How Did Hasidic Jewry Become a Stronghold of Trumpism?

2020/12/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Is American Hasidism in crisis? After successfully rebuilding its institutions after the war, Hasidism in America has flourished. And yet, its response to COVID and its newfound reactionary political populism, leads us to ask the question: is something changing in contemporary Hasidism that’s worth examining more closely?

Much has been written lately about the politicization of the Hasidic world in America, particularly its full-throttled support of Donald Trump. In fact, Hasidic voting patterns now closely resemble those of evangelical Christians. Scholars and pundits have weighed in on this surprising political activism in a community that usually keeps a low profile and focuses on its internal needs. And this activism has become even more visible as Hasidic communities have flouted health guidelines in the COVD crisis and made a public health issue into a political one. While the fact of these phenomena have been well documented, what are some of the underlying conditions that have contributed to a kind of “perfect storm” of populist reactionary Hasidic activism?

Part of what we’re witnessing in this new Hasidic populism is another stage of Hasidic Americanization in the wake of the loss of the last vestiges of European authority. The great Hasidic figures from Eastern Europe commanded intense devotion and respect from their communities, representing an authentic world destroyed in the Holocaust. Others emerged to take their place but it’s arguable that the weight of authority of these masters was not replicated in their American or Israeli born successors.

This isn’t to argue that these new rebbes haven’t commanded respect; they certainly have. It’s simply to point out that the force of their authority is diminished in comparison to those who arrived in America from prewar Europe. Eastern Europe was the fertile ground of Hasidic aristocracy. America, Mandate Palestine, and Israel, stood in its shadow. The loss of first-hand exposure to those halcyon years diminished Hasidism’s luster and authenticity. It continues, albeit in a different register.

If this is true, it’s worth considering how it contributes to a rise of the Hasidic populism that’s taken to the streets to express disdain for the government and its health mandates. It’s a complicated situation and is certainly the result of many factors. In one sense, this is a classic example of a popular revolution when individuals without much authority somehow evoke a rebellion against authority (think of Castro and Che in Cuba), be it religious or civil, by touching the nerve of a rapidly growing community in crisis coupled with a weakened stature of leadership.

The transformation of COVID from a health crisis to a political movement in the Hasidic world is a phenomenon that merits deeper study. When and why did this happen? Why and how did street protests against mask mandates and synagogue and park closings turn into Trump rallies in Hasidic Brooklyn? It’s true that Trump espouses conservative values that many Hasidim identify with, but so did Ronald Reagan and he didn’t enjoy such passionate support. And Reagan arguably did more for Hasidim than Trump ever did when, in 1984, he granted them “disadvantaged minority status” enabling them to apply for federal funding for businesses.

Whether, in fact, this speaks to a significant shift in Hasidism’s politicization or not remains to be seen. What I’m pointing to here is the rise of a populist mind-set where a rabble-rousing radio talk show host and Hasidic outsider like Heshy Tischler, who has no authoritative role in the community whatsoever, can attract the attention of young Hasidic boys and compel them to take to the streets.

One could view this as a positive manifestation of the growing autonomy of these communities and their increased involvement in public political life. And yet, as I will suggest below, an unreconstructed Hasidism will invariably—and, given theological considerations, understandably—be attracted to a reactionary political agenda and autocratic leadership.

The Americanization of Hasidism 

Hasidism rose from the depths of Jewish traditional society in Eastern Europe during a tumultuous time. The Napoleonic Wars were changing the map of Europe, autocratic rule was slowly transforming into early stages of tolerance and later democracy. Emancipation may still have been decades away, but encroaching modernity from the West was making inroads into the traditional Jewish world, attracting some of its most talented youth.

In some way, Hasidism was both a rebellion against the internal autocracy of the rabbinic elite and the modernizing mind-set of the enlightenment (haskala). It made a play for both power and piety in a very unstable period. Among the challenges of a nascent Hasidic world was one of political alliances; in one case between Napoleon and the freedoms he promised, and in the other, Czar Alexander I and an autocracy that allowed Jewish enclaves to continue their traditional lives.

Similar debates made their way westward questioning whether emancipation was good for the Jews; that is, whether the modernization that accompanied the promise of freedom ultimately threatened the Jewish tradition. As told by Chaim Heilman in his Beit Rebbe, Shnuer Zalman of Liady offered a cogent assessment of the wager: if Napoleon wins, Jews will be materially successful but will suffer spiritually, and if Alexander wins, Jews will be materially impoverished but will spiritually flourish. Throughout its history, Hasidism has lived in the balance of that wager. It arguably filters through Hasidism’s entire negotiation with modernity. Perhaps until now.

America presented another way to understand this bargain. What we may be witnessing today is another layer of the complex process of the Americanization of Hasidism. The first stage may have been propagated by Eastern European Hasidic immigrants, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, in their initial reconstruction of Hasidic dynasties in America. Schneerson’s (Lubavitch) advocacy of a moment of silence in public school (supporting Jerry Falwell), his campaign to erect Hanukkah Menorahs in public squares, and his Noahide Law campaign to gentiles, all illustrate his deep belief in America.

And Teitelbaum’s attempt to secure public funding for special education in the yeshivot in the Satmar enclave, Kiryas Joel, speaks to the extent he too understood America as holding potential for his own religious vision. The Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel isn’t a replica of something that existed in prewar Europe. It was, as David Myers and Naomi Stolzenberg write in their upcoming book, Teitelbaum’s American fantasy; an American shtetl.

In the street protests and general political activism in present day Hasidism we may be witnessing yet another iteration of Hasidism’s developing Americanism. While Hasidim have always supported political candidates and voted in relatively high numbers, most of the advocacy was primarily transactional; they supported candidates they thought could maximize their resources. In 2020, impromptu pro-Trump rallies in Flatbush and Boro Park, a pair of Brooklyn neighborhoods with high numbers of Orthodox Jews, illustrates a new kind of political populism seldom seen in communities that often prefer to stay out of the spotlight.

The question as to why Hasidim overwhelmingly supported an immoral, autocratic, and reactionary candidate with such verve and vigor is multivalent. One reading may have to do with a lopsided equation of integration. That is, on the one hand Hasidim are becoming politicized as a result of their developing Americanism, which values public political expression. At the same time, however, they haven’t revised their general worldview, which was built on earlier political realities, a theology and religious ideology founded on chosenness, and historic feelings of exclusion and resentment.

The “us vs. them” mentality that grew over time and the theology that informed traditional Jewish teaching in large part followed suit. In many ways the binary of “friend vs. enemy” plays into the Trump vision of America. Traditional Jews, like the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, have historically been attracted to strong autocratic leaders who shared their binary view of the world. In this sense, their support of Trump is predictable

The challenge of emancipation, or the “liberal social contract” with the Jews in Europe, required Jews to revise those ideological principles to become fully a part of larger society. Non-Orthodox Judaisms, Jewish secularisms, and to some extent Neo- and Modern Orthodoxy engaged this challenge in different ways. But American democracy demanded an even stronger revision.

