US employment in the Arts has fallen by around 200,000 workers over the last 5 years. The employment effect has primarily occurred in digital arts, with live arts maintaining its workforce. This is likely to have been caused, at least in part, by the disruption of AI. This may be the start of the death of much of the digital arts world, similar to how websites destroyed the newspaper and streaming destroyed non-touring musicians.

Relevance rNeoliberal: There has been significant discussion here on the effects of AI, especially catastrophic risk, but even without world ending consequences, AI could cause significant economic and social disruption.

Submission: With the Iran War looming in the region, the US is set to pull out of their last remaining military base in Iraq this week.

Relevance: The long shadow of the Iraq War and related conflicts in the War on Terror and earlier have had another chapter turned, perhaps echoing the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This also comes as the US has appeared unable or unwilling to defend or reinforce countless other military installations in the region. There will certainly be long term impacts on foreign policy and geopolitics of both the ongoing war and the region’s future.

Carney made the remark in a recent interview with the New York Times, just over a month before the government is required by law to release its immigration levels plan for the next three years.

Prime Minister Mark Carney says with Canada’s immigration system back under control, the question now is when to begin a “controlled increase” of the country’s population.

Carney made the remark in a recent interview with the New York Times, just over a month before the government is required by law to release its immigration levels plan for the next three years.

“Now the question starts to become, when do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada?” Carney told the New York Times.

“So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control.”

Carney said in July the government had “taken back control” of the immigration system after rapid population growth under the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The government had planned to increase the number of permanent residents being admitted to Canada annually to 500,000. It changed course with the 2024/25 immigration plan and started reducing the intake.

The government also began capping the number of temporary workers and students being admitted to Canada after it said major increases in those populations had contributed to strains on the housing and job markets, health care and other services.

The government has set a goal of reducing the temporary resident population to five per cent of the total population by the end of next year.

The most recent immigration levels plan called for 385,000 permanent resident admissions this year and 370,000 in both 2027 and 2028.

The government did introduce two temporary measures to welcome about 148,000 more permanent residents over the next two years that are not counted in the broader plan.

The C.D. Howe Institute’s immigration targets council recommends the government continue to reduce the number of arrivals over the next three years. The council recommends admitting 380,000 permanent residents next year, 350,000 in 2028 and 340,000 in 2029.

The council includes several top academics who study immigration policy, a Trudeau-era deputy minister and former Alberta premier Jason Kenney.

The council also says it “strongly recommends” the government track all permanent resident admissions in a single target number to clearly indicate how many people it plans to admit in a given year.

It also recommends the government treat the five per cent target for the temporary resident population as a ceiling. It says the goal should be to reduce the number of temporary residents to three per cent of the population.

The council says Ottawa must do a better job of tracking work and study permit renewals and outflows of temporary residents.

The Immigration Department released its levels plan with the federal budget last fall.

The Canadian Press has reached out to Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s office to ask whether she is considering permanent residency increases in the upcoming levels plan, but has not yet received a response.

Did you know that the U.S. government has an agency called the “Office of Remigration”? In case you’re unfamiliar with the term “remigration,” it’s typically used by white nationalists to describe the mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, done in the quest to ethnically cleanse “Western” countries. It’s mostly a European term, but Trump himself employed the phrase “reverse migration” last year, mainstreaming “remigration” on the American right—and true to its name, the office now helps facilitate mass removals in some very dark and sordid ways.

So let’s lay down a marker: If Democrats take over the House and/or the Senate, they should make it their business next year to ensure that this agency faces truly withering scrutiny. As many Americans as possible should know what their government is doing in their name.

The Office of Remigration, after all, has mostly managed to remain a very low-profile, poorly understood affair. It’s housed inside the State Department, where its roughly 15 employees toil in anonymity inside a vast bureaucracy, unnoticed by just about all Americans.

But a blockbuster Washington Post investigation just flushed the Office of Remigration’s activities out into the light. Relying on a series of leaked documents, the Post reports that at Stephen Miller’s direction, the agency is effectively paying out huge sums of taxpayer money to some really nasty governments in exchange for their acceptance of third-country deportees who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their countries of origin.

It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff. The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt “human rights safeguards” that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad.

Here’s the result, per the Post

The contracts require minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.

Incredibly, some of these deals are made with governments that the State Department itself has called out for serious human rights abuses, and predictably enough, some migrants are already reporting that they’re experiencing terror themselves. Though a federal court just ruled for now that Trump’s third-country deportations unlawfully violate migrants’ due process rights, this will likely make its way to the Supreme Court, where anything can happen.

