Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, May 25, 2025 and National Wine Day. I love sweet wines if they’re made well, and I invite you to review this 2023 post on what I think is the world’s greatest value for sweet wine. Lustau also makes another terrific wine if you like dry sherry: its finos, especially FIno Jarana ?Solera, only about $16/bottle. Eschew cocktails: a Lustau fino is the best way to start a meal, getting that saliva flowing.
It’s also Towel Day, celebrating Douglas Adams and his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the running of the Indianapolis 500 race.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 25 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
An international conference meant to resurrect the idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict will take place from June 17 to 20 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, a UN spokeswoman said Friday.
The conference stems from a resolution approved in December by the UN General Assembly, and it will be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. A diplomat in Paris close to preparations for the conference said it should pave the way for more countries to recognize a full-blown Palestinian state.
Nearly 150 countries recognize the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority as the State of Palestine, which has observer status at the United Nations but is not a full member as the UN Security Council has not voted to admit it.
In May 2024, Ireland, Norway and Spain took the step of recognizing a Palestinian state, infuriating Israel. Other European governments, including France, have not.
French President Emmanuel Macron said in April that Paris could recognize a Palestinian state in the coming months, possibly at the June conference. The French president’s statement drew a furious response from Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it a “huge prize for terror.”
Macron said at the time that he wished to organize the New York conference to encourage not just recognition of a Palestinian state, “but also a recognition of Israel from states that currently do not.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) greets French President Emmanuel Macron before a meeting in Jerusalem on October 24, 2023. (Christophe Ena/Pool/AFP)The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 during US President Donald Trump’s first term. However, many Arab countries have yet to join the agreement, including Saudi Arabia and Israeli neighbors Syria and Lebanon, though Trump has recently indicated that Syria and Saudi Arabia could join the Accords in due course.
I’m flabbergasted that countries are urging the establishment of a Palestinian state at this point. Do they think that this is going to solve the hatred of Palestinians towards Israel and Jews, or end terror attacks on Israel? Remember that Palestinians have rejected reasonable offers of their own state at least five times since 1937. What they want far more than their own state is for the state of Israel to go away. Importantly, who is going to govern this state, which presumably would include Judea and Samaria, technically parts of Israel under control of Palestinians? Hamas will not allow the Palestinian Authority to be in charge, for Hamas hates them. And the PA is itself an organization that promotes terrorism and the elimination of Israel. No, now is not the time for such a state; as people who are rational recognize, this cannot occur until Hamas and other terrorist organizations are gone the Palestinians acquire a group of leaders whose mission is to create a prosperous and peaceful state, not one that wants to wipe out Israel and kill Jews. And this is not possible now. What are France, Ireland, Norway, and Spain thinking?
*This may seem like piling on, but Matthew brought this article in Defector (by Sabrine Imbler) to my attention: “Colossal Biosciences can’t have it both ways.” (See yesterday’s article about how Colossal admitted that it really hadn’t “de-exincted” the dire wolf.)
On April 7, the New Yorker and Time ran nearly identical stories that might be better described as press releases for the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences. The two stories differed slightly: The New Yorker‘s headline proclaimed “The Dire Wolf Is Back,” whereas Time‘s announced “The Return of the Dire Wolf.” While the New Yorker led with a photo of a cub, Time led with a photo of a fully grown wolf. But the effect of these stories was the same, both creating the impression that the dire wolf is indeed back after 10,000 years of extinction.
What these stories seemed less interested in was the fact that the dire wolf was, in fact, not at all back, nor will it return anytime soon. Colossal is a company that runs on PR stunts, and the latest hoopla instigated a wave of criticism from scientists seeking to set the record straight: The “dire wolf” on the cover of these glossy magazines was not a dire wolf, meaning an individual of the extinct canine species Aenocyon dirus. Instead, the “dire wolf” was a modern wolf with 20 genetic edits, none of which involved the splicing of actual dire wolf DNA. “It’s not a dire wolf. It’s misleading to call it that,” Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, told Chemical and Engineering News. “I can’t explain how pissed off it made me, because they’re still saying this stuff, and they know it to not be true.”
