U.K.’s ‘Brightest and Best’ Visa Plan Faces Charges of Elitism

2022/06/04 Leave a comment

The English “public school” insularity! No surprise that Canada’s big three (UBC, McGill Toronto) are on the list:

When Britain started a program this week offering a two-year visa to graduates from some top global universities, Nikhil Mane, an Indian computer science student at New York University, welcomed the news.

“I was happy,” said Mr. Mane, 23, whose university was on the list. “It’s a good way to pursue our dreams.”

More than 5,000 miles away, Adeola Adepoju, 22, a biochemistry student at Olabisi Onabanjo University in Nigeria, also read the announcement with great interest. But he had the opposite reaction.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Mr. Adepoju said. “No university from the third world is ranked.”

Britain’s “High Potential Individual” visa program allows graduates from 37 top-rated world universities in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United States to come to the country for two years even if they do not have a job offer.

A majority of universities on the list are in the United States, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego.

The government said the plan would attract the world’s “brightest and best” and benefit the British economy. Critics, however, say the plan nurtures global inequalities and discriminates against most developing countries.

The purpose of the policy is to create “a highly desirable and able pool of mobile talent from which U.K. employers can recruit” and drive economic growth and technological advances, the government said in its announcement. It did not put a cap on the number of applicants who would be accepted, and said that graduates with Ph.D.s would be allowed to stay for three years.

“We want the businesses of tomorrow to be built here today,” Rishi Sunak, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a statement. “Come and join in!”

The program is in line with Britain’s post-Brexit visa policy, which has made entry easier for high-skilled workers and harder for those considered low-skilled ones, as well as asylum seekers. Visa pathways include a skilled worker visa for people who have received a job offer in Britain, a visa for people considered a “leader or potential leader” in certain fields, and a program to allow international students who graduated from British universities to stay for at least two years.

Mr. Mane, the New York University student, said that after he graduates with a master’s degree, he will be allowed to stay in the United States for three years. After that, his prospects of getting another visa are uncertain.

The opportunity to go to Britain “opens more options,” he said.

The new British visa has been praised in some academic circles in the United States as one to emulate. But many academics, students and politicians in Britain, Africa and India have spoken out against it, saying that the universities that students attend are largely influenced by their social and geographical circumstances, and that the new scheme rewards those who are already more privileged.

“I would not be eligible,” said Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and a senior lecturer in machine learning at Queen Mary University of London, who went to a university in India that is not on the list. “It is very hurtful to find that you’re devalued and that people within your community are devalued because of arbitrary thresholds.”

Dr. Gurdasani said that as a student, she got one of seven spots to study medicine at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India, for which thousands of students competed. There, she received what she said was rigorous training, seeing patients with very complex illnesses, including infectious diseases, and building expertise that she then brought to Britain.

“We’ve seen the lack of this in the U.K. during the Covid pandemic,” she said, “It’s very, very shocking to see that after that we are seeing the same sort of names, the same universities pop up, which will favor obviously a particular kind of privileged white person.”

Madeleine Sumption, the director of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, which tracks immigration patterns, said the new policy was an innovative idea, but with drawbacks.

“How do you decide who the highly skilled people are?” she asked, adding that the current policy would admit someone who just scraped through Harvard but not the highest achieving students at a top Indian university.

Introducing other criteria for assessing applicants, such as grades, would be fair, she said, but much harder to enforce. “It’s very convenient for the government to just have an institution be on the list or not.”

Britain’s Home Office said the list had been compiled from leading global university ranking lists, and that new international institutions could move up the ranks and later join the list.

However, university rankings are widely criticized in many quarters, with critics saying they often fail to grasp the quality of teaching and often overemphasize research over instruction.

Phil Baty, who is responsible for developing the methodology of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which is among those the British government used, said in a post on LinkedIn that “this isn’t what we had in mind when creating the rankings.”

Zubaida Haque, the executive director of Equality Trust, a British charity, said that in offering the new visa, the British government failed to grasp that race, class and financial barriers prevented many deserving students from reaching top universities.

A 2017 study of Ivy League colleges, as well as institutions like the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT and Duke, most of which are on the British visa list, showed that more students came from families in the top 1 percent of income distribution in the United States than the bottom half.

“This scheme shows that the government does not understand the systemic racial and class inequality in this country and they clearly do not understand it anywhere else,” Ms. Haque said. “It’s an elitist visa scheme.”

She added that the program gave an unfair advantage to those who needed it the least. “There is likely to be a good pipeline for these graduates anyway,” she said.

Christopher Trisos, a senior researcher at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town, said that the program was also detrimental to Britain itself.

