By Victor Ing – Asian Pacific Post
Canada’s Express Entry system continues to make headlines with more upcoming changes announced to the points scoring system called the “Comprehensive Ranking System” or CRS.
Starting June 6, 2017, additional CRS points will be awarded to Express Entry candidates with strong French language ability and those with siblings living in Canada.
In November 2016, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (“IRCC”) announced significant changes to overhaul the way CRS points are calculated under the Express Entry system.
These changes reduced the points awarded to candidates for job offers but increased points for candidates who have spent time in Canada, such as international students who have completed a post-secondary educational credential in Canada.
Since the November 2016 changes have taken effect, the CRS points required to obtain an invitation to apply for permanent residence have dropped significantly. Record lows are being established with each passing round of invitation in the month of April.
Since April 5, 2017 the CRS points needed to receive an invitation to apply dropped to 431. One week later, a new low score of 423 points was established on April 12, 2017.
Finally, the latest round of invitation took place on April 19, 2017 and reduced the points even further to 415 points.
The new changes to take effect on June 6, 2017 will grant up to 30 additional points to Express Entry candidates with strong French language abilities. These points can only be claimed if the candidate can prove their French language skills by completing the Test d’évaluation de français (“TEF”) for the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking.
Furthermore, starting on June 6, 2017, Express Entry candidates will be awarded 15 additional points if the candidate or the candidate’s spouse or common-law partner have a sibling in Canada who is a citizen or permanent resident and is over 18 years old. The sibling relationship may be established through an adoptive relationship.
The upcoming June 2017 changes signal a continuing and gradual shift in IRCC’s mandate for selecting skilled workers to apply for Canadian permanent residence. Whereas prior to November 2016 having a qualifying Canadian job offer made all the difference between receiving an invitation to apply for permanent residence or not, the changes to the CRS points scoring system in the past six months show a change in emphasis to selecting candidates who have strong human capital factors such as language ability and those with pre-existing ties to Canada, whether through family connections or through previous periods of work and study, all of which IRCC believes will ultimately accelerate a candidate’s ability to integrate into Canadian society and become productive and contributing members.
Although the granting of up to an additional 30 points for French language ability and 15 points for sibling relationships in Canada may appear at first glance to be subtle awards, these changes are quite significant in combination with the falling CRS points threshold seen in the past month.
Those candidates who can benefit from these additional points should begin taking steps to create Express Entry profiles, if they have not done so already, and to take the TEF examination to score extra points for French language ability.

By Tazeen Inam – New Canadian Media
A graphic novel that creates awareness about sexual abuse among immigrant and refugee women has upped its print order barely a month after its launch in Ontario.
The overwhelming demand has come from far beyond just refugee and immigrant-settlement groups.
"We have requests from outside of the province, from other parts of the country as well as internationally," says Krittika Ghosh, senior coordinator of women sexual violence at Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI).
This demand is a clear indication that there is a dire need to help such women who are new to the country due to the scarcity of their resources. Smaller friend circles coupled with language barriers and limited education result in suffering in seclusion.
Statistics tell that one in three women in Canada encounters sexual abuse or violence in one way or another.
"They range from people asking for one copy for a library, to some agencies asking for 500 copies in each language. So it's really unique."
Breaking down barriers
Titled "Telling Our Stories: Immigrant Women's Resilience", the unique novel that is written by and for immigrant and refugee women looks to break down barriers that hinder the reporting of abuse.
The project is a joint venture between the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and Le Mouvement Ontarien des Femmes Immigrantes Francophones (MOFIF).
The novel, launched on March 2, illustrates four stories of newcomer women – victims of domestic abuse, workplace abuse, and date rape. The book helps create a narrative around this deeply sensitive topic and enables victims to empower themselves to shine a light on this often unreported crime.
Unlike other story formats, the graphic novel was written with input gathered through workshops conducted with 40 immigrant or refugee women, who shared their stories and worked with illustrator Coco Guzman.
"Each story is the outcome of a four-day workshop of newcomer or refugee women and many cases were survivors of sexual and intimate kind of violence," says Ghosh.
It helps people realize that there is no need to suffer in silence as help is available.
It also challenges stereotypes of survivors and to show that they are resilient and capable of organizing to end violence themselves.
Explaining the choice of format, Ghosh says, "We wanted it to be in a format that would be more available and accessible and something that people would want to read."
Professionals and groups beyond social workers, teachers, public libraries, immigrant and refugee welcome groups and the police are reaching out for the book.
The book is available free of cost and is not meant for sale.
The novel is available in 11 languages, including French and English.