This week, Michael Le Page at New Scientistpublished a more recent interview with Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist, who appeared to concede to critics’ points that the company had not actually de-extincted a dire wolf. “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned,” Shapiro told New Scientist. “And we’ve said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they’re calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry.”
I don’t disagree with Shapiro’s first point: It is not currently possible to bring back something that is identical to an extinct species. But I disagree wholeheartedly with her second. Has Colossal said, from the beginning, that de-extinction is impossible, and that the dire wolf is not a real dire wolf? Of course it hasn’t. Le Page, to counter, cites Colossal’s April 7 press release: “Colossal Announces World’s First De-Extinction: Birth of Dire Wolves.”
This whole strategy—making enormous claims to guarantee wall-to-wall coverage in the press, only to later quietly correct such claims in an interview with a single publication—is not just dishonest, but also patronizing. Shapiro’s defense of Colossal’s “colloquial” usage of dire wolves is not intellectually serious, as Colossal relies on the obfuscation of how, exactly, they are defining dire wolves in order to garner press coverage. Shapiro’s inclusion of herself among the “we” that has been saying this from the beginning versus her exclusion of herself from the “they” that is calling them dire wolves is frustrating, too. She is Colossal’s chief scientist, one of their major talking heads, and an expert whose body of real scientific work lends credence to Colossal’s entire undertaking.
One of my Facebook friends said it was great that Shapiro walked back Colossal’s overblown claims. After all, he said, it’s good that scientists correct themselves. The problem with this statement is that Colossal and Shapiro knew from the outset that their claims were misleading. It wasn’t that science somehow corrected their claims; it was that scientists weren’t buying those claims, and Colossal realized that eventually they’d be shown up as fools. And yet, as you can see from the “de-extinction” section of their website, they persist in talking out of both sides of their mouth. [See next story to see Colossal waffling once again!]
*After Harvard was ordered by the administration to stop accepting international students (and to get rid of the ones it has), the University successfully got a hold on that order from a federal court. Yesterday the NYT discussed which American colleges and universities have the most foreign students (they usually pay full tuition). I don’t see much order here except that there are a lot of school heavy on STEMM (as expected), and the schools tend to be prestigious.
The share of international students studying at these colleges and across the United States has been growing for the past two decades as rising incomes in countries like China and India have produced more families looking to educate their children in America.
Domestic forces have played a role, too: Public research universities in particular have turned to international students, who commonly pay full price for tuition, to help compensate for declines in state funding for education.
“We have all this debate about trade deficits with China right now,” said Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied these shifts in higher education. “That’s a deficit in goods. But when you think of services — like higher ed services — we have a big surplus.”
And here’s a survey of 193 colleges and universities since 2000 showing the rising proportion of graduate + undergraduate students who are foreigners:
One more quote:
Higher education is, effectively, a major American export — and one where the foreign students consuming it do so in American communities, also spending money on housing, groceries and books there. More than 1.1 million international students contributed about $43 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-24 academic year, most of it on tuition and housing, according to an analysis by NAFSA, a nonprofit association of international educators.
U.S. students, by contrast, often receive financial aid directly from universities or other federal programs. And at public universities, many pay lower in-state tuition. As a result, foreign students can end up contributing more than one and a half times as much as their American counterparts in tuition dollars, said Mirka Martel, head of research, evaluation and learning at the Institute of International Education.
Another way to look at this is that the higher tuition paid by international students helps subsidize lower costs for U.S. students. At some public universities, international students pay a tuition rate that’s even higher than regular out-of-state tuition.
It seems to me misguided to want foreign students because they pay full fare and subsidize American students. The reason we should accept them is that we can only enrich the American university by expanding the pool of talent it garners and serves, and because it is a sort of duty that we have to allow people to get educated here and then take their education back to where they came from.
