and persistent backlogs, the U.S. immigration system has made some under-the-radar tweaks to crawl into the 21st century, with the COVID-19 pandemic serving as a catalyst. Increased high-tech and streamlined operations—including allowing more applications to be completed online, holding remote hearings, issuing documents with longer validity periods, and waiving interview requirements—have resulted in faster approvals of temporary and permanent visas, easier access to work permits, and record numbers of cases completed in immigration courts.

While backlogs have stubbornly persisted and even grown, the steps toward modernization at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the State Department have nonetheless led to a better experience for many applicants seeking immigration benefits and helped legal immigration rebound after the drop-off during the COVID-19 pandemic. Swifter processes in the immigration courts have provided faster protection to asylum seekers and others who are eligible for it, while also resulting in issuance of more removal orders to those who are not.

Yet some of these gains may be short-lived. Some short-term policy changes that were implemented during the pandemic have ended and others are about to expire, raising the prospect of longer wait times for countless would-be migrants and loss of employment authorization for tens of thousands of immigrant workers. Millions of temporary visa applications may once again require interviews starting in December, making the process slower and more laborious for would-be visitors. This reversion to prior operations could lead to major disruptions in tourism, harm U.S. companies’ ability to retain workers and immigrants’ ability to support themselves, and create barriers for asylum seekers with limited proficiency in English.

Source: Antiquated U.S. Immigration System Ambles into the Digital World

Thousands of Canada’s permanent residents are afraid to leave the country. Here’s why

Another policy and service delivery fail:

According to an email from Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), there are over 70,000 Ahmad Omars out there, waiting on their first PR cards. This situation has left them trapped in a travel limbo, unable to leave the country or make future plans.

“Initially, the estimated waiting time for the PR card was 30 days. However, 30 days later, it extended to 45 days, and then, 45 days after that, it became 61 days. Now, I find myself significantly beyond the expected waiting time,” Omar said.

“It doesn’t feel like I am actually a permanent resident until I get the card.”

Source: Thousands of Canada’s permanent residents are afraid to leave the country. Here’s why

Saunders: How the push for border security created an illegal-immigration surge

Agree, but likelihood low:

If we wanted to reduce legal immigration numbers, as Mr. de Haas argues, we’d need to change the underlying economy: fund universities and colleges so they don’t rely on overseas student fees; incentivize farms to rely on technology rather than cheap labour (at the cost of higher food prices); make domestic housecleaners and child-minders a strictly upper-class thing again; and settle for lower levels of competitiveness and economic growth.

What doesn’t work is the entire false economy of border security – as years of expensive, dangerous experiments show, it actually amplifies the problem it’s meant to solve.

Source: How the push for border security created an illegal-immigration surge

Rise in net migration threatens to undermine Rishi Sunak’s tough talk – The Guardian

Leaving others to clean up the mess:

Of Boris Johnson’s many broken promises, his failure to “take back control” of post-Brexit immigration is the one that Tory MPs believe matters most to their voters.

Johnson has long fled the scene – Rishi Sunak is instead getting the blame from his New Conservative backbenchers who predict they will be punished at the ballot box in the “red wall” of the north and Midlands.

The former prime minister’s battlecry of “getting Brexit done” at the 2019 election went hand-in-hand with a manifesto promise to reduce levels of net migration from what was about 245,000 a year.

A tough “points-based immigration system” was going to be brought in by the then home secretary, Priti Patel, and supposedly allow the UK rather than Brussels to have control of the numbers.

And yet the latest net migration figures of almost 750,000 for 2022 show that far from decreasing, net migration has gone up threefold. Many economists believe this level of migration is necessary and the natural consequence of a country facing staff shortages and high domestic wages.

