ICYMI ‘It’s cultural genocide’: Native Americans shine a light on the epidemic of disenrollment

2023/04/11 Leave a comment

Of note, “blood quantum”:

For Kadin Mills, a first descendant of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, resources offered through his family’s tribe will always be just out of arm’s reach.

He will never be able to call himself a citizen of Keweenaw Bay — and with that comes limits on the sort of benefits, such as health, that he is able to receive. In desperate cases — like when Mills needs a prescription that would simply be too expensive at non-tribal pharmacies — he must depend on good timing, luck, and the generosity of his enrolled family members.

“If my mom has the same prescription, she gives them to me and refills hers,” he said.

Mills is just one of many Native American young adults and youths who are unable to enroll with their tribe, even when one or more of their immediate family members — such as a parent or a grandparent — are enrolled. Most, if not all, federally-recognized tribes rely on blood quantum and lineage requirements to determine whether an individual is eligible for citizenship.

The term “blood quantum” is exactly what it sounds like. It refers to the amount of “Indian blood” a person has — for example, if someone’s grandparent was fully Native, that person’s blood quantum would only be a quarter Native.

According to “American Indians without Tribes in the 21st Century,” a journal article published in the National Library of Medicine, one-third of mixed-race American Indians and one-sixth of single-race American Indians did not respond to questions regarding tribal affiliation or enrollment in the 2000 United States census.

In many tribes, including the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, a minimum of one-fourth of Native American blood is required to enroll. These requirements ice out mixed-race Native Americans such as Mills, something that he said promises a decline in tribal membership and an uncertain future for traditional ways of life.

“I think it’s cultural genocide,” Mills said.

During the mid to late 1800s, the United States government began using the blood quantum measure in the hopes that “intermarriage would “dilute” the amount of “Indian blood” in the population,” according to an article by Maya Harmon published by the California Law Review at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The end goal was to breed out Native Americans and assimilate them into white society.

Other tribes, such as the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians in southwestern Michigan, rely on a model of “lineal descendancy,” where a person’s citizenship is determined by their ancestry rather than blood quantum percentage.

Blood quantum, according to an article published by NPR, “What Exactly is ‘Blood Quantum’?”, refers to the amount of “Indian Blood” an individual possesses. The manner in which this is determined is through legal tribal documents issued by a tribal official or government official. The difference with lineal descendancy is when individuals acquire citizenship by proving they have ancestors previously part of indigenous groups.

While uncommon, Mills pointed out that this model has significant potential to reshape tribal communities.

“I think that that’s the future of our communities, at least in this area,” he said.

Native Americans who are enrolled with any of the 574 federally-recognized tribes in the United States have access to benefits such as free or low-cost healthcare, subsidized housing and universal basic income, which grants citizens consistent payment to support during any socioeconomic struggle. In most tribes, no such benefits are offered to lineal descendants, even when a child’s parent is an enrolled citizen.

For Mills, whose mother is an enrolled member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, access to healthcare services has been a rocky journey, riddled with countless obstacles, financial barriers and disappointing dead-ends.

After his dad became unemployed and lost their health insurance over a year ago, Mills sheepishly explained that he hadn’t been to the dentist in over a year despite needing prescription toothpaste.

Even the primary care he once received as a student at Northwestern University was no longer accessible.

He believes that if Keweenaw Bay followed a citizenship model similar to the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, the quality of life for tribal members and their families would be much better.

“I think that it really hurts our ability to offer programs and services to people who are subject to ongoing cultural genocide that is blood quantum,” Mills said. “You keep them from actually accessing that culture and being able to be active participants in their communities.”

Even enrolled tribal members aren’t necessarily in the clear when it comes to citizenship. Such is the case with Summer Paa’ila-Herrera Jones, whose family was disenrolled from the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians in 2004.

At the time, Jones was only six years old; she said she still struggles to fully understand what led to the situation.

“I feel like I don’t have a whole grasp of the whole picture of what happened to our family or why,” Jones said. “That’s a really hard thing to grow up in. I knew the term disenrollment. But what does that mean to a six-year-old?”

Jones said that she believes that around 210 tribal members — about 25 percent of Pechanga’s membership — were disenrolled. She was one of 76 children who were impacted by the disenrollment.

“In the name of sovereignty, it happened,” she said.

Disenrollment, while uncommon, is a serious matter, as enrollment status holds power, security and privilege that an individual might not otherwise have. In the case of the Nooksack Tribe of Washington state, over 306 tribal citizens were disenrolled in 2018; 63 of these disenrolled citizens were evicted from federally-subsidized housing on tribal land.

In Jones’ case, her family was outcast socially by enrolled members of the tribe, who she said treated them poorly and discriminated against them due to their enrollment status.
“[This woman] had confronted my mom at the clinic and basically said, ‘you’re not welcome here. You’re not allowed to come here with your kids. You don’t get services here,” Jones recalled. “She [had known] me since I was born.”

After this encounter, Jones’ parents began taking her and her siblings to a health clinic on the Rincon Indian Reservation in San Diego, a 45-minute drive from the Pechanga reservation where Jones’ family lived. As an adult, Jones said that she still experiences significant anxiety and stress around making appointments for her health, even when it comes to primary care.

“To have [the disenrollment] at the forefront, when I’m literally just trying to get a teeth whitening appointment, it can be a struggle,” she said, chuckling.

“I feel like it’s still like really, I don’t know, kind of taboo or strange to talk about,” Jones said. “I do feel like my family has suffered this extra layer of trauma that is very much invisible to people in society, but also to people within the Native community.”

Source: ‘It’s cultural genocide’: Native Americans shine a light on the epidemic of disenrollment

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Shia Muslim scholars denied entry into US suspect religious bias

2023/04/04 Leave a comment

Of note, particularly given that the persons quoted had made frequent trips to the US:

It took the US consulate seven minutes to reject Nabil Ahmed Shabbir’s visa application.

