emigration | Multicultural Meanderings

Demand for French Citizenship Soars Among Israelis After …

2023/01/14 Leave a comment

Of interest. More than just general interest given applications, not just enquiries, as was largely the case with many Americans following the Trump 2016 election:

The French embassy in Israel has witnessed a 13 per cent increase in applications for citizenship, following the November elections where the most-right wing and religious government the country has seen so far, was installed.

According to Zaman Israel, a total of 1,210 applications recorded in October reached 1,365 in November, with data for December anticipated to be even higher. The French Embassy in Israel said that nearly 60 per cent of those applying for citizenship are doing so for the first time. This is the highest rate for Israelis seeking French citizenship ever recorded, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

A source further reveals applications for French citizenship among Israelis have increased by almost 45 per cent compared to last year, with this share risking to be higher if the COVID-19 pandemic wouldn’t occur in 2021.

However, the demand for foreign citizenship among Israelis is noticed in other EU countries too, especially in Portugal. According to Dror Hayek, owner of a law firm designated to obtain Portuguese citizenship, the authorities in Portugal have recorded a 68 per cent increase in such applications. In October, a total of 100 applications were filed, with these rates reaching 168 in the following month.

He also pointed out the number of applications sixfold on the day after the election and nearly 115 applications were filed during December.

Since 2013, descendants of Sephardic Jews were eligible for naturalization in Portugal, following passed legislation that intended to welcome back those that were subject to Inquisition in Spain and Portugal during the 16th century. During this period, thousands of Jews were forced to emigrate or hide their Jewish identity.

However, due to a controversy over how Jewish Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich was able to obtain citizenship in Portugal, the government suspended the law and authorities are only processing past applications.

“From April to September, there was a mad rush for Portuguese passports in order to have time to issue them before the law changed. Since September, we have been working only on the promotion of old applications and granting citizenship to spouses and children,” Hayek noted.

On the other hand, the number of applications for German citizenship, as Toti Eschbel, a lawyer specializing in European citizenship pointed out, rose by ten per cent in the last two months. Similarly, a ten per cent increase in applications for Polish citizenship has been reported by experts on the field, while the Romanian embassy says no noticeable increases have been recorded but the rates for Romanian citizenship were always high as there is a significant number of Israelis of Romanian origin and rights to Romanian citizenship.

Source: Demand for French Citizenship Soars Among Israelis After …

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with emigration, Europe, Israel

The Quiet Flight of Muslims From France

2022/02/15 Leave a comment

Of interest. Haven’t found any comparable data for Canada but will check the 2021 census data when it comes out (which will have religious affiliation data):

France’s wounded psyche is the invisible character in every one of Sabri Louatah’s novels and the hit television series he wrote. He speaks of his “sensual, physical, visceral love” for the French language and of his attachment to his hometown in southeastern France, bathed in its distinctive light. He closely monitors the campaign for the upcoming presidential elections.

But Mr. Louatah does all of that from Philadelphia, the city that he began considering home after the 2015 attacks in France by Islamist extremists, which killed scores of people and deeply traumatized the country. As sentiments hardened against all French Muslims, he no longer felt safe there. One day, he was spat on and called, “Dirty Arab.”

“It’s really the 2015 attacks that made me leave because I understood they were not going to forgive us,” said Mr. Louatah, 38, the grandson of Muslim immigrants from Algeria. “When you live in a big Democratic city on the East Coast, you’re more at peace than in Paris, where you’re deep in the cauldron.”

Ahead of elections in April, President Emmanuel Macron’s top three rivals — who are expected to account for nearly 50 percent of the vote, according to polls — are all running anti-immigrant campaigns that fan fears of a nation facing a civilizational threat by invading non-Europeans. The issue is top of their agenda, even though France’s actual immigration lags behind that of most other European countries.

The problem barely discussed is emigration. For years, France has lost highly educated professionals seeking greater dynamism and opportunity elsewhere. But among them, according to academic researchers, is a growing number of French Muslims who say that discrimination was a strong push factor and that they felt compelled to leave by a glass ceiling of prejudice, nagging questions about their security and a feeling of not belonging.

The outflow has gone unremarked upon by politicians and the news media even as researchers say it shows France’s failure to provide a path for advancement for even the most successful of its largest minority group, a “brain drain” of those who could have served as models of integration.

“These people end up contributing to the economy of Canada or Britain,” said Olivier Esteves, a professor at the University of Lille’s center on political science, public law and sociology, which surveyed 900 French Muslim émigrés and conducted in-depth interviews with 130 of them. “France is really shooting itself in the foot.”

French Muslims, estimated at 10 percent of the population, occupy a strangely outsize place in the campaign — even if their actual voices are seldom heard. It is not only an indication of the lingering wounds inflicted by the attacks of 2015 and 2016, which killed hundreds, but also of France’s long struggle over identity issues and its unresolved relationship with its former colonies.

They are being linked to crime or other social ills through dog-whistle expressions like “zones of non-France,” used by Valérie Pécresse, the center-right candidate now tied with the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, for second place behind Mr. Macron. They are singled out for condemnation by the far-right television pundit and candidate Éric Zemmour, who has said that employers have the right to deny jobs to Black and Arab people.

The tenor of the race has stoked dread as they watch it from abroad, say Mr. Louatah and others who have left, speaking with a mix of anger and resignation of their home country, where they still have family and other strong ties.

The places he and others have settled, including Britain and the United States, are not paradises free of discrimination for Muslims or other minority groups, but those interviewed said they nevertheless felt greater opportunity and acceptance there. It was outside France that, for the first time, the simple fact that they are French was not questioned, some said.

“It’s only abroad that I’m French,” said Amar Mekrous, 46, who was raised in a Paris suburb by his immigrant parents. “I’m French, I’m married to a Frenchwoman, I speak French, I live French, I love French food and culture. But in my own country, I’m not French.”