American rabbi Mordecai Kaplan argued that chosenness simply could not survive American democracy intact. One cannot easily be full members of a democratic society and maintain a theologically exceptionalist status. He was right, until he was wrong. By the 1950s, sociologists talked of the “death of Orthodoxy” in America while Hasidism was just beginning to rebuild in this new land of tolerance—what Rabbi Schneerson called a “medina shel hesed” (a land of kindness). Whether and how Orthodoxy could bear the weight of American integrationism was an open question.

What the sociologists of the 1950s could not have predicted was the rise of the counter-culture that would re-frame America’s conformism into a multitude of expressions of difference, pluralism, and later, multiculturalism. This would not only save Orthodoxy but enable Hasidism to enter the public square with minimal ideological and theological revisions. Schneerson saw this in the 1960s more than any other American Jewish religious leader and his movement flourished, riding the wave of multiculturalism. One of the byproducts of the multicultural turn was the ability of more traditional Jewish communities, Hasidim among them, to maintain strict observance and retain their ideological and theological commitments while increasingly becoming a part of American society. By the 1960s, acculturation was no longer a prerequisite for integration. Hasidim entered the public square without having to pay much of a theological or ideological price. The “liberal social contract” no longer carried the weight it once did.

The problem, however, is that Hasidim entered the public square with their old-world chauvinistic and xenophobic inclinations intact and residual fears of the left stemming from the days when the left meant socialism in Europe and when Russia used communism as a tool to attack and demolish religion. Given Jews’ complicated relationship with race, and African Americans in particular, this fear easily transformed into a belief that the progressive left, in part in the BLM movement, was inherently anti-religious, and antisemitic. Interestingly, the antisemitism of the right seemed less threatening, perhaps more familiar, than the antisemitism of the left. Trump subtly exonerating the marchers at Charlottesville seemed less problematic than Linda Sarsour’s anti-Zionism. Even though they weren’t Zionists, “Jews will not replace us” seemed less threatening to the Hasidim than “Israel is a colonialist state.”

Another paradoxical twist in this story is that the antisemitism of the left today in America is largely targeting Zionism, which the Hasidim largely don’t support either, albeit for very different reasons. Thus, what’s emerged is a kind of Hasidic anti-Zionist pro-Israelism; tacit support for Israel as an act of tribal fidelity rather than any form of Zionism. Ask a Hasidic Jew touting Trump’s moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem whether he is a “Zionist” and he will think you’re crazy. Anti-Zionism has been part of the very fabric of Hasidic Judaism for a long time, even now in muted form. But somehow without abandoning that, they found a way to support Israel and deem left-wing anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism, while their form of anti-Zionism is protecting Judaism.

The Trumpization of Hasidic Jewry should not be surprising and it can be thought of as the byproduct of multiculturalism’s enabling. When Hasidic groups can enter the public square without compromising their theological and ideological commitments—that is, without a “liberal social contract”—they can easily be attracted to right-wing reactionary movements. They will support the Czar over Napoleon.

In earlier times, as Shneur Zalman of Liady suggested, they had to compromise their material wealth for the sake of spiritual survival. In America that’s no longer necessary. They can have both and in addition they can partner with a segment of the majority (white evangelicals) that has ostensibly found its own tacit acceptance of the Jews through its own version of Zionism. Just as Hasidim can be anti-Zionist and pro-Israel, evangelicals can be antisemitic and pro-Israel. It’s not very provocative to say that when Hasidic ideology, founded on the kabbalistic tradition, becomes politicized, it can easily support a kind of autocracy—as long as they are the beneficiaries.

On this reading, the origin of Hasidic Trumpism may be Schneerson himself. It was Schneerson who believed Hasidic Jews could enter the public square without sacrificing any of their ideological positions. He couldn’t have predicted Trump but he enabled the Hasidic support of a candidate not merely as Jews, but as “Americans,” while holding onto views that reflect a Jewish experience of the old world.

Schneerson’s success is undeniable, but we may be seeing the dark side of that success in Hasidic Trumpism. Chabad has been adept at presenting its Jewish vision in the form of a sweetened Judaism to non-religious Jews and to the world more generally. But the support of a political figure who expresses a different form of chauvinism is telling in regards to how the deep-seated ideological core of Chabad, and Hasidism more generally, remains operational.

Source: How Did Hasidic Jewry Become a Stronghold of Trumpism?

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The Importance Of Immigrants For The Future Of Tech

2020/12/02 Leave a comment

As noted frequently and likely that the incoming Biden administration will reverse many of the counter-productive Trump administration policies:

The importance of migrants was underlined during the Covid-19 crisis when it was revealed that the founders of both BioNTech and Moderna, two of the companies at the forefront of the development of a vaccine against the virus, are immigrants to the United States and Germany respectively.

This should perhaps come as no surprise. After all, I wrote recentlyabout the importance of immigrants for jobs, after new researchfrom Kellogg School of Management showed that immigrants actually create a huge number of jobs by virtue of their entrepreneurial abilities.

Wharton research further elaborates on this point by pointing out that immigrant founders not only create jobs, but also bring considerable finance with them. The authors state that cross-border VC investment is now at record levels, with this in large part due to the increasingly international nature of entrepreneurship.

Driving AI

It’s perhaps no surprise, therefore, that recent research from MIT’ CSAIL lab has shown that while American continues to lead the way in the development of artificial intelligence, much of the actual breakthroughs are driven by foreign-born scientists.

The researchers assessed improvements made to the key sections of AI over the past 70 years, and found that around two-thirds of the gains in that time were delivered by researchers at North American universities. What is important, however, is that in the last 30 years, over 75% of these breakthroughs have come from foreign-born scientists.

“If we want the United States to continue to be ground zero for computer science, we need to make sure that our policies make it easy to continue to bring host international researchers to join our institutions,” the researchers say.

A broken pipeline

Research from Cornell suggests, however, that this is a pipeline that is increasingly dysfunctional. The paper highlights how despite many foreign-born Ph.D. graduates applying for jobs at tech startups, and indeed receiving offers to work for them, a large number of them fail to actually take up those jobs due to visa issues.

Instead, those people were much more likely to work at larger tech companies who have the resources and expertise to help them navigate the Kafka like H-1B and permanent residency process.

It’s a situation that has also been chronicled by researchers from Georgetown University, who found that restrictive immigration policies are hampering the ability of American firms to recruit and retain the kind of AI talent they need.

“Historically, immigrants have helped America lead the world in technological innovation,” the authors say. “Artificial intelligence is no exception. Foreign-born talent fuels the U.S. AI sector at every level, from student researchers in academic labs to foreign and naturalized workers in leading companies.”

The study reveals that foreign-born talent plugs a crucial hole in the AI talent marketplace, with the hole likely to persist and even grow in the coming years. A laborious and out-of-date immigration policy is thus hindering the competitiveness of American AI firms because they cannot recruit or retain the talent they need to thrive.