Shabbir, a British Shia scholar, had applied for his US visa to assist with the birth of his first child. His wife, an American Shia Muslim, wanted to have the birth in the US.

Shabbir hadn’t even left the embassy gate after handing in his visa application when he got a text message saying it had been rejected.

Shabbir, whose work has brought him to the US dozens of times prior to this rejection in 2020, did not think obtaining a visa would be an issue.

Instead, he had to watch his firstborn’s birth via WhatsApp video.

Shabbir is one of numerous Shia scholars who have been repeatedly – and unexpectedly – denied entry to the US in the past decade, despite their prior travel to the country for work purposes, raising concerns that they are being deliberately excluded because of their religion.

Despite traveling to the US regularly for five years on a valid 10-year visa, Shabbir was stopped at the airport in 2019 and detained for five hours, facing questions about the intent of his visit.

He was traveling with his wife, but was asked why he had invitations from years ago from American organizations – which fed his suspicion that officials had gone through his email.

He was eventually allowed to enter, but once he returned from the US, he received a notification that his visa had been revoked.

This revocation – unceremonious, without a specific reason and out of the blue – fits a pattern that has been experienced by many Shia scholars.

Mohammad Ali Naquvi, cofounder and chair of the American Muslim Bar Association (AMBA), said his organization has documented denials or revocations of more than 50 Shia scholars in the past decade.

Some were denied entry as they were about to board a US-bound flight, some were denied entry after arriving in the country and forced to turn back despite having a valid visa – and some like Shabbir still remain in a limbo of “administrative processing”.

“It has a burden on the religious practice of Shia Muslims in the US, not being able to have the scholars here,” Abed Ayoub, national executive director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said. “Not being able to have your religious events because of immigration enforcement is very problematic.”

The issue has been going on for a long time. Sheikh Jihad Ismail, an Australian Shia scholar, was about to board his flight to Albany from Dubai in 2014 when he was told he couldn’t fly into the US. This threw him off, especially because he had visited the US nearly 20 times since 2002, giving talks and engaging with the Shia community in the country. His visa has been under “administrative processing” for six years. According to Naquvi, there are some “administrative processing” cases that go back nine years.

Both Ismail and Shabbir know numerous other scholars going through similar experiences. Ismail recalled the story of a friend who was recently made to return on the next flight after arriving in the US.

Many of these scholars are from English-speaking countries such as the UK, Canada and Australia.

There is no solid reason to which anyone in the community can point to explain why so many Shia scholars have been denied entry, but they say they have their suspicions.

Ayoub traces the issue back to the San Bernardino shooting in 2015, in which the shooters had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

This was followed by the Obama administration passing the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015, which disqualified the visa waiver for applicants from 40 countries if they had made any trips to Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen on a government assignment or military order.

This is tricky because Shia pilgrimages, including the ziyarah, take place in Iran and Iraq.

Nearly all Shia scholars have visited or regularly visit these countries, which automatically puts them under scrutiny under the law.

“Because you’re seeing a big number of individuals coming from visa waiver countries, what we believe is happening is the consular officers at the state department are misreading this law,” Ayoub said.

“What they’re doing, in our opinion, is yes, the individual may not qualify for visa waiver, but they’re holding the same standard in even issuing a visa,” he added.

That still doesn’t explain why Ismail was denied the visa in 2014, before the San Bernardino shooting, feeding further confusion among the scholars. It’s clear that there is a pattern that holds true for all these instances, yet nobody can pinpoint the exact issue that would uniformly justify these cases.

This has a grave impact for Shia Americans, especially the current generation.

For a religion with a rich practice of cultural and knowledge exchange across borders, Shabbir said there is an immense value English-speaking scholars have in reaching the current generation, and these visa denials hamper that education.

If scholars like himself aren’t allowed to teach in the US, the other option for such exchange programs is to invite scholars from countries where they may not understand British or American culture, and the culture gap could become a barrier.

“Those young people then find it very difficult to consolidate their faith and the culture they are living in,” he said.

“They see the western culture as something inherently bad, and if they’re going to be religious that means they have to be against western culture,” he added. “Whereas it’s not the case – but they won’t know that until they are presented with a western scholar who has grown up through the system.”

But there are signs of progress. Ayoub said the Trump administration assisted on some individual cases, and activists are now in talks with Biden administration officials who Ayoub said had been “very receptive”.

Those like Shabbir hope the doors open up soon. For him, beyond giving talks as a religious scholar, he misses the opportunity to visit his in-laws, with whom his wife has been staying for a few months to take care of her mother. This means he has to go months without seeing his wife or child.

“It’s not just the visa rejection,” he said. “There’s just so much more that ends up being attached to it.”

Source: Shia Muslim scholars denied entry into US suspect religious bias

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Warren | The Global Transformation of Christianity Is Here

2023/03/28 Leave a comment

Of note, similar trend as in Canada:

A few months ago, I went to a worship service that, in many ways, was like a thousand evangelical services I’d seen before. People raised their hands while singing and cried out “Glory to God!” and “Amen.” People stood and gave “testimony,” telling stories of finding hope or healing from pain. They read Bible verses and prayed prayers. There was a clear difference, however, from most worship services I’ve attended: Nearly everyone in the room was an immigrant and a person of color. We sang in English but also in Spanish, Portuguese, Igbo and Nepali.

I was at a meeting of the Greater Austin Diaspora Network, a coalition that brings together immigrant leaders representing about 40 churches in the Austin area. They estimate that there are over 150 such churches around Austin.