Source: Rise in net migration threatens to undermine Rishi Sunak’s tough talk – The Guardian

The Provincial Nominee Program: Retention in province of landing

Good analysis of retention rates by province:

“The Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) is designed to contribute to the more equitable distribution of new immigrants across Canada. A related objective is the retention and integration of provincial nominees in the nominating province or territory. This article examines the retention of PNP immigrants at both the national and provincial or territorial levels. The analysis uses data from the Immigrant Landing File and tax records, along with three indicators of retention, to measure the propensity of a province or territory to retain immigrants. Results showed that the retention of PNP immigrants in the province or territory of landing was generally high. Overall, 89% of the provincial nominees who landed in 2019 had stayed in their intended province or territory at the end of the landing year. However, there was large variation by province or territory, ranging from 69% to 97%. Of those nominees located in a province at the end of the landing year, a large proportion (in the mid-80% range) remained in that province five years later. Again, there was significant variation by province, ranging from 39% to 94%. At the national level, both short- and longer-term provincial and territorial retention rates were lower among provincial nominees than among other economic immigrants. However, after adjusting for differences in the province of residence, sociodemographic characteristics and economic conditions, the provincial nominee retention rate was marginally higher than that among federal skilled workers during the first three years in Canada, and there was little difference after five years. Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia had the highest PNP retention rates, and Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, the lowest. This gap among provinces tended to increase significantly with years since immigration. Accounting for the provincial unemployment rate explained some of the differences in retention rates between the Atlantic provinces and Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. However, even after adjusting for a rich set of control variables, a significant retention rate difference among provinces persisted. Provinces and territories can benefit from the PNP not only through the nominees retained in the province or territory, but also from those migrating from other provinces or territories. Ontario was a magnet for the secondary migration of provincial nominees. After accounting for both outflows and inflows of provincial nominees, Ontario was the only province or territory that had a large net gain from this process, with significant inflows of provincial nominees from other provinces. Overall, long-term retention of provincial nominees tended to be quite high in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, particularly when considering inflows, as well as outflows. Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia tended to have an intermediate level, but still relatively high longer-term retention rates. Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador had the lowest retention.”

Read the full report: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2023011/article/00002-eng.htm

Keller: Why are our schools addicted to foreign student tuition? Because government was the pusher

Unfortunately, a large part of the visa system has been diverted to other purposes. We’re basically selling citizenship on the cheap, with the funds backfilling for provincial governments’ underfunding of higher education.

Source: Why are our schools addicted to foreign student tuition? Because government was the pusher

International students, advocates say Canada should permanently lift 20-hour work cap

Advocates underline point that international students have become a back-door immigration worker stream:

Advocacy group Migrant Workers Alliance for Change has been calling for this change since 2017 and has been fielding increasing calls from concerned students.

The alliance’s organizer, Sarom Rho, said it has been organizing against the 20-hour work limit since international student Jobandeep Singh Sandhu was arrested for working too many hours outside school in 2019.

“This is a question about whether we want to live in a society where everybody has equal rights and protections, or if we’re going to allow a system that sections off a group of people on the basis of their immigration status and denies them the same rights,” she said.

“There are six weeks left until the end of this temporary policy. Every day matters and the clock is ticking. We’re calling on Prime Minister Trudeau and Immigration Minister Mark Miller to do the right thing and permanently remove the 20-hour work limit.”

Source: International students, advocates say Canada should permanently lift 20-hour work cap

‘Canadian experience’ requirements are not just discriminatory – they harm the economy

Change happening but too often Canadian experience applied unevenly. That being said, during my experience during cancer treatment, there were some cultural differences in patient care, reminding me that immigrants would encounter also encounter differences:

In 2021, immigrants made up nearly a quarter of the Canadian population, a historic high. As Canada ages, immigration is projected to fuel the country’s entire population growth by 2032.

It is often said that immigrants help drive Canada’s prosperity. But if “Canadian experience” remains a stumbling block for newcomers to enter the job market, that vision will be nothing but a pipe dream.

Fortunately, I am now employed, working in a field where my past skills are highly relevant and respected. In hindsight, I would have answered that recruiter’s question differently.

There is nothing alien about my “foreign experience,” I would have emphasized. What I learned in China – skills like collaboration, research, empathy and writing – still applies. And I say this as a writer and communicator: a skill is a skill, regardless of where I call home.

Owen Guo is a freelance writer in Toronto. He is a former reporter for the New York Times in Beijing and a graduate of the University of Toronto.