“If U.K. businesses and governments want to play a role in addressing the biggest challenges of this century — energy access, fighting climate change and pandemics — they need to be including skills and knowledge from developing countries,” he said.

Mr. Adepoju, the student from Nigeria, said he hoped to become a researcher in molecular oncology.

“I might not get a degree in the 50 top universities but I have high potential and I want to achieve great things,” he said. But, he added, “It’s their loss, not mine.”

Source: U.K.’s ‘Brightest and Best’ Visa Plan Faces Charges of Elitism

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , ,

Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

2022/06/02 Leave a comment

Of note. Another ongoing issue, one not easy to resolve but one would hope to see some ongoing progress:

The federal auditor general says Canada’s prison service has not given offenders timely access to programs to help ease them back into society, including courses specific to women, Indigenous people and visible minorities.

Auditor general Karen Hogan found Black and Indigenous offenders experienced poorer outcomes than any other groups in the federal correctional system and faced greater barriers to a safe and gradual return to the outside world.

Hogan pointed out her office raised similar issues in audits in 2015, 2016 and 2017, yet the correctional service has done little to change the policies, practices, tools and approaches that produce these differing outcomes.

Hogan says disparities were present from the moment offenders entered federal institutions.

The process for selecting security classifications saw Indigenous and Black offenders assigned to maximum-security institutions at twice the rate of other groups of offenders.

They also remained in federal custody longer and at higher levels of security before their release.

The audit found that timely access to correctional programs continued to decline across all groups of offenders. Access to programming, which teaches crucial skills like problem solving and goal setting, worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of men serving sentences of two to four years who were released from April to December 2021, 94 per cent had not completed the correctional programs they needed before they were first eligible to apply for day parole.

“This is a barrier to serving the remainder of their sentences under supervision in the community,” the report says.

The prison service needs to find a different way to organize programming, because “that timely access is so critical to an offender’s successful path forward,” Hogan said Tuesday at a news conference.

Correctional service efforts to support greater equity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace also fell short, leaving persistent barriers unresolved, the report says.

Close to one-quarter of management and staff had not completed mandatory diversity training a year after the deadline.

In addition, the prison service had not established a plan to build a workforce that reflects the diversity of its offender populations, which has particular relevance for institutions with high numbers of Indigenous and Black offenders, the report says.

Hogan noted the correctional service has acknowledged systemic racism in the system, initiating an anti-racism framework to identify and remove systemic barriers.

The service has agreed to act on the auditor general’s recommendations to remedy the various issues she identified.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino stressed efforts toward “rooting out racism in all of its forms” by diversifying the prison service’s workforce, improving our training and collecting data to inform policies. “And we know we’ve got a long way to go.”

Mendicino noted he recently directed the correctional service head to create a new position of deputy commissioner for Indigenous corrections, saying it will ensure the overrepresentation of Indigenous offenders in the system, especially women, is addressed.

Source: Prison service must do more to remove barriers for Indigenous, Black offenders: AG

Filed under Aboriginal, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

COVID-19 Has Separated Those With Real Problems From Those With Mere ‘Snoblems’

2020/04/28 Leave a comment

Cute phrase, but one that accurately captures inequalities:

There are problems, and then there are “snoblems,” as social media like to call certain first-world personal issues during the pandemic. And almost anyone with a pen and a platform—myself included—has written about the latter, with harrowing tales of everything from long grocery lines during the lockdown to bad hair and awkward Zoom dates. But just as the privileged appear to be moving down the back side of the global coronavirus pandemic, it is those people in the margins, almost always ignored by society, that we need to be most worried about, not only for the sake of compassion, but for self-interest.

“The rigorously managed city-state of Singapore has suffered a recent spike in new cases simply because it wasn’t watching those who are easiest to ignore. ”

The curve has been flattening in most of the hardest hit areas of the global coronavirus crisis, from New York City to northern Italy, where  fewer than 500 deaths in a single day now feels oddly victorious. Wuhan is opening for business and Italy will slowly come out of its own coronavirus hibernation in early May.

But as Singapore has learned, premature celebrations of containment can easily backfire if success is only measured among those being counted. The rigorously managed city-state has suffered a recent spike in new cases simply because it wasn’t watching those who are easiest to ignore.

Migrant workers forced into lockdown in tight dorms are now emerging to help kickstart the Singapore economy, but during the height of the crisis, they were largely untested, and the virus ran wild among them. They now account for a huge increase in cases taxing the health care system and causing leaders to enforce a partial lockdown for the first time in the pandemic.

