The unbending arc: America’s race gap is stuck | Brookings Institution

2016/01/21 Leave a comment

Richard Reeves on the ongoing economic gap between white and black Americans:

America is in danger of becoming stuck, with insufficient social, geographical, or economic mobility. That’s the claim I made in a recent essay for Esquire magazine, a collaboration between the magazine and Brookings. (You can read the whole package here.)

Poverty persists across generations, too. Half of the black children born on the bottom rung of the income ladder (the bottom quintile) will stay there as adults. A boy who grows up in Baltimore will earn 28 percent less simply because he grew up in Baltimore. Sixty-six percent of black children live in America’s poorest neighborhoods, compared with six percent of white children.

Recent events have shone a light on the black experience in dozens of U.S. cities. Behind the riots and the rage, the statistics tell a simple, damning story. Progress toward equality for black Americans has essentially halted. The average black family has an income that is 59 percent of the average white family, down from 65 percent in 2000. In the job market, race gaps are immobile, too. In the 1950s, black Americans were twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. And today? Still twice as likely.

In part this reflects geographical separation, too. While the degree of segregation by race has reduced slightly in recent years, as shown by my colleague William Frey, black Americans are still likely to live in areas of concentrated income poverty, and to be Stuck in Place, as the title of Patrick Sharkey’s influential book puts it.

Race gaps in wealth are perhaps the most striking. The average white household is now thirteen times wealthier than the average black one. This is the widest gap in a quarter of a century. The recession hit families of all races, but it resulted in a wealth wipeout for black families. In 2007, the average black family had a net worth of $19,200, almost entirely in housing stock, typically at the cheap, fragile end of the market. By 2010, this had fallen to $16,600. By 2013—by which point white wealth levels had started to recover—it was down to $11,000. In national economic terms, black wealth is now essentially nonexistent.

Half a century after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, the arc of history is no longer bending toward justice. A few years ago, it was not unreasonable to hope that changing attitudes, increasing education, and a growing economy would surely, if slowly, bring black and white America closer together. It is now clear that time and economic growth alone will not heal the racial divide.

Source: The unbending arc: America’s race gap is stuck | Brookings Institution

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#MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley : NPR

2016/01/18 Leave a comment

Some real ugliness here in the comments by conservative pundits and individuals, but captures the current atmosphere in the Republican party:

In some ways, Haley seems to face the same conundrum former Louisiana Gov. and failed Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal did — not seeming “brown enough” for some voters of color, while being “too brown” for others. (We won’t bore you with the details, or subject you to some of the graphic tweets, but just take a look at the #JindalSoWhite hashtag to see what we’re talking about.)

Of course, Twitter is not exactly or entirely representative of the real world, and even thousands of tweets for or against Nikki Haley might not accurately depict actual support or disapproval of her.

A September 2015 Winthrop poll found Haley’s approval rating among South Carolina voters was 55 percent. That number was similar before Haley gained praise for helping bring down the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse in the aftermath of a Charleston church shooting that killed nine black parishioners. But she did drop 10 points with Republicans. (By December, she was back up to 81 percent with Republicans.)

Giridharadas in his New York Times article wasn’t just critical of Haley; he said it was “thrilling” to see Haley attempt to “create a broader, two-party consensus on the simple, exceptional idea that an American is defined by shared hope, not shared blood.”

But wherever you stand on Haley, her story speaks to a certain truth in politics: race is tricky — and there’s always going to be someone unhappy with how you talk about it.

With Haley, we see a multi-dimensional (and, in fact, multicultural) tilt to America’s ongoing struggle with race. A dichotomy of justblack and white isn’t big enough to comprehend or explain a Sikh Indian-American daughter of immigrants, who helped bring down what is, for many, a longstanding symbol of the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in America.

Haley’s story has layers. It is nuanced. It is not simple. And maybe that’s how it should be.