Source: ‘Canadian experience’ requirements are not just discriminatory – they harm the economy

Australia’s political opportunists have stoked hysteria and robbed refugees of their humanity – The Guardian

By former Minister of Immigration 1079-82:

There was a time in Australia when refugees were heroes. In the late 1970s, when thousands of Vietnamese refugees settled in Australia, the then Fraser government publicised their “stories of hardship and courage”. They were presented as individuals with names and faces, possessing great resilience and ordinary human needs. Giving these brave people – nurses, teachers, engineers among them – and their children sanctuary made sense. When we are humane and welcome refugees, we assist them and ourselves.

Much has changed since then. As Fraser’s former minister for immigration and ethnic affairs, I have watched with dismay the shift in Australian public attitudes to refugees over the past two decades, since the Howard government began to pedal hard on the issue, depicting people seeking asylum as a threat to the Australian way of life. The humanity and individuality of refugees has been lost in political opportunism, as dog-whistling slogans stoked the hysterical, sometimes racist elements of public discourse. Yet this politics proved a winner and over the past two decades both major parties came to share the same dehumanising asylum policies. This is evident in the recent ugly, bitter parliamentary debate following the high court’s decision that it is unlawful for the Australian government to indefinitely detain people in immigration detention and the hasty legislative response.

Ian Macphee AO was minister for immigration and ethnic affairs in the Fraser government (1979-1982)

Source: Australia’s political opportunists have stoked hysteria and robbed refugees of their humanity – The Guardian

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Ibbitson: A demographic apocalypse lies behind Chinese protests and Saunders: China will soon not be the world’s most populated country. That’s good – so why is Beijing fretting?

2022/12/08 Leave a comment

While Ibbitson offers an apocalyptic view, Saunders present a more nuanced picture, noting that:

Population decline will soon be the norm in all but a handful of countries. While governments around the world are racing to keep population up to avoid the higher public costs of that decline (especially in structurally underpopulated countries such as Canada), we’re all going to have to learn to make substantial progress without population growth. The soon-to-be second-biggest country ought to be leading the way.

Starting with Ibbitson’s apocalyptic view:

The Chinese government will probably be able to contain the protests over COVID-19 restrictions. Beijing will probably be able to contain the protests that come after that, which may be about COVID-19 or something else. But what about the protests after that? And the ones after that?

People who are pushing back against excessive restrictions by an authoritarian regime are also reacting to a slow-moving demographic apocalypse, though many of them might not know it.

China’s population will probably begin to decline this year, and will continue to decline every year after that. The country will lose half of its population by the end of the century, possibly sooner. These losses will place an enormous strain on the country’s economy and social fabric. We can expect repeated waves of protests. Maybe worse.

According to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics, China’s total fertility rate (the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime) fell to 1.15 in 2021. That is one full baby short of the 2.1 children-per-woman needed to sustain a population.

Worried about the dangers of overpopulation, the Communist government imposed its Draconian one-child policy in 1979. Like so many authoritarian restrictions, the policy had unintended consequences: For decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese parents had one child. They got used to it.

Alarmed by falling fertility, the government raised the ceiling to two children in 2015, and to three children last year. But the fertility rate continued to fall.

Many countries, including Canada, have fertility rates below replacement rate. (Ours is 1.4.) We make up the shortfall through immigration – something that China, whose population is more than 92 per cent Han Chinese, discourages.

For a variety of reasons – including insufficient government supports for child care, the high cost of tutors to give a child an advantage at school and a stigma against giving birth outside marriage – China and other East Asian societies have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world.

The upshot: The World Economic Forum estimates that China’s population will start to decline in 2022.

“The world’s biggest nation is about to shrink,” the report declares.

Unless fertility rates rebound – and no country in the world has brought its fertility rate back up to replacement rate, though several have tried – the world’s most populous country, with 1.4 billion people, will lose more than half its population over the course of this century, the Shanghai Academy of Science predicts. Another study, reported last year in the South China Morning Post, warns the population could halve within the next 45 years.

This will place an intolerable strain on younger workers. Because there will be fewer people entering the workforce every year, there will be fewer consumers available to buy the things that drive an economy. And this ever-shrinking pool of workers will see more and more of their income funnelled into supports for the elderly.

