Rachel Nyirahabiyambere was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital, an institution “in the Jesuit tradition,” after she suffered a debilitating stroke in April 2010. When she remained comatose and unresponsive, and family members failed to arrange for her transfer to a hospice facility, the hospital petitioned for a court-appointed guardian to arrange for her future. That guardian, whose appointment the woman’s family members opposed, arranged to have Nyirahabiyambere moved to a nursing home, where her feeding tube was removed, leading inevitably to her death.

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OTTAWA – Nova Scotia has an immigration problem.

As that province’s Progressive Conservative Leader Jamie Baillie told a breakfast crowd in Ottawa Tuesday, there simply aren’t enough immigrants choosing Nova Scotia as a place to build a business and raise a family.

But this is just not Nova Scotia’s problem. Many provinces and regions in this country are struggling with the same issue.

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pointed out on several occasions since coming to office, the No. 1 threat to our future prosperity is that we will fail to have enough skilled workers to continue to generate wealth and support our world-leading quality of life in a decade or two from now.

For whatever reason — too busy watching Hockey Night in Canada? — we are, as a nation, simply not reproducing at a rapid enough rate. That means we will need immigrants — hundreds of thousands of them — over the next two decades to help to continue to build this country.

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NPR

July 28, 2010

Even as it challenges Arizona’s get-tough approach to illegal immigration, the Obama administration has been waging a crackdown of its own. The federal government is quietly deporting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and scrutinizing hundreds of employers suspected of hiring them.

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The Gazette

Francophones no longer constitute a majority in Montreal’s French-language public schools, new statistics confirm.

This seems to have come as a real surprise to many Montrealers, but in fact it’s just the extension of a long-term trend.

At 20 per cent, Canada has, after Australia, the world’s highest proportion of immigrants. Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto are the three centres in Canada that attract most of these newcomers, from all over the world.

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Toronto Star

This time, the ghetto walls that close off immigrant theatre may finally be coming down.

Nina Lee Aquino, who cut her artistic director’s teeth on the in-your-face theatre of the Asian-Canadian company fu-GEN, is moving up to the bigger, more diverse, older Cahoots Theatre.

Marilo Nunez is premiering the Latin-American Canadian Alameda Theatre’s Refugee Hotel on the main stage as the first show of Theatre Passe Muraille’s fall season.

And perhaps the most audacious of all is Impact ’09, the “international multicultural platform for alternative contemporary theatre” that rounds up top professional talent from around the world for 10 days, 20 programs and 70 productions in Waterloo Region at the end of September.

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Canadian immigrants are narrowing the homeownership gap with their Canadian-born counterparts, according to a new report Thursday by Scotia Economics.

The report compared census data from Statistics Canada from 2001 and 2006, when the housing boom was near its peak and unemployment was low.

The report indicates that in 2006, 72 per cent of immigrants lived in an owned home. That’s compared with 68 per cent in 2001, an increase of four percentage points.

At the same time, the percentage of Canadian-born people choosing home ownership over renting rose by only two percentage points to 75 per cent, up from 73 per cent.

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OTTAWA – Manitoba’s new lieutenant-governor will be a Chinese immigrant to Canada and longtime City of Winnipeg employee.

Philip Lee was named by the Prime Minister’s Office Friday.

Lee was born in Hong Kong but came to Canada in 1962 to study at the University of Manitoba.

He graduated with bachelor of science in 1966 and a public administration diploma in 1977.

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U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT

Culture has a big effect on how parents raise children, and since 20 percent of children in the United States were born to immigrant parents,with that number expected to rise to 30 percent by 2015, those families have a big impact on American culture, too.

As a member of an immigrant family (my husband grew up in Russia), I’m intensely curious about how parents use their native culture for better or worse in raising children. The current issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, which is all about immigrant families, gives clues as to how culture affects child rearing. For instance, immigrant Chinese-American moms and dads are much better at being on the same page in their expectations for children than are European-American mothers and fathers, who vary much more in their parenting style and behavioral standards, according to research by Carol Huntsinger and Paul Jose. The Chinese-American parents present much more of a united front.

“Chinese parents have a more similar idea of how children need to be guided,” Huntsinger, a professor of education at Northern Illinois University, told me. “The European-American parents tend to have much more individual ideas and do their own thing. That’s what we emphasize in this country.” That’s for sure, I thought, thinking of my husband’s and my very different ideas on discipline, which I think comes more from American culture than from his Russian heritage.

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