Eideard

Most of the 1,800 people the feds believe obtained their citizenship fraudulently are Canadians of convenience who don’t even live here, according to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. “Most of these people, we believe, have never really lived in Canada and are still overseas,” he said Wednesday…

“We frankly have got them dead to rights with the proof that we have, and I don’t think a lot of these people want to go through a long, protracted public court battle where it’s clear they fraudulently obtained our citizenship. We expect most of them will just accept our decision and we’ll be able to do this in a fairly quick and low-cost way.”

The federal government revealed Tuesday it will revoke the citizenship of 1,800 people alleged to have obtained their Canadian citizenship fraudulently.

For the most part, it appears those people fudged or hired crooked immigration consultants to fudge for them their residency requirements…

Kenney warned the 1,800 are likely just the first tranche of people to have their citizenship revoked as the feds crack down on the crooked consultants.

He called it, “widespread residency fraud, where these consultants will sell packages for thousands of dollars, create a fake house or address or apartment, create fake utility bills and submit those to my ministry as proof of residency.”

In 2006, the federal government shelled out nearly $100 million evacuating 15,000 Canadian citizens from Lebanon during the Lebanon-Israel conflict.

It turns out many of them had rarely, if ever, set foot in Canada, prompting some to blast them as “Canadians of convenience…”

Since Confederation, Canada has only ever revoked 67 citizenships, 63 of them since 1977.

Sounds like this is overdue. If so, I have to ask how long did it take for someone to notice a practice this phony was going on? Like – who’s watching the store?

Yes, that is a helluva question for an American to ask, eh?

Israel has passed a law that eases the process of revoking citizenship in a step denounced as a move to threaten primarily its Arab minority.

The amendment to a so-called “Citizenship Law” was the latest in a list of parliamentary measures taken this past month that civil rights activists denounce as undemocratic but Israeli rightists see as essential to the Jewish state’s defense.

The measure, which passed by a vote of 37 to 11 after a stormy debate, empowers Israeli judges to deny citizenship privileges to anyone convicted of espionage or committing violence with nationalist motives.

Some of the delights of the McCarran-Walters Act that made life in McCarthyite America such an “adventure”.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose ultra-nationalist party sponsored the measure, proclaimed victory after the vote, saying he had fulfilled a pledge to voters to crack down on any “citizen who sides with the enemy.”

Israel’s Association for Civil Rights issued a statement in protest saying that “in a democracy you don’t deny citizenship” and that the measure sends a “humiliating and discriminatory message that citizenship for Israeli Arabs is not automatic…”

Israeli Arabs, who make up about a fifth of Israel’s population, are descendants of Palestinians who remained in what is now Israel when hundreds of thousands were driven away or fled in a 1948 war over Israel’s establishment.

Unlike Palestinians living in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war, Israeli Arabs are fully enfranchised though many complain of discrimination…

Not an important topic for the Israeli government. Or their allies in our Congress. In fact a few of the latter are preparing similar legislation for the United States.

Pimps for populism
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

At a breakfast on Thursday in Washington, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, tried to tamp down a controversy that started when Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, questioned the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which grants the right to citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

“I am not aware of anybody who has come out in favor of altering the 14th Amendment,” Mr. McConnell said.

But Mr. Graham, speaking on Fox News last week, said it was “a mistake” to allow American-born children of illegal immigrants to become citizens automatically, a practice known as birthright citizenship. He said that along with a plan to grant legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, he would also amend the 14th Amendment as a way of discouraging future unauthorized immigration…

The proposal caught Republican and Democratic lawmakers by surprise, not least because it came from Mr. Graham, who earlier this year was the leading — and almost the only — Republican negotiating with Democrats to create an immigration overhaul bill. Mr. Graham gave new prominence to an issue that has long been a favorite of conservatives advocating reduced immigration, but has been peripheral to the immigration debate in Congress…

The amendment was adopted in 1868 to ensure the citizenship of the American-born children of freed slaves…

But giving citizenship to everyone born in the United States has been the practice since the 1860s, and was upheld by the Supreme Court on the few occasions when it was tested there, immigration lawyers said. A change to the law to disallow the children of illegal immigrants would vastly increase the undocumented population, lawyers said, rather than reducing it. Babies born to Mexican mothers here illegally, for example, would become illegal Mexican immigrants from the moment of birth…

As usual – the party of death panels has it wrong. Immigration law requires so-called anchor babies to be 21 before they can even apply for legal residency for their parents. A longer wait than even the stalled-out bureaucratic miasma masquerading as current procedure.

But some Republicans worried that the issue could backfire. “This type of position may help you win a few elections,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, a group that tries to draw Latinos to the Republican Party. “But you are damaging relations with the Latino community.”

Of course. The Republican tradition of opportunism in the face of challenging questions remains intact. A bit of sophistry shared often and equally with their Democrat counterparts – but, not as often on questions so blatantly couched in right-wing bigotry.

There is no chance of this revisionist demagoguery coming to pass. Whether or not that sinks into the brains of an American electorate frustrated by an economic collapse unmatched since the Great Depression – and a national tradition of populist hypocrisy – remains to be seen.

Egypt’s supreme court has upheld a decision to strip citizenship from Egyptian men who wed Israeli women if the marriage poses a threat to national security.

With ties between the two countries strained, particularly over the situation in the Gaza Strip, the verdict is being seen as a reflection of Egyptian sentiment towards Israel.

Mohammed al-Husseini, a judge with the supreme administrative court, said Egypt’s interior ministry must ask the country’s cabinet to take the necessary steps to strip Egyptian men married to Israeli women, and their children, of citizenship.

“The court asks the ministry of interior to present all the marriages to the cabinet to examine … Each case should be investigated separately and with consideration to personal freedoms and the nation’s security,” he said.

Nabil al-Wahsh, a lawyer in the case, said he wanted to prevent the creation of a generation who are “disloyal to Egypt and the Arab world”.

The children of such marriages “should not be allowed to perform their military service“, he said…

Well, there’s one bright spot, then.

It’s difficult to conceive of any society premised more on injustice than theocracy.

The French government has refused to grant citizenship to a foreign national on the grounds that he forced his wife to wear the full Islamic veil.

The man, whose current nationality was not given, needed citizenship to settle in the country with his French wife.

But Immigration Minister Eric Besson said this was being refused because he was depriving his wife of the liberty to come and go with her face uncovered.

In a statement, Mr Besson said he had signed a decree on Tuesday rejecting a man’s citizenship application after it emerged that he had ordered his wife to cover herself with a head-to-toe veil.

“It became apparent during the regulation investigation and the prior interview that this person was compelling his wife to wear the all-covering veil, depriving her of the freedom to come and go with her face uncovered, and rejected the principles of secularism and equality between men and women,” he said.

Later, the minister stressed that French law required anyone seeking naturalisation to demonstrate their desire for integration.

The interior ministry says only 1,900 women wear full veils in France, home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority.

France is serious about being a secular state. They don’t pick and choose among religions for acceptable and not-so-acceptable the way many nations do.

Over the last eight years, of course, I thought about this pretty often. My kin up on PEI say they’ll all swear I was born up there. Though my father’s generation all worked hard at swearing they were all born down south of the GWN.

It surely must be nice to be a citizen of a land that doesn’t think it owns the world.