Fragile ground

This could have profound implications for the hegemony of Western nations in the development of AI. The MIT researchers highlight that while residents of Europe and North America making up just 15% of the global population, they’ve contributed over 75% of the breakthroughs in AI.

The free movement of people has been crucial to that, as people with considerable natural talent have been able to move to countries where that talent not only has the opportunity to flourish, but the peer group to help support their work.

This was emphasized clearly by research from McKinsey a few years ago, which highlighted that 35% of the 247 million or so people who live outside their country of birth are highly skilled migrants with at least a tertiary education. What’s more, these migrants are typically significantly more qualified than the native population.

What’s more, research from the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy goes further still and directly measures the impact of migrants on innovation. It shows that bringing in talent from abroad not only helps with the birth of new products and phasing out of older ones, but also has an impact on corporate profits and consumer wellbeing.

“We found companies with higher rates of H-1B workers increased product reallocation–the ability for companies to create new products and replace outdated ones, which in turn, grows revenue,” the authors say. “This discourse could have far reaching implications for U.S. policy, the profitability of firms, the welfare of workers, and the potential for innovation in the economy as a whole.”

Brain drain

The findings come at a time when countries such as the United Kingdom and United States have been gripped by populist politicians who have risen to power in large part due to opposition to immigration. Recent research from Vienna University of Economics and Business highlights how the “hostile environment” created in the U.K. has been driving foreign-born scientists from their shores, with a particular exodus occurring since the Brexit referendum in 2016.

A similar picture was painted of the U.S. by research from Ohio State University, which revealed that a growing number of Chinese researchers are leaving the country and taking their ideas and intellect with them.

The study found that around 16,000 researchers have returned to China from overseas in the last few years, with 4,500 leaving the United States alone. That’s roughly twice the number who were leaving per year in 2010. It’s a trend that is helping to turn China into a true scientific powerhouse.

The West has undoubtedly been a driving force in the development of AI over the past 70 years, but if restrictive immigration policies continue to dominate, it is highly likely that other regions will drive the next generation of AI.

Source: The Importance Of Immigrants For The Future Of Tech

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128 Tricky Questions That Could Stand Between You and U.S. Citizenship

2020/12/01 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries on the new test, designed to exclude, not include:

Take it from me, a noncitizen, there is much to learn from the naturalization test, one of the final hurdles an immigrant must clear to become a citizen.

It’s pretty tough actually, particularly the new and expanded version of the civics test that is to go into effect on Dec. 1. To those of us living under The Stephen Miller School of Exclusion, this is one more barrier to an immigrant’s quest to live here. The questions and answers are online now. I’ve been practicing in a variety of American accents.

The latest test has 128 civics questions about American government and history. Just getting to take the test usually means you’ve made it through an obstacle course involving reams of paperwork, thousands of dollars in lawyer and government fees, years of legal residency, a biometrics appointment and an English proficiency test. The questions come in the form of an oral test where an officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S.C.I.S., asks the would-be citizen to answer 20 of the 128 civics questions; if she gets 12 right, she passes. After that, all she needs to do is pick up her paperwork. Then she can pledge allegiance to the flag and decide which season of “Real Housewives” to watch to truly understand this complex nation.

The latest test is a jump from the current one, which requires you to study only 100 questions, and answer 10 of them, with 6 correct answers, to pass. The Trump administration has left almost no part of the immigration system untouched. It made changes large and small, from thundering bans of entire nationalities to insidious but potent administrative changes like this one. However innocuous some changes may seem, they illuminate the end goal: curbing legal immigration.

As with many Trumpian ideas, the seeds were there all along. The Naturalization Act of 1906 first decreed that citizens-to-be must speak English, and while English is not the official language of the United States, most immigrants today still have to pass an English proficiency test. The civics test is carried out only in English.

I’m a native English speaker, but I still find some questions difficult to understand. And unlike the study guide online, the questions are not multiple choice. That means that one day, if I get to take the test, I will have to try to keep a straight face as I look into another human being’s eyes and try to answer the question, “Why is the Electoral College important?”

Some people have an easier ride. If you are 65 or older and have 20 years of permanent residency under your belt, you are required to answer fewer questions. This makes me feel better about the substantial errors made by the 66-year-old senator-elect from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville. In an interview this month in The Alabama Daily News, Mr. Tuberville got the three branches of the federal government wrong and misidentified the reason the United States fought in World War II. To be fair, Mr. Tuberville played football for a long time. It is my understanding that this extremely American game involves repeated bashes to the head, one of which is bound to knock out some civics knowledge.

Speaking of senators, one of the more sinister changes to the civics test is the answer to the question, “Who does a U.S. Senator represent?” The only acceptable answer has been changed from all people of their state to citizens of their state. I’m just a person, not a citizen. Am I not worthy of representation? There was a whole kerfuffle about taxation without representation back in the day, I believe.

Simone Hanlon Shook is worried about these changes. “It’s just really punitive to people that don’t have advanced degrees and it’s not in their first language,” she told me. She said she was not worried about passing her own test when she took it on Oct. 7. It was the shorter and simpler one. Plus, she is a high school history teacher. Originally from Ireland, Ms. Hanlon Shook lives in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and in past years used the U.S.C.I.S. questions to quiz her high school students as she waited her turn to take the real thing. “The idea was: if you weren’t a citizen, would you pass this test? And a lot of them wouldn’t.”

Her turn finally came during a pandemic, so the U.S.C.I.S. officer brought her into a room with an iPad, and then he went to the room right next to hers and conducted the interview virtually. She got 100 percent of the questions right and on Oct. 23 she was presented with her citizenship papers and a small American flag during a drive-through ceremony in a parking lot beside the Albany airport. The next day, she told me, she voted in the presidential election.

One day I hope to do the same, so I’m taking practice questions when I can. This one caught me out. “What is Alexander Hamilton famous for?” He’s famous for his cool ponytail and for being a breakout star on Broadway, right? Wrong. Apparently he’s famous for being “one of the writers of the Federalist papers.” Not sure what those are, but they sound serious.

Another one is “Name one example of an American innovation.” Voodoo-flavored Zapp’s chips spring to mind, as does unearned confidence. However, neither is included in the list of acceptable answers. Instead: light bulbs, skyscrapers and landing on the moon.

Hernan Prieto is the citizenship program coordinator at Irish Community Services, a nonprofit in Chicago that provides immigration and social services to immigrants of any nationality in the Midwest. Part of his job is preparing immigrants for the civics test. Unlike Senator-elect Tuberville, his students usually get the question about the branches of government right. They are also familiar with some of the names on the test, he told me. They know who Martin Luther King Jr. is and why he is important. Dates trip them up, though.

