Canada’s Immigration System, Lauded by Trump, Is More Complex Than Advertised – The New York Times

2017/03/04 Leave a comment

Following Trump’s ‘shout-out’ to Canada’s (and Australia’s) immigration system, more coverage in US media:

Canada’s merit-based immigration system received a loving mention by President Trump this week in his speech to Congress. Mr. Trump, who has railed against illegal immigration and talked tough about tightening borders, said adopting that kind of system would cost American taxpayers less and help increase wages for poor workers.

But in Canada, immigration is not just about selecting newcomers based on their skills. It is part of a system that promotes both the economy and the country’s multicultural society, which has arguably become as much a part of Canadian identity as hockey. And it is largely seen as a way to increase immigration, not reduce it.

“Canadians are more likely than citizens of any other industrial country to think immigration is essential to the economy and the future of the country,” said Jeffrey Reitz, a professor of ethnic and immigration studies at the University of Toronto.

Canada, a country of 35 million, aims to take in 300,000 immigrants this year — 0.85 percent of its population, compared with the United States’ 0.3 percent — and polls show Canadians are happy with this. In fact, the finance minister’s advisory council on economic growth wants 150,000 more.

Part of that enthusiasm is the country’s recognition that, with an aging population, immigration is essential to economic growth. Add to that Canada’s geography — a long border with the prosperous United States to the south and the Arctic to the north — and illegal immigration is less of an issue.

And finally, Canadians have a wholehearted belief in the merit-based immigration system, which creates a positive feedback loop.

“The advantage of our system is the people who come in — everyone agrees they’ve passed some sort of merit system,” said Ravi Pendakur, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. “The Canadian population in particular is more willing to buy into immigration. They can see it’s managed, and that’s an advantage.”

The program does have its drawbacks. It has become enormously complex, ever-morphing and a source of huge backlogs.

Created in 1967, the merit-based system was seen as a way to select immigrants based on their “human capital” and not simply their country of origin, as had been the tradition. The idea was to bring in immigrants, regardless of where they were born, with vetted qualities that would make them the most successful at integrating into the Canadian economy.

Candidates received points for their level of education, ability to speak one or both of the country’s official languages, work experience, age, a job offer and what immigration officials called adaptability, which meant they came with family or had family here.

Initially, this system was the smallest of three streams of immigrants. People reuniting with their families and refugees were the other two. But increasingly, Canadian leaders have favored these “economic immigrants” to the point that this year, the government projects they will make up 57.5 percent of newcomers.

….“I teach this stuff and I find it confusing,” said Prof. Audrey Macklin, director of the University of Toronto’s Center for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. “It’s inherently confusing, plus it keeps changing.”

Still, the principle remains: The immigrants coming in under this system are well educated, literate in the local language and have great credentials.

Not surprisingly, studies have shown that economic immigrants, arriving with more education and language skills, land higher-paying jobs with greater potential for raises. Their children also have higher college graduation rates.

“If America changes toward our system, the Apples and Microsofts and Googles will be very happy,” said Robert Vineberg, a retired regional director general of immigration. “But the vegetable growers in California will not be so happy.”

Mr. Vineberg offered government immigration statistics from 2015 as an example. That year, Canada identified 66,360 newcomers as economic immigrants for their occupational skills.

Around 36,300 were categorized in the top two classes, meaning they were fluent in one national language and had a college degree. Most would have been recruited for a specific job, Mr. Vineberg said: for instance, vice president of a company or administrator of a hospital. Another 22,700 were picked for a job in skilled trades, like an industrial electrician. They needed the language skills to read a blueprint and follow complicated directions, and at least some postsecondary training and certification in their trade.

Only 2,177 were brought in as laborers, and even they would have been chosen for specific positions, most likely in a hard-to-fill job or a remote location — for instance, a Japanese-speaking hotel receptionist in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Mr. Vineberg said.

His example, however, illuminates the contradiction at the center of the immigration system.

In 2015, almost 272,000 people were granted entry, and only a quarter were picked for their merit. Most of those counted in the economic class were family members, chosen not for their human capital — although many might also be educated and intend to work — but their blood ties.

