Latest news with #American-only
The Spinoff
26-05-2025
- Politics
- The Spinoff
‘We will not go quietly': The Māori Harvard student fighting for his future
Aotearoa-born Harvard student Samuel Taylor argues a US government crackdown threatens not just his visa, but the very ideals of academic freedom, global collaboration and free speech. The American government's decision last week to ban Harvard University from certifying visas for international students is a direct assault on academic freedom and integrity. It undermines the United States' standing as the centre of global academic collaboration and innovation, and holds the futures of some of the brightest, most passionate young people in the world hostage. This isn't just political – it's personal. I know, because I'm one of the international students whose future now hangs in the balance. When I was 11 or 12, on the opposite side of the world in Aotearoa New Zealand, I decided that I was going to go to Harvard. I'd heard that it was the best school in the world and I wanted to prove that I deserved to be there. From then on, I worked to turn my dream into a real goal – and I achieved it in 2019 when I was admitted to Harvard College to study political science and economics. Now, everything I worked for – everything thousands of international students have worked for – is at risk, through no fault of our own. Earning a place at Harvard is the dream for many young people around the world. It takes dedication and sacrifice, offering an opportunity to change lives in return. Harvard is unique among American universities for charging international students the same tuition as domestic students and offering them equally generous financial aid. In exchange for giving international students this extraordinary opportunity, Harvard gets a student body enriched by our unique perspectives and insights that no American-only university could replicate. All throughout Harvard, international students play a vital part in scientific and sociological discoveries that change the world. The government's decision means, effective immediately, one of the most important research institutions in the world will be critically damaged. To justify its actions, the Trump administration has accused Harvard of 'fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus' and 'employ[ing] racist diversity, equity, and inclusion policies'. On the basis of these accusations, the government has made sweeping demands – including access to private records and changes to university policies – that would effectively end free speech on campus. Complying would not only undermine Harvard's academic integrity and violate international students' constitutional and legal rights but also, given the government's treatment of immigrants and international students recently, put us in real danger. My peers aren't violent antisemites or Chinese Communist Party spies, nor has Harvard made them so. They're passionate, dedicated, gifted young people with the potential and the desire to change the world – and they're being punished for it. This conflict is bigger than Harvard, though. This administration is not only attacking our university, but every university in America. If the country's oldest and wealthiest school can be bullied into submission – for daring to defy the president, and on the thinnest of pretexts – then no institution in America will be safe from arbitrary, authoritarian crackdowns on free speech. As long as this decision stands, no international student will ever feel secure in their place in the United States. The door will slam shut on bright, talented people who came from across the world in search of a better future – and who would have given back in return. The spirit of discovery that has defined the last century of American life will find a new home. Harvard has challenged this decision in court, and while I'm hopeful that the courts will find in its favour, I'm not confident that we'll be safe. I'm angry, and I'm upset, and I'm scared for my future and for the futures of my friends, peers and classmates whose lives have been thrown into uncertainty. But this is about more than Harvard's international students. It's about the lives of every international student and scholar who comes to the United States in pursuit of a better life – and a better world. If this attack succeeds, it won't just end our dreams – it will trample on the very values that make Harvard, institutions like it and the United States great: free speech, academic integrity, global collaboration and the pursuit of knowledge. This is not just a fight for international students – it's a fight for the principles that underpin education in America. We will not go quietly.
Winnipeg Free Press
05-05-2025
- Business
- Winnipeg Free Press
Premier Eby tells B.C. industry not to panic after Trump threatens film tariffs
VICTORIA – B.C. Premier David Eby says the provincial film industry should not 'panic' over a plan by U.S. President Donald Trump to put a 100 per cent tariff on foreign films, adding that the implementation challenges would be 'profound.' Eby says his government will continue to stand with the film industry although he didn't mention specific measures of support. The premier said Trump's proposal could leave Americans with two versions of Netflix, one showing a limited number of American-only productions and a more costly version that shows viewers everything from around the world. B.C. has emerged as a top destination for film and TV production, but the industry also faces growing competition from California and other jurisdictions that want to lure production through tax incentives. The province raised its production services tax credit by eight per cent last year to 36 per cent, if principal photography started by Jan. 1, 2025, while the film incentive tax that supports Canadian-content in production went up by one per cent to 36 per cent. The added tax credits would bring the provincial contribution to about $1.2 billion annually, for an industry that employees about 26,000 in the province. This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 5, 2025.
