Inevitable: Alleged EB-5 Fraudster Already Has a Third Nation’s Citizenship | Center for Immigration Studies

2016/06/15 Leave a comment

David North on the use/abuse of the US EB-5 investor immigrant visa program:

It had to happen. One of the alleged fraudsters involved in an EB-5 scandal in the United States has also purchased an additional citizenship in another nation.

We reported a few days ago that Charles Liu and his wife, Lisa Wang, were exposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission as diverters of $18 million in EB-5 investments involving a cancer treatment center in Southern California. They sent the money to their own bank accounts and to three companies in China rather than building the medical center.

It now turns out that Liu, before the SEC’s move, had already purchased a citizenship from Grenada, the little ex-British island we invaded during the Reagan administration. They call their equivalent of our EB-5 program “citizenship by investment” (CBI); several other island nations have similar programs.

Irritatingly, neither the SEC complaint nor any of the press coverage describes, in this immigration-related case, the immigration status of Liu and Wang. SEC says he is a “resident of Laguna Niguel, California” as is she. The form that Liu used when applying for Homeland Security permission to run a regional center (the I-924) does not ask about the civil status of the person applying for the center. I would think it would be a perfectly legitimate question.

One Caribbean newspaper reported that the government of Grenada had said in the blandest of terms, following the SEC announcement: “Through our diplomatic channels, the Government of Grenada continues to monitor the situation, to communicate with all diplomatic and other sources, and continues to fully engage mutual cooperation with all the parties concerned.”

Another, earlier report said that Liu is already deeply embedded in that nation’s diplomatic channels as he is the commercial attaché in the little nation’s Beijing embassy. This is presumably a part-time, probably unpaid position, as the incumbent is, according to SEC, living in yet a third country, the United States.

There are no indications as of this writing that anything has gone wrong with the island investment.

So we have what appears to be a Chinese national who has already purchased one additional citizenship, and has secured what appears to be a diplomatic post from his new nation, putting together a company which will promote tourism in Grenada while simultaneously seeking to sell American green cards to Chinese investors by falsely promising to build a cancer treatment center in the United States.

Charles Liu is just one example of the interesting people who are attracted to our EB-5 program.

Source: Inevitable: Alleged EB-5 Fraudster Already Has a Third Nation’s Citizenship | Center for Immigration Studies

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Supreme Court rejects American Samoan citizenship case

2016/06/15 Leave a comment

Lack of congressional statute, unlike Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Marianas, raising of course the question of why no statute:

American Samoans have no automatic claim to U.S. citizenship by birth despite living in a U.S. territory, according to a move by the Supreme Court on Monday.

The court declined to reconsider a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the Constitution does not confer citizenship on those born in American Samoa. The Supreme Court’s move effectively preserves the appellate court’s decision in the case as the last word.
In the case, an American Samoan, Leneuoti Fia Fia Tuaua, petitioned the U.S. courts for citizenship under the clause of the Constitution that confers citizenship at birth to those born in the United States. American Samoa has been a U.S. territory since 1900.
Those born in the other U.S. territories — Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Marianas — all get citizenship at birth, but that was determined by statute in Congress. No such statue exists for American Samoa.
Tuaua was opposed in his quest by the American Samoan government itself, which argued that recognizing a right to citizenship at birth could complicated the legal structure in the territory.
The appeals court, in an unanimous ruling, agreed with the American Samoan government, emphasizing that the resident population has also avoided automatic U.S. citizenship.
The opinion from a conservative panel of justices drew criticism for heavily drawing from a set of cases that have grown controversial. The so-called Insular Cases, a series of rulings at the turn of the 20th century, distinguished between U.S. territories destined for statehood, such as Hawaii and Alaska, and those that weren’t, like Puerto Rico and American Samoa. Those residents in territories not likely to become states were entitled to only “fundamental” rights, the cases say.
But the cases have drawn criticism for being racially tinged and vestiges of colonialism, and the appellate court’s decision relying on them likewise drew flak.

Source: Supreme Court rejects American Samoan citizenship case – CNNPolitics.com

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Fear of Islam, immigrants and diversity are leading indicators of Donald Trump support – The Washington Post

2016/06/08 Leave a comment

Fear_of_Islam__immigrants_and_diversity_are_leading_indicators_of_Donald_Trump_support_-_The_Washington_PostHardly surprising:

That headline may be self-evident these days, but at least we have some pretty solid data to back it up.

According to a new Pew Research study, if you look just at Republican voters who think the growing number of newcomers in the United States “threatens traditional American customs and values,” more than twice as many have “warm feelings toward Donald Trump” as have cold ones. Among those who say immigrants strengthen U.S. society, it’s about 2-to-1 in the other direction.