Finding the suspicion surrounding French Muslims oppressive after the 2015 attacks, Mr. Mekrous settled with his wife and three children in Leicester, England.

In 2016, he created a Facebook group for French Muslims in Britain, which now has 2,500 members. Newcomers to Britain surged before Brexit, he said, adding that they were mostly young families and single mothers who found it difficult to find jobs in France because they wore the Muslim veil.

Only recently have academic researchers begun to form snapshots of French Muslims who have left. They include the research project into the emigration of French Muslims led by academics affiliated with the University of Lille, a leading French university, and the National Center for Scientific Research, the French government’s main research institution.

Separately, researchers at three other universities — the University of Liège and K.U. Leuven in Belgium, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands — have been working on a joint project looking at the emigration of Muslims from France, as well as from Belgium and the Netherlands.

Jérémy Mandin, a French researcher involved in the study at the University of Liège in Belgium, said that many young French Muslims had been disillusioned “that they had played by the rules, done everything that was asked of them, and ultimately been unable to lead a desirable life.”

Elyes Saafi, 37, a marketing executive at the London operations of StoneX, an American financial firm, grew up in Remiremont, a town in eastern France, where his parents settled after arriving from Tunisia in the 1970s. His father operated a spinning machine at a textile factory.

Like his own parents, Mr. Saafi ended up making a new life in a new country. In London, he met his wife, Mathilde, who is French, and found an easygoing diversity unimaginable in France.

“At corporate dinners, there might be a vegetarian buffet or a halal buffet, but everybody mingles,” he said. “The C.E.O. shows up and he has a turban on his head, and he mixes with his employees.”

The Saafis miss France, but they decided not to return partly because of worries about their 2-year-old son.

“In Britain, I’m not worried about raising an Arab child,” Ms. Saafi said.

In 2020, anti-Muslim acts in France rose 52 percent over the previous year, according to official complaints gathered by the government’s National Human Rights Commission. Incidents have risen in the past decade, rising sharply in 2015. A rare official investigation in 2017 found that young men perceived as Arab or Black were 20 times more likely to have their identities checked by the police.

In the workplace, job candidates with an Arab name had 32 percent less chance of being called for an interview, according to a government report released in November.

Despite her degrees in European law and project management, Myriam Grubo, 31, said she was never able to find a job in France. After a half-dozen years abroad — first in Geneva at the World Health Organization and then in Senegal at the Pasteur Institute of Dakar — she is back in Paris with her parents. She is looking for work — abroad.

“To feel like a stranger in my country is a problem,” she said, adding that she just “wanted to be left alone” to practice her faith.

Rama Yade, a junior minister for human rights during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, said that France’s denial of problems like police violence had made matters worse. She saw the current backlash in France against “wokisme” — or supposedly “woke” American ideas on social justice — as “nothing else but a pretext to no longer fight discrimination.”

When Ms. Yade — born in Senegal in a Muslim family — was appointed a junior government minister in 2007, she believed it would be a “starting point.” But after an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2017, she left for the United States.

“My glass ceiling was political,” said Ms. Yade, 45, who is now senior director of Africa at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

To her, the presidential race’s focus on immigration was the “consecration of 20 years of deterioration” in a political culture obsessed with national identity. She had quit her political party — for which Ms. Pécresse is now the candidate — because, Ms. Yade said, it had become “very hostile to anything that did not represent a fantasy version of French identity.”

Mr. Louatah, the writer in Philadelphia, whose French wife is an economist and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, said he hoped to return one day to the country that fills his novels. When the television series based on his work, “The Savages,” was broadcast in 2019, it became an immediate hit for the company behind it, Canal Plus — and an unusual one, imagining France for the first time led by a president of North African descent.

But two years later, Mr. Louatah has come to view his series as an “anomaly.” He began writing the second season, with a story line focusing on police violence, one of the most sensitive themes in France. Ultimately, “The Savages” was not renewed for reasons that he said were never made clear to him. A spokeswoman for Canal Plus said that the series had been planned for only one season.

In Philadelphia, he is writing a new novel that deals with exile from a country that is never named.

Source: The Quiet Flight of Muslims From France

Filed under Immigration Tagged with emigration, France, Muslims, USA

Rich Countries Lure Health Workers From Low-Income Nations to Fight Shortages

2022/01/25 Leave a comment

The costs to source countries:

There are few nurses in the Zambian capital with the skills and experience of Alex Mulumba, who works in the operating room at a critical care hospital. But he has recently learned, through a barrage of social media posts and LinkedIn solicitations, that many faraway places are eager for his expertise, too — and will pay him far more than the $415 per month (including an $8 health risk bonus) he earns now.

Mr. Mulumba, 31, is considering those options, particularly Canada, where friends of his have immigrated and quickly found work. “You have to build something with your life,” he said.

Canada is among numerous wealthy nations, including the United States and United Kingdom, that are aggressively recruitingmedical workers from the developing world to replenish a health care work force drastically depleted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The urgency and strong pull from high-income nations — including countries like Germany and Finland, which had not previously recruited health workers from abroad — has upended migration patterns and raised new questions about the ethics of recruitment from countries with weak health systems during a pandemic.

“We have absolutely seen an increase in international migration,” said Howard Catton, the chief executive of the International Council of Nurses. But, he added, “The high, high risk is that you are recruiting nurses from countries that can least afford to lose their nurses.”

About 1,000 nurses are arriving in the United States each month from African nations, the Philippines and the Caribbean, said Sinead Carbery, president of O’Grady Peyton International, an international recruiting firm. While the United States has long drawn nurses from abroad, she said demand from American health care facilities is the highest she’s seen in three decades. There are an estimated 10,000 foreign nurses with U.S. job offers on waiting lists for interviews at American embassies around the world for the required visas.

