A Bit More Detail

• Skepticism about immigration in many traditional receiving countries appeared. Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative took issue with the argument of Andray Domise after an EKOS poll, that Canadians would not know much about the nature of migration flows. The Conversation observed how the rise of Vox in Spain means that country’s language on immigration is set to change towards greater skepticism. Elsewhere, the SCMP called on South Korea, facing pronounced population aging and workforce shrinkages, to become more open to immigrants and minorities.


• Cities facing challenges were a recurring theme. This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential. Also on Ireland, the NYR Daily looked at how Brexit and a hardened border will hit the Northern Ireland city of Derry, with its Catholic majority and its location neighbouring the Republic. CityLab reported on black migration patterns in different American cities, noting gains in the South, is fascinating. As for the threat of Donald Trump to send undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities in the United States has widely noted., at least one observer noted that sending undocumented immigrants to cities where they could connect with fellow diasporids and build secure lives might actually be a good solution.


• Declining rural settlements featured, too. The Guardian reported from the Castilian town of Sayatón, a disappearing town that has become a symbol of depopulating rural Spain. Global News, similarly, noted that the loss by the small Nova Scotia community of Blacks Harbour of its only grocery store presaged perhaps a future of decline. VICE, meanwhile, reported on the very relevant story about how resettled refugees helped revive the Italian town of Sutera, on the island of Sicily. (The Guardian, to its credit, mentioned how immigration played a role in keeping up numbers in Sayatón, though the second generation did not stay.)


• The position of Francophone minorities in Canada, meanwhile, also popped up at me.
• This TVO article about the forces facing the École secondaire Confédération in the southern Ontario city of Welland is a fascinating study of minority dynamics. A brief article touches on efforts in the Franco-Manitoban community of Winnipeg to provide temporary shelter for new Francophone immigrants. CBC reported, meanwhile, that Francophones in New Brunswick continue to face pressure, with their numbers despite overall population growth and with Francophones being much more likely to be bilingual than Anglophones. This last fact is a particularly notable issue inasmuch as New Brunswick's Francophones constitute the second-largest Francophone community outside of Québec, and have traditionally been more resistant to language shift and assimilation than the more numerous Franco-Ontarians.


• The Eurasia-focused links blog Window on Eurasia pointed to some issues. It considered if the new Russian policy of handing out passports to residents of the Donbas republics is related to a policy of trying to bolster the population of Russia, whether fictively or actually. (I'm skeptical there will be much change, myself: There has already been quite a lot of emigration from the Donbas republics to various destinations, and I suspect that more would see the sort of wholesale migration of entire families, even communities, that would add to Russian numbers but not necessarily alter population pyramids.) Migration within Russia was also touched upon, whether on in an attempt to explain the sharp drop in the ethnic Russian population of Tuva in the 1990s or in the argument of one Muslim community leader in the northern boomtown of Norilsk that a quarter of that city's population is of Muslim background.


• Eurasian concerns also featured. The Russian Demographics Blog observed, correctly, that one reason why Ukrainians are more prone to emigration to Europe and points beyond than Russians is that Ukraine has long been included, in whole or in part, in various European states. As well, Marginal Revolution linked to a paper that examines the positions of Jews in the economies of eastern Europe as a “rural service minority”, and observed the substantial demographic shifts occurring in Kazakhstan since independence, with Kazakh majorities appearing throughout the country.
  
• JSTOR Daily considered if, between the drop in fertility that developing China was likely to undergo anyway and the continuing resentments of the Chinese, the one-child policy was worth it. I'm inclined to say no, based not least on the evidence of the rapid fall in East Asian fertility outside of China.


• What will Britons living in the EU-27 do, faced with Brexit? Bloomberg noted the challenge of British immigrant workers in Luxembourg faced with Brexit, as Politico Europe did their counterparts living in Brussels.


• Finally, at the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie wrote about an interesting exhibit at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris on the contributions made by immigrants to popular music in Britain and France from the 1960s to the 1980s.

• CBC's Q recently interviewed Jeremy Larter about his new film, Pogey Beach.The Journal-Pioneer reported on the rescue renovation of an old farm house in the PEI community of Sea View.


• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that the show Anne with an E is hosting auditions for a Mi'kmaq character.


• CBC Prince Edward Island pays tribute to the life of Neil Harpham, a taxi pioneer who recently benefitted from assisted dying.


• CTV's W5 recently examined the controversies surrounding the controversial PEI immigration program intended to attract investor-immigrants.

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly raves about The Alienist. I certainly did like the Caleb Carr original novel, myself.