What’s more, only 21 percent of Republicans said that immigrants “strengthen” America. But among these Republicans, only 30 percent told pollsters they have “warm feelings” about Trump and an even smaller share — 14 percent — feel “very warmly” about the presumptive Republican nominee.

The same was true of feelings about Islam and the fact that the U.S. population, in a few decades, will be mostly black, Latino and Asian, not white. In both cases, attitudes more antipathetic toward Islam and the country’s increasing diversity were more in-line with Trump support, while people who thought Islam is not more violent than other religions and that increased diversity isn’t a bad thing were colder toward Trump.

Source: Fear of Islam, immigrants and diversity are leading indicators of Donald Trump support – The Washington Post

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The US Supreme Court needs to settle birthright citizenship.

2016/06/08 Leave a comment

One to watch given the current political climate:

Soon, the Supreme Court will decide whether to take a case of astounding constitutional importance. Its outcome could alter the rules governing citizenship, equal protection, and the power of the federal government. And it centers around a tiny chain of islands that you probably cannot find on a map.

The question: Can Congress decide that an entire group of Americans—born in America, raised in America, allegiant to America—does not deserve United States citizenship?

American Samoans, the group in question, have been Americans since 1900, when the United States acquired their territory in the midst of an imperialist expansion. Since then, residents of America’s other territories have either achieved independence or gained U.S. citizenship. But in 2016, American Samoans stand alone: Unlike people born in, say, Puerto Rico or Guam, they are not granted citizenship at birth. Instead, they are considered “noncitizen nationals,” a legally dubious term that effectively renders them stateless, a mark of second-class status imprinted on their (American) passports.

Is all of this constitutional? No, it is not. And that’s why a group of American Samoans are asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the status quo and extend citizenship to all those born in the territory. Their lawsuit arrives at a peculiar cultural moment, in the midst of an election that has thrown the definition of birthright citizenship into political (if not legal) controversy, with Republicans such as Donald Trump challenging its constitutional legitimacy. If the justices take the case, they’ll have the opportunity to definitely settle the matter of U.S. citizenship. If they do not, they’ll allow this unfortunate debate to rage on—and permit American Samoans to suffer citizenship discrimination indefinitely.

The story of birthright citizenship in the United States is, in large part, the story of the Civil War. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court decision that arguably rendered a war inevitable, the justices found that black people, even those born in the U.S., were not citizens. Rather, the court held, black people were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race … and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”

After the Civil War, Congress and the states overruled Dred Scott by passing the 14th Amendment, whose very first sentence explicitly granted birthright citizenship to “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” This clause was originally designed to give birthright citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children. But, as the Supreme Court confirmed in a later ruling, it also promised citizenship to anyone born in America. (The only exceptions were the children of diplomats and certain Indian tribes that were then quasi-sovereign.)

Source: The Supreme Court needs to settle birthright citizenship.

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Unsettling U.S. Political Climate Galvanizes Muslims to Vote – The New York Times

2016/06/03 Leave a comment

Not surprising. A similar shift happened in the Canadian 2015 elections with Canadian Muslims:

In late December — after the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and the call by Donald J. Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — the United States Council of Muslim Organizations, a national umbrella group, announced plans to register a million voters.

“When your existence in society is in danger, you try to mobilize your community,” said the organization’s secretary general, Oussama Jammal. “You have to be part of the entire society.”

While the effort is mostly geared toward the November election, groups here have made a push to register Muslims in time for the state primary on Tuesday. Drives were held on a recent Friday at 21 mosques and Islamic centers in the Bay Area and Sacramento and at seven places in the Los Angeles area.

“Muslims are a big campaign issue, as big as the climate, the economy and immigration. We’re spoken about as if we’re not there,” said Rusha Latif, an organizer of the Rock the Muslim Vote campaign. “We want to amplify our voices.”

For organizers, the time is ripe for registration.

“It’s hard to encourage people to participate based on good things happening,” said Melissa Michelson, an author of “Mobilizing Inclusion: Transforming the Electorate Through Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns” and a professor at Menlo College. “Fear and threats are much more powerful motivators.”

As the general election approaches, Muslim organizations will pay particular attention to swing states, where “several thousand voters have the ability to tip the elections,” said Robert S. McCaw, the director of the government affairs department at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Muslims make up about 1 percent of the United States population. A study conducted by the Institute for Social and Policy Understanding, a nonpartisan think tank, found that only 60 percent of citizens who are Muslim were registered voters, compared with at least 86 percent of Jews, Protestants and Roman Catholics.

“A lot of Muslims didn’t participate in elections because they didn’t see a lot of difference between the parties,” said Emir Sundiata Alrashid of the Lighthouse Mosque in Oakland, where a voter-registration drive was held last month. The mosque sits in a residential neighborhood near a freeway overpass.