*Speaking of these schools, Andrew Sullivan’s column this week is relevant: “Trump declares war on Harvard.” An excerpt, first giving the brickbats and then the roses:
Harvard in recent years has betrayed that liberal calling, of course, effectively sacrificing the idea of a liberal university in favor of an illiberal machine for systematic discrimination and neo-Marxist indoctrination. This is not true of all of it, of course. For a defense of the freedoms Harvard still maintains, and the excellence of a lot of the scholarship it still produces, check out Steven Pinker’s op-ed today. But it proudly selects students and faculty by race, sex, and ideology — and seems to have largely ignored the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. And when a public university breaks civil rights laws, suppresses free debate, allows intimidation of Jews, and chills dissent within, it should be held to account.
So let me say upfront, I have no problem with suing Harvard for its discrimination, and penalizing it for allowing the physical and psychological intimidation of Jewish students — or indeed of any students not wedded to the maxims of critical theory. I don’t have a problem raising taxes on university endowments either. They have a lot of money and charge exorbitant fees. But there is a clear line between demanding a university abide by the law and pay its taxes and dictating what it can teach, how it conducts its own affairs, and whom it can hire. Harvard is as right to resist King Donald I in this respect as Magdalen was in defying King James II.
. . . . Stripping Harvard of hundreds of millions of dollars for scientific research in order to punish queer theorists in the English Department is capricious, idiotic, and malevolent. But the blunt withdrawal of certification so that Harvard has to lose a quarter of its student body immediately, along with an even greater percentage of its tuition income, is clearly an attempt to destroy the place. It’s spite and vengeance.
This is not about ending wokeness; it’s about extending wokeness to correct what DHS calls, in classic woke terminology, “an unsafe campus environment.” It’s not about expanding free speech; it’s about more surveillance, restriction, and sanctions on free expression, as the case of Rümeysa Öztürk proves. The DHS secretary — who graduated from South Dakota State University at the age of 41, and who has no idea what habeas corpus is — wants Harvard to provide “any and all video footage, in the possession of Harvard University, of any protest activity involving a nonimmigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years.”
Not violence, not criminal action, just “protest activity.” What is this, the Soviet Union? We already know Rubio is surveilling and targeting foreign students purely for their speech in a blatant assault on the First Amendment. And this assault on Harvard is merely an extension of the administration’s attempt to control and censor political debate.
In all this destruction, the damage this administration is doing to this country’s investment in scientific and medical research is profound, irreparable, and moronic. Targeting smart foreign students the US should be eager to attract is another act of egregious self-harm. Forcing a quarter of a university’s students to leave the country almost at once is malice, not policy. The persecution of foreign students — I was once one of them — makes no sense, except as cheap jingoism, xenophobia, and the crudest nativism.
I’ve lamented Harvard’s steep decline, illiberalism, intolerance, and racism. I find its leftist faculty terrifyingly illiberal and its liberal faculty, for the most part, spineless cowards. (There are effectively almost no conservative faculty left.) But when an administration is pursuing policies not for reform but destruction, when it is focused on targeting every institution in society that does not echo its own ideology, when it is motivated by revenge and malice and not the common good, and when it is run by know-nothing demagogues like Noem, I will rally behind Harvard as doggedly as Magdalen’s 17th century dons fought back against King James. This is the West.
Ius suum cuique!
That last bit means “to each his due.” But let nobody think that Sullivan has a scintilla of love for Trump. He may approve of some of the things that Trump ordered (like using the biological definition of sexes), but he knows what autocracy, stupidity, and mendacity is when he sees it.
*And from the AP’s reliable oddities section, we learn that an American news anchor kept on delivering the news as her water broke.
Local news co-anchor Olivia Jaquith went ahead with a three-hour morning newscast even after her labor contractions began and her water broke, keeping viewers updated about the coming birth of her first baby.
“We do have some breaking news this morning — literally,” co-anchor Julia Dunn said at the top of the CBS6 Albany broadcast Wednesday morning. “Olivia’s water has broke, and she is anchoring the news now in active labor.”