A green card holder from Argentina, Mr. Prieto hopes to apply for naturalization next year, and he told me he appreciates what he learns alongside other immigrants. Most crucially, studying civics informs would-be Americans of what they stand to gain and what they need to give if they hope to live up to this nation’s earliest motto. They learn that motto too; it’s “E Pluribus Unum” or “Out of many, one.” They learn that equality is promised by the Constitution, that nobody is above the law and that it is a civic duty to vote.

Mr. Prieto treasures that knowledge, but is not convinced that the test itself is helpful. “I don’t know that we need to have a formal test, with 128 questions that you need to learn, and get 12 of them right,” he said. “Do we really need that? What is important for a new citizen is to know their rights and their responsibilities. That is what levels them with other citizens.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/opinion/us-citizenship-test.html

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Universities urge Biden to end curbs on foreign students

2020/11/30 Leave a comment

Not surprising and warranted with respect to the curbs:

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education (ACE), has written to United States President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris on behalf of 43 US university associations calling on them to move to ensure that American colleges and universities are “once again, the destination of choice for the world’s best international students and scholars”.

To accomplish this aim, Mitchell says the Biden administration should move to: 

• Withdraw the proposed regulations that would limit an international student’s ‘duration of status’ and create a fixed duration of admission. Mitchell says there is no evidence to suggest that such a restriction is required or that the issues raised cannot be addressed through the existing Student and Exchange Visitor Program.

“The amount of time the Trump administration proposes to give students is less than the average amount of time it takes an international student to complete his or her education. Such a policy is not fair to international students or institutions,” Mitchell says. 

• Withdraw the interim final rules and the proposed rule that make it harder and more expensive for individuals to receive H-1B visas. These new requirements imposed by both the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security were finalised without allowing for public comment, Mitchell says. 

“The business and higher education communities vigorously oppose the proposed rules, and two lawsuits have already been filed to block them. In addition, the proposed rule regarding subject caps will make it difficult for recent international students graduating from US institutions to participate in the H-1B programme.” 

• Make clear that the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme remains in place as it was at the end of the Obama administration. The Trump administration’s constant signalling that it might change OPT created a serious disincentive for students to enrol in post-secondary education in the United States, Mitchell says. 

Most international students see the OPT programme as a transitional stage to obtaining an H-1B visa. More than 5,000 assistant professors and over 1,700 research associates hold H-1B visas, according to an online visa tracker. The H-1B visa programme is one of the very few pathways for foreign-born researchers to remain in the United States on a long-term basis. 

The demands are among a list of steps that Mitchell says “could and should” be undertaken quickly by the new US administration once it is sworn in in January.

In the open letter, ACE President Mitchell says: “First and foremost, we welcome and applaud the announcement that the Biden administration will move quickly to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections that the Trump administration repealed. 

“We hope that your administration will take steps to make the DACA protections permanent and will work with you to support whatever measures are necessary to accomplish this worthy goal.”

An estimated 450,000 undocumented immigrants are college students and about half of those are eligible for the DACA programme.

In addition to DACA, Mitchell said the associations believe that the Biden administration should take immediate action in a number of areas to terminate, revise or replace a number of decisions that the Trump administration has put in place regarding higher education. 

He called on the Biden administration to work with all stakeholders to address “aspects of the Title IX regulations [the law against sex discrimination in education provision] that are deeply problematic and that micromanage campus processes in an inflexible manner and undermine college and university efforts to effectively, fairly and compassionately address the problem of campus sexual assault”. 

In particular, Mitchell said, the administration “should eliminate the mandate for a live hearing with cross examination, which could have a chilling effect on the willingness of survivors to come forward and raises serious concerns about re-traumatisation”.

Foreign gift reporting requirements

He also demanded a halting of the expanded reporting requirements, including the new Information Collection Request (ICR) and Notice of Interpretation (NOI) on Section 117, which relates to conditions of transparency and reporting of institutions’ foreign gifts or contracts worth US$250,000 or more. 

The higher education associations regard the new interpretation imposed by the Department of Education as part of an effort to expand those reporting requirements beyond existing requirements. The ACE letter says the Higher Education Act prescribes the information that institutions are required to disclose, and, in the absence of a regulation, the Education Department has no authority to impose new requirements beyond those in statute. 

The letter also accuses the Trump administration of launching “politically motivated” investigations of higher education institutions conducted by political appointees. Examples given include investigations launched by the department’s Office of the General Counsel of “racism at Princeton” and “academic freedom at UCLA”.

Mitchell said: “The [Education] Department’s response to instances of insufficient institutional reporting should have focused on reporting remediation to enhance the intended transparency rather than launching investigations that forced institutions to invest scarce resources in responding to burdensome document requests that sought information beyond the statutory authority.”

Limits on the effectiveness of student aid

Mitchell called for the withdrawal of the interim final rules regarding the eligibility of higher education students for funds under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security or CARES Act. Mitchell said this rule “contradicts congressional intent as to which students should be eligible for the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund and limits the effectiveness of such aid”.

In order to “enhance the integrity” of student aid programmes, he called on the Biden administration to rewrite the rules to protect the risk to students and taxpayers and ensure that students’ financial aid eligibility is limited to “quality programmes”.

The letter calls for the reinstatement of Obama-era guidance on the use of race in admissions and the immediate termination of the Department of Justice’s “unprecedented demand that Yale University cease any consideration of race in its admissions practices”. 

Mitchell says: “There is no evidence that Yale is in violation of Supreme Court decisions that bear on this issue.”

Similarly, ACE calls on the Department of Justice to withdraw its support for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. 

“The trial and appellate court decisions, both of which found for Harvard, have established a clear and compelling record that Harvard is in no way violating the law,” Mitchell says.

The letter also calls for the repeal of the Executive Order on Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency and Accountability at Colleges and Universities and the portion of regulations related to that order included in the Education Department’s 23 September 2020 final rule, “Direct Grant Programs, State-Administered Formula Grant Programs…” 

Mitchell said: “Colleges and universities are committed to free inquiry and academic freedom. It is improper for federal officials, including those at the Education Department, to insert their own political judgments about what speech should or should not be permitted on campus. 

“In fact, federal law specifically prohibits the Education Department from interfering in academic matters.”

Mitchell also demanded the repeal of the president’s Executive Order on Race and Sex Stereotyping. “Needless to say, colleges and universities are totally opposed to race and sex stereotyping, but the executive order is sweepingly overbroad and has chilled the implementation of critical diversity training programmes that ensure more respectful and productive work and learning environments,” Mitchell writes.

Source: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20201128102119141

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Hate crimes in US reach highest level in more than a decade

2020/11/18 Leave a comment

Of note (still less than the previous high in 2008) so not all attributable to Trump. Canadian police-reported hate crimes 2019 numbers not yet out:

Hate crimes in the U.S. rose to the highest level in more than a decade as federal officials also recorded the highest number of hate-motivated killings since the FBI began collecting that data in the early 1990s, according to an FBI report released Monday.

