#Immigration resources

[visas-connect]

Title: Understanding the Timeline: Receiving an Invitation from Express Entry after Applying for a Provincial Nomination

Introduction: The Express Entry system has become a popular pathway for skilled workers to obtain permanent residence in Canada. If you are considering applying for a provincial nomination through Express Entry, it's essential to understand the timeline involved in receiving an invitation. In this blog, we will explore the factors that affect the processing time and provide you with insights to manage your expectations.

Factors Affecting the Processing Time:

Province or Territory: The processing time for provincial nominations can vary depending on the province or territory. Each region has its own administrative procedures and resources, which can influence the speed at which they process nominations. For example, British Columbia is known for its relatively shorter processing times compared to other provinces like Ontario.

Demand for Skilled Workers: The demand for skilled workers in a particular province or territory also impacts the processing time. If a region is experiencing a high demand for skilled professionals in specific occupations, the processing of nominations in that area may be expedited. Conversely, if the demand is lower, it may take longer to receive an invitation.

Express Entry Profile Score: Your Express Entry profile score plays a significant role in determining the likelihood and speed of receiving an invitation. A higher profile score indicates a stronger match with the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) requirements, increasing your chances of receiving an invitation sooner. It's crucial to continuously improve your profile score by enhancing factors such as language proficiency, education, work experience, and additional qualifications.

Managing Your Expectations: While we provide general information on processing times, it's important to note that individual cases can vary. The actual processing time depends on a variety of circumstances unique to your situation. However, here are some practical steps to help you manage your expectations:

Stay Informed: Regularly check the official websites of the province or territory that nominated you for any updates on processing times. These platforms usually provide estimated processing times and relevant information to keep you informed.

Be Patient: The processing time for nominations can range from a few weeks to several months. Patience is key during this period. Avoid unnecessary stress by acknowledging that the process takes time, and factors beyond your control can affect the timeline.

Monitor Express Entry System: Keep a close eye on the Express Entry system to check for any updates regarding your invitation. The system will notify you if you have been invited to apply for permanent residence. Stay proactive and ensure you have provided accurate and up-to-date information in your Express Entry profile.

Conclusion: Receiving an invitation from Express Entry after applying for a provincial nomination requires understanding the factors that influence the processing time. Factors such as the province or territory, demand for skilled workers, and your Express Entry profile score all play a role. By staying informed, managing expectations, and remaining patient, you can navigate through the process more effectively.

Remember, each case is unique, and there are no guarantees regarding specific timelines. If you have concerns or require further clarification, consider consulting with immigration professionals who can provide personalised advice based on your circumstances. Good luck with your Express Entry journey towards Canadian permanent residence! Read More

[writingwithcolor]

Naming International POC Characters: Do Your Research.

This post is part of a double feature for the same ask. First check out Mod Colette's answer to OP's original question at: A Careful Balance: Portraying a Black Character's Relationship with their Hair. Below are notes on character naming from Mod Rina.

~ ~ ~

@writingraccoon said:

My character is black in a dungeons and dragons-like fantasy world. His name is Kazuki Haile (pronounced hay-lee), and his mother is this world's equivalent of Japanese, which is where his first name is from, while his father is this world's equivalent of Ethiopian, which is where his last name is from. He looks much more like his father, and has hair type 4a. [...]

Hold on a sec.

Haile (pronounced hay-lee), [...] [H]is father is this world’s equivalent of Ethiopian, which is where his last name is from. 

OP, where did you get this name? Behindthename.com, perhaps?

Note how it says, “Submitted names are contributed by users of this website. Check marks indicate the level to which a name has been verified.” Do you see any check marks, OP? 

What language is this, by the way? If we only count official languages, Ethiopia has 5: Afar, Amharic, Oromo, Somali, & Tigrinya. If we count everything native to that region? Over 90 languages. And I haven't even mentioned the dormant/extinct ones. Do you know which language this name comes from? Have you determined Kazuki’s father’s ethnic group, religion, and language(s)? Do you know just how ethnically diverse Ethiopia is? 

~ ~ ~

To All Looking for Character Names on the Internet:

Skip the name aggregators and baby name lists. They often do not cite their sources, even if they’re pulling from credible ones, and often copy each other. 

