New Geography

Author: admin

  • Photojournalist

  • Canada’s Immigration Dilemma

    The subject of immigration in Canada presents a great dilemma for many Canadians. Like other countries of the western world, Canadians do not have enough children of their own to maintain the population at its present level. At the same time, the overall population, which is around 33 million, is getting older. Baby boomers are looking at retirement. Many calculate the amount of income they will need in order to maintain a decent standard of living. Their calculations include government pensions. The absence of a sufficient younger, active, working population to continue paying for the system of pensions presently in place and on which our retirees depend is well known and understood in the country.

    Since the problem is staring us in the face, the evident solution is to turn to immigrants from other countries to make up for our shortfall. But Canada’s ethnic situation was already complex enough as, in addition to the original inhabitants known as the First Nations, the founding populations of Canada, the French and the English, have in the past been referred to as “The Two Solitudes”. The descendants of the original French settlers are concentrated mainly in the province of Quebec. There are French-Canadians in other provinces as well, though, generally, not in large numbers.

    Over the last few decades, many French Quebecers started worrying about their diminishing numbers in other provinces as former French speakers began primarily using English in their daily transactions and sending their children to English schools, either due to a lack of French schools in the area they lived in or to facilitate their own integration or that of their children. The net result was a steady decrease of that population declaring French as their mother tongue in Canadian censuses.

    Inside Quebec, after the English conquest in 1759, in order not to lose the French language and their religion (Catholicism), the French population of 60,000 people coalesced around the Church. The Church was seen as the unflinching defender of that population’s language and culture. Moreover, again under the influence of the Church, French-Canadian families were having many children, so much so that in the 1960s, Canada was home to approximately six million French-speaking people.

    This is when modernity set in. French-Canadians decided that the place of religion was to remain in the church and, parallel to what was taking place elsewhere in the democratic world, the birth rate plummeted. From 1956 to 1961, the birth rate was 4.2 children per 1,000 married women. In the 1990s, Quebec’s birthrate was the lowest of all Canadian provinces. From 1986 to 1991, the Quebec fertility rate was only 1.5, therefore very much less than the 2.2 children needed for a population to replenish itself.

    In the short term, recent government measures such as a generous parental-leave program have contributed to an increase in the birth rate. While in 2004, Quebec had 74,200 births, the birth rate rose in 2006 to 10.6 per 1,000 population, compared to the national rate of 10.5. According to government statistics, there was a further increase in 2007, albeit a small one. However, these small increases in the young population do not come close to remedy the wide gap with the need for replenishment of the work force.

    Consequently, for both Canada as a whole and Quebec in particular, the issue of immigration has become a crucial one. The question of who will support pensioners comes to mind immediately, according to a 2008 survey by the respected CROP polling firm 38% of Quebec workers say they plan to retire before age 60 and 61% plan to retire between the ages of 55 and 64. The implications are food for thought. European immigrants are now outnumbered by immigrants from the rest of the world.

    Strong arguments against discrimination have led to a system of points awarded in considering whether one qualifies as an immigrant. The philosophy behind that point system is that an immigrant should have the prerequisites likely to make for harmonious integration. Having skills needed for employment, a support system in terms of already established family or friends, and knowing one of the two official languages of Canada, either French or English, are a help in determining if one should be accepted as an immigrant.

    Many people arriving as immigrants came from countries that were once British colonies, such as Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Jamaica and Nigeria.

    There is also a large percentage of immigrants coming from China. If continued unabated, these substantial numbers would have drowned the diminishing numbers of French-speaking Canadians. Also worrisome to concerned defenders of the French language was the fact that most of these immigrants in Quebec could function effectively in English and never had to learn any French.

    The federal government has taken some measures to promote the language. For example, food packages must contain French as well as English. Although sometimes difficult to implement, federal government offices across the land must be able to offer their services also in French.

    In Quebec, restrictive laws on the English language have promoted the use of French, particularly in Montreal. The ultimate problem, however, remains the small French population within a surrounding sea of speakers of English in North America.

