Ipsos: Where is the US public on immigration?

2022/08/22 Leave a comment

Interesting overdue with historic data:

Immigration is a perennial and divisive issue in American politics. Our latest polling with NPR demonstrates just how true that is.

As the midterms approach, the misinformation and the heated political rhetoric surrounding immigration seem to be resonating with the public.

But why is that? How did we get here? In short, populism and the persistent feeling many Americans have that the system is broken are creating the political ingredients that drive some of this sentiment. This is our context.

That and more below in five charts, looking at immigration, nativism, and the politics of it all in the U.S.

  1. Immigration then and now. In the first part of the 21st century, immigrants are increasingly making up a larger portion of the total U.S. population. The late 19th century and early 20th century were the last time immigrants made up a similar share of the U.S. population. Nativism grew in prominence then, just as it does now.immigration over time
  2. Who is America? Even as immigrants are making up a larger portion of Americans, fewer Americans feel immigrants are an important part of American identity. This is true regardless of party. Independents and Republicans saw the most notable drop over the past four years, though the dip among Democrats is also significant.Who is America
  3. System remains broken. Despite a new presidential administration, a pandemic, a recession, and inflation, all these things haven’t swayed the fundamental context Americans feel the country exists within–the system is broken. Populism underpins this moment.System is broken
  4. Invasion? The populist currents running through the public frame how people feel about borders and their security. Right now, many Americans feel that the U.S. is experiencing an invasion at the southern border. Half of Hispanics and a majority of white respondents feel this way. Though, this opinion is most pronounced among Republicans.Populism
  5. Not a monolith. Hispanic Americans, many of whom report experiencing xenophobic comments, are split on whether it is more important to help immigrants escape poverty and violence and find success in the U.S. or secure America’s borders. Partisanship drives opinion here as it does for the general public. A tale of two Americas—one Red, the other one Blue.Not a monolith

Immigration is a culture war topic that brings out some of our most divisive rhetoric and tendencies. Populism and nativism are the cultural currents framing this topic and this moment. This is not new in American politics.

Immigration is an issue that is unlikely to fade away anytime soon.

Source: Where is the public on immigration?

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‘Second Chances’: [USA] Racist law preventing citizenship for Black immigrants leaves man fighting his case from afar

2022/08/19 Leave a comment

Weird that US still makes distinction between in and out of wedlock. The 1977 Canadian Citizenship Act revisions removed that distinction on a go forward basis as well as gender discrimination:

After being deported, Kelvin Silva said he sometimes finds himself lying on the floor of his apartment, crying. He’s lonely – and alone. He’s scared, knowing that he’s fighting an uphill battle to gain U.S. citizenship and return home to North Carolina.

Silva – who identifies as Black and Latino – was returned to the Dominican Republic on Feb. 15 under an archaic law known as the Guyer Rule, which disproportionately affects nonwhite immigrants, especially Black fathers.

The Guyer Rule did not allow U.S. citizenship to pass from fathers to their biological children if the parents were unmarried, even though citizenship automatically passed to the children of other citizen parents who came to the country under the same circumstances. Were it not for the Guyer Rule, Silva, 45, would have automatically gained citizenship at age 11, his age when his father became a naturalized citizen.

Silva’s legal team – Asian Americans Advancing Justice (Advancing Justice-Atlanta), the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and the Southern Poverty Law Center – filed a brief this week in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, challenging this law that prevented Silva’s citizenship and resulted in his deportation to a country completely unfamiliar to him.

“Throughout his battle in the immigration court system and now the federal court, Mr. Silva has shown unswerving commitment and inspiring resilience in the face of this sexist and racist law,” said Peter Isbister, senior lead attorney for the SPLC’s Immigrant Justice Project. “The Guyer Rule is yet another part of the U.S. immigration system that unfairly targets Black and Brown people.”

Meanwhile, Silva’s entire family – including his children and grandchildren – resides in the U.S. But changing immigration law through the courts is a difficult process, even when a law like the Guyer Rule results in a grave injustice such as the one Silva is facing.

To cope with the uncertainty of his immigration case, Silva maintains an attitude of optimism. But he admits his smile is a façade concealing his sadness.

“From the beginning, it was rough,” he said. “I just put a smile on my face, but I don’t talk to too many people. This is really, really hard. But I’m alive. I breathe every day. It’s up to me how I’m going to tackle these obstacles, and I try to be happy.”

It’s been a shocking experience for Silva. Before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initiated deportation proceedings against him, he believed he was a U.S. citizen because of his father’s citizenship. So, when Silva was deported, he was stunned.

“I was scared, worried and nervous,” he said. “Nobody believed [deportation] would happen. Even I can’t get over it.”

Before being deported, Silva had spent 30 months in ICE detention, most recently at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, the deadliest immigrant prison in the nation. He said that while some give up on their immigration claims, he decided to fight. He doesn’t want to give up.

“I always have high hopes,” he said. “It will take time and it might be a long process, but I know there will be a good outcome for me – and for the other men in my situation.”

Betting on Congress

The Guyer Rule prevented U.S.-citizen fathers, but not U.S.-citizen mothers, from passing their citizenship status to foreign-born, nonmarital children. The rule disproportionately restricted how nonwhite parents could secure citizenship for their children – and for decades was maintained for just that reason. In short, U.S.-citizen fathers were discriminated against by the unfair denial of U.S. citizenship for their children born “out of wedlock.”

The Guyer Rule originates from an 1864 Maryland court decision, Guyer v. Smith, in which the court ruled that two sons born overseas of a white U.S.-citizen father and a Black mother from St. Barthélemy were “not born in lawful wedlock” and thus were not U.S. citizens. The Guyer Rule was subsequently incorporated into federal nationality laws, first through administrators’ policies and practices, and later by Congress through the Nationality Act of 1940 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

Although Black immigrants were eligible for naturalization starting in 1870, historical and legislative records show that lawmakers nevertheless worked to limit the number of people of color who could become U.S. citizens. Administrators and legislators accomplished this goal in a variety of ways, including literacy tests, a racially discriminatory quota system and immigration preference categories that prioritized the “marital” family over other forms of familial arrangement, notably at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most states.