• Crooked Timber asks whether immigration laws should be respected, if they are the sorts of laws that should be respected.


• D-Brief takes a look at the rain Cassini detected falling from the rings of Saturn onto the planet they orbit.


• Drew Ex Machina's Andrew LePage takes a look at the Juno V and the birth of the Saturn rocket family.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Alex Harrowell notes how the Greens in Germany seem to be benefiting from the problems of the CSU.


• Marginal Revolution notes how the retaliatory tariffs of China are targeting the economies of Trump-supporting regions of the United States.


• Drew Rowsome reports on Mar, a gay erotic horror film from Portugal.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why information loss from black holes is a problem.


• Window on Eurasia notes the trade of illegal loggers in Russia with Chinese buyers.

• National Observer argued, before Bernier broke, that his stances on immigration and multiculturalism bode ill for Canada, here.


• If a Canada that needs immigration to sustain its workforce turns against immigration, that would be the real crisis. Global News reports.


• The Golden Dawn movement of Greece, this essay argues, set precedents for alt-right movements across the developed world with its engagement with locals. The Conversation has it.


• Canada, despite everything, is still one of the most socially mobile countries in the world. MacLean's reports.


• Andrew Coyne wonders why Maxime Bernier chose to break from the Conservatives now, over at the National Post.

• Bon Appetit has a mostly accurate listing of things to do and places to see and eat on Prince Edward Island.


• The warm dry summer means that Prince Edward Island faces a serious potato shortage with economic consequences. Global News reports.


• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that, according to Environment Canada, what counts as a heat warning on the Island might not be such in Toronto. Local conditions matter.


• A federal government probe has been opened up into immigration practices on the Island, as it is alleged that some immigrants connived with some motel owners to provide fake addresses. The National Post tells the story.


• The Guardian notes that senior citizens on the Island, with fixed incomes, are hit hard by the shortages of affordable rental housing.

• Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net notes that the more Neanderthal DNA gets sequenced, the more we know of this population's history.


• Anthro{dendum} takes a look at anthropologists who use their knowledge and their access to other cultures for purposes of espionage.


• Crooked Timber tackles the question of immigration from another angle: do states have the authority to control it, for starters?


• Dangerous Minds shares a fun video imagining Netflix as it might have existed in 1995.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers how the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is an instance of American state failure.


• The Frailest Thing's L.M. Sacasas considers is vows to abandon Facebook are akin to a modern-day vow of poverty.


• JSTOR Daily looks at Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and why it still matters.


• Language Log considers the naming practices of new elements like Nihonium.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that, based on the stagnation of average incomes in the US as GDP has growth, capitalism can be said to have failed.


• Lingua Franca considers the origin of the phrase "bad actor."


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting that the American opioid epidemic is not simply driven by economic factors.


• The NYR Daily considers how Poland's new history laws do poor service to a very complicated past.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw has an interesting post examining the settlement of Australisa's inland "Channel Country" by cattle stations, chains to allow herds to migrate following the weather.


• The Planetary Science Blog's Emily Lakdawalla takes a look at the latest science on famously volcanic Io.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel examines how the Milky Way Galaxy is slowly consuming its neighbours, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds.

• This Michael Tutton Canadian Press report looking at how some immigrants to Prince Edward Island have been exploited economically by companies participating in the provincial immigration program points to serious issues.


• Elizabeth McSheffrey reports for National Observer about how some bluefin tuna off the north shore of PEI are so hungry that they are actually approaching humans for food.


• The PEI government does not plan on permitting advertisements for cannabis when legalization comes. CBC reports.


• Fees for crossing the Confederation Bridge are set to rise to $47 for cars in the new year. CBC reports.

For residents of Cathedraltown, the news was nothing short of a Christmas miracle.

After nearly a decade of seeing the towering Slovak Cathedral of Transfiguration in Markham closed to the public, local resident Mayrose Gregorios couldn’t believe it when she heard the news from two men doing cleanup work on the property one morning: the church would be open for weekend mass.

For as long as Gregorios had lived in Cathedraltown, a quiet subdivision near Major Mackenzie Dr., and Highway 404, whose name was inspired by the adjacent European-style cathedral, the empty building had cast a dark shadow on the community. The last service in the cathedral, which broke ground more than three decades ago, took place in 2006.

The reasons for the closure are believed to be twofold: The first, a decade-old dispute between the developer Helen Roman-Barber and the Eparchy for Catholic Slovaks of the Byzantine Rite in Canada, over the title to the land, left the cathedral without a congregation.