    Eager to maintain its predominately French speaking status, the province of Quebec came to an agreement with the federal government in 1978 and was given a measure of authority to select their immigrants. The Quebec government could select a percentage of immigrants based on the proportion of the population in Quebec versus that of Canada. The Quebec government decided to increase the number of French-speaking immigrants which it found mostly in Haiti and French-speaking Arabs from the Maghreb, mainly Algeria and Morocco. Quebec also looked for immigrants from Latin-American countries with the premise that they could adapt easily to the French language and culture.

    Canada and Australia are the two leading countries with the highest proportion of their total population born in other countries. In 2004, Canada received over 230,000 immigrants. Being a democratic society, Canada does not restrict immigrants to any one part of the country. People arriving in Quebec or any other province are free to move elsewhere if they choose to. It is not rare to find that immigrants arriving in Quebec who have an easier time with English than French will not stay long in that province, thereby causing havoc with all the calculations of the Quebec government.

    In the past, Canada prided itself on being different from the U.S. in its philosophy regarding the integration of its different ethnic populations.

    Where the U.S. favoured the “melting pot” approach, Canada favoured the “multi-cultural” approach, encouraging immigrant societies to perpetuate their own culture in this country. Supposedly this approach would contribute to harmonious relations with other ethnic groups, with the general population as a whole, and result in happy integration within Canadian society.

    Of late, the multi-cultural approach has been called into question. The issue under debate has been whether that concept of integration does, in fact, facilitate integration or whether, instead of contributing to unity, it tends to keep people apart and is contrary to Canadian unity, accentuating differences within the Canadian population. The question has not yet been resolved.

    There are many problems that come as no surprise as they exist in all western countries. Immigrants have always known that the first few years in a new country could be difficult years. I, myself, did not have an easy time when I came to Canada many years ago and neither did my friends also young European immigrants. Even the many well-educated immigrants struggle because their academic credentials are often not recognized as equal to similar credentials awarded by Canadian institutions. Unfortunately for them, their expectations of recognition of those credentials are disappointed more often than not.

    Stories abound of medical doctors, some with much previous experience, not granted the license needed to practice as doctors in Canada. There is much need for more medical practitioners in Canada, but both the medical lobby and the government budgets set strict restrictions on who can practice as a doctor. There is talk, of relaxing some of those restrictions, but one should not hold one’s breath. We’ve been there before.

    Of course, the example of doctors is often given prominence. But similar obstacles apply to many other professionals who also are told that they lack Canadian experience. However, they are supposed to have been informed before their departure that they will not be able to practice medicine, law and some other professions. Many believe that there is an element of subtle discrimination as many of them are members of what is termed visible — meaning non-white — minorities. Be that as it may, immigrants always faced difficulties in a new country. Yet, they keep coming, and in great numbers. The backlog of waiting, hopeful, would-be immigrants is estimated at somewhat below but close to one million.

    There are other problems. As in other occidental countries, many would-be immigrants use the back door to come in. They arrive, legally or not, and then claim refugee status. The traffic of would-be refugees ranges in the billions of dollars. As a result of a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada, anyone in Canada applying for refugee status has the right to have his claim being heard in person. Many of those applying have had a story of persecution concocted for them before they arrive here. Some purchase their story once in Canada or have their history of persecution “improved” by newly-found friends in their community. That way, many applicants for refugee status are able to obtain the immigrant status that would otherwise be denied to them under normal conditions.

    In summary, Canada faces many of the same problems faced by several other western countries: a population growing older that needs to be replenished and the need to facilitate the integration of newcomers which are of a background different from the descendants of the earlier European population that used to constitute the backbone of the country.

    Leon Graub is a former member of the Immigration and Refugee Board recently retired. He came from France to Canada in 1951 and resides in Laval, Quebec.

  • With Debate in Town, St. Louis is the Nation’s Capital for a Day

    In 1869 L. U. Reavis spoke for many when he made the case for moving the nation’s capital from, as he put it, “the banks of the Potomac to the banks of the Mississippi.” Citing St. Louis’s location in the exact center of the nation, the growing population of the Mississippi Valley, the presumably temporary expediency that had led leaders to place the capital in Washington in the first place, and the commercial advantages of a capital city on the Mississippi River, Reavis thundered that just as Mohammed had gone to the mountain, so the nation would go to St. Louis. Predicting Congress would make the move within five years, Reavis concluded: “Before 1875 the President of the United States will deliver his message at the new seat of government in the Mississippi Valley.”