“The statistics convey the impression that Canada chooses most people based on economic criteria, and perhaps policy makers think this reassures Canadians that immigration serves Canada’s economic interests,” Professor Macklin said. “In reality, most people still enter on the basis of kinship. The idea that this can be easily or significantly altered is a bit of a fantasy.”

The other distinctive aspect of Canada’s immigration policy is what the country does not face: a tidal wave of migrants. Surrounded on three sides by enormous and frigid oceans, Canada has few people sneaking in. Even the increasing number of asylum seekers illegally crossing the border from the United States in recent years is comparatively small.

“It’s easier to be relaxed about immigration when your only land border is a huge wall with the United States,” Professor Reitz said.

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Failing Quebec’s Muslims – The New York Times

2017/03/01 Leave a comment

Patriquin in the NYTimes on Quebec’s ongoing debates:

But the trivialization of anti-Muslim crime and the outright demonization of Muslims, so common on Quebec City’s airwaves, contribute to a poisonous political climate for Muslims across the province.

Quebec’s political class has been embroiled in a decade-long obsession over the place for the province’s religious minorities in society. Because the discussion has focused largely on the Muslim veil, the effect has been further social and economic shunning of Muslims.

Quebec’s National Assembly is debating a bill that would compel much of the public service work force to keep their faces uncovered. The bill, which will probably be approved, comes just over three years after the previous Parti Québécois government tried to pass the Quebec Charter of Values, a more restrictive law that would have banned the wearing of all religious symbols by anyone drawing a provincial government paycheck.

This debate has only grown more intense. Seemingly inconsequential requests — as when, in 2007, a Muslim group asked for pork-free baked beans and a prayer room for a private retreat at one of Quebec’s many “sugar shacks,” where maple syrup is made and feasted upon — have been taken as assaults on Quebec’s vaunted secularism. More recently, the right-of-center Coalition Avenir Québec party said it would seek to ban the “burkini,” the body covering swimsuit worn by some Muslim women, from Quebec beaches. (The party eventually backed down, admitting that such a ban would be difficult to enforce.)

On paper, at least, the Muslims here are well suited for Quebec. Many of them are from North Africa, and are well versed in French, Quebec’s official language. They tend to be well-educated and have large families — a boon for a province with a low birthrate and an aging population.

Yet integrating into society has remained a stubborn problem. Quebec has the highest unemployment rate among recent immigrants to the country, just over 15 percent, nearly four percentage points higher than the national average, according to census data.

There are several reasons behind this high unemployment rate. Roughly 75 percent of Quebec’s immigrant population settles in Montreal, an already competitive job market. The province’s unions and professional organizations have been particularly reluctant to credit job experience at foreign companies, or even to recognize degrees earned at foreign universities. One of the mosque shooting victims, Aboubaker Thabti, was trained as a pharmacist in his native Tunisia. A married father of two, he was working at a chicken slaughterhouse at the time of his death.

The province’s government has promised that remedies are on the way. Last year, the governing Liberals introduced a bill that would streamline the recognition of foreign university degrees and compel professional organizations to more readily accept applicants from non-Canadian institutions. Other provinces have instituted such measures, with varying degrees of success. In Ontario, where most of the country’s immigrants settle, there are still far too many professionals driving cabs and delivering food.

Then there is the thorny issue of who, exactly, is a Quebecer. In the job market, there remains a preference for what is known as “pure laine” Quebecers. The expression — literally “pure wool” — denotes anyone with a Québécois last name and the appropriate skin tone.

“Unfortunately, you’re more likely to get a good job if your name is Lachance than if it’s Hamad,” said Tania Longpré, a researcher and French teacher in Montreal. “The key to integration is the ability to contribute to the economy. Quebec only loses when its professionals are forced to cut chickens.”

Mr. Duhaime, the radio host, has remained largely unrepentant in the wake of the mosque shooting, at one point blaming envious rivals for taking his words out of context. Others have been more contrite.

Sylvain Bouchard, a popular morning radio man, said that he’d failed in his duty to invite members of the city’s Muslim community to his show. “Muslims here are pacifist,” he said.

