WorkingForTheClampdownVille
We recently noted that the international men and women of mystery who make up the consulting firm McKinsey and Company received 100 million dollars from the Trudeau government over the past five years or so, a considerable chunk of it for their work on immigration issues.
Well.
As reader Graham noted, it turns out that these same fine folks also worked for another federal government on their immigration 'issues' as well...
Just days after he took office in 2017, President Donald Trump set out to make good on his campaign pledge to halt illegal immigration. In a pair of executive orders, he ordered “all legally available resources” to be shifted to border detention facilities and called for hiring 10,000 new immigration officers.The logistical challenges were daunting, but as luck would have it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) already had a partner on its payroll: McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm brought on under the Obama administration...
Interestingly, it wasn't long before the consulting company started to write its own ticket inside the Trump Administration's burgeoning immigration clampdown apparatus:
...(T)he consulting firm’s sway at ICE grew to the point that McKinsey’s staff even ghostwrote a government contracting document that defined the consulting team’s own responsibilities and justified the firm’s retention, a contract extension worth $2.2 million. “Can they do that?” an ICE official wrote to a contracting officer in May 2017.The response reflects how deeply ICE had come to rely on McKinsey’s assistance. “Well it obviously isn’t ideal to have a contractor tell us what we want to ask them to do,” the contracting officer replied. But unless someone from the government could articulate the agency’s objectives, the officer added, “what other option is there?” ICE extended the contract...
And what kinds of things did the consultants do for Mr. Trump's clampdown on all immigration?
Well...
Well...
...The money-saving recommendations the consultants came up with made some career ICE staff uncomfortable. They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act...{snip}...In what one former official described as “heated meetings” with McKinsey consultants, agency staff members questioned whether saving pennies on food and medical care for detainees justified the potential human cost.But the consulting firm’s sway at ICE grew to the point that McKinsey’s staff even ghostwrote a government contracting document that defined the consulting team’s own responsibilities and justified the firm’s retention...
Gosh.
This sure sounds like the type of very, very, very fine folks we here in Canada would want to deal with our post-COVID and global hotspot-driven increase in immigration, visa and refugee requests in both a humane and expeditious manner.
After all, we've dealt with it all so well so far.
After applying for a tourist visa, a Nova Scotia woman is asking why she and her husband may have to wait a year for him to be approved to visit Canada.
Mary Dahr looked up the timeline for the processing of a visitor visa for her husband, who is Cuban, two months ago. At that time, the estimated wait was 90 days.
By the time Dahr went to put in an application, the wait had jumped to 209 days, and has since risen to a year, at 359 days.
It's an issue that continues to affect people across the country, as immigration applications of all kinds, including visitor visas, continue to be the subject of long delays...
{snip}
...There are approximately 2.1 million applications awaiting decision by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), including close to 1.09 million that are considered "in backlog."
Betsy Kane, an immigration lawyer in Ottawa and co-founding member of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association (CILA), said the long processing times are a sign of a broken system.
"It's not normal to expect somebody to wait a year for a visitor visa," Kane said. "There's no excuse for that."...
Maybe if we doubled down and threw another $100 million to the Clampdown Consultants we could get that backlog down to, say, 0.99 million.
_______
As you might expect, the International Men and Women of Clampdown Consulting Mystery are nothing if not aggressive when it comes to P.R....As such, they pushed back, hard, against the original 2019 ProPublica/NYTimes piece...ProPublica pushed back even harder, receipts in fully in hand...
3 comments:
Thank you the information. Too bad more of us didn't know about this. That company ought to be banned. What went on as a result of their "recommendations" made the American government look like Nazis leading up to WWII and during the war.
I suspect the long wait for some one from Cuba maybe recommended by this firm. If Trudeau want to know how to make things work better in the Immigration dept. all he has to do is ask the front line staff. As to the IRB, the current structure was implemented decades ago and ought to be tossed out and returned to the former system.
Time to write a letter to my M.P. This stinks on ice.
e.a.f.--
I agree that the lack of context in this regard (i.e. what McKinsey has done for immigration initiatives in other countries) is a shortcoming of our proMedia.
I myself had forgotten about it until Graham brought it up in the comments to the original post.
The thing is, this isn't obscure info...It was the NY freaking Times for gosh sakes (and it wasn't just one story).
.
it is why I read blogs such as yours and Empty Wheel,Norm Farrell's blog, to get the news the MSM in Canada doesn't report any real news which is important to us as Citizens.
Post a Comment