Migrant Integration is a Two-Way Street

Three stories popped up in the media today that illustrate the fact that the integration of migrants into society (that which happens when we overcome xenophobia) requires work on the part of the immigrants and the host society both. The first story is from NPR about how a Syrian couple and their kids now living in Seattle are getting along. They are refugees who arrived in the U.S. last November, but of course this involved a longer stay in refugee camps while they were vetted before being allowed to move to the U.S. A local Muslim charity in Seattle is helping to support them (and, of course, life would be easier for them had they not made the earlier choice to have six children). But they are learning English with the expectation of finding employment and fitting in.

The second story if from the NYTimes about a program in Canada that allows individual Canadian families to sponsor a specific Syrian refugee family. 

Advocates for sponsorship believe that private citizens can achieve more than the government alone, raising the number of refugees admitted, guiding newcomers more effectively and potentially helping solve the puzzle of how best to resettle Muslims in Western countries. Some advocates even talk about extending the Canadian system across the globe. (Slightly fewer than half of the Syrian refugees who recently arrived in Canada have private sponsors, including some deemed particularly vulnerable who get additional public funds. The rest are resettled by the government.) 

The fear is that all of this effort could end badly, with the Canadians looking naïve in more ways than one.

The third story--from Switzerland--shows what could go wrong if the immigrants aren't really interested in becoming integrated. In this case the immigrant is from Bosnia, not Syria.

A Swiss court has fined a Muslim man who refused to allow his daughters to attend mandatory swimming classes during school hours, as well school camps and other school events.

Letting his eldest daughter take part in ski camp was incompatible with his faith, said the man. The authorities of the town of St Margrethen in northeastern Switzerland, where the family resides, have clashed with the family – whose members live on welfare – for years.

This is a reminder that migrants--like the rest of us--are just people. Some get along better in life than others. However, getting along in any new environment requires adjustment and the more there is of that, the less xenophobic we all will be. 

Big Boost to Abortion Rights From the US Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court today struck down a Texas law that was designed to shut down abortion clinics in that state. The Economist has a good summary:

The 2013 law that the justices gutted today was disingenuously framed by Texas Republicans as a measure to protect women’s health. By requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and mandating that clinics be retrofitted as “ambulatory surgical centres” (renovations that are prohibitively expensive), legislators said they were just trying to make the procedure safer. But in the oral argument, this pretext was exposed as a strategy for limiting abortion access. In his majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer surveyed the record and “found nothing...that shows that...the new law advanced Texas’ legitimate interest in protecting women’s health.” Mr Breyer added that “when directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment”, Scott Keller, the lawyer for Texas, “admitted that there was no evidence in the record of such a case”. The regulations have “nothing to do with ability to perform medical procedures”, Mr Breyer wrote.

Several other states have either written or had been contemplating writing similar laws, and this ruling will put a stop to them. Also significant is the fact that five justices were in agreement that this was a bad a law. Thus, no matter who is eventually confirmed to the Court to replace Justice Scalia, the Court is unlikely to go along with other similar attempts to crush women's access to safe abortions.

Chinese Government Understands the Health and Climate Impact of Eating Too Much Meat

The Chinese are not the biggest meat-eaters in the world on a per-person basis, as I noted a few months ago, but the country has so many people that they actually are the biggest meat consumers in the world, and the overall consumption has been rising quickly. Fortunately for the world, it seems that the Chinese government has realized that this is a huge problem both for the climate and for health, and is trying to do something about it, according to Brad Plumer of Vox.com.

Here in the US, the Obama administration has been reluctant to encourage people to eat less meat for health and environmental reasons. The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines, for instance, remained fairly muted on the topic after fierce lobbying by the meat industry.

But in China, where livestock emissions are soaring and obesity is on the rise, officials are being far less circumspect. The Chinese Nutrition Society (CNS) is now enlisting celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, director James Cameron, and actress Li Bingbing in a nationwide campaign urging people to cut their meat consumption in half — in line with new dietary recommendations. 

The campaign, taglined "Less Meat, Less Heat, More Life," will tout the climate benefits of lower meat consumption and feature PSAs on billboards and televisions across China.

Government campaigns of this kind have been helpful in reducing smoking in the U.S. and elsewhere, and we can hope that this campaign in China will not only be successful, but will set a trend for other countries to follow. 

Demographics of the Brexit Vote

Voters in the UK preferred to leave the EU by a small margin, but the demographic differences are pretty stark between those who wanted to remain and those who wanted to leave. LordAshcroftpolls.com lays it out:

* The older the voters, the more likely they were to have voted to leave the EU.

* A majority of those working full-time or part-time voted to remain in the EU; most of those not working voted to leave. More than half of those retired on a private pension voted to leave, as did two thirds of those retired on a state pension.

* A majority (57%) of those with a university degree voted to remain, as 64% of those with a higher degree and more than four in five (81%) of those still in full time education. Among those whose formal education ended at secondary school or earlier, a large majority voted to leave.

*White voters voted to leave the EU by 53% to 47%. Two thirds (67%) of those describing themselves as Asian voted to remain, as did three quarters (73%) of black voters. Nearly six in ten (58%) of those describing themselves as Christian voted to leave; seven in ten Muslims voted to remain.

And here is another fascinating demographic. Immigration was a big issue raised by those campaigning to leave the EU, as I noted yesterday, yet those voting to leave were least likely to live in areas with immigrants. This is, in my view, consistent with the idea that it was xenophobia, not familiarity, that was breeding contempt.

Overall, then, the leavers were older whites with lower levels of education living in areas with few immigrants. As many commentators have noted, this demographic profile sounds a lot like the typical Donald Trump supporter in the US.

Xenophobia Wins in the Brexit Vote

The vote in the UK to leave the EU was inspired by a variety of things, but none so central as the issue of gaining control over immigration. Unlike in the US, where Donald Trump has railed against undocumented migrants (especially from Mexico), the problem in the UK is that as more countries were added to the EU over the years, their citizens gained the right to work anywhere in the EU, including in the UK. In the abstract this labor mobility is a good thing economically. But migrants aren't always like the "natives," and that was a problem--as it is all over the planet. As the Associated Press (via the San Diego Union Tribune) reported after yesterday's vote:

After winning a majority in Parliament in the last election, Cameron negotiated a package of reforms that he said would protect Britain's sovereignty and prevent EU migrants from moving to the U.K. to claim generous public benefits.

Critics charged that those reforms were hollow, leaving Britain at the mercy of bureaucrats in Brussels and doing nothing to stem the tide of European immigrants who have come to the U.K. since the EU expanded eastward in 2004. The "leave" campaign accuses the immigrants of taxing Britain's housing market, public services and employment rolls.

Those concerns were magnified by the refugee crisis of the past year that saw more than 1 million people from the Middle East and Africa flood into the EU as the continent's leaders struggled to come up with a unified response.

As I noted a few days ago, leaving the EU is going to raise a host of new migrant-related problems in the UK, and so the consequences of this round of xenophobia will take a while to play out.