Source: #MemeOfTheWeek: The Racial Politics Of Nikki Haley : NPR

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President Obama Takes on Trump and Tribalism – The Daily Beast

2016/01/14 Leave a comment

Some of the messaging of note in President Obama’s State of the Union address and South Carolina Governor Haley’s response:

The two parties are more polarized than ever before. And at least one stomach-turning poll found that of a majority of millennials don’t think its essential to live in a democracy. No wonder President Obama said combating this cynical, self-defeating drift into disillusion and hyper-partisanship was “maybe the most important thing I want to say tonight.”

In the process, the president took aim at Trump and tribalism, warned against identity politics and offered a three-part prescription for reducing polarization in American politics.

Demagogues have always been the dark side of democracy.  The appeal of a strongman, who promises to solve every problem through brute force, dividing the country into “us” against “them”, was a fear of the founding fathers.  That fear is now embodied by Donald Trump.

The president fired off a few brush-back pitches in The Donald’s direction, an unusual move in a State of the Union. “We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong… When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. And it betrays who we are as a country.”

This full throated defense of diversity of a source of strength, patriotically name-checking Muslims and mosques, alongside mention of gay rights and marriage equality and an extended conversation about climate change is a reminder of how much President Obama has changed the terms of the debate over the past eight years. And this cultural shift helps fuel the frustrations of conservative populists who want to “take America back.”

Of course, eight years ago it would have been hard to imagine an Indian-American female Governor of South Carolina giving the Republican response to the first black president. Our country is changing, and perhaps not coincidentally Nikki Haley also found time in her speech to implicitly dis Trump. “Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume. When the sound is quieter, you can actually hear what someone else is saying. And that can make a world of difference.”

Haley’s VP audition was a timely reminder that neither party has a monopoly on virtue or vice and that good people can disagree civilly in our democracy.  This dovetailed nicely with President Obama’s core caution about the coarseness of our civic debates these days: “Democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic.”

Source: President Obama Takes on Trump and Tribalism – The Daily Beast

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The great melting [less segregation, more diverse communities]| The Economist

2016/01/13 Leave a comment

Good piece on how racial segregation may be being replaced by economic segregation in the UK and USA:

OAK PARK, just outside Chicago, is known to architecture aficionados as the home of Frank Lloyd Wright, who built some fine houses there. This small suburban village also has another distinction: it is racially mixed. In the 1970s it vigorously enforced anti-segregation laws; today the “People’s Republic of Oak Park”, as it is sardonically known, is 64% white, 21% black and 7% Hispanic. “Oak Park stands out so much,” says Maria Krysan at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But it does not stand out quite as much as it used to.

America remains a racially divided country, and Chicago is one of its most segregated cities. The south side is almost entirely black; northern districts such as Lincoln Park are golf-ball white; a western slice is heavily Hispanic. Yet the Chicago metropolis as a whole—the city plus suburban burghs like Oak Park—is gradually blending. For several reasons, that trend is almost certainly unstoppable.

When it comes to race, appearances often deceive. Streets can appear black or Asian when they are actually full of black or Asian shoppers who live somewhere else. Statistics are more reliable, and the best measure is known as the dissimilarity index. This reflects the proportion of people of a given race who would have to move out of their census tract—an area of a few thousand inhabitants—and into another one in order to spread themselves evenly. In 1970 the black-white dissimilarity index for Chicago was above 90, meaning that more than 90% of blacks would have had to move in order to become integrated with whites. By 2000 the figure had fallen to 81. William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, calculates that it now stands at 76.

In 45 of 52 big American metropolises with sizeable black populations, black-white segregation has fallen since 2000, according to Mr Frey. Southern cities, which many blacks fled in the first half of the 20th century, are now less segregated than northern ones such as Chicago and New York; sunbelt cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix are more mixed still. In 1980 the average black urbanite lived in a district that was 61% black. Now he or she lives in a place that is 45% black (see chart). Asians and Hispanics are neither more nor less segregated than they were, probably because two trends are cancelling each other out: as some members of those fast-growing groups move out of ethnic enclaves, they are replaced by new immigrants. Still, both groups are far more integrated than blacks: the Hispanic-white index of dissimilarity was 44 in 2010, and the Asian-white score just 40.