“Early labor, early labor,” replied Jaquith, who was two days past her due date.
Jaquith stayed on air as Dunn kept recording on Facebook Live.
“I’m happy to be here, and I’ll stay on the desk for as long as I possibly can,” Jaquith said. “But if I disappear, that’s what’s going on.”
Jaquith had the option of going home, but she told the Times-Union that she decided to pass the time at her job rather than “nervously waiting around at the hospital.”
“Having the entire morning team alongside me cracking jokes helped me get through contractions much easier,” she said in a text to the newspaper.
The birth of her baby boy, Quincy, was announced Thursday.
Here’s Olivia on the air while she goes into labor:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej mansplains to Hili:
Hili: What is female intuition?A: An art of drawing conclusions from everyday observations. Women are gatherers.
Hili: Co to jest kobieca intuicja?Ja: Sztuka wyciągania wniosków z codziennych obserwacji. Kobiety są zbieraczkami.
*******************
From Things With Faces, a ballerina tree. I hope this real but I smell the mendacity of AI:
From The Dodo Pet, a brave sheepdog:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih is still quiet, but here’s J. K. Rowling using the biological definition of “woman” in her ongoing fight with India Willoughby:
A woman is an adult human whose body is organised to produce large gametes. One easy way to tell if you’re a woman is to ask yourself: have I ever produced sperm? If, as in your case, the answer is ‘yes’, you are a surgically altered man enacting a male idea of femaleness. pic.twitter.com/b5hqQZsJnk
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 24, 2025
From Luana, bizarre foreign legal strictures:
It is so grotesque when European countries cannot deport foreign rapists and murderers due to alleged “human rights” enforced by undemocratic EU courts, that even our left-wing Danish Prime Minister can see this.
“It is simply not a human right to come to Denmark and kill”. pic.twitter.com/WhyjOR1ZE9
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) May 24, 2025
From Malcolm. Notice that the second (“experienced”) guy really does bring down the wall:
New employee vs experienced employeepic.twitter.com/pEQkFcwfKl
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 7, 2025
Two from my feed. I have a poem for this first one: Capybara has no fear/But why that’s so just isn’t clear.
Capybara is the boss in the swamp 😆 pic.twitter.com/jLGTTL0mGe
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 23, 2025
A quick check on a joey:
How do they keep their pouches clean? pic.twitter.com/sRUJckF4Vl
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 24, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
A Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was fifteen years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-25T09:20:23.048Z
Two posts from Matthew. He calls this “turtles all the way down.” The Sagrada Familia is a masterpiece; a must-see in Barcelona.
#WorldTurtleDayGaudi placed 2 great turtles at the base of columns on facade of his spectacular Sagrada Familia in #Barcelona – a sea turtle + this land based one.They symbolize the stability of the cosmos and are said to emphasize the permanence and unchangeable nature of time.
— Becky Wallower (@bwallower.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T13:12:07.453Z
And Matthew adds to this one, “How could he be sure?”
— Hillary Monahan (@hillarymonahan.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T17:52:54.298Z
Newspaper fillers were a great source of oddities. Not usually the front page. Inserted to fill gaps on a page.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? -Theodore Roethke, poet (25 May 1908-1963)
“Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientific circles and through practical work in these fields. They should not be settled in summary fashion.”
-Mao Tse-Tung
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
1957
1st pocket ed., pp. 49-50.
Sadly, when the flowers started blooming the head gardener decided they were weeds, and dealt with them accordingly.
Big race day: Before watching Indy 500, gearheads can watch F1 Monaco GP starting at 0900 edt this morning. When the cameras pull back, Much more beautiful scenery than Indianapolis.
I knew that Capybaras were pretty chilled out, but that’s ridiculous!
India Willoughby, who JKR responds to in her tweet, fathered a child before deciding that he is a woman after all. He also claims to be a biological woman and to have a cervix. Ridiculous man!
Most of what Trump is doing has already been done by Democrats, except that people forget. This doesn’t make it good or right, but it wasn’t right when Obama did it, either.