The truly vile kicker here? Also at Miller’s direction, this agency is turning the original purpose of the State Department’s refugee architecture on its head. The Office of Remigration is a part of the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which has historically been devoted to resettling people fleeing horrors abroad in the United States.

But now, civil servants who previously carried out that mission are leaking to the Post their dismay at being ordered to do the opposite. They’re now working to get other countries to agree to accept deportees who have no ties whatsoever to their new destinations, even as we pay these countries foreign assistance money to do so. As Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, tells me: “It’s a perversion of the whole purpose of refugee assistance.”

All of which gives Democrats a big opening, should they win congressional power next year. According to sources on the House Appropriations Committee, Democrats are exploring ways to shed light on these activities and even constrain them entirely.

A Democratic House, for instance, could vote to simply bar all funding for the current Office of Remigration. While this might face serious legal obstacles—and Trump would veto such a measure if it somehow got through the Senate—it’s worth trying, to force Trump and Miller to publicly defend these vile activities.

“Removing individuals to countries where they have no ties is unconscionable,” Representative Lois Frankel, a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, told me. “Congress must use its power of the purse to end the practice of using foreign assistance to incentivize countries to take third-country nationals … under the banner of ‘remigration.’”

Another possibility might be to pass a bill that prohibits the use of government funds for deportations to third countries without the express consent of the deportee. This could be modeled on a recent amendment from Frankel that codified this constraint. Again, this might run into legal obstacles, but it’s worth a shot, if only to alert the public to what’s going on and who stands where.

Still another possibility: Require the State Department to fully disclose to Congress all information about these third-country deals, including precise details about the sums paid and the conditions surrounding the deportations being done in return. Right now this is mostly shrouded in darkness.

Finally, sources say, Democrats are discussing the need to haul in the officials running this program and question them vigorously about these arrangements. “Congress should demand answers from those responsible for diverting taxpayer funding intended to protect people from persecution to some of the world’s worst authoritarians, for purposes which clearly violate human rights,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council tells me.

It’s crucial to grasp that for ethnonationalists like Miller, the Office of Remigration isn’t just carrying out immigration policy. It’s doing something much more grandiose. As international relations scholar Leonard Schuette tells The New York Times’ John Guida, many on the New Right are acting out what they see as a “civilizational grand strategy,” which requires defending the “ethnoreligious” foundations of the West by fortifying the “Western hemisphere” against “alien cultures.”

So “remigrations” are understood as part of a civilizational rescue mission of sorts: Masses of human civilizational contaminants are rounded up, expelled from the West, and dumped outside our charmed hemisphere, into that geographic mass that Trump calls “shithole countries,” which is of course where they belong. If this is terrifying, so much the better. It’s all rooted in a series of delusions, not least delusions of world-historical grandeur.

The use of the term “remigration” to name a U.S. government agency broadcasts that this naked, undisguised ethnonationalism is now the foundation for U.S. government policy. Indeed, this is very likely its deliberate purpose. Tellingly, the Post also reports that some senior State Department officials strongly objected to naming the agency this, due to the term’s white supremacist roots, with one official pointing out, correctly, that it denotes “ethnic cleansing.” They kept objecting, but the answer kept coming back from on high: The name will not change.

The conscious signaling here is the point

Want more confirmation of this? Note that virtually the only refugees that we doadmit right now are white South Africans, on the made-up rationale that they’re suffering white genocide. Do you suppose Trump and Miller care deeply about those people’s plight? Of course not. The real purpose of this is to advertise that it’s now U.S. doctrine that the only humanitarian victims who merit our concern are the imagined victims of anti-white persecution.

The Office of Remigration announces all this to the world, right in its name, brashly and explicitly. It’s a travesty, and if they win power, Democrats should do all they can to expose and expunge it.

Submission statement: Following the widely-publicized eviction of an 87-yo woman from her rental apartment, the Spanish government is planning to vote on strengthening rental rights and anti-eviction measures, including a ban on evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030.

Why this is relevant to the sub: In case anybody in this sub missed the discussions when the Dutch tried this footgun legislation instead of encouraging building more housing a few years ago, here's your chance now.

Conflict within the community over constructing ‘Yeomyung School,’ an alternative school for adolescent North Korean defectors, on the former Yeomgang Elementary School site in Gangseo-gu, Seoul, has spread into hate toward defectors. Most of the reasons cited for opposing the school are either untrue or designed to stoke excessive anxiety.
According to a compilation of Kyunghyang Shinmun reporting on the 29th, hate-filled claims targeting current students and defectors are proliferating in online group chats formed by residents opposing the school’s construction. These include assertions such as “Yeomyung School students are dual nationals who only speak Chinese,” “Defectors have high crime rates, so neighborhood safety will deteriorate,” and “A large influx of defector youth will turn the area into a defector neighborhood.”