“China’s low fertility and declining number of working-age population will definitely result in slower economic growth” along with “social and economic inequalities,” said Ito Peng, Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy at University of Toronto, in an e-mail exchange.

“As the labour market becomes increasingly more precarious and divided, and as the income gap continues to rise, I think it will lead to more social and economic polarization,” she continued.

Many China observers speak of a post-Tiananmen Square social contract: After the suppressed demonstrations in 1989, the state promised prosperity if people avoided politics and left the Communist Party in charge.

But each year going forward, the state will find it harder to fulfill its side of the bargain, as fewer and fewer young people support more and more old people in a slowing economy.

Many people around the world will welcome a world in which there are half a billion fewer people contributing to global warming and otherwise taxing the resources of the Earth.

But urging Chinese workers to embrace the limits of growth won’t ease their financial burden. Many of them won’t accept such hardship quietly.

The recent protests are the most extensive in more than 30 years. But they may be just the beginning.

Source: A demographic apocalypse lies behind Chinese protests

Turning to the earlier commentary by Saunders:

The news that China will soon cease to be the world’s largest country, by population, should not have been received as an unwelcome development.

But the projection that in 2023 India will surpass China as the most populated country – a detail contained in this week’s annual United Nations world population forecast – capped a long-mounting frenzy within China’s media and political class about its faster-than-expected shift to a declining population.

Beijing, visibly alarmed by this pending milestone, is now desperately pursuing population-growth strategies that include incentives to have more children and, more ominously, restrictions on birth control and abortion rights (especially for minorities), as well as efforts to prevent well-off people from fleeing to more democratic countries.

President Xi Jinping’s about-face on population policy during the past half-dozen years might appear irrational, if you don’t understand the real source of anxiety. After all, Beijing spent decades alarmed by the spectre of overpopulation, attempting to combat it with sometimes draconian family-control measures.

But what actually caused China’s population to all but stop growing was its shift from being a poor agrarian country to an increasingly middle-class consumer economy. It is now home to about 400 million citizens whose family incomes fit securely into the global middle class (with family earnings between $19,000 and $95,000 a year).

The Chinese Communist Party, as it likes to boast, has succeeded in ending the horrific absolute poverty that was created during the postwar decades by, well, the Chinese Communist Party. As a consequence, China’s population stopped growing quickly for the same reasons that it has in two-thirds of the world’s countries: urbanization, education, greater equality for women and income security.

Why wouldn’t China content itself with being a non-impoverished country of more than a billion? After all, it is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s failure to attain this status that has given his country the population crown. Its female work force participation rate is a shameful 19 per cent (compared with 62 per cent in China) and its share of agriculture in employment has actually risen, to almost 40 per cent (while China’s has fallen below 25 per cent).

So why is Beijing so anxious? To understand that, you need to look beyond the headline national-population figures in that UN report. As economic writer Justin Fox noted in his analysis at Bloomberg, the striking change is how quickly working-age populations are falling: Within a few decades, Europe, Canada and the United States will have more working-age people than all of East Asia.

You might think this doesn’t matter any more. Aren’t we beyond the age when a country needed vast reserve armies of labour? China stopped being predominantly a low-wage export-manufacturing economy around the time of the 2008 economic crisis. There just aren’t that many very low-wage, labour-intensive industries at the heart of major economies any longer; the big growth sectors these days, especially in China, are all more skilled, more educated, service-dominated fields.

But Mr. Xi and his officials aren’t obsessed with the size of their working-age population because they want more workers; they’re obsessed because they believe an aging population, with fewer tax-contributing workers and more revenue-consuming pensioners, will make it impossible to escape the “middle-income trap.”

That theory emerged in 2006 to describe the paradox faced by most countries in Latin America and the Middle East, as well as some in Asia: The very economic growth that got them out of poverty made their wages too uncompetitive to rise beyond the slightly-above-poverty level, where they then remain stuck.