America is unusual, both for its obsession with race and for its superb statistics. Poor countries lack the means to collect precise data, and many rich ones choose not to. Some, like France, are so high-minded that they hold race to be irrelevant; in others racial censuses smell uncomfortably like fascism. A few countries distinguish foreigners from natives, though, and there the trend is mostly the same as in America.

In Sweden migrants from outside Europe have become less segregated since the 1990s, calculate Bo Malmberg and others at the University of Stockholm. By one measure, desegregation is happening fastest in Malmo, a city with lots of immigrants. In the Netherlands Sako Musterd, a geographer, calculates that foreigners have become less segregated from the native Dutch in Rotterdam. Amsterdam grew more segregated until the late 2000s, but now seems to be going the other way.

The European country that stands out is Britain. Like America, Britain collects excellent data on race and ethnicity; also like America, it is becoming steadily more mixed. Gemma Catney at the University of Liverpool has shown that every ethnic minority became less segregated between 2001 and 2011 (the two most recent British census years). Black Africans, who had been among the most clustered, are spreading out especially quickly.

…Perhaps Britain and America will become more segregated over time, with ghettos in new places. Perhaps many cities in countries that refuse to collect race data are quietly dividing. Perhaps—but probably not, because the forces driving integration are both powerful and widespread.

The first is the drift of non-whites from city centres to suburbs and commuter towns. British and American suburbs are still mostly white, but less so than before. In 1990 just 47% of American Hispanics and 37% of blacks lived in suburbia; by 2010, 59% of Hispanics and 51% of blacks did. Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago, has lost 140,000 black inhabitants since 2000, while the surrounding rural and suburban counties all gained them. Whites are moving into some cities, including Chicago, though rarely as quickly as blacks are leaving.

Some old suburbs have become heavily black or Hispanic—or, in Britain, south Asian. But for the most part suburbanisation leads to mixing. Ethnic minorities who leave city centres tend to be better-off and neither need nor want to live in enclaves. If they choose to move to a newly built suburb, as they often do in America, they will be blocked neither by racist housing laws, which have been abolished, nor by bigoted assumptions about the character of the neighbourhood. That is why the swelling, sprawling cities of the American south and west are so mixed.

A second force for integration is immigration. In Newham the churn caused by immigrants arriving and then moving to better districts has thoroughly dissolved old colour lines. The same is true of parts of America, too. John Logan of Brown University says that whites often stay when Latinos and Asians move in to a district. After a while blacks move in too, taking advantage of the path paved by the Latinos and Asians—and whites mostly continue to stay. Logan Square, a handsome district in north Chicago with wide boulevards and big, stylish houses, seems set to become such a “global neighbourhood”. Its population is 42% white and 46% Hispanic.

A powerful third force is love, which integrates families as well as places. In London whites and black Caribbeans marry or cohabit in such numbers that there are now more children under five who are a mixture of those two groups than there are black Caribbean children. Marriages between whites and Asians are growing, too. America is mixing just as quickly. In 2014, Mr Frey calculates, 19% of new American marriages involving whites and 31% involving blacks were mixed-race. The share for both Hispanics and Asians was 46%. The children of such unions can be hard to deal with statistically. So in the future the numbers will probably underestimate the speed of desegregation.

All this is most welcome. But there is a fourth driver of racial and ethnic integration in cities, which is not so benign. Because big cities are such desirable places to live, and have failed to build enough new homes, they are now so expensive that people can barely afford to segregate themselves. In London property prices have risen so steeply that the average first-time buyer needs to raise a deposit equivalent to about 120% of annual income, according to Neal Hudson of Savills, an estate agent. In the 1980s it was enough to raise just 20-30%.

Increasingly, people just buy property where they can. And along with the great weight of evidence showing that countries are becoming less segregated by race and ethnicity, there is also growing proof that they are becoming more segregated by income. One kind of separation might be replaced by another.