“The face of Christianity is undergoing a fundamental transformation,” Sam George, the director of the Global Diaspora Institute at Wheaton College, told me. “What is happening in America is just a part of a larger transformation because Christianity is getting a new face. It is getting more Black and brown and yellow.”

The last century has seen a near-complete reversal of the global demographics of Christianity. Currently, the fastest growing Christian communities are in the “majority world” — the term I use for non-Western countries that make up most of the world’s population.

In his book “The Unexpected Christian Century,” Scott Sunquist notes that in 1900, about 80 percent of the world’s Christian population lived in the Western world and about 20 percent in the majority world. By 2000, only 37 percent lived in the Western world, and nearly two-thirds lived in the majority world. Sub-Saharan Africa had the most striking growth of Christianity, growing from around 9 percent Christian at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. There are around 685 million Christians in Africa now.

“Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century,” said George, “is the most global and most diverse and the most dispersed faith.”

In Africa, Latin America and Asia, Christianity is growing in historic denominations, such as Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, but the most explosive growth has been in Indigenous, independent Pentecostal churches. Sunquist argues that in addition to Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches, we ought to start talking about a new family of “spiritual” churches that have no historical ties to Western church traditions. These “spiritual” churches are largely not a result of colonial missions. In fact, the meteoric rise of Christianity in the majority world occurred only after the withdrawal of colonial powers when Christianity became more indigenized.

In popular religious discourse in the West, we tend to associate Christianity with white Westerners and European influence. At this point, our assumptions about this need to change. The largest church congregation in the world belongs to Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, an Assemblies of God church, which has around 480,000 members. Statistics vary but even conservative estimates guess there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globallyin 1970. Now, there are over 342 million.

In my own tradition of Anglicanism, with nearly 60 percent of all Anglicans living in Africa and over 30 percent in Nigeria and Uganda alone, there are most likely more Anglicans in Sunday services in these two countries than in America and England combined. Latin America boasts 14 megachurches with total membership over 20,000. And by some estimates, China will have more Christians than any other country by 2030.

Source: Opinion | The Global Transformation of Christianity Is Here

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McWhorter: Today’s Woke Excesses Were Born in the ’60s

2023/03/25 Leave a comment

McWhorter’s reflections always of interest, including these on the “performative” aspects of activism:

Various books I’ve been reading lately have me thinking about 1966. I have often said that the history of Black America could be divided between what happened before and after that year.

It was a year when the fight for Black equality shifted sharply in mood, ushering in an era in which rhetoric overtook actual game plans for action. It planted the seed for the excesses of today’s wokeness. I wouldn’t have been on board, and I’m glad I was only a baby that year and didn’t have to face it as a mature person.

The difference between Black America in 1960 and in 1970 appears vaster to me than it was between the start and end of any other decade since the 1860s, after Emancipation. And in 1966 specifically, Stokely Carmichael made his iconic speech about a separatist Black Power, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he led expelled its white members (though Carmichael himself did not advocate this), the Black Panther Party was born, “Black” replaced “Negro” as the preferred term, the Afro went mainstream, and Malcolm X’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (written with Alex Haley) became a standard text for Black readers.

I doubt most people living through that year thought of it as a particularly unique 365 days, but Mark Whitaker, a former editor of Newsweek, has justified my sense of that year as seminal with his new book, “Saying It Loud: 1966 — the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement.” Whitaker has a journalist’s understanding of the difference between merely documenting the facts and using them to tell a story, and his sober yet crisp prose pulls the reader along with nary a lull.

But one question keeps nagging at me: Why did the mood shift at that particular point? The conditions of Black America at the time would not have led one to imagine that a revolution in thought was imminent. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had just happened. The economy was relatively strong, and Black men in particular were now earning twice or more what they earned before World War II. As the political scientist and historian duo Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom noted in their book “America in Black and White,” “Before World War II, Black bank tellers, bookkeepers, cashiers, secretaries, stenographers, telephone operators or mail carriers were rare. By 1970 they were very common, though far more in the north than in the south.”

And as to claims one might hear that Black America was uniquely fed up in 1966, were Black people not plenty fed up in 1876, or after World War I or World War II?

What Whitaker so deftly chronicles strikes me less as a natural development from on-the-ground circumstances than as something more elusive for the historian: the emergence and influence of that mood shift I referred to. Carmichael memorably said: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”

The dramatic impact was obvious. But what did Black Power mean, and how much change on the ground did this kind of rhetoric ever actually result in? What were Carmichael’s concrete plans for action in the first place?

There was always a certain performative element in the man: not for nothing was he referred to as Starmichael. Whitaker recounts Carmichael’s proposing having Harlem “send one million Black men up to invade Scarsdale” — but really?

The N.A.A.C.P. head Roy Wilkins was infuriated at a crucial summit meeting between leading Black groups where Carmichael referred to Lyndon Johnson as “that cat, the president” and recommended publicly denouncing his work. This was a key conflict between an older style seeking to work within the only reality available and a new style favoring a kind of utopian agitprop.

Figures like Carmichael and Black Panthers Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown fascinate from a distance, with their implacable fierceness and true Black pride shocking a complacent “Leave It To Beaver” America. Plus their fashion sense — the berets, the leather jackets — was hard not to like. It all made for great photos and good television. But at the time, affirmative action and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, supported by those white “cats” responding to the suasion of people like Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr., were making a real difference in Black lives, central to encouraging the growth of the Black middle class.

This difference between mood and action is relevant to the historian Beverly Gage’s magnificent new biography, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The book’s 800-plus pages are so Caro-esque in detail, context and narrative energy that I have dragged the hardback across the Atlantic and back; Gage somehow makes a page turner out of the life of a man with the stage presence of a toad.