In his fascinating recent analysis of Mr. Xi’s decade-long obsession with the concept, Frank Tang of the South China Morning Post notes that the President and his cabinet have raised the spectre of middle-income traps dozens of times in major speeches and reports. Senior party officials have frequently concluded that the biggest barriers to breaking out of the trap are “the economic impact of the country’s rapidly aging population” and its falling fertility rate – possibly because they know that Asian countries that have escaped it, such as South Korea and Singapore, did so while their populations were still growing.

Major economic analyses of China’s economic prospects, however, conclude that any escape from the trap requires increases in efficiency, productivity and technological innovation – and an end to repressive policies that are quickly driving developed economies away from investing in, and trading with, China. A growing working-age population may make it cheaper and easier to do so, but isn’t really required.

Population decline will soon be the norm in all but a handful of countries. While governments around the world are racing to keep population up to avoid the higher public costs of that decline (especially in structurally underpopulated countries such as Canada), we’re all going to have to learn to make substantial progress without population growth. The soon-to-be second-biggest country ought to be leading the way.

Source: China will soon not be the world’s most populated country. That’s good – so why is Beijing fretting?

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Saunders: How the pandemic may have made government agencies better at their jobs

2022/07/11 Leave a comment

Ironic timing, given that large immigration and passport backlogs in Canada. That being said, IRCC is moving on IT and more online services.

But perhaps MPI should have accompanied this analysis with a snapshot on backlogs in all the countries surveyed:

Chaos descended on governments more than two years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of frontline public-service workers and back-office bureaucrats to abandon their offices, stop meeting with clients and managing lineups, and switch quickly to improvised digital services in departments that in many cases had barely moved beyond the fax machine.

Unsurprisingly, some departments became frozen and dysfunctional, leaving a legacy of perpetual waiting lists, undelivered projects and unanswered calls. But an unexpected consequence of the global crisis was that some branches of government actually sharply improved their quality of service, in terms of both timeliness of delivery and effectiveness of results. The virus forced transformations, in many places, that should have happened decades ago.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way governments have changed how they deal with the process of immigration, settlement and the pathway to citizenship. If you’ve ever emigrated to new country, you know it involves years of day-long waits at government offices, repeat trips to bring in the proper documents, hard-to-arrange appointments with officials, forms that must be handled in person and often years of non-optional classes in language and citizenship. Even for a middle-class immigrant with resources, it’s a complex, disruptive process that can go on for years.

But the pandemic had a striking and often overwhelmingly positive effect on the Western world’s immigration bureaucracies. That’s made apparent in a new study, “The COVID-19 Catalyst,” by Jasmijn Slootjes of the Brussels-based Migration Policy Institute Europe, in which her team looked at the immigration bureaucracies of 14 countries, including Canada’s.

Pretty much every developed country faced twin problems during the pandemic. One, restricted travel and sometimes-closed borders made it very hard to bring in the people who were needed to keep the economy rolling, especially in suddenly crucial fields such as healthcare, eldercare and food production. And two, an already undersized bureaucracy was now working from home and unable to operate service desks, offices and classrooms.

Three important things happened, according to Ms. Slootjes.

First, the entire landing, settlement, integration and naturalization process was moved online. While this created some disadvantages – immigrants often value in-person meetings and the networking opportunities that come with them – these, the researchers were surprised to find, were usually far outweighed by the benefits, which allowed more people to be reached, far more quickly and effectively, across a wider geography and with less inconvenience.

This was particularly true for immigrant women and members of vulnerable refugee communities, who, for various reasons, previously had trouble making in-person meetings during business hours but now could be reached directly, in large numbers. Some countries did this immediately: Germany spent €40-million in 2020 developing online language-oriented integration classes.

Of course, some immigrants and especially refugee claimants have trouble finding internet connections and smart devices. But the speed with which this problem was solved surprised everyone. In the Netherlands, a major new program brought tech companies together with government to give devices to more than 12,000 people. Canada’s tech-donation schemes became far more active, and Ottawa launched a popular digital-literacy program for immigrants during the pandemic.