    140 years later, the mountain waits. St. Louis today is not without the advantages that led Reavis to paint it as a bustling river town. The city hosts a federal reserve bank, a growing financial sector, a Boeing factory, excellent universities, and a collection of museums, gardens, and theatres that do, in fact, rival D.C.’s. Local demographics reflect the nation as a whole. Behind the Obama and McCain signs that dot my neighborhood are union members, Catholics, college professors, veterans, Jews, Reagan Republicans, pro-lifers, Muslims, and Hillary supporters. I can walk to the city where residents debate gentrification, community continuity, the quality of schools, and the costs of segregation. But if someone had asked me to describe the political vibe of the city when I first moved here in 2006, I would have settled on “resigned.”

    Compared especially to residents of my previous home, Los Angeles, St. Louisans seemed reluctant to admit that they or their concerns mattered at all. At its best, this attitude comes across as midwestern plain-spoken humility. Whereas I couldn’t spend a day in LA without hearing about its status as the city of the future, few folks here mentioned that Missouri is a bellwether state, voting for the winner of every Presidential election since 1904 except that of 1956. And while St. Louisans regularly express familiarity with LA’s geography or its demographics or, at least, its Hollywood productions, I have had to tell Angelenos that St. Louis is on the Mississippi River, that it’s a union town and that, with a greater metro-area population of well over 2 million, we do, in fact, get first-run films in our theaters. At its worst, local humilty seemed to mean passivity and obeisance to national whims dictated by the coasts. When the rest of the nation figured out how to handle crumbling downtowns and failing schools, maybe they’d let us know what to do.

    But in the past month, there’s been a slow rise in local pride. I’ve noticed more signs out for political candidates. Maybe that’s just because the election is nearing. No doubt, too, McCain’s surprise selection of Palin had similar effects here as elsewhere in the country. I see “Hockey Mamas for Obama” scrawled in shoe polish on the backs of mini-vans and sealed with a lipstick kiss. Local moms are writing their suburban papers to say they see themselves in the governor of Alaska and it feels good. The city turns its collective head to Phyllis Schlafly to hear what she has to say. But there’s also suddenly interest in who gets to attend the vice-presidential debates. And the St. Louis Post Dispatch is interviewing a retired high school debate coach on pointers for Biden and Palin, not for Obama and McCain.

    The debates will be here, in St. Louis, at Washington University (what the father of a friend of mine used to call “the best university you’ve never heard of”) and people are excited. WashU has hosted presidential debates before. In fact, it’s hosted more than any other institution in history. And I confess that I detected the slightest disappointment among locals when we first learned that it would be the vice presidential, rather than presidential debates, that would be held there on October 2. But no one complained too loudly. After all, what are you going to do? It’s just St. Louis.

    But all that has changed now. Although the sentiment may be tacit, people are beginning to think that St. Louis matters. Maybe instead of waiting for the nation to tell us what to do, we should be telling the nation. On my way to class at St. Louis University, in the city, I stop and chat with an African American man out registering voters. He’s an Obama supporter. I ask how I can get a handle on which way different St. Louis neighborhoods will go in the election. He tells me to stay in the city: “That way you can talk to immigrants, black people, white people – you’ll get diversity.” It’s an unusually gray day for September. We shiver. I ask him what he thinks of the vice presidential debates. He lights up. “They’ll decide everything!” he tells me enthusiastically. “The debate will determine Missouri, and Missouri is a bellwether state – and it’s going to make all the difference. I’m going to be there! I’m going to be there!” It is the most enthused he’s been in our conversation, the most enthused I’ve seen anyone here about the election.

    I wonder if he’s heard of L.U. Reavis.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

  • Rob Voigt

  • Flannery Burke

  • What’s the Biggest Flaw in the Administration Bailout Plan?

