Abraham: J.D. Vance’s lessons on immigration for Canada

2024/07/31 Leave a comment

More immigration commentary, arguing for greater focus on economic immigrants with a more self-interested approach. Nails some of the current disfunctionalities, including the confusing plethora of pathways which, of course, large reflect responses to political pressures:

I’m not sure if many Canadians paid attention to U.S. Senator J. D. Vance’s speech to the Republican convention in Milwaukee recently. Even those who stayed up for the late-hour speech might dismiss it as another populist rant from a “hillbilly.” They’d be mistaken, because it carries big lessons for Canada.

I’m most interested in this section of his speech: “Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.”

In my 22 years of following the immigration debate in both Canada and the United States, I’ve not heard a clearer articulation of how immigration should work. It’s the exact opposite of what’s happening in Canada today: we have plunging support for immigration; a plethora of visa categories that would make even the immigration minister’s head spin; losing track of hundreds of thousands of temporary residents; and a record number of newcomers giving up on Canada, including moving to the U.S.

That is because we don’t know why we want to bring 500,000 or more immigrants into Canada every year. Every month brings a new number, as if we were talking about widgets in a giant wheel, rather than human beings whose lives depend on how we welcome them, how we treat them and how we make room for them. There is an almost limitless appetite for moving to Canada, and so, the question is: who do we take in … and why?

Instead, what we have is a mushy articulation of feel-good sentiments that mostly portray us as “better Americans.” We throw in words such as multiculturalism, welcoming, settlement, “all of us are immigrants,” etc., to establish our bona fides, but I’m not sure our national interest is served by sustaining very high levels of immigration — in fact, the highest per capita threshold in the world. All of us know at least one newcomer to Canada.

I recall moving to Ottawa in 2002 and disregarding doomsayers who told me that Toronto was the place to be. My kids were the first kids of colour in our local public school, but since then I have been delighted by the number of brown and Black folks moving into our neighbourhood. It was a simpler time and I knew the immigration department had three basic categories for newcomers: economic migrants like me who arrived based on a points system; a family class for close relatives; and humanitarian admissions for refugees and asylum seekers.

Today, I dare anybody to recite the various streams, sub-streams, super streams and slipstream visa categories that define Canadian immigration. No wonder immigration consultancy is a booming business.

Vance offered a more cogent — if narrow — policy prescription. He predicts that a Donald Trump administration will only admit those who serve the U.S.’s national interest, be it high tech, family unification, low-wage labour, entrepreneurs, international students, etc. Of course, his prescription is influenced by the immigration experience of his wife, Usha Vance. Her parents migrated from India, established successful careers in San Diego, and gave their daughter an Ivy League education. She may one day be the wife of a U.S. vice-president.

That is what immigration is supposed to do: grow citizens to become full participants in a nation’s life.

Instead, what we have here is falling rates of naturalization, diving political participation, and growing reverse migration, in addition to maladies such as foreign interference and communal tensions that are almost exclusively the fallout of immigration. Other than hearing or reading about Canada crossing the 40-million population mark — driven largely by immigration, not Canadian births — when is the last time you read something positive about the prowess of newcomers and the dynamism they bring?

I have three simple prescriptions to determine who gets in and how many. One, the quota of newcomers must be determined by economic conditions and must be re-calibrated the moment things begin to go south. Two, we must progressively increase the proportion of economic arrivals in line with labour market gaps. Lastly, we should recognize that there are 280 million people out there who want to move to a developed country because of the appalling conditions in their home nations. Our intake will always be less than a drop in the bucket.

At this moment of political inflection both in the U.S. and Canada, let’s have an honest conversation about immigration. At its root, our policy must be clear enough so a minister or any spokesperson for the government can clearly articulate the fundamentals of our policy. Let’s close back doors that dupe international students into believing their study visas will result in permanent residence.

In a nutshell, we should encourage those who come from other nations to become the next Usha Vance in Canada. That, to my mind, is an example worth emulating.

George Abraham is an Ottawa-based independent commentator on immigration.

Source: Abraham: J.D. Vance’s lessons on immigration for Canada

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A cultural policy that overlooks multiculturalism [media focus]

2017/10/21 Leave a comment

George Abraham, publisher of New Canadian Media, on the need for broader and more diverse journalism (disclosure: I assisted George and New Canadian Media during its early years):

For a multicultural country, we have a rather monocultural media landscape. Our newsrooms and media organizations no longer reflect their audiences.  Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly missed an opportunity to make a policy intervention that would have at least nudged some reform.