Source: Unsettling U.S. Political Climate Galvanizes Muslims to Vote – The New York Times

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Why Americans are giving up citizenship in record numbers – The Washington Post

2016/06/03 Leave a comment

Latest data:

And indeed, government statistics show record numbers of people are renouncing their U.S. citizenship. But it’s not Trump that has persuaded them to go. It’s taxes.

The IRS publishes the names of each American who gives up his or her citizenship. The list comes out every three months, and international tax lawyer Andrew Mitchel has tallied them up. In the first quarter of this year, 1,158 people expatriated — more than 10 times the number in the first quarter of 2008, when Mitchel began his count. Last year, a record 4,279 people renounced their citizenship.

Expatriations have grown steadily since 2008 but began to spike in 2013. That timing undermines the theory that Trump is responsible. (Back then, he was busy suing talk-show host and comedian Bill Maher for calling him the spawn of an orangutan.) But the increase dovetails with the implementation of new federal reporting requirements and penalties for assets held overseas by U.S. citizens.

The rules were passed back in 2010 as part of legislation intended to encourage businesses to hire more employees and jump-start the nation’s economic recovery. Attached to the law was a provision called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) that was supposed to “detect, deter and discourage” tax evasion through offshore bank accounts.

Source: Why Americans are giving up citizenship in record numbers – The Washington Post

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A gorgeous visualization of 200 years of immigration to the US – Vox

2016/05/31 Leave a comment

Great data visualization and Canadian version would be comparable, although the post 1960s mix would be somewhat different:

It’s easy now to assume that Mexico has always been among the main sources of immigration to America. But as this wonderful chart by Natalia Bronshtein shows, that’s not even close to true.

200 years immigration

(Natalia Bronshtein)

Bronshtein pulled 200 years of government data to put together the visualization. There’s an interactive version on her website: you can hover over any color, at any point, and see the exact number of immigrants who became residents from that country in that decade.

But taken as a whole, the chart tells a very clear story: there are two laws that totally transformed immigration to the United States.

The first, the National Origins Act of 1924 (a capstone on a series of anti-immigration bills passed in the few years before that), set very strict quotas on immigration to America from any country — and especially strict quotas on any country that wasn’t in western or northern Europe. (Immigration from Asia was, for the most part, simply banned.) That’s the bottleneck you see in the graph.

The second, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, demolished the old quota system. But instead of just turning the clock back to the dawn of the 20th century, the 1965 law created a completely different era of immigration to the US from all over the world — and especially from Latin America and Asia. None of the colors that are dominant on this chart up until the 1920s are dominant from the 1970s onward. Once large-scale immigration to the US was restored, the face of it looked totally different.

Source: A gorgeous visualization of 200 years of immigration to the US – Vox

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My ‘Oriental’ Father: On The Words We Use To Describe Ourselves : NPR

2016/05/27 Leave a comment

Further to my earlier post on the US retiring obsolete ethnic group descriptions (Minorités: des mots offensants retirés des lois américaines | États-Unis), interesting reflections on the generational shift in language from Oriental to Asian American:

Chink as a racial moniker was always meant to cut, but there was a time — my dad’s — when “Oriental” was the status quo. To some degree, these things come down to the words available to us in the first place. Between the late ’60s, when my dad immigrated here from British colonial Hong Kong, and 1990, when I was born, there was an eruption in the way Americans talked and thought about all sorts of identities. While my dad’s English vocabulary was equipped with “Oriental”, scholars and activists alike turned away from words like it and “Negro” in favor of self-appointed terms like “Asian,” “Asian-American,” “black” and “African-American.” And recently, President Obama signed a bill striking the term “Oriental” — one of many other outdated terms — from federal laws.

I came of age in a generation that benefited from these wind shifts. My dad, like many people his age, didn’t really pay them much mind. When it came to describing himself, the words he had when he came to this country were all he ended up needing. I get that he uses it as a matter of fact. He gets that I have my reasons for not using it. And when it comes to us talking to each other, that’s fine.

Source: My ‘Oriental’ Father: On The Words We Use To Describe Ourselves : Code Switch : NPR

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Don’t Blame Diversity for Distrust – NYTimes.com

2016/05/25 Leave a comment

Good piece by Maria Abascal and Delia Baldassarri on disadvantage and unequal opportunities being more important to trust than diversity:

For his own part, Professor Putnam filed an amicus brief in the Fisher case objecting to the use of his findings in arguments against affirmative action. In the brief, he states his belief that diversity can be beneficial in the long term, despite its short-term drawbacks.

Our research reveals that even in the short term, diversity is not to blame. We independently analyzed the same data set Professor Putnam used, and we demonstrate that disadvantage, not diversity, is responsible for distrust.