    The biggest flaw in the Administration bailout package: It could all happen again. The system doesn’t need just fixing, it needs decentralizing. Financial institutions should be big enough to fail—and never any bigger. We need compartmentalization, also known as federalism.
    The current crisis was caused by mega-financial institutions that could gamble their money—and lose it. And they did. But first, they grew to the point where they couldn’t be allowed to fail. That’s why even a staunch free-marketeer such as Larry Kudlow supported the AIG bailout. “A collapse of AIG would have been unfathomable,” he wrote on Saturday. “It is simply too interconnected globally.”

    Well OK, then, AIG was too big. When even free-marketeers want the government to step in, that’s proof that size matters. In a bad way. But the American people cannot let themselves be hostage to the financial megalomania of casino-capitalist empire builders.

    It might, indeed, be the responsible thing to vote for a bailout, but it is irresponsible to allow such a meltdown to happen again. And it will happen again if banks, investment houses, and insurance companies are allowed to grow this big once again. Adding another layer of regulations and record-keeping will make work for more lawyers and more accountants, but if the basic business model survives—gambling with other people’s money, and lots of it—then we will right back into deep doodoo soon enough, except that the dollar totals will have a few more zeroes. Remember Sarbanes-Oxley? What good did that do?

    As my colleagues at the New America Foundation, Sherle Schwenninger and Michael Lind, have argued for years, we need different kinds of banks to do different things. So the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act—which solved this problem once before—should be restored, so that the bank down the street once again is limited to only accepting deposits from its neighborhood and only making loans to locals. That’s a boring low-margin business, to be sure, but it’s mostly a safe business. Meanwhile, on Wall Street, investment bankers and speculators would be free to speculate, but they wouldn’t be free to speculate with the capital base of Main Street.

    In addition, the states should reclaim their role as laboratories of democracy—and laboratories of the economy. Leaders of each state should figure out how much money they are losing in this deal—that is, how much of that projected $1 trillion they are “contributing.” Or, to put it another way, how much of an income transfer is the state of New York reaping? How much is Manhattan gaining at the expense of all the rest of us?

    Politicians across the 50 states might be tempted to demagogue these wealth-transfer data, but there is the not-so-little concern of avoiding a depression.

    Instead, politicians should say, “I will vote for this bailout, AND I will also insist that we compartmentalize, or federalize, the solution. How? We should establish a state bank, or a regional bank, to keep capital right here in (fill-in-the-blank) state or region.” If South Carolina and North Dakota keep more of their money in the first place, to be invested in local projects, that will be good news for South Carolinians and North Dakotans. And it will be bad news for money-hungry Manhattanites, plotting their next incomprehensible derivate swap; they will be free to gamble their money, and nobody else’s.

    And that would be good news for the rest of us.

    This was originally posted on politico.com.

    James P. Pinkerton worked in the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Since leaving government in 1993, he has been a columnist for Newsday, a contributor to the Fox News Channel, and a regular on Fox’s Newswatch show.

  • Joe Sertich

  • Minnesota’s Iron Range Colleges Attracting Business

    Being a college president for thirteen years convinced me of the importance of addressing the interdependence between a campus and its town. Inspired by my third presidency, I saw the need to brand a strategy needed to revitalize community.

    We gathered 90 stakeholder partners for a full day meeting at Ironworld, a discovery center for the region to preserve its rich heritage and history. The local residents focused efforts on a place-based institution with the capacity to serve as a catalyst for pulling up the towns across Northeast Minnesota. That was in November, 2000.

    “True North,” in navigational terms, is a precise measurement used to calculate one’s direction. In this part of the world, “True North” came to symbolize a drive to unleash the potential of unique and resourceful college towns for what has been a hard-hit region. The goal was to use colleges as a catalyst to help local communities become viable places to live, learn, work and grow. Through a structured process of guided intervention, colleges and their communities learned how to change. I guess you could call it the first steps of reinventing college towns.

    We believed we had a society and lifestyle worth sustaining in the northland of America. Small to medium-sized towns represent the very foundation of society. These towns are the primary source of many aspects of our religious beliefs, traditional notions of family and property, and work ethic. These communities also afford an environment where we can enjoy the great outdoors, those things we love doing, whether it’s bicycling, hiking, skating, or just meeting with other people. These are things we believe are important to a good quality of life.