Source: The great melting | The Economist

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ICYMI: Canada rejects African-American’s asylum claim

2016/01/13 Leave a comment

Expected:

A Canadian tribunal has rejected a claim for refugee status from an African-American man who said he feared persecution and police abuse in the United States based on his race, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada said on Friday.

While saying he did find Kyle Lydell Canty to have a genuine fear of returning to his home country, adjudicator Ron Yamauchi said that was not enough to grant asylum.

A string of shootings of black men by U.S. police over the past 18 months have led to widespread protests and the issue has fuelled a civil rights movement under the name Black Lives Matter.

“The Act does not protect claimants from every form of ill-treatment, suffering, and hardship,” he wrote in the decision, dated Dec. 3. “It is addressed at situations of persecution, which is serious harm, an interference with a basic human right.”

He added: “There are no substantial grounds to believe that his removal to the United States of America would subject him personally to a danger of torture.”

Source: Canada rejects African-American’s asylum claim – The Globe and Mail

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ICYMI – The U.S. Senate: Still One of the World’s Whitest Workplaces – The Atlantic

2015/12/23 Leave a comment

Not that surprising. Have not seen a comparative Canadian study on staffers (anyone know one?) but I would suspect that visible minority percentages would be higher:

The U.S. Senate is famously known as the world’s most deliberative body, but it has never been its most representative. And that remains true not only of the 100 people elected to serve, but of the hundreds more hired as their top advisers.

Just over 7 percent of congressional aides who hold senior staff positions in the Senate are people of color, according to a new study set to be released Tuesday by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. That amounts to just about 24 of the 336 people who hold top job titles, and it is a far lower percentage than the country as a whole, where people of color—defined as African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans—comprise about one-third of the population. The lack of diversity is particularly glaring among African Americans (0.9 percent of top staff positions) and in the offices of senators hailing from states with large black and Hispanic populations. And it suggests that little has changed in the decade since the online magazine Diversity Inc. called the Senate the nation’s worst employer for diversity.

In one way, the finding is not surprising. While the 114th Congress as a whole is the most diverse in history (admittedly a low bar), the Senate itself is notoriously unrepresentative as an elected body. There are just two African American senators and three Hispanics to go along with 20 women out of 100 senators. Yet the report’s author, James Jones of Columbia University, said he was still shocked to find the staff numbers to be so low, particularly in the offices of Democratic senators. “I didn’t expect it to be this bad,” he told me. The social demographics of senators naturally influences the social demographics of the people they hire as their senior advisers, Jones said. But, he added, “I don’t think diversity in the Senate—especially racial diversity—should be dependent on the racial backgrounds of senators. All senators come from states with racially diverse demographics, and so I think they have a responsibility to have staffs that look like the states that they represent.”

The Senate’s static diversity also bucks a trend in the federal government under President Obama, who has appointed a record percentage of minorities and women to posts requiring confirmation. The Senate, therefore, is approving a lot of minorities; it just isn’t hiring them. Jones told me that his research indicated that staff diversity in the top rungs of the Senate hadn’t changed much since the 1980s, despite periodic efforts to highlight and remedy the problem. In the mid-2000s, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid created a diversity initiative to encourage minority hiring by Democratic offices. But Jones said the impact of that effort had been mixed: It helped staffers of color get their foot in the door with entry-level positions, but it didn’t make much difference in senior-level jobs. “Senior positions are more competitive, they’re more political, and the opportunities to fill these vacancies are more rare,” Jones said.

Source: The U.S. Senate: Still One of the World’s Whitest Workplaces – The Atlantic

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Mandy Patinkin: The Real Politics in The Princess Bride | TIME

2015/12/21 Leave a comment

One of our favourite family films, with its underlying strong message contrasted with the meanness in US largely Republican political discourse:

It was near the end of the movie when the Man in Black is standing at the window with Inigo, and Robin Wright, who played the princess, jumps out the window into Andre the Giant’s arms. Inigo says to the Man in Black: “You know, it’s very strange. I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.”