In treating marriage as a prerequisite for fathers, but not mothers, to pass on their U.S. citizenship status to their foreign-born children, lawmakers were relying on the outdated stereotype that mothers have closer bonds with their nonmarital children than fathers.

Silva, however, only met his mother when he was 13 years old. His father and grandmother took care of him his entire life – not his mother. Simply put, because his parents never married, the law stopped Silva from becoming a U.S. citizen.

“[The Guyer Rule] is not fair,” Silva said. “I went to school in the U.S., grew up over there, made friends, family. But here I know no one. It’s weird, it’s hard, it’s rough.”

Congress partially remedied the unfairness of the Guyer Rule by passing the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, or CCA, which repealed the Guyer Rule. However, the CCA did not apply to people over the age of 18 when it passed – people like Silva.

Silva’s supporters and legal team hope that Congress will take swift action to make the CCA retroactive, which would allow him and other immigrants affected by the Guyer Rule to obtain citizenship.

“The goal of a nation’s citizenship laws should be to keep families together, not tear them apart,” said Meredyth Yoon, litigation director for Advancing Justice-Atlanta. “As Congress implicitly recognized by passing the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, a parent’s marital status has nothing to do with the bond they have with their child.

“Silva asks the court to rectify the harm done by the Guyer Rule by extending him full U.S. citizenship. By doing so, the court would take one small but crucial step toward undoing the inequities, including the systemic racism, that plague this nation’s immigration laws.”

‘I’m a fighter’

Silva is trying to find employment in the Dominican Republic as he hopes for his return to the U.S.

“I’m a human being just like everybody else, and everybody deserves second chances,” he said.

Silva truly misses his family. But, he said, “they belong in the U.S.” Because of that – being separated from his children and grandchildren – Silva feels “robbed.”

“The ripping away of the families and lives of people who came to the U.S. as children simply because their parents were unmarried is an antiquated and immoral act of which all of us should be deeply ashamed,” said Bacardi Jackson, interim deputy legal director for the SPLC’s Children’s Rights Practice Group. “Such a cruel and unjust punishment for the crime of being born outside of European norms is all the more despicable for its uneven effect on Black and Brown families.”

In the end, Silva knows he must persevere. As he tries to adapt to living in a country unknown to him, he leans on the support of members of his legal team, who reach out regularly to update him on his immigration case.

“I’m taking it day by day,” he said. “I’m a fighter; I have to do what I have to do. … Everything is in God’s hands, and things happen for a reason.”

Source: ‘Second Chances’: Racist law preventing citizenship for Black immigrants leaves man fighting his case from afar

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Douglas Todd: People of Indian descent a rising force in the U.S. and Canada

2022/08/13 Leave a comment

While the understandable focus is with respect to those of Indian descent holding leadership and senior positions, there is a larger group of workers in such industries as agriculture and trucking. From a political perspective, the outsized influence of Sikh and other Indo-Canadians reflects their geographic concentration: 47 ridings in Canada have 10 percent or more South Asian residents (2016 Census).

List: VM Ridings South Asian 10 percent

India is on the rise across the United States and Canada — in education, high-tech and politics.

The CEOs of five of the most powerful high-tech companies in North America have origins in India. They’re heading Microsoft, Google, IBM, Twitter and Match Group (which owns Tinder).And people of Indian ancestry are punching above their weight in politics in the U.S. and Canada. “There may well be an Indian-American president before there is an American Indian one,” says The Economist.

The educational achievements of people of Indian origin are above the norm in North America. And their are among the strongest of any ethnic group in the U.S. and Canada. This is not to mention one study showing people of Indian origin are almost four times more likely to own a home than the average Canadian.

India is the second highest source country for immigrants to the U.S., where 4.6 million have Indian origins, or 1.4 per cent of the total. They are mostly from southern India and tend to live in the U.S. South and East.

In Canada, India is the No. 1 source country for immigrants by far, accounting for 30 per cent of all newcomers since 2016.

There are 1.4 million people with Indian roots in Canada, most of whom are immigrants. They make up four per cent of the population. Generally from Northern India, most live in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.

Even though many are already flying high in U.S. high-tech, the impact of people of Indian background on Canadian business, especially, is growing sharply.

The influence of Indo North Americans is destined to expand further. Let’s look at why.

The tech sectors in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are expanding on the strength of a workforce where two of five are foreign born. And U.S. immigration rules designed to protect homegrown workers means our southern neighbour is losing thousands of Indian high-tech experts and others to Canada.

With the U.S. restricting its coveted H-1B working visa (including with a rule that no one country can be the source of more than seven per cent of recipients), many computer specialists are among the more than 217,000 people from Indian who can work in Canada as foreign students (they make up 30 per cent of all international students).

Canada also accepted 128,000 people from India last year as new immigrants, many of them programmers. And it’s on track for a similar number in 2022. That compares to just 39,000 immigrants from India in 2015, when Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were first elected.

Such business success is made possible in large part because educational levels soar among those of Indian descent.

In the U.S. three of four of adults of Indian background have bachelors degrees or better, according to Pew Research. That’s the highest of any Asian immigrant group, with Chinese Americans coming in at 57 per cent. The overall bachelor’s degree average in the U.S. is 38 per cent.

In Canada, educational achievement is also pronounced. A recent Statistics Canada study by Theresa Qiu and Grant Schellenberg found 50 per cent of South Asian-Canadians (mostly from India) had bachelors degrees or more. The portion rose to 62 per cent among South Asian women.