There were 51 hate crime murders in 2019, which includes 22 people who were killed in a shooting that targeted Mexicans at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, Texas, the report said. The suspect in that August 2019 shooting, which left two dozen other people injured, was charged with both state and federal crimes in what authorities said was an attempt to scare Hispanics into leaving the United States.

There were 7,314 hate crimes last year, up from 7,120 the year before — and approaching the 7,783 of 2008. The FBI’s annual report defines hate crimes as those motivated by bias based on a person’s race, religion or sexual orientation, among other categories.

Some of the 2019 increases may be the result of better reporting by police departments, but law enforcement officials and advocacy groups don’t doubt that hate crimes are on the rise. The Justice Department has for years been specifically prioritizing hate crime prosecutions.

The data also shows there was a nearly 7% increase in religion-based hate crimes, with 953 reports of crimes targeting Jews and Jewish institutions last year, up from 835 the year before. The FBI said the number of hate crimes against African Americans dropped slightly to 1,930, from 1,943.

Anti-Hispanic hate crimes, however, rose to 527 in 2019, from 485 in 2018. And the total number of hate crimes based on a person’s sexual orientation stayed relatively stable, with one fewer crime reported last year, compared with the year before, though there were 20 more hate crimes against gay men reported.

As the data was made public on Monday, advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, called on Congress and law enforcement agencies across the U.S. to improve data collection and reporting of hate crimes. Critics have long warned that the data may be incomplete, in part because it is based on voluntary reporting by police agencies across the country.

Last year, only 2,172 law enforcement agencies out of about 15,000 participating agencies across the country reported hate crime data to the FBI, the bureau said. And while the number of agencies reporting hate crimes increased, the number of agencies participating in the program actually dropped from the year before. A large number of police agencies appeared not to submit any hate crime data, which has been a consistent struggle for Justice Department officials.

“The total severity of the impact and damage caused by hate crimes cannot be fully measured without complete participation in the FBI’s data collection process,” the Anti-Defamation League’s president, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement.

An Associated Press investigation in 2016 found that more than 2,700 city police and county sheriff’s departments across the country had not submitted a single hate crime report for the FBI’s annual crime tally during the previous six years.

Greenblatt also said America must “remove the barriers that too often prevent people in marginalized communities – the individuals most likely to suffer hate crimes – from reporting hate-based incidents,” a sentiment shared by other advocates.

“The FBI’s report is another reminder that we have much work to do to address hate in America,” said Margaret Huang, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Source: Hate crimes in US reach highest level in more than a decade

Filed under Hate crimes, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Religious Freedom Arguments Give Rise To Executive Order Battle

2020/11/17 Leave a comment

As in so many policy areas, partisan gridlock:

Key government policies on religious freedom and discrimination, once set through legislation, are increasingly dictated by presidential orders, meaning they shift capriciously from one administration to the next.

In 2014, advocates for LGBTQ rights cheered when President Obama unilaterally issued an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating in their hiring practices on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Four years later, the Trump administration weakened that order with another unilateral movedirecting that contractors facing a discrimination claim under Obama’s order should be entitled to a “religious exemption.”

The Labor Department then proposed a rule that would give the directive the force of law and permit faith-based contractors to give hiring preference to individuals with particular religious beliefs, such as an opposition to same sex unions or transgender identities.

That time, it was conservatives who were pleased.

Such back-and-forth executive orders are now set to continue under President-elect Joe Biden, who has promised to reverse President Trump’s hiring directives.

Behind the dueling orders is a deep disagreement over the meaning of the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom. Conservatives say the right to “free exercise” of religion means people and organizations should be able to act on their religious objections to abortion, same sex marriage, or accommodation policies for transgender individuals.

Others say the First Amendment’s prohibition against the “establishment” of a religion means that religion-based arguments should not be used to justify discrimination or the denial of civil rights or basic human services.

Such conflicts in the past have been resolved through legislative remedies. Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993. Both measures had bipartisan support, but that consensus has since broken down.

Health care and nondiscrimination became so partisan,” says Holly Hollman, general counsel at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. “We’ve kind of lost our shared definition and commitment to religious liberty in ways that make it harder to legislate.”

The prospect of a divided government in 2021, with Joe Biden in the White House and possibly a Republican-led Senate, means that consensus around religious freedom issues may continue to be elusive.

“Given the gridlock, we’re going to see more unilateral action from the executive branch, whether it be regulatory action or executive orders,” says Ryan Anderson, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who writes often on religious freedom issues.

Following his 2014 order barring discriminatory hiring practices by federal contractors, Obama issued guidance in 2016 that required schools to protect transgender students from harassment and to accommodate their identities with respect to pronouns and bathrooms.

That guidance, however, was rescinded shortly after Trump was inaugurated, when his administration told school districts that the relevant policies were more properly established by state and local authorities.

Three months later, Trump issued a sweeping order “promoting free speech and religious liberty.” The order called for weaker enforcement of the Johnson Amendment, which bars tax-exempt religious groups from endorsing political candidates. It also instructed government agencies to consider new regulations to address “conscience-based objections” to the provision of certain health care services, and it directed the Attorney General to issue guidance to all federal agencies on what religious liberty protections require.

Among the agencies responding quickly to the order was the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where a conservative activist, Roger Severino, was put in charge of a “conscience and religious freedom division” under that department’s Office of Civil Rights, which Severino directs.

“Every agency has a civil rights office in the federal government,” Severino noted last month in a video presentation. “Not every agency, until now, had a religious freedom office. And now we do.”

Over the course of his term in office, Trump has taken a variety of unilateral steps to promote a conservative view of religious freedom, many of which a Biden administration might be inclined to reverse.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) have both issued detailed lists of the executive actions they expect to see Biden take in the area of religious freedom, perhaps beginning with a broad order similar to the one Trump issued.

“We would like to see the Biden administration sign an executive order to restore and protect religious freedom for all Americans,” says Rachel Lazer, the AU president, “and make clear that religious freedom should operate as a shield to protect us and not as a sword to license discrimination.”

Some of Trump’s executive actions will be easier than others to reverse. The directive to weaken enforcement of the Johnson Amendment could be countered simply by mandating strengthened enforcement. Other issues could be settled through the courts.

An HHS-issued “conscience rule” that would allow health care workers to refuse to provide medical services that conflict with their moral and religious beliefs has faced several court challenges and is now on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The AU’s Lazer says a Biden administration could simply decline to defend the rule.

“We would expect that the Biden administration would not carry forward with any type of appeal,” Lazer says. “[That] would cut that off at the knees.”

Some of Trump’s directives would be vigorously defended by outside groups, however, particularly where they concern sexuality and marriage.

“There are a variety of religious traditions that hold viewpoints on this question,” says Ryan Anderson, of the Heritage Foundation. “Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, evangelicals, Latter Day Saints, Muslims, and various people who accept the Genesis creation story are going to have strong convictions about male and female.”