Where Hoover comes in on the 1966 issue is a common observation of his, which was that the Black-led urban riots of the Long, Hot Summer, and the general change in mood from integrationist to separatist, was not solely a response to the frustrations of poverty. Of course, Hoover couldn’t get much further than seeing Black people as having simply given in to a general anti-establishment degeneracy, egged on by Communist influence. That was one part nonsense (the Communist one) and one part racism.

Hoover was bred in a Southern city (D.C.) at the turn of the 20th century, post Plessy v. Ferguson. He came of age embraced by a fraternity steeped in post-Reconstruction “lost cause” ideology about Black people. His late-career persecution of the Panthers with F.B.I. technology and tactics was nastier — and more reckless with people’s lives — than his earlier witch hunt against white Communists had been.

Yet, his sense that the new developments were not caused by socioeconomics was not entirely mistaken. Rather, I suspect that much of why leading Black political ideology took such a menacing, and even impractical, turn in the late 1960s was that white America was by that time poised to hear it out. Not all of white America. But a critical mass had become aware, through television and the passage of bills like the Civil Rights Act, that there was a “race issue” requiring attention.

It’s a safe bet that if Black leaders had taken the tone of Carmichael and the Panthers in 1900 or even 1950, the response from whites would have been openly violent and even murderous. The theatricality of the new message was in part a response to enough whites now being interested in listening.

The problem was that so much of the message, at that point, was a kind of Kabuki, as the Black essayist Debra Dickerson memorably put it a while ago. Savory, dramatic poses were often more important than plans. This was perhaps a natural result of the fact that the remaining problems were challenging to address. With legalized segregation, disenfranchisement and residential Balkanization now illegal, the question was what to do next and how. “Black Power” did not turn out to be the real answer: It all burned out early — Whitaker identifies signs that this would happen as soon as the end of 1966.

Daniel Akst’s lucid group biography, “War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance,” demonstrates people of the era engaging in action that brings about actual change. Following the lives and careers of the activists Dorothy Day, Dwight Macdonald, David Dellinger and Bayard Rustin, one senses almost none of the detour into showmanship that so infused 1966. While Carmichael made speeches that, to many, were suggestive of violence, and later moved to Africa, Rustin, for example, essentially birthed the March on Washington.

I hardly intend that Carmichael’s brand of progressivism has only been known among Black people. Today it has attained cross-racial influence, serving as a model for today’s extremes of wokeness, confusing acting out for action. One might suppose that the acting out is at least a demonstration of leftist philosophy, perhaps valuable as a teaching tool of sorts. But is it? The flinty, readable “Left is Not Woke” by Susan Neiman, the director of the Einstein Forum think tank, explores that question usefully.

Neiman limns the new wokeness as an anti-Enlightenment program, despite its humanistic Latinate vocabulary. She associates true leftism with a philosophy that asserts “a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power and a belief in the possibility of progress” and sees little of those elements in the essentializing, punitive and pessimistic tenets too common in modern wokeness. Woke “begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization,” she writes. “In the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal.”

Neiman critiques pioneering texts of this kind of view, such as Michel Foucault’s widely assigned book, “Discipline and Punish,” and his essay “What is Enlightenment?,” in which he scorns “introducing ‘dialectical’ nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.” In this cynical and extremist kind of rhetoric, Neiman notes that “you may look for an argument; what you’ll find is contempt.” And the problem, she adds, is that “those who have learned in college to distrust every claim to truth will hesitate to acknowledge falsehood.”

All of these books relate to a general sense I have always had, that in 1966 something went seriously awry with what used to be called “The Struggle.” There is a natural human tendency in which action devolves into gesture, the concrete drifts into abstraction, the outline morphs into shorthand. It’s true in language, in the arts, and in politics, and I think its effects distracted much Black American thought — as today’s wokeness as performance also leads us astray — at a time when there was finally the opportunity to do so much more. I will explore what that more was in another column, but in the meantime, Whitaker, Neiman, Akst and — albeit more obliquely — Gage are useful in showing why 1966 was such an important turning point in the story.

Source: Today’s Woke Excesses Were Born in the ’60s

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Niskanen Center: The rising cost of stagnant immigration policy

2023/03/25 Leave a comment

More on the implications of their recent study (from a Canadian perspective, this harm to the USA is to our benefit):

In a recent Niskanen commentary, we released new data revealing how Canada is poaching valuable graduates of American universities by offering a direct pathway to permanent residency based on merits alone–without requiring sponsorship or even a job offer. What’s more, American companies are increasingly moving their foreign employees to Canada and other nearby countries to avoid the delays in our immigration system.

By seeking immigration status for foreign employees in countries other than the U.S.,  businesses can dodge the visa caps, backlogs, and country caps currently plaguing our immigration system–a short-term win for these businesses.

The practice of moving business operations or employees abroad is commonly known as offshoring or, in the case of our closest neighbors, nearshoring. Although these practices may give businesses greater stability than our current immigration system, they could also severely affect the U.S. economy.

In a survey of over 500 business representatives, 86 percent reported that visa challenges forced them to hire employees abroad for roles intended to be U.S.-based. Ninety-three percent said they were likely to pursue nearshoring or offshoring in the future due to immigration barriers and labor shortages in the U.S.

Businesses consider these alternatives because even after demonstrating that no qualified American workers are available to meet their needs, they are often left without sufficient labor for months or even years due to backlogs and capacity restraints. At that point, transferring a new hire to work remotely from Canada, Mexico, or another nearby country that can promptly meet their immigration needs becomes the next-best option.

While remote work may now be the new normal for many Americans, there are economic consequences to losing out on in-person employment. Many American cities have already felt it, with office buildings remaining empty and downtown lunch spots shuttering their doors.

Furthermore, because American spending patterns have shifted away from city centers, other localities have been able to capitalize on the opportunity for economic gain.