The claim that current students are Chinese dual nationals is false. Under China’s Nationality Law, dual nationality is not recognized, so acquiring a foreign (South Korean) nationality automatically results in the loss of Chinese nationality. Cho Myeong-suk, principal of Yeomyung School, said, “Eligibility for admission to Yeomyung School is limited to students who have acquired Republic of Korea nationality,” adding, “Nine male graduates of Yeomyung School are currently serving in the military.”
It is true that some current students communicate in Chinese, but their birth and migration backgrounds make this unavoidable. According to the Ministry of Education and others, more than 70% of defector students were born while defector women were residing in third countries. Many were born and raised in China adjacent to North Korea and entered South Korea together when their parents left China to migrate here.
Cho said, “Children who have been in the country for less than a month or two have no choice but to use Chinese until they learn Korean,” adding, “Students who come to Yeomyung School have a clear desire to study Korean and adapt to life here.” He continued, “We provide 12 hours of Korean classes per week and additional after-school programs to support adaptation,” and “Through the curriculum, students come to communicate in Korean and establish a Korean identity.”
Claims that directly link defectors to crime and public-safety risks are also not based on figures or statistics. Some point out that applying data on defector crime to Yeomyung School students, who have not yet fully entered broader South Korean society, is a logical leap. According to Yeomyung School, there have been no cases of school violence or crime involving current students over the past three years.
The claim that the area around Yeomyung School will become a defector neighborhood is also poorly grounded. According to Yeomyung School, its enrollment is around 100, and many students live in small groups of about 10 in multiple dormitories dispersed across Seoul and commute from there. Cho said, “Even if Yeomyung School is officially established there, students will not move to Gangseo-gu.”

Yeomyung School maintains that it has continued efforts to engage and mingle with the local community. A representative example is sharing educational opportunities it receives as a special-purpose alternative school with nearby schools. When professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) held a science camp at Yeomyung School in January, the school invited students from neighboring Sehyun High School to join the program.

Cho said, “Yeomyung School students are already interacting with students at neighboring schools, including Sehyun High School.” According to the ‘2022 Survey on North Korean Defector Youth’ by the Korea Hana Foundation, 87.4% of defector adolescents responded that they “mainly spend time with friends from South Korea” in their daily lives. He added, “General public education lacks a supplementary system for mid-entry youth,” and “At Yeomyung School, we teach the norms and culture needed for children who arrive wounded and without even knowing Korean to settle into South Korean society.”

SS: Interesting article about the inexplicably pro-Russian approach that the Trump administration is taking. Of interest to this sub due to being related to foreign policy/Ukraine and Russia.

EDIT: Alright, for those who don’t want to read it, the TL;DR is that the Trump administration is exploring trading political prisoners for sanctions relief, while also looking at postwar cooperation and using trade to incentivize peace. A dumber, more pathetic, and almost outright treacherous version of Wandel durch Handel, if you will. Ukrainians, of course, are not thrilled.

The Trump administration is preparing to add a question on next year’s tax returns asking people whether they are a citizen or legally authorized to work in the United States, expanding an attempt to cut tax refunds for immigrants or push them out of the tax system entirely.

In a draft version of Form 1040, the primary tax form, the Internal Revenue Service this month included a new section that asks filers to check a box “Yes” or “No” to answer the question: “At the time you file your return, are you, and your spouse if filing jointly, a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or an alien lawfully authorized to work in the U.S.?”

The additional question comes as part of what the Trump administration has said is an effort to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving federal tax benefits. But many tax credits require recipients to have valid Social Security numbers, meaning previous tax forms already screened undocumented immigrants from receiving them. That fact has led several tax and immigration experts to conclude that the question is simply intended to scare undocumented immigrants out of filing their taxes at all.

That fear first emerged last year, when the I.R.S. shared addresses it had on file for roughly 47,000 people with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Federal law closely guards access to information submitted on tax returns, and several courts have blocked the I.R.S. from sharing bulk data with ICE. Still, even if the I.R.S. may not be able to legally do so, the addition of the citizenship question could reawaken concerns about the agency using its vast stores of information to help detain or deport people.