Canada’s multicultural media has been decimated in recent years.  There were budget cuts in multicultural programming at the Rogers-owned OMNI Television. A promising media enterprise that published a string of multicultural and community newspapers went under in 2013. It was ironic that the Mississauga-based Multicultural Nova Corporation was being subsidized by the Italian government. These and other outlets help Canadians weave a shared narrative around what it means to be Canadian, at a time when our “ethno-cultural” (to use a favourite expression of bureaucrats) makeup is rapidly changing. Our ethnic media remain as fragmented and resource-strapped as ever.

“Canada’s ethnic and third-language communities do not have access to enough news and information programming in multiple languages from a Canadian perspective,” the chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) Jean-Pierre Blais said in May.

The fact is, Canada is rapidly changing before our eyes, but we continue to sleepwalk through this transformation.

While media organizations and journalism schools appear to have given up measuring the representation of minorities in newsrooms (the last credible industry-wide study was in 2004), the government is aware that this lack of representation is a major handicap for new immigrants. A June 2014 study titled “Evidence-based Levels and Mix: Absorptive Capacity” (bureaucratese for how well Canada integrates its immigrants) stated categorically: “There is no clear commitment to achieving diversity in Canada’s newsrooms or in Canadian news content.” (The study was commissioned by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and it was released under the Access to Information Act.)

The government’s new cultural policy did little to shift the conversation to the emerging media players who are redefining journalism for a new era. It failed to state the obvious: a shrinking cohort of media organizations that have monopolized national discourse are headed for irrelevance, because neither their audience nor their newsrooms are reflective of Canada at large.

This lopsided media structure means that folks like me don’t get to tell our own stories on our own terms. Somebody else uses the lens of their lived experience to interpret our immigrant stories. A cultural and content policy written in 2017 ought to have been much more mindful of this shift – roughly 40 percent of Canadians are either foreign-born or the children of immigrants (the bulk of them have Asian roots, like Jagmeet Singh). The minister should have outlined specific goals to foster and sustain the kind of journalism that reflects a new Canada where the rise of a sardar (turbaned Sikh) is not a leap of faith, but a fact of life.

I write this as somebody who is well aware of the perils of “government support.” Not all governments are benign actors. In Dubai, the owners of the newspaper where I once worked found themselves on the wrong side of the ruling family. We had a dedicated “reporter” whose job was to relay diktats from the government to the editor. At another outlet in Doha, the newspaper was owned by the country’s then foreign minister. It was my job as managing editor to walk the gauntlet between censorship and shackled freedom. The country even had a director of censorship, who subsequently became the editor-in-chief of an Arabic language newspaper.

Not all journalists welcome government support. The Canadian nonprofit media organization that I run has lost editors who couldn’t live with any form of government funding. We’ve viewed these grants – including those from the Canada Periodical Fund – as seed money for an enterprise that serves the collective public good. I’d like to think that we exist because we fulfill a need. Joly missed an opportunity to signal a shift of tax dollars towards content that enables new players to take advantage of gaps in the marketplace of ideas.

I also know first-hand that editors and newsroom managers are loath to take the bold steps that will change the demographics of their newsrooms. There’s a lot of lip service being done out there and little concrete action. The cultural industries policy statement could have made a big difference by offering incentives to correct this imbalance and foster the growth of alternative media platforms that cater to niche markets.

Instead, the headline coming out of the policy statement was focused on Netflix and its promise to make investments in Canadian productions, as if this would in some way feed this country’s desperate need for a new narrative and a new conversation. Entertainment seemed to take precedence over journalism in the policy announcement, although both embody the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell the rest of the world.

However, fact is more important than fiction. Facts are sacrosanct and the need of the hour. The phenomenon of “fake news” can only be addressed by true and tested journalism. The opinions of Canadians need to be shaped by solid, on-the-ground reporting done by journalists who are embedded in their communities and share the lived experience of the places they call home. This includes newcomer journalists who offer unique perspectives about their communities and are informed by the day-to-day trials that immigrants face in buying or renting homes, finding employment, enrolling their children in schools and becoming full members of the society around them. There is a public interest in ensuring that their voices are heard, not just through niche media and ethnic platforms but also in legacy newsrooms.

The federal government has rightly supported Canadian culture and content since the days of the Massey Commission in 1951. A Canada of 35 million people, or an imagined one of 100 million, will live or die on the ties that bind its people together. Old-fashioned journalism ought to be the bedrock of a more globalized, more multicultural Canada.

Source: A cultural policy that overlooks multiculturalism

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