The portion of bachelors degrees among Canadians with origins in South Asia is much higher than the 24 per cent for white men and 38 per cent for white women, as well as the 17 per cent for Latin American men and 28 per cent for Latin American women. One of the few ethnic groups scoring higher than South Asians are Chinese Canadians.

And wages reflect education levels. The median household income in the U.S. of Indian households is by far the highest of any ethnic-Asian group, at US$119,000, according to Pew.

The typical Chinese American household brings in US$82,000. The median household income across the U.S. is US$67,000.

While U.S. figures on housing are not readily available, a consumer survey by Vivintel, based in Toronto, found that South Asians, a solid majority of whom are from India, are almost four times more likely to buy a homethan the average Canadian.

“Home ownership is very important to South Asians … because they’re told by their parents that renting is just throwing away your money,” says Rahul Sethi, a 38-year-old director of Vivintel who immigrated to Canada from India with his family.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the rise of Indians in North America is their oversized affect on politics.And it’s not just because of U.S. vice-president Kamala Harris, who went to an English-language high school in Montreal after her scientist mother from India, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, got a job researching breast cancer at McGill University.

Even though Harris is a front-runner as a future Democrat presidential nominee, she’s far from alone in U.S. halls of power.

Karthick Ramakrishnan, who surveys Asian American attitudes from the University of California, maintains Indo Americans are far likelier than other immigrant groups to get involved in politics as donors, voters and candidates. They tend to favour Democrats by a margin of three to one.

Ram Villivalam, a state senator in Illinois, says having Harris running to be president gives confidence to Indo Americans. Pramala Jayapal, the first woman of South Asian descent to preside over the Congress, is now one of four influential Indo American politicians, dubbed the Samosa Caucus, in the House.

A similar movement is happening in Canadian politics.

The Indo Canadian population, like the Indo American, leans liberal-left. More than 38 per cent of respondents to a 2021 YouGov poll would cast a vote for the Liberals — twice the number that planned to go with the Conservatives.

One in five backed the left-wing New Democratic Party, the country’s third largest party, which has been lead for five years by Indo Canadian Jagmeet Singh.

More than 12 per cent of cabinet ministers in the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are Indo Canadian, including Harjit Sajjan and Anita Anand. At least 14 Liberal MPs are Indo Canadian.

This impact list goes on in politics, as well as in business and education. Indo North Americans are on a roll.

Source: Douglas Todd: People of Indian descent a rising force in the U.S. and Canada

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USA: Board Diversity Is Sacrificed When Companies Underperform, Study Finds

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

Of note but not particularly surprising:

Companies that are underperforming in comparison to their competitors or to their goals are more likely to experience a decrease in racial and gender diversity rates on their boards, a newly released study has found.

Researchers at Imperial College Business School in London tracked data from more than 700 U.S. firms from 1996 to 2013 to make the assessment.

Dr. HeeJung Jung, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Imperial College Business School, and lead researcher of the study, tells TIME that this phenomenon is not deliberate, but rather a result of the pressure firms face to better adapt and begin performing well. Leaders search for a quick solution, but boards can become less inclusive as executives minimize their boards, or unconsciously seek directors that have similar ascriptive backgrounds.
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“The board deliberately seeks new expertise and new perspectives among a variety of industries and backgrounds in the belief that it might rescue the company. But while this expertise came from a range of sectors, that’s as far as the diversity goes, in terms of race and gender,” Jung says.

Despite ongoing conversations about racial equity becoming more prevalent across the U.S., particularly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when companies made public pledges to better address racial inequality, Jung says that there is still a lot of fluctuation when looking at racial and gender diversity rates across corporate America.

In 2021, women comprised just 27% of board seats among the 3,000 largest publicly traded companies incorporated in the U.S., and only 6% of those seats were held by women of color, according to a report by the Women Business Collaborative. Men of color held 9% of board seats in the same year. Black board membership increased by nearly a third in 2021, but accounted for only 6.4% of directors overall.

Jung notes that companies will always experience periods of growth and decline, making more consistent strides for diversity and inclusion among the workforce difficult. The problem is, diversity is not a priority for companies when profits decrease, Jung says. “In their view, diversity efforts or DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] matters last, it becomes a second matter or a second goal.”

Some countries in Europe have safeguards in place that would prevent progress on board diversity being rolled back. Gender diversity quotas are common in nations like France, Norway, Spain and Iceland, where women must make up at least 40% of boards at publicly traded companies, according to the Harvard Business Review.

While research about the benefits of gender-based diversity in the U.S. has shown mixed results, Jung says this may be because, despite great strides in female leadership, American corporate culture has not yet normalized it. One of the roadblocks to progress that female CEOs often face is pushback from teams, including constant cross-checking of their decisions to verify that they are acting “correctly,” Jung says.

“That causes an efficiency problem, and in a time of crisis where speed is important for any corporation, having this is a delay in decisions [and] makes directors [from underrepresented backgrounds] doubt their leadership too,” Jung told TIME.

Diversity efforts in corporate America

Currently, the U.S. has no federal policy that mandates inclusivity, though that has not stopped local governments from attempting to implement changes. States like Washington, for instance, require at least a quarter of a public company’s board to be women. In California, a law, passed in 2020, requiring public companies to have greater racial and gender diversity on their boards, was struck down in April, according to the New York Times, but the state still has a 2018 law in effect that forces companies to have at least one woman on their board.

In some cases, business leaders have created their own solutions. Last year, Nasdaq secured regulatory approval for plans to require listed companies to share diversity data about their boards of directors. Companies without at least two diverse directors, including one who self-identifies as a woman and one who identifies as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+, are required to explain their lack of diversity.

Having executives from underrepresented backgrounds in positions of leadership helps too. Jung’s study found that when board member chairs come from underrepresented groups, they are less likely to sacrifice the gender and racial diversity of their board in response to a downturn.

