More measures coming to reduce temporary residents, Canadian minister says

2024/08/03 Leave a comment

Stay tuned, more signs of reality, both substantive and political:

Canada’s government is preparing to unveil a suite of measures to clamp down on temporary immigration and has no plans to follow through right now on a broad program offering status to undocumented residents, the country’s immigration minister told Reuters.

“The era of uncapped programs to come into this country is quickly coming to an end. This is a big shift. You can’t just slam on the brakes and expect it to stop immediately,” Marc Miller said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.

Canada has long prided itself on welcoming newcomers, and the current Liberal government has overseen a dramatic increase in the influx of new residents, especially temporary ones, as many employers struggled to fill vacancies coming out of the pandemic.

But over the past year the tide has shifted: Immigrants are being blamed for a worsening housing situation along with an affordability crisis in the country. Critics have accused the federal government of bringing in too many people.

A Leger poll conducted in July found 60% of respondents said there are too many immigrants coming to Canada.

“I’m not naive enough to think Canada is immune to the waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. … Canadians want a system that is not out of control,” Miller said in a phone interview.

Canadians “want a system that makes sense. And they want one that still has a lot of welcoming aspects we’ve been proud of, but it’s got to make sense,” Miller said, predicting immigration would be “a top issue, if not the top issue, in the next election,” expected to take place in late 2025.

The Canadian government has already outlined some measures. In January it announced a two-year cap on international students – an area of Canada’s immigration system that got “overheated” and was not meant to be “a backdoor entry into Canada,” Miller said.

In March the immigration minister announced Canada’s first-ever cap on temporary immigration. Canada wants to reduce temporary residents to 5% of the total population over the next three years from 6.2% in 2023. That would be a cut of about 20% from Canada’s 2.5 million temporary residents in 2023.

But in its recent monetary policy report, the Bank of Canada expressed doubts that the government could meet its temporary residents goal, noting that non-permanent residents made up 6.8% of the country’s population as of April and that “the share is expected to continue rising over the near-term.”

The bank is right to say achieving this goal is a challenge, but it is a “reasonable” one given the suite of measures Canada plans to announce over the next several weeks, Miller said.

Miller would not give details but said these measures could include changes to post-graduate work permits and enforcement.

Asked if his government had made a mistake in allowing rapid growth in temporary residents, Miller said, “Every government makes mistakes. I think we are all human.” But “coming out of COVID, in particular, we were facing massive labor shortages.”

REFUGEE INFLUX

Meanwhile, Canada is seeing record levels of refugee claims – more than 18,000 in June, according to the Immigration and Refugee Board. This is despite government efforts to deter people by closing the land border to asylum-seekers through a contested bilateral agreement with the United States and by implementing new visa requirements for Mexicans.

Canada cannot dictate how many people file refugee claims but it can make it difficult for asylum-seekers to reach the country. Miller said the government may impose stricter criteria on temporary resident visas to prevent asylum-seekers from coming.

The government had also previously said it would pursue a regularization program to give status to undocumented residents.

That is not on the table before the election, Miller said, but he noted there is a possibility of sector-specific programs.

Source: More measures coming to reduce temporary residents, Canadian minister says

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Trump gives away the game on his census citizenship gambit

2020/07/23 Leave a comment

Indeed:

The Supreme Court was confronted with a difficult question in the past year. The Trump administration wanted to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, and its stated reason was to enforce the Voting Rights Act. But opponents argued this was, in fact, a thinly veiled partisan gambit to draw more GOP-friendly districts.

The court issued a remarkable rebuke of the Trump administration’s stated reason. And now, the Trump administration is pretty much acknowledging its motivation was precisely what its critics claimed.

President Trump on Tuesday signed a memorandum stating that undocumented immigrants should not be included as part of the next process of apportionment — i.e., the doling out of congressional districts that follows every census. Such a move would reduce the representation of states (many of them blue) with higher undocumented populations.

Apportionment has never been handled like this, and there are major questions about both the legality and practicality of the memorandum.

The Constitution states that congressional districts must be drawn according to “the whole number of persons.” And federal courts have long ruled that congressional districts must be drawn according to total population. But there has been some ambiguity in how the Supreme Court has decided this question. And Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has indicatedthat perhaps states might be allowed to draw their legislative districts according to citizen voting-age population. At the least, the Trump administration is putting all of that to the test.

Beyond that, it’s not clear how this will be executed. Given that the Supreme Court struck down the citizenship question, how is the federal government to even determine which people are citizens? Even if the idea passes constitutional and legal muster, actually doing what the memorandum says is another matter entirely.

But those two very important questions aside, there’s the matter of what this says about the Trump administration’s true intent. The Supreme Court ruled in the past year that the Trump administration’s stated reason — the Voting Rights Act — “seems to have been contrived” and that officials such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross seemed to invent a justification for something they planned to do very early in the Trump presidency.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. strongly rebuked Ross and the administration, saying, “What was provided here [as a justification] was more of a distraction.”

Absent from the Trump administration’s legal defense was any indication that this was part of an effort geared toward apportionment or redistricting — the latter being the decennial drawing of new districts to reflect population shifts.

But it was part of the opposition’s case. Critics in the past year pointed to a previously unpublished 2015 presentation from the late GOP redistricting expert Tom Hofeller, which stated that using citizenship data in a state such as Texas “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” by diluting the influence of Democratic-leaning Hispanics. The critics argued that the Justice Department’s case for a census citizenship question closely mirrored Hofeller’s 2015 study, reinforcing the political motivations of the move.

And Trump himself seemed to affirm that aim. As the case was progressing, the president blurted out that, “Number one, you need it for Congress — you need it for Congress for districting.”

This ran afoul of the Supreme Court defense offered by the Trump administration, led by then-Solicitor General Noel Francisco. Francisco said at the time that Ross “did not rely on that rationale in his decisional memorandum.” Francisco added: “Instead, he relied on DOJ’s explanation … that citizenship data from the [American Community Survey] has substantial limitations.”

In other words, the defense was that we needed the citizenship question because the more-frequent but less-robust American Community Survey couldn’t provide totally accurate citizenship data — not because of a need for apportionment or redistricting data.

Both before and since then, the administration hasn’t done much of anything to reinforce its claimed desire to enforce or bolster the Voting Rights Act. But it has now confirmed that it would very much like to use citizenship data to award congressional districts — just as its critics claimed (and it denied) was its true aim.

Trump’s move Tuesday suggests his comments were more than just a coincidence — and that his administration’s disavowals of this alleged goal were dishonest, at best.

Source: Trump gives away the game on his census citizenship gambit

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