If you still wish to use a name website, find a second source that isn’t a name website. 

Find at least one real life individual, living or dead, who has this given name or surname. Try Wikipedia’s lists of notable individuals under "List of [ethnicity] people." You can even try searching Facebook! Pay attention to when these people were born for chronological accuracy/believability. 

Make sure you know the language the name comes from, and the ethnicity/culture/religion it’s associated with. 

Make sure you understand the naming practices of that culture—how many names, where they come from, name order, and other conventions. 

Make sure you have the correct pronunciation of the name. Don’t always trust Wikipedia or American pronunciation guides on Youtube. Try to find a native speaker or language lesson source, or review the phonology & orthography and parse out the string one phoneme at a time. 

Suggestions for web sources:

Wikipedia! Look for: “List of [language] [masculine/feminine] given names,” “List of most common [language] family names,” “List of most common surnames in [continent],” and "List of [ethnicity] people."  

Census data! Harder to find due to language barriers & what governments make public, but these can really nail period accuracy. This may sound obvious, but look at the year of the character's birth, not the year your story takes place. 

Forums and Reddit. No really. Multicultural couples and expats will often ask around for what to name their children. There’s also r/namenerds, where so many folks have shared names in their language that they now have “International Name Threads.” These are all great first-hand sources for name connotations—what’s trendy vs. old-fashioned, preppy vs. nerdy, or classic vs. overused vs. obscure. 

~ ~ ~

Luckily for OP, I got very curious and did some research. More on Ethiopian & Eritrean naming, plus mixed/intercultural naming and my recommendations for this character, under the cut. It's really interesting, I promise!

Ethiopian and Eritrean Naming Practices

Haile (IPA: /həjlə/ roughly “hy-luh.” Both a & e are /ə/, a central “uh” sound) is a phrase meaning “power of” in Ge’ez, sometimes known as Classical Ethiopic, which is an extinct/dormant Semitic language that is now used as a liturgical language in Ethiopian churches (think of how Latin & Sanskrit are used today). So it's a religious name, and was likely popularized by the regnal name of the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie (“Power of the Trinity”). Ironically, for these reasons it is about as nationalistically “Ethiopian” as a name can get.

Haile is one of the most common “surnames” ever in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Why was that in quotes? Because Ethiopians and Eritreans don’t have surnames. Historically, when they needed to distinguish themselves from others with the same given name, they affixed their father’s given name, and then sometimes their grandfather’s. In modern Ethiopia and Eritrea, their given name is followed by a parent’s (usually father’s) name. First-generation diaspora abroad may solidify this name into a legal “surname” which is then consistently passed down to subsequent generations.

Intercultural Marriages and Naming

This means that Kazuki’s parents will have to figure out if there will be a “surname” going forward, and who it applies to. Your easiest and most likely option is that Kazuki’s dad would have chosen to make his second name (Kazuki’s grandpa’s name) the legal “surname.” The mom would have taken this name upon marriage, and Kazuki would inherit it also. Either moving abroad or the circumstances of the intercultural marriage would have motivated this. Thus “Haile” would be grandpa’s name, and Kazuki wouldn’t be taking his “surname” from his dad. This prevents the mom & Kazuki from having different “surnames.” But you will have to understand and explain where the names came from and the decisions dad made to get there. Otherwise, this will ring culturally hollow and indicate a lack of research.

Typically intercultural parents try to

come up with a first name that is pronounceable in both languages,

go with a name that is the dominant language of where they live, or

compromise and pick one parent’s language, depending on the circumstances.

Option 1 and possibly 3 requires figuring out which language is the father’s first language. Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned national ubiquity of Haile, you will have to start from scratch here and figure out his ethnic group, religion (most are Ethiopian Orthodox and some Sunni Muslim), and language(s). 

But then again, writing these characters knowledgeably and respectfully also requires figuring out that information anyway.

~ ~ ~

Names and naming practices are so, so diverse. Do research into the culture and language before picking a name, and never go with only one source.