It was an unexpected show of regret in a medium known for its hot takes and big egos. If only words were the cause, and not just a symptom, of the problem.

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Quebec’s Response to Hate: More Tolerance – The New York Times

2017/02/03 Leave a comment

NYT editorial notes the contrast between Canada and the US (but no reason to be smug):

No society is immune to acts of terrorism, especially by a lone wolf driven by deep hatreds. The United States has known many mass shootings; Norway had the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik; in France last July, a man drove a truck into a crowd in Nice, killing dozens; the list could go on and on. When they strike, the measure of a wounded society is how it responds.

On Sunday, Quebec City was struck when, officials say, a 27-year-old student named Alexandre Bissonnette, known to be a right-wing extremist, walked into a mosque, began shooting and killed six people. The shock across Canada was immediate and tangible: Tolerance is a proud theme in Canadian identity — the country has taken in nearly 40,000 Syrian refugees since late 2015 when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office. Now Canadians were wondering how this could have happened, and what it means — a question made more acute by their widespread revulsion at President Trump’s actions to block Muslims from the United States.

The response of Quebec’s premier, Philippe Couillard, is worth noting. “Every society has to deal with demons,” he said. “Our society is not perfect. None is. These demons are named xenophobia, racism, exclusion. They are present here. We need to recognize that and act together to show the direction we want our society to evolve.”

That was what Canadians sought to do. Thousands gathered at memorial services across the country, including Mr. Trudeau on Monday. Speaking earlier to Parliament, he addressed the more than one million Muslim Canadians: “Thirty-six million hearts are breaking with yours,” he said, referring to the population of Canada. “Know that we value you.”

In sad contrast, the reaction from Mr. Trump’s White House was to use the shootings to justify its anti-immigrant policies. The attack was a “terrible reminder,” said the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, of why America’s actions must be “proactive, rather than reactive.” The logic, or illogic, seemed to be that if Muslims had been kept out of Canada, they would not have been killed.

Canada is not perfect; it, too, has its demons, as Mr. Couillard said. But the response of a democratic society must be to reaffirm its fundamental faith in freedom, including the freedom to practice one’s faith and cultural traditions. In Quebec, the demons took a terrible toll, but the country’s commitment to inclusion was, if anything, strengthened.

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ICYMI: Ten Theses on Immigration – Douthat, The New York Times

2016/02/03 Leave a comment

Buried in Ross Douthat’s concerns regarding immigration and integration, is an endorsement of Canadian and Australian approaches:

As someone who is (obviously) skeptical of the elite-level consensus on immigration’s benefits, I’m glad to see the G.O.P. and conservatism tilting away from George W. Bush/Rubio-Schumer “comprehensivism” on immigration policy. But I also think that the stampede to Trumpism is being unduly influenced by a conflation of the American and European situations. Europe faces a real, potentially deep and epoch-defining crisis — a refugee problem that could threaten the very foundations of the continent’s post-Cold War order. America faces a much more normal sort of policy quandary, to which the ideal political response could reach the destination that Salam proposes in his essay — sharper limits on low-skilled migration and a more Canadian or Australian approach to immigration as, effectively, recruitment  — without huge and wrenching shifts, mass deportations, religion-specific entry bans, and all the rest of the Trumpian bill of goods.

So while we should be guided, no less than Europe, by a greater prudence than our leadership has shown to date, we should also recognize that what is (for Germany especially) now a crisis Over There remains as yet an opportunity for us.

Source: Ten Theses on Immigration – The New York Times

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Syrian Family’s Tragedy Goes Beyond Iconic Image of Boy on Beach – The New York Times

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Syrian_Family’s_Tragedy_Goes_Beyond_Iconic_Image_of_Boy_on_Beach_-_The_New_York_TimesA good in-depth profile of the extended Kurdi family and how they have been dispersed as Syria fell apart:

When Alan Kurdi’s tiny body washed up on a beach in Turkey, forcing the world to grasp the pain of Syria’s refugees, the 2-year-old boy was just one member of a family on the run, scattered by nearly five years of upheaval.

