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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USA: The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today’s immigration problem – Vox

2016/05/12 Leave a comment

Good long-read on US immigration policies and their impact by Dara Lind (thanks to Arun with a View):

But one effect was clear: After IIRIRA, deportation from the United States went from a rare phenomenon to a relatively common one. “Before 1996, internal enforcement activities had not played a very significant role in immigration enforcement,” sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren have written. “Afterward, these activities rose to levels not seen since the deportation campaigns of the Great Depression.”

A chart of Mexican deportations from the US.Douglas Massey/Julian Simon Lecture Series

This particular law was passed during an era where Congress and the Clinton administration were both working to increase the amount of spending and agents on the US–Mexico border.

And after 9/11, the way the federal government handled immigration changed in two major ways. The bureaucracy was reorganized — and moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security. And the funding for immigration enforcement got put on steroids.

The combination of those gave rise to what Meissner and the Migration Policy Institute have called a “formidable machinery” for immigrant deportations — a machinery that took the US from deporting 70,000 immigrants in 1996 to 400,000 a year though the first term of the Obama administration. But that machine was built on the legal scaffolding of the options IIRIRA opened up.

“Both of those things have had so much more force because of this underlying statutory framework that they were able to tap into,” says Meissner. In retrospect, “it was sort of a perfect storm.”

After ’90s immigration reform, the unauthorized population tripled

But even though deportations exploded after the passage of IIRIRA, it didn’t keep the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US from growing. It went from 5 million the year IIRIRA was passed to 12 million by 2006. (By contrast, during the decade between the Reagan “amnesty” and IIRIRA, the unauthorized population grew by only 2 million.)

These two things didn’t happen despite each other. More immigration enforcement is one big reason why there are so many unauthorized immigrants in the US today.

A lot of this is because of the increase of enforcement on the US–Mexico border — something that was happening even without IIRIRA. Many unauthorized immigrants used to shuttle back and forth between jobs in the US and families in Mexico. Once it got harder to cross the border without being caught, they settled in the US — “essentially hunkering down and staying once they had successfully run the gauntlet at the border,” as Massey and Pren write — and encouraged their families to settle alongside them.

(This wasn’t the only reason unauthorized immigrants started settling in the US around this time. The types of jobs available for unauthorized workers were changing, with seasonal agricultural jobs being replaced by year-round service-industry ones, for one thing. But it was certainly a major factor.)

But if border enforcement encouraged families to stay, IIRIRA prevented them from obtaining legal status. By this point, a majority of the unauthorized-immigrant population of the US has been here 10 years — more than enough time to qualify for cancellation of removal, if IIRIRA hadn’t made it so difficult to get. Millions of them have children who are US citizens.

Douglas Massey/Julian Simon Lecture Series

The 3- and 10-year bars alone have caused millions of immigrants to remain unauthorized who’d otherwise be eligible for green cards or US citizenship by now. According to Douglas Massey’s estimate, if those bars hadn’t been instituted in 1996, there would be 5.3 million fewer unauthorized immigrants in the US today. In other words, the population of unauthorized immigrants in the US would literally be half the size it is now.

Source: The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today’s immigration problem – Vox

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Obama Administration Seeks to Lower Cost of Citizenship for Lower-Income Immigrants

2016/05/06 Leave a comment

Something for the Canadian government to consider given the quintupling of citizenship fees in 2014-15 ($630 plus language assessment cost):

In a rule published in the Federal Register Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security is proposing changes to the fee schedule that it says would ensure that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — a largely fee-funded branch of DHS — can cover the cost of its immigration processing mission. The total adjustment amounts to an average 21 percent increase in the fee structure.

Largely exempt from the increases are, however, low income immigrants who wish to become U.S. citizens. Under the proposed rule, “DHS would charge a reduced fee of $320 for naturalization applicants with family income greater than 150 percent and not more than 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines.”

“DHS is proposing this change to increase access to United States citizenship,” the proposed rule explains.

The allowance effectively cuts in half the current cost of naturalization — $680, including the $85 biometric fee. The rule, however, also seeks an additional $45 increase in the cost of naturalization applications for immigrants who can afford it.

USCIS last adjusted its fee schedule in 2010 and the proposed rule will be open to public comment for 60 days.

Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-IL), who has been promoting naturalization and voter registration across the country as a means for immigrants to “Stand Up to Hate,” cheered the rule.

“Right now, a lot of immigrants face a difficult choice: pay $700 or so for the chance to take all the tests and apply for citizenship, or pay $450 to renew a green-card for five years,” Gutiérrez said in a statement.

“Now, the math is much better,” he continued. “You can apply for citizenship and a fee waiver and become an American citizen – with all the rights, duties and honor of citizenship – for a more attainable price or maybe even for free. The new calculation is going to mean that millions of those who are already eligible can finally take the step and apply for citizenship.”

Applicants can apply for a fee waiver if their income is below or 150 percent of the poverty line, they are receiving a means-tested benefit, or they are experiencing a “financial hardship.”

Obama Administration Seeks to Lower Cost of Citizenship for Lower Income Immigrants

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Race and the Standardized Testing Wars – The New York Times

2016/04/26 Leave a comment

Without data, hard to know where the issues are and what to do about them:

As a counterexample, he pointed to Kaya Henderson, the chancellor of Washington’s public schools, who has made it a requirement that all second graders learn how to ride a bicycle.

Ms. Henderson, in an interview, said she believed that, in the transition to the Common Core learning standards, states and districts had not been “as aggressive as they need to be in terms of changing their curriculum and professionally developing teachers and principals to really understand how to teach differently.”

Her own district, she said, spent four years developing a curriculum in which students hone their reading and math skills while studying a wide variety of subjects, including science and social studies.

She added that it was the responsibility of state and district leaders to emphasize the importance of field trips and extracurricular activities and to tell principals that “holding kids back from those kinds of things doesn’t help them on the test.”

“I’ve had to at some points remind my principals that kids should have a well-rounded experience all throughout the year, and it’s not O.K. to say no field trips until after the test,” she added.

But she also said that doing away with the tests would be most damaging to black and Latino students and those with disabilities. “Before No Child Left Behind, there were lots of schools where parents thought their kids were going to great schools, but after you disaggregated the results, you figured out that black kids and Latino kids or special-ed kids were actually worse off” than similar students in less high-performing schools, she said. “We need to know that kind of information. I don’t ever want to go back to a time when we don’t know.”

Sonja Brookins Santelises, vice president of K-12 policy and practice at the Education Trust, an organization that advocates for high academic achievement for poor and minority students, said she had watched the video produced by the Baltimore Algebra Project and been shaken by the students’ disappointment in their education and feelings of marginalization.

She said it was educators’ responsibility to speak to students about testing in a positive way. Ms. Brookins Santelises recalled an experience from when she was a middle schoolteacher, when she showed a student named Tabitha her test scores and explained to her that she was significantly below grade level in reading.

“She said to me, ‘Oh, my God, nobody told me I couldn’t read,’ ” Ms. Brookins Santelises recalled. “I watched how she started to internalize it, and I immediately said, ‘Wait a minute, hold up, this test is not Tabitha. But what this says is we’ve got some real work to do, and I am here to help you.’ ”

If students are being made to feel inferior, she said, it is because educators — from teachers to district officials — aren’t taking responsibility for their own failures and instead are sending low-income students the message that their poor performance is their fault.

Source: Race and the Standardized Testing Wars – The New York Times

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