The same is likely to happen across Europe, where migrant workers and seasonal laborers are desperately needed to harvest winter crops. Special dispensation to cross closed borders is now being considered for Romanian harvest workers to come to Italy, where they will move into barrack-style lodgings and work side by side. In Great Britain, after calls for furloughed workers from non-agricultural sectors to step up and work in the farm industry were largely ignored, the government chartered flights to bring Romanian fruit and vegetable pickers in, despite travel bans.

Romania has had just over 11,000 positive cases, but as of the weekend had carried out only around 115,000 tests, meaning a large part of the population probably is infected without knowing. Italy does not have the capacity to test seasonal farm workers, who could introduce the virus in the southern regions of the country where winter agriculture is based, and which have largely escaped the brunt of the pandemic.

“On Greek islands, where thousands of refugees live in horrific conditions awaiting rulings on their asylum requests, testing is virtually nonexistent.”

The more than 71 million people displaced by war and conflict worldwide, as tallied by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, have also been locked down without the sort of testing carried out on other populations. Human Rights Watch warns that as nations lift restrictions, many of the migrants will start moving again without any proper care during the critical early stages of the pandemic.

On Greek islands where thousands of refugees from the Middle East live in horrific conditions awaiting rulings on their asylum requests, testing is virtually nonexistent. A spokesperson for Doctors Without Borders told The Daily Beast that at the notorious Moria camp on the island of Lesbos, where 19,000 migrants and refugees live in a space meant for just 3,000, there is just one water tap for every 1,300 people and no soap at all.

“Families of five or six have to sleep in spaces of no more than three square meters [about 32 square feet],” Dr. Hilde Vochten, MSF’s Medical Coordinator in Greece, said recently. “This means that recommended measures such as frequent hand-washing and social distancing to prevent the spread of the virus are just impossible.”

As the world has learned from watching COVID-19 tear through cruise ships, aircraft carriers and New York  City, tight living arrangements are the perfect breeding ground for the virus. In so many parts of the marginalized world—from refugee camps to labor farms—social distancing cannot be enforced effectively and blanket testing for the virus is just not a priority.

These also are the environments where other health issues are rampant, from malnutrition to a lack of hygiene, which will complicate even mild cases of COVID-19, and where asymptomatic carriers could easily spread the disease to thousands of people before a single case is confirmed.

Moria, like other camps, is serviced by staff who live on the island and come and go from the camps, making it easy for them to spread the disease, and holes in the fences make it easy for many of the people there to move freely and return.

Writing in The Nation, author and human rights advocate Sasha Abramsky warns of a storm on the horizon. “So preoccupied are we by our own fears and by the U.S. pandemic calamity that we risk forgetting the misfortunes piled on misfortune of the 70 million people around the world currently displaced by war and social collapse,” he writes, warning that in the United States, Donald Trump’s policies on immigration have caused a bottleneck in facilities where those who may be carrying COVID-19 are neither treated nor released.

In the United States, where there are an estimated 11 million people Trump likes to call “illegal aliens,” many work in the sectors that solve the snoblems for the rest of us. A lack of access to health care could be deadly, not just for “them” but for “us,” too. Out of fear of deportation, these vulnerable undocumented workers are likely to avoid hospitals, and instead stay on the job, working in those businesses that are opening up in some states, like restaurants, massage parlors, and bowling alleys.

The stark degrees of suffering and vulnerability to COVID-19 have largely focused on the elderly and unwell in the developed world, the strain on normally well-developed health systems that should have been far better prepared, and the shocking lack of preparedness in the world’s richest economies. But, writing in The Economist, Bill Gates warns that as the pandemic slows in developed nations, it will accelerate in developing ones.

“Their experience, however, will be worse,” says Gates. “In poorer countries, where fewer jobs can be done remotely, distancing measures won’t work as well.” He notes that, “COVID-19 overwhelmed cities like New York, but the data suggest that even a single Manhattan hospital has more intensive-care beds than most African countries. Millions could die.”

Gates goes on to say he hopes wealthy nations include poorer ones as they move to a post-pandemic world. “Even the most self-interested person—or isolationist government—should agree with this by now,” he says. “This pandemic has shown us that viruses don’t obey border laws and that we are all connected biologically by a network of microscopic germs, whether we like it or not.”

But if nothing is done to integrate the needs of those vulnerable populations on the margins—whether at home in the “first world” or abroad in less affluent societies—experts warn they may contribute massively to the second wave of COVID-19. And they won’t be as easy to ignore the next time around.

Source: COVID-19 Has Separated Those With Real Problems From Those With Mere ‘Snoblems’

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Racialized student achievement gaps are a red-alert

2019/02/12 Leave a comment

Interesting explanation and discussion of affirmative (helping individual students) versus transformative (addressing systemic barriers) without citing any evidence regarding the relative success of each approach:

Toronto public schools have major and rising student achievement gaps based on race and income, according to a landmark report last year. One of the biggest blocks to closing these gaps is educators’ understanding of why these gaps exist and the methods used to try and close them.