But, as Jung states, retaining diverse talent requires companies to take the important first step of creating corporate norms that recognize the value of having diverse teams. “It’s not only about bringing [diverse candidates] in but also making them play an important role in the board and change the norms,” she says. “There’s a lot of positive benefits and corporations have to be very sensitive about and must pay attention to make a better strategy for their boardroom structures and who they are going to appoint.”

Source: Board Diversity Is Sacrificed When Companies Underperform, Study Finds

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ICYMI: Iranian-Canadians feel like ‘2nd-class citizens’ as many continue to be stopped while travelling to the U.S.

2022/08/11 Leave a comment

For better or worse (as in these cases), all countries exercise sovereignty over who is admitted and who is not. Not “offloading responsibility” to the USA, just a reflection of reality:

Amir Abolhassani sold his house in Saskatoon when his U.S.-based employer asked him to relocate to North Carolina. But at the Calgary airport this January, his family was not allowed to cross the border.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer told Abolhassani, who is a Canadian citizen, that it was because of time he spent as a conscript in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) more than a decade ago. The family was subjected to a secondary screening involving a long interview and an extensive search of their belongings, cellphones and social media.

“It’s like we are not Canadians and our lives, our suffering is not important to anyone,” Abolhassani said.

“Am I not Canadian enough? The stress to be linked to a terrorist organization is the worst thing.”

The Trump administration labelled the IRGC as a terrorist organization in 2019. Abolhassani said all men in Iran above the age of 18 have to do mandatory service with one of the arms of the military.

“One in every three Iranians will be assigned to IRGC because it is one of the biggest branches of the military.”

Abolhassani said refusing conscription would prevent a man from getting a passport or accessing civic amenities, and can sometimes lead to further punishment.

“I know around 500 cases, almost 150 are Iranian-Canadians and others are Iranians that are facing the same situation.”

CBC News spoke with 15 Iranian-Canadians, all of them Canadian citizens, who continue to be stopped and detained while crossing into other countries due to their names being flagged as people who have helped a terrorist organization. All say they feel they are treated as second-class citizens.

“The officer said my wife can’t go to the U.S. either because she may have received military training from me. It’s disastrous,” Abolhassani said. “In two months of training, I held a weapon for three days. I have just fired four bullets in my life. A typical American teenager may have fired more.”

‘We’re not real Canadians yet’

Worried about losing his job, the 41-year-old applied for a visa to the U.S., but he is worried because he knows some people have been waiting for U.S. visas since 2019.

“We’re not real Canadians yet. Once you are flagged at the U.S. border, your name enters a list that when you are travelling to or from Canada and any other ally of the U.S., you will be flagged,” he said.

Maryam Ghasemi, a research assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, was supposed to begin a new research position at Augusta University in Georgia on Aug. 1. When Ghasemi went to the Rainbow Bridge border office in Niagara Falls, Ont., in May to apply for a TN Visa, she was denied.

Ghasemi said officers from Homeland Security searched through her family’s social media then escorted them to their car without giving any reasons.

“A CBP officer told me having a passport of the country doesn’t give me the nationality. She said my background is something else and that I’m not Canadian. That was really rude,” she said.

The family was given a letter of inadmissibility to the U.S. with no further explanation and was asked to consult the consulate in Toronto to get approved. An officer later told her it was because her husband had served in the IRGC.

“The university has decided to postpone my position until next semester. But if the visa process doesn’t work out, I will lose the position. The future is not clear to us.”

Canada offloading responsibility to the U.S.

Ghasemi, like many others, contacted members of Parliament and the Prime Minister’s Office, only to be told that it is not Canada’s responsibility.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) told CBC News in an email statement that though it is aware of instances of Iranian-Canadians being denied entry to the U.S. and other countries, there is not an internal mechanism for tracking them.

“The CBSA does not possess any power or authority to intervene in the immigration decisions made by other nations,” the statement said.

Global Affairs Canada shared a similar response.

“As a sovereign state, the U.S. retains the prerogative to determine the admissibility and the screening procedures for the entry of foreign nationals,” a spokesperson said.

But Iranian-Canadians like Abolhassani and Ghasemi say it is very much a Canadian problem.

“We feel we are second-class citizens. I thought Canada would support us, but we are not very important. This is shameful,” Ghasemi said.

“We want the government to stand up for us because they can solve it if they want to as they did with the Muslim ban. No one is taking action.”

CBC News reached out to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and CBP for a comment, but did not receive a response before publication.

4S on boarding pass

Iranian-Canadians with past conscription with IRGC often receive a “4S” designation, which stands for Secondary Security Screening Selection, on their boarding passes.

Javad Mokhtarzadeh, a business owner in Montreal, said that on a recent trip to Europe his family was screened upon arrival and when they returned to Canada, their boarding passes had 4S on them.

“Officers talk to us as if we aren’t Canadian citizens. You granted me citizenship [and] my daughter was born here. I told my five-year-old daughter, it’s part of the game when passing airports,”  Mokhtarzadeh said.

“It was so frustrating and infuriating they asked my little girl to raise hands for body inspection and remove her shoes. In my own country, I’m treated this way and asked whether I have something to hide.”

Calgary resident Kamran Farzamfar said the problem affects even Canadian-Iranians, those born in Canada but of Iranian descent.

Farzamfar’s family of four visited the U.S. multiple times before 2019, for both leisure and work. But when they went to the airport for their first vacation since the pandemic this past February, they were denied entry.

“I tried to ask the officer if they can let my sons go for holiday at least, but [they] refused us entry that day,” Farzamfar said.

A few days later, the family tried again to have their sons allowed in for the trip.

“My son, who was born here, was denied entry. This issue is not only affecting Iranian-Canadians but also Canadian-Iranians,” he said.

On another occasion, when coming back from Frankfurt, a friend accompanying Farzamfar was also given a 4S designation, as they were on the same booking reference.