Under President-elect Biden, Anderson says, “the government might be asking us to violate those convictions. If we’re going to be pluralistic, how do we navigate those disagreements?”

Even if a Biden administration manages to undo some of the government directives that reflected conservative interpretations of religious freedom principles, other groups could go to court with similar claims, using the same arguments.

“The undoing would give rise to legal challenges,” warns Louise Melling, the deputy legal director at ACLU.

Such challenges are likely to get a more favorable hearing, given the installation of more conservative judges in federal courts across the country and a newly powerful conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The court is clearly in the midst of reconceiving some of our religion statutes and the constitution, I think,” Melling says.

With that prospect, battles over religious freedom are likely to continue, no matter the presidential administration.

Source: Religious Freedom Arguments Give Rise To Executive Order Battle

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Erna Paris: A rigid belief in freedom is driving France and the U.S. to tragedy

2020/11/17 5 Comments

Complements the NYTimes interview (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/business/media/macron-france-terrorism-american-islam.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage):

When my children were young, derisive “Newfie” jokes were all the rage. I didn’t allow them in my house; I’d lived in France as a student and learned enough about pre-war history to know that plural societies can exist peacefully only within an ethos of mutual respect.

Which is why both France and the United States have evolved into tragic political entities. Both their foundational ideologies are dangerously anachronistic.

Take the recent atrocities in France following the conduct of a teacher who pulled out the same caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that provoked major violence in the past. There is no possible excuse for his monstrous medieval-style murder, or for the others that occurred after. But to understand circumstance is neither to assign blame nor to condone violence, a fact historians must constantly emphasize. That France houses almost six million Muslims, the largest population in the West, makes it critical to understand the impact of the Prophet Mohammed caricatures in that country.

The contemporary world will remain a mix of ethnicities and religions as migrations increasingly reshape societies, but when it comes to pluralism, France has a twofold problem. First is its commitment to rigid secularism – a foundational ideology that dates back to the French Revolution of 1789. Second is an absolutist view of free speech that is detrimental to society.

French secularism, which mandates that the public sphere be religiously homogeneous or “neutral,” effectively nullifies one’s right to be accepted for who one is. If you wear a hijab, for example, you cannot be a teacher of children, among other public professions. Your religious obligation to dress in certain ways may “offend” the majority. If you do follow your spiritual beliefs, you will be considered an unassimilated “other” – a second-rate faux citizen who rejects the values of the French Republic.

Complicating this problematic ideology is the aggressive abuse of free speech – a foundation of democracy – to incite social tensions. A teacher who relies on unfettered free speech to teach about Islam through ugly caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed is being knowingly provocative, especially when he facetiously suggests that anyone who might be offended leave the room. This is not an innocent moment. Let us imagine Berlin in 1934, for example. Hitler is in power, but Jewish children still attend school. In the name of free speech and high-level permission, the teacher pulls out examples of Julius Streicher’s caricatures of Jews and suggests that anyone who might be offended leave the room. Such scenarios risk toxic consequences.

There are limits to free speech, as we acknowledge in Canada. In 1990, in the case of James Keegstra, an Alberta teacher who propagated anti-Semitism in his classroom, the Supreme Court upheld the Criminal Code provision prohibiting the wilful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group. And for good reason. Plural societies are inherently fragile.

Like the French, many Americans hold rigid commitments to absolute free speech – and to freedom in general. But it is precisely this foundational ideology of libertarian freedom that is propelling what was the world’s most admired nation into tragedy.

The trigger has been COVID-19 and the politicization of mask-wearing. In a recent study at Stanford University that quantified infections stemming from Donald Trump’s maskless campaign rallies, it was estimated that there were at least 30,000 coronavirus infections and 700 deaths as a result of 18 rallies the President held between June and September.

American “rugged individualism” was first popularized by Herbert Hoover in 1928 when he compared his compatriots to a European philosophy of “paternalism and state socialism,” but the ideology can likely be traced back to the 1776 War of Independence from the British, followed by the cowboy ethos of opening up the West, coupled with a distrust of government oversight. But the downside of libertarian freedom has been a lack of commitment to the public good.

Foreheads furrowed when former San Francisco baseball hero, Aubrey Huff, announced in June that he would “rather die from the coronavirus than wear a damn mask,” and in May when a guard in a store in Flint, Mich., was shot dead after telling a woman that her child had to wear a mask. Both these events expose the tragedy of freedom paired with a weak concept of commonality.

In Canada, our national narrative has shifted over the past century from xenophobia to multiculturalism. How fortunate we are. Sadly, rigid foundational ideologies are likely to continue to threaten social peace as the 21st century progresses.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-rigid-belief-in-freedom-is-driving-france-and-the-us-to-tragedy/

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Biden Wants Census To See ‘Invisible’ Groups: LGBTQ, Middle Eastern, North African

2020/11/16 Leave a comment

Of note:

As the incoming Biden administration prepares for office, the Census Bureau is already looking ahead to changes for the 2030 count.

While Biden’s transition team has not announced any specific policies yet for the next once-a-decade tally of the country’s residents, the president-elect’s campaign has previewed what could end up on the new administration’s agenda. They include ideas that gained steam during the Obama administration but stalled after President Trump took office.

Biden will direct federal agencies to “improve their collection efforts, including enhancing demographic information around race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability status,” Jamal Brown, the national press secretary for the Biden-Harris campaign, told NPR in a statement before the election.

Here are two specific policy proposals that could change how LGBTQ people and people with roots in the Middle East or North Africa can identify themselves for the next census and future federal surveys, and could give policymakers and researchers better insight into the U.S. population.

Census questions about sexual orientation and gender identity

One proposal by the Biden campaign would require the Census Bureau to gather voluntary information about people’s sexual orientation and gender identity through its census forms and survey questionnaires — a policy that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris supported as a senator.

There are currently no reliable national-level data about how many LGBTQ people live in the U.S., and that, many public policy experts say, makes it difficult to know whether the government is fully meeting the needs of LGBTQ groups. A change on this year’s census form is expected to generate the most comprehensive demographic information to date about same-sex couples who live together in the U.S., but other LGBTQ groups, including transgender and non-binary people, will be left out.

During the Obama administration, four federal agencies asked the bureau to start asking a sample of households questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on the bureau’s American Community Survey. That survey, which goes out to about 1 in 38 households every year, is considered a testing ground for the decennial census, which every household has to complete.

The Census Bureau, however, stopped working on the request after the Trump administration came into office, specifically after the Justice Department — which had said it needed the data to better enforce civil rights protections for LGBTQ people — backed down from its ask.

Under federal law, the bureau cannot release any census information identifying individuals until 72 years after it is collected. It can, however, put out anonymized data about demographic groups at levels as specific as neighborhoods.

Some data privacy experts have flagged concerns that this data could be used against LGBTQ people.