    Healthy communities require a strong economy, dependable healthcare, and basic infrastructure, including service and faith-based organizations. But demographic changes, usually driven by the economy, can overpower the healthy pillars of a community. That’s what happened on Minnesota’s Iron Range, mostly because of its reliance on a natural resource-based economy under increasing global pressure. We identified three existing industries critical to the future of the region: taconite mining and processing to make steel; timber; and tourism. In the face of challenges to these industries, people became very resilient; people were able, again and again, to respond to changes in the economy. This can also create a kind of lassitude, thinking the economy will eventually come back on its own. That’s why higher education, government, and the private sector needed to come together to guide a process for change.

    There was no better part of my job than getting our college faculty, staff, and students engaged with the town in ways that changed the traditional pattern of interaction. Each college town created a TechNorth Prep Center on its main street – for high-skill technology education and business development. We developed an ongoing alignment strategy to bring problem solvers, leaders and resource managers together in order to facilitate economic growth.

    All economies evolve and change. That’s why we didn’t sugarcoat those challenges that were frankly overwhelming, like an aging population, migration of young people and families out of the area, mines closing, and high unemployment rates. But we also knew our communities had many assets — including a strong tradition of public education .Our schools had to be more than temporary homes for students as they went off elsewhere We needed to create an environment and opportunities to keep at least some of them close to home.

    Today there are $6 billion dollars of private investments in development throughout the region. Once hard-hit communities are preparing for housing expansions, public infrastructure improvements, and increased population, including a migration of “downshifting“ Boomers. The area is building off of its unique assets, like natural beauty and quality of life, while utilizing its higher education institutions as catalysts for this change. Each college towns is reinventing itself to attract wealth to the community.

    So, if you’re still wondering why a college president is concerned with investments, economic growth, community development and jobs, it’s because of the saying, “As communities go, so go their colleges, and vice versa.” No one has or should have a greater stake in the future of their town than those of us who live in it and love it. Geography, history, economics, and politics combine to create an environment where strong community ties can help people to work together.

    The critical components of a healthy community are ultimately about the individual. Minnesota’s Iron Range is a remarkable place: stunningly beautiful and resource rich geography; diverse immigrant history; often turbulent economics; and “boot strapping iron range” politics. But now thanks to True North and the on-going process of reinventing college towns across the region we are gathering the resources to help prepare our communities for new opportunities.

  • Searching for Los Angeles by the Gateway Arch – a Reminiscence

    The obsession started before the earthquake.

    I was driving on Manchester Road, and something about the slant of light off the car dealerships, the particular combination of Mexican-food diner/meat market/bank/shoe store/train-whistle-in-the-distance, and the unending nature of my errand was enough to take me back. I was on San Fernando Road, and for a just a split second, I was happy – happy to be in traffic, happy to have the glare of the sun in my eyes, happy, even, to be hopelessly late — because I thought that I was back in Los Angeles.

    I was obsessed with Los Angeles. I had lived there for three years. I started my first real job there as a history professor at Cal State Northridge. My son was born there, in Hollywood no less, right across the street from the world headquarters of the Church of Scientology. But my husband worked in St. Louis, and after my son was born, I took leave from my job and we started family life in St. Louis together.

    I told this story to just about anyone who would listen. Random mothers in the park, random co-workers of my husband, random grocery store clerks, random anyone. I wanted the whole world to know I belonged back in LA. And when there was no one there to listen, I stole moments to look at web sites filled with jacaranda trees and the views from Griffith Park. Motherhood proved readily adaptable to the aesthetic of studied dishevelment followed by the young filmmakers, writers, and web designers of my old neighborhood, and I eagerly embraced it (at least the dishevelment part). When winter came and St. Louis’s farmers’ markets ended, I would grill my husband upon his return from the grocery store. “Are you sure this was the best produce they had? Are you sure you even bought this today?”