It isn’t every day that you see a moderately liberal institution like the Washington Post accuse a Democratic president of waging an “ideological crusade.” But the newspaper did just that last Sunday, blasting the Obama administration for its campaign against for-profit colleges.
The Post pointed out that the Education Department has just imposed the death penalty on ITT Technical Institutes, despite the fact that the school chain has not been accused—let alone convicted—of any wrongdoing. The department carried out the extrajudicial killing by bureaucratic fiat, imposing stringent financial requirements and declining federal aid to new students.
https://reason.com/2016/09/19/obamas-anti-profit-crusade-targets-colle/
Wait – wasn’t ITT Tech a huge scam? (I might be getting the name wrong…)
There were plenty of fake schools preying on prospective students usually from disadvantaged backgrounds during the Obama admin.
It is how we got the (worse) student loan forgiveness program I thought.
D.A.
NYC
I am shocked, shocked to find that some schools will grant degrees with little to no market value.
In other news, the Dems decided that they didn’t like for-profit schools and used the power of the federal government to go after them. Sound familiar?
It was fraudulent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute
Yes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Technical_Institute
My point stands. Unlike Harvard, which was found to have racially discriminated against Asians, ITT Tech was not found guilty of anything in a court of law.
Maybe they were fraudulent, but they still deserved their day in court before being punished.
It was in court.
Canada has had a number of shady private colleges that did nothing more than allow foreign students to come to Canada (offering courses like babysitting). They were eventually shut down.
Although since it’s important to you, they weren’t discriminating by race (only by pocketbook).
Not discriminating alone isn’t enough.
They sure do (deserve their day) Lysander my friend.
But I think you might be mistaking or grouping scam institutions which aren’t even in the ed biz – just the ripoff biz – with the malfeasance of regular schools and especially elite universities.
(I’m not for the loan forgiveness program any more than I’d forgive a gambler his debt at a casino). The solution there – in the 2000s – was to close down ITT and other fake schools. And charge them with fraud.
The solution to woke uni horrors is underway at the moment albeit with big time overreach and typical Trump administration errors.
They’re diff categories I think.
best,
D.A.
NYC
There is a “sorting” value to having international students here. Sure, I’m biased as I came here as an international student on a scholarship to Georgetown University, stayed and I’ve been annoying Americans in situ ever since! And paying taxes!
Part of our secret sauce as a country is attracting the best (or me!) talent from abroad – there’s hardly a better filter for immigrants I’d argue.
D.A.
NYC
chuckle Thanks for annoying us, David. Appreciated 🙂
Um, Olivia’s water has apparently brokEN, not broke😵💫
👍
I wonder if it’s because the simple past expression almost always used is “Her water broke [say] an hour ago.” I suspect the speaker was at a loss to come up with the past perfect, “Her water has broken,” because even if she knows you don’t say, “I have saw,” she just has never had reason to use the past participle in an obstetrical contest. A broken heart but not broken water? And the medical term “ruptured membranes” doesn’t care either way.
English-speakers intuitively use the two tenses differently in a way I can’t put my finger on. I don’t even remember being taught explicitly when to use the past perfect, just memorizing the verbs where the past participle differs from the simple past tense.
The English tense system is a marvel of subtle distinctions, which are useful for native speakers but are always a pain for non-natives trying to learn the bloody thing. And ISTM the system goes a long way towards compensating for the fact that English lacks a stand-alone future tense.
Suppose that the UN votes to create a Palestinian state? Does the UN declaration make it so?
And suppose it becomes so? What does that really mean? Does it mean that Israel is now at war with the State of Palestine? If so, does that really make a difference?
Could declaring a State of Palestine force the governing entity to function as something other than a death cult? Would Palestine have to meet certain requirements in order to obtain the benefits of statehood, potentially forcing it to moderate its behavior—to stop sending armies of terrorists into Israel to kill Israelis and destroy the only democratic state in the region, for example?