Since the middle of 2020, the number of international nurses registering to practice in the United Kingdom has swelled, “pointing toward this year being the highest in the last 30 years in terms of numbers,” said James Buchan, a senior fellow with the Health Foundation, a British charity, who advises the World Health Organization and national governments on health worker mobility.

“There are 15 nurses in my unit and half have an application in process to work abroad,” said Mike Noveda, a senior neonatal nurse in the Philippines who has been temporarily reassigned to run Covid wards in a major hospital in Manila. “In six months, they will have left.”

As the pandemic enters its third year and infections from the Omicron variant surge around the world, the shortage of health workers is a growing concern just about everywhere. As many as 180,000 have died of Covid, according to the W.H.O. Others have burned out or quit in frustration over factors such as a lack of personal protective equipment. About 20 percent in the United States have left their jobs during the pandemic. The W.H.O. has recorded strikes and other labor action by health workers in more than 80 countries in the past year — the amount that would normally be seen in a decade. In both developing countries and wealthy ones, the depletion of the health work force has come at a cost to patient care.

European and North American countries have created dedicated immigration fast-tracks for health care workers, and have expedited processes to recognize foreign qualifications.

The British government introduced a “health and care visa”program in 2020, which targets and fast tracks foreign health care workers to fill staffing vacancies. The program includes benefits such as reduced visa costs and quicker processing.

Canada has eased language requirements for residency and has expedited the process of recognizing the qualifications of foreign-trained nurses. Japan is offering a pathway to residency for temporary aged-care workers. Germany is allowing foreign-trained doctors to move directly into assistant physician positions.

In 2010, the member states of the W.H.O. adopted a Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, driven in part by an exodus of nurses and doctors from nations in sub-Saharan Africa ravaged by AIDS. African governments expressed frustration that their universities were producing doctors and nurses educated with public funds who were being lured away to the United States and Britain as soon as they were fully trained, for salaries their home countries could never hope to match.

The code recognizes the right of individuals to migrate but calls for wealthy nations to recruit through bilateral agreements, with the involvement of the health ministry in the country of origin.

In exchange for an organized recruitment of health workers, the destination country should supply support for health care initiatives designated by the source country. Destination countries are also supposed to offer “learn and return” in which health workers with new skills return home after a period of time.

But Mr. Catton, of the international nurses organization, said that was not the current pattern. “For nurses who are recruited, there is no intention for them to go back, often quite the opposite: They want to establish themselves in another country and bring their families to join them,” he said.

Zambia has an excess of nurses, on paper — thousands of graduates of nursing schools are unemployed, although a new government has pledged to hire 11,200 health workers this year. But it is veteran nurses such as Lillian Mwape, the director of nursing at the hospital where Mr. Mulumba works, who are most sought by recruiters.

“People are leaving constantly,” said Ms. Mwape, whose inbox is flooded with emails from recruiters letting her know how quickly she can get a visa to the United States.

The net effect, she said, “is that we are handicapped.”

“It is the most-skilled nurses that we lose and you can’t replace them,” Ms. Mwape said. “Now in the I.C.U. we might have four or five trained critical-care nurses, where we should have 20. The rest are general nurses, and they can’t handle the burden of Covid.”

Dr. Brian Sampa, a general practitioner in Lusaka, recently began the language testing that is the first step to emigrate to the United Kingdom. He is the head of a doctor’s union and vividly aware of how valuable physicians are in Zambia. There are fewer than 2,000 doctors working in the public sector — on which the vast majority of people are reliant — and 5,000 doctors in the entire country, he said. That works out to one doctor per 12,000 people; the W.H.O. recommends a minimum of one per 1,000.

Twenty Zambian doctors have died of Covid. In Dr. Sampa’s last job, he was the sole doctor in a district with 80,000 people, and he often spent close to 24 hours at a time in the operating theater doing emergency surgeries, he said.

The pandemic has left him dispirited about Zambia’s health system. He described days treating critically ill Covid patients when he searched a whole hospital to find only a single C-clamp needed to run oxygenation equipment. He earns slightly less than $1000 a month.

“Obviously, there are more pros to leaving than staying,” Dr. Sampa said. “So for those of us who are staying, it is just because there are things holding us, but not because we are comfortable where we are.”

The migration of health care workers — often from low-income nations to high-income ones — was growing well before the pandemic; it had increased 60 percent in the decade to 2016, said Dr. Giorgio Cometto, an expert on health work force issues who works with the W.H.O.

The Philippines and India have deliberately overproduced nurses for years with the intention of sending them abroad to earn and send remittances; nurses from these two countries make up almost the entire work force of some Persian Gulf States. But now the Philippines is reporting shortages domestically. Mr. Noveda, the nurse in Manila, said his colleagues, exhausted by pandemic demands that have required frequent 24-hour shifts, were applying to leave in record numbers.

Yet movement across borders has been more complicated during the pandemic, and immigration processes have slowed significantly, leaving many workers, and prospective employers, in limbo.

While some countries are sincere about bilateral agreements, that isn’t the only level at which recruitment happens. “What we hear time and time again is that recruitment agencies pitch up in-country and talk directly to the nurses offering very attractive packages,” Mr. Catton said.

The United Kingdom has a “red list” of countries with fragile health systems from which it won’t recruit for its National Health Service. But some health workers get around that by entering Britain first with a placement through an agency that staffs private nursing homes, for example. Then, once they are established in Britain, they move over to the N.H.S., which pays better.

Michael Clemens, an expert on international migration from developing countries at the Center for Global Development in Washington, said the growing alarm about outflows of health workers from developing countries risks ignoring the rights of individuals.

“Offering someone a life-changing career opportunity for themselves, something that can make a huge difference to their kids, is not an ethical crime,” he said. “It is an action with complex consequences.”

The United Kingdom went into the pandemic with one in 10 nurse jobs vacant. Mr. Catton said it some countries are making overseas recruitment a core part of their staffing strategies, and not just using it as a pandemic stopgap. If that’s the plan, he said, then recruiting countries must more assiduously monitor the impact on the source country and calculate the cost being borne by the country that trains those nurses.