But in recent years, Roman-Barber, head of King David Inc., told residents the cathedral, with its magnificent 14-storey bell towers and cupolas plated in 22-karat gold, was closed so that the numerous detailed mosaics planned for the inside could be completed. An anticipated deadline of December 2015, set by Roman-Barber in a Markham staff report, came and passed. Residents stopped hoping for good news.

So two weeks ago, Gregorios woke up early and waited for the 18-tonne bronze church bells, built at the prestigious Paccard Foundry in France, to ring and announce the momentous occasion. When she didn’t hear them toll that day, she walked over to the cathedral, saw people streaming in and joined them.

“They said it was a private mass, but couldn’t stop anyone who wanted to worship,” she said, adding there were about 200 people in attendance. “It was a beautiful moment: the mass, the singing, the spirit of it all,” said Gregorios, who said the mass was in Arabic and English.

On Dominion Day, 1923, Canadians were in a celebratory mood. But those good feelings didn’t extend into any Chinatown. July 1 came to be regarded by the Chinese in Canada as “humiliation day.” The Chinese Immigration Act, known commonly as the Chinese Exclusion Act, banned virtually all Chinese immigration for the next 24 years. It stood as the most severe legislation of the more than a hundred anti-Chinese policies of the day. The successively increased head tax of $50 (1885), $100 (1900), and $500 (1903) failed to deter immigration, as intended, at a time when the vision for the country was a ‘white Canada.’

My mother, Jean Lumb, nee Toy Jin Wong, was three years old on that infamous day, but almost a year would elapse before a government bureaucrat photographed her for this official document. After all, the Chinese Exclusion Act not only halted immigration; it also required that all Chinese, whether born in Canada (as my mother was) or abroad, to register for an identification card within one year of the passage of the new law.

The card looks uninteresting in itself – a document that lived for decades in a shoebox. But in a recent interview for Ming Pao Daily News, a former employee of the now defunct Shing Wah Daily News, once the largest Chinese newspaper in North America, commented that the need to pass on and preserve this history to future generations is more urgent than ever. The connections to our past are fast fading with the loss of our elders.

Such documents will now be shared, thanks to a new initiative of the Toronto Public Library. The mandate of the Chinese Canadian Archive — which will be launched officially at a reception this evening (Tuesday) at the Toronto Reference Library – is to collect, preserve, store, and provide access for researchers and the general public.

“This archival program is a great opportunity to properly accommodate our family’s precious historic material that our children will not want to keep,” says Nelson Wong, whose father, W.C. Wong, was a prominent leader in Chinatown.

Mavis Chu Lew Garland, who grew up in Chinatown, wants others to know that her “half-Chinese family also existed in Toronto.” Garland’s sizeable donation of documents and photos reveals the extent to which her family honoured its Chinese heritage. “The items will now be available to be shared with whoever is interested in the Chinese culture, and in the people who valued them.”

Eric Zhou grew up in China's Fujian province watching his father, an accomplished chef, whip up banquets of intricate Chinese dishes. But when Zhou moved to the United States and started working in a Chinese restaurant, he saw that his native cuisine was mostly considered cheap in this country, confined to greasy takeout counters and $7.95 lunch buffets.

So Zhou edged his way into a much more lucrative industry: Japanese food. Years later, he owns four Japanese and Asian fusion restaurants in the Washington area. With Chinese food, he says, "the price in America is too low. Japanese restaurants don't have this problem. To us, it's more suitable. It's a better life."

Zhou, 44, has joined thousands of other Chinese immigrants in the United States in seeking a leg up the economic ladder through Japanese food. From Ames, Iowa, to Lancaster, Pa., Chinese Americans have opened many of the sushi joints that dot suburban malls and city blocks across the country. It's the result of what experts describe as a striking convergence between U.S. ethnic-food preferences and the economic pressures facing a new wave of Chinese immigrants, whose population in the United States has tripled in the past 25 years.

Which cuisines sell well and which do not may seem a combination of chance and cultural tastes. But the outsize role of Chinese Americans in the Japanese food business, according to academics who have studied it, sheds light on deeper forces. The influx of low-wage Chinese immigrants -- China recently eclipsed Mexico as the largest source of immigrants to the United States -- has created fierce competition to provide cheap food. At the same time, Japan's wealth and economic success helped its cuisine gain a reputation as trendy and refined. So for many entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants looking to get ahead, Japanese food has often become the better opportunity.

"Chinese entrepreneurs have figured out that this is a way to make a slightly better living and get out of the ... world of $10, $5 food at the bottom end of the market," says Krishnendu Ray, who leads New York University's food studies program.