And that line just sung to me that night. I heard it in a way that the 34-year-old Mandy never heard those words. But the 55-year-old Mandy heard them loud and clear. I find it ironic that everyone who quotes the movie never quotes that line. It’s the most important line that William Goldman wrote in the whole film.

I love the idea of giving up the vengeful nature that so many of us have. Too often we think that when we have a problem with our lives or our country that the way to fix it is to take an eye for an eye. That doesn’t help anything or anyone. Violence only perpetrates more violence, and it becomes a vicious cycle. There are political situations all over the world where there are untold acts of revenge for incidences, and thousands and thousands of lives are lost because of them. Not acting in a vengeful manner is a much brighter road to a peaceful existence.

Inigo Montoya spent his life trying to avenge the murder of his father. He found the six-fingered man, and he killed him. But he realized that did not bring his father back. It didn’t do any good. Inigo realized that he might have made a different choice to do something else with his life. If they ever did a sequel, you would see all the good he has done for the world.

Ted Cruz, who uses phrases like “carpet-bombing” the people of ISIS and who said, after the incidents in Paris, that we need a war president, is using fear mongering and hate speech. As a citizen of the world, I’m very concerned that this kind of behavior is being cheered on by anyone. It only brings more pain and suffering.

My wife, Kathryn Grody, has taught the men of our family—my two sons, Isaac and Gideon, and me—a phrase that has become one of the mantras of our family: “Hurt people hurt people.” In my opinion, someone who thinks like Ted Cruz does has been hurt some time in his life, and believes that the only way to heal that hurt is to hurt others. And I’m certain that that is not the way to heal a wound.

We need to learn to accept and certainly mourn any harm that comes to any human being on this earth. But we also need to not be vengeful. We need to find ways to be hopeful and welcoming and caring toward our fellow man, not to shut the doors, as certain governors have done, to refugees who are fleeing horrific violence, who have spent years trying to save their children’s lives, risking them by putting them in rafts to get to safety. You would never put your child in a boat like that if you had an alternative.

Refugees come to us seeking asylum, seeking freedom, justice and dignity—seeking a chance just to breathe. And people in our country are saying close the doors and don’t let them in?

When I visited Greece in November, I met this extraordinary couple who had lived through hell during the Syrian war. Fleeing ISIS for the Turkish border with their two children, the wife said she saw death behind her and life in front of her. I know those same words have been spoken in Yiddish and Hebrew and Italian and German and Irish and by many in America—other than those who were brought here by slavery. America is a country that has opened its arms to humanity.

I asked the couple: “Are you afraid of anything?” And they said to me: “We’re afraid of nothing.” If they can live without fear, we, who haven’t experienced that hell, can be a little less afraid and a little more courageous. We must help the refugees that come to this country, listen to their stories, and welcome them.

I’m not saying for a second that we don’t need to keep our defenses up. But we must also keep our humanity up. People forget to keep their humanity up to an equal degree as their defenses. If you have no humanity, there is nothing to defend.

Playing CIA agent Saul Berenson on Homeland, I’ve had the privilege of meeting many people who work to ensure our security. They are very good at what they do, and they’re going to get better. They’re doing the best that they can, but they’re human beings, and there are going to be mistakes.

People are scared—of course they are. No one wants anyone they know in the world to suffer. But we can’t be naïve. If you don’t think dangerous people are already here, you need to think again. Since 9/11 there hasn’t been a single act of terrorism committed by a refugee in the U.S. Instead we have homegrown terrorists infected by the Internet, which is a whole new playing ground for revenge and war and insane acts by human beings. Those acts are not going to go away.

When Saul in the Fourth Season of Homeland is ready to kill himself instead of be traded for a group of terrorists who were going to get out of prison and do more terrible things, he learns that he’s seen the enemy, and it’s himself. We are the enemy if we think that violence and hate is our only way, and if we don’t have compassion and empathy for what is pushing people to commit such horrific acts of violence. I decided Saul would keep a reminder on his desk wherever he is: “Take one life and it’s as though you’ve destroyed the entire world. Save one life and it’s as though you’ve saved the entire world.”

