The truth about immigrants?

Dana Kramer-Rolls says on Facebook:

Dr. Ben Carson got into some trouble by saying that black slaves were immigrants, too. But I heard poetry and wondered what Maya Angelou would have made of it. I'm not her, but here is my take.

They came as immigrants,

Stolen by invaders, sold by their kings.

They came as immigrants,

Chained in the holds of ships, the living and the dead.

They came as immigrants,

Sold, beaten, families torn apart.

They came as immigrants,

The religion of their mothers mocked and forbidden.

They came as immigrants,

Now the chains were broken, but they were still lynched, shot.

And then it began again.

They come as immigrants.

Fleeing invaders, fleeing the bombs.

They come as immigrants,

Washed up on shores, the living and the dead.

They come as immigrants,

Their religion mocked, families torn apart.

They come as immigrants,

They think they are safe, but still they are beaten and shot.

Will it ever end?

Big Canada

From Today's Globe and Mail. I ask, was Big Canada even possible?
See this.

Whenever the idea of dramatically increasing immigration comes up, that Sir Wilfrid Laurier line is sure to be trotted out. You know the one: The 20th century will belong to Canada. The actual quote was that just as the 19th century had been the century of the United States, so Canada would “fill the 20th century.” The phrase is always invoked as an indictment against Canada’s present, and its smallness of vision. Laurier told us that one day we’d be big man on campus. And yet here we are, all these years later, somewhere between the 10th and 16th largest economy on earth.
In his 1904 speech to Ottawa’s new Canadian Club, Laurier engaged in more than a bit of hyperbole. It’s an occupational hazard of politics, in any era. But in the years before the First World War, many people really did believe that Canada was on its way to becoming one of the world’s best-governed and richest countries, and one of its most populous.
The first part of that prophecy – call it Model Canada – came to pass. Canada is a world leader when it comes to peace, order, good government and prosperity. But the second prediction – Big Canada – never happened. For some people, it remains a missed opportunity, like a ship that never sailed, but still could.
The thing is, Big Canada is a 20th-century idea. In the 21st century, it doesn’t compute. It’s an anachronism, like going online in 2016 and trying to book passage from the Old Continent to the New World in steerage class, on a steam-powered ocean liner.
But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the age of hyper-nationalism, Big Canada made a great deal of sense. The size of one’s population mattered. It was one of the attributes that allowed countries to survive, and avoid being conquered by their neighbours. Population was military power. And a little more than 100 years ago, it was widely believed that the British Empire’s centres of population and power would soon be fast-growing Canada and Australia, not Britain.
If that had come to pass, it might have changed history. Back in 1914, the Kaiser would have been reluctant to go to war if Britain and her dominions, instead of having fewer people than the German Empire, had far more.
And in 1939, if Adolf Hitler told his generals of his plan to fight France, Britain and the 100-million strong Dominion of Canada, they would have overthrown him. The Nazis would have had no hope of victory against the overwhelmingly superior wealth and population of the British Commonwealth, led by that industrial colossus, the arsenal of democracy, Big Canada. It’s fun to dream about what might have been. But the problems a much more populous Canada might once have solved are themselves locked in the past.
The main question today for Canadians and their governments should be what can be done to make us and our fellow citizens, and generations to come, safer, freer, happier and wealthier.
The Trudeau government is on the right path in at least asking how to boost incomes in the long run. At the same time, on Monday the government put its recently acquired obsession with Big Canada on hold, at least for now, when Immigration Minister John McCallum sidelined the recommendations of the advisory council on economic growth, and announced the immigration target for next year will be 300,000, the same as this year.
The research shows an at-best tenuous connection between population growth and economic success – and the government’s own polling shows voters expressing little appetite for the large increases in immigration needed to bring about Big Canada, several decades from now.
In his 1904 speech, Laurier pointed out that the Canada of his day was already more populous than “many of the nations of Europe who have filled history with their fame and renown.” His list included Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. A century later, these countries, along with Canada, are among the handful leading the world in quality of life. And Canada already has more people than all of them combined. Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe alone has as many people as Sweden.
Can Torontonians of the future be made more prosperous and happier than the Swedes, simply by ensuring that, in a few decades, Toronto and its suburbs have three or four times as many people as Sweden? Can a Canada that currently has one-ninth the U.S. population be made better off simply by raising our population to, say, one-seventh that of our neighbour?
Other than setting this country up to jump into a time machine to refight the battles of the last century, it’s not clear what Big Canada is supposed to accomplish.