Biden’s campaign website says that the president-elect will “ensure” that federal agencies collecting data on sexual orientation and gender identity are “vigorously enforcing appropriate privacy protections.”

Meanwhile, the Census Bureau has started conducting research on potential questions and response options on the Current Population Survey it carries out monthly for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Cultural and generational differences in how people describe their sexual orientation and gender identity make the wording on forms especially key to avoiding undercounts and overestimates of LGBTQ people, a working group formed by federal agencies during the Obama administration found.

A census check box for people with Middle Eastern or North African roots

Another Biden campaign proposal is creating a new category on census forms for people of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) descent, including Arab Americans.

A person with “origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa” is officially categorized as white in data about race and ethnicity released by the Census Bureau and other federal agencies, according to the U.S. government’s current standards.

Some advocates for MENA groups in the U.S., however, have long pushed for a check box of their own on census forms.

In a report about research on collecting race and ethnicity information, Census Bureau researchers wrote that in 2010, focus group participants with Middle Eastern or North African roots “often did not know how to respond and/or felt excluded” when presented with the current census racial categories, which are set by the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Including the terms “Lebanese” and “Egyptian” as examples under the white racial category — as they were on this year’s census form — was seen as “wrong or incorrect” by the focus group members.

During the Obama administration, the bureau recommended creating a separate response option for “Middle Eastern or North African” on the 2020 census form as part of a broader overhaul of the questions about race and Hispanic origin. The change would have likely produced more accurate data about people with MENA origins, while shrinking the share of people checking the “White” or “Some other race” box on the census, the bureau’s testing in 2015 suggests.

But the efforts to create a MENA category stopped in 2018 under the Trump administration. After decades of waiting for the addition, the move was bittersweet for some longtime advocates who were worried about how the rollout could have been perceived in the wake of Trump issuing travel bans that targeted people from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Iran, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Still, earlier this year, that decision prompted an awkward exchange between Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, a Trump appointee who joined the bureau in 2019, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan whose parents are Palestinian immigrants to the U.S.

“Dr. Dillingham, do I look white to you?” Tlaib asked in February during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the census.

“Congresswoman, I think that if you tell me what you identify with,” Dillingham replied, “I think I would respect that.”

Tlaib went on to describe how the decision to not move forward with a MENA category for the 2020 census will make people living in the U.S. who identify as Middle Eastern or North African “invisible” for the next 10 years when new census data are used to distribute federal funding, conduct health research and determine what kind of language assistance communities need.

“Director,” Tlaib pushed back, “we need to get it right because I’m not white.”

Getting a MENA category right on the census will require the bureau to work through how to represent the diversity among people with origins in regions that have no universally agreed-upon borders.

Among the suggestions the bureau has received so far are to highlight “Kurdish” as an example of a transnational group and to include “Israeli” as an example to encourage people born in Israel or with Israeli ancestry to identify with the category on the form.

Source: Biden Wants Census To See ‘Invisible’ Groups: LGBTQ, Middle Eastern, North African

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International recruitment [international students]– The US eagle could soar again

2020/11/16 Leave a comment

We shall whether there is a quick bounce or some longer-term scarring of the US as an attractive destination:

Just as recent articles have suggested that ‘kangaroos can bounce’ to reflect the potential resurgence as a favoured international student destination of Australia post-pandemic, there is every reason to believe the US eagle can soar under a Biden administration. 

In his acceptance speech as president-elect, Joe Biden said: “For American educators, it’s a great day for you all”, and that must include higher education institutions looking to regain their place as the favoured destination for international students. While there’s new hope and opportunity, it will be important to reflect on recent lessons and the changing world if the recovery is to last.

The good news is that President-Elect Biden was part of the administration that saw international student numbers rise 44.9%, from 623,119 to 903,127, between 2009-10 and 2016-17. A repeat of that performance would see enrolments grow to 1.26 million by 2025 from the 2018 base of 872,000. 

But there are three key steps that need to be taken – building recognition of the economic value of international students, ensuring understanding of the part they play in securing global soft power and getting the basics of visa and post-study work right. 

The creeping malaise of anti-science, alternative facts, reinvention of history and downright lying in recent years should be a sobering wake-up call for institutions. Their connection with the broader population and, perhaps ultimately, their place in society is challenged and nowhere more so than in the US. 

It is time to get serious about integration with communities, better communication, making sure that graduates get jobs and developing the country’s understanding of universities as generators of wealth. 

Economic benefits and soft power

International students contribute US$41 billion to the US economy and support more than 450,000 US jobs, but that story needs telling in the good times rather than waiting for the bad.  

In a 2016 report for NAFSA, Giovanni Peri and Gaetano Bassoestimated that the 10 states with the most international students – which, in addition to New York and California, include heartland states such as Ohio, Illinois and the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania – stand to gain nearly US$8.3 billion in wages and US$283 million in state taxes. 

There are millions of jobs at stake for all Americans, including those who voted Republican, but the role of universities and their precarious financial future hardly registered on the election landscape.

US universities also need to point out more aggressively the ‘elephant in the room’ that is China. The ability of the US to dominate global economics and build strategic alliances is partly based on the soft power it is able to exercise through having US-educated leaders in government and industry around the world. 

Universities have helped the US into a position of power, but this has been eroded in recent years to the extent that the competition see an opportunity to strike. 

In 2018 Wang Huiyao, founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization, was explicit about the country’s ambition. He said: “We are still lagging behind the US on soft power … There are more than 300 world leaders, including presidents, prime ministers and ministers around the globe that graduated from US universities, but only a few foreign leaders that graduated from Chinese universities, so we still need to exercise effort to boost academic exchange and educate more political elites from other countries.” 

China’s long-term goal is to host 500,000 students by 2020 and it had reached 490,000 by 2017. It is currently the third most popular destination of study after the US and the UK and is within striking distance of the latter (it is expected to surpass the UK in the near future). 

The increasing quality of institutions and range of courses, often taught in English, have seen nearly 50% of international students in China now enrolled on degree programmes, including 75,800 graduate students.

Post-study work opportunities

The wider benefits of attracting international students and the way in which they support America’s global influence are two important factors and better communication of these is called for. But this requires long-term campaigns to win the hearts and minds of policy-makers and the public. More immediate benefit can come from simple wins in visa administration, work visas and post-study work opportunities.

Being able to work after completing a degree has been a driver of growth in Australia, Canada and the UK, and Optional Practical Training is an American version that, since 2008, has allowed students a 29-month post-study work period. Critically, the Obama administration expanded the number of eligible fields of study by about 90 to 400 in 2012. The numbers in the programme exploded from 94,919 in 2012-13 to 175,695 by 2016-17. 

While international students may not be at the top of Biden’s priority list and COVID-19 and reducing spiralling unemployment will undoubtedly take priority, one would think that Biden will be quick to relax travel restrictions and issue orders to be far more welcoming to international students, given they contribute US$41 billion to the US economy and support more than 450,000 US jobs.