‘Zero rights as a Canadian’

Toronto resident Samin Kalhor tried to drive into the U.S. with his girlfriend, who had newly obtained Canadian citizenship, her mother and two little dogs. They were planning on celebrating Thanksgiving with family.

All three were stopped at the Buffalo border.

“They took my phone, credit cards, searched the car thoroughly and even the dogs. For five hours, they collected biometrics, fingerprints, retina scans and copied all the data from my phone including social media,” he said.

“My girlfriend, who I’d known for two months, was also denied entry.”

The couple met the same fate when travelling to Mexico for the new year holiday.

Kalhor said he was interrogated for seven hours in Cancun, in a room with glass walls with other “bad guys.”

“All the passengers passing by could see me sitting there as if I did something wrong. They asked questions about my religion, sexuality, and everything you can imagine,” he said. “It was probably one of the worst days of my life. I’m a very self-confident person but it crushed me.”

Kalhor said he came to Canada to make a better life for himself, but feels stuck. He said the issue will affect more Iranian-Canadians as travel picks up.

“If I want to plan my honeymoon, where should I go? Wherever I’ll go, I’ll get flagged. This is forever,” Kalhor said.

“I have zero rights as a Canadian. If other countries put IRGC on their lists, we’re doomed.”

Source: Iranian-Canadians feel like ‘2nd-class citizens’ as many continue to be stopped while travelling to the U.S.

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Canadians are seeking asylum in US due to Trudeau’s Covid policies

2022/08/10 Leave a comment

Funny and sad that some think they can apply for asylum in the USA given COVID-related restrictions. At least the lawyer involved is reasonable honest about the likelihood of success (while pocketing his fees). “True” North is not exactly innocent in promoting such beliefs:

Buffalo immigration lawyer Matthew Kolken has filed asylum applications for at least half a dozen Canadians who hope to flee the country permanently due to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pandemic policies. 

In an exclusive interview with True North, Kolken, who is a former director of the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, explained that his clients fear being persecuted for being unvaccinated should they return to Canada.

“If you just don’t want to go back to Canada, you actually need to fear that you will be the victim of targeted persecution by the Government of Canada or by groups within the country that the government either can’t or won’t protect you from,” said Kolken. 

“(The application) says they’ve either expressed some sort of political speech or a member of a particular social group like unvaccinated individuals that have faced persecution before either through seizing of bank accounts, or loss of employment, or forced quarantines, things of that nature.”

According to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, those seeking asylum must apply within one year of arriving in the country. Groundsfor seeking asylum include suffering persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. 

An application filed by Kolken in January for one client cited the Liberal government’s crackdown on the Freedom Convoy in February. To deal with the situation, Trudeau took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act which enabled the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters.

Kolken stated that his clients were also “scared to death” of being singled out by the Trudeau government for speaking out against vaccine mandates or have their employment opportunities limited. 

“They’re scared to death that if they go back to Canada they will be singled out and isolated by the Government of Canada, they will be unable to travel,” said Kolken.

“They’re afraid they wouldn’t get onto a plane in Canada and they will be trapped within their own country and that their abilities to obtain employment are limited there.”

Although the Liberals lifted travel mandates which prohibited unvaccinated Canadians from boarding a plane and train domestically or abroad, public health officials have not ruled out re-introducing restrictions in the future. 

“[If] COVID-19 takes a turn for the worst and we need to readjust and go back to a different regime, maybe similar to what we might have had before, we’re ready to do that,” said Deputy Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Howard Njoo in June. “We have no idea what the long term success rate is but I counsel my clients over the phone, the applications that clearly are justifiable under the law and regulations. They set forth a bonafide non-frivolous case.”

He also warned those seeking asylum that the Safe Third Country Agreement which dictates asylum applications between Canada and the US could be used against them. 

“The Safe Third Country Agreement cannot differentiate either country’s treaty obligations to accept asylees from one of the two contracting countries. You can’t say that because of the Safe Third Country Agreement that nobody who is a Canadian citizen can’t apply for asylum in the United States.”

Source: Canadians are seeking asylum in US due to Trudeau’s Covid policies

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Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