We have to look at facts. We have to realize some of the things candidates are saying are based on falsehoods. This is a terrible, terrible misuse of a presidential election. All for the sake of politics, many are revving up a selling tool to get themselves elected, a tool that has been tried and true over the years: fear. It’s not the way for us to be.

Rob Reiner once summed up The Princess Bride: “It’s about a little boy who is sick in Evanston, Illinois, and his grandfather comes over to read him a story to tell him the most important thing in life is true love.”

Every character in that movie is looking to be loved. I’m sure Ted Cruz wants to be loved. I know Donald Trump does. Everyone wants it. But we mustn’t look for love by spreading hate.

I encourage us to remember that line at the end of the film and say it as often as we say the other lines in the movie. We must learn from this day forward what to do with the rest of our lives. Let it be an act of humanity, not revenge.

Source: Mandy Patinkin: The Real Politics in The Princess Bride | TIME

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The Ugly Fight Over Arabic in Augusta County – The Atlantic

2015/12/21 Leave a comment

One of the better pieces on the Virginia county controversy over the content of a world religions module of geography classes, and the choice of the shahada as the example of Islamic calligraphy:

Of all the phrases to choose, though, why this one? Using the profession of faith, an essential part of converting to Islam, feels strange, especially when there are so many other possibilities that could achieve the same task. (The phrase is also on the flags of Saudi Arabia and ISIS, among other places.) Why not bismillah al-rahman al-rahim (in the name of God, the most gracious the most merciful), a far less charged phrase? There’s no reason to believe that LaPorte was trying to indoctrinate her students into Islam, but the choice of phrase just feeds paranoia about it. It may be just another case of conservative political correctness run amok, but there’s also something uncomfortable about using someone’s expression of faith in this impersonal way. It’s hard to imagine a case in which students would be asked to recite the Apostle’s Creed as part of an academic lesson on Christian liturgy.

Not that the new compromise seems great either. “Although students will continue to learn about world religions as required by the state Board of Education and the Commonwealth’s Standards of Learning, a different, non-religious sample of Arabic calligraphy will be used in the future,” the district said in a statement. That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Arabic calligraphy is of world-religion interest specifically because it is Islamic. Because Arabic is the language of the Qur’an, it has attained an exalted place in Islam throughout the world, well beyond Arabic-speaking countries. And because many forms of Islam prohibit or discourage figurative imagery, elaborate, beautiful, and highly stylized calligraphic artwork using Qur’anic phrases is a staple wherever Muslims are, around the world. Islamic art is a major chunk of world art, and while it’s inextricable from religion, it’s also a larger, civilizational thing than mere devotion. Using a secular Arabic phrase glosses over all that context.

Think about it this way: Would someone try to teach a class on Western art while excising Christian art as indoctrination? Of course not—in part because they’d have very little to work with in the centuries between Constantine’s conversion and the Renaissance. But Islam is something different, something that many Americans still view as a threat. My colleague Emma Green reported earlier this week on how schools in Tennessee and around the nation are facing intense efforts to roll back even the most academic, detached lessons on Islam. In many of these cases, too, the fight is being led by a small but vocal band of parents who find the act of educating about Islam, a religion with 1.6 billion followers around the world, itself objectionable and dangerous. It’s no coincidence that these battles almost always occur in heavily white, Christian school districts.

The Augusta County assignment was more vulnerable to outcry because of the unwise step of including the shahada. But there’s little question this is about fear of Islam, and not about objections to religion in the public schools. After all, Augusta County schools also offer students the chance to leave school once a week to attend Bible study.