As a Turkish officer lifted the boy from the shallow waves at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, one of Alan’s teenage cousins was alone on a bus in Hungary, fleeing the fighting back home in Damascus.

An aunt was stuck in Istanbul, nursing a baby, as her son and daughter worked 18-hour shifts in a sweatshop so the family could eat. Dozens of other relatives — aunts, uncles and cousins — had fled the war in Syria or were making plans to flee.

And just weeks after Alan’s image shocked the world in September, another aunt prepared to do what she had promised herself to avoid: set sail with four of her children on the same perilous journey.

“We die together, or we live together and make a future,” her 15-year-old daughter said, concluding, as have hundreds of thousands of other Syrians, that there was no going back, and that the way to security led through great risk.

This image of Alan’s body washed up on a beach in Turkey led to an outpouring of concern for Syrian refugees. Since then, at least 100 more children have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Nilufer Demir, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 

Alan, whose mother and brother drowned with him, belonged to a sprawling clan from Syria’s long-oppressed Kurdish minority. But for most of his closest relatives, that identity was secondary to the cosmopolitan ethos of the Syrian capital, Damascus, where they grew up. They barely spoke Kurdish, identified mainly as Syrian and joined no faction.

So when war broke out, and political ties, sect and ethnicity became life-or-death matters, they were on their own.

Interviews with 20 relatives, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Istanbul, in five German towns and by phone in Syria, tell a story of a family chewed up by one party to the Syrian conflict after another: the Syrian government, the Islamic State, neighboring countries, the West.

Source: Syrian Family’s Tragedy Goes Beyond Iconic Image of Boy on Beach – The New York Times

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With the Rise of Justin Trudeau, Canada Is Suddenly … Hip? – The New York Times

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

While this is largely a puff-piece, it reflects some of the rebranding taking place after the election. And in terms of the 17 Canadians it profiled in entertainment and fashion, 7 were women (41 percent) and 5 were visible minority (29 percent):

As Mr. Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau (along with their three young children, Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien), create a Canadian Camelot, they are casting light on a wider eruption already in progress.

An expanse once stereotyped as the home to square-jawed Mounties and beer-swilling “hosers” has quietly morphed into a multicultural breeding ground that has given us the Weeknd, who can’t feel his face; the director Sarah Polley, who makes films of subtle power; and the upstart fashion designer Tanya Taylor, whose creations have been worn by Michelle Obama.

The rapper Drake, of Toronto, comes in for a little ribbing now and then, but none other than Jay Z called him the Kobe Bryant of hip–hop. And even the latest albumfrom Justin Bieber, the pride of Stratford, Ontario (population 33,430), is — gulp! — pretty terrific.

It’s all very exciting, eh? But still … Canada? The land of hyper–politeness and constant apology? The home of maple syrup, poutine, the gentle sport of curling and 10 percent of the world’s forests? The country that Spy magazine once said had “cultural Epstein-Barrness”?

As Joe Zee, 47, the Toronto-raised editor in chief of Yahoo Style, said: “There was always the feeling of being in the shadow of the U.S. For a treat we would take family trips to Niagara Falls, and I’d always want to cross the border and go to Buffalo, to go shopping! Buffalo, N.Y., was my rainbow growing up — it’s where the pot of gold was.”

“Even our national anthem sounds like a sigh: ‘O Canada,’” said the writer and editor Sarah Nicole Prickett, who was born in London, Ontario, and has written for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. “Drake, more than anyone, is the prophet who’s changing that, because, unlike a lot of talented Canadians before him, he accepts embarrassment as a cost of making big art.”

The niceness factor is something that may distinguish Canadian cultural producers. “The first month I lived in Manhattan, in the spring of 2012, I heard that I was ‘nice’ from seven people,” Ms. Prickett said. “That’s when I realized I was Canadian.” But like her confreres Grimes, Ms. Polley and the Weeknd, Ms. Prickett does not produce work that is meant to comfort.