Domestically, one program offers remote workers over $10,000 to live in certain parts of West Virginia, and internationally, many developing countries have profited from Americans’ desire to work remotely by offering so-called digital nomad visaswith hefty incentives.

These policies recognize that although the work contributes to a company’s profits elsewhere, the mere presence of those workers can still stimulate local economic growth.

Similarly, when American companies move workers to Canada out of necessity, Canada benefits through tax and consumption. Foreigners pay income tax to the Canadian government, even if they work for a company that does not have an office or operations in Canada. These workers then spend the vast majority of their income in Canada on rent, cars, groceries, and lifestyle goods.

This translates to the U.S. economy losing out on significant profits made by American businesses because they are used to stimulate economic growth in other countries.

The current outlook for retaining immigrant workers in the U.S. is also hardly promising. The H-1B program for specialty workers was established in the 1990s, and demand for the program has outsized its cap every year since 2004. Country caps have exacerbated already daunting wait times, and some green card wait times are nearly 50 years, even with employer sponsorship.

These factors, among others, make offshoring and nearshoring attractive alternatives for employers frustrated by the U.S.’s current limitations.

The U.S. must act fast to alleviate these concerns by updating the American immigration system so that it’s responsive to our economic interests, capable of attracting and retaining talent, and robust enough to encourage corporations to keep their workforce within our borders. If we don’t, we will only continue investing in the growth and prosperity of our competitors at the expense of our economy.

Source: The rising cost of stagnant immigration policy

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Border crossings from Canada into New York, Vermont and N.H. are up tenfold. Local cops want help.

2023/03/20 Leave a comment

More on the southern flow at the border:

On the snowy border between New York and Canada, the local sheriff’s office is calling for the U.S. Border Patrol to put more manpower behind what the locals call a growing crisis: The number of illegal border crossings in the area over the last five months is nearly 10 times what it was over the same time last year, and the border crossers are in danger of freezing to death.

From Oct. 1 to Feb. 28, about 2,000 migrants crossed the border between Canada and New Hampshire, Vermont and New York south through the forests, compared to just 200 crossings in the same period the previous year.

The migrants are mainly from Mexico, and they can travel to Canada without visas before they cross illegally into the U.S., often to reunite with their families.

Last weekend, Clinton County, New York, Sheriff David Favro’s team assisted Border Patrol in rescuing 39 migrants, some whose clothes had frozen to their bodies.

“We are seeing more and more people, and it can be a deadly terrain if you’re not familiar with it,” Favro said.

He said responding to rescues like that has taxed the resources of his department, already stretched thin to cover the residents of his rural county, population 80,000, which shares about 30 miles of border with the Canadian province of Quebec.

“The only way to really be able to cover and protect [the northern border] is boots on the ground,” Favro said.

Just last week, Customs and Border Protection added 25 agents to the area, the Swanton Sector, to deter migration. But Favro and other locals who spoke to NBC News in Mooers, New York, said that’s not enough.

Mooers Fire Chief Todd Gumlaw said he recently helped rescue two Mexican women stuck in an icy swamp in the middle of the night. Gumlaw, along with Border Patrol, local police and EMS workers, was able to render first aid and get the women to a hospital to be treated for frostbite and mild hypothermia after they lost their shoes in the swamp, he said. “Preservation of human life is first and foremost with my department. We put [immigration status] to the back of our mind,” Gumlaw said.

The Mooers/Champlain region is a clump of small blue-collar residences and farms, where, according to locals, “everyone knows everyone” and properties can be several blocks apart, adding a sense of unease among some of the locals witnessing the mass migration in the region.

According to local first responders, southbound migrants often seek shelter in empty sheds and barns to shield themselves from the cold.

April Barcomb, a Mooers resident, said she has had migrants show up at her doorstep and is now saving up for security cameras.

“It’s not something I would usually do,” she said. “But it makes me think twice. And with the kids and the family, I gotta install cameras.”

While most locals who spoke to NBC News said they understood that most migrants crossing the region aren’t threats, neighbors are keeping their eyes open for unusual activity.

“People are scared,” a Champlain County resident said. “It’s the fear of the unknown. They’re [neighbors] worried about their safety, because they don’t know these people.”

Most of the migrants are Mexicans, who are frequently blocked from crossing the southern U.S. border and believe they will have an easier time if they fly to Canada and then cross into the U.S. from the north.

According to a CBP spokesperson, the Swanton Sector has been the site of more than 67% of all migrant crossings at the northern border across all eight sectors through February.

Unlike the southern border, where over 16,000 Border Patrol agents are responsible for staffing roughly 2,000 miles, about 2,000 border agents patrol the 5,000-mile border between the U.S. and Canada, which includes Alaska’s land boundaries, making it the longest international land border in the world.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a letter Tuesday to step up enforcement along his state’s 51-mile border with Canada or allow his police forces more authority to do so.

“Over the last few months, the State of New Hampshire has attempted to assist the federal government in securing our northern border. These offers of assistance have been repeatedly rejected. The Biden administration has cut funding and hindered the state’s ability to assist in patrolling the northern border,” Sununu said.

A spokesperson for CBP said the additional agents who were just sent to the Swanton Sector will help deter migration.

Source: Border crossings from Canada into New York, Vermont and N.H. are up tenfold. Local cops want help.

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Lind: We Should Give Up the Fantasy of Solving the Border Crisis

2023/03/17 Leave a comment

Reality:

How did President Biden go from denouncing the immigration policies of his predecessor to following in his footsteps by proposing a regulation that would make the vast majority of current asylum seekers ineligible? How did he go from decrying the detention of immigrant families to contemplating the mass use of it?