    I didn’t just miss the sunny days and the fresh vegetables and our hipster neighbors (although I did miss those desperately, even the hipster neighbors). I missed LA’s problems. I’m a historian of the American West; I have a fondness for the twentieth century. And LA just happens to be THE twentieth-century western city. It’s not just the highways or the cars, although I thought about them too, especially when I was on Manchester Road. When I was in LA, I couldn’t drive to work without thinking about managing the water supply or the way Angelenos had covered over the desert in their yards with bougainvilleas. I couldn’t stop by the hardware store or look at a bus stop or pick up some of that fabulous lettuce without thinking about unionization. I would exit the highway early just to drive through a neighborhood and think about immigration. When my cousin asked why I liked Los Angeles so much, I said without even pausing at the irony: “The people there are so real.”

    So at first it seemed like more obsession, and no one was having any of it. When I proposed that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to line St. Louis and Los Angeles up side-by-side and compare them – to look a little harder for that bit of LA that I thought I had seen on Manchester Road, virtually no one heard me out.

    My mother: “You must remove LA’s weather from your browser’s start-up page.”

    My aunt, distastefully: “That sounds like a blog.”

    My husband, who saw just the faintest echo of an earlier obsession with my home state of New Mexico: “Not everyone measures success in terms of proximity to mountains.”

    For those who knew me, this was just one more ploy to get back, if only in my imagination, to the city that had, with its smog and its traffic and its astronomical housing prices and its gross inequalities and its devotion to surface appearances and its unrelentingly bright days, won my heart.

    For those that didn’t know me, it just sounded weird. “This must feel really different,” said the grocery store clerks and the mothers at the park and my husband’s co-workers and the teachers at my son’s day care. “Oh, no,” I would say. When I first fell in love with LA, I had heard the urban historian Greg Hise lecture on how Los Angeles was not the great urban exception, how it actually had great similarities to Pittsburgh and St. Louis. ST. LOUIS!

    “St. Louis,” I would say when anyone gave me the slightest opening, “is a combination of neighborhoods like LA. It has the same public transportation problems, a large Catholic population, a history of racial segregation and a deracinated downtown.” I didn’t actually say deracinated.

    When I started looking, I found more parallels, large and small. Prominent Armenian populations in both cities, a history of fraught public education, both were once part of Spanish territory, both had an elite oddly fascinated with itself (“What high school did you go to?” ask St. Louisans. “Are you in the industry?” say Angelenos), and a similar wackiness in small corners of each city – the drag queen in a wheel chair I once saw in Hollywood; the cigar-smoking elderly man who jogs near Forest Park.

    But there must have been something about the exercise that seemed kind of pathetic. “What’s wrong with St. Louis?” asked my friends from elsewhere. “Nothing,” I’d rush to tell them. “It’s a great town — Forest Park is awesome; there are good restaurants; we can walk to the art museum AND the zoo AND to work AND to day care all from our apartment. It’s a great city for kids. It has a world-class symphony.” “So what’s wrong with St. Louis?” they’d say again. “Nothing,” I’d say, “It’s just…this will seem melodramatic, but it’s just that I don’t feel fully awake here.”

    It seemed best to let the idea drop. Sure, cities are more than climate and topography, and there might just be a few scraps of St. Louis that shared whatever magic I had found in LA, but it did seem kind of silly. I let it go.

    When my husband tried to wake me, I could feel the shaking. “What is it?” I said. “An earthquake,” he said. “hmmm,” I said. “What do we do?” he asked. I wasn’t fully awake, and I didn’t want to be. I thought about getting up. For a St. Louis earthquake? “I don’t know what to do here,” I said and went back to sleep. But the next day, everyone was talking about it — the grocery store clerks and the teachers at my son’s day care, and my husband’s co-workers. “Did you feel it?” “The epicenter was in Illinois.” “It was a 5.2.” “Is this common?”

    It’s not common, but it wasn’t the first time either. There are earthquakes in St. Louis. I had known that already, but this one made me think again. Maybe there are other similarities, things I had come to consider distinctly LA, when really they were things places shared.

    I decided I would go looking for Los Angeles right here in St. Louis. I don’t know what I will find. Maybe something about what it means for people to live together in a city. Maybe something about the homogenization of America. Maybe something about why we’re willing to call some places, but not all places, home. I know it makes little sense to go looking for Los Angeles where it is not. I do, after all, know where it is. I’ve been there before. But I’m fully awake now.

  • Paul R. Levy