Alex Mulumba, the Zambian operating room nurse, says that if he goes to Canada, he won’t stay permanently, just five or six years to save up some money. He won’t bring his family with him, because he wants to keep his ties to home.

“This is my country, and I have to try to do something about it,” he said.

Source: Rich Countries Lure Health Workers From Low-Income Nations to Fight Shortages

Filed under Immigration Tagged with brain drain, emigration, healthcare workers, nurses

Study: Estimating immigrants’ presence in Canada [and emigration using tax filing data]

2021/03/17 Leave a comment

Useful analysis, with best estimates I have seen to date pending full implementation of the exit-entry program:

By the tenth year after landing, about 15% to 20% of adult immigrants who landed between 2000 and 2004 were estimated to have emigrated from Canada, depending on the definition and data sources used to estimate emigration. Emigration refers to leaving Canada to settle in another country.
A Statistics Canada technical report “Estimating immigrants’ presence in Canada within the context of increasingly fluid international migration patterns” seeks to refine the estimation of emigration among immigrants by assessing methodological choices concerning the scope of the data and definitions of emigration using tax-based administrative data. This study was conducted in collaboration with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
The analysis showed that if emigration is defined proximately as absence from the T1 Personal Master File for two consecutive years, the estimated emigration rate by the tenth year after landing would reach 20% among immigrants who landed between 2000 and 2004 and were aged 25 to 64 on arrival.
The estimated emigration rate was reduced to 15% when emigration was defined as absence for four consecutive years from 14 available tax- or benefits-based data sources.
Even with the 14 available data sources, it is still possible for immigrants who are present in tax files in a given year to not actually reside in Canada, or for those who are absent from tax files to still reside in Canada. The federal government has established an entry–exit program to collect exit and entry data at the land border with the United States and exit data from airlines on all travellers leaving Canada by air. Once available for research purposes, these exit data will further improve the estimation of individuals’ Canadian residence status.

Products

The study “Estimating Immigrants’ Presence in Canada within the Context of Increasingly Fluid International Migration Patterns,” part of the Analytical Studies: Methods and Reference Series (Catalogue number11-633-X), is now available

Filed under Immigration Tagged with emigration, Statistics Canada, tax data

COVID-19 pandemic prompts recent newcomers to leave Canada for their home countries

2021/03/08 Leave a comment

Data on departures less accurate than arrivals. But a decline in permanent residents of 41,000 in 2020 compared to 2019 using labour force data is much smaller than the drop in new permanent residents, which fell by 156,000, so I think the significance is over-stated:

The economic and life disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted some recent immigrants to leave Canada and return to their countries of origin, where they have more social and family connections.

The number of permanent residents who have been in Canada for less than five years declined by four per cent to 1,019,000 by the end of 2020 from 1,060,000 the year before, according to an analysis of Statistics Canada’s labour force survey that measures the number of workers between 15 and 65 years old by their immigration status.

The number had grown three per cent a year, on average, in the previous 10 years.

The data show that the number of permanent residents who have been in Canada for five to 10 years also dropped from 1,170,000 in 2019 to 1,146,000 in 2020.

“It’s actually not uncommon to have immigrants go back to their home country during the recessionary periods,” said Robert Falconer, a researcher at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy.

“If they’ve lost their job, they can go and live with their family and not pay rent. They can maybe find some social connections and work back home.”

He said the number of new immigrants fell by about three per cent between 2008 and 2009 during the financial crisis and the recession that followed.

He said many of those who have left in the past year might not come back if the economy doesn’t recover quickly.

“The longer they stay at home in their home countries, the less likely they are to come back to Canada.”

A study by Statistics Canada released in August showed that in the early months of the pandemic, recent immigrants to Canada were more likely than Canadian-born workers to lose their jobs, mainly because they had held them for less time and, as a whole, are overrepresented in lower-wage employment. That includes in service-sector jobs.

Julien Bérard-Chagnon, an analyst with Statistics Canada, said the agency doesn’t keep a monthly count of immigrants who leave the country but a group of its analysts are now working on a paper to examine the issue during COVID-19 pandemic.

“The literature signals that immigrants, especially recent immigrants, are more likely to emigrate than the Canadian-born population,” he said.

While the pandemic has also driven down immigration to Canada by about 40 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019, the Liberal government announced in October that Canada is seeking to admit upwards of 1.2 million new permanent residents in the next three years, including 401,000 this year.

But this number seems optimistic as travel restrictions and the sharp economic downtown remain.

“I doubt they will hit their target this year,” Falconer said.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said the government is very confident it will meet it immigration targets in the next three years.

“In January 2021, we welcomed more new permanent residents than in January 2020, when there was no pandemic,” Alexander Cohen said in a statement.

“We’re already ahead of schedule, welcoming new permanent residents at a rate 37 per cent higher than our projections.”

Falconer said the government is focusing on transitioning temporary residents in Canada to permanent status.

“It’s the best thing to do for people who are living here,” he said. “But in terms of this population growth, it’s a wash, meaning that we’re not actually increasing our population.”

He said this policy is necessary but not sufficient to help the government meet its high immigration target this year.

“Not every temporary resident wants to become a Canadian permanent resident or Canadian citizen. Some of them are here to work, to study and they are perfectly happy to go back home.”

He said the incentive for the government is still to try to increase immigration numbers, especially in jobs related to health care and technology because having fewer immigrants will harm these two sectors more than others.

Andrew Griffith, a former director of citizenship and multiculturalism at the Immigration Department, says immigrants who arrive during an economic downturns tend to suffer economically, at least in the short term, more than those who arrive when the economy is growing.

He said maintaining high levels of immigration at a time when the economy is weak and sectors such as hospitality, retail and tourism are devastated has an element of irresponsibility.