The answer is simple: The numbers went up. Current U.S. border policy — under a fig leaf known as Title 42, a statute activated under a Covid public health order that just about everyone candidly agrees isn’t about public health — puts most border crossers at risk of summary expulsion without any chance to seek asylum. Despite that, last year apprehension levels hit 20-year highs. With the planned expiration of the Title 42 order this spring, the Biden administration is pre-emptively on a crisis footing, rushing to ensure that it will have a crackdown ready for an anticipated surge of asylum seekers.

And that’s exactly the problem. The United States has been intermittently on crisis footing at the border for the past decade. Each administration keeps cycling restlessly through the same few ideas. A family detention facility that Mr. Biden might reopen was built under Barack Obama. The recently proposed regulation — which would essentially withhold asylum from anyone crossing into the United States illegally — is a variation on a proposal from Donald Trump.

The federal government is patently out of ideas. What makes this so frustrating is that it’s not hard to imagine other, better ways to evaluate the health of our immigration system and to improve it.

But we are now stuck in a border-crisis version of “Groundhog Day.” Border apprehensions go up; the administration panics and enacts harsher enforcement; apprehensions decline; the administration declares victory; border apprehensions go up again.

It would be tempting to assume the problem is that enforcement isn’t sustained, but evidence doesn’t back that up: For example, the Title 42 era has had both record lows in unauthorized border crossings and 21st-century highs. There are other determinants of migration outside the control of the United States and beyond the reach of our policies.

When apprehensions go down, instead of preparing for the inevitable next rise, whatever administration is in charge declares the crisis over and moves on with palpable relief. (Even as the Biden White House prepares for the end of Title 42, it has been taking a victory lap over a decline in the number of apprehensions since the fall.)

The state of crisis is defined by apprehension numbers, the number of people getting caught by or turning themselves in to the Border Patrol. Yet that number is incapable on its own of saying anything about the U.S. government’s capacity to deal with those border crossers or what happens to them after apprehension. Furthermore, it is impossible to crisis-proof the border because no investment in and of itself — even a wall — will stop people from being able to set foot on U.S. soil.

The only way to reduce the number of people caught by the Border Patrol is to try to intimidate them from coming. That is the strategy of deterrence that the United States has been using since 2014: telling people not to come and trying to make sure that the people already coming are treated poorly enough that the same message spreads through word of mouth.

Imagine if the only metric of the U.S. economy that anyone cared about — the only one that got reported on month to month or that was addressed in cabinet meetings — was the number of people who left a company’s payroll in a month. It would be reasonable to assume that the U.S. government would focus nearly all its efforts on preventing people from losing their jobs, wholly ignoring other aspects of economic health like purchasing power and gross domestic product. Its efforts might tend toward the overdesigned (like trying to shape incentives in specific states and industries, to predict exactly where companies might be tempted to downsize) or the overly blunt, doing everything short of passing a law preventing companies from firing anyone.

No one thinks of job loss in and of itself as a good thing. But mature policymaking requires acknowledging that there are nuances — like the difference between two-week “funemployment” and six-month (or longer) unemployment — and that there are many interests involved that must be balanced.

There are multiple interests in immigration policy, too: the United States’ historical humanitarian commitment not to deport people back to a country where they will be persecuted, for example, and a sensitivity toward the conditions in which children and families are held in government custody. White House officials take umbrage at comparing their transit ban to Mr. Trump’s, because they stress there are significant exceptions to the ban. They promise that this time, they won’t end up holding families in jail-like conditions for months.

Yet deterrence sends just one blunt message: no. If the message is “probably not” or “hold on, let’s check,” the policy will fail on its own terms.

One of two things will be true of our post-Title 42 border policy. The ban will function as a ban, and families will be forced through a multistep process to determine their ineligibility for asylum within 20 days (the point at which courts have said the United States must generally release them). Or the exceptions will be real, and large numbers of people will remain here to pursue their cases — thus requiring their release from detention and muddying the message sent to their countries of origin.

Either the Biden administration will go back on its humanitarian promises or it will undercut the brute deterrent effectiveness of its policy. Either way, it’s sabotaging itself.

There are other ways to measure the health of our immigration system. A system that cared about maximizing orderly asylum claims would focus on scaling up the capacity at ports of entry to conduct orderly asylum interviews rather than forcing people to use Customs and Border Protection’s notoriously buggy CBP One app in the hopes of setting up scarce appointments.

A system that cared primarily about processing people quickly and safely would invest in facilities to house them that weren’t effectively jails. A system that cared about ensuring no one skipped out on a court date would guarantee clear communication from the courts — and maybe even lawyers to help immigrants navigate the system. A system that cared about executing removal orders would station Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in courtrooms.

Some of these are more appealing than others to me and perhaps to you, but that’s part of the point: There are so many other ways for hawks or doves to get what they want, and talking openly about what they want the system to accomplish can refocus the discussion on things that are actually within the government’s control.

It’s time to let go of the fantasy of solving a border crisis, with the uncomfortable — and unsupported — implication that the only successful border policy is the least humane one.

Source: We Should Give Up the Fantasy of Solving the Border Crisis

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Survey Finds H-1B Visa Restrictions Push More Jobs Out Of U.S.

2023/03/17 Leave a comment

Of note, another factor to leading to more high-skilled immigration to Canada:

A national survey of more than 500 human resources professionals across industries and company sizes has found immigration restrictions lead to more jobs, workers and resources being sent outside the United States. The survey results do not surprise immigration attorneys and members of the business community but contradict what many analysts consider questionable assertions by opponents of H-1B visas and immigration. The survey was conducted in February 2023 by Envoy Global, a global immigration services provider, and Cint, a digital insights and research company.

The survey results raise questions about the purpose of the government restrictions imposed on employers that try to grow their business and workforce in the United States. According to the survey:

– Employers are sending jobs outside the United States in response to visa restrictions. “86% of companies hired employees outside the U.S. for roles originally intended to be based inside the country because of visa-related uncertainties.” (Emphasis added.