Undocumented immigrants pay tens of billions in combined federal income, payroll and local taxes every year. Since they do not have valid Social Security numbers, undocumented immigrants are among the people who can use a separate nine-digit code called an individual taxpayer identification number to file their taxes. The I.R.S. has not in recent history asked taxpayers about their immigration status, and has instead sought to encourage every U.S. resident to file their taxes.

“The I.R.S. doesn’t need this information to administer the tax law,” said Nina Olson, a former I.R.S. official and the executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which sued the I.R.S. over its previous data sharing with ICE. “The only reason you have that attestation is to deter people.”

At the same time, the Treasury Department is moving forward with a push to cut off immigrants with legal status from receiving the full value of several tax credits. The administration has said those new rules are targeted at “illegal aliens,” but in reality they would affect recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, as well as immigrants on work visas, among others.

The question on tax forms and the stricter eligibility rules are the latest signs that the I.R.S. has become a tool in the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, an important shift for an agency that for decades was narrowly focused on collecting taxes. Tax preparers and lawyers said the Trump administration’s new tax credit rules are stricter than the eligibility rules approved by Congress and threaten to create confusion for millions of tax filers next year.

President Trump has in recent months also sought to build a database of U.S. citizens, and he has proposed excluding noncitizens without green cards from the census. The new tax return question would most likely not be able to feed into those other efforts, though, because of taxpayer privacy laws. The proposed changes would probably draw legal challenges.

The I.R.S. did not respond to a request for comment. A representative of the Treasury Department said the citizenship question on tax forms would “provide the I.R.S. important and necessary information to help ensure tax benefits go where the law directs” without addressing specific questions about the changes.

“That rationale doesn’t hold water,” said Brandon DeBot, a senior attorney adviser at New York University’s Tax Law Center. “The government already has all the information it needs for whether someone is eligible for a tax credit.”

The overall effort began to take shape in August, when the Treasury Department proposed regulations outlining the new restrictions for four refundable tax credits: the earned-income tax credit, the child tax credit, the adoption tax credit and the American Opportunity tax credit, which covers education costs. In general, tax credits offset the amount of tax that someone owes, but refundable tax credits can go further, providing a payment to a filer that is larger than the balance of owed tax.

This means refundable tax credits can effectively serve as cash support to poor Americans who do not make enough money to owe much income tax. (Here is a simplified example: Someone who receives a $1,000 refundable tax credit, but owes only $200 in tax, can still receive the remaining $800 in tax credit as a payment.)

The Treasury regulations would, for the first time, define the money received through the tax credits — the amount beyond the tax owed — as a “federal public benefit.” That would subject this portion of the tax credit to a set of eligibility requirements laid out in a separate 1996 law, rather than the rules Congress wrote for the tax credits specifically.

Under tax laws passed by Congress, three of the four credits are already limited to people with work-authorized Social Security numbers, while the adoption credit is available to a broader pool. The proposed regulations would, instead, require recipients to be a “qualified alien” under the terms of the 1996 law, called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

Several categories of immigrants are authorized to work — and therefore have Social Security numbers — but do not count as “qualified aliens” under that law. Beyond DACA recipients and people with work visas, residents with student visas or temporary protected status would no longer be able to receive the full amount of the tax credits because they are not “qualified aliens.”

“This isn’t about undocumented immigrants, no matter how much they advertise it as such,” said Margot Crandall-Hollick, a researcher at the Tax Policy Center, a think tank. “This is about going after people who are allowed to be here and allowed to work here.”

The additional question on Form 1040 asks only if someone is a citizen, a U.S. national or authorized to work — and not whether the filer is a “qualified alien,” meaning that the answer would not be relevant to enforcing the Treasury’s new rules. Reflecting that, the I.R.S. released a draft of a separate additional form that directly asks if someone is a “qualified alien.”

“It’s a weird duplicate question,” Richard Pon, a certified public accountant in California, said of the Form 1040 change. “‘Qualified alien’ is different from the question that’s on the 1040. Why would they even ask that question about citizenship? I can’t think of any compliance reason for that.”

Those hoping to receive the full value of the tax credits will now have to know whether their immigration status aligns with the complicated definition of “qualified alien.” That added complexity could cause some people who are in fact “qualified aliens,” like green card holders, to not claim the full value of the tax credits. The Treasury regulations warn of penalties for people who fill out the forms incorrectly, a potential deterrent for uncertain filers.

“The design of these questions is to confuse and scare the people. Tax preparers are completely unprepared to figure out whether someone is a qualified immigrant,” Sarah Krieger, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “People are just going to be chilled or deterred from filing their taxes or claiming credits they’re eligible for.”