Source: The Ugly Fight Over Arabic in Augusta County – The Atlantic

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Congress Just Put Iranian-Americans and Others At Risk for Becoming Second-Class Citizens

2015/12/21 1 Comment

Under-reported, given the potential impact on the large number of Canadians (according to the 2011 NHS, about 170,000 Iranian Canadians, 50,000 Iraqi Canadians, 41,000 Syrian Canadians and 17,000 Sudanese Canadians):

TODAY BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS approved a $1.1 trillion spending bill intended to keep government services funded through September 2016. Tucked into this omnibus legislation are provisions that could undermine, on the basis of personal heritage, the ability of many American citizens to travel visa-free to countries in Europe and east Asia.

For more than 25 years, the Visa Waiver Program has allowed people from a select list of countries, currently 38 nations long, to travel to the U.S. without a visa. Those countries, in turn, must reciprocate, allowing Americans the same privilege on their own soil. Today, Congress voted to change the deal: People coming from countries covered under the Visa Waiver Program, including people who are citizens of those countries, will now need to get a visa if they are determined to be nationals of Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria, or if they have visited those countries since 2011.

This is worse than it sounds, because at least two of those countries, Iran and Syria, deem people to be nationals, regardless of where they were born or live, if their fathers are citizens. So it’s possible that someone who is a citizen of one of the countries on the visa-free travel list — the United Kingdom, say — and who lives there and grew up there and has never visited another country, could end up denied entry to the U.S. because of a parent born in Iran or Syria.

It gets even worse still, because there is a strong likelihood that countries party to the newly altered Visa Waiver Program, including European Union member states, will institute reciprocal restrictions on Americans, meaning that many Iranian-Americans, Syrian-Americans, and others in the U.S. would see their ability to travel the world seriously degraded based on ancestry or dual citizenship. Potentially facing similar reciprocal restrictions are any aid workers, journalists, or other Americans who simply visited at some point since 2011 the countries targeted in the new legislation.

An open letter published by the European Union’s ambassador to the United States has already said that passage of the bill “could trigger legally mandated reciprocal measures” against American citizens, in this case, specifically those whose national origin is from Iran, Sudan, Syria, or Iraq, effectively placing them into a lower category of citizenship when attempting to travel abroad.

The new restrictions have alarmed civil rights groups in the United States, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which in a letter to the House of Representatives earlier this month called the changes arbitrary, discriminatory, and “un-American,” since they would punish individuals solely based on their nationality or ethnic origin. Despite this harsh criticism, at least some of the provisions were approved by the House of Representatives in a 407-19 vote on December 8, paving the way for today’s vote.

Jamal Abdi, a spokesperson for the National Iranian American Council, believes the legislation will eventually prompt other countries to deny Iranian-Americans the same rights of free travel enjoyed by other Americans.

“Targeting people who are dual nationals is particularly discriminatory and unjust, since dual nationality is not something you choose,” Abdi said. “Under this legislation, if you’re a European of Iranian origin or your father is an Iranian citizen, you wouldn’t be able to travel without a visa to the United States. As we’ve already heard from the EU, this would trigger reciprocal measures that would result in the passports of Iranian-Americans being treated as inferior, essentially putting them in a category of second-class citizenship.”

The bill approved by the House earlier this month, HR-158, which is related to the legislation approved today, was initially written for the narrow and reasonable purpose of blocking or restricting from U.S. entry individuals who traveled to Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria or Iraq. But provisions later added by Republican lawmakers made the legislation more draconian, including by imposing restrictions involving entire countries — official “state sponsors of terrorism” like Iran and Sudan. (In those two countries, at least, the Islamic State is nonexistent.)

Some parts of the newly passed legislation could even violate the recently negotiated deal between the U.S. and Iran to curb Iranian nuclear activity.

For example, under the new rules, a European or Japanese business owner who traveled to Iran to take advantage of recently lifted economic sanctions would thereafter find themselves denied visa-free entry to the United States — a restriction that would inevitably act as a deterrent to doing business in Iran. But the provisions of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal prohibit policies that undermine “the normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran.”

Thirty-three Democratic members of Congress signed an open letter published last week criticizing some of the new Visa Waiver Program restrictions. The letter said the restrictions “would result in discrimination against people simply because they are dual citizens based on ancestry” and asserted that national origin should not be a factor when determining visa requirements. People entering the United States, the letter said, should be evaluated on an individual level, not based on “where their parents are from.”