Last summer, education researchers, community partners and teachers gathered to address such reports of inequality. One of the main issues discussed was how identity-based data helps to locate and remove systemic barriers.

The action plan for Ontario, which aims to make sure every student has the opportunity to succeed, “regardless of background, identity or personal circumstances,” includes an analysis of identity-based data.

Researchers have demonstrated that in Toronto public schools, Black, racialized and lower-income students face significant gaps in student outcomes. Other reports show gaps as high as 30 per cent on standardized test scores. Lower socioeconomic groupings of Black, Middle Eastern, Indigenous and Latino boys were among those most impacted by the achievement gap

On top of this, racialized students feel less comfortable at school. Black, Latino and (racially) mixed students from lower socioeconomic groups reported lower levels of school satisfaction than all other racial groups. These students felt less comfortable participating in class than students in higher socioeconomic groups.

This data could help Ontario school boards not only identify issues, but also change the systems and structures that cause achievement and opportunity gaps for underserved groups of students.

Factor in historical injustices

For decades, researchers in the United States have used identity-based data to identify achievement gaps between groups of students based on race, gender, language, ability, sexuality and other social identities.

This has not been common practice in Canada. Although some of the U.S. research has been misguided, critiques of these early reports by education scholars has been helpful.

Research attention then turned to opportunity gaps. This framing considers historical structural barriers in schools that produce educational inequities. So instead of focusing on deficits in students, the research focuses on systemic issues such as economic resources, racism and embedded practices in policies.

This research shift was promising, but most discussions of opportunity gaps still fell short. They generally consider only the distribution and access to material goods within different schools, and fail to account for other opportunity gaps denied to students both inside and outside of school, including present-day and historical inequities.

Challenge traditional ways of thinking

As a former TDSB lead teacher in the Model Schools for Inner Cities(MSIC) Program designed to close gaps, and later, as a researcher who studied the MSIC program, I have some insight into how we might begin to tackle these issues in Ontario.

The MSIC program was launched in 2004 to support schools whose students faced the greatest barriers to success. My research analyzes how stakeholder groups like MSIC staff, community partners, district-level staff, school trustees and school principals in the MSIC program made sense of opportunity gaps.

I interviewed people from the stakeholder groups and analyzed program documents to gauge their understanding of the program and how their analysis shifted over a decade. Participants mostly agreed on the purpose of the program (to close opportunity gaps), but they had dramatically different ways of thinking about those gaps.

The two different approaches that emerged are affirmative versus transformative. These are categories defined in the context of international development by political theorist Nancy Fraser. The affirmative approach emphasizes fixing or saving students. This method tends to use language like “empower.”

The transformative approach focuses on addressing inequitable systemic barriers as well as challenging ways of thinking that maintain opportunity gaps. This method tends to use language like “support” and “affirm.”

These two different approaches to opportunity gaps lead to very different practices, policies and initiatives. Affirmative approaches saw students and families in the MSIC program as “in need,” while positioning the program as the “saviour.”

Transformative approaches positioned the program as temporary support that aimed to work itself out of existence. Underserved communities were understood to have abundant social, political and cultural resources and agency to ensure their children’s success.

Affirm identities

Affirmative approaches work to ensure all students have access to the same experiences and material goods. Equal access to nutrition, technology and health services is also essential in transformative approaches. However, a transformative approach believes opportunity gaps are not fixed by just providing equal resources. Programs should also work to affirm students’ identities.

In other words, schools should develop curriculum, field trips and extracurricular activities based on the students’ lived experiences, interests and aspirations. Injustices can be addressed by the redistribution of goods, but recognition and representation matter as well.

Affirmative approaches provide parents with opportunities to network, learn about parenting and build workforce skills within the confines of board structures.

Transformative approaches work with parents and caregivers to advocate for their rights and navigate the educational system to support their children.

Teach students to engage critically

Affirmative approaches are related to the purpose of achieving excellence, in teaching and learning, generally in the form of standardized test scores.

Transformative approaches view equity as a prerequisite for excellence, but excellence is not the main point of education. The main point is to support students in engaging critically in a democratic society.

As Ontario school boards begin their project of collecting identity-based data, and as the boards work towards closing the achievement and opportunity gaps, policy-makers and school leaders will need to focus on transformative approaches. Their work needs to understand the relationships between historical injustices and student achievement, engagement and well-being today.

Source: Racialized student achievement gaps are a red-alert

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,