2022/08/06 Leave a comment

Really interesting analysis on the shifts over time, both general and partisan, along with group specific attitudes. A comparable Canadian study would likely show some historical parallels, with less political polarization than in the USA, with a focus on different groups (e.g., contrasting Mexican and Chinese immigration makes sense for the USA while for Canada early attitudes towards Chinese immigration paralleled USA attitudes, a better comparator for later attitudes would be Middle Eastern immigrants):
Immigration is one of the most important and divisive topics in American public life. From the rise of vocal antiimmigrant politicians in recent years, it is tempting to conclude that attitudes toward immigration are more negative—or at least more polarized—than ever before. However, resistance to newcomers has always been a central part of our public discourse about immigration. From anti-Chinese fearmongering in the 1880s to concerns about Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the 1920s to the antiimmigration rhetoric of the Trump administration (2017 to 2020), claims that certain types of immigrants can never truly join American society have been a perennial part of our discourse. For example, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an architect of antiimmigrant legislation, declared a century ago, “[Immigration] is bringing to the country people whom it is very difficult to assimilate” (1, p. 35) because immigrants are from “races most alien to the body of the American people” (1, p. 32).
We seek to move beyond individual anecdotes to ask, how have attitudes toward immigrants in the United States changed over the past century? How does recent political debate over immigration compare to the long sweep of US history? This question is a challenge because public opinion polls that asked about attitudes toward immigration only began in the 1960s and were then only asked about immigration sporadically until recent years. We instead turn to the Congressional Record and other sources of political speech, using quantitative text analysis methods to systematically investigate the language used in congressional and presidential speeches about immigration over the past 140 y.
Our paper considers the full corpus of more than 17 million congressional speeches from 1880 to the present, of which we identify ∼200,000 speeches relevant to the topic of immigration. We also incorporate presidential communications from the same time period, making this a comprehensive quantitative analysis of American political speech about immigration at the federal level, covering the entire time period from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the present day.
Numerous studies have analyzed the political history of US immigration using qualitative approaches and historical archives (2–7); quantitative work on immigration has also used data such as migration and census records (8, 9). Rhetorical aspects of immigration debates have been studied qualitatively—especially the use of dehumanizing language and metaphors such as “vermin” and “cargo” (10–13)—but these authors have not rigorously quantified how common such language is over time. Last, other scholars have applied computational methods from natural language processing to study coverage of immigration in news media and Congress (14–18), but none have used these tools to investigate such a long time span or comprehensive corpus of speeches about US immigration with a consistent methodology.
Our analysis is based on a combination of methods. To identify relevant speeches, along with a corresponding tone (proimmigration, antiimmigration, or neutral), we make use of automated text classification based on extensive human annotations. Using a semiautomated process, we also curate and apply a set of lexicons for analyzing relevant frames (i.e., ways of characterizing immigrants and immigration). Finally, to quantify implicit dehumanizing metaphors in speeches, we develop an approach using neural contextual embedding models to measure if references to immigrants are suggestive of various metaphorical categories (Materials and Methods).
We find that political speeches about immigration today are far more likely to be positive than in the past, with the shift from negative to positive mostly taking place between World War II (WWII) and the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and being net positive on average in nearly all sessions of Congress since the early 1950s. Extending this analysis to presidential communications, we find President Trump to be a stark exception, as the first president in modern American history to express sentiment toward immigration that is more negative than the average member of his own party. As with many political issues, the two parties have become increasingly polarized over time, and we find a linear increase in polarization on immigration, beginning in the late 1970s under President Carter. Today, Democrats are unprecedentedly positive about immigration, whereas Republicans are as negative as the average legislator was in the 1920s during the push for strict immigration quotas. This divergence is clearly part of a broader trend toward polarization on many issues (Discussion); for immigration specifically, our analysis reveals the beginnings of this, predating the rise in generic political polarization observed in Gentzkow et al. (19) by more than a decade.
Along with the polarization by party, nationality of immigrants continues to matter greatly, with speeches mentioning Mexican immigration being consistently more negative than the average (dramatically so in comparison to European groups). Moreover, there is a striking similarity between how Mexican immigrants are framed today and how Chinese immigrants were framed during the period of Chinese exclusion in the 19th century: more negative in tone; greater explicit emphasis on frames such as “crime,” “labor,” and “legality”; and significantly greater use of implicit dehumanizing metaphors, in comparison to European groups.
Thus, while far more members of Congress today express favorable attitudes toward immigration than in the past, there remains a strong and growing strain of antiimmigration speech, especially among Republicans, along with perennial references to threats, legality, and crime. Despite the elimination of country-specific immigration quotas in the 1960s, expressed opinions toward immigrants still vary greatly by country of origin, and enduring rhetorical strategies continue to be deployed against more marginalized groups.

Results

Tone of Immigration Speeches.

Starting with the complete record of 17 million congressional speeches from 1880 to 2020 (Data), we collected human annotations and trained machine learning classifiers to identify speeches relevant to immigration, along with an accompanying tone (proimmigration, antiimmigration, or neutral; Classification). Both panels of Fig. 1 show the average tone (percent proimmigration minus percent antiimmigration) expressed in congressional speeches over this time period (black line).* The trends for congressional speeches by Democrats and Republicans are also shown in Fig. 1, Top. A comparable time series for presidents is shown in Fig. 1, Bottom, by applying the same models to all presidential communications collected by the American Presidency Project (20). For alternative models, validity checks, and variation within parties, refer to SI Appendix.
Fig. 1.
Evolution of attitudes toward immigration expressed in congressional speeches and presidential communications. Average tone is computed as the percentage of proimmigration speeches minus the percentage of antiimmigration speeches, where proimmigration means valuing immigrants and favoring less restricted immigration and vice versa. Top and Bottom show the overall tone using all congressional speeches about immigration (black dashed line, with bands showing plus or minus two SDs based on the estimated proportions and number of speeches). Top also shows separate plots for speeches by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. (Due to limitations of the data, about 15% of speeches do not have a named speaker or party affiliation.) Bottom shows the corresponding estimates for each president, showing the overall average for a president’s tenure when there are insufficient data to show annual variation. Note that most modern presidents have been more favorable toward immigration than the average member of Congress. By contrast, Donald Trump appears to be the most antiimmigration president in nearly a century. Similarly, congressional Republicans over the past decade have framed immigration approximately as negatively as the average member of Congress did a century earlier.
OPEN IN VIEWEROPEN IN VIEWER
We begin by documenting a number of findings about political speech related to immigration. First, average sentiment toward immigration in Congress and the executive branch is negative throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) through the advent of strict immigration quotas in the 1920s. The pervasiveness of negative sentiment can help make sense of the political context that gave rise to a suite of increasingly restrictive immigration regulations. It is particularly noteworthy that we do not find a rise in negative speeches leading up to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Rather, we find that political sentiment in Congress was staunchly antiimmigration for more than 4 decades, which is consistent with the political history that has recounted the many congressional attempts to pass antiimmigration legislation, all of which were struck down by the president, in the years before the successful passage of quotas (21). Second, attitudes toward immigration became more positive around the start of WWII, rising steadily from 1940 until the end of the Johnson administration (1969). The average tone in Congress has essentially been proimmigration since the beginning of the Eisenhower administration (1953), consistent with efforts by postwar presidents to reframe the public understanding of immigration as positive for the country.
Third, beginning about a decade after the reopening of the border with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, there has been a growing partisan divide, larger year-to-year variations, and an overall decline in sentiment toward immigration among Republicans. Democrats, by contrast, have grown more positive about immigration over time, especially under Presidents Obama and Trump, with the exception of a temporary bipartisan drop in proimmigration speeches in the early 1990s, coinciding with the end of the Cold War and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). By contrast, Republican legislators are now approximately as overtly antiimmigration in their speeches as the average legislator was during the Age of Mass Migration from Europe and the 1920s quota periods.
The trends for presidential attitudes toward immigration should be treated more cautiously as there is less text available from presidents overall and because these estimates involve a slight domain shift (from congressional speeches, on which our models were trained, to more varied types of presidential communications). Nevertheless, we document a similar pattern, whereby early presidents were more antiimmigration than modern presidents. In recent years, presidents have been uniformly more proimmigration than the average member of Congress, including both Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Democrats like Jimmy Carter. In historical comparison, President Trump was a stark exception: by his utterances, he was the most antiimmigration president to sit in office over the past 140 y, relative to the average attitude of the time expressed in Congress.
Although the difference in tone between the parties today is larger than at any point in the past, tone also varies dramatically depending on which groups of immigrants are being discussed. Fig. 2 shows the average tone when considering only those speeches that mention each of the three most commonly mentioned nationalities in immigration speeches—Mexican, Chinese, and Italian (Identifying Groups).
Fig. 2.
Average tone of immigration speeches when considering only those speeches that mention the country or nationality for each of the three most frequently mentioned nationalities (Top) and the percent of the US foreign-born population from each of these countries over time (Bottom). Despite the midcentury increase in proimmigration attitudes applying to all groups, a gap in tone by group persists to the present day, with Mexican immigrants being consistently framed more negatively than others and Italian immigrants being framed especially positively. These trends are mirrored in broader regional patterns for Europe, Asia, and Latin American and the Caribbean (SI Appendix).
…