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right
For decades, America's young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren't just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65. Precisely polling teens and 20-somethings is a fraught business; some surveys suggest that Trump's advantage among young people might already be fading. But young people's apparent lurch right is not an American-only trend. 'Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,' the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties 'in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.' In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new 'gloomy outlook' on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift. [Read: Why the COVID deniers won] What's driving this global Rechtsruck? It's hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn't inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first. There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic. Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person's 20s. The paper certainly matches the survey evidence of young Americans. Young people who cast their first ballot in 2024 were 'more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,' according to the Harvard Political Review. A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the 'lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.' In the past decade alone, young Americans' trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent. Another way that COVID may have accelerated young people's Rechtsruck in America and around the world was by dramatically reducing their physical-world socializing. That led, in turn, to large increases in social-media time that boys and girls spent alone. The Norwegian researcher Ruben B. Mathisen has written that 'social media [creates] separate online spheres for men and women.' By trading gender-blended hangouts in basements and restaurants for gender-segregated online spaces, young men's politics became more distinctly pro-male—and, more to the point, anti-feminist, according to Mathisen. Norwegian boys are more and more drawn to right-wing politics, a phenomenon 'driven in large part by a new wave of politically potent anti-feminism,' he wrote. Although Mathisen focused on Nordic youth, he noted that his research built on a body of survey literature showing that 'the ideological distance between young men and women has accelerated across several countries.' [Read: The not-so-woke Generation Z] These changes may not be durable. But many people's political preferences solidify when they're in their teens and 20s; so do other tastes and behaviors, such as musical preferences and even spending habits. Most famously, so-called Depression babies, who grew up in the 1930s, saved more as adults, and there is some evidence that corporate managers born in the '30s were unusually disinclined to take on loans. Perhaps the 18-to-25-year-old cohort whose youths were thrown into upheaval by COVID will adopt a set of sociopolitical assumptions that form a new sort of ideology that doesn't quite have a name yet. As The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum has written, many emerging European populist parties now blend vaccine skepticism, 'folk magic' mysticism, and deep anti-immigration sentiment. 'Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult,' she wrote. New ideologies are messy to describe and messier still to name. But in a few years, what we've grown accustomed to calling Generation Z may reveal itself to contain a subgroup: Generation C, COVID-affected and, for now, strikingly conservative. For this micro-generation of young people in the United States and throughout the West, social media has served as a crucible where several trends have fused together: declining trust in political and scientific authorities, anger about the excesses of feminism and social justice, and a preference for rightward politics. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right
For decades, America's young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren't just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65. Precisely polling teens and 20-somethings is a fraught business; some surveys suggest that Trump's advantage among young people might already be fading. But young people's apparent lurch right is not an American-only trend. 'Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,' the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties 'in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.' In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new 'gloomy outlook' on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift. What's driving this global Rechtsruck? It's hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn't inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first. There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic. Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person's 20s. The paper certainly matches the survey evidence of young Americans. Young people who cast their first ballot in 2024 were 'more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,' according to the Harvard Political Review. A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the 'lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.' In the past decade alone, young Americans' trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent. Another way that COVID may have accelerated young people's Rechtsruck in America and around the world was by dramatically reducing their physical-world socializing. That led, in turn, to large increases in social-media time that boys and girls spent alone. The Norwegian researcher Ruben B. Mathisen has written that 'social media [creates] separate online spheres for men and women.' By trading gender-blended hangouts in basements and restaurants for gender-segregated online spaces, young men's politics became more distinctly pro-male—and, more to the point, anti-feminist, according to Mathisen. Norwegian boys are more and more drawn to right-wing politics, a phenomenon 'driven in large part by a new wave of politically potent anti-feminism,' he wrote. Although Mathisen focused on Nordic youth, he noted that his research built on a body of survey literature showing that 'the ideological distance between young men and women has accelerated across several countries.' These changes may not be durable. But many people's political preferences solidify when they're in their teens and 20s; so do other tastes and behaviors, such as musical preferences and even spending habits. Most famously, so-called Depression babies, who grew up in the 1930s, saved more as adults, and there is some evidence that corporate managers born in the '30s were unusually disinclined to take on loans. Perhaps the 18-to-25-year-old cohort whose youths were thrown into upheaval by COVID will adopt a set of sociopolitical assumptions that form a new sort of ideology that doesn't quite have a name yet. As The Atlantic 's Anne Applebaum has written, many emerging European populist parties now blend vaccine skepticism, 'folk magic' mysticism, and deep anti-immigration sentiment. 'Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult,' she wrote. New ideologies are messy to describe and messier still to name. But in a few years, what we've grown accustomed to calling Generation Z may reveal itself to contain a subgroup: Generation C, COVID-affected and, for now, strikingly conservative. For this micro-generation of young people in the United States and throughout the West, social media has served as a crucible where several trends have fused together: declining trust in political and scientific authorities, anger about the excesses of feminism and social justice, and a preference for rightward politics.