~ Mod Rina

[heritageposts]

Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel

By Orit Bashkin (2017, Standford University Press)

Between 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to the newly established Israeli state. Lacking the resources to absorb them all, the Israeli government resettled them in maabarot, or transit camps, relegating them to poverty. In the tents and shacks of the camps, their living conditions were squalid and unsanitary. Basic necessities like water were in short supply, when they were available at all. Rather than returning to a homeland as native sons, Iraqi Jews were newcomers in a foreign place. Impossible Exodus tells the story of these Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel. Faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, Iraqi Jews resisted: they joined Israeli political parties, demonstrated in the streets, and fought for the education of their children, leading a civil rights struggle whose legacy continues to influence contemporary debates in Israel. Orit Bashkin sheds light on their everyday lives and their determination in a new country, uncovering their long, painful transformation from Iraqi to Israeli. In doing so, she shares the resilience and humanity of a community whose story has yet to be told.

[chelledoggo]

need help compiling a list of crisis lines and resources

can anyone help me?

i'm working on a video about my thoughts about things post-election.

in the desctiption, i wanna include links/numbers for crisis lines (especially for marginalized groups, but also for anyone in general), as well as some links to organizations/charities that people can check out if they want to help out (especially for LGBTQ+/BIPOC/women/disabled/immigrants/impoverished people in the US, and possibly also for Palestine and Ukraine.)

can you help me compile a list?

(if you can find me an already made google doc or carrd or something similar with all these on it that'd be even better but if not i totally get it)

[bfpnola]

hey! as y’all know, Better Future Program is an entirely youth-run nonprofit and we provide over 3,000 FREE social justice, mental health, and academic resources. but because the majority of our volunteers are full-time students in middle school, high school, and college, we need YOUR help!

the screenshotted sections above have WAYYYY less resources than some of the others. do you think you could help us out? if you have leftist, anti-capitalist resources that align with these topics, please submit them here!

to reiterate, we are looking for leftist, anti-capitalist resources pertaining to: Jewish rights, Muslim rights, immigration, climate change, reproductive rights, classism, children’s rights, educational equity, and fat liberation

[qqueenofhades]

America isn't the only nation where immigrants are being given aid above its own citizens. The UK is actively placing immigrants over its own citizens for financial aid, housing and healthcare. UK families have been on housing lists for months but immigrant families are housed within days to weeks. Our healthcare is free so immigrants are flocking here and combined with the crippled state of our healthcare system already, I've been waiting literal months for a basic GP appointment while the as part of aid initiatives, immigrants are being given priority.

And no, I am absolutely not saying we should not help people, or that people shouldn't come to the UK and be helped, because I absolutely believe that people fleeing volatile countries and situations have a basic right to be given refuge, but when they're fleeing to places that are already in a downward slide of taking care of the people who've lived there their entire lives, and it then begins to prioritise its already lacking resources not into diving care equally but into providing care for immigrants, its a problem.

Our NHS is already crippled and at risk of being made for-profit like America and with more and more people coming to the UK specifically for the free healthcare and more affordable living (which, trust me, its not so affordable anymore) we are literally running out of resources and people who've lived here their entire lives are losing out on housing, healthcare, financial aid and other resources because they're all being given to people seeking refuge. We can't keep going like this but our Government won't listen to us and won't work with other countries and Governments to help allocate resources, space and divide the number of people coming here. We're a small country. We don't have half the room America does or half the resources.

And you think the reason for all health, education, housing, public service, civic/arts, infrastructure, economic, etc funding being cut for British citizens, after 13 years of the Tories deliberately and extensively cutting all that funding, is because of......... immigrants?

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[retconomics]

Long-ass shot but the internet has been fully unhelpful.. How tf do you get a canadian work visa do you need a job offer first or do you get the visa first and then start applying to jobs 😭

[pickapea]

my absolutely biggest online pet peeve is US centric people projecting their rich sorority girl bully stereotype of nurses onto everyone else, as if nurses aren't working class and mostly immigrants of colour everywhere else. and when did it become cool to hate on underpaid and exploited workers anyway

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Share this resource everywhere:

[marta-bee]

Musk just endorsed the AfD.

You know, that AfD.

I know panic does no one any good and I can't jump at every potential outrage. But this feels not-good in a new kind of way.