Canadian ideals, 1957

This is how the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration greeted a new Canadian citizen in 1957:
Dear Madam,
I wish to take this opportunity of congratulating you personally upon the attainment of Canadian Citizenship. By this certificate of citizenship you have been granted the rights and privileges of the citizen of Canada. These rights and privileges entitle you to freedom of speech, religion, thought and action, the right to vote as you choose, and the right to be secure in your possessions.
Your citizenship carries with it the obligation of defending your adopted country in time of need, of living in peaceful brotherhood with your fellow Canadians, and of doing your part in the preservation of Canadian ideals and institutions.
I extend to you a warm welcome on this solemn occasion and I invite you to share with us the ancient liberties of a free people living together in harmony, under a democratic government which recognizes the rights of all its citizens.
Ellen L. Fairclough,
Minister
Note: this certificate of citizenship (?) looks like a letter from the Minister and has no date. Note that the Queen is not mentioned. Nor is the recipient named.

Purge those evil foreigners

From the Guardian:

Leading foreign academics from the LSE acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked to contribute to government work and analysis on Brexit because they are not British nationals.
The news was met with outrage by many academics, while legal experts questioned whether it could be legal under anti-discrimination laws and senior politicians criticised it as bewildering.
“It is utterly baffling that the government is turning down expert, independent advice on Brexit simply because someone is from another country,” said Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ EU spokesman.
“This is yet more evidence of the Conservatives’ alarming embrace of petty chauvinism over rational policymaking.”
Sara Hagemann, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics who specialises in EU policymaking processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments and the consequences of EU enlargements, said she had been told her services would not be required.

It's the end of the British Empire, at the hands of its own people. Late Roman historians, think of this.
Image: Stilicho, an obvious evil foreigner.

Not quite so welcome

Canada has got a lot of praise recently for its generous attitude towards admitting Syrian refugees. And rightfully so.

But Canadians are not so keen on another group: rich, mainly Chinese immigrants who have been moving into the Vancouver area for years and driving up real estate prices to a more than merely remarkable extent. That real estate boom (and a somewhat different boom in places like Toronto) has a major effect on the national economy as a whole. And it makes it easy to blame foreigners for this unbalanced, potentially perilous situation.

Of course, the word racism comes up, in part because British Columbia has a history of excluding Asian immigrants.

But it's not a simple situation. A recent article in the Globe and Mail discussed at length the fact that different groups of Chinese immigrants don't get along with each other; older immigrants and their children and grandchildren don't feel any great solidarity with new immigrants from other regions.
Here is one Globe and Mail article. There are plenty more. Like this one about the not exactly rich, not necessarily immigrant.