Griffith said immigrants leaving Canada can reflect a failure of Canadian integration policies.

He said the government needs to put more focus on immigrants who are already here as we face structural change in sectors including hospitality, travel and service industries that will affect mostly women, visible minorities and recent immigrants.

“We may be in a fairly structural shift that will eliminate some jobs or dramatically reduce some jobs, and then what kind of retraining programs or other programs we need to support people as they transition.”

Cohen said the government has invested in settlement services during the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing funding to help boost wages by 15 per cent. It has helped buy personal protective equipment to keep staff safe, as well as cellphones and laptops to ensure services, including language training and job-search help, can be offered remotely.

Falconer said the government should address problems with licensing and professional development that many newcomers face in Canada.

“We make it very, very difficult for somebody who worked in a profession in their home country to come here and work in the same profession.”

“Immigrants come here with aspirations or hopes of being able to work and earn a much better living here in Canada than they did in their home country and they discover that they’re actually going to be working in an unpaid, underemployed job.”

Source: COVID-19 pandemic prompts recent newcomers to leave Canada for their home countries

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Andrew Griffith, emigration, Robert Falconer

Ahead of November election, growing numbers of Jews consider leaving US

2020/10/05 Leave a comment

Of note even if anecdotal. Interest and intention are of course different from action:

By 11:42 a.m. on the morning after US President Donald Trump refused to condemn white supremacists during the presidential debate, Heather Segal had received four inquiries from Americans interested in moving to Canada. Two of them were Jewish.

Segal, an immigration lawyer in Toronto, knows there’s always a spike in inquiries during US election years. But in her 25 years of experience, it’s never been as big as it is now.

In 2016, she said, she received a couple dozen inquiries, total, from Americans looking to move to Canada. This year, she gets six or seven inquiries every day. And most of them, she said, are from Jews.

“In my life, I have never seen what I’m seeing,” said Segal, who is herself Jewish. She said she hears the same fears from one Jewish American after another.

“What they echo to me: ‘We’ve seen this before,’” Segal said. “‘I’m not going to get stuck. I’m not going to get caught. We know how this goes. There’s going to be a civil war. It’s going to be the end of democracy. I’m very concerned for our future. I don’t want to wait and see what happens. My grandparents left Poland in World War II.’”

She added, “Whatever it is, honestly, it gives me pause. What do I hear? ‘I never thought that I would be looking for this. I’m well established in the United States. My family is here, my business is here. This is not something I ever thought would happen or that I even considered.’ That line is not one person saying it. I hear it several times a day.”

Americans vowing to move to Canada after the presidential election is almost a cliche. Among observant Jews, the same might be said of moving to Israel — where most Jews get automatic citizenship — if the wrong person takes office or if conditions change in the United States.

This year feels different, say immigration lawyers and others who work in the small industry of Jews permanently crossing borders. Much of the drive to leave has to do with the prospect of Trump winning reelection, potentially after a chaotic post-election period in which he or others dispute the results of the vote. American Jews, lawyers and advocates say, are also chilled by a climate of rising extremism and anti-Semitism, some of it stoked or condoned by the president.

Last year saw the most anti-Semitic incidents in the US since at least 1979, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The past two years have seen lethal attacks on Jews in Pittsburgh; Poway, California; Jersey City, New Jersey; and Monsey, New York, plus a string of assaults on Jews last year in Brooklyn. Amid a rise in extremist activity, Trump has repeatedly declined to condemn far-right groups.

Longtime Jewish leaders who are seen as moderate are now comparing this moment in American politics to early 1930s Germany, when Hitler rose to power and the fate of the Jews in Europe began to be sealed. For members of a people who have never experienced lasting security under any government until the last century, the moment is awakening deep-seated anxiety about how to ensure their family’s safety if the worst comes to pass in the United States.

“There’s a lot that goes through my head while this is going on, about what was my family thinking as Hitler was rising to power?” said Sarah Morris, a lawyer in Colorado whose grandfather, originally from what was then Czechoslovakia, was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

Morris is one of an increasing number of American Jews who are exploring finding a home outside the United States — whether in Canada, Israel, or the European Union. She is eligible for Canadian citizenship and submitted her application in August, spurred by fear of what could happen on and after November 3.

It is, of course, too soon to tell if the presidential election and its aftermath spark a wave of Jews and other Americans moving abroad. Certainly, most people who vow to emigrate over election resultsultimately do not.

But Morris’s story reflects the anxiety that is shaping many American Jews’ thinking right now.

She and her wife have discussed getting a mobile home, partly in case they decide to leave home at a moment’s notice for a prolonged period of time.

“You think about those kinds of questions: What would be the triggering point that would cause me to leave the country?” she said. “It’s really challenging to know exactly what that tipping point should be. And I think I have a different sort of understanding of that challenge that our ancestors probably had to go through in deciding whether or not to go.”

Other Canadian immigration lawyers are seeing the same pattern.

You think about those kinds of questions: What would be the triggering point that would cause me to leave the country?

Joseph Young, another Jewish immigration lawyer in Toronto, usually gets about two inquiries per week about moving to Canada. That number has jumped recently to at least five. And though Jews make up approximately 2% of the US population, he estimates that about 20% of his inquiries are from Jews.

Nan Berezowski, another Canadian immigration lawyer, also said inquiries about leaving the United States have risen, though she couldn’t quantify the increase, and that at least 20% appear to be from Jews.

“Things in the United States are getting a little bit out of hand,” Young said. “If Trump wins, I think you’re going to see more people continuing and completing their [immigration] applications, or at least applying. They’ve lived through four years and they’re saying ‘I’m not going to live through another four years.’”

Moving to Canada is not simple. Applications for permanent residency are evaluated based on a points system that takes into account language fluency, age, profession, and whether the applicant has previous connections to Canada, such as Canadian family or a Canadian academic degree. The process can take a year or more.