In the end, those objections were not enough to stop the new rules. Abdi said that politicians have stoked fears of immigration and helped increase public support for harsh laws that target en masse individuals from Muslim-majority countries.

“This bill is a direct response to the rhetoric of GOP leaders like Donald Trump and others who have called for restricting people coming to the United States based on national origin,” Abdi said. “There has been a lot of outcry about his outrageous comments and proposals from the public and in the media, but now as a consequence of the environment he’s helped create, we’re actually seeing Congress take steps to turn such xenophobic ideas into law.”

Source: Congress Just Put Iranian-Americans and Others At Risk for Becoming Second-Class Citizens

Filed under Citizenship, discrimination, Dual Citizenship Tagged with , , , , ,

ICYMI: Abigail Fisher deserves an ‘F’ for her race-baiting Supreme Court case aimed at boosting subpar white students – Salon.com

2015/12/17 Leave a comment

The latest court case around affirmative action:

Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in what is easily the most baffling case it’s going to hear this session, yet another attack on affirmative action policies at state universities, in this case the University of Texas at Austin. If ever there was a case that has no business in front of the high court, it is this one. The suit is a nuisance suit, it’s poorly argued, it’s disingenuous, it’s been heard before and, to make everything even more bizarre, the plaintiff’s claim to injury is demonstrably untrue. This is a case that should have been laughed out of court years ago, but instead, this is the second time — second time! — it’s being presented in front of the Supreme Court.

 At stake is the claim made by Abigail Fisher, now 25, who hails from a wealthy suburb of Houston called Sugar Land, that she was deprived of her rightful admission at UT Austin because, in her view, some person of color who didn’t deserve it stole it from her.
Throughout her now seven-year campaign to make the school pay for not letting her in, Fisher has never been able to produce any evidence that the school tossed her application to make room for a less qualified minority applicant. That’s because, as UT Austin has maintained throughout this ordeal, Fisher was never getting in to their school. Fisher’s GPA and SAT scores weren’t high enough, and she didn’t have enough external accomplishments to convince the school to give her a shot otherwise. As Pro Publica explained at the time:

It’s true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.

Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s who were also denied entry into the university that year.

Fisher’s case only makes sense if you assume that people of color are inherently less worthy than white people. How else do you justify an argument that assumes that every white person should have been given a shot before minority students do?

This assumption of the inherent superiority of white people, even above those people of color who have more appealing applications, was reflected in Antonin Scalia’s remarks during today’s case.

Instead of telling her where to shove it, the Supreme Court sent Fisher’s case back to the appeals court. Now she and her lawyers are back again. This time, they’ve tweaked their argument a bit, trying to argue that diversity itself is an illegitimate goal for schools and, to add a bit of extra nastiness sauce to it, they’re claiming that diversity is bad for students of color.

In other words, Fisher and her lawyers are concern-trolling the Supreme Court.

Most of UT Austin’s admissions are on the basis of high school class standing — about 80 percent of its class in the year that Fisher applied. But the other 20 percent are determined in a holistic fashion, by looking at grades, extracurricular activities, test scores, writing samples, the usual stuff. Because of the school’s commitment to diversity, race and class background is also taken into consideration. Someone who shows potential but faced some obstacles gets a closer look than someone who hasn’t had similar obstacles.

When you read about this case, it quickly becomes self-evident why the admissions committee didn’t think Fisher had some hidden potential that wasn’t reflected in her grades. Fisher, however, has decided her unparalleled genius is going unnoticed because of the notorious racism against white people. But since that argument hasn’t gotten her very far, her lawyer, Edward Blum, is now trying a different tactic to argue that schools should admit mediocre white people over talented students of color: His claim is that  giving students of color an opportunity somehow hurts them.

Source: Abigail Fisher deserves an ‘F’ for her race-baiting Supreme Court case aimed at boosting subpar white students – Salon.com

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

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