Canada’s multiculturalism: A circle, ever edging outwards, by JOHN RALSTON SAUL

Canada’s multiculturalism: A circle, ever edging outwards
JOHN RALSTON SAUL
Special to The Globe and Mail Published Friday, Apr. 22, 2016 1:15PM EDT Canada is now the only Western democracy in which there is no serious argument among the citizenry or politicians over the importance of immigration. Canadians understand that immigration is not migration. It must be seen as the first step toward citizenship. And the sooner an immigrant becomes a citizen, the better.
The main complaint after the arrival of the first 25,000 Syrian refugees seems to be that more of them should have been citizen sponsored because it is harder to settle those who are government assisted. So we now need more refugees, but in that first category.
Incidentally, I believe the term should be citizen sponsored, not privately sponsored. Private implies self-interest or commerce. This is all about citizen engagement.
Seen from outside the country, our attitude toward immigration and citizenship often seems to make Canada an outlier – problematic, a contradiction, sleepwalking to disaster, even unacceptable as a real nation-state
. Over the last month in several European countries, I found that many people, of all backgrounds, educations and beliefs, were quicker than ever to say Of course, you can believe in these things. You have a big country. You’re a new country.
Neither is true. We aren’t big. For the last hundred years most immigrants have gone to a handful of big cities. And we aren’t new. As a settler society we are the product of 400 years, most of it spent going through the same economic, political and social dramas as other Western countries. We are the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world – beating Switzerland by a few months. We are the second- or third-oldest continuous democracy of any sort in the world – 168 years without breaking up, without a civil war, a coup, an absolute monarch, a dictator.
Our cities are built where Indigenous peoples prospered for thousands of years. As I pointed out in A Fair Country, back in 2008, First Nations and Métis peoples far outnumbered settlers into the second half of the 19th century. So Canada at its best is very much the product of the long relationship with Indigenous peoples, their approaches and philosophies; and above all, their concepts of inclusion and belonging, which today we would call immigration and citizenship. If the central characteristic of Canada is its complexity, this also is an outcome of our long relationship with Indigenous peoples. In particular we owe a great deal to the example of the Métis Nation, the very model of living complexity.
None of this lessens the reality that, for more than a century as immigrant power grew, the Indigenous-settler relationship was betrayed and great evil was done. But that in turn cannot erase the Indigenous influence on our society. That Indigenous reality is now reasserting itself. The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision April 14 that re-establishes Métis and non-status Indian rights is yet another example of this.
Today, repairing the relationship with Indigenous peoples is the single most important test for Canadians. We now seem ready to play our part as their allies, but must remind ourselves every day that central to reconciliation is concrete restitution. Many of us keep coming back to the words of Chief John Kelly – “as the years go by, the circle of the Ojibway gets bigger and bigger. Canadians of all colours and religions are entering that circle. You might feel that you have roots somewhere else, but in reality, you are right here with us.”
When I find myself explaining to Europeans why our system of inclusion and diversity more or less works, I inevitably go back to those non-racial Indigenous ideas which leave space for multiple identities and multiple loyalties, for an idea of belonging which is comfortable with contradictions, which shifts humans from their autocratic role as masters of the universe to one more integrated into the place itself. This is an approach to values which is the opposite of the European-U.S. understanding of the monolithic citizen melted into a pot of national uniqueness.
All of which matters today because Canada is out on the cutting edge, doing things other countries are not. We know that the leaders of the three most powerful European countries have declared multiculturalism a failure. Which I suppose is supposed to mean that Canada is or will be a failure. But we should also know that what they mean by multiculturalism has more or less involved the abandonment of what they inaccurately call migrants into ghettos; that they imagine it involves the breaking up of society into unrelated pods, producing in the worst cases police no-go zones and failed schooling. The author of a recent biography of Tony Blair presents the former British prime minster as preferring “multiculturalism” over the “integration of immigrant communities.” We know this is not at all what multiculturalism is supposed to mean. And our opinion should be worth something since we are seen as the inventors and the experimental centre of the concept.
Our great weakness as Canadians is that we have been lazy when it comes to explaining what our experiment consists in. Our excuse could be that it is, after all, an experiment. That is not good enough. The atmosphere out there in most Western countries is one of tired elites, many of them caught up in bourgeoning campaigns of fear. Canadians know all too well how contagious these are. Our last prime minister started down that road, which is one of the reasons he is out of a job. And we know well the confused, divisive atmosphere in the United States – the discourse of walls and security. The current British Prime Minister believes he must get the immigration levels down. The French Prime Minister has just called for the banning of headscarves on students in universities. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, having made a great ethical gesture in 2015 to welcome one million Syrian refugees, now finds that, because Germany does not have an overarching immigration-citizenship policy and structure, it is a nightmare to organize their settlement. The result has been a political backlash. And yet we must admire the risk that Germans have taken and their determination to make it work.
What’s more, we must not confuse the massive political and ethical failure of most European governments with the attitudes of large parts of the citizenry. Europe is filled with citizens throwing themselves into the crisis as volunteers. Just as the Macedonians were closing their borders, I was in the transit camp on the Athenian docks in Piraeus. At that point, they were managing a few thousand refugees. The sheds were all well organized and run by amazing volunteers – not NGOs or government. In fact, the Greeks, almost broken by their own crisis, have responded with generosity and care to the refugees’ plight, just as many citizens of Calais have stepped in to support refugees in the awful camp outside their city. In southern Italy, in Germany, there are thousands of such stories. And there are thousands of study groups, professors, NGOs, activists doing whatever they can.