“If you speak English, you’re a graduate of a Canadian university and young, you’re a prime candidate for Canadian immigration,” said Greg Siskind, an immigration lawyer in the United States who is considering working on emigration from the US as well, based in part on the rising number of people seeking to leave. “If you are older and middle class, you’re probably not going to have such an easy time.”

Another option available to some American Jews is also onerous: securing a European passport. A handful of European countries, owing to their histories of anti-Semitic persecution and expulsion, offer citizenship to Jews whose ancestors fled their borders. Austria widened its doors earlier this month.

On that front, too, interest appears to be on the rise. Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services, an agency founded last year that helps Jews track down genealogical records and navigate the countries’ citizenship processes, is getting two to three inquiries about pursuing European citizenship per week, as opposed to one a month several months ago.

The founders, Caitlin Hollander and Michael Waas, have also both individually pursued European citizenship for themselves, for emotional and practical reasons. Hollander has obtained her German citizenship, while Waas is still in the process with Portugal, the homeland of his ancestors.

The irony of potentially seeking refuge on the continent where the Holocaust and centuries of anti-Semitism were perpetrated does not escape them. Both, however, said the idea of having an option outside of America was compelling at a volatile time.

A Jew can never have too many passports

“If I can have another passport — a Jew can never have too many passports,” Hollander said. “It gives you that one little piece of freedom, one little piece of being able to travel freely without having to worry about one more visa, one more restriction, what new restrictions could exist.”

She added, “It’s reclaiming something that had been stolen, and saying this was mine. You can’t take this. And to me, at least, it’s righting a wrong that was done in 1938.”

Israel, of course, represents a global redress for the wrongs done in that year and the following decade. Almost any Jew in the world is eligible under the Law of Return, which gives Jews the ability to claim citizenship in the country if they move there.

Right now, the number of American Jews seeking to exercise that right is on the rise. Nefesh B’Nefesh, which facilitates Israeli immigration, has seen double or triple the number of applications opened from the US every month from May through September compared to the previous year. The number of completed applications, indicating a sustained interest, has also doubled or tripled every month. Even September, which saw skyrocketing COVID-19 case numbers in Israel, saw a 72% increase in completed applications compared to September 2019, to 523 people.

But a spokeswoman for the group, Yael Katsman, said most people completing the process had long been interested in moving to Israel and felt able to make the leap after their workplaces went remote because of the pandemic.

“The political unrest is not dominant at all,” she said.

That may be because Jews must actually move to Israel to gain citizenship, making it a perpetual and vital backup plan but not a first-line destination for Jews anxious about the political situation in America.

In contrast, citizenship programs for Jews in European countries don’t require applicants to live in the country. So for those who qualify, citizenship in Europe gives them a potential refuge while they see how things in the US turn out.

“Especially this year, it’s been like, I need to have a backup beyond Israel because to have a Portuguese passport doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go and live in Portugal,” Waas said.

It’s having multiple options, multiple routes, and that’s what a lot of people are realizing more and more

Hollander added, “It’s having multiple options, multiple routes, and that’s what a lot of people are realizing more and more.”

A move abroad appeals even to Jews who don’t fear direct, physical danger following the election but worry that another Trump term will transform the US into a place that does not reflect their values.

Jeremy, an educator in Pennsylvania who has focused his energies on teaching immigrants and underprivileged students, has found himself recently searching Canadian job boards and researching the cost of living in different Canadian cities. He said Canada is appealing because life there seems relatively similar to the US, but that the country appears to care more for marginalized groups, which is important to him as a Jew.

“I knew from a young age that I’m different because I’m Jewish,” said Jeremy, who did not give his last name due to concerns regarding privacy and job security. “That makes us able to understand certain things, to live certain fears that we have or that pretty close ancestors of ours have had in this country or in other countries. That very directly relates to how I feel about immigration. That very explicitly relates to how I feel about systemic racism.”

Segal, the Canadian immigration lawyer, said the rising number of people seeking to leave the US is “devastating to see,” despite the uptick in potential business for her. She’s always looked at the United States as an inspiration. Now she views it with fear and concern.

“It saddens me because, you know, I love America and what it stands for and what it’s accomplished,” she said. “I keep saying to myself, what is going on in America? Because I see a lot of fear and I feel like we’re at this stage [where], the fear, we don’t know what it’s going to bring.”

Source: Ahead of November election, growing numbers of Jews consider leaving US

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with American Jews, emigration

Brexit fuels brain drain as skilled Britons head to the EU

2020/08/04 Leave a comment

Not surprising:

Brexit has sparked an exodus of economically productive people from the UK to European Union nations on a scale that would normally be expected only as a result of a major economic or political crisis, according to a detailed new study.

Using a combination of official statistics across the EU and in-depth interviews with people living in Germany, the study found huge changes in migration patterns of UK citizens since the 2016 referendum, which contrast with largely stable ones among nationals from the 27 EU states remaining in the bloc.

The report, a collaboration between the Oxford in BerlinResearch Partnership – a project made up of Oxford university and four Berlin institutions – and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, also found a “seismic shift” in the number of UK citizens already living abroad who had decided to go a step further by obtaining EU member state passports since 2016, showing how Britain’s vote to leave the EU pushed many individuals into long-term decisions.

The study says that migration from the UK to EU countries has increasedby about 30% compared to pre-Brexit numbers. Britons living in other EU countries who decided to obtain EU member state passports as well as their UK ones had increased by more than 500% overall, and by 2,000% in Germany.

Dr Daniel Auer, a co-author of the report, said: “These increases in numbers are of a magnitude that you would expect when a country is hit by a major economic or political crisis.”

Moreover, the study found that UK migrants are among the most educated and skilled of those from any nation, with one of the highest net average income rates, suggesting that Brexit has begun a steady drain of the most talented and productive people to the continent.