I agree that declaring a Palestinian state rewards terrorism, and I hope it doesn’t happen—certainly not while Hamas remains the governing entity. I gag even to think about it. But declaring Palestine a state removes statehood as an issue of focus for the international community—one less thing for the politicians, the pundits, and the media to whine about.
In very practical terms, does declaring a state really matter?
Almost nothing, Norman. Taiwan flourishes and only a few countries “recognize” them – and that’s in a context where one can only recognize Taiwan OR PRChina. So these things mean little in actual fact.
On our side – Israeli not just recognition but full scale relations – diplomatic and commercial – have increased dramatically over the past 25 years (one of Bibi’s victories). These are REAL relations with real benefits like UAE and Morocco, billions in cross investments – not just a flag circle jerk.
That said… official recognition of Palestine lately is a horribly popular move which used to apply to just Islamists, hooligan countries and loser Third Worlders. In the last few decades though the virus has spread as per this unfortunate map:
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/22/norway-ireland-spain-palestine-state
It is almost like a civilizational map of earth.
In answer, if Euro-wokes and IRA-stans want to “officially recognize” Pal, let ’em. Who cares? Only one country matters in this equation and it is Israel and they’ll never ever do it. Were they to make that suicidal choice it’d be a short time till ISIS-istan or Talibanland next door extincts Israel worse than the Dire Wolf.
Whatever ugly Pal flags places like Chad allow in their capitals isn’t our concern.
D.A.
NYC
State recognition is a matter of international law that long predates the United Nations. Natasha Hausdorff reminds us that the U.N. is not a legislative body and so does not make international law as if it were some supranational-sovereign government. The Security Council does not have the authority to create a state, especially a state that would violate the sovereign integrity of an existing state (Israel.). Nonetheless an American veto of any such hot-air resolution would be expected but is not necessary.
https://www.justia.com/international-law/formation-and-recognition-of-states-under-international-law/ This reference doesn’t cite Ms. Hausdorff but it hews to what she has said in various public appearances.
If Palestine did somehow get recognized as a state, Israel would simply declare war on it — it has ample causus belli — and continue with its efforts to destroy its ability to wage aggressive war as a state actor. This would be very bad for the Palestinian “civilians” in the same way that the declaration of war on Germany and Japan by the countries they attacked was very bad for German and Japanese civilians. Careful what you wish for, folks in Gaza. A belligerent state can’t expect its enemy to feed it and keep the water and the lights on.
Just noticed that this comment puts me over 10%. I plead humanitarian necessity to allay worries that despotic UN kleptocrats could make things worse for the only democracy and non-theocracy in the Middle East.
“If Palestine did somehow get recognized as a state, Israel would simply declare war on it” – Sure, it’d be a great idea and the “Islamic Republic of Palestine” wouldn’t last long after they send over their first katushka rocket (I give ’em a day…)
But Leslie I think that assumes Israel cares what the recognition implies and indeed the legitimacy of the whole enchilada.
I’m not in Tel Aviv but I get the impression that the legal niceties of how many Islamists, 3rd world losers and “Euro-wokes” (TM – me) recognize or don’t doesn’t matter much there.
Your argument is good and based on good legal reasoning but recognition by anybody isn’t the main thing. The main thing is terrorists are terrorisin’ and Israel is gonna whack them. And I’m all aboard!
keep well my frosty northern friend. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Canadian colleges and universities have faced the same problem (declining government funding) and relied on the same solution (increased international student admissions). Nothing to do with enriching the student experience etc. because Canada is already a country of immigrants, even more so than the USA.
One awkward Canadian feature is that study permits to come to Canada were advertised to students as an easy way to immigrate permanently & legally to Canada (and this was true, and was abused by institutions that came to be known as “visa colleges”). The other is that, because so many of our schools are crowded into just three cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver), the flood of students coincided with rising prices for housing and reduced availability of medical and social services. Causation is uncertain there, but it seemed so likely that immigration caused shortages of housing and family doctors that our Liberal government (which thinks of mass immigration as an unalloyed good) cut study permits last year and put the universities into crisis (mass layoffs, program closures).