[jellogram]

In light of the upcoming election Americans might want know that they can spend a full six months in Canada (and I believe Mexico too) without a visa.

[learnwithmearticles]

French Politics Update

Since the 2024 French elections earlier this year, we left off with a more balanced National Assembly. Left-wing politicians became the highest population at 188 seats with centrist Emmanuel Macron still the president. The centrist party is not far behind with 161 seats and the right-wing party with 142.

Many networks at the time discussed the expectation of a hung parliament, as no one party holds the 289-seat majority.

Some things stay the same. In July, the National Assembly voted to keep centrist party member Yaël Braun-Pivet as speaker, winning by 13 votes. Additionally, many people have called for Macron to step down as President, but he will likely stay for the rest of his term until 2027. 

New PM

On the other hand, there have been major changes. Prime Minister Gabriel Attal resigned in July, and was replaced by Michel Barnier in September. He is a conservative, the leader of the 2016-2019 Brexit negotiation, and his appointment was met with much criticism from the left-wing parties.

Days after his appointment, over 100,000 people participated in protests across France. Many people view President Macron’s PM choice as disruptive to democracy, as the PM is most often chosen from the dominant National Assembly party.

Macron states that he made this choice based on the belief that Barnier seemed the most capable of dealing with political deadlocks, as is expected of the Parliament with no party holding majority.

I have to wonder, though, if this was also out of spite for the left-wing parties winning more seats than his centrist party. Barnier’s politics are expected to rely on joint support from the centrist and conservative parties. If the right or center opposes him on anything, he almost certainly will face loss after loss with his proposed policies. Will this lead France backward after the left finally gained some political power?

Barnier’s Address

Barnier delivered his first parliamentary address on Tuesday, October 1st. Summarily, he emphasized the hazard of French finances and debts, and the environment.

France is more than 3 trillion euros in public and environmental debt, which Barnier addresses first. His goal is to bring the deficit down from 6% of the national GDP to 5% in 2025, with the goal of under 3% by 2029.

His outline for achieving this is reducing spending, being more efficient in government spending (addressing corruption and unjustified spending), and taxes. He phrases higher taxes as a temporary measure, and states that large companies as well as the richest and wealthiest French people will be asked for exceptional contributions.

Barnier also addresses environmental debt. He plans to continue reducing GHG emissions, and for France to be more active in the EU and in the Paris Agreements, which push for countries to collectively act against climate change. He also mentions encouraging industry transitions in energy and recycling, encouraging nuclear energy development, and developing renewable resources of energy more, like biofuels and solar energy.

He has also conceived of a large national conference to act on the matter of water, the scarcity of which is an imminent issue for France.

Additionally, he plans to propose a yearly day of citizens consultations. In his idea, doors will be open for citizens for people of all levels of government to ask questions and start discussions and debates on various topics.

Another noteworthy statement from Barnier is that the pension reform bill voted on in 2023 might have to be changed, which received a loud reply from the audience.

As someone living in a country where an entire political party is built on denying factual evidence and realities, it is surprising to hear someone who does not deny climate change, and calls for equitable taxes to address debt.

About 30 minutes into his address, though, New Caledonia comes up. This is more in line with expectations of conservatives. New Caledonia is still a colonized territory of France, and a recent bill from Macron was going to disadvantage native Kanak people for the advancement of French loyalists on the archipelago. After fatal protests, the bill has been suspended before ratification, likely to be readdressed in 2025.

Also in conservative spirit, Barnier calls for stricter immigration policies in effort to meet “integration objectives”. France faces a cost-of-living crisis and an affordable housing shortage that has buttressed the right’s stance on needing stricter border measures.

Le Pen Trial

Also straining politics, especially for right-wing support, is recent news about popular right-wing figure Marine Le Pen.

On September 30th, Le Pen faced charges of embezzling European Parliament money. The right-wing party Rassemblement National is accused of filing false employee records in order to improperly use funds to pay members of the party. Le Pen is one of many senior party members involved in the alleged embezzlement.

This trial is expected to go on for seven to nine weeks, so the final outcome is some time away. But for now we can expect this will have negative impacts if Le Pen still vies for presidential election in 2027. It will likely also decrease citizen’s trust in the conservative party’s ability to make responsible economic decisions.