In Germany, UK migrants were among the highest earners, bringing in on average €2,812 a month in 2019, just behind those from Austria and the US.

There are now about 1.2 million British citizens living in the EU, between 120,000 and 150,000 of which are in Germany. In the four years since the Brexit referendum, 31,600 Brits have been granted dual British/German citizenship: 2019 saw 14,600 naturalisations compared to 622 in 2015.

About half of all British citizens living in Germany will have dual UK/German nationality by the end of 2020, the report says.

Interviews with UK citizens living and working in Germany showed Brexit had made people prepared to take on levels of risk that they previously would not have considered.

A British academic in his 40s, who is married with a young family – and who migrated in July 2016 – told researchers: “The referendum happened and we immediately changed our minds about buying a house in Bristol. Our whole emigration decision hung on the referendum result.”

The majority of interviewees who left agreed to either a pay cut or a pay freeze as part of their decision. Some struggled to find a job. “I have still not found work, which is not what I expected […] The cost of the move in personal and financial terms is always difficult to foresee, and I’m starting to wonder if I underestimated the risk involved,” said a British IT worker who migrated in October 2019 with his wife and three children.

Co-author Daniel Tetlow added: “We’re observing a new social migration phenomenon and a redefining of what it means to be British-European. In 2019, Brits came in just behind Turks in numbers receiving German citizenship – way ahead of Poles, Romanians, Iraqis or Syrians, whom you might otherwise expect to be more eagerly applying for German/EU citizenship.”

Source: Brexit fuels brain drain as skilled Britons head to the EU

Filed under Immigration Tagged with BREXIT, Daniel Auer, emigration, EU

Europe’s south and east worry more about emigration than immigration – poll

2019/04/02 Leave a comment

Interesting results but understandable given the demographics:

Southern and eastern European countries are more concerned about emigration than immigration, according to a wide-ranging survey of attitudes in 14 EU countries.

In Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary and Romania, six countries where population levels are either flatlining or falling sharply, more citizens said emigration was a worry than immigration, according to the poll by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

The steepest falls are in Romania, where the population has decreased by almost 10% over the past decade as an exodus of mostly young people move to work in western Europe.

https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2019/03/popuation-change-zip/giv-3902leY08K5RYnIs/

However, in northern and western nations, concerns over immigration far outstripped those over emigration.

The survey was conducted to establish the principal issues of concern ahead of the European parliamentary elections in May. The 14 nations polled will occupy 80% of the seats in the new parliament.

The poll discovered that Europeans are concerned about far more than migration, even though it has dominated EU politics and discourse over the five year term of the outgoing parliament. Corruption, nationalism, terrorism and climate change are also uppermost in minds.

In the survey as a whole, 20% were worried about emigration and 32% about immigration. The poll was conducted by YouGov and questioned almost 50,000 people.

https://interactive.guim.co.uk/charts/embed/mar/2019-03-25T13:41:59/embed.html

In some countries, the fear of emigration was so great that large numbers of people believed compatriots should not be allowed to leave their country for long periods of time.

https://interactive.guim.co.uk/charts/embed/mar/2019-03-25T15:48:16/embed.html

“The EU elections have been sold as a battleground over the heart of Europe,” said Mark Leonard, the director of the ECFR, adding that nationalists were trying to turn the vote into a referendum on migration.

“The findings from this poll should give heart to pro-Europeans, and show that there are still votes to be won on major issues such as climate change, healthcare, housing, and living standards,” Leonard said. “They will be making a strategic blunder if they accept the framing of the anti-European parties that this election will be won or lost on migration alone.”

Populist leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Matteo Salvini are seeking to put migration front and centre of the 23-26 May polls, in which 374 million people are eligible to vote in a new parliament for a five-year term. The Orbán government recently deployed a scare poster warning about migration policy in Brussels.

Hungary has refused to take refugees under an EU quota system and continues to block an EU law that proposes a permanent redistribution system for asylum seekers. The poster referred to this theme, stating: “They want to introduce compulsory relocation quotas.”

Orbán, who is under pressure to quit the main centre-right European parliament group, has called for migration policy to be “withdrawn from the commission and returned to the member states”. EU member states already play the decisive role in migration policy.

While Orbán has scaled back his media attacks, following pressure from allies in the European People’s party, he has indicated that he could resume his anti-EU campaign. “Our job now is to continually inform the people about what Brussels is up to.”

But immigration numbers have fallen sharply over the past two years: in 2018, the number who crossed the Mediterranean was put at just over 116,000 by UNHCR, down almost 90% from those who made the journey in 2015.

The survey found that Islamic radicalism was the top area of concern, worrying about one in five Europeans, though fears were much higher in countries like Belgium, France and the Netherlands than in eastern Europe.

In almost all countries, a majority of people agreed that the environment should be made a priority even if it damaged economic growth.

https://interactive.guim.co.uk/charts/embed/mar/2019-03-25T15:47:08/embed.html

But the data also showed a wide range of concerns cropping up in different countries, meaning that the election will be fought on different issues across the continent.

The economy was the single biggest concern in Italy, Romania and Greece. In seven countries – Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, Greece and Slovakia – more than 50% of people surveyed said corruption was a major issue.

Some experts have warned centrist and traditional parties against accepting a pro-EU versus anti-EU narrative, fearing it will only bolster populists by setting up straw-man arguments.

The European elections are the second-largest electoral contest in the world, behind the Indian elections. Voters in 27 countries are due to elect 705 MEPs, who will take office on 2 July. The UK is not scheduled to take part in the vote and will have to inform the EU by 12 April if it wishes to elect MEPs, meaning a long Brexit delay.