Second, national governments were forced to work with outside organizations and local governments, who actually have more front-line knowledge. (That’s the paradox of immigration: It’s a national policy area that manifests itself almost entirely at the municipal level.) “In Canada, Finland, Flanders and France, governments were forced to reach out to colleagues in other policy areas to address newly arising issues,” Ms. Slootjes writes

Many countries decided to follow the decentralization lead of Canada, whose settlement and integration services are mostly delivered not by the federal public service but by 500 not-for-profit institutions and local-government offices whose employees and volunteers are able to work longer and more flexible hours, adapt more quickly and work in more trusted relationships with clients, at lower cost.

And third, the pandemic forced government agencies to rethink their primary missions – and sometimes, their entire purpose.

The concept of “integration,” which in Europe had often meant language and “values” education, was quickly redefined around its more important meaning: inclusion in the country’s economy, education and housing systems.

Immigration agencies, which had previously seen themselves as gatekeepers that slowly filtered in the more desirable and well-off people from lists of applicants, suddenly found “a renewed appreciation of low-skilled migrant workers in essential roles,” and often invested in chartered flights and instant naturalization invitations in order to fill the economy’s yawning gaps with such people.

Countries that undertook this rethink are, in this year of overheated recovery, typically having less difficulty with shortages and inflation than countries that stuck to their old ways. And, thanks to the wholesale reinvention of their immigration bureaucracy, they’ve been able to respond better – and with less hassle or controversy – to the millions of Ukrainian refugees they now face.

Few of them will publicly credit a deadly pandemic with making them better at their jobs. But they could.

Source: How the pandemic may have made government agencies better at their jobs

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Saunders: The Christchurch massacre may have had a Canadian connection – but there’s a reason you may not know about it [Rebel Media]

2022/03/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

Three years ago this week, a young man drove to a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday prayers and, strolling through them while firing an arsenal of military-style weapons at worshippers, killed 51 women and men. In the midst of the massacre, he posted an online manifesto that described the murders as acts of racially motivated terrorism intended to stop immigration, using phrases and ideas borrowed from a small circle of extreme-right and white-supremacist publications.

The young man – who we are not naming, in following New Zealand convention – had learned these ideas over a period of months. And one of the apparent sources of those ideas was a Canadian fringe-media outlet – something you may not know, as a result of that outlet’s determined efforts to use the courts to prevent you from reading about it in this newspaper and elsewhere.

Between January of 2017 – around the time he first “had a terrorist attack in mind” – and August of that year, when he moved from his native Australia to New Zealand to begin actively planning the attack, the future murderer spent months reading far-right literature and communicating with people and organizations that had inspired him. By the end of that summer, he possessed “a fully developed terrorist ideology.” Those were the conclusions of a detailed forensic report on the massacre published by the New Zealand Parliament in November, 2020, after the young man had been imprisoned for life on murder and terrorism charges.

We now have a sense of what ideas might have inspired him during those eight formative months. The investigation found that in August and September of 2017, while he was making active plans for the rampage, he made a series of donations to a small circle of publications and organizations. The recipients of his donations, all on the extreme right, had all published or promoted a similar set of then-obscure racially oriented ideas.

One of those organizations was Rebel Media, the Canadian right-wing publisher known for online video sites such as Rebel News. On September 15, 2017, the future terrorist made a donation of $106.68 from his personal bank account to Rebel News Network Ltd. of Canada, using PayPal. Around the same time, he made donations to organizations such as the neo-Nazi publisher Daily Stormer and the white-supremacist organization Generation Identity. It is reasonable to conclude that he felt influenced by those organizations, because they were among the few places in the world then publishing and publicizing the collection of ideas that would be at the core of his manifesto.

Canadians may not be aware of this connection between the Christchurch massacre and their country’s fringe media – and that’s because Ezra Levant, the publisher of Rebel Media, went to great lengths to ensure that it stayed out of the press. Around the time that the New Zealand parliamentary report became public, Mr. Levant launched a series of libel suits against journalists who had mentioned his organization’s possible influence on terrorists and violent individuals and groups. That included a suit against the author of this column for having mentioned the terrorist’s donation to Rebel Media on Twitter, after it appeared in the New Zealand report.