If found guilty, Le Pen and the other defendants could face up to ten years in prison and lose the eligibility to run for office.

After the 2024 shock vote instigated by President Macron, the French National assembly gained a left-leaning majority, though not enough for an automatic 289-vote majority. In most cases, this would mean a left-wing Prime Minister as well as a left-wing president, though that’s because the presidential vote is usually shortly after that of the national assembly.

Contrarily, Macron went with a conservative candidate that he believed to be stronger for the job. This increases the political unrest in the country, and increases the likelihood of delays and blockages in legislation development.

While the conservative Prime Minister has stated many intentions that people in the U.S.A. might call left-leaning, regarding climate change and tax targets, his appointment has upset many. His views on immigration, especially, contrast with most left-wing groups who want integration and safety for others. Overall, this decision from Macron calls into question his loyalty and dedication to the wants of the French people.

Additional Resources

1. New Prime Minister

2. Barnier on Borrowed Time

3. Le Pen on Trial

4. Barnier Address

5. Barnier Address Summary

[monetizeme]

Updated November 1, 2024

The sanctuary jurisdictions are listed below. These cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.

A detainer is the primary tool used by ICE to gain custody of criminal aliens for deportation. It is a notice to another law enforcement agency that ICE intends to assume custody of an alien and includes information on the alien's previous criminal history, immigration violations, and potential threat to public safety or security.

[bfpnola]

The appalling rise in recent decades of Hindu nationalism, however, which views Indian and Hindu identity as coterminous and seeks to transform India from a secular democracy into a “Hindu Rashtra”, highlights the dangers inherent in any project of national identity construction. Such a project necessarily runs the risk, as we have seen not just in India but across the world, of degenerating into a crude chauvinism that defines national identity not on any genuinely unifying basis, but rather in terms of the socially-dominant community—in the Indian case, dominant-caste Hindus—at the expense of everyone else. In the process, the rich internal diversity that characterizes any community—imagined or otherwise—is flattened and obscured in favor of a fabricated homogeneity. Likewise, internal structures of oppression such as caste and gender are swept under the rug, and those who speak out against them are lambasted for hurting the cause of national unity—all while that same national cause is twisted to serve explicitly majoritarian ends.

Therein lies the fatal flaw of the nationalist project. By flattening a community in order to imagine it, nationalism—even in its most liberatory, anti-colonial form—allows crucial questions of power and injustice within that community to remain unaddressed, giving the worst tendencies of human society all the room they need to grow and fester beneath the surface until they inevitably spill over. This is due, in large part, to the fact that even as national identity seeks to promote internal unity, its rigid adherence to a given set of borders means that it simultaneously divides people along those same lines, defining itself in opposition to everything that lies beyond them. If my nationality is X, according to our conventional understanding of what it means to “belong” to a given nation, then that necessarily means that I cannot be Y.

Regardless of the country in which we were brought up, every one of us is taught from an early age that national identity is fixed and finite, with rigid boundaries that neatly correspond to those that have been etched on the world map and given the name of Border. We have all been assigned, we are told, membership in a given imagined community, and it is expected that we will stick with that community, no questions asked—that in times of war or recession or other great national need, we will rally around the flag that was stamped onto our foreheads at birth.

The experience of immigration, however, shatters that illusion of fixity. Cracks begin to form in the rigid walls that supposedly enclose a person’s national identity the moment they step foot onto the soil of a new country, slowly expanding as they establish roots and begin to strive, consciously or unconsciously, towards acceptance by an unfamiliar and potentially unwelcoming society. No matter how strongly a person identifies with the nationality of the mother country, it is inevitable that as time goes on these bonds will weaken. In their place, the seeds of a new national identity—that of the destination country—will begin to sprout, nourished by symbolic milestones such as buying a home or applying for citizenship, new roots penetrating into new soil. By the time a second generation comes into the world, endowed perhaps with citizenship rights at the moment of birth, the ties of nationality that bind a diaspora to the motherland are weakened further as these roots extend themselves yet deeper into the new country’s soil.

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