True, Canada has delivered sultans of cool in the past. Amid the polite folk rock of Gordon Lightfoot and Anne Murray, there was the melancholy genius of Joni Mitchell, who was hip enough to win the blessing of Charles Mingus. And we would be foolish to forget the alternately sensitive and raucous Neil Young, who never met an expectation he did not defy. (“Obviously people are delighted with the change that has taken place,” Mr. Young, a California resident, said after Mr. Trudeau’s election. “It’s very positive news.”)

And let us not ignore the coolest cat in a hat, Leonard Cohen, still capable of multiple encores at 81.

Then there are the Canadian kings and queens of comedy like David Steinberg, Lorne Michaels, Mike Myers, Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara, who started out as foils to mainstream American pop culture and ended up shaping it.

Canadians have always been funny, according to the Toronto-born editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter. “S.­J. Perelman used to think that Stephen Leacock was the funniest writer in the world,” Mr. Carter said, referring to the multifaceted author who moved to Canada from his native England at age 6. “And he was. The trouble is, the self-deprecation so regularly on display is often lost on Americans. Now Marty Short is the funniest person in the world — although he’s far too modest to admit it.”

Mr. Zee agrees that Canada has not become hip all at once, with the election of the mediagenic Mr. Trudeau. It is partly a dawning of self-recognition.

“We’ve always had Frank Gehry,” he said.

Source: With the Rise of Justin Trudeau, Canada Is Suddenly … Hip? – The New York Times

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Her Majesty’s Jihadists – NYTimes.com

2015/04/15 Leave a comment

Long in-depth profile of radicalized youth in the UK:

I asked Maher if, based on the center’s research, he could draw a typical jihadist profile. “The average British fighter is male, in his early 20s and of South Asian ethnic origin,” he began. “He usually has some university education and some association with activist groups. Over and over again, we have seen that radicalization is not necessarily driven by social deprivation or poverty.” He paused for a moment, and then went on. “Other than those who go for humanitarian reasons, some of the foreign fighters are students of martyrdom; they want to die as soon as possible and go directly to paradise. We’ve seen four British suicide bombers thus far among the 38 Britons who have been killed. Then there are the adventure seekers — those who think this will enhance their masculinity, the gang members and the petty criminals too; and then, of course, the die-hard radicals, who began by burning the American flag and who then advanced to wanting to kill Americans — or their partners — under any circumstance.”

Her Majesty’s Jihadists – NYTimes.com.

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Turning to Big, Big Data to See What Ails the World

2015/04/13 Leave a comment

Good examples of how big data can help identity the more important issues and the consequent shift in focus from death to disability:

The disconnect between what we think causes the most suffering and what actually does persists today. It is partly a function of success. Diarrhea, pneumonia and childbirth deaths have greatly declined, and deaths from malaria and AIDS have fallen, although far less dramatically. (The charts here show the stunning improvement in health around the world. And here are similar charts tracking progress in hunger, poverty and violence — a big picture that’s an important counterpoint to the constant barrage of negative world news.) This success is partly due to changes made because of the first Global Burden reports.

The downside is that longer lives mean people are living long enough to develop diabetes and Alzheimer’s.   “What decline we’re seeing from communicable diseases, we’re seeing a compensatory increase from diabetes,” Murray said.   And neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s now account for twice as many years lived with disability as cardiovascular and circulatory diseases together, Smith writes.

This is not simply because people are living longer. It’s also a function of worsening diet everywhere, as poor societies adopt the processed foods found in rich ones.

The most surprising information, though, came not in measuring deaths, but disability. “Major depression caused more total health loss in 2010 than tuberculosis,” Smith writes. Neck pain caused more health loss than any kind of cancer, and osteoarthritis caused more than natural disasters. For other findings that may surprise you, see the quiz.

The report is a giant compilation of “who knew?”

Based on this information, countries and international organizations have been able to change how they spend their health resources, and some ambitious countries have done their own national Burden of Disease studies.

Iran, writes Smith, found that traffic injury was its leading preventable cause of health loss in 2003, and put money into building new roads and retraining police. It also targeted two other big problems its study found: suicide and heart disease.