Source: Computational analysis of 140 years of US political speeches reveals more positive but increasingly polarized framing of immigration | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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New Clues On What Immigration Will Look Like In A Second Trump Term

2022/08/04 Leave a comment

Hopefully just a theoretical exercise:

What would it mean for U.S. immigration policy if, on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States? Many people expect a crackdown on illegal immigration. However, recent clues and past actions indicate the more significant impact of a second Trump presidency would be on legal immigration, including the admission of refugees, family immigrants and high-skilled professionals.

Personnel Is Policy: “Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his ‘America First’ ideology . . . The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” according to Axios. The publication also reported American Moment, a pro-Trump group, wants to replace current federal workers with “applicants who want to cut not just illegal but also legal immigration into the U.S.”

It is easy to see how this would result in more restrictive immigration policies. After White House adviser Stephen Miller received pushback the first year he reduced the annual refugee cap, at least one career government employee was reassigned so the individual could not interfere in the future, according to Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear.

With the power to hire and fire civil servants, Trump officials could fill the federal government with anti-immigrant personnel. If immigrants, businesses and attorneys complain now about U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), they should consider what agency processing would look like after an anti-immigrant litmus test is imposed on USCIS employees during a Trump-Miller second term.

Trump Likely To Fail Again To Reduce Illegal Immigration: In a second term, in the name of combating illegal immigration, Trump administration officials would attempt to enact nearly every restrictive immigration measure considered in recent years. This would include eliminating the practical ability to apply for asylum after crossing the southern border, building more of “the wall,” increasing the use of expedited removal and other policies.

Given that Donald Trump failed to reduce illegal immigration the first time around, there is no reason to believe similar policies would succeed if tried again. During the Trump administration, between FY 2016 and FY 2019, apprehensions at the Southwest border (a proxy for illegal entry) increasedfrom 408,870 to 851,508—a rise of more than 100 percent. While the Covid-19 pandemic caused apprehensions to decline for several months starting in March 2020, by August and September 2020, apprehensions had resumed at the approximate level of illegal entry seen during the same months in FY 2019. In short, Donald Trump’s policies failed to reduce illegal immigration and were enacted at a great human cost, particularly for parents and children separated at the border.

The Biden administration, in large measure, continued Trump’s border policies, namely Title 42, which allows individuals to be expelled without further processing. Title 42 is supposed to be a public health measure but has been used to prevent many people from applying for asylum. The policies have boosted Border Patrol apprehensions and encouraged people to enter unlawfully, often multiple times, likely making the border more problematic. A federal judge has ordered the Biden administration to keep Title 42 in place.

Department of Homeland Security reports show over the years tighter enforcement has significantly increased the number of immigrants who use human smugglers to cross the border (i.e., virtually everyone crossing now employs smugglers). The policies have also resulted in an increased loss of life. In July 2022, 53 immigrants suffocated inside a tractor-trailer in San Antonio.

Opposition To Legal Immigration: Ironically, the Trump administration is likely to try every measure to combat illegal entry but the one proven effective in reducing illegal entry: Making it easier to enter and work legally in the United States.

Research from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) found that a significant increase in the lawful admission of farm workers during the 1950s under the Bracero Program dramatically reduced illegal entry to America. Based on apprehensions at the border, unlawful entry across the southwest border declined by 95% between 1953 and 1959, as farm workers entered legally in greater numbers.

Trump Immigration Policies Will Likely Decimate Long-Term U.S. Economic Growth: Labor force growth is a crucial part of economic growth, without which Americans grow poorer or see their standard of living stagnate.

Those who argued that Donald Trump was only concerned about limiting illegal immigration have a problem—it’s not true. Unlike any president before him, Trump made broad use of executive authority under section 212(f) to restrict legal immigration and suspend the entry of many categories of immigrants and temporary visa holders. In 2020, this prevented the entry of workers and professionals on temporary visas, and immigrants on family, employment-based and Diversity visas. He also set the lowest refugee admissions ceiling of any president.

Given another term, expect refugee admissions to be extremely low and for Trump to use section 212(f) to bypass Congress and block the entry of many immigrants and visa holders. The ban on immigration from a number of majority Muslim countries could return.