But the problem is so profound that the continent is failing and governments are justifying this failure by blaming others. You could call it a massive mismanagement of the end of empires; less the uncontrollable outcome of geographic proximity and more the result of 50 years of hypocrisy when it comes to Mediterranean relationships. The Brexit movement in Britain can only be seen as a deeply romantic desire to return to another era, which itself never existed. I hear serious individuals talking about a need to recreate an alliance of the English-speaking peoples, as if we have all been sitting around for 40 years, waiting for Britain to come back to us. The most likely outcome of Britain voting to withdraw from the EU would be Scotland separating in order to stay in Europe. This is one of those do-I-laugh-or-do-I-cry moments.
There is a whispered conviction among many around the continent that the real problem is Islam; that it is not absorbable into Judeo-Christian civilization. This is the language which Christians used to use against Jews and Protestants against Catholics and vice versa. This was once the excuse in Canada for excluding Sikhs, Chinese, Japanese. And it was the excuse for trying to destroy Indigenous peoples.
Reactive panic – and crisis
The heart of the crisis lies elsewhere. Every year for seven decades Europe has been taking in large numbers of immigrants from many places. They were called many things – migrants, refugees, guest workers. The delusional assumption was that they would serve their economic purpose or be protected for a while, then go home. They didn’t. And European leaders, off the record, knew they wouldn’t.
And so, 70 years of lying to themselves has resulted in an immigration civilization profoundly unprepared for immigration. No attempt has been made by the EU or by individual European countries to develop an overarching, proactive immigration policy, with the necessary infrastructure both at home and in their embassies. In many cases they are doing better than they think, but their idea of themselves hides this success. The result now is a reactive panic; a crisis of drownings, disgraceful camps, human disorder and suffering. And there is still no hint of any desire to create a dignified, balanced immigration policy with citizenship as an essential celebratory part of the whole. It is precisely now, in the midst of the crisis, that they should be developing a positive, holistic approach. If anything, the latest EU-Turkish agreement crosses basic ethical lines and so in the long run will make matters worse.
The countdown to citizenship
Let me go back for a moment to the failure of Canadians to explain ourselves to ourselves, let alone to others. There are real risks involved in this ham-handed mutism and naive triumphalism. What’s more, it is unnecessary. The patterns of our immigration and citizenship history, at their best and their worst, are clear.
The idea of a broad government-supported immigration/citizenship policy goes back to the Indigenous welcome. That’s how the settlers survived. It was equally central to both the New France settlement strategy and system created for the Loyalist refugees fleeing in the 1780s from the American war against Britain. In February, 1848, the first law passed by the new responsible-government parliament of Canada laid out the beginnings of a modern immigration/citizenship policy. With Confederation in 1867, the government immediately created a department for immigration and citizenship, and sent agents out around the world. Rules guiding the newcomers from immigrant status to citizenship were put in place and, ever since, that process has ranged between three and five years.
By the late 19th century, citizenship ceremonies were growing in popularity. Citizenship was a choice to be celebrated publicly. Since 1900, the annual immigration numbers have ranged between 200,000 and 400,000. In 1995 we set the yearly target at 1 per cent of the population. It usually ends up at around 0.7 per cent – between 250,000 and 300,000. As a point of reference: The one million refugees taken in by Germany last year, had they been shared around the EU, would have represented 0.2 per cent of the population. In many of our embassies, over half the staff looks after immigration. We were able to handle the 25,000 Syrian refugees in a few weeks because we have a large group of public servants expert in immigration, settlement and citizenship. The first thing those refugees received on disembarking in Canada was their permanent-residency status, starting them on the countdown to citizenship.
We all know that these 400 years of policy development were tarnished and regularly knocked off track by multiple insurgencies of racism and exclusion. But each of these was gradually eliminated and the main line re-established.
The philosophical trick in all of this is that immigration and citizenship have always been treated as inseparable steps. Engagement and marriage. This means that each immigrant arrives knowing that she must think of herself as a citizen, because she soon will be a citizen. This is a philosophy which changes radically everyone’s attitude toward inclusion and integration. It means that language training is simply part of the package from the beginning, as is the expectation that new Canadians will get involved in volunteerism and politics – the two keys to an engaged citizenry.
A perpetual experiment
What of the multicultural misunderstanding?
Canadians seem to be moving toward other words – diversity, pluralism, inclusion, interculturalism – as we have sensed a growing confusion elsewhere. But the idea is really not so difficult.
I think of it as rooted in balance – a central Indigenous concept of how societies function. At its best a balance between the place, the group and the individual. You could also describe it as a balanced or positive tension between organized integration and celebrated diversity; a conviction that diversity and fairness are reflections of each other; that this requires a rigorous use of political restraint; an allergy to universal mythologies and ideologies. All of which means that we must be self-confident enough and tough enough to live with the reality of complexity.
This is the opposite of the tired European-U.S. insistence on monolithic identities. The Canadian concept of living in a perpetually incomplete experiment may seem radical to many in the Western world. And yet you could simply see it as a profoundly non-racial approach to civilization – one based on the idea of an inclusive circle that expands and gradually adapts as new people join us.