– Companies are sending employees to other countries because of U.S. immigration policies. “82% of employers saw a foreign national employee forced to depart the U.S. because they were unable to obtain or extend an employment-based visa in the last year.”

– America’s loss is other countries’ gain, according to the findings. Among the companies surveyed, 62% relocated employees to Canada, 48% to Mexico, 48% to the United Kingdom, 31% to Germany and 25% to Australia. Canada has no annual limit on high-skilled temporary visas and a straightforward path to permanent residence for most employment-based immigrants.

– The problems are likely to continue. “93% of companies expect to turn to nearshoring or offshoring to fill positions abroad due to immigration barriers and labor shortages in the U.S.”

Academic research supports the survey’s findings. Britta Glennon, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded in a study that restrictions on H-1B visas likely result in more jobs leaving the United States: “[A]ny policies that are motivated by concerns about the loss of native jobs should consider that policies aimed at reducing immigration have the unintended consequence of encouraging firms to offshore jobs abroad.”

Approximately half the employers in the survey cited the “limited number of H-1B visas available” as the primary immigration barrier affecting companies. Thirteen percent named slow and uncertain government processing, 15% cited government regulations and paperwork, 4% identified sponsorship costs and 21% named “all of the above” as problems.

Another recent poll, of 2,006 registered voters conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center and Morning Consult, also showed support for more liberalized policies on international students and high-skilled immigration. “Over half of voters say that increasing high-skilled employment-based immigration (57%) and allowing foreign students with in-demand degrees to stay and work in the U.S. (56%) would have a positive impact on the economy,” according to the survey. Only about 12% to 13% thought more welcoming policies would have a negative impact.

Economists (and their research) overwhelmingly support the United States liberalizing rules for international students and employment-based immigrants. Economists Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih, Chad Sparber and Angie Marek Zeitlin found the annual numerical restrictions on H-1B petitions harm job growth for U.S.-born professionals: “The number of jobs for U.S.-born workers in computer-related industries would have grown at least 55% faster between 2005-2006 and 2009-2010, if not for the denial of so many applications in the recent H-1B visa lotteries.”

The polling found that language matters: “Across political party and race/ethnicity, voters are more likely to say employment-based immigration would have a positive impact when using the term high skilled compared to immigration broadly.” The survey also found, “Among Republicans . . . the most impactful messaging focus on competitiveness with China and having an economy for the future.”

The polling comes as efforts to liberalize rules for foreign-born scientists and engineers have been blocked in Congress, most recently in 2022 by Sen. Charles Grassley. Grassley prevented green card exemptions for foreign nationals with master’s and Ph.D.’s in science and engineering fields from being included in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The number of Indians immigrating to Canada has more than tripled since 2013, largely due to that country’s more attractive policies for companies and high-skilled immigrants compared to the United States.

Surveys cannot determine policies. However, polling and the real-world experiences of businesses combined with sound analysis can point toward a better path.

Source: Survey Finds H-1B Visa Restrictions Push More Jobs Out Of U.S.

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Previously unreported data: the U.S. lost 45,000 college grads to Canada’s high-skill visa from 2017 to 2021

2023/03/16 Leave a comment

Of note, Canadian advantage in play:

Despite having some of the best universities and training programs in the world, the U.S. struggles to retain high-value international students, thanks to our outdated immigration system. Canada has historically been one of our competitors for talent, and new data obtained by the Niskanen Center demonstrates just how stark this problem has become. To remain competitive in the global market, the U.S. must find ways to prevent the continued loss of domestically-trained talent.

The data demonstrate that Canada is eager to profit from the valuable training of our graduates and can do so by taking advantage of the systemic shortcomings that often render our labor market inaccessible to these foreign students.

Niskanen recently obtained previously unreported (and still unpublished) data from the Canadian immigration office’s Statistical Reporting Group detailing top Express Entry applicants’ educational and citizenship backgrounds. Express Entry is Canada’s recruitment arm for skilled talent worldwide. Recipients can pursue permanent residence in Canada without requirements for employer sponsorship or secured employment. Express Entry applicants must demonstrate their language skills, educational credentials, and work experience and are then ranked as a part of Canada’s point-based system. Only the top applicants are invited to seek permanent residence.

According to the data we obtained, between 2017 and 2021, approximately 45,000 invitations went to skilled workers who received their postsecondary education in the U.S–88 percent of whom were not U.S. citizens.

This is especially disconcerting because many international students at American universities do want to work in the U.S. after graduation. What’s more,the U.S. desperately needs these students. Still, our outdated immigration system makes employing them unnecessarily difficult.

One of the most common pathways for international students to remain in the United States is Optional Practical Training, followed by a bid in the H-1B lottery. Unlike Express Entry, success in the H-1B lottery is not based on merit, but on a random selection of petitions chosen for adjudication. The most recent rate of selection was about one in four, meaning that nearly 75 percent of H-1B hopefuls never had the chance to put their credentials before U.S. immigration officials.

This lottery and the overall capacity restraints of the immigration system put the U.S. at a distinct disadvantage. We invest in educating and training thousands of international students every year, often with incredibly valuable skill sets. But then we don’t offer opportunities for these skilled individuals to stay and contribute to our economy after graduation–despite the high demand from employers. This amounts to our loss, and Canada’s gain.

Since 2013, Canadian companies have regularly run billboard advertisements in Silicon Valley to target foreign talent frustrated by the American immigration system’s limitations. These billboards are straightforward: “H-1B Problems? Pivot to Canada.”  Though they target individuals, companies are also responding.

According to Envoy Global’s 2022 Immigration Trends Report respondents, 71 percent of American employers are pursuing global strategies to retain talent that couldn’t obtain U.S. work authorization, with Canada being the top destination for employee relocation.