The impact of Trump’s policies would be devastating to the nation’s future economic growth. A National Foundation for American Policy analysis concluded if Trump’s policies had continued, legal immigration would have been reduced in half, and “average annual labor force growth would be approximately 59% lower than compared to a policy of no immigration reductions.”

In 2021 and 2022, America saw the negative results of Trump’s immigration policies, with an estimated 2 million immigrant workers missing from the U.S. labor force blamed for reducing U.S. economic output and contributing to inflation. Another four years of similar policies would likely produce more negative results, potentially longer term, if enacted by legislation.

Trump Likely To Push More International Students And High-Skilled Professionals Away From The U.S.:During the Trump administration, many international students diverted away from the United States, primarily to Canada, and employers saw denial rates for H-1B petitions skyrocket. Expect America to lose talent in even more significant numbers should the entire Trump immigration agenda against highly educated foreign nationals come to fruition.

Businesses and universities should expect every idea or regulation the Trump administration failed to implement to be tried again. That would mean:

– New limits on who qualifies for an H-1B petition and how (and where) an H-1B visa holder can work;

– Requiring employers to pay well above-market wages for H-1B visa holders and employees sponsored for permanent residence;

– New restrictions on international students and Optional Practical Training (OPT), and other policies.

There is no evidence such policies would help U.S. workers or American students—the evidence shows the opposite would be true. The harm to the U.S. economy and future innovation would be real.

Between 2017 and 2020, attorneys representing businesses, universities and immigrant rights organizations successfully blocked several Trump policies. That task would become much more difficult the second time around since former Trump officials would have learned from their mistakes and have a fresh four years to implement restrictive immigration policies.

What Would A Different Republican President Do? A different Republican president, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, would likely adopt many of Trump’s policies on illegal immigration. However, DeSantis (or another Republican) might not allow Stephen Miller back in the White House. Without Miller, a different Republican president could adopt policies on legal immigration more consistent with the views of mainstream economists, particularly given the potential for Republican inroads with Asian and Latino voters.

New Limits On The Freedom Of Americans: Trump’s most significant policies will restrict legal immigration, which, economists note, will harm innovation and reduce economic growth in America. But the impact will be broader.

“An immigration restriction is a government ban on a wide variety of economic activities by natives,” according toeconomist Michael Clemens. By that standard, a second Trump term would mean less freedom for consumers who wish to enjoy products and services offered by immigrants, Americans who hope to sponsor family members and employers who want to hire foreign-born scientists and engineers to compete in the global economy.

Source: New Clues On What Immigration Will Look Like In A Second Trump Term

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USA: How anti-immigrant groups are misrepresenting border data

2022/07/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

Recently, there has been increasing concern over the growing number of encounters (the number of people apprehended) reported on the southwest border. U.S. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) data show 207,416 encounters in June 2022 — a record high. Many anti-immigrant groups misinterpret — or purposefully misuse — this data, suggesting encounters are akin to admissions or arrests. But citing that number alone to demonstrate the need for more robust deterrence policies ignores the impacts of Title 42 expulsions and discounts historical migration trends.

CBP tracks the number of noncitizens apprehended each month, known as “encounters.” Anti-immigrant groups have cited the high number of encounters in June 2022, stating that it is a dramatic departure from the typical amount of migrants entering the U.S. in other years — but that’s not the case.

The number of migrants at the southwest border demonstrates a return to regular migration trends. In a study of migration trends over the last decade, researchers found that there is consistently an increasing number of encounters between January and May, with a sharp decrease after June.

The Covid pandemic significantly disrupted these patterns. As a result, between March and June of 2020 the U.S. saw the lowest rate of encounters in years. In 2021, that number steadily increased, but the overall was still drastically lower than average. This year, we have seen a return to regular patterns, with numbers increasing in the spring and decreasing starting June.

CBP Southwest Land Border Enforcement data for 2019-2022. Data prior to 2019 can be found here.

Since March 2020, a significant portion of migrants at the southwest border have been subjected to rapid expulsion under Title 42. Although the administration has attempted to terminate the health order, the courts blocked its termination. The result is a recidivism rate for border crossers that is more than triple what it was before the pandemic. Moreover, the encounter data alone does not account for the continued rapid expulsions nor the amount of people who repeatedly attempt to enter the U.S.

Indeed, the number of people that CBP is processing now is comparable to FY 2019, before the implementation of Title 42 in response to the pandemic. There is only an eight percent difference in the number of people processed in FY19 compared to FY22. In February and May, the Trump administration processed more people in FY19 than the Biden administration in FY22.

CBP Southwest Land Border Enforcement data for FY 2019-2022. CBP Title 42 Expulsions data for FY 2022.

Whenever there is a “surge” at the border, anti-immigrant groups use it as an excuse to call for and implement deterrence policies. Citing numbers of encounters without additional context has led to administrations repeating the mistake of using previously failed deterrence measures.

To counter this pattern, we should learn to anticipate when there will be higher numbers of people arriving at the border and improve processing capacity to efficiently and humanely process those seeking admittance to the U.S.

Source: How anti-immigrant groups are misrepresenting border data

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New evidence disputes Trump administration’s citizenship question rationale

2022/07/22 Leave a comment

No suprise:

Previously unreleased internal communications indicate the Trump administration tried to add a citizenship question to the census with the goal of affecting congressional apportionment, according to a report issued Wednesday by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The documents appear to contradict statements made under oath by then-Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who told the committee that the push for a citizenship question was unrelated to apportionment and the reason for adding it was to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.

The nearly 500 documents include several drafts of an August 2017 memorandum prepared by a Commerce Department lawyer and political appointee, James Uthmeier, in which he initially warned that using a citizenship question for apportionment would probably be illegal and violate the constitution, the report said.

Source: New evidence disputes Trump administration’s citizenship question rationale

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