Justin Trudeau – a giant among men?

I have not made up my mind about Justin Trudeau. I expect that he will disappoint (not so much me as the large number of his current fans). And hey, he is Liberal. And finally, I was never that fond of his father (not that I expected J. Trudeau to be a reincarnation of his father).

But OMG! Have you seen that video of Trudeau greeting the first Syrian refugees to land in Toronto two or three days ago? Telling them that they will leave the buildings as Canadians?

Trudeau greets the refugees

Canada is coming out of ten years of the rule of the man without a heart – a characterization that the man so characterized pretty much owned up to himself. If there was a way of making a policy less generous and more divisive, he found it. If a policy used up some of the reputational capital that previous governments and private individuals had earned, or sucked up to the great powers while ignoring Canada's need and desire to maintain an independent international identity, our just past prime minister enthusiastically adopted it. And the extent of the rot he encouraged and promoted in Canada's institutions – the civil service and Parliament in particular -- will only be revealed over years and years of investigation and the testimony by people no longer afraid to speak up.

This is a man who was perfectly happy to say that he was unmoved by a picture of a dead baby on a beach. It's not that the past PM lacked a certain degree of support. Any country has its fearful and ungenerous elements. But when those elements are made the foundation of the ruling party's efforts to create a permanent ruling coalition, god help the country so afflicted.

But that dead baby reminded Canadians that they are by and large more generous than that. Justin Trudeau was given the opportunity to embody the generous side of Canadians, and he took it. Enthusiastically and without compromise. While people all over the world were freaking out about the supposed dangers of admitting refugees, Trudeau (however sincerely, however calculatedly) made a major commitment to work with private organizations (who were already gearing up) to do something to help the Syrians. And has stuck to that commitment, despite the supposed political dangers.

To look at the situation from the crass political angle, the ungenerous approach taken by the past government may go down as one of the most amazing own goals in Canada's history. A year ago, six months ago, the past government could gain a certain amount of traction by presenting Trudeau as "not ready for prime time." Then they handed him an issue that he could exploit, not just during the election campaign but after. Has there ever been a newly elected PM whose stature was so great so soon after his initial victory? Who has identified himself with what many Canadians like to think is the best aspect on this country? Who in fact has made it clear that if the government wants to do something, and has the backing of a good part of the citizenry, it can DO SOMETHING WORTHWHILE?

This could all blow over and the Liberals may end up looking like a group of sad sacks – hey, they've done it before. But maybe not. This could be an important turning point.

Aljazeera: They are refugees from war, not migrants seeking jobs

Barry Malone in Aljazeera:

Imagine waking your children in the morning. Imagine feeding and dressing them. Imagine pulling a little girl’s hair into a ponytail, arguing with a little boy about which pair of shoes he wants to wear.

Now imagine, as you are doing that, you know later today you will strap their vulnerable bodies into enveloping life jackets and take them with you in a rubber dinghy - through waters that have claimed many who have done the same.

Think of the story you’d have to tell to reassure them. Think of trying to make it fun. Consider the emotional strength needed to smile at them and conceal your fear.

There is no "migrant crisis" in the Mediterranean.

What would it feel like if that experience – your frantic flight from war – was then diminished by a media that crudely labelled you and your family "migrants"?

And imagine having little voice to counter a description so commonly used by governments and journalists.

The umbrella term migrant is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to describing the horror unfolding in the Mediterranean. It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.