This is a win-win scenario for Canada. Immigrants arrive ready to work with highly sought-after skills, contribute to the Canadian economy in tax and consumption, and fill — or create — jobs that can stimulate further economic growth.

While international students make up less than 5 percent of all higher education enrollees in the U.S., they are vastly overrepresented in our most crucial fields. For instance, in electrical engineering, petroleum engineering, and computer sciencegraduate programs, approximately 80 percent of students are foreign-born. When the U.S. fails to provide ample and accessible visa pathways for these students after graduation, they take their valuable skills elsewhere–to our competitors’ benefit, and to our detriment.

This new data spells out in stark numbers what we had already reasonably deduced: that the U.S. is in the midst of a brain drain, and Canada is reaping the benefits as talent moves elsewhere to put their critical skills into practice. The U.S. must respond promptly by providing ample and viable visa pathways that can protect the educational investments made in these students.

Source: Previously unreported data: the U.S. lost 45,000 college grads to Canada’s high-skill visa from 2017 to 2021

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U.S. border app has host of issues, including recognizing Black skin tones, migrants say

2023/03/14 Leave a comment

USA also having problems with apps and automation:

When the U.S. government rolled out the CBP One app in January, it was touted as a way to stem the flow of migrants at the country’s southern border while still giving them the opportunity to make refugee claims.

Instead of showing up at a border crossing – or crossing illegally and waiting to be arrested – asylum seekers file their information through the app and receive an appointment with Customs and Border Protection.

But Haitian migrants at the border and their advocates are reporting a host of problems with the app. Many say it is full of glitches and frequently crashes, denying them the ability to submit their information. Others say it has tried to split up families, offering appointments to cross the border to parents but not their children or vice-versa.

It also frequently rejects the photographs it requires asylum seekers to submit: CBP One appears to have particular trouble recognizing Black skin tones, they say, making it harder for Haitians to use.

“It’s a long wait to get an appointment, and that’s if you’re lucky,” said Ricot Picot, 42, as he stood in the courtyard of a migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, watching his seven-year-old daughter and one-year-old son play nearby.

Mr. Picot said he was assigned a time slot last month to make his claim. When he got to the appointment, he learned that only he would be allowed across, while his wife and children would have to wait. So he turned back, opting to wait until all four of them could get an appointment together.

Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, who runs the Sidewalk School, a group that provides classes for migrant children waiting at the Mexican border, recounted many similar situations. In some cases, children and their parents had opted to take the separate appointments, she said. Once in the U.S., it could be a lengthy process for parents to find their children in the system and reunite with them.

She said it was common for CBP One to fail to recognize photos of Black asylum seekers, meaning many could not even complete the application. In addition, the app was originally available only in English and Spanish before a recent update translated it into Haitian Creole.

“If you’re a Black asylum seeker, CBP One was not meant for you. There are constantly errors,” said Ms. Rangel-Samponaro. “If you’re Haitian, you’ve probably been out here since October. If you’re Latino, you’ve been here since December. If you’re white, you’ve been waiting two weeks.”

A lack of reliable internet and low-quality phones in the encampments where many migrants live are also problems. Some U.S. lawyers, meanwhile, are trying to charge up to US$7,000 for help using the app, she said. It has all meant that asylum seekers with more resources have a leg up in filing claims.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not reply to The Globe and Mail’s questions about the problems with its app.

“You have to choose whether to eat today or spend the day doing the application,” said Alexis Wilson, 38, laying out the stark calculus facing migrants relying on pay-as-you-go data plans to access CBP One. He was standing amid several dozen tents pitched on a concrete pad at the edge of the city centre.

Marileidi Bazil, 16, said her family was turned back by U.S. border guards on the bridge from Reynosa to Hidalgo, Tex. Born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, her family went first to Brazil when she was 11 before leaving there last year after work opportunities dried up.

“I’ll just keep trying with that stupid app. It’s worse every time I use it,” Ms. Bazil said as she sat in 34-degree sunshine, the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights playing on her phone. “But I’ll be patient.”

David Xavier, 53, has the added problem of suffering from cataracts. All of his possessions were stolen in Colombia and he’s had run-ins with organized crime in Mexico. “The app doesn’t work. I can’t upload photos and I have problems writing because of my eyesight,” he said. “I just want to get out of here.”

Pastor Hector Silva, who runs two migrant shelters, said that when the app started in January, it took about three weeks for migrants to get appointments. Now, waiting times are stretching to three months. The app also assigns appointments at any border crossing, so some migrants who file in Reynosa are told to travel 2,400 kilometres to Tijuana to make their claim.

“They want everyone registered on CBP One, but it’s been very hard for people. It’s not letting them in,” he said.

For Mr. Picot, there isn’t much choice but to keep pressing forward.

By the time he left Haiti, he said, it was impossible to go downtown in Port-au-Prince without risking getting robbed or shot. Children couldn’t attend school. Kidnappings for ransom were becoming so pervasive that parishioners were getting snatched out of church pews during Sunday services.

Mr. Picot, a teacher by profession, initially tried to settle in Brazil, where he took a job in a slaughterhouse. His income wasn’t steady enough to support his family, so they left last September.

The hardest part of the journey came while trying to ford a raging river in the Darien jungle between Columbia and Panama, he recounted. The water was so swift that other migrants were swept to their deaths. First, Mr. Picot swam across alone to gauge the difficulty. Then he came back and, one by one, guided across his wife and two children.

Wherever they go from here, he insists, no one is getting left behind.

“I follow the rules,” he said. “I pray for the chance that I can cross and bring my family.”

Source: U.S. border app has host of issues, including recognizing Black skin tones, migrants say

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