Other visa priorities include:

• Increasing acceptance for student F1 visa applications. The 2019 student visa refusal rate of 35% is currently continuing to undermine recruitment.

• Rescinding July 2020 guidance issued by immigration authorities which says that foreign students will no longer be able to stay in the country if their courses move fully online in the autumn.

• Rescinding the proposed policy that, if enacted, would limit international student visas for those born in countries associated with high visa overstay rates to either two or four years.

A ‘soaring eagle’ is not good news for the other dominant English-speaking study destinations. The US has always been the preferred destination for most international students who can afford to study there. It’s likely that Australia will remain highly competitive because of its proximity to Asia, the largest market of international students, but Canada and the UK are almost certain to feel the pressure of a resurgent US.

But there is good news all round for students when it comes to making the case for international higher education. The US could join the list of countries with well-ranked universities that are developing increasingly benevolent post-study work regimes, more flexible visa policies and innovative routes to study. 

They will also find smart institutions providing evidence of the return on investment for the degree by giving data-backed evidence of graduate career outcomes, both in country and for those returning home.

Louise Nicol is director of the Asia Careers Group. This piece forms part of a series in University World News, which last month featured “Canada, the squeezed middle”, which was preceded by “Australia, the comeback kid”. Within each article, Asia Careers Group aims to provide insight on the prospects for the world’s four largest destinations for inbound international students. Later this month we will be looking to the future of international higher education in the UK post-Brexit.

Source: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-nl.php?story=20201110092209150

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The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

2020/11/13 Leave a comment

To watch:

Counting has ended, but the 2020 census is not over yet — and it’s likely to get tangled in the fraught transition to President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.

Some major final steps for this year’s national head count are set to take place while President Trump is still in office. That includes the release of the first set of results, legally due by Dec. 31, that are used to reapportion congressional seats among states and reset the Electoral College map for the next decade. Under federal law, the president is required by Jan. 10 to hand off those numbers to Congress for certification.

And the census continues to be mired in legal fights over the Trump administration’s push to alter the apportionment numbers, as well as last-minute decisions to shorten the schedule for the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the United States. A federal judge in California, plus Census Bureau employees themselves, said those changes risked serious data inaccuracies.

Once in office, the Biden administration is poised to start shaping the 2030 count and could reverse some of the Trump administration’s census-related moves. Perhaps most notably, Biden could stop the bureau from producing citizenship data the Trump administration requested that could be used to radically change state-level redistricting in a way that a prominent Republican strategist concluded would benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic white people.

“It’s probably no secret that the census is not top of mind for every administration on an ongoing basis,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House Oversight subcommittee for the census who advised the Obama-Biden transition team in 2008. “But this time is really different because this census faced unprecedented challenges and then disruptions.”

In a statement to NPR before the election, Jamal Brown, the Biden campaign’s national press secretary, said that Biden “knows the critical importance of the census and how it touches every aspect of American life, from federal investments around health care, housing, and education, to how states redistrict and draw their congressional boundaries.”

Among the members of Biden’s transition agency review team for the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, are two census watchers who have been calling for more transparency as the bureau prepares to release the 2020 census results. They include Nancy Potok — who, during the Obama administration, served as a deputy director at the bureau and was later appointed to be the chief statistician within the White House Office of Management and Budget — and Denice Ross, a senior fellow with the National Conference on Citizenship who worked on data projects and policy in the Obama administration as a presidential innovation fellow and an adviser at OMB.

But before Biden officials can make any changes, there are some key questions about the census for the courts and Congress to answer in the final weeks of the Trump administration.

Can Trump change who is counted in numbers that determine House seats and the next Electoral College map?

The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in with its answer to that question after hearing oral arguments on Nov. 30.

So far, three lower courts have rejected the presidential memo Trump issued in July that calls for an unprecedented change — the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the census numbers used for determining each state’s share of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as each state’s Electoral College votes.

All of those three-judge panels unanimously found that carrying out the memo would violate a federal law requiring the president to deliver a report to Congress of “the whole number of persons in each State” as determined by the census. One of those panels also ruled that it would go against the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration has been pushing the high court to rule before Dec. 31. That’s the legal deadline for the commerce secretary, who oversees the bureau, to give the president the first set of census results, which Trump wants to alter.

But it remains unclear, given all of the schedule changes the Trump administration has made, whether the Census Bureau can meet the Dec. 31 deadline and how that would affect the president’s ability to report numbers to Congress by Jan. 10. Any delays that push key steps in the congressional reapportionment process past the Jan. 20 inauguration could strip Trump of control over the count.

Last month, the bureau’s top career official in charge of the census, Al Fontenot, said the agency hasn’t committed to when it will wrap up processing and checking all of the information it has collected.

“We are trying to maintain the flexibility to get the job done in a quality way,” Fontenot said during a news briefing.

Justice Department attorneys say the administration hasn’t finalized how to accurately count unauthorized immigrants, aside from those in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, in order to exclude them from the apportionment numbers.

In July, Biden condemned Trump’s memo in a tweet, writing: “We won’t let him deny communities the funding and representation they deserve. Because in America, everyone counts.”

But Brown, the Biden campaign spokesperson, has not responded to NPR’s question about what the Biden administration would do if, before leaving office, Trump attempted to remove unauthorized immigrants from the apportionment numbers before giving them to Congress.

If Trump did that, it is also unclear whether the clerk of the House, which will remain under Democratic control, would certify those numbers.

Will Congress extend legal deadlines for reporting census results to allow for more quality checks?

That question has been hanging over the census since April, when the Trump administration first proposed four-month extensions to the legal deadlines for reporting the apportionment counts and redistricting data, which are due to the states by March 31.

Publicly backed at the time by Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, career officials at the bureau said that because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, they needed more time to tally the country’s residents and run quality checks on the results.

But the administration made an about-face in July and began pushing to end counting early, sticking with the original reporting schedule. The Supreme Court ultimately allowed the administration to cut counting short, leaving open the possibility for Trump to control the apportionment numbers even without winning reelection.

Faced with a shortened window for counting in their states, some Republican lawmakers in Congress began publicly supporting the Democratic-led push for deadline extensions.

But now that counting has stopped, it’s unclear if there’s enough bipartisan support for deadline extensions to be passed.

The bureau has already scaled back some quality checks, risking “serious errors,” career officials warned, that they may not have time to fix.

Some census advocates — including Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — are calling for Congress to pass deadline extensions during the lame-duck session to help ensure that the bureau has enough time to address any major errors it finds in the census results before they’re used to reapportion House seats.

“I think waiting until a new administration and new Congress to act would be too late for the census,” Gupta, a former Obama administration official, says. “A new administration and new Congress really would be in uncharted territory that would take time to navigate, conceivably creating a constitutional crisis that could be avoided if Congress gives the Census Bureau the time that it needs and the time that it asked for.”

Source: The Census Is Not Over: What’s Ahead During The Biden Transition

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