At my university, the proposed solution to this situation is to open an overseas campus where we could enroll international students but not have to get them scarce study permits to immigrate to Canada. The most likely places for such a campus are in countries with conservative or authoritarian politics. It’s unclear how that will interact with my university’s commitments to social justice and academic freedom.
I cannot understand how the Liberals got reelected after all they did. I guess a lot of the migrants were voting. Trudeau made it so easy to get citizenship.
Not so, I don’t think. The Liberals were re-elected by elderly boomers, particularly women, scared to death of losing the free health care that keeps them alive. That, and the boogeyman Conservative Party were Trump’s handmaidens bent on banning abortion and somehow giving away our fresh water — making rivers flow uphill — under Free Trade 3.0. This has given Leftists the willies since the 1960s, and guess how old those voters are now. And when the enviros and socialists (heavily native-born) abandoned the NDP, who else but Liberals were they going to vote for? Young people, even immigrants, are skeptical of the Liberal diversity fetish that has shut them out of the housing market. Old white people wouldn’t give our candidate in a swing riding the time of day, yet we still won with the young and Asian.
Few education migrants become voting citizens even if they do become permanent residents. Over-all, the “conversion rate” of PRs taking out citizenship within ten years — the minimum is three — has been falling for decades, now at 30%. Yes it’s a truism that all these low-wage migrants from Pakistan and India are instant Trudeau voters but it’s not anywhere near that simple.
Sorry – I’m SOOO over my limit of comments today, but America let me in and I’m a loudmouth…..so…
The uptake of citizenship is an interesting aspect (for me) as Oz and Canada have very short times required (3 years in Oz is almost a world record – along with Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, and you say Canada as well). I wonder how “New Immigrants Are Votes For Us!” style politics works. I’m not sure it does.
I’m curious generally to know how people come to the decision of to naturalize or not. My selection is biased both as an immigrant and as a (former) attorney who did immigration law. The right to vote was pretty low for my clients as a priority to go through the hassles of doing it.
D.A.
NYC
There’s been a similar situation in Australia I’m told Mike: immigrants pretending to be students and scam schools set up for “Student” visas with a “work allowance” to sneak in under the visa radar.
In that scam most of the people were Indians – which Oz lets in generously and is pretty good all up as immigration goes. But you gotta arrive legally, that’s the point.
They seem to be addressing it – as well as slowing immigration generally there in line with much of the world.
best to you Mike,
D.A.
NYC
Let me connect a few dots:
Dot One: U.S. companies constantly complain they can’t find enough qualified American engineers and tech workers.
Dot Two: About 15% of U.S. bachelor’s degree recipients are international students and at the graduate level, that number is much higher — over 40% in engineering and computer science PhD programs.
Dot Three: At Harvard, about 25% of matriculants are international students. If those 492 foreign students hadn’t been admitted, would Harvard have left those seats empty? Of course not. Highly qualified American applicants — of which there were tens of thousands — would have taken those spots.
Connection: Could there be a connection between the first three dots? The U.S. says it needs more American talent in critical fields, but elite universities are prioritizing foreign students — who often pay full tuition — even when comparably qualified Americans are being rejected.
Bonus Dot: I think we can agree that Harvard offers an extraordinary education.
Which raises another question: Have you heard of the O-1A visa? It’s reserved for individuals of “extraordinary ability.” I wonder how many foreign students who got that extraordinary education at Harvard later went on to be awarded O-1A visas — in effect, being fast-tracked as elite contributors to the U.S. economy.
So here’s the question I ask:
Are we educating the world’s future elites — or our own?
Educating elites other than one’s own is generally considered to be valuable in various ways. Both those who return home and those who stay enable smoother inter-elite understanding and cooperation.
Agree wholeheartedly with “other than one’s own” but not in place of one’s own. At Harvard there were more than 492 American high school students qualified to slip into those classroom seats taken by international students. I don’t have the answer, I just know elite college admission slots are a finite resource.