Source: Europe’s south and east worry more about emigration than immigration – poll

Filed under Immigration, Polling Tagged with emigration, EU, European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR)

No surprise here: Canada a turnoff for some refugees – Saunders

2015/12/07 Leave a comment

Doug Saunders on Canadian smugness:

It was only in the early 20th century, under Wilfrid Laurier’s leadership, that Canada learned to attract and keep people – by spending serious money on agencies and campaigns abroad, and giving people land and cash to come. No period has come close to the Laurier decade for keeping immigrants.

We soon fell back to our exclusionary patterns. With the exception of the 1910s and the 1950s, immigration in the 20th century contributed little to Canada’s population growth: In many decades people didn’t want to come; in others, people arriving barely outnumbered those departing. We spent much of that century turning away refugees and warning each other about the civilizational threats posed by southern and eastern Europeans and Asians. Only after 1999 did immigration, for the first time, overtake childbirth as the main source of population growth.

Still, we spend more money keeping newcomers out, and throwing obstacles in the way of their settlement and citizenship, than we do welcoming them. The mean-spirited politics of the past decade, the policies denying health care to asylum seekers and the cruel temporary-worker rules and family-reunification restrictions are well known overseas, and the best-qualified people would rather go elsewhere. We think we’re a hot date, but we really need to upgrade our Tinder profile.

Even in Britain, Canada has become a turnoff: We are currently the fourth-most-popular country for British emigration, far behind Australia (which receives twice as many people), the United States and Spain. In fact, it’s a net loss: During the past decade, an average of 5,200 British emigrants came here each year, while 8,500 moved the other way. Worse, the British Post Office surveyed British emigrants, and the happiest were those in France, Spain, the United States, Australia and Thailand – Canada didn’t make the list.

We should heed the lesson we learned a few years ago in Ireland: After the country’s economy collapsed in 2008, Ottawa hoped for a migration boom of skilled workers. But only about 1,000 a year came, and they complainedabout unfriendly conditions and unaffordable cities. Only after paying for a big advertising and outreach campaign did that rise to 5,000 – for a year, until things got better in Ireland.

Next time we have a months-long national debate about migrants, maybe it shouldn’t be about them, but about us – why we still seem so cold and unwelcoming, even to those we want.

Source: No surprise here: Canada a turnoff for some refugees – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Immigration Tagged with Doug Saunders, emigration

America, the Not So Promised Land – The New York Times

2015/11/16 3 Comments

Tara Zahra provides an US historical perspective on return migration (immigrants who return to their country of origin).

In Canada. an estimated one-third of working-age male immigrants leave within 20 years (2006 Statistics Canada study, have not seen anything more recent):

Within Europe, state officials also questioned the myth of the “Golden Country.” This was partly a matter of their perceived self-interest: They were anxious about the number of conscripts and workers lost to “American fever.” But they were also legitimately concerned about the lack of social solidarity in the American “jungle.” The Austrian War Ministry, for example, claimed that “hard labor and an unfamiliar climate, along with the absence of any kind of social protection” resulted in the “complete physical and moral breakdown” of Austrian workers in America.

As European migrants were recruited to replace the plantation labor of freed slaves, some feared that they would be no better treated. Emigration, they insisted, was more likely to deliver migrants to a new form of slavery than greater freedom.

Today’s migrants are not so different from their predecessors. Most make frequent round-trips. They stay in close touch with relatives, aided by low-cost airlines, cellphones and Skype. Many migrants and refugees would like to return home someday, if only they could do so securely. But in a world in which visas are lottery prizes, and refugees die in trucks or find themselves trapped in stateless purgatory, it is not so easy to come and go freely.

In spite of the rhetoric of globalization, we still live with the passports and border controls introduced after the First World War. This system, a response to xenophobic agitation, created the current distinction between legal immigrants and “illegal” aliens. In 1965, the quota system was eliminated, enabling more migrants to come to the United States from Asia, Latin America and Africa. But it remains difficult for migrants to respond nimbly to changing economic or political conditions.

What has not changed is the degree of polarization around migration. Many countries with high levels of migration remain ambivalent about the effects of emigration on their societies. The value of remittances does not clearly outweigh the strain on separated families and the loss of human talent. Migrants continue to have mixed feelings about life in the United States. “We were afraid of poverty,” recalled one family of Bosnian refugees in the 1990s. “We thought we wouldn’t be able to step out on the street because of drugs, murders and similar things. We were afraid that there was no health insurance similar to what we had.”

They came anyway, since “everything looked better than going back to Bosnia with no future at all.”

Americans, meanwhile, are almost perfectly divided about whether immigration makes the United States better or worse, according to the Pew study. Given the overwhelming percentage of Americans descended from immigrants, these attitudes betray deep historical amnesia. We too easily forget the suffering of previous generations of migrants, or imagine that it was redeemed by the relative comfort of their children or grandchildren.

And when these attitudes are combined with xenophobia, punitive migration laws, harsh working conditions and a lack of social support, they raise the same question posed by migrants a century ago. Will my dreams be realized or shattered in America? For most people, the answer will lie somewhere in between.

Source: America, the Not So Promised Land – The New York Times

Filed under Immigration Tagged with emigration, return migration, Tara Zahra, USA

Multicultural Meanderings

Demand for French Citizenship Soars Among Israelis After …

The Quiet Flight of Muslims From France

Rich Countries Lure Health Workers From Low-Income Nations to Fight Shortages

Study: Estimating immigrants’ presence in Canada [and emigration using tax filing data]

Products

COVID-19 pandemic prompts recent newcomers to leave Canada for their home countries

Ahead of November election, growing numbers of Jews consider leaving US

Brexit fuels brain drain as skilled Britons head to the EU

Europe’s south and east worry more about emigration than immigration – poll

No surprise here: Canada a turnoff for some refugees – Saunders

America, the Not So Promised Land – The New York Times

Follow Blog via Email

Follow Me

Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote

Translate

Follow me on Twitter

Facebook Page

Andrew

Citizenship

General

Multiculturalism

Archives

Categories

Subscribe

Tag Cloud