...

The argument that most of those risking everything to land on Europe’s shores are doing it for money is not supported by the facts.

According to the UN, the overwhelming majority of these people are escaping war. Most of them - some 63 percent since the beginning of the year - are fleeing Syria, a country in which an estimated 220,000 to more than 300,000 people have been killed during its appalling and escalating war.

Many others come from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Eritrea and Somalia – all places from which people are commonly given asylum.

There is no "migrant" crisis in the Mediterranean. There is a very large number of refugees fleeing unimaginable misery and danger and a smaller number of people trying to escape the sort of poverty that drives some to desperation.

So far this year, nearly 340,000 people in these circumstances have crossed Europe's borders. A large number, for sure, but still only 0.045 percent of Europe's total population of 740 million.

Contrast that with Turkey, which hosts 1.8 million refugees from Syria alone. Lebanon, in which there are more than one million Syrians. Even Iraq, struggling with a war of its own, is home to more than 200,000 people who have fled its neighbour.

There are no easy answers and taking in refugees is a difficult challenge for any country but, to find solutions, an honest conversation is necessary.

"Progress"?

A good piece from Michela Wrong in Foreign Policy:

When Migrants Flee Progress

Each migrant trying to cross the Mediterranean in a rickety boat has his or her own reason for risking the journey. But for people who study Africa, one overall lesson quietly emerges from this mass movement: Man cannot live by MDGs alone.

I’m talking about the Millennium Development Goals, the eight targets the United Nations drew up as benchmarks of successful development back in 2000. The U.N. set precise goals for poverty alleviation, education, and health care that poor countries, supported by Western donors, could tick off a list -- the supposed building blocks of a better life. Ironically, the deadline set for achieving the MDGs was 2015, the very year in which Europe has been confronted by a mass exodus of refugees voting with their feet.

Some migrants are fleeing violence in Syria and Somalia; some are West Africans who worked in Libya and now find it too dangerous to stay. But a significant share comes from African countries neither wracked by civil unrest nor embroiled in war. Counterintuitively, many of these nations perform extremely well on the MDG front.

Take the Red Sea nation of Eritrea, which accounts for the greatest number of migrants to Europe after Syria, an extraordinary figure given its population of just around 6 million. According to the U.N. refugee agency, 34,561 Eritreans crossed the Mediterranean in 2014.

Bizarre as it may seem, I often encourage Western friends to take holidays in Eritrea, this country so many are now fleeing and which I myself can’t access, for want of a journalist visa. It’s safe, clean, and cheap, and it boasts some of Africa’s best roads and most dramatic scenery, and the continent’s most beautiful capital city. Back in 2013, President Isaias Afewerki’s government patted itself on the back for achieving three health MDGs ahead of schedule: reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV, malaria, and other diseases. It expects to check three more off the list by the end of this year.

... The point is: All that just isn’t enough. Eritrea, run by a former communist rebel movement that seized power in 1991, may well offer its citizens excellent medical care. Claims that it knows how to protect its people from East Africa’s frequent droughts and resulting famines may even be true. But the government has failed dramatically to deliver on a range of less quantifiable needs that hold the key to human fulfillment.

There’s no independent media or political opposition in the country. Religious freedom is narrowly curtailed. A multiparty constitution has never been implemented*, no presidential elections staged. Both men and women must do military service, which is often open-ended. If you’re lucky enough to get demobilized, there’s no private-sector economy to soak up your labor and provide you with skills. Asmara is an elegant cage -- a suffocating place to live.

Africa is struggling to digest a massive youth bulge, and youngsters are instinctively aspirational. They want the chance of a better existence in their own lifetimes, not promises of some distant utopia. While governments such as the one in Eritrea may score impressively when it comes to keeping youth fed, vaccinated, and literate (the MDG emphasis is on primary education, of course, not the tertiary education likely to produce rebellious students), they routinely frustrate deeper needs.

Indeed, the paradox is not unique to Eritrea. Since the end of the Cold War, a new generation of African leaders has emerged that wins the consistent and enthusiastic backing of the U.S. Agency for International Development and Britain’s Department for International Development for delivering on the MDGs, even while these leaders show open contempt for civil society, human rights groups, and the free press. “Democracy is a luxury we can’t afford,” is the implicit message to Western partners.