Australia, responding to the high impact of depression, began offering cost-free short-term depression therapy .

Mexico was one of the countries making the most use of Global Burden of Disease data, after Julio Frenk became health minister in 2000.   Frenk had been Murray’s boss at the W.H.O., and a participant in Murray’s work. He found that Mexico’s health system was targeting the communicable diseases that predominated in 1950, not what currently ailed Mexicans. In response, Frenk established universal health insurance (before that, 50 million were uninsured) and set coverage according to the burden of disease.

The program covered emergency care for car accidents, treatment of mental illness, cataracts, and breast and cervical cancer — all of which had been uncovered, even for people with insurance. “You want to cover those interactions that give you the highest gain,” ]he said.

Murray and company have now branched out beyond diagnosis to measuring treatment: How many people really have access to programs like anti-malaria bed nets or contraception? How much is being spent and what does it buy? Where are the most useful points of intervention?   Meanwhile, data from the Global Burden reports  is seeping further into health policy decisions around the world — data that saves suffering and money and lives.

via Turning to Big, Big Data to See What Ails the World – NYTimes.com.

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Research Shows White Privilege Is Real

2015/02/26 Leave a comment

More examples of unconscious bias at work:

A field experiment about who gets free bus rides in Brisbane, a city on the eastern coast of Australia, shows that even today, whites get special privileges, particularly when other people aren’t around to notice.

The bus study underscores this point. Drivers were more likely to let testers ride free when there were fewer people on the bus to observe the transaction. And the drivers themselves were probably not aware that they were treating minorities differently. When drivers, in a questionnaire conducted after the field test, were shown photographs of the testers and asked how they would respond, hypothetically, to a free-ride request, they indicated no statistically significant bias against minorities in the photos (86 percent said they would let the black individual ride free).

Of course, unconscious bias might play out differently in the United States than in Australia. But research in America, too, suggests that decision makers use discretion to bestow benefits in a discriminatory fashion. For example, a recent study of 22 law firms by Arin N. Reeves, a lawyer and sociologist, found that partners were less critical of a junior lawyer’s draft memo if they were told the lawyer was white than if they were told the lawyer was black.

What does white privilege mean today? In part, it means to live in the world while being given the benefit of the doubt. Have you ever been able to return a sweater without a receipt? Has an employee ever let you into a store after closing time? Did a car dealership take a little extra off the sticker price when you asked? When’s the last time you received service with a smile?

White privilege doesn’t (usually) operate as brazenly and audaciously as in the Eddie Murphy joke, but it continues in the form of discretionary benefits, many of them unconscious ones. These privileges are hard to eradicate, but essential to understand.

Research Shows White Privilege Is Real – NYTimes.com.

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Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender – NYTimes.com

2015/02/10 Leave a comment

Gender bias universities

Frequency of word “genius” in RatemyProfessor

Interesting study on bias, this time in the university setting:

Studies have also shown that students can be biased against female professors. In one, teachers graded and returned papers to students at the exact same time, but when asked to rate their promptness, students gave female professors lower scores than men. Biases cut both ways — teachers have also been found to believe girls are not as good in math and science, even when they perform similarly to boys.

Mr. Schmidt, who made the chart as part of a project called Bookworm for searching and visualizing large texts, said he was struck by “this spectrum from smart to brilliant to genius, where each one of those is more strongly gendered male than the previous one was.” He was also surprised that relatively few people commented on female professors’ clothing or looks, which he had expected to be the case.

Another surprise, he said, was Shakespeare — apparently many more men than women teach it in English departments.

Men are more likely to be described as a star, knowledgeable, awesome or the best professor. Women are more likely to be described as bossy, disorganized, helpful, annoying or as playing favorites. Nice or rude are also more often used to describe women than men.

Men and women seemed equally likely to be thought of as tough or easy, lazy, distracted or inspiring.

Interestingly, women were more likely to be described in reviews as role models. Mr. Schmidt notes that the reviews are anonymous, so he doesn’t know the gender of reviewers. It could be that more female students describe female professors as role models than men do when describing men or women.

Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender – NYTimes.com.

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