By Amitava Kumar
On a September evening in 1987, Navroze Mody, a thirty-year-old Indian man living in Jersey City, went for drinks at the Gold Coast Café, in Hoboken. Later that night, after he left the bar, he was accosted on the street by a group of about a dozen youths and severely beaten. Mody died from his injuries four days later. There had been other attacks on Indians in the area at that time, several of them brutal, many of them carried out by a group that called itself the Dotbusters – the name a reference to the bindi worn by Hindu women on their foreheads. Earlier that year, a local newspaper had published a handwritten letter from the Dotbusters: “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her.”
When I first read about the attack on Mody, I had only recently arrived in the United States. I was a young graduate student at Syracuse University then, and although the news alarmed me I wasn’t fearful. In those days, distances felt real: an event unfolding in a city more than two hundred miles away seemed remote, even in the imagination. I might have worried for my mother and sisters, who wore bindis, but they were safe, in India. Whatever was happening in Jersey City, in other words, couldn’t affect the sense that I and my expat friends had of our role in this country. The desire for advancement often breeds an apolitical attitude among immigrants, a desire not to rock the boat, to be allowed to pass unnoticed. Since 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the racist quotas of the nineteen-twenties, our compatriots had been bringing their professional skills to America. If we didn’t hope to be welcomed, we at least expected to be benignly ignored.
A lot has happened in the long interregnum. Indian-Americans have the highest median income of any ethnic group in the United States. There is a greater visibility now of Indians on American streets, and also of Indian food and culture. I’ve seen the elephant-headed deity Ganesha displayed all over America, in art museums, restaurants, yoga centers, and shops, on T-shirts and tote bags. The bindi isn’t the bull’s-eye it once was. But the bigotry, as we have witnessed in 2017, has not gone away. In early February, an Indian man in Peyton, Colorado, awoke to find his house egged, smeared with dog feces, and vandalized with racist slogans. Two weeks later, at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, a U.S. Navy veteran named Adam Purinton allegedly opened fire on two Indian patrons. Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a thirty-two-year-old aviation engineer, was killed; his colleague Alok Madasani survived. Ten days later, a Sikh man was attacked outside his home in Kent, Washington, while washing his car. A white man wearing a mask told him to go back to his country, then shot him in the arm. Soon after that, as if to confirm that Indians across the country were now on notice, an unsettling video began to circulate online. Originally posted in August by a sixty-six-year-old computer programmer named Steve Pushor, it shows a crowded park in Columbus, Ohio. As the camera pans past immigrant parents playing with their children, Pushor says, in voice-over, “The Indian crowd has ravished the Midwest.”
The racist’s calling card is ignorance: he cannot discriminate (if that is the right word) between nationalities and religions, between Indians and Saudis and Egyptians, Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs. One of the first hate crimes to take place in the days following 9/11 was the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas-station owner in Mesa, Arizona. The killer probably thought that Sodhi, with his turban and beard, was Muslim; he had told his friends that he was “going to go out and shoot some towelheads.” This year’s attacks bear some of the same hallmarks. Purinton reportedly shouted “Get out of my country!” before firing on the men from India, who he believed were from Iran. And in March, a white man in Florida set fire to an Indian-owned convenience store because, he told police, it didn’t carry his brand of orange juice and he wished to “run the Arabs out of our country.” We, the mistaken people.
The incitement sixteen years ago was 9/11. Today it is Donald Trump. The President’s nationalistic rhetoric and scapegoating of racial others, not to mention his habitual reliance on unverified information, have sown panic among immigrants. I’ve often asked myself lately whether I’ve been right to suspect that people were looking at me differently on the street, at airports, or in elevators. Whenever a stranger has been kind to me, I have almost wanted to weep in gratitude. Unlike when I first arrived here, distance no longer offers any reprieve from these feelings. The Internet delivers ugly fragments of report and rumor throughout the day, and with them a sense of nearly constant intimacy with violence.
Soon after Kuchibhotla’s murder, a commentator in India pointed out a grave irony: in the run-up to the 2016 election, a number of right-leaning American Hindus supported Trump’s candidacy, not only with donations but also with elaborate prayer ceremonies to propitiate the gods. The more conservative of these people – those who backed the rise of a hypernationalist Hindutva ideology in India through the nineties – have made common cause with American conservatives, who share their view of Islam as the enemy. Trump’s fear-mongering found a ready echo in the ultra-right-Hindu heart. But to the homegrown racists emboldened by that same fear-mongering, the Hindu-G.O.P. alliance makes no difference. Purinton’s question for Kuchibhotla and Madasani in the bar in Kansas was not whether they were Muslim but whether they were in the country illegally. (They weren’t.) A week later, in a Facebook post, Kuchibhotla’s widow framed the question as Purinton perhaps really meant it: “Do we belong here?” Later, a possible answer came from Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, when an Indian-American woman confronted him at an Apple store. “It’s such a great country that allows you to be here,” Spicer told her. His interlocutor was an American citizen, but that didn’t seem to register. (Not white, not quite.)
An Indian man in the Midwest once told me that, every time an American shakes his hand and says, “I love Indian food,” he wants to respond, “I thank you on behalf of Indian food.” He might just as well thank the American on behalf of – take your pick – spelling bees, lazy “Slumdog Millionaire” references, yoga and chai lattes, motels, software moguls, Bollywood-style weddings, doctors and taxi drivers, henna, Nobel laureates, comedians, the baffling wisdom of Deepak Chopra, and Mahatma Gandhi. But perhaps it’s time he reminded the American of something, too. The man who shot Gandhi, in 1948, was neither Muslim nor Sikh nor a foreigner. He was a disgruntled member of the majority, like Purinton, and had once belonged to India’s most nationalistic party – the same party that told Indians in the United States to stop worrying for their safety.

(Amitava Kumar is a writer and journalist who teaches at Vassar College. His latest book, “Immigrant, Montana: A Novel,” is forthcoming from Knopf.)

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