... “Africa Rising,” the recent buzz phrase adopted by investors excited by the economic potential of the continent’s growing middle class and the spread of modern technology, has distracted attention from a series of reactionary trends. In east, west, and central Africa we are seeing elections rigged not once, but repeatedly; the establishment of de facto royal dynasties; and draconian legislation aimed at closing down the non-governmental sector, muffling the press, and stamping out homosexuality. Annual reports by human rights organizations make for grim reading.

Back when the U.S. President George H.W. Bush promised “a new world order” premised on liberal values, such developments would have alarmed Western partners. Now they generate shrugged shoulders from diplomats and development officials who regard them as part of the realpolitik of the modern era.

The MDGs were designed, in part, to give Western donors and African governments apolitical, uncontroversial common ground upon which all could agree. Clean water, primary education, decent health care -- who wouldn’t want those, after all? But the message coming from the migrants crossing the Mediterranean is: “Oh, sure, we want those. But we want far, far more.” And who can blame them?

Diversity

I think the next time I hear "Canada is becoming more diverse," I may scream.

Has there been a single week since 1763 when that was not true?

Image:  Here they come -- whoever they are. :-)

How the other half lives

While J-Lo dances in Ibiza, Tunisian migrants cross the Mediterranean the hard way.

As usual, click to see a larger version.

From the Big Picture.

European countries with significant Muslim immigrant populations -HIST 3805

Does this sound like the country you are researching?  If so, you may want to look at what Juan Cole has to say about the situation in Germany. For the population background to immigration debates,  see this article in the Guardian. 

If you are Irish...

..is one good generation all you get?

Image: Canada's gain.

"The customer is always right" goes out the window in France

Or to be fair to what is really a very large country, one corner of France.

I have to admit I was somewhat shocked by the stupidity/rabble rousing revealed in this news report from Al Jazeera English. When you hear that Muslims in Europe will not integrate with the older population, remember this.


Where are those terrifyingly threatening backward baseball caps, anyway?

Unhappy; or, what's the matter with kids today?

A certain number of people in France think they are unhappy about Muslim immigrants and their children for not fitting in to the French way of life. I am not so sure that their self-diagnosis is correct.

The issue that everyone is talking about is the government policy forbidding women -- Muslim women -- from wearing in many public places veils of various sorts and more concealing garments like the burqa. Although there are about 5 million Muslims in France, it is estimated that only a few thousand or maybe even a few hundred women actually wear these things. Yet the government is rolling out the big guns against them.

It was when I read the Globe and Mail report about the wider context of this move that I began to doubt that Islam is really that central to this feeling of France is on the wrong track. Look at these quotations and you tell me:

The public hearing [part of a government-sponsored national debate] was called to discuss one question: What does it mean to be French? It got off to a rocky start...

The next speaker wanted to talk about globalization. “Kids today,” he said, as people around him rolled their eyes, “identify more with Michael Jackson and Madonna than with France."

...

The French have also been uninhibited in their response to the call for debate, with more than 40,000 comments posted in the first month on the government's national identity website. About 6 per cent, according to the Immigration Ministry, were racist or hateful enough to be removed.

The posts that remain run the gamut from quotations from 19th-century French philosophers to rants about immigrants.

“France has become a colony of Africa,” wrote one contributor. To be truly French, wrote another, one must have “French blood” from both parents “and going back several generations.” Others said all schoolchildren should be required to memorize the Marseillaise and to sing it, on pain of punishment, at least once a week.
...

Nadine Morano, the junior minister for family affairs, has tried to backtrack for days after she was filmed at another debate advising young French Muslims how to fit in. “What I want,” she said, “is that they love France when they live in this country, they get a job, they not use slang … and not wear their caps back to front.”

I absolutely love the junior minister's remarks about the characteristics of all powerful, unstoppable, heritage-endangering Islam. If you somehow missed that in the last paragraph, that dangerous foreign religion apparently consists of:

Hating France

Not getting a job

Using slang

Wearing [baseball] caps back to front.

Straight out of the Arabian desert in the seventh century! I might buy some of this had I not been a teenager in the 60s, when I was told that wearing jeans to school and growing your hair too long made you some kind of outlaw. Same, same.