At first glance, our results resemble those of previous studies: People in more diverse communities report lower levels of trust. Scholars and columnists alike have taken this to mean that diversity reduces trust, but we argue that this interpretation is flawed.

A thought experiment sheds light on what is going on. Imagine two schools: a homogeneous school with all Dutch students and a diverse school with half Dutch students and half Bolivian students. If we are studying student height, we would most likely find that students in the diverse school are shorter, on average, than students in the homogeneous school. Hardly anyone would then argue that attending a diverse school makes students shorter. Dutch people are taller than Bolivians, on average, and this explains the difference between the schools. Substitute trust for height and communities for schools, and, based on a similar association between diversity and trust, scholars have concluded that living in a diverse community makes people less trusting.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but it draws attention to an important possibility: Trust, like height, might be determined by pre-existing differences between groups, rather than exposure to diversity. In the United States, blacks and Latinos report lower levels of trust than whites, regardless of the communities where they live. The average homogeneous community (defined as a census tract) in the United States is 84 percent white, whereas the average diverse community is 54 percent white. Together, these patterns indicate that diverse communities do not make people less trusting. Rather, distrust is higher in diverse communities because blacks and Latinos, who are more likely than whites to live in one, are less trusting to begin with.

If diversity doesn’t reduce trust, what does? According to our analysis, disadvantage accounts for lower levels of trust. If you have a low income, or less schooling, or are unemployed or experiencing housing instability, you are likely to report lower trust. To make matters worse, if your neighbors experience similar disadvantages, this compounds your distrust. Taken together, this suggests that it is not the diversity of a community that undermines trust, but rather the disadvantages that people in diverse communities face.

This is why blacks and Latinos report lower trust than whites: Socioeconomic and neighborhood disadvantages are more common among these groups. We suspect that blacks and Latinos also report lower trust for other reasons, including continuing discrimination, victimization by the police and hostile political rhetoric.

Finally, our only finding related to diversity confirms a familiar story about white intolerance toward minorities. Whites who live among more blacks and Latinos report slightly lower trust than those who live in predominately white communities. This is a far cry from the claim that the minorities who are diversifying the nation are responsible for declining levels of trust.

This distinction has important implications for the affirmative action debate and social policy in general: If diversity is the problem, then policies should aim to protect or even promote homogeneity. If, instead, whites’ bias against blacks and Latinos is partly to blame, then policies should aim to allay these biases and their consequences for targeted groups. This was part of President John F. Kennedy’s original rationale for affirmative action: to address unequal opportunities across “race, creed, color.” Many of the conditions that motivated Kennedy’s directive persist today. Blacks, Latinos and members of other disadvantaged groups still face unequal treatment across a range of arenas, from the labor market to housing to education.

The current debate on affirmative action is playing out in the context of widespread anxieties about the changing face of the nation. Research that links diversity to negative outcomes legitimizes these anxieties. And it doesn’t help that this research has found its way into arguments against affirmative action. But disadvantage and unequal opportunities, rather than diversity, present the biggest obstacles to our getting along. By doing away with affirmative action and limiting access to higher education for blacks and Latinos, we will aggravate the disadvantages these groups face, while accommodating the intolerance of whites toward minorities.

Source: Don’t Blame Diversity for Distrust – NYTimes.com

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Minorités: des mots offensants retirés des lois américaines | États-Unis

2016/05/25 1 Comment

Updating to reflect language and culture changes. Curious to know if anyone has examples of Canadian laws that need similar updating:

Les lois fédérales américaines ne comporteront plus de termes désuets et offensants utilisés autrefois pour désigner les minorités.

Le président Barack Obama a signé un projet de loi proposant de supprimer plusieurs de ces mots, dont «Nègre» et «Oriental», vendredi, a indiqué la Maison-Blanche.

Ces deux expressions seront remplacées par «Afro-Américain» et «Asio-Américain».

Le projet de loi a été adopté en février par la Chambre des représentants et la semaine dernière par le Sénat. Aucun représentant ou sénateur ne s’y est opposé.

Les termes visés par la législation apparaissent dans des lois des années 1970 tentant de décrire les minorités.

Dans la Loi sur l’organisation du département de l’Énergie, la phrase «un Nègre, un Portoricain, un Indien d’Amérique, un Esquimau, un Oriental ou un Aléoute ou un hispanophone d’origine espagnole» sera remplacée par «Asio-Américain, natif d’Hawaï, natif des îles Pacifiques, Afro-Américain, Hispanique, Portoricain, Amérindien ou natif d’Alaska».

Les mêmes mots seront aussi remplacés dans la Loi sur le développement et les investissements dans les travaux publics locaux, qui remonte à 1976.

Source: Minorités: des mots offensants retirés des lois américaines | États-Unis

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