None of these lawsuits have been successful. In 2021, three of them were thrown out by Ontario judges, who agreed with the defendants that the suits were simply attempts to silence the media (or, in legal terms, “strategic lawsuits against public participation”). This January, a judge ruled that, in two suits, Mr. Levant and Rebel Media were “using litigation to silence critics” and ordered the outlet to pay more than $250,000 in costs. In late 2021, Rebel Media dropped its suit against me, too, with an agreement not to pursue its defamation claim against me with respect to my tweets or their contents, and not to pursue any claims against me relating to them.

What Rebel Media appears to have been trying to keep out of the public eye – and, to a large extent, successfully so – was any suggestion that their content could have influenced terrorists and violent figures in several countries.

In preparing my defence around the lawsuit, I found a string of articles and videos that were published on Rebel Media’s sites during those key months when the terrorist was gathering influences, shortly before he made his donation to the Canadian organization. Most have been subsequently deleted from their sites, but can be found on internet archives.

Central to many of those articles is Martin Sellner, an Austrian extreme-right figure who was arrested in 2006 for painting swastikas on synagogues and who, in the late 2010s, made declarations about the “Jewish question” and funded attacks on refugee ships using his extreme-right organization Generation Identity. He has popularized a racial conspiracy theory known as “the Great Replacement,” which holds that people in Western countries from racial or religious minorities are not simply fellow citizens, but the subjects of a plot to “replace” white and Christian people. He is also known for promoting the concept of “white genocide,” which holds that the immigration of racial minorities is a form of extermination.

The Christchurch terrorist was an admitted admirer of Mr. Sellner’s. He corresponded with the extremist repeatedly during those formative months of 2017, and he titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” filling it with Mr. Sellner’s quotes and concepts, including “white genocide.” The murderer’s donations appear to have all been directed to Mr. Sellner’s organizations or those that regularly published and advocated his ideas.

That includes Rebel Media. On June 22, 2016, Rebel Media published a post headlined, “Leader of Generation Identity Austria: We want to stop what we call the Great Replacement,” devoted to an adulatory video interview between a Rebel staffer and Mr. Sellner. The post remained visible until at least March of 2019, and carried the tagline, “Martin Sellner of the Austrian chapter of Generation Identity joined me to talk about Europe’s disastrous immigration policies, and why more people like him are fighting back.” Rebel Media’s main Twitter account promoted it with the line, “We want to stop the Great Replacement,” and a photo of Mr. Sellner with one of their staff.

Journalists have also identified at least one other Rebel interview with Mr. Sellner(which has since been deleted), as well as two other instances of posts that appeared during this period in which Rebel hosts reportedly express advocacy for Mr. Sellner. These were among the few places in the world, aside from the Daily Stormer and Mr. Sellner’s own sites, where his ideas could be found in any detail during this period.

The concept of “white genocide,” central to the terrorist’s manifesto, featured prominently on Rebel Media platforms during the time the young man was planning his terrorist attack. On May 31, 2017, Rebel published a much-discussed article, also later deleted, titled “White genocide in Canada?” which asked whether “diversity is just code for population replacement.” Another, published in December, 2016, claimed that a CBC show “celebrates white genocide.” During 2018, other Rebel posts and tweets promoted the “white genocide” concept.

I am not suggesting that this Canadian fringe-media site was responsible for, or approved of, the murderous violence of March 15, 2019; that is solely the responsibility of the man who committed the crimes. But it is quite reasonable to conclude that Rebel Media was an influence on his ideas during the time he was planning an attack, as were the people and concepts the outlet regularly and enthusiastically promoted during those years.

What does appear clear is that Mr. Levant and his colleagues at Rebel Media have devoted considerable effort and expense to ensuring that Canadians do not hear any discussion of their organization’s potential influence on people who commit horrible crimes in the name of baseless racial conspiracy theories.

While Rebel Media’s legal efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, they do mean that many Canadians have spent three years without hearing a word about what could be a Canadian connection to this, and other, atrocities. At a moment when the online publication of hateful fictions is having an increasingly damaging effect on the world, we need to be on guard against such attempts to silence the media.

Source: The Christchurch massacre may have had a Canadian connection – but there’s a reason you may not know about it

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

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